Lew Rockwell Institute

As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, the world is drifting as close to another nuclear confrontation as it has been in decades.

With Israeli and American attacks on Iranian nuclear energy sites, India and Pakistan going to war in May, and escalating violence between Russia and NATO-backed forces in Ukraine, the shadow of another nuclear war looms large over daily life.

Eighty Years Of Lies

The United States remains the only nation to have dropped an atomic bomb in anger. While the dates of August 6 and August 9, 1945, are seared into the popular conscience of all Japanese people, those days hold far less salience in American society.

When discussed at all in the U.S., this dark chapter in human history is usually presented as a necessary evil, or even a day of liberation—an event that saved hundreds of thousands of lives, prevented the need for an invasion of Japan, and ended the Second World War early. This, however, could not be further from the truth.

American generals and war planners agreed that Japan was on the point of collapse, and had, for weeks, been attempting to negotiate a surrender. The decision, then, to incinerate hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians was one taken to project American power across the world, and to stymie the rise of the Soviet Union.

“It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse,” General Henry Arnold, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1945, wrote in his 1949 memoirs.

Arnold was far from alone in this assessment. Indeed, Fleet Admiral William Leahy, the Navy’s highest-ranking officer during World War II, bitterly condemned the United States for its decision and compared his own country to the most savage regimes in world history.

As he wrote in 1950:

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

By 1945, Japan had been militarily and economically exhausted. Losing key allies Italy in 1943 and Germany by May 1945, and facing the immediate prospect of an all-out Soviet invasion of Japan, the country’s leaders were frantically pursuing peace negotiations. Their only real condition appeared to be that they wished to keep as a figurehead the emperor—a position that, by some accounts, dates back more than 2,600 years.

“I am convinced,” former President Herbert Hoover wrote to his successor, Harry S. Truman, “if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan—tell them they can have their emperor if they surrender, that it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists—you’ll get a peace in Japan—you’ll have both wars over.”

Many of Truman’s closest advisors told him the same thing. “I am absolutely convinced that had we said they could keep the emperor, together with the threat of an atomic bomb, they would have accepted, and we would never have had to drop the bomb,” said John McCloy, Truman’s Assistant Secretary of War.

Nevertheless, Truman initially took an absolutist position, refusing to hear any Japanese negotiating caveats. This stance, according to General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, actually lengthened the war. “The war might have ended weeks earlier,” he said, “If the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” Truman, however, dropped two bombs, then reversed his position on the emperor, in order to stop Japanese society from falling apart.

At that point in the war, however, the United States was emerging as the sole global superpower and enjoyed an unprecedented position of influence. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan underscored this; it was a power play, intended to strike fear into the hearts of world leaders, especially in the Soviet Union and China.

First Japan, Then The World

Hiroshima and Nagasaki drastically curbed the U.S.S.R.’s ambitions in Japan. Joseph Stalin’s forces had invaded and permanently annexed Sakhalin Island in 1945 and planned to occupy Hokkaido, Japan’s second-largest island. The move likely prevented the island nation from coming under the Soviet sphere of influence.

To this day, Japan remains deeply tied to the U.S., economically, politically, and militarily. There are around 60,000 U.S. troops in Japan, spread across 120 military bases.

Many in Truman’s administration wished to use the atom bomb against the Soviet Union as well. President Truman, however, worried that the destruction of Moscow would lead the Red Army to invade and destroy Western Europe as a response. As such, he decided to wait until the U.S. had enough warheads to completely destroy the U.S.S.R. and its military in one fell swoop.

War planners estimated this figure to be around 400. To that end, Truman ordered the immediate ramping up of production. Such a strike, we now know, would have caused a nuclear winter that would have permanently ended all organized life on Earth.

The decision to destroy Russia was met with stiff opposition among the American scientific community. It is now widely believed that Manhattan Project scientists, including Robert J. Oppenheimer himself, passed nuclear secrets to Moscow in an effort to speed up their nuclear project and develop a deterrent to halt this doomsday scenario. This part of history, however, was left out of the 2023 biopic movie.

By 1949, the U.S.S.R. was able to produce a credible nuclear deterrent before the U.S. had produced sufficient quantities for an all-out attack, thus ending the threat and bringing the world into the era of mutually assured destruction.

“Certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated,” concluded a 1946 report from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and future president, was of the same opinion, stating that:

Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…[it was] no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.”

Nevertheless, both Truman and Eisenhower publicly toyed with the idea of using nuclear weapons against China to stop the rise of Communism and to defend their client regime in Taiwan. It was only the development of a Chinese warhead in 1964 that led to the end of the danger, and, ultimately, the détente era of good relations between the two powers that lasted until President Obama’s Pivot to Asia.

Ultimately, then, the people of Japan were the collateral damage in a giant U.S. attempt to project its power worldwide. As Brigadier General Carer Clarke, head of U.S. intelligence on Japan wrote, “When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them [Japanese citizens] as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”

Tiptoeing Closer To Armageddon

The danger of nuclear weapons is far from over. Today, Israel and the United States – two nations with atomic weaponry – attack Iranian nuclear facilities. Yet their continued, hyper-aggressive actions against their foes only suggest to other countries that, unless they too possess weapons of mass destruction, they will not be safe from attack. North Korea, a country with a conventional and nuclear deterrent, faces no such air strikes from the U.S. or its allies. These actions, therefore, will likely result in more nations pursuing nuclear ambitions.

Earlier this year, India and Pakistan (two more nuclear-armed states) came into open conflict thanks to disputes over terrorism and Jammu and Kashmir. Many influential individuals on both sides of the border were demanding their respective sides launch their nukes – a decision that could also spell the end of organized human life. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed.

Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine continues, with NATO forces urging President Zelensky to up the ante. Earlier this month, President Trump himself reportedly encouraged the Ukrainian leader to use his Western-made weapons to strike Moscow.

It is precisely actions such as these that led the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to move their famous Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest the world has ever been to catastrophe.

“The war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation,” they wrote in their explanation, adding that conflicts in Asia could spiral out of control into a wider war at any point, and that nuclear powers are updating and expanding their arsenals.

The Pentagon, too, is recruiting Elon Musk to help it build what it calls an American Iron Dome. While this move is couched in defensive language, such a system – if successful – would grant the U.S. the ability to launch nuclear attacks anywhere in the world without having to worry about the consequences of a similar response.

Thus, as we look back at the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago, we must understand that not only were they entirely avoidable, but that we are now closer to a catastrophic nuclear confrontation than many people realize.

This article was originally published on MintPress News.

The post 80 Years of Lies: The US Finally Admits It Knew It Didn’t Need To Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared first on LewRockwell.

August is the month when I always write about Greece, where I find myself at present enjoying the Attic climate. This time Sparta is on my mind, perhaps because I’ve been thinking about the man in the white suit of late, and the Spartans were the ones who made him redundant. Death to a Spartan was like the proverbial cold, to be endured but not to be feared nor taken too seriously.

All my mother’s antecedents were Spartans. Her mother’s brother, whose name is honored by streets and squares in central Sparta, was president of the Greek Academy, president of the Archaeological Society, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and even Prime Minister of Greece, Panagiotis Poulitsas. He taught me how to read ancient Greek when I was very, very young and was bitterly disappointed when I returned from America speaking Greek with an accent. Modern Sparta, needless to say, always votes for the right. Another uncle of mine used to win elections to the Greek Senate with 99 percent of the vote, and due to his 6-foot-2 height and Spartan toughness was never, ever challenged over the Stalin-like electoral result. When war broke out in 1940, my mother had four brothers and a husband up in the front the next day.

“The Spartans remain famous throughout history for their doomed stand at Thermopylae and are immortalized as the epitome of martial prowess.”

Sparta’s demise came from lack of men. Spartans were warriors, and warriors die in battle. The city-state simply ran out of fighters. Machiavelli and Montesquieu were big admirers of Sparta, as was the American Samuel Adams. Sparta conquered all surrounding states like Messenia and Laconia, and by 750 B.C. was the mistress of all Doric-speaking people. Helots, or slaves, of conquered territories did the heavy lifting. Unlike modern Caribbean and African dictators, no one has ever demanded reparations from modern Spartans for past helot services.

A true Spartan was one whose father and mother were Spartans, and they were called peers. A male peer devoted himself exclusively to military training. His dedication to the state was reciprocated by a grant of state-owned land in Laconia or Messenia, which was worked on by helots. The first six years of a Spartan boy’s life were spent at home, where he would be looked after by his mother and a nurse. He was taught not to be afraid of the dark, or of being left alone, and not to cry or throw temper tantrums. Then at the age of 7 he went to the barracks with other boys his age. Their hair was cropped and they trained naked. Food was in short supply in order to harden them for eventual warlike conditions. From age 18 Spartan young men were called up for military service. At age 20 they were permitted to marry.

At age 24 the Spartan male became a frontline combatant and at 30 a full citizen with the right to participate in the Assembly. Girls did not have it much easier. They trained intensively and ran, wrestled, and threw the discus. They were taught to sing and dance and were allowed to make fun of men and criticize their failings but also sing their praises. Doesn’t their education remind you of American high schools today?

The two most famous Spartan sayings are “Molon Lave” and “I Tan I Epi Tas.” “Molon Lave” was the answer by King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans when King Xerxes of Persia and his 200,000 troops offered the Spartans freedom if they laid down their arms. “Come and get them,” was the answer. They died to a man but killed thousands and won time for the rest of the Greeks to unite and defeat the invading Persians.

“I Tan I Epi Tas” was what every Spartan mother told her son as he departed for war: With it or on it, come back victorious or dead. Ancient Sparta was a mixture of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, something that made it difficult for ancient writers to classify. Plato himself could not decide whether Sparta was a democracy or a tyranny. Sparta’s council of 28 elders, who had to be over 60 years of age, sat along with the two kings. Leave it to the Spartans to have two of the latter.

Sparta’s eventual demise came at the hands of the Thebans, whose military strategy outfoxed the set Spartan plans (a weak center but two strong flanks). But the Spartans remain famous throughout history for their doomed stand at Thermopylae and are immortalized as the epitome of martial prowess. All my maternal relatives were proud Spartans, and they never forgot to remind me that I was half Spartan, hence to act like a man. Just like the #MeToo movement in America.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post Laconophilia appeared first on LewRockwell.

This article was first published on March 9, 2022, revised and expanded on October 5, 2022, minor revisions on May 25, 2023.

Introduction

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable. All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped.

Let us also recall the unspoken history of America’s doctrine pertaining to the conduct of nuclear war. 

Barely six weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. War Department released a Secret Plan on September 15, 1945 to  bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union with 204 atomic bombs.

The September 1945 Plan was to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map” at a time when the US and the USSR were allies. Confirmed by declassified documents, Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as a “Dress Rehearsal” (see historical details and analysis below).  

Video: The Dangers of Nuclear War: Michel Chossudovsky with Caroline Mailloux

April 2023. Comments: Link to Odysee

The Dangers of Nuclear War are Real. Profit Driven. Two Trillion Dollars

Under Joe Biden, public funds allocated to nuclear weapons are slated to increase to 2 trillion by 2030 allegedly as a means to safeguarding peace and national security at taxpayers expense. (How many schools and hospitals could you finance with 2 trillion dollars?):

The United States maintains an arsenal of about 1,700 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and at strategic bomber bases. There are an additional estimated 100 non-strategic, or tactical, nuclear weapons at bomber bases in five European countries and about 2,000 nuclear warheads in storage. [see our analysis of B61-11 and B61-12 below]

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in May 2021 that the United States will spend a total of $634 billion over the next 10 years to sustain and modernize its nuclear arsenal. (Arms Control)

In this article, I will focus on

• The Post Cold War shift in US Nuclear Doctrine,
• A brief review of the History of US-Russia Relations since World War I, 
• An Assessment of  the history of nuclear weapons going back to the Manhattan Project initiated in 1939 with the participation of both Canada and the United Kingdom.

Most people in America do not know that the Manhattan Project in the immediate wake of bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki in August 1945, was intended to formulate a nuclear attack against the USSR, at a time when the Soviet Union and the U.S. were allies.

Read the Whole Article

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I’ve watched the Carlson interview of Margaret Roberts all the way through now, and it is extremely powerful.  I have not had time to watch the Gingrich interview yet, so I’ll have to react to that one later.

It’s important to note, which you do with your touting of the Gingrich interview, that this Roberts book, Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing, is hot off the press, just having been published on July 22.  Anyone who might have had a little bit of confidence in our government and our news media would certainly have lost it by the time they get to the end of the interview.

I knew quite a bit about the Kenneth Trentadue case, but it was news to me that two other key people in the OKC bombing case also “hanged themselves” in their prison cells.  And she doesn’t even mention the highly suspicious “suicide” of the skeptical Oklahoma City policeman in the case, Terrence Yeakey, which I touch on in “Upton Sinclair and Timothy McVeigh.”  From reading early customer reviews, I see that she does treat that subject in the book, though.

It also takes a long time, I thought, for the interview to get into the serious pay dirt.  Not until the second hour do we learn about McVeigh’s almost certain recruitment into doing undercover work for the government right out of the Army, where he was something of a super soldier.  Similarly, we don’t hear the names of Andreas Strassmeir and Carol Howe until the second hour.  We do hear of an expression of surprise by McVeigh of the damage supposedly wrought to the Murrah Building by his truck bomb explosion, but neither Carlson nor Roberts makes the next logical step, which we see in my article, “Lying about Bombing.”  It’s clear that most of the damage to the building was done by bombs planted in the building, not by the truck that blew up on the street out front.

They also don’t mention PATCON until the second hour.  Searching the term online is very informative.  Roberts’ estimate that there are some 15,000 informants for the FBI is also quite an eye-opener.

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Tariffs are going to Make America Great Again!!!!

Our deficit problems will be cured. The national debt will decline. Our fiscal nightmare is over. Right?

Trump is so excited, he can’t sleep. He’s boasting about the billions in tariff revenues at midnight.

He ain’t wrong. The chart below clearly shows the massive surge in tariff revenue generated by his policies since taking office. The total tariff revenues in the 6 months since he has taken office are $120 billion, versus the $50 billion taken in those same 6 months in the prior year. Based on current trends, Trump’s tariffs could bring in close to $400 billion on an annualized basis. Not too shabby compared to the $100 billion taken in the years prior to his new tariffs.

Trump isn’t bashful about hyping what he believes are outstanding achievements, like quadrupling tariff revenues and forcing those foreign countries to “pay their fair share”.  The numbers don’t lie, but a little perspective on the scale and ultimate impact of these tariffs may be helpful.

The national debt is on course to increase by $1.9 trillion this fiscal year ending 9/30/25. It is up $700 billion since Trump took office. The Big Beautiful Bill didn’t cut one dime from the budget. The national debt will increase by about $2 trillion in the next fiscal year, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that. You get the picture. Increased debt until economic collapse.

The national debt will increase by approximately $5.5 billion per day forever, because the spending is on automatic pilot. Trump and your corrupt congress maggots have no intention of cutting any spending. A recession, war, or another fake pandemic would just drive the spending higher. So basically, the $300 billion in added tariff revenue will be frittered away by your government in less than 2 months. And if Trump goes through with his tariff rebate idea, the revenues will evaporate quicker, not that we should mind having the money in our pockets, rather than Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumer’s.

I know the Trump cheerleaders and social media influencers have been ecstatic that the tariffs have not created the dreaded surge in inflation predicted by the Fed and other economic “experts”. As the chart clearly shows, the tariffs have only been in place for 4 months. Does anyone understand the inflation impact is going to lag the implementation period? Does anyone understand there are only two possibilities regarding these tariffs? – either the corporations buying the goods wholesale eat the increase and decrease their profits or they pass along the price increases to the customers.

In the first case, corporate profits will decline and the stock market (at all-time highs and valuations) will likely decline significantly. In the more likely case, the corporations will pass the price increases to their customers, generating an increase in inflation and further robbing the average household of their spending power. Of course, Trump will instruct his new head of the BLS to fake the CPI number even more than it is already faked, to hide the real inflation caused by his tariffs.

I think a personal anecdote I’ve experienced will show you the devious methods corporations will use to pass these tariffs along. I have been buying a pack of coated paper plates at Wal-Mart for years. The pack contained 70 paper plates. Within the last four months, the pack was reduced to 50 plates, for the same price. They know the average dolt, after years of government schooling, is deficient in math skills, so they would not realize they just experienced a 40% increase in price per plate. This will show up nowhere in the fake BLS numbers. Shrinkflation is just as bad as inflation, but they can hide it and pretend all is well, while maintaining their profits.

Tariffs sounded great on the campaign trail. Foreign countries were clearly taking advantage of the U.S. through unfair trade practices. Trump’s threats and follow through on those threats have forced concessions from dozens of major trading partners. But his threatening rhetoric hasn’t worked on China, Brazil, India or the other BRIC countries, as they maneuver to replace the U.S. ruling economic empire. And now using tariffs/sanctions against Russia, China, and India to force Putin into an unacceptable peace plan with Ukraine/NATO is rhyming with FDR’s oil embargo on Japan in 1941. The unintended consequences of his actions are yet to be revealed, but ultimately these tariffs should be judged by their overall results, rather than the intentions and narratives surrounding them.

Reprinted with permission from The Burning Platform.

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The intensifying trade war between the United States and China has once again thrust the global economic system into a crucible of uncertainty.

The Trump administration’s aggressive approach with skyrocketing tariffs (threatening to go up to 100% on some goods) is not only disrupting global supply lines, but also signaling a broader geoeconomic strategy aimed at decoupling the increasingly postindustrial American economy from China’s sprawling industrial base. This move, coupled with Beijing’s retaliatory export controls on critical minerals, underscores a deepening rivalry that transcends mere economics, touching the nerve of global power projection dynamics.

The question is not whether this escalation marks the onset of a new Cold War, as that has already happened, but how the global economy can adapt to this new reality, particularly as the political West’s aggression against the entire world is now openly focused on arresting global development based on its geopolitical interests. This is now a calculated game of “3D chess” where Western powers seek strategic leverage without tipping into outright conflict, which is entirely in line with their approach of “crawling invasions”. America’s rationale for escalating tariff wars is rooted in a blend of economic nationalism, (neo)colonialist tendencies and geopolitical posturing.

Prior to Trump’s “America First” policies, the White House used various euphemisms to conceal this approach. However, it now wants to prioritize domestic manufacturing, particularly in critical sectors such as semiconductors and rare-earth elements (REEs). But, as previously mentioned, the US economy is now too far into its postindustrial phase, exacerbating Trump’s troubles with reindustrialization. This is precisely why he now openly says that war is “good business”, as the American Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is now the only major production sector left in the US. This has clear geopolitical implications, as evidenced by Trump’s “sudden” change of heart regarding wars around the world.

The deal between the Department of Defense (DoD) and MP Materials to restart REE production at Mountain Pass mine is a clear nod to this strategy, aiming to restore the Pentagon’s ability to acquire REEs without having to rely on imports. The exact data varies significantly, but depending on the source, China dominates the market with a share of up to 60% in mining REEs and 86% in processing and manufacturing. However, Beijing had no export restrictions of any kind before Washington DC launched its trade war. It did so only after America started implementing its strategic encirclement of China in an attempt to disrupt the latter’s normal economic activity and growth.

United States Plans to Step Up Its Economic War Against China

Still, the Asian giant understands perfectly that such moves are not merely economic. Its dominance in REEs terrifies the US, which cannot acquire enough of them to manufacture everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to advanced weapon systems. However, America’s attempts to attain long-term self-sufficiency are failing, as it lags in the production economy, which would take years (if not decades) to scale up to China’s current levels, provided there’s a long-term stagnation in the Chinese economy. Washington DC knows this is not possible if Beijing is left alone, which is why the US military is actively destabilizing virtually the entire Asia-Pacific region.

This now leaves American strategic planners with a virtually insurmountable paradox. Namely, there’s no evidence to support the claim that China would (ab)use its REE dominance, but is now forced to do so as America escalates its aggression. In turn, this is affecting the latter’s ability to acquire REEs, leaving negative consequences on the functioning of the Pentagon. In other words, Washington DC can blame this vulnerability to Beijing’s countermeasures solely on its aggressive foreign policy. It’s in China’s interest to keep exporting REEs without any disruptions, so all the US needs to do is simply deescalate, ease tensions and restore normal trade relations.

Otherwise, it can expect a sharp response from China, which will inevitably use its REE leverage to blunt the blade of US aggression in the Asia-Pacific. It can do so through export controls or by imposing additional licensing requirements. Either way, Beijing has sent a clear message – it can choke off the Pentagon’s supply lines just as effectively as Washington DC can impose tariffs (although the consequences for the US will be far worse). This tit-for-tat response is nothing new, but its timing is quite problematic for the political West, particularly in the context of global economic reconfiguration that amplifies the impact of China’s legitimate retaliation.

The sheer concentration of critical REE mining, refining and manufacturing underscores the Asian giant’s strategic advantage. Meanwhile, the US, its vassals and satellite states keep insisting on the so-called “diversification” (just like with Russian energy). However, China’s position as the most powerful production economy in human history allows it to dictate terms whenever the political West engages in aggressive posturing. The world’s most vile racketeering cartel is now scrambling for alternatives, but no country on the planet can match China’s economic might. Thus, all this is not a mere trade spat, but a geopolitical battle for control over the arteries of the global economy.

It’s worth noting that neither China nor its partners in the multipolar world picked this fight. On the contrary, BRICS keeps offering mutually beneficial economic cooperation based on fair conditions for all. However, the political West’s parasitic, (neo)colonial stance prevents normal relations with every remotely sovereign nation on the planet. The US/NATO’s demands for blind obedience and virtually total submission disrupt all positive global integration trends and processes. In addition, expecting that countries won’t retaliate when attacked reveals the sheer magnitude of Western arrogance and dangerous delusions that keep pushing the world into a state of constant confrontation.

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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Andy Thomas wrote:

Another sign that Britain is finished, or soon will be.

See here.

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Thanks, John Frahm.

The American Conservative

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Thank you, John Frahm.

FOX News

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Tim McGraw wrote:

The globalists hate Christianity. They want it destroyed. Nothing has really changed since they crucified Christ. America is becoming the last one standing in the way of the globalists.

While America Soul Searches, The Rest of the World is Falling Apart: Brandon Smith

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Scott Daniels wrote:

Hi Lew,

Why stop at the penny or even the nickel? We should drop everything less than a dollar. Based on silver value, a quarter is the new penny, and based on gold value, the two dollar is the new penny. Let’s make it simple – make the dollar the new penny.Personally, I would prefer a return to coins, best done by redenominating the dollar by 100x, making a penny the value of today’s dollar. Other countries do it, why can’t we? Is it too dangerous to point out the emperor has no clothes? Alas, I can dream can’t I?

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“Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.”—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Power to the people.”—John Lennon

What on earth is happening to this country?

How, over the course of 250 years, did we go from prizing self-government to allowing a corrupt, self-serving ruling elite to dominate us with terror campaigns, brute force, and psychological warfare?

Don’t be fooled: the madness, mayhem and malice unfolding in America is not politics as usual. It’s not partisan hardball. It’s not bureaucratic overreach.

It’s theft in the gravest sense imaginable: the theft of our nation, the theft of our sovereignty as citizens, the theft of our constitutional republic.

This isn’t just corruption—it’s a betrayal of the very purpose for which governments are instituted. As John Locke warned, when those in power break the social contract by seizing rights they were appointed to protect, they no longer govern with the consent of the people—they rule by force, and the people are justified in resisting.

The Declaration of Independence echoed this principle: “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

What we face now is just such a train of abuses—systematic, strategic, and swift.

The government is seizing what does not belong to it: our voice, our rights, our power to choose and to resist. It is robbing us of the very tools of self-government—accountability, transparency, representation, free speech, bodily autonomy—and replacing them with coercion, propaganda, and force.

So when the White House threatens to withhold FEMA aid from states that won’t endorse its foreign policy? That’s theft.

When the president attacks the courts for calling out executive overreach? That’s theft.

When the media is muzzled, the police state expands, and new concentration camps rise? All of it—theft.

We are being robbed blind in broad daylight by the very individuals entrusted with safeguarding our rights and our republic.

Despite his assurances to the contrary, Donald Trump never had any intention of draining the swamp. He is the swamp.

Yet make no mistake: this didn’t start with Trump. The groundwork for this theft was laid long before—through successive administrations, both Republican and Democrat—that expanded executive power, hollowed out the Constitution, and normalized the rule of force over the rule of law.

What Trump has done is remove the mask, weaponize the tools of tyranny, and accelerate the dismantling of the republic in full view of the people.

Here are just a few of the many ways the Trump administration—no different than its predecessors in motive, yet far more brazen in execution—is stealing the birthright of the American people and cementing the transformation of the republic into a government of wolves.

• Police, once tasked with serving the people, now act as an occupying force—conducting no-knock raids in the dead of night, using military-grade weapons against civilians, and treating constitutional rights as optional.
• ICE agents, incentivized by massive $50,000 bonuses and shielded from accountability, behave more like mercenaries than law enforcement—disappearing immigrants, terrorizing families, and operating far outside the bounds of due process.
• Fourth Amendment protections, under constant assault, have become optional. Armed police raids—often executed without warrants or on faulty intelligence—are increasing in frequency and aggression. Constitution-free zones now extend well beyond the border, with entire communities living under constant threat of militarized home invasions and door-to-door sweeps.
• Elected representatives enrich themselves through insider trading, while the crises they help manufacture devastate the populace.
• Federal courts are being threatened or ignored outright when they attempt to check executive overreach. Judges who speak out are branded enemies of the state.
• Whistleblowers, journalists, and truth-tellers are prosecuted, surveilled, or silenced—treated as threats to national security. Journalism, once protected as a check on power, is under siege.
• Statisticians, public health experts, and government researchers are being purged or silenced when their data doesn’t support the administration’s narrative. We are living in the shadow of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, where facts are negotiable, history can be rewritten, and reality is whatever the Deep State says it is.
• Disaster relief, foreign policy, and executive authority have been weaponized to punish dissent.
• The Department of Justice has become a tool of loyalty enforcement—targeting dissenters while shielding cronies.
• Meanwhile, the Epstein files remain sealed. Despite public outcry and compelling evidence of elite involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking network, the Trump administration has refused to release the full client list or investigative records. In doing so, it continues the bipartisan pattern of shielding the powerful from scrutiny while everyday Americans face ever-expanding surveillance, suspicion, and punishment.
• Public lands are being auctioned off to corporate allies without oversight or accountability.
• Citizenship is no longer a birthright but a privilege granted or revoked by political fiat.
• Digital platforms, pressured by federal agencies, now censor views deemed “inconvenient” to the state.
• Education is being reshaped to discourage critical thought and enforce ideological conformity.
• Government services, once created to serve the public good, are now political weapons—used to reward loyalty, punish dissent, and control the masses through selective aid and ideological enforcement.
• Executive orders have become tools of rule-by-decree, bypassing Congress and obliterating checks and balances.
• Economic chaos is being weaponized strategically. By manufacturing crises, withholding aid, and destabilizing budgets, the Deep State has found a new way to consolidate power, transfer wealth upwards, and condition compliance.
• Corruption is not punished. It’s rewarded—so long as it serves the power elite.

And while all of this is happening, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to keep the citizenry distracted, divided, and demobilized—peddling outrage, manufacturing crises, stoking culture wars and threatening global wars.

Transparency is buried beneath spectacle. Accountability is drowned out by distraction. And by the time we look up from the latest scandal or political brawl, another piece of the republic has been carved away.

Bit by bit, freedom is being caged. And what is emerging in its place is a vast, inescapable prison—walled in not by bars, but by bureaucracy, deception, and brute force.

Aided and abetted by the Trump administration, the Deep State is turning the entire country into one sprawling, swampy, digitally surveilled Alligator Alcatraz: a carceral state in which every citizen is suspect, every movement is monitored, and escape routes are vanishing fast.

When “we the people” no longer have a say in how we’re governed—when we have no way to guard against our trust being abused and our rights violated—when we have no way to counter government efforts to silence our voices, manipulate our choices, and erase our rights—what remains is not a constitutional republic.

It’s a prison. A prison made of laws perverted, truths twisted, and power unchecked.

Yet the government—present and past—is stealing more than just power. It’s stealing the people’s ability to be the government.

This is not just about the loss of freedom. It is the systematic dismantling of self-government—of the people’s role as the final check on power. And it begins subtly. It begins with our right to know what is happening in our own government being blocked.

Transparency—the cornerstone of any functioning representative democracy—is vanishing behind a fortress of secrecy. Laws meant to hold power accountable are neutered by “national security” exemptions and stonewalled FOIA requests. The government issues secret executive orders, redacts critical information, and shields entire policy regimes from public view.

What we don’t know can and will hurt us.

Next goes the right to participate. Representation, once a sacred principle, has been reduced to a numbers game—rigged congressional maps, voter roll purges, and data-driven manipulation that keep incumbents entrenched and challengers out. The people are no longer choosing their representatives; representatives are choosing their people.

Dissent—an essential function of free government—is now pathologized, criminalized, or digitally erased. Protesters are surveilled, activists labeled extremists, and speech censored through backdoor collusion between federal agencies and tech platforms. The First Amendment is being gutted in real time.

Even physical sovereignty is under assault. The right to bodily autonomy has been quietly subverted by biometric tracking, mental health detentions, and proposed mandates for wearable surveillance devices. What was once science fiction is now federal policy. In the name of safety, every heartbeat, step, and biometric signal is being harvested, scored, and archived.

Meanwhile, civil liberties once considered foundational—due process, freedom from arbitrary detention, the presumption of innocence—are being erased by executive edict. With the stroke of a pen, entire populations (immigrants, homeless individuals, protest organizers) can be swept up, locked away, and denied basic constitutional protections.

Local communities, too, are being robbed of their self-governance. Cities that seek to set their own course—whether through sanctuary laws, public health rules, or environmental standards—are being overridden by federal command. Militarized police forces, far from acting like local peace officers, have become extensions of the government’s standing army.

Even the symbolism of the republic is being repurposed. The White House is daily becoming less a house of the people and more a gilded monument to imperial presidency.

This is not democracy.

This is the theft of a nation in real time by those entrusted with the highest offices of power, who use their power to strip “we the people” of our sovereignty and our rights.

The founders warned us against kings. What we face now is far more insidious: an executive branch that pays lip service to freedom while locking down the nation.

This is not how free people are governed.

This is how free people are ruled.

If the people are no longer allowed to check power, to criticize it, to reform it, to influence it, or even to see it—then we no longer have a government of the people, by the people, or for the people.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we have a government against the people.

The answer, as the Founders understood—and as poets from Percy Bysshe Shelley to John Lennon have urged—is that there is power in our numbers if only we would stand united against tyranny.

To quote Shelley:

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.”

Unless we wake up to what is being stolen from us—not just our rights, but our role as masters, not servants—we may find that the chains we refused to shake off have become impossible to break.

The post Theft of a Nation: How the Deep State Swamp Is Stealing the People’s Power appeared first on LewRockwell.

Founded by two Stanford University graduate students who were former smokers, Juul is the top-selling e-cigarette in the United States. According to the Juul website:

JUUL is a vaporizer, also known as an electronic cigarette or e-cigarette, unlike any other — designed to be convenient, easy-to-use, and familiarly enjoyable for adult smokers. Our proprietary nicotine-containing e-liquid formulation is the first of its kind, making innovative vapor technology a truly satisfying alternative.

The mission of Juul Labs is to transition the world’s billion adult smokers away from combustible cigarettes, eliminate their use, and combat underage usage of our products.

Juul has been demonized for years as being responsible for the supposed epidemic of teen vaping. For several years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tried to ban Juul products from the market. But now, the FDA has given Juul authorization to sell its products after determining that Juul products provide less exposure to deadly chemicals than traditional cigarettes.

The FDA actually maintains a list of e-cigarettes that it has authorized to be sold in the United States. In May of this year, the FDA, along with the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), seized nearly two million units of unauthorized e-cigarette products in Chicago.

“Today’s FDA authorization of JUUL products marks an important step toward making the cigarette obsolete,” said K.C. Crosthwaite, Juul Labs’s CEO. “Americans who use nicotine deserve an orderly, reliable market in which they can confidently choose from a wide array of smokefree nicotine products that are high-quality, innovative, backed by rigorous research, made in FDA-inspected manufacturing facilities, and marketed and sold responsibly,” he added.

However, Yolonda Richardson, president and CEO of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, had a different opinion: “It is a big step in the wrong direction to authorize sales of the product that was responsible for this public health crisis in the first place.” And so did Ranjana Caple, senior manager of federal advocacy for the American Lung Association (ALA): “Juul is responsible for the youth vaping epidemic, and its products have hooked a generation of kids on nicotine. Authorizing these products signal a stunning failure to protect public health.”

Juul products may be unhealthy, they may be addictive, and they may be harmful, but the vindication of Juul is good for individual liberty.

It is not the job of the government to prevent anyone from vaping, smoking, or ingesting dangerous, destructive, or even deadly products. This is because it is simply not the job of government to keep people from harming themselves with any substance.

It is the job of parents to keep their kids from vaping just like it is the job of parents to keep their kids from drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, becoming a couch potato, chewing tobacco, viewing pornography, reading raunchy literature, seeing bad movies, having premarital sex, eating junk food, surfing the Internet, taking drugs, watching too much television, staying on their phone too long, and hanging out with bad people. It is never the job of the government.

The Family Smoking and Tobacco Control, which gave the FDA authority to regulate the manufacture, marketing, sale, and distribution of tobacco products, should be repealed.

The FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) should be abolished, as should the FDA itself. All warning labels on tobacco and vaping products should be voluntary. All taxes on tobacco products should be eliminated. All bans and regulations regarding tobacco advertising should be ended. All government smoking bans in private businesses should be ended.

I don’t smoke or vape, and consider both to be unhealthy and harmful, but I much prefer to live in a free society than a nanny state.

The post Juul’s Vindication Good for Individual Liberty appeared first on LewRockwell.

Nathaniel Macon was one of the most significant figures during the first half century of American history. Yet Macon is basically unknown in the contemporary United States, and his role and importance in American history, so appreciated before the War Between the States, are largely ignored or glossed over. Mention the name “Nathaniel Macon” to a contemporary politician, and the response is usually a blank stare, betraying ignorance, a lack of basic familiarity.

Years ago, while researching Macon and his life, I was amazed to discover the incredible importance that “the Squire of Buck Spring” (his very modest plantation in northeastern North Carolina) had in the new American nation, and, more interestingly, the incredible influence he had on such later and much better-known figures as John C. Calhoun, President John Tyler, and other, more contemporary figures in our history. Think of the various towns, cities, and counties named in his honor. At one time in the American nation his name and renown were widely known and acknowledged.

Quite a bit of this contemporary ignorance must be attributed, certainly, to Macon’s philosophy. He was, to quote his contemporaries, “the father of states’ rights” and the figure most critical in the actual development and survival of the states’ rights philosophy that, still, in many ways, percolates in American politics. After the War Between the States Macon was largely identified with the defense of slavery. Although during his long tenure in Congress he stoutly defended the “peculiar institution,” his strictures were always based on a clear understanding of the Constitution and its provisions and that to abandon it on one major question was to in effect open the floodgates for other, often unforeseen or undesirable changes.  And such changes, he predicted, could well lead to civil war.

It was Macon’s probity of character and his steadfast devotion to principle that won him general admiration from across the entire spectrum of antebellum political opinion. Leaders as diverse as Presidents John Quincy Adams and John Tyler expressed great admiration for Macon; many attempted to tie in their own views, even those ideas that seemed at odds with Macon’s, to those of the Squire of Buck Spring.

Macon was first elected to the United States House of Representatives from North Carolina in 1790—at the very beginning of the new American nation—serving there until 1815. During the presidency of Thomas Jefferson he served as Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1801 until 1807. He quickly became known for his unbreakable “old republican” principles: individual liberty, local and state authority over matters closest to the citizens, strict economy and accountability in government expenditures, frequent elections, avoidance of debt, and a staunch adherence to a decentralist, originalist view of the nature of the new nation. These he stubbornly maintained even if it placed him in opposition at times to American presidents of his own political persuasion.

Along with John Randolph of Roanoke and a few other congressional representatives Macon represented undeviating allegiance to the fundamental principles enunciated during the American Revolution and inscribed in the Constitution. For him those principles did not—and must not—change. During the first fifty years of the nation’s history, it was Macon who incarnated them and in various ways ensured their survival. After leaving the U. S. House of Representatives in 1815 and being elevated to the United States Senate by the North Carolina General Assembly, Macon’s influence only grew and became more pervasive, especially in the South. It was his significant role during the debates over the Missouri Compromise (1819-1820) that signaled the actual emergence of a genuine states’ rights philosophy which would continue and influence significantly subsequent American history.

Although Macon is portrayed almost uniquely for his defense of slavery, it was not that hotly debated issue which dominated his attention. For his views and observations also ranged over topics such as government involvement in internal improvement programs which he considered to be in the purview of the respective states, the establishment of a national banking system (which he opposed), and the essential nature of the Federal union as intended by the Framers. For him all such issues, and not only the increasingly contentious issue of slavery, were a part of a larger question, that of how the Constitution was to be interpreted and applied.

As early as March 1818 he wrote to North Carolina congressman Bartlett Yancey as follows:

I must ask you to examine the Constitution of the United States….and tell me, if Congress can establish banks, make roads and canals, whether they cannot free all the slaves in the United States?….We have abolition, colonization and peace societies–their intentions cannot be known; but the character and spirit of one may without injustice be considered that of all. It is a character and spirit of perseverance bordering on enthusiasm, and if the general government shall continue to stretch its powers, these societies will undoubtedly push it to try the question of emancipation….

With the debate over Missouri looming, Macon wrote to Yancey again, in April 1818:

If Congress can make canals they can with more propriety emancipate. Be not deceived, I speak soberly in the fear of God and the love of the Constitution. Let not the love of improvement or a thirst for glory blind that sober discretion and sound sense, with which the Lord has blest you. Paul was not more anxious or sincere concerning Timothy, than I am for you. Your error in this will injure if not destroy our beloved mother, North Carolina, and all the South country. Add not to the Constitution nor take therefrom. Be not led astray by grand notions or magnificent opinions. Remember that you belong to a meek State and just people, who want nothing but to enjoy the fruits of their labor honestly and to lay out their profits in their own way.

In early 1819 the actual debate in the Senate over the admission of Missouri to the union commenced, and, as Missouri was a territory where slavery existed, that contentious question became central to the debate. A resolution–a compromise–put forward by Senator Jesse Thomas of Illinois proposed admitting Maine as a “free” state and Missouri as a “slave” state but prohibiting slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36 degrees, 30 minutes.

Many Southern leaders, including the then Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, were prepared to go along initially with the compromise, but Macon, singularly, rose to oppose it. And it was in his famous Senate speech on the question that heralded the birth of a full-fledged “states’ rights philosophy.” The speech deserves to be quoted at length:

All the states now have equal rights and are content. Deprive one of the least right which it now enjoys in common with the others and it will no longer be content….All the new states have the same rights that the old have; why make Missouri an exception? Why depart in her case from the great American principle that the people can govern themselves? All the country west of the Mississippi was acquired by the same treaty, and on the same terms and the people in every part have the same rights….The [Thomas] amendment will operate unjustly to the people who have gone there from other states. They carried with them property [slaves] guaranteed by their states, by the Constitution and treaty; they purchased lands and settled on them without molestation; but now, unfortunately for them, it is discovered that they ought not to have been permitted to carry a single slave….Let the United States abandon this new scheme; let their magnanimity, and not their power, be felt by the people of Missouri. The attempt to govern too much has produced every civil war that ever has been, and will, probably, every one that ever may be.

And finishing with a prescient vision of the future, Macon continued:

Why depart from the good old way? Why leave the road of experience to take this new one, of which we have no experience? This way leads to universal emancipation, of which we have no experience….A clause in the Declaration of Independence has been read, declaring “that all men are created equal.” Follow that sentiment, and does it not lead to universal emancipation? If it will justify putting an end to slavery in Missouri, will it not justify it in the old states? Suppose the plan followed…is it certain that the present Constitution would last long?

The debate over the Missouri Compromise marked a significant turning point in American history and, eventually, in the diverging views of the leaders of both the South and the North. Although Macon had been engaged in a losing effort to block the compromise, it was, above all, his forthright and clear-sighted defense of strict constructionism that singled him out as a prophet. In 1819 his view was nearly unique, even among his fellow Southerners. But not many years after his remarkable interventions in the Missouri debates, a whole generation of Southern congressmen and national political leaders would acknowledge him as the intellectual father of states’ rights. In 1821 a chastened Thomas Jefferson, who had also foreseen how the crisis would affect the nation—Jefferson, who termed the stark reality made visible by the debates as “a fire bell in the night”—called Macon “the Depositor of old & sound principles,” and wrote him: “God bless you & long continue your wholesome influence in public councils.” In a letter Jefferson addressed to Macon on March 26, 1826, a few months before his death, the former president declared that Macon was “Ultimus Romanorum”—“the last of the Romans”—“whom I consider as the strictest of models of genuine republicanism.”

Despite his staunch support for states’ rights and “old republicanism,” Macon was greatly esteemed by a wide variety of American political leaders. President John Quincy Adams, a man of opposite views, in his Memoirs described Macon as “…a stern republican…a man of stern parts and mean education, but of rigid integrity, and a blunt, though not offensive, deportment…one of the most influential members of the Senate. His integrity, his indefatigable attention to business, and his long experience give him a weight of character and consideration which few men of superior minds ever acquire.” In 1828 it was widely rumored that Adams, despite differences with Macon, considered him as his potential vice-presidential choice.

In 1824, after the illness of leading states’ rights presidential candidate, William H. Crawford, Governor George M. Troup of Georgia put forward Macon as a candidate for president: “I know of no person who would unite so extensively the public sentiment of the southern country…as yourself.” In 1825 Macon received twenty-four electoral votes for the vice-presidency. In 1826 and 1827 he was elected President Pro-Tempore of the United States Senate.

As he approached the end of his long career, recognition of his significant role in American history and political development came from some of the most significant voices of the time. From Calhoun, John Tyler, and Thomas Hart Benton came encomiums and words of admiration and the recognition that Macon had played a pivotal role in the history of the first sixty years of the American nation, as well as in the development of their own personal philosophies and political positions.

While many readers in our modern age may think that Macon’s most pointed comments deal with the institution of slavery, it was not defending the “peculiar institution” that was at the core of his philosophy. Indeed, his commentary on such important questions as the Federal bank and government support for internal improvements reflect a states’ rights consistency and integrity. Slavery, because Macon recognized it as a particularly dangerous lynchpin for the American nation, certainly occupied a salient part of his commentary. But the greater issue for him was the growing power and control of the Federal government and the eventual destruction of the older Constitutional system erected by the Framers.

In 1835, in his last major public role, Macon was elected to preside over the North Carolina Constitutional Convention. While he made few interventions, he generally opposed changes to the state constitution. For him, “all changes in government were from better to worse.”

In June 1837 Macon summoned his doctor and the undertaker and paid them in advance. He died on June 29 that year, at Buck Spring. In a simple ceremony on his plantation he was interred, attended by grieving slaves, with whom he had worked side-by-side in his fields. He instructed his executor and son-in-law, Congressman Weldon N. Edwards, that no monument mark his grave, but that a pile of smooth stones be placed upon the site.

His epitaph he spoke eighteen years earlier, in Congress: “The attempt to govern too much has produced every civil war that ever has been, and will, probably, every one that ever may be.” Macon understood and clearly foresaw the results of the destruction of liberties and the erosion of states’ rights and the emergence of an all-encompassing Federal government.

The pile of stones at his Buck Spring plantation site remains, as does the philosophy that Macon first enunciated, despite the completion of the shattering prophecy he foresaw. And, now, it is up to later generations to attempt to retrieve and recover the Framers’ vision.

The post Nathaniel Macon: The Forgotten Prophet of States’ Rights appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I began to think about what I would write about in this week’s column, my first thought was that I hoped everyone saw the gruesome photographs of the tiny five-month-old girl in Gaza who had starved to death.

She had weighed six pounds, six ounces at birth. Five months later, at her death, she was skin and bones with legs thinner than an ordinary pencil.

My second thought, though, was that I wished nobody had had to see those photos, because I wish neither she nor anyone else had starved to death in Gaza or any place else.

On July 27, the World Health Organization said there had been 63 deaths by starvation in Gaza so far that month, and 24 of those were children under the age of five years old.

Two days earlier, ABC News said 19 people had starved to death in the past 24 hours and that most were little children. That same day, the British newspaper, The Independent, reported that in recent weeks, 113 people had starved to death, and 82 were children.

Rep. Randy Fine of Florida, who is Jewish and the newest Republican in Congress, wrote in his official account on July 22 that he hoped Palestinians would “starve away.” A few days later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there is “no starvation in Gaza.”

Yet NBC News reported on July 28 (the day after Netanyahu’s claim) that there is “mounting global outrage over rising deaths and scenes of starvation under Israel’s military offensive.”

Almost every story about Gaza, whether in print, online, or TV or radio – with the exception of FOX News – referred to the “growing global outrage” against Israel’s starvation tactics.

Of course, the most glaring exception has been in the U.S. Congress, which the Israel Lobby controls because of its ability to direct campaign contributions either for or against any member. If any country other than Israel were carrying out such a cruel war – killing and starving thousands of women and children – the Congress would have long ago condemned it and stopped sending billions to support it.

No publication has been as supportive of Israel over the years as the New York Times. Yet, on July 26 the paper carried a story headlined “No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole UN Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say.”

Then on July 18, the Times carried another story headlined “Revenge Is Not A Policy: Israelis Voice Dissent Against War In Gaza.” The story said: “Now a growing number of Israelis are speaking out against what they describe as atrocities carried out in their name in the Palestinian enclave.”

The reporter, Isabel Kershner, added: “Israeli protesters are holding aloft portraits of Palestinian children killed in Gaza. Academics and authors, politicians and retired military leaders are accusing the Israeli government of indiscriminate killing and war crimes.”

An iPhone news report said: “Palestinians are beginning to resemble ‘walking corpses,’ a United Nations official said, as (British Prime Minister) Keir Starmer called the starvation unfolding in Gaza ‘unspeakable and indefensible.’ He added, ‘While the situation has been grave for some time, it has reached new depths and continues to worsen. We are witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe.’”

On July 21, the United Nations put out a statement which said, “We have recorded 1,054 people killed in Gaza while trying to get food … 288 near UN and other humanitarian organizations’ aid convoys.”

Two days earlier, the Doctors Without Borders organization published a release saying, “As the Israeli government’s siege starves the people of Gaza … just outside Gaza, in warehouses – and even within Gaza itself – tons of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items and fuel sit untouched with humanitarian organizations blocked from accessing or delivering it.”

That statement said Israel’s total siege has “created chaos, starvation, and death. An aid worker… spoke of the devastating impact on children: children tell their parents they want to go to heaven, because at least heaven has food.”

Sen. Ted Cruz said on Tucker Carlson’s podcast that he supported what Israel is doing because the Bible says to bless Israel. However, he became very flustered when Carlson asked him where it says that in the Bible, and Cruz obviously did not know.

The Bible does instruct people to bless Israel, but it does not say people should bless Israel’s government no matter what it does. There is a lot more to the United States than our federal government. People can love this country while at the same time criticizing things our federal government does.

In the same way, people can love and bless Israel while criticizing its slaughter of the Palestinian people. Hundreds of thousands of Jews – maybe even a few million – are now doing just that. It is time for Christians to condemn the starving and killing of little children.

There is a very old Christian song which says:

Jesus loves the little children,

All the children of the world;

Red and yellow, black and white,

They are precious in his sight.

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

It does not say He loves all the children except for the little children in Gaza.

This article was originally published on The Knoxville Focus.

The post Starving Little Children Creates Global Outrage appeared first on LewRockwell.

In his first address to the College of Cardinals, Leo XIV explained his choice of name was inspired by “Pope Leo XIII [who] in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”

I knew of Rerum Novarum as the foundation of Catholic Social Teaching, and I had accepted the common claim that it rejects both socialism and capitalism. But there was a certain dissatisfaction about this understanding, a sense that I must have been missing something. As the daughter of Cuban exiles, I could not fathom how the Church could reject these two systems to the same degree when one had lifted millions out of poverty while the other had slaughtered millions in the name of equality.

So, now that Leo XIV had given this encyclical a place of honor in his new pontificate, I stopped relying on secondhand interpretations and read it for myself.

What Does Rerum Novarum Really Say?

As I read it, disbelief gave way to outrage. How misled I had been! This was no evenhanded critique of socialism on the one hand and capitalism on the other! It was a strong condemnation of socialism backed by a vigorous, principled defense of private property and the family. And, even more radically for our day, it was an explanation of why socialism hurts the poor rather than helps them. Leo never once promotes government redistribution of wealth as a general policy, but he does say—several times!—that only when private property is held sacred (yes, sacred) can we truly help the needy.

I could hardly think of a more provocative statement these days, certain to make most modern social justice warriors uncomfortable.

And it seems others feel the same. The opening paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on Rerum Novarum (RN) contains what I now know are multiple misrepresentations:

It supports the rights of labor to form trade unions [true], and rejects both socialism and capitalism [false] while affirming the right to private property [true, though vastly understated] and to a living wage [misleading, given how the term is used today].

Does RN champion the right to form unions governed by Christian morality? Absolutely, and with good reason.

Does it critique the treatment of workers as means to an end, inhumane working conditions, defrauding workers of their wages, and other practices where the rich and powerful treat workers as slaves? Yes, strongly. But capitalism hardly has a monopoly on these—it’s got nothing on atheistic Communism. And as the horrors of Communism began to be made known two generations after Leo XIII wrote RN, the Church has left absolutely no doubt that Communism is evil and irreconcilable with Christianity.

What Is a “Living Wage”?

One point from the Wikipedia entry is especially salient today: the “living wage” claim. Does RN argue that workers have the right to a living wage? Yes, though it does not use that term. Here is how RN expresses the idea (emphasis added):

Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages should support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner…. If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. Nature itself would urge him to this. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners. Many excellent results will follow from this; and, first of all, property will certainly become more equitably divided…

Do you believe the average Wikipedia reader thinks this is what “living wage” means? Sadly, the term is often used by those aiming to stoke division and envy, and nothing will put that fire out more quickly than realizing Catholic Social Teaching emphasizes property ownership as a natural right, requires wages to reflect the individual’s situation, and places demands on how employees spend their earnings. And that, Leo XIII argues, is how you get a more equitable distribution of property. Equity!

Read the Whole Article

The post They Lied to You About Rerum Novarum appeared first on LewRockwell.

In terms of geopolitics one could argue that allies don’t have to like each other, they just have to provide a mutual benefit that serves the greater purposes of peace. One could also argue that through cultural exchange the good habits of one country could easily influence the bad habits of another, but that kind of influence can also happen in reverse.

Though we might think of American culture as the content driver of the planet, the reality is that our ideals are an exceedingly rare dynamic found in no other society. We provide sanctuary to a fragile ember of free thought in an otherwise gloomy world of globalist oppression. It is something that must be protected at all costs.

Over the years I’ve heard many arguments from ignorant liberals about the grand progressive accomplishments of the European experiment and its centralized system. I’ve been told many times about how much safer Canada and Australia are. How the UK has near zero gun crime and how socialism works so well in Norway and Sweden.

Leftists in the US have long embraced this messaging as gospel and for generations they have told us that we MUST join the rest of western civilization by sacrificing certain liberties for the sake of future generations. We must become more like our allies in “more civilized” and liberal nations, or be left behind and labeled an “embarrassment”.

In reality, progressive leaders have abandoned western civilization, forsaking it in exchange for the elitist “Great Reset”. The political landscape in the UK, Canada and Australia has turned decidedly sour. They are speed running into technocracy and communism and abandoning any semblance of “democratic” governance. The mask is coming off to reveal Orwell’s “Big Brother”.

Europe Is Now A Third World Cesspool

Western civilization has been a net positive for humanity over the centuries and the only people that deny this are those that don’t know history and those that refuse to look at what is happening in the EU today with any honesty.

When you truly study the history of third-world societies you will find that life in these environments is brutal, devoid of compassion and bereft of freedom. The majority of their conflicts are solved with violence, often to the point of barbarism.

No woke liberal today stands a chance living within these societies. They would be laughed at over their calls for “equity” and slaughtered for their activism. Yet, leftists aggressively lobby for open borders so the third-world can invade.

It’s important to understand that Multiculturalism is a weaponized ideology. It’s not about coexistence, or labor markets, or population decline; it’s about eliminating western culture. The goal of globalists is to destabilize the connective tissue of the west, to saturate and dilute our shared cultural principles and make us as weak as possible.

They hope to use migrants as enforcers. It’s a classic strategy implemented by many tyrannical regimes that prefer to recruit foreign mercenaries as leverage to control an otherwise rebellious peasantry. Third world migrants are creating an atmosphere of crime and decay that globalists think will terrorize native Europeans into submission and apathy.

If you’re afraid to walk the streets of your own country, then your country no longer belongs to you.

The Muslim/Leftist Alliance

It’s no coincidence that the EU is importing migrants primarily from Islamic societies: They have no intention of integrating and they openly brag about how they’re coming to Europe to plunder and conquer. As these groups enter the west they bring with them a philosophy of exploitation – Their religious rules only apply to believers; non-believers are fair game and can be freely targeted.

One might wonder how an alliance between the leftists and the Muslims is even possible. They seem to be diametrically opposed to each other on almost everything. But consider for a moment what they share: A parallel hatred of western civilization and a desire to destroy it. Muslims see atheist progressives as disgusting, but they also see them as useful for opening the gates to predominantly Christian nations. Leftists, being generally weak and unable to project physical power, see Muslims as much needed hired muscle.

Keep in mind that the Canadian government has been flooding the country with Muslim migrants over the past ten years and is allowing them extreme latitude to run their own communities. There has been no government effort to silence the anti-LGBT rhetoric of Islamic speakers.

Canada has been quickly sinking into authoritarianism with draconian censorship laws and woke indoctrination. The Carney government is currently implementing a mass gun ban with over 300 models of firearms abruptly prohibited. Conservative Canadians in provinces like Alberta believe that the Carney government is trying to disarm them to prevent secession, a serious possibility under the current conditions. Our conservative brothers to the north have a difficult path ahead of them.

The legal changes in Canada will leave the US as the only nation left in the west with widespread civilian gun ownership, not to mention the only nation left with legitimate free speech rights.

America Soul Searches At The Edge Of The “Great Reset”

Incrementally, the majority of the western world has been turned into a pit of dystopian despair. Australia, for now, is the only region not burying their population in hostile migrants but it’s enforcing all of the same speech and thought control laws. The US is the only country trying to reverse course, but our soul searching is, frankly, too slow.

The defeat of woke doctrine in the US is certainly a relief. Clearly most Americans are done with deconstructionism and liberal mental illness. Most people hate leftists and want nothing to do with them. However, there is a deep divide among populists, from conservatives to libertarians to moderates. Their isn’t a strong bond except for our opposition to wokeness, and this is a problem.

Loving freedom is not enough. Having a shared enemy is not enough. There needs to be more for a society to survive and thrive. There needs to be a greater purpose.

In the meantime, we still have millions of illegal migrants to deal with as well as a small army of unhinged woke militants that are roaming the streets when they should be locked up in padded rooms. The will to take necessary action is limited by a refusal among many people to accept that we are alone, and we are at war.

There are millions of patriots in the EU, the UK, Australia and Canada that want to join the fight. We’ll have to wait and see if their civil disobedience bears fruit. I believe that they are waiting for us to make a move. They’re hoping we spark a greater rebellion against globalism. This requires that we clean our own house first and rediscover the unifying ideals that make the west something worth fighting for.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post As America Soul Searches, the Rest of the West Is Falling Apart appeared first on LewRockwell.

“It will not be long before we are reduced to savagery. We are the barbarians within our own empire.”

—Russell Kirk

Eighty years ago today, the U.S. government committed one of the awful acts in human history. Three days later, it did it again.

Harry Truman insisted the decision to vaporize or fatally irradiate almost a quarter million civilians (plus a dozen American prisoners of war) was his and his alone.

Whether meant as acknowledgment or confession, this assertion was correct. The buck stopped with him. It was Harry Truman who (literally) “gave ‘em Hell”.

The president assured the world (and presumably his conscience) that he had no choice. Proud and stubborn, the Japanese would never surrender. Nuclear weapons were the only way to end the war.

In a sense, like an abortionist convincing himself his victims aren’t really human, Truman had to believe that. Otherwise, what would his actions say about him?

Most Americans seemed to accept his argument. Retroactive propaganda argued the destruction of two sizable cities saved up to “a million lives” that would’ve been lost by invading the islands. Besides, “the Japs” had it coming for bombing Pearl Harbor!

OK. But which “Japs”?

Leave aside FDR’s pre-war actions intended to entice a Japanese attack. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were filled with half a million civilians who had no say in what their government did. Were those “the Japs” who had it coming? Why?

Grasping for Straws

Almost four years earlier, 2,400 Americans died on the “date which will live in infamy”. Most were in the Navy… plus over 200 in the Army, about a hundred Marines, and 68 civilians. Nearly half the dead were on the USS Arizona.

Government officials (in Tokyo and DC) needed to answer for that. But did the mothers, infants, and elderly of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How many of them picked the fight, gave the orders, flew the planes, or dropped the bombs that killed Americans that morning in Hawaii?

Dastardly as Pearl Harbor was, the attack was obviously trained on a military target. Atomic bomb advocates, including Truman, suggested Hiroshima and Nagasaki were too. That’s preposterous… akin to wiping out Waikiki because Pearl Harbor was near Honolulu.

Truman grasped for more straws. On the day Nagasaki was obliterated, the president defended the first bombing by saying Hiroshima was “an industrial center”. But its major factories sat far from the bullseye at the center of the city, and “Little Boy” left those largely unscathed.

As historian Ralph Raico wondered, if Hiroshima were such a vital military target, why was it untouched by years of air raids, and excluded from Bomber Command’s list of thirty-three primary targets?

After the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden earlier that year, official angst over innocent life carries little credibility. The U.S. government clearly had few qualms about killing civilians. Truman was caught chuckling during his announcement of the Hiroshima bombing (at the 2:30 mark):

The president did acknowledge some compunction during an inadvertent confession. He’d contemplated a third bomb, but rejected the idea because (as he put it to his Cabinet the day after Nagasaki), “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people”… including “all those kids”… was “too horrible” to contemplate.

The president was well aware the number of innocents he was killing, including “all those kids”. But did the quarter million dead Japanese save half a million Americans (or “millions”, as President George HW Bush once ludicrously claimed)?

It’s astounding that anyone accepts this. But for decades it’s what Americans have been taught. They’re expected to believe that an invasion of Japan would’ve cost almost as many lives as the War Between the States, and more than America lost in every other theater of Second World War combined.

Worst-case scenarios for a Nipponese D-Day come to fewer than 50,000 American dead. This estimate (approaching the U.S. death toll in Vietnam) is obviously horrific. But it’s still unrealistic. An invasion was never necessary to compel Japan to give up.

“Barbarians of the Dark Ages”

As citizens of China, enemy prisoners of war, and the peoples of Pacific archipelagos will attest, the Japanese military was vicious and barbaric.

But by 1945, despite its persistent pride and notorious intransigence, it was on the cusp of defeat. The Imperial government knew it, and was prepared to capitulate.

As Stanford professor Barton Bernstein relayed in a New York Times article preceding a Smithsonian exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

“Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either of these events took place.”

These weren’t Barton’s words. He was quoting what Brigadier General Bonnie Fellers wrote to General Douglas MacArthur soon after V-J Day.

As John Denson relayed in his terrific anthology, The Cost of War, “other high ranking military expressed similar sentiments.”

Among them was Admiral William Leahy, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the war:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was no material success in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. … My own feeling was that in being the first to use [nuclear weapons] we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

Former President and retired Five-Star General Dwight Eisenhower chimed in with similar sentiment:

“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. … I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

Major General JFC Fuller described the bombings as “a type of war that would’ve disgraced Tamerlane.” He also dispensed with the common justification:

“Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.”

This isn’t the convenient clarity of 20/20 hindsight. Skeptics were wearing corrective lenses many months before the Enola Gay left the runway.

In January 1945, the Japanese offered to surrender on terms virtually identical to those they accepted after Nagasaki. MacArthur informed FDR of this two days before the president left for Yalta. Leahy provided the information, and Truman himself later corroborated the account.

Had the US accepted the overture, not only the devastation of the atomic bombs would’ve been avoided, but Iwo Jima and Okinawa wouldn’t have occurred, sparing 20,000 American lives.

Denson elaborates on the Japanese proposal:

“… the surrender terms of the Japanese government were specified in a 40-page memorandum from General MacArthur to President Roosevelt dated January 20, 1945, which has never been made public, acknowledged, or denied by the American government. It is reported that the information in the memo was secretly delivered by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, to journalist Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune because the Admiral rightfully feared that the offer would be ignored by the president and he wanted history to record the truth. Furthermore, President Truman, who assumed office after Roosevelt’s death in April, 1945, is reported to have later admitted to former President Herbert Hoover that by early May, 1945, he was aware of the peace offer and that further fighting was unnecessary, yet he still authorized the bombing. It is further alleged that President Truman also discussed the specific terms of the peace offer with Stalin at Babelsberg prior to the bombing; and finally, that General MacArthur confirmed the existence of this memo and its contents after the war.”

Wartime censorship forced Trohan to withhold this vital information for seven months. As Denson notes, he “first published this information about the Japanese peace offer in the Chicago Tribune on August 19, 1945, after the bombs were dropped earlier that month causing the deaths of approximately 210,000 civilians.”

The Japanese kept fighting only because the U.S. required unconditional surrender. This destructive demand (which Truman reiterated at Potsdam) had prolonged the war in Europe, and extended fighting in the Pacific.

The Japanese assumed those terms included dethroning the Emperor, which they wouldn’t abide. Truman knew this, yet insisted the bombs be dropped. Not to end the war, which was happening anyway… but to send a message to someone else.

The bombs were less to subdue Japan than to signal the Soviets. British scientist P.M.S. Blackett, one of Churchill’s advisers, wrote that dropping the bombs was “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.” They were the opening shots of the Cold War, with a quarter million innocents lined against the wall.

Read the Whole Article

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A “scientific” ideology banned raw milk and vilified mothers who chose it anyway. Behind this, was a wealthy philanthropist pushing his agenda and setting the stage for the demise of the small farmer and food security in America.

An age-old food

In the opening scenes of the famous musical Fiddler on The Roof, our hero–Tevye–arranges his milk cart.

As the overture plays, drawing us into the scene and his inner musings on “Tradition!” he and his horse drive through the village serving his community with the milk from his cows and the cheeses he makes from that milk.

He is a farmer. A milkman. He is central to his community.

He dips his ladle into his milk can and pours the liquid into the waiting pitchers of the women. The activity of feeding his community is a small detail almost lost in the background of the plot–an illustration of a challenging time in 1905 Imperial Russia. It is lost in the background because of its normalcy. In this illustration of a time long ago, there was nothing unusual about a milkman feeding his community. It was what happened in many civilizations for millenia. The drama of the story unfolds as a controlling ideology comes closer into village life, destroying what they treasured and leaving them to ruin.

This is not a story about imperialism. It is about raw milk. It is about how this life-giving food has become a villain in modern America.

What Happened To Change How We View Raw Milk?

Raw milk–it is a food that is obscure to many Americans. Do you fear it? Despise it? Are you curious about it? We’ve been told that raw milk is dangerous. Is it?

Forgotten details of American history allow us to explore the topic and untangle our societal prejudice against it. Perhaps understanding the facts of our history will help us to understand how we got here and how we can make better decisions for the future.

The history is a tangled web of greed, deceit, and control.

Raw Milk Is a Significant Food for Civilization

Raw dairy is a perfect food–one of the two foods designed by nature to nourish the young (honey is the other). It is rich in nutrients humans need–filled with protein, fats, and sugars. It contains vitamins and minerals. It has vital enzymes that help our bodies absorb and use these nutrients. For example, lactase helps us digest the lactose (sugars), while the phosphatase helps us absorb phosphorus. Raw milk is probiotic, containing bacteria that help our own microbiomes thrive and that allow milk to change into other desirable foods.

There is nothing more basic between a mother and child than milk. Historically, a mother nurtures her child on the milk she produces. For the first few months of life, the child gets all the nutrients he or she needs from this wonderful mechanism our creator bestowed on all mammals.

We humans are not special in this regard.

For millennia, human civilizations have relied on a relationship between us and other mammals–most notably cows, goats, sheep, camels, water buffalo, and horses.

Not every civilization developed these relationships. But in those civilizations that did, milk became a fundamental ingredient in their food security.

There were 2 things that were true across the cultures that had dairy:

It was local.

It was primarily consumed raw.

In some lands, because these were warm climates, there was no way to keep dairy cold. It would immediately begin its fermentation process. Cow and water buffalo milk turn to clabber (drinkable yogurt), goat and sheep milk become yogurt, while camel and horse milk transform to a sour kefir-like drink.

These fermented dairy products brought life to the cultures that depended on them. They were often revered.

In time, cheese became a way we learned to preserve milk. All types of milks could be crafted into cheeses specific to their regions.

What happened that changed raw milk from a staple of civilization to something obscure, scary, reviled, and even criminal?

It all started with whisky…

The Entangled Relationship Between War, Whisky, and Milk

You are probably asking “What does whisky have to do with milk?”

We must understand whisky production in America to understand our history with milk.

In 1800s America, high taxes (to pay for the Revolutionary War) on imported spirits led to the rise of whisky distilleries in America. American farmers said “We can do this!” and they did. American whisky skyrocketed in popularity and production.

Whisky distilleries popped up everywhere. Even in certain cities. Transportation was a big cost, so putting the distilleries near the people seemed like a good idea. Disposing of the spent grain used to make whisky was expensive and cumbersome. This led to the concept of putting dairies right next to the distilleries and feeding the cows the spent grain from the whisky-making process. Spent grain is not a cow’s native food. Her native food is a diversity of grasses, while she roams the fields in the sunshine.

For those profiting from both the whisky and the milk, this seemed like a great idea. However, these abominations on agriculture led to disastrous results for cows and humans.

What ensued from this situation was predictable. The cows spent most of their short miserable lives indoors, in filthy conditions, unhealthy and producing milk that was of terrifying quality. There were no closed milking systems at the time. Workers hand milked into open pails.

This milk became known as “swill milk.”

It is not shocking that infant mortality was unacceptably high during this period. Sanitation was poor, there were no closed milking systems and no refrigeration. Public voices began to implicate the milk from the distillery dairies as a factor in the infant mortality rate.

This tragic situation had an easy-enough solution: stop feeding cows spent grain. Return cows to their native diets. Give them adequate lives out on pasture, and provide clean milking conditions. Have healthy workers milking the animals. Bring clean milk to the cities from the surrounding countryside.

But that was not the proposed solution.

A Wealthy Philanthropist “Saves” The Children

By the late 1800s, Nathan Straus, a wealthy philanthropist and co-owner of Macy’s department store, advocated for and then subsidized the pasteurization of all milk in New York City.

Several doctors spoke out against this policy noting that clean raw milk was highly nutritious and great for children. Leading the campaign for clean raw milk was Dr. Henry Coit. He saw the terrible conditions of the “distillery dairies,” and the health consequences that were blamed on the raw milk. He proposed an entirely different solution: establishing a “Medical Milk Commission” that would have doctors certify raw dairies outside the city. These doctors would ensure the farms had clean practices and produced healthy, safe milk.

His approach was a decentralized approach to feeding communities. Farmers remained in control of their own farms, the Medical Milk Commission simply became a certifying agent.

Many doctors participated in this endeavor and they had great results.

These doctors advocated for proper nutrition for children and proper animal husbandry. The results were a win-win.

But Straus’ argument against this was that certified clean raw milk was more expensive than Straus’ subsidized, “efficient” pasteurized milk. It was often double or quadruple the cost of the swill milk or the subsidized, pasteurized milk that Straus offered.

The obvious solution is a dual approach. But that is not what happened.

The “public health” campaign, backed by Straus’ deep pockets, prevailed. Pasteurization won out on the better “efficiency” although most all players recognized that certified clean raw milk was the better option. (One can only wonder what types of influence Straus’ “philanthropy” led to.)

What ensued was a decades-long battle. Many doctors advocated for clean raw milk. Those in Straus’ camp campaigned for “public health” and compulsory pasteurization without focusing on the underlying quality of the product.

The doctors who advocated for clean, certified farms were vilified, ridiculed, and bullied. The “public health advocates” who spoke about the dangers of raw dairy and pushed for mandatory pasteurization shifted policy in many cities.

Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there.

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