Lew Rockwell Institute

President Trump was elected in part because he promised to reduce prices and not drag the country into foreign wars. Sadly, President Trump has adopted a tariff policy that will raise prices and abandoned his “America First” foreign policy in favor of a return to Bush-era neoconservatism.

Despite criticizing President Biden for bombing Yemen, President Trump has authorized bombing that country under the false pretense that Yemen’s Houthis are threatening international shipping. President Trump has also threatened to bomb Iran. A false justification for this threat is that Iran is controlling the Houthis. If President Trump follows through on this threat against Iran, it could lead to another “forever war.” He has also continued US support for Israel and Ukraine’s wars.

President Trump started a trade war by imposing a ten percent universal tariff on imported products and other tariff expansions. Chinese imports will face a tariff of 54 percent, while goods imported from the European Union will “only” be assessed a 20 percent tariff.

The day following President Trump’s tariffs announcement, US stocks lost 3.1 trillion dollars in value, while the dollar fell to its weakest level since October.

China responded to the tariffs by imposing a 34 percent tariff on US imports along with other measures increasing the costs of US products in China. Canada imposed a 25 percent tariff on cars imported from the US. France President Emmanuel Macron called on European businesses to refrain from investing in American businesses, saying it makes little sense to invest in America when the US is punishing Europe.

President Trump’s actions are setting off a global trade war that means US consumers will suffer from increased prices for many products both foreign and domestic. Manufacturing and other American businesses that rely on imported raw materials and other inputs from abroad will have to pay more for these inputs, assuming they are able to get them at all. US exporters will suffer from decreased demand for US products in overseas markets.

According to estimates by the Budget Lab at Yale University, President Trump’s tariffs will cost the average American household a 3,800 dollars loss of purchasing power. The Tax Foundation estimates the tariffs will reduce US GDP by at least 0.7 percent and decrease the average American’s after-tax income by about two percent. Middle- and lower-income Americans will obviously be hardest hit. The decrease in income, combined with the increase in prices and increase in the unemployment rate, will raise demand for government welfare programs and thus put pressure on Congress to reject attempts to cut spending.

Thus far, Trump’s response to the economic chaos he has unleashed is to say everything will work out as other countries will negotiate “beautiful” trade deals with the US. President Trump, on the same day he announced the new tariffs, called on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, saying it was a “perfect time” to do so. The interest rate cut, though, would only further degrade the dollar and further burden Americans with increasing prices.

President Trump called the day he announced his tariff plan “Liberation Day.” This may be the most misleading name since the Affordable Care Act. Renaissance Macro Research head of US economic research Neil Dutta more appropriately labeled it “Obliteration Day.” President Trump’s tariffs, along with his support for war, could obliterate what is left of America’s peace and prosperity.

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What is understood now is that ‘we’re no longer playing chess’. There are no rules anymore.

Trump’s ultimatum to Iran? Colonel Doug Macgregor compares the Trump ultimatum to Iran to that which Austria-Hungary delivered to Serbia in 1914: An offer, in short, that ‘could not be refused’. Serbia accepted nine out of the ten demands. But it refused one – and Austria-Hungary immediately declared war.

On 4 February, shortly after his Inauguration, President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM); that is to say, a legally binding directive requiring government agencies to carry out the specified actions precisely.

The demands are that Iran should be denied a nuclear weapon; denied inter-continental missiles, and denied too other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities. All these demands go beyond the NPT and the existing JCPOA. To this end, the NSPM directs maximum economic pressure be imposed; that the U.S. Treasury act to drive Iran’s oil exports to zero; that the U.S. work to trigger JCPOA Snapback of sanctions; and that Iran’s “malign influence abroad” – its “proxies” – be neutralised.

The UN sanctions snapback expires in October, so time is short to fulfil the procedural requirements to Snapback. All this suggests why Trump and Israeli officials give Spring as the deadline to a negotiated agreement.

Trump’s ultimatum to Iran appears to be moving the U.S. down a path to where war is the only outcome, as occurred in 1914 – an outcome which ultimately triggered WW1.

Might this just be Trump bluster? Possibly, but it does sound as if Trump is issuing legally binding demands such that he must expect cannot be met. Acceptance of Trump’s demands would leave Iran neutered and stripped of its sovereignty, at the very least. There is an implicit ‘tone’ to these demands too, that is one of threatening and expecting regime change in Iran as its outcome.

It may be Trump bluster, but the President has ‘form’ (past convictions) on this issue. He has unabashedly hewed to the Netanyahu line on Iran that the JCPOA (or any deal with Iran) was ‘bad’. In May 2014, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA at Netanyahu’s behest and instead issued a new set of 12 demands to Iran – including permanently and verifiably abandoning its nuclear programme in perpetuity and ceasing all uranium enrichment.

What is the difference between those earlier Trump demands and those of this February? Essentially they are the same, except today he says: If Iran “doesn’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before”.

Thus, there is both history, and the fact that Trump is surrounded – on this issue at least – by a hostile cabal of Israeli Firsters and Super Hawks. Witkoff is there, but is poorly grounded on the issues. Trump too, has shown himself virtually totalitarian in terms of any and all criticism of Israel in American Academia. And in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, he is fully supportive of Netanyahu’s far-right provocative and expansionist agenda.

These present demands regarding Iran also run counter to the 25 March 2025 latest annual U.S. Intelligence Threat Assessment that Iran is NOT building a nuclear weapon. This Intelligence Assessment is effectively disregarded. A few days before its release, Trump’s National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz clearly stated that the Trump Administration is seeking the “full dismantlement” of Iran's nuclear energy program: “Iran has to give up its program in a way that the entire world can see”, Waltz said. “It is time for Iran to walk away completely from its desire to have a nuclear weapon”.

On the one hand, it seems that behind these ultimata stands a President made “pissed off and angry” at his inability to end the Ukraine war almost immediately – as he first mooted – together with pressures from a bitterly fractured Israel and a volatile Netanyahu to compress the timeline for the speedy ‘finishing off’ of the Iranian ‘regime’ (which, it is claimed, has never been weaker). All so that Israel can normalise with Lebanon –and even Syria. And with Iran supposedly ‘disabled’, pursue implementation of the Greater Israel project to be normalised across the Middle East.

Which, on the other hand, will enable Trump to pursue the ‘long-overdue’ grand pivot to China. (And China is energy-vulnerable – regime change in Tehran would be a calamity, from the Chinese perspective).

To be plain, Trump’s China strategy needs to be in place too, in order to advance Trump’s financial system re-balancing plans. For, should China feel itself besieged, it could well act as a spoiler to Trump's re-working of the American and global financial system.

The Washington Post reports on a ‘secret’ Pentagon memo from Hegseth that “China [now] is the Department’s sole pacing threat, [together] with denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan — while simultaneously defending the U.S. homeland”.

The ‘force planning construct’ (a concept of how the Pentagon will build and resource the armed services to take on perceived threats) will only consider conflict with Beijing when planning contingencies for a major power war, the Pentagon memo says, leaving the threat from Moscow largely to be attended by European allies.

Trump wants to be powerful enough credibly to threaten China militarily, and therefore wants Putin to agree speedily to a ceasefire in Ukraine, so that military resources can quickly be moved to the China theatre.

On his flight back to Washington last Sunday evening, Trump reiterated his annoyance toward Putin, but added “I don’t think he’s going to go back on his word, I’ve known him for a long time. We’ve always gotten along well”. Asked when he wanted Russia to agree to a ceasefire, Trump said there was a “psychological deadline” – “If I think they’re tapping us along, I will not be happy about it”.

Trump’s venting against Russia may, perhaps, have an element of reality-TV to it. For his domestic audience, he needs to be perceived as bringing ‘peace through strength’ – to keep up the Alpha-Male appearance, lest the truth of his lack of leverage over Putin becomes all too apparent for the American public and to the world.

Part of the reason for Trump’s frustration too, may be his cultural formation as a New York businessman; that a deal is about first dominating the negotiations, and then quickly ‘splitting the difference’. This, however, is not how diplomacy works. The transactional approach also reflects deep conceptual flaws.

The Ukraine ceasefire process is stalled, not because of Russian intransigence, but rather because Team Trump has determined that achieving a settlement in Ukraine comes firstly through insisting on a unilateral and immediate ceasefire – without introducing temporary governance to enable elections in Ukraine, nor addressing the root causes of the conflict. And secondly, because Trump rushed in, without listening to what the Russians were saying, and/or without hearing it.

Now that initial pleasantries are over, and Russia is saying flatly that current ‘ceasefire’ proposals simply are inadequate and unacceptable, Trump becomes angry and lashes out at Putin, saying that 25% tariffs on Russian oil could happen ANY moment.

Putin and Iran are both now under ‘deadlines’ (a ‘psychological’ one in Putin’s case), so as to enable Trump to proceed with credibly threatening China to come to a ‘deal’ soon – as the global economy is already wobbling.

Trump fumes and spits fire. He tries to hurry matters along by making a big show of bombing the Houthis, boasting that they have been hit hard, with many Houthi leaders killed. Yet, such callousness towards Yemeni civilian deaths sits awkwardly with his claimed heart-rendering empathy for the thousands of ‘handsome’ Ukrainian young men needlessly dying on the front lines.

It all becomes reality-TV.

Trump threatens Iran with “bombing [the] likes of which they have never seen before” over an ultimatum that likely cannot be met. Simply put, this threat (which includes the possible use of nuclear weapons) is not given because Iran poses a threat to the U.S. It does not. But it is given as an option. A plan; a ‘thing’ placed calmly on the geo-political table and intended to spread fear. “Cities full of children, women, and the elderly to be killed: Not morally wrong. Not a war crime”.

No. Just the ‘reality’ that Trump takes the Iranian nuclear programme to be an existential threat to Israel. And that the U.S. is committed to using military force to eliminate existential threats to Israel.

This is the heart to Trump’s ultimatum. It owes to the fact that it is Israel – not America, and not the U.S. intelligence community – that views Iran as an existential threat. Professor Hudson, speaking with direct knowledge of the background policy (see here and here) says, “it's NOT just that Israel as we know it – must be safe and secure and free from terrorism”. That's Trump and his Team’s ‘line’; that's the Israeli and its supporters narrative too. “But the mentality [behind it] is different”, Hudson says.

There are some 2-3 million Israelis who see themselves as destined to control all of what we now call the Middle East, the Levant, what some call West Asia – and others call “Greater Israel”. These Zionists believe that they are mandated by God to take this land – and that all who oppose them are Amalek. They believe the Amalek to be consumed with an overwhelming desire to kill Jews, and who therefore should be annihilated.

The Torah records the story of Amalek: Parshat Ki Teitzei, when the Torah states, machoh timcheh et zecher Amalek—that we must erase Amalek’s memory. “Every year we [Jews] are obligated to read – not how God will destroy Amalek – but how we should destroy Amalek”. (Though many Jews puzzle how to reconcile this mitzvah with their ingrained contrarian values of compassion and mercy).

This commandment in the Torah is in fact one of the key factors that lies at the root of Israel’s obsession with Iran. Israelis perceive Iran as an Amalek tribe plotting to kill Jews. No deal, no compromise therefore is possible. It is also, of course, about Iran’s strategic challenge (albeit secular) to the Israeli state.

And what has made the Trump ultimatum so pressing in Washington’s view – apart from the China-pivot considerations – was the assassination of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. That assassination marked a big shift in U.S. thinking, because, before that, we inhabited an era of careful calculation; incremental moves up an escalator ladder. What is understood now is that ‘we're no longer playing chess’. There are no rules anymore.

Israel (Netanyahu) is going hell-for-leather on all fronts to mitigate the divisions and turmoil at home in Israel through igniting the Iranian front – even though this course might well threaten Israel’s destruction.

This latter prospect marks the reddest of ‘red lines’ to ingrained Deep State structures.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post ‘Break-a-Leg’ (That Old Mafia Warning) – Trump Has Threatened Iran Over an Ultimatum That Likely Cannot Be Met appeared first on LewRockwell.

I’ve never met Donald Trump nor had any dealings with him, and since I don’t watch television, I’d barely paid attention to his antics until his unexpectedly strong run for the White House began attracting heavy media coverage in 2015.

But some time ago I was privately meeting on other matters with one of Trump’s powerful and influential backers when Trump’s name happened to come up. Since I tend to be forthright and speak candidly about most things, I casually described him as an “ignorant buffoon.” I was hardly surprised that my interlocutor failed to reply to that provocative characterization, but I noticed the slightly embarrassed expression on his face and interpreted his silence as an admission that he quietly shared my own appraisal.

I strongly suspect that the worldwide tariff policies recently declared by Trump will soon cause more and more Americans, including erstwhile Trump supporters, to come to that same distressing conclusion.

Tariff policy is part of economics, and I hardly claim any great personal expertise in that discipline. Indeed, quite the contrary.

Back almost a dozen years ago, before my increasingly controversial writings rendered me far too radioactive for such things, I was invited to participate in a televised NYC debate on the economics of immigration policy, with one of my opponents being the prominent libertarian economist Bryan Caplan of George Mason University. The show was syndicated around the country and simulcast on NPR, and early on I boldly admitted my total ignorance of economics, declaring that not only had I never taken a class in that subject, but I had never even opened the pages of a single economics textbook.

However, I also suggested that much of economics constituted basic common sense and perhaps partly as a consequence of that approach, our side won the debate by the widest margin in the history of that series, with one of the opposing team members even shifting towards our position.

• Open Borders, American Elites, and the Minimum Wage
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 11, 2013 • 1,700 Words

Video Link

Yet that minor legalistic technicality barely scraped the surface of the very bizarre tariff rates that Trump had decided to impose against the 150-odd other countries of the world.

For example, our factually-challenged president declared that his new tariff rates were “retaliatory” and indeed the first column of the chart he displayed showed the foreign tariffs that had allegedly provoked his retaliation, but everyone quickly noticed that these figures were total nonsense. Switzerland hardly imposes a 61% tariff on American goods, nor does Vietnam maintain a 90% tariff rate against our products.

Instead these figures were merely calculated using a formula based upon America’s existing trade deficit in goods, which was something entirely different. So if another country sold us more goods than they themselves bought, that was described as due to a tariff even if no such tariff actually existed. In a perfect example of this absurdity, Trump incorrectly claimed that the penguins of Norfolk Island near Antarctica maintained huge barriers against American products, with his counter-vailing tariff of 29% aimed at punishing those water-fowl for their unfair trading practices.

Obviously, Trump’s claims justifying his new tariff rates were totally ridiculous, but they were actually ridiculous in several different ways.

For example, it’s undeniably true that for decades America has run a horrendous and growing global trade deficit with the rest of the world, most recently totaling $1.2 trillion during 2024.

However, suppose that this weren’t the case, and our trade in goods with the rest of the rest of the world were totally in balance, just as Trump wished it to be. Under those circumstances, we would naturally have trade surpluses with some countries and trade deficits with others, with all of the different figures netting out to zero.

But according to Trump’s framework, those countries with which we had a trade surplus would still be hit with a new 10% tariff while those with which we had a deficit would suffer much larger tariffs, and these would then be jacked up if those countries decided to retaliate. So the apparent goal and endpoint of Trump’s policies would be to sharply reduce or even eliminate all our trade with the rest of the world. Thus, Trump was self-sanctioning America much like he had sought to do against Iran, Russia, North Korea, and all the other countries he and previous administrations had regarded with considerable hostility.

Yet oddly enough Trump seemed to believe that cutting off the global trade of countries he didn’t like would severely hurt them, but cutting off our own trade would strengthen our country and benefit the American people.

His declared tariff methodology was even stranger. I noticed that all his international trade statistics focused only on goods while ignoring services.

So if our trade with some particular foreign nation were in perfect balance, with a deficit in goods exactly matched by a surplus in services, Trump would only consider the former not the latter, and impose large tariffs to reduce that problem.

Back in the 1990s, Paleoconservative trailblazer Pat Buchanan had advocated a sweeping set of controversial economic and political policies that greatly outraged our reigning intellectual establishment, with higher tariff rates among them. These positions led the Donald Trump of that era to harshly denounce Buchanan as “a Hitler lover.” But with the sole exception of Buchanan’s sharp criticism of Israel and its powerful American lobby, our mercurial current president seemed to have now fervently adopted nearly all of Buchanan’s ideas, but apparently attempted to implement them with an IQ that seems 30-40 points lower.

I’ve only casually explored Trump’s bizarre tariff proposal and given my self-proclaimed ignorance of economics, perhaps I even misunderstood some of its elements. But according to media reports, his proposal raises average American tariffs on goods more than ten-fold, from around about 2% to 24%. This will surely constitute a gigantic shock to our economic system.

American businesses and the investors who own them seemed to see that shock in very negative terms, with our stock markets suffering their sharpest declines since the unprecedented collapse caused by the Covid epidemic of Trump’s previous term.

I’ve long suspected that our stocks were heavily over-valued, and Trump’s tariff announcement may have finally punctured that huge bubble, perhaps with financial consequences greater than he expected or intended.

For example, I’ve been rather surprised that high-profile tech companies that spent years annually losing billions of dollars have continued to maintain and even grow their market valuations, and perhaps these will now finally come down to earth, even with a gigantic thump. I had also thought that the release of China’s inexpensive and open source DeepSeek AI system would have a greater impact upon the American AI companies burning through so many billions of dollars each year, and maybe that will now happen.

Just a few days before the very sharp drop in American stocks, the Wall Street Journal had run a major article noting that over the last dozen years or so, the outsize returns in our stocks had drawn in unprecedented amounts of foreign investment. This inflow of funds might be reversed if stocks heavily fall, which would obviously magnify that effect.

Perhaps after their extremely sharp drops on Thursday and Friday, American stocks will stabilize themselves this week or even regain some of their lost ground. But perhaps the decline will still continue or accelerate.

The self-proclaimed goal of all of Trump’s wild tariff plans is the reindustrialization of American society, achieved by persuading major corporations to increase their domestic investment and relocate their factories back to our shores. But as numerous critics have pointed out, his policies seem rather unlikely to achieve that result.

Creating a major factory along with its associated sub-contractors and supply-chains is a very lengthy and expensive undertaking, likely to involve years and billions of dollars. So planning such major investment decisions requires a great deal of certainty that the factors responsible for the shift will remain in place for many years to come, thereby justifying such long-term capital expenditures. Uncertainty in the business climate will lead to the postponement of business investments.

Yet uncertainty is surely the watchword of Trump’s mercurial economic policies, with the recent announcements of crippling tariffs against Canada and Mexico having been repeatedly restricted, reversed, or delayed from day to day and week to week. Nobody had expected the sweeping worldwide tariffs announced last week, and given the ongoing collapse in global stock markets, nobody can say whether those tariffs—or even the president who issued them—will still be around in a few months’ time. Only a particularly foolish corporation would initiate long-term investment plans until the situation becomes much more clear.

So although Trump intended to promote a huge wave of new industrial business investment in America, the actual results seem much more likely to be the exact opposite.

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That ruckus you hear in the capital markets is the sickening howl of the Fugazy Economy meeting its extinction. Fugazy means fake, unreal, dishonest, misaligned to what societies need to thrive. Fugazy means mis-using the time-value of things that purport to be wealth to multiply fake wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the many. The pernicious effects of that system are visible all across the ruined landscape of our country, a nation of broken cities, failed towns, and a demoralized populace.

Mr. Trump apparently aims to convert the expiring Fugazy economy into a production economy — yikes! — based on making things of value, and perhaps more importantly, of people at all social levels having meaningful roles in the making and moving of things. The Trump tariffs are the first big step in a process that is already generating a whole lot of friction, heat, and ferment. The aim of the tariffs is straightforward: the end of a trade regime that punishes and cripples American production.

The response so far is heartening. Many other countries suddenly seek new trade arrangements with the USA, correctly sensing that Mr. Trump means bidness. (This ain’t no Mud Club. . . this ain’t no foolin’ around. . . .) It’s even possible that these readjustments will happen so swiftly that the tariff differentials will be a wash before summer, and everybody will be, at least, on a firm footing, knowing what the clear new rules say. This new disposition of things required forceful incentives to change entrenched, harmful practices.

Another angle on this process is the dynamic known as import-replacement. It means exactly what it sounds like: where you used to get stuff from other lands, you now make it here. It should be obvious that this can’t be accomplished overnight. But the question is: okay, when are you going to start? Part of the answer is: we can’t afford to put it off any longer. There’s an awful lot of stuff, from machine tools to pharmaceuticals to military equipment that we had better start making again — or else slide into collapse, perhaps even slavery to other powers.

That process starts with deploying real capital — as opposed to Fugazy capital — to re-start businesses and industries. That will take money away from hedge funds and other rackets that exist to play games with evermore abstract layers of things that only pretend to represent money. As that occurs, a lot of pretend money will vanish. Don’t be too shocked by this. That’s what happens when a society bends back toward reality: you start sorting out the real money from the fake money. That’s why the price of gold keeps marching up.

I sense that Mr. Trump and his colleagues knew full-well that the tariff play would rattle the markets badly, that these “corrections” are an unavoidable consequence, and are better gotten-over as quickly as possible. What else would you expect in a system that has dedicated itself for decades to mis-pricing the value of just about everything? The snap-back is sure to be harsh.

The psychopathocracy that drives the Global Left lost more traction last week in its quest to keep all of its old rackets running. Their foot-soldiers in the USA have been defunded effectively by Mr. Musk’s DOGE, starting with the immense network of rackets that were run around the USAID program. The Woke NGOs are no more and the fat paychecks are no longer going out to the nose-ring-for-lunch-bunch who came to infest the DC Beltway — and their satellite offices in Democratic Party controlled cities. Hence, the feeble turn-outs in last weekend’s street actions.

The Baby Boomers have gone especially psychotic. That’s why there are so many old folks waving those Soros-made placards in the astroturfed crowds of the “Hands-off” protests. After an eighty-year run of the most mind-blowing comfort and convenience enjoyed by any generation in world history, America’s Boomers stare into the abyss of their fading Fugazy fortunes as their stock portfolios tank. Kind of too bad. Maybe you shouldn’t have gone along for the ride. Maybe you should have cared for your country a bit more.

Here’s your poster-boy for that: the retarded slob rock-and-roller Neil Young, performing in support of the US Intel blob, the Covid-19 vaccine campaign, the degenerate Democratic party, Senator Adam Schiff, and BlackRock. Neil Young’s estimated net worth is about $200-million. He could lose ninety percent of that and still live a life of luxury. In 2022, he inveighed against Covid vaccine “misinformation” and promoted the shots. Guess, what? You were dead wrong about that, Neil, and now a lot of people are dead and dying because of those vaccines. He has many compadres in showbiz who took the same position against reality.

The time is not far-off when they will be revealed as disgraceful tools — Public vaxx champions such as Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern, Ryan Reynolds, Lady Gaga. . . the list is long and discouraging. Meanwhile, they’re all out there rallying the Woke troops against the Golden Golem of Greatness as the Left’s leaky lifeboat goes down, gurgle, gurgle. In the process, they’ve destroyed Hollywood, rock and roll, and comedy. The country will recover from that, too. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to laugh at them in the years to come as the obituaries roll in.

Meanwhile, brace and rejoice! Great changes are set in motion. Roll with the turbulence. You’ll come out the other end, stronger, wiser, steadier, perhaps even happier. And, mark ye, the silence emanating from the DOJ and the FBI these budding spring days. The New York Times is nervous as all git-out.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

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I feel one of the biggest issues in modern medicine is that patients often don’t get the opportunity to establish a genuine relationship with their physician and hence often lack the critical voice necessary for a therapeutic doctor-patient relationship.

Because of this, my goal here was always to be able to correspond with everyone who reached out to me (e.g., through comments). Unfortunately, due to the unexpected reach of this publication (two hundred thousand readers), I don’t have the time to both do that and to write here. For that reason, I decided the best solution was to have monthly open threads where people could ask whatever they wanted on any topic and I would make a point to always reply to them.

In tandem with these open threads, I try to have them tie to a subject that I feel is important to cover, but isn’t enough to be the focus of an entire article. For this month’s post, since water is a foundation of our body’s health, I would like to share my perspectives on the healthiest types of water to drink.

Note: I am currently finishing up a month long project on an article on DMSO and hematoxylin (two easily accessible compounds) which when combined, have over the years been shown to be a remarkable cancer therapy but like many things unfortunately was stonewalled by the FDA and became another Forgotten Side of Medicine.

The Water Industry

Over the decades I’ve been in the holistic health field, I’ve noticed device after device hit the market which claims to produce the optimal source of water for you to drink, frequently has a lot of marketing behind it, briefly becomes popular and in many cases, then fades into obscurity and is forgotten. This in turn has led me to cynically conclude the primary reason why these products are created is because they are easy to market, not because they are necessarily helpful.

From having extensively studied the subject, presently, I believe the following:

•There are so many unhealthy things in the water that any filter that can remove some of them is better than nothing.

•Many of the things you want to take out (e.g., fluoride) can only be taken out by a reverse osmosis water system, so if at all possible you should use one of them.

•There are a variety of other decent water filtration methods that many people get invested in, and may have specific advantages (e.g., Berkey water filters are gravity fed so they can be operated without electricity or an existing water pressure) but they are simply not as good at filtering as a reverse osmosis system.

•I do not like alkaline water filters (as I believe it is not good to neutralize your stomach acid) and I believe many of the benefits attributed to alkaline water filters come from how alkalinity can somewhat improve zeta potential or the fact that alkaline water generators often produce molecular hydrogen in the water.
Note: as Dr. Mercola discusses here, it is fairly unlikely alkaline water devices will actually change your pH.

•There are a variety of products which “energize” or “structure” water. Some people (e.g., those belonging to the “sensitize constitutional archetype”) find they help, but having explored this for years, all I can say is that the results vary immensely depending upon the product and the person who uses it.

•The one (recent) innovation I’ve repeatedly seen provide some degree of benefit to users are the hydrogen water bottles (which electrolyzes water so it becomes full of dissolved hydrogen and oxygen—which may also provide some of the benefit of the water). Many of the devices that do this are fairly cheap, so I believe if you want to experiment with a water product to see if it benefits you (e.g., some athletes find drinking hydrogen water increases their endurance) it’s the one to try.
Note: these is a significant amount of scientific evidence demonstrating the benefits of hydrogen water for a variety of conditions. Much of it has been compiled by The Molecular Hydrogen Institute.

•I like fresh spring water, but the value of it again varies immensely depending on the spring (a few are very good, many however are not). Additionally, I find long term consumption of spring water frequently causes issues for people due to the dissolved (positively charged) minerals disrupting their physiologic zeta potential (e.g., I know a few people who went on prolonged spring water diets who then developed cardiac arrhythmias). Finally, I believe if you want to store spring water, it needs to be stored in glass, as otherwise it loses the life-giving quality many attribute to spring water.

Note: when I was younger I spent a lot more time exploring spring water, but now that I live in a part of the Midwest that doesn’t have any springs to drink from, I’ve stopped doing that. For those sincerely interested in the topic, people around the world have spent years compiling a list of springs around the world on this website.

•I believe one of the most important but least appreciated water filtration needs is for showers. This is because once water is heated, chlorine will off gas from water, which results in people frequently breathing it significant amounts of it in while showering. In turn, I and many others have found a subset of patients (e.g., singers or those with a sensitive throat) find certain chronic symptoms improve once they get a chlorine shower filter, and likewise that it feels much better for the skin and hair if they use a dechlorinated shower. Given that shower chlorine filters cost very little and last for a long time, I believe they are an excellent health investment.

•Generally speaking, I believe you should not have ice in the water you drink. This is partially because the ice often comes from very dirty sources (especially on airplanes) and partially because it adversely affects your digestion (which for instance is why Chinese Medicine they advise many patients to not have cold drinks with meals).

Lastly, there are a variety of water products I believe sometimes have merit (e.g., Quinton Water), but since there are so many of them out there, I feel going into those is beyond the scope of a monthly open thread.

Reverse Osmosis Water

Throughout my life, I’ve seen a variety of things suggesting reverse osmosis (RO) water is the ideal liquid to drink. I believe many of the benefits of RO water are a result of some combination of the following:

•As mentioned before, RO is the most reliable way to remove toxins from water (although this requires having good quality filters which proceed the RO step).

•RO breaks water into much smaller clusters, which in turn makes it easier for that water to enter the cells of the body.

•The water being deionized by RO improves the physiologic zeta potential.
Note: distilled water also deionizes water.

In turn, we frequently find RO water just “feels good” to drink, and I often see patients experience clear benefits when they start drinking RO water.

Conversely, since selling water is such a competitive business, each business will come up with a variety of reasons to attack competing products.

In the case of reverse osmosis (RO) water, some of the most common arguments I’ve see raised against it are that it depletes you of vital minerals, its production process wastes a lot of water and it leaches toxins from its containers.

In my own experience, the first point primarily holds true for magnesium. This is because:
•Our bodies are quite sensitive to lowered magnesium levels (e.g., this can cause heart arrhythmias or muscle pain).
•We often depend upon water for our daily magnesium intake
•Many foods are now magnesium deficient (due to modern agricultural practices having demineralized the soil and the herbicide Roundup binding many of the essential minerals that remain in the soil), and as a result widespread magnesium deficiencies already exist.

For these reasons, I often advise people who plan to drink RO water for a prolonged period to also take a magnesium supplement (preferably magnesium threonate, malate, orotate or citrate—magnesium oxide is not good).

I don’t really agree with the second point, because while extremely inefficient RO systems exist (e.g., ones that waste 95% of the water you put into them) most waste between 20%-75% of the water during the filtration process. Given that people drink 3 liters of water per day, this translates to around 10 liters of water being wasted per day, which is equivalent to 1-2 toilet flushes or someone spending about one minute in the shower (or about 2.6% of the average amount of water someone uses).

In regards to the leaching perspective, I think this can be a valid point (e.g., if RO water is stored in old plastic containers or tanks, it can develop a plastic taste). For this reason, I try to store RO water in glass containers and make sure I don’t use a poor quality RO system to store water.
Note: conversely some people argue that RO’s ability to “leach” substances makes it helpful for detoxification protocols.

Reverse Osmosis Water and Zeta Potential

One of the greatest challenges in medicine is determining how much something actually helps people, as frequently the “benefit” is small and takes a long time to manifest. In turn, one of the reasons I was so drawn to the zeta potential concept was that one would immediately notice significant differences once something was done to restore their physiologic zeta potential and conversely, I repeatedly saw serious complications immediately follow a disruption of one’s zeta potential (e.g., I’ve never forgotten a patient I met when I admitted her the hospital after she suffered a textbook zeta potential collapse from receiving a pneumococcal vaccine).

Zeta potential, briefly, quantifies the tendency of particles that are (colloidally) suspended in a solution to clump together or remain separated and dispersed from each other. The degree of clumping present, in turn, determines how freely a fluid will flow, so when individuals have an impaired zeta potential, it will cause fluid stagnation throughout the body.

This fluid stagnation is often immensely consequential as almost every part of the body depends upon a healthy fluid circulation (e.g., people’s legs swell when fluid gets stuck in them and can’t flow back out). The consequences of an impaired zeta potential are particularly apparent in the blood, as once blood cells begin to clump together, the circulation significantly diminishes and severe conditions like heart arrhythmias, blood clots or strokes can follow.

To illustrate: the therapeutic usage of improving the physiologic zeta potential was originally developed by a colloidal engineer in the 1960s (at a time when therapeutics for heart conditions were sorely lacking). He built upon (sadly forgotten) medical research that showed many illnesses resulted from blood cells sludging together and concluded the clumping he saw in colloidal systems was the cause of this sludging. He then theorized that clumped blood was harder for the heart pump, so that to treat arrhythmias, the blood needed to be unclumped.

This worked (treating his severe heart arrhythmia) and gradually caught on (initially for heart conditions and then a variety of other ailments like dementia and poor wound healing). In turn, while readers here have reported a variety of improvements from restoring their physiologic zeta potential (e.g., fatigue, neuropathies, cold fingers or tinnitus), the most common feedback I’ve received is that restoring their physiologic zeta potential fixed their atrial fibrillation.
Note: I also had a reader who reported drinking my favorite bottled water brand (which has zeta potential enhancing ingredients) greatly improved her heart palpitations along with a few other issues like waking up with extreme dryness in the middle of the night.

Since zeta potential is largely determined by the balance of positive and negative charges in the body, certain agents (particularly aluminum—which is present in most vaccines) have very strong positive charges which in tiny concentrations cause large amounts of fluid to clump together. For example the main method of purifying sewage (which is composed of small organic waste matter particulates suspended in water) is to mix it with a flocculating agent so those suspended particles clump together and then settle out to the bottom where a sludge exists that can be separated from the rest of the water.

As aluminum is highly effective at disrupting zeta potential, it (primarily Al₂(SO₄)₃ ) is commonly used to treat municipal water it is hence frequently found in drinking water. Unfortunately, while the EPA puts limits on how much aluminum can be there, unlike many other regulations, those limits are strictly voluntary and the EPA only discloses that higher levels of aluminum can create “colored water” (due to it causing colloids in the water to clump together and become visible). As such, I believe it is important to use a filtration system (e.g., reverse osmosis) that removes these aluminum particles from drinking water.

Because of this, we frequently observe individuals have severe consequences when exposed to a zeta potential reducing agent. For example, as I show here, many of the subtle neurological injuries that have been observed for over a century from vaccines (which contain typically contain aluminum adjuvants) occur concurrently with microstrokes that affect the cranial nerves (e.g., causing facial paralysis or eye changes), and as such, restoring the physiologic zeta potential is a critical component of rehabilitating vaccine injuries.

Similarly, the COVID-19 spike protein (due to its positive charge density) is also highly effective at impairing the physiologic zeta potential. This is why COVID-19 patients would often have issues like microclots, and what I believe underlies many of the highly unusual medical issues seen in those injured by the COVID vaccines. Likewise, beyond the severe injuries, many people I know who were vaccinated no longer have eyes that no longer move smoothly when they look to the side.

Furthermore, while not as common, we’ve seen quite a few cases of someone having a stroke after they ate something cooked in aluminum, and I’ve read of many cases where a human or animal (e.g., a parrot) gradually developed a severe illness which went away after it stopped drinking water which was stored or cooked in aluminum. This is particularly unfortunate because almost all non-stick cookware on the market either utilizes a toxic substance (e.g., teflon) or is comprised of a thin layer of the safe non-stick coating (e.g., ceramic) lining an aluminum pan which inevitably begins to peels off and expose you to the aluminum underneath.

Note: I believe many of the health “issues” people ascribe to consuming salt are actually due to the fact aluminum is frequently added to salt products.

Typically, the kidneys are responsible for maintaining the physiologic zeta potential, which they do by excreting the most problematic positive charges (e.g., aluminum) while retaining the beneficial negative charges. In turn, since renal function declines with age, zeta potential worsens as well, and I believe many of the complications of aging are ultimately a result of a gradual loss of the physiologic zeta potential (particularly since restoring it greatly improves those degenerative conditions).

Note: I adopted the initial RO unit I used after I found out a hospital was using it for patients with kidney failure because it was the only filtration system which effectively removed aluminum from water they used for dialysis (toxic levels of aluminum are a recurring issue for these patients).

A variety of approaches exist for improving zeta potential, but most of them essentially boil down to avoiding the problematic positive charges (e.g., reducing your aluminum exposure) and adding beneficial negative charges to the body. In turn, I have found that many of the holistic therapies which have a wide range of positive benefits attributed to them (e.g., Earthing) all share the common thread of improving zeta potential.

Drinking deionized water forms a critical part of the zeta potential protocols because it eliminates many of the positive charges from the water you ingest which the kidneys would otherwise need to eventually eliminate. This is particularly important because the kidneys function much more efficiently when they have a low workload on them (i.e., not having to work against as high of a positive ion concentration gradient in the blood).

In short, all of the pioneers of treating zeta potential found that while drinking deionized water or consuming the correct negative charges helped, both typically had to be done together for anyone with a significant zeta potential impairment. This, in turn, has matched my own clinical and personal experience (as I am more sensitive to zeta potential disruptions—e.g., I’ve experienced minor microstrokes from eating food that was stored in aluminum).

Note: I’ve had a few older patients who switched from drinking RO water to well water and then developed a variety of unusual illnesses I was ultimately able to attribute to a loss of zeta potential (as well water often contains a significant amount of positively charged minerals).

Read the Whole Article

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Interoperability issues could make the US think twice about intervening in the EU’s support against Russia.

“Trump Is Unlikely To Pull All US Troops Out Of Central Europe Or Abandon NATO’s Article 5”, but he’s definitely “Pivoting (back) to Asia” in order to more muscularly contain China, which will have consequences for European security. Although Russia has no intent to attack NATO countries, many of these same countries sincerely fear that it does, which leads to them formulating policy appropriately. This (false) threat perception heightens their concerns about the US’ gradual disengagement from NATO.

To make matters worse, Reuters cited five unnamed sources to report that the US chided the EU for its military-industrial plans, particularly those which relate to production and procurement within the bloc. They’re presumably connected to European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen’s “ReArm Europe Plan” that calls for members to boost defense spending by 1.5% on average for a collective €650 billion more in the next four years and provide €150 billion worth of loans for defense investments.

This bold program will strengthen the EU’s strategic autonomy but will likely come at the cost of accelerating the US’ disengagement from NATO. EU-produced equipment might not be interoperable with American equipment, which could complicate contingency planning. The bloc wants the US to intervene in the event of a military crisis with Russia, yet the US might think twice if its commanders can’t easily take control of European forces in that event.

The US might also be less likely to do so if the EU reduces its reliance on American equipment like the F-35s that are rumored to have “kill-switches”. These could hypothetically be activated if the EU tried provoking a conflict with Russia that the US didn’t approve of for whatever reason. If the EU becomes emboldened to do precisely that and thus becomes a major strategic liability for the US, then the odds of the US intervening in its support would dwindle, thus leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At the same time, some countries like the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania – which occupy NATO’s strategic eastern flank with Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine and are much more pro-American than their Western European counterparts – will likely remain within the US’ military-industrial ecosystem. This could therefore serve to retain American influence along the EU’s periphery, keep those countries out of the bloc’s military-industrial ecosystem, and thus hamstring plans for a “European Army”.

Nevertheless, the US would also do well to share some defense technology with Poland and agree to at least partial domestic production of its large-scale purchases, which could transplant a portion of the American military-industrial ecosystem to Europe for easier export to other countries. That could in turn keep Poland from pivoting to France or at least relying more on it to balance the US like the ruling liberal-globalist coalition might do if its candidate wins the presidency during the next elections in May.

The US could therefore leverage its military-industrial cooperation with Poland by offering preferential terms (i.e. technology-sharing and at least partial domestic production) as a means for retaining American influence along the EU’s periphery amidst the bloc’s own military-industrial plans. That could greatly impede the EU’s strategic autonomy, make any “European Army” more difficult to form due to interoperability issues, and thus pressure Western Europe to relent by purchasing more US equipment.

This originally appeared on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

The post The EU’s Military-Industrial Plans Could Accelerate the US’ Disengagement From NATO appeared first on LewRockwell.

Life seems fast and furious lately. In fact, it has even rendered me wordless—the writer’s version of speechless—as everything from blossoming life to advancing years invades at once. Sometimes it feels a bit scary. With eyes of faith, I find myself riding the waves with some mix of exhilaration and terror, hanging on to the beautiful gift of life, in all its unscripted glory.

Mostly, there are joys: My married daughter will be a young mother in two short weeks, and I will become a grandmother at the relatively young age of 51. A long-awaited home renovation will be underway soon, so I’ll finally have a muscular kitchen and pantry. My husband and I find ourselves five years from an empty nest; and 27 years into this marriage adventure, we’ve not yet lost our minds.

By God’s grace, our children are, for the moment, free of a variety of universally unpleasant brands of youthful drama. The young married girl is plowing ahead into family life. The teens are making good grades, playing baseball, playing soccer, and mastering the long jump. The college kids are thriving yet shrouded in some rose-colored mystery; nonetheless, they are slowly maturing. They’ve fine-tuned their majors but focus their remaining energies on basketball brackets or dating—subjects worthy of a separate article.

However, I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit that the happy cacophany weighs me down sometimes. With six children, growing fatigue and an aging mother, I suddenly feel pulled impossibly between eight different life stages and their unique concerns. The middle schooler is just hitting puberty and its famous moods, while my mother can’t make sense of her TV anymore. I’m awakened by hot flashes, while my daughter prepares to be awakened by a newborn. My younger daughters compare skin products, while I dream of laser surgery. There’s a baby shower, baseball game, elder care discussion, soccer trip, prom party and teacher conference—and don’t forget the colonoscopy!

Above it all hangs the most pressing concern of all: Do my children know and love God? Did we teach them well? Are they living for his glory, or will they be consumed by the noisy darkness?

This morning—amid yet more joyful news, mixed with some resultant fretting—I read this in I Peter 1:24-25:

“For all flesh is like grass
and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers, and the flower falls,
but the word of the Lord remains forever.”

At midlife, one grows familiar with withering grass and fading flowers. The glories we chased in our twenties had their moment but passed. Someone else broke our record, surpassed our reputation, or attracted bigger applause. Our accumulated earthly treasures disappoint us, too—the boat’s in disrepair, golf clubs collect dust, and nobody wants the old “custom” sofa we’re selling. Even if we’re blessed with vitality and health, the reality is that our trophy days are behind us, in earthly terms.

Willingly or not, we will discover that life is about so much more; it’s not about the now, but about the forever. This is good news for tired parents; more importantly, though, it’s the only lasting treasure we can pass to our children. Like us, they need more than earth’s fading flowers.

When I think of forever, I think of stars. Genesis records their creation, and Hebrews reminds us that God “upholds the universe by the word of his power.” His forever words sustain a cosmos that confounds our puny minds and powerful telescopes yet blankets us in velvety calm. God’s gospel, his promises, his creation, his plan for each of us and our children—all are upheld and guaranteed by his forever words.

On my way to bed the other night, I stopped to stare out a window overlooking the westward sky. The night was sparkling clear, with Mars in view. I was stuck that I’d taken this sky for granted. As a teenager, I’d sit out in my driveway at night, staring up into the mystery. On summer nights at the beach, I’ve taken my kids to sit up in the lifeguard chair and survey constellations hanging over the ocean. Nowadays, I’m surprised to see they’re still there—majestic, quiet, unmoved by my schedule—when I take out the garbage at night.

On this particular night, though—during a moment when I decided to crane my neck and peer further through window pane—I saw a shooting star. Was this phenomenon still happening—and despite elections, doctors’ appointments, countless forms, tiresome chores, endless tuitions, elderly moms, and soccer trips? While I’d been darting around and playing life’s whack-a-mole, a sea of stars still held court in my backyard planetarium.

Just as those stars are upheld by our faithful God, so are our very lives. All his promises are yes and amen, even when life’s inevitable clouds—and even its happy, blinding sunshine—obscure their glory. God is faithful; and when I find myself wordless and weary, the universe still proclaims.

So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
Hebrews 55:11

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
Philippians 1:6

This originally appeared on Restoring Truth.

The post The Universe Proclaims appeared first on LewRockwell.

Equity markets continued to sell of Monday morning as Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro told CNBC that even a 0% tariff offer from Vietnam would not be enough for the Trump administration to change its tariff policy toward that country.

“Let’s take Vietnam. When they come to us and say ‘we’ll go to zero tariffs,’ that means nothing to us because it’s the nontariff cheating that matters,” said Navarro.

Non-tariff cheating refers to subsidizing domestic manufacturers, currency manipulation, and other measures designed to give a country’s domestic producers an advantage over potential exporters to that country.

Navarro’s comments seem to indicate the administration is committed to maintaining tariffs not only until trading partners lower or eliminate their own, but rather until no trade deficit at all exists between the U.S. and that country. This means that even countries with a natural comparative advantage in some export – or no need for many potential U.S. imports – may see U.S. importers of their products taxed indefinitely.

Stock market selloffs don’t always mean a recession is imminent, but they usually precede one. And to the extent that the input costs may be artificially higher for not only importers of finished goods but also of components for products manufactured in the U.S., a recession would be natural result.

While recessions are always painful those who go out of business or lose their jobs, they can be healthy for the economy as a whole in terms of liquidating malinvestment. According to the Austrian theory of the business cycle, recessions are the market’s way of redirecting unproductive deployments of capital to product ends. The mistakes are made during the artificial boom caused by monetary inflation by the central bank.

Artificially low interest rates and an overabundance of currency mislead entrepreneurs into expanding production more than real savings will support or investing in ventures that would not be profitable at all under natural market circumstances. The market eventually forces these mistakes to be acknowledged, and entrepreneurs must make the necessary adjustments – cutting production or filing for bankruptcy – so that the misallocated capital can flow to profitable projects.

Since all this takes time, recessions are painful. But at the end, capital is redirected towards better use instead of continuing to be wasted on unprofitable endeavors.

The problem with the tariff recession, if there is one, is that it is not being driven by natural market forces. As with Covid lockdowns, it is being imposed by government edict and therefore, also like Covid lockdowns, it has the potential to do the opposite of what a market-driven recession would do. Instead of targeting companies which have invested capital unwisely, it will target companies with perfectly sound investments of capital that just happen to be dependent upon imports for some part of their production process.

And if the administration’s policy were successful in the long term – a tenuous proposition at best – it would reward companies that operate inefficiently, unable to compete in international markets without government protection.

The Covid lockdowns did similar damage to the economy. They didn’t punish companies that had invested capital unwisely. They merely punished companies that served the public in person. That punishment was also very selective. Small, family-owned businesses were disproportionately punished while large, multinational corporations were not only exempt but received trillions in newly created money dollars via Federal Reserve monetary inflation.

The effect was to put perfectly good, profitable small companies out of business or severely damage their earnings while rewarding many large corporations dependent upon cheap money and credit for their survival.

There are good cases to be made that the U.S. economy was due for a recession in 2020 after a decade of near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing. There is an equally good case the U.S. economy is similarly positioned right now after an even larger expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet following the Covid lockdowns. But Trump’s tariffs, like the lockdowns, have the potential to bring all the pain of a deep recession with none of the gain – the liquidation of malinvestment.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Like Covid Lockdowns, a Tariff Recession Would Punish and Reward the Wrong Companies appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I specialize in the work that others pay me more for, I produce more of what people value.

If one of my customers lives where he is subject to different government people, often those people force him to pay them some money before he can buy my work.

Tariffs Done Right versus Tariffs Done Wrong

President Trump has raised a chance that those government people might get pushed back against by USA national government people.

True reciprocal tariffs could be levied product category by product category. That would target those government people and their cronies very precisely, crony by crony. This targeting would systematically incentivize those government people to eliminate their tariffs. That would help me specialize in the work that my customer pays me more for.

But the tariffs that Trump is calling reciprocal, aren’t. And they aren’t half the tariffs that would be reciprocal. Trump isn’t assessing his tariff rates based on different government people’s tariff rates. He’s assessing his tariff rates based on how much more our people import from a nation’s people than we export to the nation’s people.

So Trump isn’t targeting other nations’ government/crony relationships, crony by crony. Instead, he’s keeping in place and protecting all the harms that governments are currently wreaking as they outlaw sound moneys, borrow and spend, and regulate.

Further, Trump’s tariff rates ratchet up how many decisions our national government takes out of the hands of customers (the people who work out what’s most valuable to them), and takes out of the hands of producers (the people who work out the best ways to produce value).

Trump is issuing overall edicts, both directly on our people and indirectly on other nations’ people. Other nations’ government people are being called on to issue edicts on their people to try to make the USA imports from and exports to each of their nations nation balance in the ways that Trump and the other government people think are best.

When Individuals Are Free to Use Good Money, Individuals Balance Trade

What’s actually best for my customers and me is to be left alone. Then we make our best decisions for ourselves.

To enable the rest of us to add the most value ourselves, government people must limit other government people to within good boundaries.

Governments are justly instituted only to secure individuals’ unalienable rights, among which are individuals’ rights to life, liberty, and secure property. Above all, governments must make these rights secure from the grabbing hands of government people and their cronies. Every other action is out of bounds for government people, if they do their jobs justly.

Left to ourselves, free people would produce and use sound moneys, starting with gold. This would leave it to individuals to balance out the trade among the people of various nations.

The USA people could temporarily buy more imports. But then the USA people would end up with less gold to spend to buy products made by other nations’ people. Also, other nations’ people would end up with more gold to spend to buy our products made by USA people. Individuals would make choices for themselves that would optimally rebalance trade.

Individuals’ choices would balance trade in such a way that the total quantity of gold that the USA people would have on hand would tend to be constant.

Importantly, trade wouldn’t get balanced between the USA people and each individual other nation’s people. Instead, trade would get balanced between the USA people and all other nations’ people combined.

This great flexibility is essential to ensure that each nation’s people can specialize in doing the work that others pay them the most for.

Don Boudreaux illustrates:

Americans buy $1M of wine from France, then the French use these export earnings to buy $1M of bananas from Guatemala, and then Guatemalans spend this same $1M on software imported from America. As a result, each of the three countries has a “trade deficit” with another country, and a “trade surplus” with a different country.

The USA’s overall trade deficit is zero, and each nations’ people specialize in what others pay them more for.

Individuals Are Only Free When Government People Have Good Boundaries

Individuals aren’t able to specialize this way, freely and flexibly, under Trump’s tariff plan. But people are supposed to be free to specialize freely and flexibly, under the Constitution.

Constitutionally, Trump must cease and desist from executing his decreed rules. Constitutionally, Republican congressional majorities must get any such rules debated on and voted on, up or down.

Instead, Republicans are letting Trump make many decisions himself. By doing that, Republicans are also pushing other nations’ government people to make many decisions themselves. Republicans are taking all these decisions out of the hands of customers and producers.

Every choice that the Republicans are muscling their way in and controlling with their tariffs is something that free people would make for themselves, and would make far better. Republicans are ratcheting up their violations of individuals’ freedoms to choose what products to buy and what work to do. Republicans aren’t holding themselves and others to good boundaries.

Republicans are treading all over our boundaries because they refuse to hold themselves and their esteemed colleagues to within the constitutional boundaries, which respect each individual’s freedom.

Current government money is unconstitutional. Government spending is massive and nearly all unconstitutional. Government regulations are all unconstitutional.

The Constitution requires every president to, all by himself, substantially hold governments to within significant good boundaries; including:

• Keep the money quantity constant, which would work much the same as freeing people to use gold money.
• Close every unconstitutional department, agency, and subdivision, ending its unconstitutional spending.
• Stop executing every regulation.

These actions are constitutionally required from Trump. These actions would deliver the benefits that Trump wants from tariffs. Trump’s tariffs won’t.

The Constitution requires every official to use his powers fully to make other officials cease and desist. Nearly all officials simply don’t.

They’re from the government and they’re here to help, alright—to help themselves and their cronies.

We’re stuck with these people for now because both of our current major parties are well-adapted to do the bidding of activist-crony socialists and business-crony socialists. We need to build a major party that’s a real alternative.

Maybe, for starters, today’s ongoing sequel to 1970s stagflation plus 1930s–1940s regime uncertainty will finally be what it takes to get better decisions from the older Iowa Republican caucus voters the next time around.

The post Republicans’ Tariffs Take Away Individuals’ Freedom appeared first on LewRockwell.

After two decades of speculation following Mel Gibson’s groundbreaking The Passion of the Christ, it’s finally official: a sequel will begin shooting this summer in Italy. Like the first film, The Resurrection of the Christ will seek to challenge audiences as a wild work of cinema in a world (and a Church) growing devoid of anything like bold originality in art.

Rome’s Cinecittà Studios confirmed the upcoming shoot of Gibson’s second biblical epic to stoke the fervor achieved by his 2004 runaway hit. With Jim Caviezel as Jesus Christ, The Passion made $612 million worldwide against its $30 million budget (which Gibson largely self-financed).

While The Passion presented the final twelve hours of Jesus’ life in potent and painful detail, The Resurrection will reportedly explore what happened in the three days before Easter Sunday, including the harrowing of Hell, the war of the angels, and other apocalyptic sequences.

Doubting-Thomas moviegoers will have to see it to believe it, as it all sounds pretty controversial. But controversy is the legacy of The Passion, acclaimed as it is by Christians and Catholics and even serving as a Holy Week staple for many. The difficulty of the film lies mostly in its graphic violence, as it does not shy away from the explicit details of Jesus’ torturous suffering and death—while secular audiences questioned and criticized Gibson’s portrayal of the Jews.

“There was a lot of opposition to it,” Gibson recalled, knowing what Hollywood millstones feel like. “I think if you ever hit on this subject matter, you’re going to get people going.” With an artistic reputation for brutal violence and a personal reputation for boorish comments, Gibson may be guilty as charged, but his reverence for the subject matter of The Passion is clear even if his treatment is arguable.

“It’s a big subject matter,” Gibson has said about The Passion,

and my contention was, when I was making it, it was like, you’re making this film, and the idea was that we’re all responsible for this, that His sacrifice was for all mankind, and for all our ills and all the things in our fallen nature. It was a redemption.

Well said by an artist who knows what he is about. A film about Jesus Christ should strive to be sacred art, that is, a work of art that is used in a public or private context for evangelization, contemplation, or education in the Faith. A film can do this if done boldly, as Gibson demonstrates, and many—if not all—have fallen short of the mark he hit.

The Last Supper, in theaters now, doesn’t make anything new as any true creative act does, and as such it fails in a central artistic purpose, with a Messiah played by Jamie Ward that is too straightforward to be stirring. It doesn’t take the risk of Gibson’s quivering Christ in shredded skin. There’s Jonathan Roumie’s surfer-bro Messiah in The Chosen, also in theaters, which borders on the tacky in its desire to appeal and doesn’t go far enough with the conundrums of the God Man. Then there are those that go too far, with heretical blasphemies like Willem Dafoe’s Jesus being tempted by Mary Magdalene in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 drama The Last Temptation of Christ.

These treatments aren’t as successful as Gibson’s feature because they are not as artistically meaningful—they don’t take on as much as the subject demands. Meaningfulness comes with calculated risk, as all worthy things do, and that risk lies in an honesty which is often dangerous, especially when it comes to depicting the mysteries of faith.

So many “Jesus movies” fall prey to a tepid trend of sentimentalism, being too safe to be significant. It is not so much dangerous as it is damaging, and this schmaltziness poses a central problem in sacred art today. Despite decent production values and pure intentions, films like The Last Supper may not be egregiously offensive against the Catholic call to produce high artistic representations of the highest artistic material, but they never reach the height of what has already been produced by Gibson.

It may not be fair to compare shows like The Chosen or films like The Last Supper so directly with the record-shattering triumph and ongoing legacy of The Passion, but it is a natural critical inclination. Considering films on their own merits is possible, but it is impossible to avoid acknowledging that the bar is high. The Passion is a powerful film, and it’s good that this story of stories has been given strong treatment, demanding that artists rise to new occasions in taking on this narrative which deserves and demands retelling.

Read the Whole Article

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It is not a full quarter as his inauguration was 20 days into it, but it is the first quarter of 2025.  How does it look?

Perhaps I can put it this way:  a lot of good initiatives undertaken in a haphazard way that could limit their effectiveness or even result in failure. I will use a few of Trump’s initiatives to illustrate my concern.  I will begin with Trump’s approach to ending the conflict in Ukraine.  Next I will examine Trump’s use of DOGE’s revelations about waste, fraud, and grift in the federal budget.  Then I will examine Trump’s approach to tariffs.

President Trump has no stake in the conflict with Russia.  He is on record as stating that the conflict would not have occurred if his 2020 reelection had not been stolen by the Democrats, RINO Republicans such as Mitch McConnell, and the whore American media. Trump’s ability to extract the US from the conflict is greatly helped by the NY Times very long article, in my view written by the CIA as a confession, that from day one the conflict was one initiated by the United States against Russia with Russian defeat as its goal, with Ukrainian military action decided by Washington, including targets, weapons to be used, and targeting guidance of missile and drone attacks.  In other words, the conflict has been Washington’s attack on Russia, not Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The CIA’s confession in the NY Times is a statement that the CIA has admitted a failure and has withdrawn from the conflict.

This paves the way for Trump to withdraw.  The conflict will end the minute that Trump tells Putin that he hasn’t a dog in the fight and is withdrawing the US from participation.  No more US weapons, money, US targeting information.  Total military and diplomatic withdrawal and removal of all sanctions, as they are conflict related and Washington is responsible for the conflict.

This will leave the conflict where it belongs, not with Washington and NATO, but with Putin and whoever the Ukrainians elect to the office now in the hands of a person whose term has expired and who has no negotiating authority under the Ukrainian constitution.

But Trump has not taken advantage this obvious way of ending the conflict. Instead, he has introduced extraneous elements into the negotiations such as Washington’s claim to Ukrainian rare earths as payment for the war aid given by the Biden regime.  Trump has also complicated the negotiations by denouncing Putin, who has kept the agreement, while defending Zelensky who has violated it 12 times according to news reports.  But according to the NY Times, as the war is conducted by Washington and NATO, not by Zelensky, how is Zelensky sending missiles into Russia without US or UK targeting services? Is the Pentagon and NATO carrying on a war that the US president opposes? If so, who is in charge?

The Kremlin is also an obstacle to ending the conflict.  I have come to the conclusion, perhaps mistakenly, that Putin had no intention of winning the conflict, only of continuing it while expressing willingness to negotiate.  With who?  With the West.  What Putin and the Russian Establishment want is a new Yalta agreement. I learned this some years ago when I was invited to speak at a conference at the Russian Academy of Sciences about a Yalta agreement for our time.  I pointed out that the Zionist neoconservative policy as presented by Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was a policy of American hegemony, which is clearly prohibitive of a new Yalta agreement.  This was unwelcome information to the conference, and I was cut off. The conference monitor protected the Russian Academy of Sciences from reality.  Today as I read it, Russian analysis is largely self-deception.  Russian intellectuals are writing articles  promoting a new Yalta agreement. They are entertaining these hopes despite Britain and Europe preparing for war with Russia.

DOGE was a great Trump/Musk invention. But its contribution to Trump’s program of American renewal has been largely squandered.  Trump should have held his horses and let DOGE provide more and more detailed evidence of the US budget used to promote ideological agendas and enrichment of insiders and favored people and groups.  With accumulated evidence, Trump should have addressed on national television the House and Senate  and presented the evidence that Democrats and Democrat-sponsored NGOs created fake entities to which grants were given by USAID, National Endowment for Democracy and other federal budgetary entities. The fake foundations then passed on the grants to legitimate foundations such as Rockefeller, Ford, Pew, et. al., and were then passed to the intended receivers, such as “news oganizations” that enforce the official narratives, NGOs that work to overthrow democratically elected governments, and into the personal accounts of Democrats, such as allegedly Chelsea Clinton to the tune of $84 million. 

In his address Trump should have asked Congress what are we to do about this?  Shall we ignore and perpetuate the exploitation of the American taxpayer and their trust in their government, or shall we cease to use the budget in this way?  

This would have given Trump the high ground. Instead, his piecemeal attacks have given the high ground to the “victims” of his budget cuts.

If Trump had proceeded in a thoughtful organized way, the corrupt Democrat judges, not Trump, would be on the defensive.

Trump’s position on tariffs is problematical for many reasons.  First, let me say that historically tariffs were a legislative issue.  The Morrill Tariff was voted by Congress. The Smith-Hawley Tariff was voted by Congress.  How is it that the executive is imposing tariffs?

Assuming the president has this authority and assuming that we don’t have tariffs on others but others have tariffs on the US, the way to success is for Trump to sit down with the offenders and explain that the situation is not working for us. How do they propose to rectify the inequality?  This would have given Trump the upper hand.  Instead, he is portrayed as issuing threats not only to China but also to American allies. Retaliation has become the game, and this itself raises another serious consideration.

With Wall Street predicting a recession caused by Trump’s tariffs, not by the tariffs of other countries, the Federal Reserve has cover to cause the predicted recession, and thereby, to restore Democrat majorities in the House and Senate in the midterm elections and terminate Trump’s renewal of America.

The first time the American people tried to put Trump into the presidency, the chosen one did not know what he was doing and appointed his enemies to his government.  The second time, his election was stolen. The third time he behaves instinctively without thought and design and undermines his opportunity to succeed.

Possibly the higher courts will overrule the lower courts which seem to be populated with an assembly of non-Americans recruited by Democrat DEI.   America now has federal district judges who are Japanese, Chinese, Arab, African, Hispanic, and LBGT+.  Once a country becomes a tower of babel, the country is lost.

Can a lost country really be renewed?  Perhaps, but not by a haphazard approach to the task.

For the Morrill Tariff see this. 

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Thanks, John Smith. 

CNN News

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Thanks Gail Appel.

See here.

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Thanks, John Smith. 

BBC News

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Dave Braatz wrote:

Re: Terri Wu’s article (and others) on tariffs

Complaining about the US trade deficit assumes that the US Dollar is an honest unit of account; it is NOT. Please consider what exactly is trading hands, and what the “deficit” is.

As long as the US continues to operate on make-believe funny money, we have no right to bitch about a trade deficit – or anything. A US trade rep says the US has “suffered” decades of “wealth loss”.  NONSENSE.  Please define wealth.  A $1.3 trillion annual trade deficit means that we got other countries’ labor, products, and resources (i.e., real wealth) and we “paid” them with fiat debt money that corrupt politicians and bankers create out of thin air by the trillions (and then have the guts to charge “interest” on it). Yes, it is dishonest (a form of economic slavery), but undoubtedly a good deal for the US Gov’t (as long as it lasts).

Paper IOU’s are not wealth.  We got the real goods while “trade surplus” countries got stuck with constantly devaluing fiat garbage or UST’s. Unbacked paper money is always destroyed by inflation, as the dollar debts or deficits become progressively worthless in real terms.

Since 2019 the US M2 money supply increased (inflated) by 43%. That means that the REAL VALUE (constant purchasing power) of our $36 trillion nominal national debt was inflated away (i.e., destroyed or stolen) to the tune of $15.5 Trillion Dollars. That is a massive theft from the poor “trade surplus” idiots who believed in paper money or were forced to accept the PetroDollar.

That is how the US Government and corrupt banks control and rob the world, why many nations continue to sell US Treasuries and repatriate their gold, and why the BRICS nations continue to grow and abandon the Dollar to seek a more honest and level playing field.  More power to them! 

The US needs to return to honest, Constitutional money (gold & silver).

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USAID Exposed: The Secret War You Never Saw Coming reveals how the U.S. Agency for International Development became a global tool of influence, deception, and control. From Cold War origins to billion-dollar scandals under Elon Musk’s investigation, this documentary uncovers how USAID operations blurred the lines between humanitarian aid and covert power plays. Was it ever really about development—or always about dominance? With shocking revelations about DEI spending, digital regime change, and propaganda back home, this is more than a history lesson—it’s a wake-up call. If you think foreign aid is harmless, think again. Watch the full story and decide: reform, replace, or bury USAID?

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Here’s what to know,” insisted the New York Times Adam Nagourney in a lead editorial the day the JFK files dropped. “Oswald still did it.” If there was such a thing as a Confirmation Bias Olympics, Nagourney would have earned the right to represent the U.S. Reviewing and dismissing 64,000 pages of National Archives material in fewer than 24 hours is no small accomplishment even by the standards of the New York Times.

As opinion writer David Wallace-Wells reminded his readers a week later, the Times decides what is a valid conspiracy theory and what is not. Apparently, JFK theories are not. Wrote the supercilious Wallace-Wells, the JFK files “turned out to be, by the standards of conspiracy hype, a total dud.”

Although Wikipedia describes me as “an American author, blogger and conspiracy theorist,” I remain agnostic on the JFK assassination. If the files turn out to be a “total dud,” so be it. Similarly, if they indict LBJ and a rogue crew of CIA contractors, I would not be surprised.

In either case, what is eerily true is that Wallace-Wells used the same Alinskyite strategy to ridicule conservative investigators that the Times used nearly 30 years ago to defame JFK’s legendary press secretary Pierre Salinger. Salinger’s sin was to reveal the truth behind the 1996 shootdown of TWA Flight 800, a genuine conspiracy in which the Times played a critical role.

According to Wallace-Wells, “we are living in a golden age for conspiracy theory.” In the way of example, for instance, he wrote, “It is now perfectly reasonable, for instance, to believe that a novel virus that killed more than 20 million people worldwide and upended for years the daily life of billions was engineered by scientists and then released by accident, with a global cover-up improvised in the months that followed.”

Coy with his language, Wallace-Wells refused to acknowledge that this “conspiracy theory” proved to be true, and that the Times played a critical role in suppressing the truth, a truth he has a hard time swallowing.

Last month Wallace-Wells headlined an opinion piece, “The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else.” If there were an Olympics for Jesuitical reasoning, Wallace-Wells would be a gold medalist. To make this argument, he ignored all contrary evidence and elevated a few floating, unverifiable numbers to the “gotcha” level.

The people he mocked, the “Covid minimizers and vaccine skeptics,” were the ones paying attention in 2020, the ones least susceptible to the hysteria ginned up by the Times. As tangible proof of the same, I would refer Wallace-Wells to a survey done by Franklin Templeton-Gallup during the last six months of 2020.

In the survey, some 35,000 Americans were asked a series of questions, the most revealing: “What percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized?” Democrats proved particularly vulnerable to major media propaganda. Some 41 percent believed that 50 percent or more of those who contracted COVID would end up in the hospital. Another 28 percent answered 20-50 percent.

The correct answer was 1-5 percent. In sum, 69 percent of Democrats were deeply misinformed, and they translated their unfounded alarm into public policy. These policies often bordered on tyranny and ruined more lives, especially young lives, than COVID did.

Making the age of conspiracies so golden is the one technology that the major media still resent, what Wallace-Wells described as “a network of infinite wormholes, some opening up into full-on alternate realities like QAnon and sudden vaccine death.” Ah, yes, the internet, forever condemned for costing the major media their monopoly on information.

Reading Wallace-Wells’s internet bash recalled the Times treatment of Salinger. In the way of background, TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747, en route from New York to Paris on July 17, 1996, crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. At the time, Salinger was working in Paris where the interest in TWA 800 was understandably high. Some 36 French citizens were killed in the crash.

With a likely assist from French intelligence, Salinger was put in touch with retired United Airline pilot and accident investigator Dick Russell. Having gathered information through his own network of aviation insiders, Russell sent a summary e-mail to his associates with the message, “TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a U.S. Navy guided missile ship which was in area W-105. It has been a cover-up from the word go.”

Salinger remained a loyal enough Democrat to sit on his information until it lost its political punch. He broke his silence at an aviation conference in the French resort city of Cannes two days after Bill Clinton’s reelection on November 4, 1996.

Read the Whole Article

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You would think it is impossible to call Ludwig von Mises a fascist. He was of course an old fashioned classical liberal, what we would call today a libertarian. Some extreme leftists have even ben stupid enough to claim that Mises was sympathetic to the Nazis. They don’t deny that Mises was a refugee from  Nazism, but they say, when it comes down to it, Mises would take fascism, even Nazism, over a Marxist socialist revolution.

Of course, this is nonsensical. Mises wrote the classical analysis of Nazism, identifying it as a form of socialism in which the ostensible forms of the market, such as private ownership and private business, were preserved, but in fact Nazi officials told the businessmen what prices to charge. They were totally subject to the will of the state.

Despite all this, some historians have answered our question in the affirmative, and foremost among them is Perry Anderson, a formidable Marxist scholar. In an essay ”The Intransigent right and the Sources of Fascism,” which appeared in the London Review of Books in September 1992 and has been often referenced since then, Anderson says of Mises that “there was no more uncompromising champion of classical liberalism in the German-speaking world of the Twenties … [but] looking across the border, he could see the virtues of Mussolini. The blackshirts had for the moment saved European civilization for the principle of private property; ‘the merit that Fascism has thereby won will live on eternally in history.’”

Anderson accurately quotes from Mises’s Liberalism but nevertheless utterly distorts Mises’s view. Mises offers in that book a penetrating criticism of Italian fascism, and only by extracting the quoted sentence from its context, and distorting its meaning, has Anderson been able to portray Mises as a supporter of Mussolini. In what follows, I  will try to explain Mises’s view of fascism, as he expounds this in Liberalism. In doing so, I will  follow the great libertarian  historian and student of Mises Ralph Raico, who addressed the topic in an essay of characteristic brilliance, “Mises on Fascism, Democracy, and Other Questions.”

Mises’s discussion is contained in “The Argument of Fascism,” a section in the first chapter of Liberalism, “The Foundations of Liberal Policy.” Mises maintains that the coming to power of the “parties of the Third International”—i.e., the Communist parties controlled by Soviet Russia—has changed the nature of European politics for the worse, in a way that even World War I did not. Before the Communists came to power, the influence of liberal ideas imposed patterns of restraint on authoritarian forces.

Before 1914, even the most dogged and bitter enemies of liberalism had to resign themselves to allowing many liberal principles to pass unchallenged. Even in Russia, where only a few feeble rays of liberalism had penetrated, the supporters of the Czarist despotism, in persecuting their opponents, still had to take into consideration the liberal opinions of Europe; and during the World War, the war parties in the belligerent nations, with all their zeal, still had to practice a certain moderation in their struggle against internal opposition. (All subsequent quotations are from Liberalism)

Things changed when the Communists came to power.

The parties of the Third International consider any means as permissible if it seems to give promise of helping them in their struggle to achieve their ends. Whoever does not unconditionally acknowledge all their teachings as the only correct ones and stand by them through thick and thin has, in their opinion, incurred the penalty of death; and they do not hesitate to exterminate him and his whole family, infants included, whenever and wherever it is physically possible.

We now come to a part of Mises’s argument that is crucial to understanding his opinion of fascism. He says that some opponents of revolutionary socialism thought they had made a mistake. If only they had been willing to kill their revolutionary opponents, disregarding the restraints of the rule of law, they would have succeeded in preventing a Bolshevik takeover. Mises clearly associates the Fascists with these “nationalists and militarists” and says they were mistaken. Revolutionary socialism is an idea, and only the better idea of classical liberalism can defeat it.

What distinguishes liberal from Fascist political tactics is not a difference of opinion in regard to the necessity of using armed force to resist armed attackers, but a difference in the fundamental estimation of the role of violence in a struggle for power. The great danger threatening domestic policy from the side of Fascism lies in its complete faith in the decisive power of violence. In order to assure success, one must be imbued with the will to victory and always proceed violently. This is its highest principle. What happens, however, when one’s opponent, similarly animated by the will to be victorious, acts just as violently? The result must be a battle, a civil war. The ultimate victor to emerge from such conflicts will be the faction strongest in number. In the long run, a minority—even if it is composed of the most capable and energetic—cannot succeed in resisting the majority. The decisive question, therefore, always remains: How does one obtain a majority for one’s own party? This, however, is a purely intellectual matter. It is a victory that can be won only with the weapons of the intellect, never by force. The suppression of all opposition by sheer violence is a most unsuitable way to win adherents to one’s cause. Resort to naked force—that is, without justification in terms of intellectual arguments accepted by public opinion—merely gains new friends for those whom one is thereby trying to combat. In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.

Mises has no use for Fascist domestic policy, and its foreign policy is no better.

That its foreign policy, based as it is on the avowed principle of force in international relations, cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization requires no further discussion. To maintain and further raise our present level of economic development, peace among nations must be assured. But they cannot live together in peace if the basic tenet of the ideology by which they are governed is the belief that one’s own nation can secure its place in the community of nations by force alone.

But what about the sentence quoted by Perry Anderson? The merit that Mises ascribes to Italian fascism is that it has saved Italy from a Communist takeover, which would have resulted in the application of Bolshevik methods of extermination. It is in that respect, Mises holds, that it has “saved European civilization” and won for itself merit that will “live on eternally in history.” Mises does not claim that only the Fascists could have stopped the Communists; his claim is rather that the Fascists in fact did so. By wrenching a sentence from its context, Anderson has converted a condemnation of fascism into a defense of it. It is as if someone were called a communist sympathizer because he wrote that “Soviet communism has earned eternal glory by saving Europe from Nazi barbarism,” even though the writer was a strong critic of communism. In fact, that is exactly Mises’s view, as readers of Omnipotent Government will recollect.

Mises explicitly says in that book that Soviet Russia should be allowed to expand in Eastern Europe after World War II ends, in order to prevent the rebirth of a strong Germany. Whether he was right or wrong about this is a topic for another day. But it certainly shows that Mises did not prefer Nazism to a Marxist revolution.

Let’s do everything we can to encourage the study of the great Ludwig von Mises! That is our aim at the Mises Institute, which it was my great privilege to found in 1982 and is now headed by our great President, Tom DiLorenzo.

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On March 28, Utah became the first state to ban fluoride from drinking water after Governor Spencer Cox (R) signed legislation to remove the potentially damaging substance from the state’s water supply.

transformative health bills that are quietly making their way through court rooms across the country.

In Utah, the move comes after HHS Secretary Kennedy said that removing fluoride from water is one of his administration’s top priorities. Studies show that fluoride can have dangerous neurotoxic effects that are particularly pronounced in babies, children and expecting mothers.

One day earlier, Iowa’s state House of Representatives passed a bill to restrict using subsidies from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a food stamp program aimed at helping unemployed and low-income Americans. The bill forbids SNAP recipients from using their government aid to purchase ultra-processed ‘junk food.’

The Iowa bill, which passed with a 56-40 vote, mirrors proposals reportedly in the works at a federal level.

But passing the bill in Iowa was not smooth sailing. The American Beverage Association (ABA), among other groups, have been lobbying against any SNAP restrictions.

More Dyes Banned

West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey signed legislation banning seven toxic food dyes from food served in the state’s schools. Beginning in 2026, these dyes will be banned on all food sold in the state.

According to media reports, over half of the nation’s states are considering similar bans.

Prior to the current administration, it was difficult for states to take steps to provide healthier food options to K-12 students. One reason: the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), a federally funded meal program that provides low-cost lunches to students in public and nonprofit schools, administered by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), has strict grounds for school eligibility.

In order to receive federal meal subsidies on a per-student basis, states and local school districts cannot deviate from the NSLP’s nutritional guidelines, unless a waiver is granted by federal agencies.

This is the case, even when states and school districts offer higher quality nutritional standards built around fresh, locally sourced ingredients.

However, both the HHS and USDA Secretaries have indicated an eagerness to grant waivers to states and school districts that are pursuing initiatives to provide better nutrition to students. This marks a major departure from the approach of the previous administration.

Speaking with Governor Morrisey, Secretary Kennedy confirmed that West Virginia will receive a federal waiver to provide healthier food in K-12 schools. Kennedy also said that the federal government will give the state a waiver that allows it to restrict SNAP dollars going to junk food purchases.

Earlier in March, the Texas State Senate unanimously passed Senator Lois Kolkhorst’s SB 25. The bill requires labels on all food sold in Texas to list all ingredients that are legal in the U.S. but banned in Canada and the EU. The deadline for the new labeling will take effect in 2027.

The bill also mandates 30 minutes of physical education in all Texas schools in addition to special courses on nutritional education. Finally, the bill calls for nutrition education for Texas physicians and medical students, to enhance their understanding of diet-related health issues.

The Texas Senate also recently passed SB 314, which restricts over a dozen ingredients in the ultra-processed foods served to students at Texas schools.

MAHA’s chief aim is to make America Healthy again while rolling back the nation’s chronic disease epidemic. What has started as a federal push, encouraged by President Trump and HHS Secretary Kennedy, is now sweeping the country, one state at a time.

This originally appeared on The Kennedy Beacon.

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