Lew Rockwell Institute

In my last column, I wrote about the new Independence Day, Jan. 20. This is when a corrupt and tyrannical administration exits Washington, D.C., for Delaware beaches or unwatchable and dying left-wing cable news shows.

Such a housecleaning is long overdue. Thanks to former (that has a nice ring to it) President Joe Biden, America has 10-15 million new illegal aliens, mostly young men of military age, from virtually every country across the globe.

Biden upped the national debt to over $36 trillion, with annual interest payments on this debt exceeding $1 trillion, more than we spend on defense. Crime is out of control, as exemplified by a New York City subway rider being set on fire and a flight attendant getting her throat slit on the 16th Street Mall in Denver.

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars securing the borders of Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, and others while leaving our borders open with a large welcome mat.

The government has been weaponized against domestic opposition, ranging from a presidential candidate to nonviolent protestors, school board attendee parents, Latin Mass aficionados, and those challenging the whimsical and fickle COVID “science.”

Inflation has wrecked the finances of middle-class America, making it challenging to put groceries on the family table, pay basic bills, and enjoy anything close to the lifestyle of past generations.

The people spoke several months ago, on Nov. 5, by a commanding margin, asking for another helping of MAGA (Make America Great Again) after four years of MASA (Make America Suck Again). We now have president (that has an even better ring) Donald Trump taking a second bite of the presidential apple.

Trump is no longer a neophyte to Washington, D.C., as he was in 2016. He visited the nation’s capital only 17 times before moving into the White House the first time. As the 45th president, he had an up-close-and-personal view of the deep state, administrative state, ruling class, swamp, blob, or whatever you choose to call the permanent and unaccountable national power structure.

America had a chance to vote based on a head-to-head comparison. Both Trump and Biden/Harris had four years to lead the country, for better or for worse. Trump also had four years off the field, planning his second-term strategy.

He has stood down a special counsel investigation based on fabricated campaign opposition research. He was impeached twice. The media criticized his every word or action for four years.

He picked his cabinet, advisors, and inner circle far more strategically and thoughtfully than eight years ago. Rather than trying to play nice with the GOP establishment and ruling class, he is going scorched earth. He has two, maybe four, depending on how the midterm elections go, years to deliver a fatal blow to the corrupt administrative state.

Trump needed his four-year walk in the wilderness to rethink, regroup, and prepare himself for battle. If he won reelection in 2020, his second term would be bogged down with treacherous and disloyal advisors and lawfare from both Republicans and Democrats, threatening to ruin or bankrupt Trump, his family, and his supporters.

Democrats and the ruling class will rue the day they pilfered the 2020 election. Instead of a weakened lame-duck President Trump serving his second term, with the lawfare chihuahuas constantly nipping at his ankles, they had the failed Biden presidency.

Now in 2025, it’s a new and improved Donald Trump, refreshed and ready to release a can of Mar-a-Lago whoop-ass on Washington, D.C.

As Obama adviser David Plouffe threatened, “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”

For four years, from 2020 through 2024, they certainly tried. If the 2024 presidential election turned out differently, Plouffe’s warning would have come true.

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TikTok is back in the US after a brief shutdown, reportedly because Trump pledged to suspend the Biden administration’s ban. A Gaza ceasefire has also finally emerged due to pressure from Trump after Biden stalled for 15 months, and NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration plans on pressuring the Israeli government throughout negotiations to establish a permanent peace beyond the 42 days scheduled for the first phase of the agreement.

Remember this: it’s not that Trump is good, it’s that Democrats are just that bad. Biden’s completely unconditional facilitation of Israeli atrocities has actually been the exception rather than the norm among US presidents, as Trita Parsi explained in Foreign Policy last April. From what we are seeing so far, Trump is just returning things to their horrible standard baseline.

Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism. The Democratic Party plays just as crucial a role in promoting the tyranny and abuse of the US empire as the Republican Party does, and it is nonsensical to think of either of them as a lesser evil. The empire itself must end.

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Do yourself a favor and spare yourself the indignity of thinking the ceasefire and suspending the TikTok ban indicate that Trump is going to be a good president. You don’t get to become the US president unless the powers that be trust you to inflict the evils necessary for running the empire.

The system does not work. You cannot vote your way out of the tyranny of the empire, and the president is not going to save you. Trump will do many evil things as president, because that’s what US presidents do.

Don’t believe me? Then watch and pay attention. And learn the lessons you failed to learn last time.

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It’s possible that Trump’s term will constitute another swing from Bush-level depravity to Obama-level depravity.

It isn’t normal for the US empire to be as openly depraved as it has been in Gaza. Normally its evils are much more well-disguised, because it is in the empire’s interests to preserve its image in the eyes of the western public. You only see the really in-your-face acts of monstrosity when a coalition of forces within the swamp are able to seize on a rare opportunity to shove them through, as we saw in the wake of 9/11 and again in the wake of October 7.

The rest of the time, the empire likes to be a lot subtler about its abuses, like it was during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration. Starvation sanctions. Staging coups. Secretly arming proxy forces. Drone assassinations. Covert ops. It prefers these means over the Hulk Smash ground invasions like we saw during George W Bush’s first term, and the overt genocidal atrocities like we saw during Biden’s.

The Zionists, war profiteers and empire managers seized on the rare opportunity presented by October 7 combined with a senile lifelong Zionist in the White House to push through agendas in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon that they had wanted to push through for years, but they greatly damaged the empire’s propaganda interests in the process. We can expect the empire to try to move its ugliness out of the spotlight as swiftly as possible in the coming years and attempt to restore its false public image as a force of good in the world, while continuing to advance its psychopathic agendas in sneakier ways.

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Young Americans can take the same lessons from the TikTok ban that they’ve taken from Gaza: that they live in a tyrannical dystopia, and that the Democratic Party is not their friend.

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To be clear, when you hear people saying that US lawmakers voted to ban TikTok in order to shut down criticism of Israel among young people, it’s not some antisemitic conspiracy theory; they have openly admitted that this was in fact what they were doing. Legislators like Chris Murphy, Mitt Romney, Mike Gallagher and Mike Lawler are all on record saying they supported the ban because of the prevalence of pro-Palestinian content on the platform.

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One of the most politically interesting developments in recent days has been Americans flocking to the Chinese app Red Note in response to the looming TikTok ban and interacting with people in China for the first time in their lives with the help of translation technology.

If you had asked me last month what country I wish ordinary Americans would start communicating with at mass scale, I would have said China without a moment’s hesitation. If this keeps up it’s going to cause some real problems for the empire propagandists down the track.

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I no longer read today’s shysters, those grubby-fingered leeches called journalists, mostly because they’re as far removed from fairness and the truth as I am from LGBQTVMGM. The fact that Trump has won has not reminded them of their primary duty, which is to inform, not to convert. Most of them are envious creatures who erroneously believe in their moral superiority and their left-wing ideology, which is par for the course. One such jerk, writing in The New York Review of Books after November 7, announced the following: “There will be mass round ups and treason trials….” In other words, Stalin- and Hitler-like methods in the Land of the Free. The author of such rubbish is one Fintan O’Toole, probably the kind of wokester who thinks opening a door is unpaid labor.

Never mind. There are a few who have remained old-fashioned and tell it like they see it, not how they wish it were. One who comes to mind offhand has a tongue twister for a Christian name, Srdja Trifkovic. Basically he’s an academic, not a hack, as I call journalists.

Here’s Srdja on Metternich: “His impact on European affairs during the first two decades of the 19th century was arguably second only to Napoleon.” He then goes on to explain how the great Rhinelander became the architect of political balance following the Congress of Vienna in 1815. “By restoring the European balance of power, his diplomatic finesse helped create the conditions for 99 years of relative peace and unprecedented flourishing within the Old Continent.”

“We could use a few Metternichs these days.”

Hear, hear! Ninety-nine years of peace. We could use a few Metternichs these days. Instead we have midgets: Macron instead of Talleyrand, Scholz instead of Hardenberg, and the biggest joke of them all, Lammi instead of Castlereagh. Metternich, like most great men, was a swinger. He was happily married but was always in love with various grand ladies and mistresses. Wilhelmina, Duchess of Sagan, was his favorite, but she fell in love and ran off with the best-looking young Austrian nobleman, Frederick von Windischgraetz. Freddy had challenged Tsar Alexander to a duel over the Russian’s compliments to Wilhelmina, and the tsar was forced to make a public apology to the Austrian.

“I am no longer good for anything, I have lived in the space of two years through more torment, pain and sorrow than would be found in 20 years of lives lived by the majority of humans,” wrote Metternich to Wilhelmina, but to no avail. Such was Metternich’s torment over the duchess that both his wife and Talleyrand advised him to perk up and stop feeling sorry for himself.

He did just that. He spent a night with the fabulously beautiful Russian princess Katya Bagration, widow of the hero of Borodino, General Prince Bagration. The aged general had taken a cannon shot that partly took his leg off and was bleeding heavily. Urged by his staff to dismount and be attended to, he replied in the negative: “If they see me get off they’ll run.” His troops held fast, and the old general bled to death. His widow received the honors and was invited to Vienna for the congress by her then lover Tsar Alexander (whose Tsarina wife was also in the throes of love with the Polish prince Adam Czartoryski).

In the late morning after his tryst with Katya, Metternich was informed that he had missed an opportunity to settle an important border dispute with the Prussians. That is when he gave one of the loveliest responses where hanky-panky is concerned: “Ah, but she was worth it.” Tana and Milana Windishgraetz, direct descendants of Freddy’s, are great friends of mine and are both married to grand Italian and German princes. Adam Czartoryski’s direct descendant, also called Adam, was a contemporary of mine, and I begged him time and again when we were young to hit and run but not fall desperately in love each time. (He never listened and is now dead.) But I repeat: Between all the fooling around, the drinking, the dancing, and the debauch, Metternich, Castlereagh, Alexander, Talleyrand, and Humbold managed to seal a deal that kept the peace for 99 years in Europe. Perhaps that’s what’s missing from today’s diplomatic missions: more debauch.

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I have no credit card debt and no car payment and my credit score is in the 800s.  I got a letter from Macy’s telling me that my old Macy’s credit card that I haven’t used in years will have its interest rate increased from 22% to 30%.  This is Macy’s response to Amazon.

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The Brandon/Obama/Dubya/Clinton Clown Show did not clap once or stand up like everyone else in the room did when President Trump announced that he intended to restore freedom of speech in America during his second inaugural address.  I loved how he kept his back turned to all four stooges for the entire speech.  (The only time senile old Brandon smiled was when Carrie Underwood entered the room and stood inches in front of him to sing God Bless America).

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Click Here:

YouTube

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Writes TMTF:

Hello Lew,

The inauguration gets more like church every year. Now, we have hymns to the sacred state.

Go back and watch Reagan’s inauguration. He takes the oath, makes his speech, and leaves.

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Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

RT News

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. . . of the fact that an American president would have to issue an executive order that from henceforth a man will be defined as a man and a woman will be defined as a woman as President Trump is about to do today?

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Comments open on Rumble

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Recently, I discovered that Pluto TV has all the episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. You have Pluto if you have a smart TV. So that’s become my new nightly routine, watching them until the warmth and nostalgia eventually breaks down my chronic insomnia. It was a remarkably well done show, starring really talented people.

Ozzie Nelson was a former popular big band leader, as well as a star athlete. He played several instruments, including the banjo. Harriet was the primary vocalist for Ozzie’s band. They had two sons, David and Ricky, who both appeared on the show as themselves. It was a personal look into their private lives, with some scripts taken from real life events. David projected kindness, and was the big brother anyone would want. Even better than Wally Cleaver. Ricky, though, was the star of the family, and the television series. In the early episodes, he was featured playing the drums. Before long, Ozzie- who was in full control of their careers, realized that he had the first modern teen idol on his hands. Sinatra, Elvis, didn’t appeal primarily to teenage girls. Ricky Nelson did. He paved the way for Fabian, and Frankie Avalon, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, the Jonas Brothers. But Ricky was by far the most talented of them all.

Ozzie began inserting performances by his youngest son, with his trademark “Rick” guitar, singing his latest number at the end of nearly every episode. It was a brilliant marketing strategy, and helped Ricky to sell millions of records. Ricky’s band was renowned, especially lead guitarist James Burton, who is still alive and playing music. Keith Richards, among others, was said to be a huge fan of Ricky’s music, and especially loved the guitar work of Burton. The shows are a blend of long antiquated family values and humor, and music that holds up really well. Many of the scripts were written by Ozzie’s brother Don Nelson, so this was really a family affair. When David married actress June Blair, she was cast as his wife on the show. Shortly after that, Rick married Kristin Harmon, and she also became his onscreen wife.

Ricky Nelson, who started referring to himself as the more mature sounding “Rick” at about this time, was one of my early favorites. My sister gave me his Greatest Hits LP for my seventh birthday. I was already rocking in second grade. My first two 45s, at that same birthday, were Ricky Nelson’s “It’s up to You” and Lou Christie’s “Two Faces Have I.” I can’t remember if my sister or my cousin gave them to me. At any rate, my brother Ricky loved Ricky Nelson, too, and started wanting people to call him “Rick” at about the same time the youngest Nelson did. Not surprisingly, my brother’s family disrespected him enough to ignore his request. He would remain Ricky to all of us. I would keep buying Ricky Nelson records, but it wasn’t long before the Beatles and the Beach Boys took over, and most of my meager allowance went to their latest hit, whenever I bought records. The Nelsons were a good looking family, but Ricky was Cary Grant-level handsome. And I say that as non-gayly as possible.

Was this early sitcom, which began airing in 1952, as funny as The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, or Green Acres? No, of course not. But it was heartwarming, and the messages it conveyed were not heavy handed, unlike today’s “Woke” proselytizing. I haven’t seen a show yet where any of the family really engaged in much of an argument. No yelling. And the boys, even when they were busy with their college fraternity, and then married and on their own, literally told their parents everything that was going on in their lives. Ozzie & Harriet knew who they were dating, the names of all their friends, and were there to pitch in and help with any little bump in the road. There was not the slightest bit of dysfunction displayed to the audience. They all loved and trusted each other. Now, I know that their incredible closeness probably didn’t mirror that of many families of that era. But if feels good to watch.

Both Ozzie and the boys were great athletes. Ricky and David became accomplished trapeze artists, and this was sometimes incorporated into the show as well. Ozzie was still playing volleyball regularly and in seemingly wonderful shape when he was stricken with cancer and died at only 69. Ricky, of course, died at only forty five in what seems to have been a very suspicious plane crash on New Year’s Eve 1985. Like his father, Ricky had a great affection for ice cream, milk, and hamburgers. It’s hard to believe that drug use had anything to do with his untimely death. Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band is now looked at with respect by music critics, and he is often given credit for inventing the country/rock blend that the Eagles took to new heights. I communicated some with his actress daughter Tracy, before she deleted me from Facebook, almost certainly because of my forbidden views on COVID.

It was a long and winding road from Ozzie & Harriet, Leave it to Beaver, and Father Knows Best to “reality” family shows like The Osbournes, Jersey Shore, or The Kardashians. While Rick Nelson and his family will never be forgotten, the likes of Snooki and “The Situation” already bring blank stares in polite society. The messages from these shows, and the “sitcom” Modern Family, are the inverse to those coming from Ozzie & Harriet scripts. While not many families in the 1950s were as seemingly perfect as the Nelsons, how many reflect the gay/transgender friendly “warmth” of Modern Family? While perhaps unrealistic affection was on display in Ozzie & Harriet, monstrous dysfunction was promoted and celebrated as “entertainment” in The Osbournes, starring the family of former Black Sabbath front man Ozzie Osbourne, whose lifetime of drug abuse left him largely incoherent. But he was no Cousin It.

But The Kardashians show is really the yin to Ozzie & Harriet’s yang. At least Ozzie Osbourne was at one time a rock and roll star. The entire Kardashian clan are a bunch of whining, lazy, narcissistic and talentless modern females. The brother is largely invisible, and we all know too well what happened to husband Bruce Jenner. I suppose mother Kris Jenner might be annoying enough to cause a complete break in sanity. The star of the show is daughter Kim. Or actually Kim’s very large ass. That is really the extent of her “talent.” We only know about Kim’s ass because of a sex tape she did with some Black “star” I’ve never heard of. But then again, I’ve never heard of almost all of these new “celebrities.” Kim rode that “only sleeps with Blacks” to cultural prominence, which will happen when the culture is as anti-White as ours is. Her youngest sisters, one of whom is inexplicably a billionaire, love only Black men, too.

Can we imagine Harriet Hilliard, or Barbara “June Cleaver” Billingsley promoting a sex tape? Even with White 1950s- crew cut types? Yes, Marilyn Monroe had a pretty big ass, herself, but it wasn’t the sole reason for her fame. She was a captivating presence onscreen, and could sing as well. All the “sex symbols” of the era, like Jayne Mansfield, had some acting ability. Kim Kardashian has no acting or musical ability at all. She’s really good at that resting bitch face thing, which all female celebrities must master in America 2.0. And she has the world’s most famous transsexual for a stepfather, and only wants Black men. Plus her big ass is always rear and center. So how could she not be famous? Her mother Kris I think has gone Black as well, without even a big ass. If only the Nelsons were alive. Imagine the possibilities of The Nelsons meet the Kardashians.

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In today’s U.S., people are actually not allowed to avoid punishment if they publicly express the opinion that America’s continuing to donate the weapons and satellite intelligence that Israeli troops are using to exterminate the Gazans is unacceptable to them.

On January 16th, Caitlin Johnstone aptly headlined “None Of These War Criminals Will Face Justice While The US Empire Exists”, and opened with:

Two journalists were ejected from a State Department press conference on Thursday for asking inconvenient questions about Gaza. One of them, Sam Husseini, was physically carried out by security while demanding to know why Secretary of State Antony Blinken is not in The Hague for his war crimes.

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal was also made to leave while asking Blinken why he allowed hundreds of journalists to be murdered in Gaza, telling State Department spokesman Matt Miller that he “smirked through a genocide.”

Husseini was then forcibly removed for asking questions about Gaza, and about Israel’s nuclear program and Hannibal directive. Blinken told Husseini to “respect the process,” to which Husseini replied, “Respect the process? Respect the process? While everybody from Amnesty International to the ICJ says Israel’s doing genocide and extermination, and you’re telling me to respect the process? Criminal! Why aren’t you in the Hague?”

The western political-media class is expressing outrage over the incident, not because of journalists being manhandled for asking critical questions of their government, but because those journalists asked critical questions. …

Just the day before, the January 15th edition of The Chris Hedges Report, “America’s Academic Gulag (w/ MIT Student Activists) | The Chris Hedges Report”, showed the great international war reporter Hedges interviewing two young rising stars and Ph.D. students at America’s leading STEM University, MIT, who are being driven out, and their scholarships and grant funding cancelled, simply because they consider genocide to be unacceptable. One, named Prahlad Iyengar, had been a National Science Foundation Fellow studying for his Ph.D. in the intersection of quantum information, quantum sensing, and machine learning; and the other, who is Richard Solomon, had been studying for his Ph.D in the political economy of trade and science, and who had previously been a Vice Consul and Assistant Secretary in the U.S. State Department.

That 58-minute video starts out with an excellent four-minute introduction by Hedges, and then proceeds to his interviewing each of these two young men regarding the circumstances that had led up to his virtually inevitable expulsion from MIT. Each of these two describes clearly his own activities that had caused him to be now involuntarily seeking employment outside of his intended career-path (because each of the two is now a marked man within that career-path inside the U.S. empire). Each, though in a very different professional field from the other — one of them representing the STEM side, and the other the political-science side — describes a situation that I would characterize as being the incompatibility in today’s United States, between success within the U.S.-and-allied Establishment, versus decency or what might be called “conscience,” so that a stark choice must be made between those two objectives. Holding both of them simultaneously is prohibited by the U.S. Establishment. One may pursue success, or one may pursue being decent, but one cannot pursue both at once, without being punished for doing so.

The U.S. Government and its Establishment — both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party sides of it, and their respective propaganda-agencies including academia, the press, and all the rest — are now so blatantly violating the U.S. Contitution, as to make a mere mockery of it.

In the early 1940s the U.S. Government was against racist-fascist-imperialist-capitalist supremacism, but now it leads the world in racist-fascist-imperialist-capitalist supremacism. It’s not that the Constitution switched 180 degrees to the opposite end, to oppose the Constitution, it is instead that a heinous Deep State quickly became Established in the Government upon FDR’s 12 April 1945 death and then seeped down into the entire U.S. society to make it what it has now become. The rot in the American Establishment is now total. It is shocking.

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

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On Wednesday, Peter marked his return to the Peter Schiff Show studio. He tackles the most recent batch of 2025 economic data, highlights inflation signals in commodity prices, and comments on President Biden’s legacy as his term comes to a close. Donald Trump is set to take the reins on Monday, and Peter also analyzes the latest from the president-elect.

To start the show, Peter praises Trump for what appears to be a behind-closed-doors negotiation of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Despite his strengths, Trump is unlikely to solve America’s economic troubles:

You know, I criticize Trump when criticism is due. And believe me, there’s a lot of criticism that is due. And I’m going to be criticizing him later in this podcast. But I do want to get credit for what credit is due. And it’s my feeling that he has a lot to do with this. There will be some successes during the Trump presidency. Unfortunately, economically, there’s going to be a lot of failures. And it’s not necessarily because of what Trump’s going to do. It’s kind of preordained. It’s baked into the cake here.

Turning to President Biden’s farewell speech, Peter reiterates how decisively the American electorate renounced the Biden presidency:

He also talked about his accomplishments in his four years as president, which, of course, you know, he doesn’t really have any accomplishments. These are made up. I mean, the things that he’s bragging about actually undermined the economy during his four years. That’s why the public didn’t vote for four more. … The public didn’t feel that the Biden presidency was a success. They didn’t want four more years of that. They wanted four more years of Trump. And that’s because they thought the economy was better when Trump was president than it was when Biden was president.

When looking at recent economic statistics, Peter is reminded of commodity price action during the 2020 pandemic. If history repeats itself, the economy is in for another year of tough inflation:

If you remember, commodity prices really started to boom in the second half of 2020. I was talking about that on this podcast constantly, how we were going to have a big move up in inflation just looking at commodity prices. That’s when the Fed was not worried about it at all. …Look at commodity prices. They’re a leading indicator. And the big increase that we have in commodity prices in 2024, that’s not going to show up in the CPI until 2025 this year. So CPI was up 2.9% last year. Now we have soaring commodity prices. So what’s the odds that the CPI is going to be up less in 2025 than it was in 2024 before we had this big run up in commodity prices?

With alarming CPI numbers downplayed in the headlines, Peter points out that another important metric– the Empire State Manufacturing Index– plummeted this week, signaling recessionary pressures to go with inflation:

You know, while everybody was celebrating the fake good news about inflation, nobody noticed the Empire State Manufacturing Index, which was another disaster. They were looking for a positive number. They didn’t get one. They were looking for plus 1. They got minus 12.6. I think that’s about a seven-month low in the Empire State Manufacturing Index. Look, as far as I’m concerned, all the data confirms stagflation. 

Peter lambasts Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen for understating the role of the Fed in causing inflation in a recent interview. In fact, the Fed monetizing deficit spending was the primary driver of inflation over the last 5 years:

The deficit spending financed by Fed money printing, that was the inflation. So it wasn’t that the deficit spending may have contributed to it. It was it. It was part of it. It takes two to tango. And in fact, Chairman Powell actually asked for these deficits. He told Congress, ‘Run big deficits, spend a bunch of money, I’ll buy the bonds.’ He was encouraging the inflationary fiscal policy during COVID. So it didn’t just have a casual incidental effect. That was it.

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

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Accidents and crime happen, all the time in fact, and generally the American public barely takes notice of the number of such events that occur on a monthly basis. The reason for this is because the vast majority of incidents don’t lead to economic and infrastructure damage on a large scale.  A disaster has to be pretty extensive to get the attention of the public and usually that attention doesn’t last long because most people are still able to go on with their day without much inconvenience.

But let’s say you are a villain; a terrorist or a social engineer (same thing).  Let’s say you are a person or group with malicious intent and you have deliberately set out to destroy a country, or a society or a civilization.  Do you try to do this with a single elaborately planned event?  Probably not.  Instead, you would coordinate and encourage thousands of smaller acts of sabotage that go largely unnoticed by the population until infrastructure breaks down and the country is in ruins.

The concept is actually rather common – We see it in the covert instigation of civil unrest and color revolutions throughout history.  We have seen it in the US with groups like the leftist/communist “Weather Underground” in the 1970s.  Such plans were executed broadly by western governments in Europe under Operation Gladio, which was exposed in the 1990s.

An interesting fictional example of this idea is the movie ‘Invasion USA’ starring Chuck Norris, about a communist network using America’s open borders to sneak thousands of foreign agents into the country.  They then coordinate a series of infrastructure and terror attacks nationwide in order to expedite a civil breakdown and economic crash.

The point is, the public doesn’t know they are under attack because all the incidents seem to be far apart and unrelated.  I believe that such a strategy is well underway within the US and parts of Europe right now, but instead of covert agents or terrorists working at the behest of some foreign adversary I argue that our OWN GOVERNMENTS are engaged in this sabotage.

I call this strategy “Monkey Wrenching”, based on the book ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang’ written by Edward Abbey and published in 1975.  I touched on the concept in my article ‘Open Borders Have Created A Terror Attack Time Bomb In The US In 2025’ published last December, and then again in my article ‘Terror Attacks Kick Off In 2025 – It’s Only Going To Get Worse So Be Prepared’.

I want to go a little more in-depth on the “monkey wrench” concept because, as I predicted last year, 2025 just started and already we’ve seen multiple terror attacks including the car attack in New Orleans and the car bombing in front of Donald Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas.

These events follow some strange and disturbing incidents in 2024, including the armed invasion of Venezuelan cartels into multiple US neighborhoods and cities, two assassination attempts on Donald Trump by leftists as well as the assassination of an insurance CEO in New York by Luigi Mangione (identified as politically ambiguous by the media but widely applauded by leftists).

Then there’s the natural disaster issue.  The government displayed what appears to be total incompetence during the horrific fires in Maui, the lack of adequate federal response after Hurricane Helene in states like North Carolina, and of course there’s the absolute neglect of practical fire precautions in LA leading to one of the worst disasters in US history (more and more evidence is being released showing that these fires were, at least in part, started by a flurry of arsonists).  But what if government apathy and inaction in the face of fires and floods are just another deliberate form of monkey wrenching?

And let’s not forget about human-composed disasters like the mass illegal immigration created by the Biden Administration.  Dropping tens-of-millions of third-world aliens into the US economy in the span of a few years is a calamity bigger than anything Mother Nature could possibly produce.

But how are any of these things connected?  Aren’t they just the natural random noise of civilization?  It couldn’t possibly be maliciously planned, right?  Well, it depends – Chaos is not always directly created, but it can be encouraged into being through policy.

Is this conspiracy theory?  We’ve seen many conspiracy theories proven true over the past couple years, from the covid pandemic lockdowns, mandates and death numbers being exposed as a sham, Twitter and Facebook now outed for colluding with government officials to censor conservatives, the US government and Ukraine blowing up the Nordstream gas pipeline to Europe.  Conspiracy theorists are racking up an impressive list of wins lately.

If it seems to you as it does to me that the frequency of destabilizing events is increasing, that’s probably because it is.  It’s not a symptom of internet “information overload” as the media claims; the internet has been around a long time now and we’re used to the ease of info access.  No, this is something new.

The Monkey Wrench Gang

Edward Abbey’s politically charged book titled ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang’ portrays a group of environmentalist extremists out to stop the “pollution” of the southwestern US using sabotage of machines and infrastructure as a means to grind development to a halt.

The Monkey Wrench Gang has long been considered an inspirational work of fiction for the political left, but it is also treated as a sort of instruction manual for leftists and anarchists – A guide for bringing down the system. It depicts the destruction of minor targets like billboards and bulldozers, up to and including the destruction of bridges, the derailment of trains and the attempted bombing of a dam. It’s sort of like the leftist version of The Turner Diaries.

The idea is that one small attack alone doesn’t do much, but thousands of attacks have an accumulative effect that can result in the downfall of a country or system.

What the book does not address is the idea that a shadow government would HELP or fund these kinds of attacks.  With the government on their side as it remains passive, saboteurs can operate with impunity. They can then commit acts of sabotage in a way that avoids drawing too many questions – In other words, they would have the ability to make the events look like accidents, or commit crimes in a way that looks random.

Leftist Reactions To Losing Political Power – The Rise Of Marxist Terror

Leftists throughout modern history have a habit of engaging in destabilization efforts when they don’t get what they want.  They view their motivations as sacrosanct and beyond criticism, be it “saving democracy” or “saving the planet” or “taking down capitalists and colonists”.

In every case where the political left had influence over social conditions and then lost that power, they revert to directed exponential disruption and violence from riots to assassination.  They claim to care about the right of the majority to have their voices heard, but in reality they don’t care at all.  When the majority goes against the leftist narrative, leftists go rogue.

If I could come up with one word to describe progressives and their behavior it’s this:  Petty.

That might sound too reserved, but there’s nothing more dangerous than people who are petty; they’re capable of justifying anything.  We saw this on a large scale after Donald Trump’s first election win in 2016 and I guarantee we’re going to see a lot more as he enters office again in 2025.  Establishment gatekeepers in the media and among globalist institutions have conjured an atmosphere in which at least 30% of the country believes that “democracy” is facing an existential threat from Donald Trump and conservatives.

They think they’re headed for concentration camps once Trump settles into the White House and that all their rights are about to be taken away.  Ironically, it’s their pettiness and propensity for sabotage that might actually end up creating the desire among conservatives for putting these people behind bars for a long time.

Establishment elites have fostered an environment in which random attacks are more easily triggered, but they also participate in the direct funding and training of Marxist extremist groups.  For anyone who thinks this kind of thing never happens, I suggest you look into the true history behind the leftist terrorists of the Weather Underground and how many of those people (who were wanted by the FBI) ended working within the government and teaching at major universities.

There WILL be a number of these groups active in the coming years.  These people will not accept failure and they will lash out any way they can.  Some of them will be given help from establishment elites with extensive resources.

The Tempting Authoritarian Response To Monkey Wrenching

The temptation in the face of mass induced sabotage of a nation is to respond with cold and calculated power.  Frankly, it’s hard to see another solution at times.  As most Libertarians will point out, government power is like the Ring of Sauron from Lord Of The Rings – You might think you can wield it for good, but ultimately it will corrupt you just as it corrupts everyone.  I tend to agree.

In the decade after WWI Germany faced a series of Marxist provocations from economic sabotage to armed violence and assassinations.  The German government and traditionalist citizens eventually responded in kind, creating militias to quell leftists and imprisoning or killing some in their leadership.  Germans were well aware of what happened under Marxism in other nations and the havoc it inspired.  Those years of instability in the 1920s and the fear they induced led to the ultimate formation of the Nazi Party and the rise of National Socialism.

Disturbingly, fascism was presented as the counter to Marxism, but even Adolph Hitler admitted on multiple occasions that fascism was inspired by Marxism. The German people, in a desperate effort to return to normalcy and prosperity, embraced a Marxist inspired political system in order to undo the chaos created by Marxist revolutionaries.

We stand at a dangerous crossroads in 2025, but this does not mean we sit back and do nothing (which, unfortunately, seems to be a common Libertarian response).  Do we form citizen militias like the Germans did and take down leftist agitators?  Or, do we let the government under Trump flirt with unconstitutional measures?  Do we arrest Democrat city or state officials that refuse to fix infrastructure problems?  Do we remove them by force if they continue protecting illegals from deportation?

Recent surveys show that nearly HALF of all federal employees plan to resist or obstruct the plans of the Trump Administration, which means they will be actively trying to sabotage the implementation of policies that most Americans voted for.  They’re telling you that the will of the voter doesn’t matter.  What should be done about these people?

These are the kinds of questions that are going to come up frequently in the next four years and we need to consider them seriously.

Some would argue that any violence of action whatsoever is authoritarian in nature, but I see little chance of reversing the damage done by globalists and leftists without some form of violence.  For example, mass deportations of millions of illegal immigrants will be presented by critics as authoritarian in nature.  Yet, this strategy is entirely necessary if our country is to be saved.

Do the ends justify the means?  In this case, yes.  When your civilization is under attack it is morally acceptable to defend it.  The problems arise when the act of retaliation against an enemy results in the loss of the very freedom and prosperity your society hopes to protect.  This is the conundrum created by the monkey wrench:  It’s an internal war, with internal enemies, and to strike at internal enemies you sometimes take the risk of striking yourself.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post The ‘Monkey Wrench’ Sabotage of America Begs for an Authoritarian Response appeared first on LewRockwell.

Producing quality goods that aren’t addictive or obsoleted in a few years–there’s no money in that, fool. Get real. You want to get rich, “invest” in a bet in the casino.

Is placing a bet in a casino an “investment”? Absolutely! An “investment” is now defined as a wager, often leveraged, at a gaming table in the casino. Anything that offers a gain is an “investment.”

This is of course at odds with the classic understanding of “investing in new productive assets” that is core to classical capitalism in which the open market for goods, services, labor, risk and capital allocates capital to the highest and best use, i.e. the most profitable use, via the maximization of self-interest by all participants.

Once upon a time, increasing productivity was the most profitable deployment of capital. Now financial trickery in the casino is the source of outlandishly large gains. For example, buying back shares of the corporation’s outstanding stock, reducing the number of shares “sharing” the company’s earnings, cash flow and valuation.

So management creates a million new shares as compensation to managers and employees, and then uses surplus capital to buy back two million shares, jacking up the value of the newly created shares that are now mostly in the hands of senior management. $10 million for you, $100 million for me: easy-peasy.

What risk-laden investment in higher productivity could possibly match the gains generated by this low-risk financial mechanism? There is none, hence the rise of stock buybacks as a core use of surplus capital and borrowing power, for it’s even smarter to borrow vast sums to fund buybacks and then service this debt with earnings, as borrowing vast sums to fund huge buybacks boosts shares prices far more than a trickle of net earnings.

What makes sense is offloading the risks and low profit margins of production to overseas companies and using the gains from this transfer of risk to fund more stock buybacks and other financial tricks in the casino.

In the happy story, the money investors buy shares with is invested in new equipment that boosts productivity. But this describes a tiny sliver of the financial realm: yes, a new start-up company will issue shares to raise capital to fund its expansion. But this is approximately 0.1% of the transactions in the casino, which is all about trading existing shares–and financialized derivatives of those shares–of companies.

Read the Whole Article

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Just before he leaves office, President Biden is commuting the prison sentences of 2,500 people who have been convicted of non-violent drug offenses. Biden stated, “This action is an important step toward righting historic wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and providing deserving individuals the opportunity to return to their families and communities after spending far too much time behind bars.”

Biden’s last-minute drug-war commutations raise several questions.

First, why did he wait until now to release those people from prison? Given his professed concern for righting wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and giving people more time with their families, why didn’t he issue those commutations during his first week in office? Why did he force those people to spend four more unnecessary years in prison?

Second, and more important, why were those people in prison in the first place? In other words, what business does the federal government (or any government) have punishing people for engaging in purely peaceful behavior, even if it is considered harmful?

That’s the question that all too many Americans simply refuse to ask. Having been born and raised under a vicious drug war, they view drug laws as something permanent, immutable, and perpetual. From the first grade on up, they were indoctrinated into believing that government has a legitimate role in controlling what people ingest and punishing them when they ingest something that the government hasn’t approved.

Control of people is what the drug war is all about. All of the drug-war enforcement measures have one aim in mind: to prevent people from possessing and ingesting what the government says is harmful to them. Amazingly, with the exception of libertarians, no one finds that objectionable.

In 1944, Friedrich Hayek wrote his famous book The Road to Serfdom. While Hayek was referring to the push toward government regulation and economic control, it would be difficult to find a better example of America’s serfdom society than the drug war. With its power to determine what people possess, ingest, and distribute, the federal government has firmly established that it is the master and that the citizens are the serfs. Drug laws demonstrate perfectly that, for all practical purposes, the federal government owns the American people. They exist to serve the government.

Why shouldn’t people be free to possess, ingest, and distribute anything they want, no matter how harmful it might be? Why should the government wield the authority to send them to jail for any period of time, short or long? Why should there be any drug laws at all? After all, we don’t have laws against the possession, ingestion, and distribution of alcohol and tobacco. Why not the same for other drugs?

There is also a utilitarian question that needs to be asked? What good are drug laws? Sure, they enable the government to punish people who engage in self-destructive activity. But so what? People have always engaged in self-destructive activity. Moreover, despite all of the harsh measures that government has taken to enforce its drug war — which Biden and presidents before him have acknowledged with their pardons and commutations — people continue to engage in self-destructive activity.

The drug war has done nothing to change that aspect of human nature. What the drug war has done is make society worse. Consider the drug cartels and the drug gangs and the massive violence that has come with them. The cause? The drug war. Without drug laws, there would be no drug cartels or drug gangs or drug violence.

Or consider the massive assault on civil liberties brought on by the drug war: asset-forfeiture laws, no-knock raids, unjustified stopping of people and pat-down searches, and warrantless searches. Consider also mandatory-minimum sentences, assaults on financial privacy, and money-laundering laws. Consider also the never-ending parade of much-publicized record drug busts and criminal prosecutions.

None of it has worked to achieve a drug-free society. Yet, the drug war just keeps going and going and going. Just mindlessly repeating the same patterns, with every U.S. president striving to show how good and caring he is by issuing last-minute commutations and pardons of people for crimes that should never have been crimes in the first place.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Peace on earth is a wish that gets extra emphasis this time of year. We’re told to pray for it, wish for it, keep it forever in our minds. So why don’t we have it?

The short answer is money. War is profitable to some. It’s profitable enough that profiteers in private industries influence government, which stays home and orders others to do the fighting. War costs money. Where does the government get it? Visible taxes (income, corporate, and payroll) cover about two-thirds of government revenue. The rest comes from borrowing and inflation.

In the US, the central banking cartel known as the Fed stands ready to fund almost anything the government wants, especially wars. The Fed does this by creating money from nothing and buys government debt instruments, the accounting name for which is “assets.” The destruction of the dollar is the residue from the “asset”-buying sprees of the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee, an operation which its members and most of the economics profession insist is necessary for a prosperous economy—and to keep the bad guys at bay in obscure places on the planet.

Government can’t supply bombs to proxy warlords using tax money alone. Outlays in the hundreds of billions must be stolen surreptitiously, which is why government created a central bank and a bought-and-paid-for economics profession. No matter the propaganda spewed by its lapdog media, taxpayers will eventually make the connection between war and a cheaper dollar.

History and theory prove we don’t need a committee cranking up the money supply to make the price of money more appealing, that on a free market increases in the money supply come about from the usual profit and loss forces. A miner brings money to the market as a hat maker brings hats, neither one violating anyone’s property rights. But a committee such as the FOMC doesn’t go mining à la the Seven Dwarfs to bring something people want to the market. That’s way too restrictive. Far better to create the money as a child would while playing make believe.

The Fed—as the federally-certified monopoly counterfeiter—performs the child’s magic. In doing so, it steals wealth. Nothing is exchanged for something.

Surely, I must be wrong

To suggest the economics profession supports a monopoly counterfeiting operation to run the economy is too ludicrous to accept. It would mean the government works against our interests. It would mean government is our enemy. There must be more to the story. There has to be.

Allow me to quote directly from a primary source, in this case one of the most controversial federal reserve chairmen in recent history. Ben Bernanke, chairman from 2006 to 2014, summa cum laude at Harvard, PhD at MIT, Time Person of the Year in 2009, awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 2022, and now serving as an economist for the Brookings Institution and advisor for the financial services firm Citadel—made this speech before the National Economists Club in Washington, DC on November 21, 2002, which he entitled Making Sure “It” Doesn’t Happen Here. You might want to read this passage twice, as it’s so off-the-wall your inner economist might find it impossible to digest:

[T]he US government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of US dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the US government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.

“Of course,” he continues, “the US government is not going to print money and distribute it willy-nilly…“ He’s right. The government—or the Fed as its assigned counterfeiter—ensures that “Willy” doesn’t get the newly-printed money until much later, after it’s circulated through the economy and put upward pressure on prices and downward pressure on Willy’s real wages, sucking the purchasing power from his wallet. The first ones to get the new money benefit because it arrives immediately, too soon to affect price levels. Call them “the favored few.” Call them “connected.” Call it the government. Call this the Cantillon Effect, and see Jonathan Newman’s graphical expression of the subterfuge in four charts.

The “It” in Bernanke’s title refers to “the danger of deflation, or falling prices.” Since deflation increases the purchasing power of the monetary unit, it’s puzzling that an economist of Bernanke’s stature would find that objectionable.

Moore’s Law has been a deflationary phenomenon since it was first identified in 1965—thirty-seven years before Bernanke’s speech—and has led to the proliferation of tech throughout the economy. Among other things, it has meant businesses and individuals can buy more for less—certainly a key indicator of prosperity. And he regards this as a danger?

But he later expands his definition of deflation to mean “a general decline in prices, with emphasis on the word ‘general.’” Using his general understanding he says:

The sources of deflation are not a mystery. Deflation is in almost all cases a side effect of a collapse of aggregate demand—a drop in spending so severe that producers must cut prices on an ongoing basis in order to find buyers.

The economy-wide aggregates Bernanke describes are an instance of “credit expansion and its tampering with the free-market rate of interest,” Rothbard explains. Projects thought to be profitable turn out not to match consumer demands. Thus, we see firms slashing prices to save themselves. The cure is not deficit spending, but to let the free market breathe, “to make most efficient use of the existing stock of capital.”

Since an inflation-driven economy benefits debtors at the expense of creditors, but debtors will sleep better knowing Bernanke and his subsequent replacements are certified fiat-money inflationists making sure “It” never, ever happens here. For details, see the BLS inflation calculator.

Conclusion

Because deflation is considered a monetary failure, we get perpetual inflation instead, which is just what a belligerent government needs. Deflation in an economy using sound money is a natural result of competition and improved methods of production. The latter part of the 19th century, even with a government-controlled gold standard, blossomed in blessed deflation.

While no era of US history was free of conflicts, the period following Reconstruction—when the income tax and the Fed were yet to intrude on our lives, thus limiting government revenue—was one of the most peaceful ever. We should never feed an institution that thrives on war. End the Fed. End the income tax. Starve the beast.

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I have done my best to alert MAGA Americans to the difficulty of regaining control of the US government. For decades the US government and its policies have been controlled by the organized interest groups that fund political campaigns.  Regardless of the candidates voters elect, the legislation enacted and the federal government’s policies are the work of lobby groups. Among the powerful lobbies are the Israel Lobby, the military/security complex, Big Pharma, Wall Street, and agri-business.

American voters are repeatedly disappointed that little ever changes regardless of who they elect. Sometimes an administration can achieve changes in a few areas, as Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan did in reducing tensions with the Soviet Union.  But even these achievements were overturned by subsequent administrations in response to the military/security complex’s demand for an enemy to secure their profit and power. Without an enemy, why does the US need a military budget that exceeds the GDP of most countries on earth? (for example, according to the World Bank, the GDP of South Africa in 2023 was $389.7 billion; Argentina $646 billion, Belgium $529 billion; Hungary $212 billion; Norway $485 billion; Pakistan $338 billion; Sweden $585 billion; Thailand $515 billion.) See here.

The resistance to change is because the interests of what constitutes the American Establishment is institutionalized. American social and governmental institutions have become homes of The Establishment.  It was 64 years ago on January 17, 1961, that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the five-star general in charge of the Normandy invasion, at the end of his second term warned Americans about the increasing power of the military-security complex.  

As a congressional staffer in both House and Senate I experienced the power almost daily. I still remember the day when I was on the floor of the US Senate and Strom Thurmond, the fourth longest serving senator in US history, tapped me on the shoulder. A vote was before the Senate whether to partially pay for a reduction in marginal income tax rates by reducing a military appropriation. Senator Thurmond said to me: “Don’t ever let your senator vote for a reduction in military spending. If he does, he won’t be reelected, and you will be out of a job.” He brought clarity to me that survival as a senator meant accommodating the profits of the armaments corporations, not the living standards of the taxpayers.

Thurmond, who served in the Senate for almost half a century, was no novice.  He was educating me that whatever the interest of Wall Street and the financial sector in lower tax rates, their power was less than that of the military/security complex. As sometimes there were conflicts between the interests of lobby groups, it was important for a Senate staffer to know the hierarchy of power rankings. 

Having experienced all this first hand, I warned readers that the US Senate is an Establishment-owned institution, and that the US Senate has the power to deny federal office to a president’s nominations.  I explained that this establishment power over an incoming administration could render it impotent.

Tulsi Gabbard is Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence. As a member of the House, she was a strong critic of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that I am convinced is unconstitutional and the foundation  of a police state.  Fear of non-existent “Muslim terrorist threat,” hyped by a whore media, made insouciant  Americans accept the foundation of a police state. In 2020 together with Rep. Thomas Massie, the only independent member of the House today,  she introduced a bill to repeal the entire Patriot Act, a police state measure imposed on us by the Republican regime of Bush/Cheney, the worst in modern American history until Biden. 

Clearly, Gabbard had targets painted all over her. Both Democrat and Republican senators have made it clear to her that any repeal or lax enforcement of “national security” legislation must be disavowed if she expects the Senate to confirm her in office. Gabbard got the message and backed off her opposition to the unconstitutional surveillance of Americans without submitting to judges that the surveillance was needed for national security and obtaining a warrant.

Commentators unfamiliar with Washington are denouncing Gabbard for “selling out”.  A commentator in the Unz Review says Gabbard has betrayed herself and many others, but will have her 30 pieces of silver.

It is so much easier to denounce than to understand.  I often think that Americans do not want to understand how things really work, because it is so distressing. So they stay in denial, and this renders them useless in bringing change and protecting their liberties.

Tell me before you condemn Tulsi Gabbard, would you rather have her, a person fiercely opposed by the military/security complex, or a person to whom the military/security complex has no opposition?

Tulsi can tell the blackmailing bought-and-paid-for US Senate one thing and do another once she is in office.  I would bet on her integrity, not denounce it. It is the US Senate that is devoid of integrity.

We will get Trump’s measure this Monday, January 20.  As I explained last Friday, on the Oval Office desk awaits pardons for all the J6 victims of a totally corrupt Democrat administration and a US Department of Justice (sic) devoid of an ounce of integrity, essentially a collection of criminals.  The criminality of the Biden Regime is unrivaled in American History.  As an instrument of justice, Biden’s “justice” department ranks with  Joseph Stalin’s purge of the Bolsheviks in his show trials of the 1930s when the leaders of the Russian revolution were sentenced to death for being capitalist spies.

In my opinion, Democrats are so corrupt, so anti-American, so anti-normality, so anti-white, so anti-citizen that they are discredited as a political party.  Republicans are stupid beyond belief and ignorant of what needs to be done, but Democrats are Satanic. The second party in the American political system belongs to Satan. The Democrats are Satanists. They reek of evil.

Let us hope that tomorrow the FBI/CIA/NSA doesn’t attack the inauguration with a drone, blame Iran, and rush us off to war for Israel.

The post Can Trump Make a Difference? appeared first on LewRockwell.

On January 17, 2025—just three days before President Trump is to be sworn in—Congress issued a press release with the following statement:

Today, after an eight-month investigation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cut off all funding and formally debarred EcoHealth Alliance Inc. (EcoHealth) and its former President, Dr. Peter Daszak, for five years based on evidence uncovered by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

As far as I can tell, the New York Times did not report this story, though the New York Post did.

More interesting than the superficial news reporting is the HHS ACTION REFERRAL MEMORANDUM recommending that Dr. Peter Daszak be barred from participating in United States Federal Government procurement and nonprocurement programs.

The Memorandum also states:

Dr. Peter Daszak was the President and Chief Executive Officer of EHA from 2009 until his termination, effective January 6, 2025. Dr. Daszak was the Project Director (PD)/Principal Investigator (PI) for Grant Number 1R01AI110964-01.

I am not sure what to make of this document, which is written in such an arcane and convoluted style that it challenges the attention span of even the most focused reader.

I have been researching this story for four years, and I found the following paragraphs the most intriguing:

9. In a letter dated May 28, 2016, the NIAID contacted EHA concerning possible GoF research based on information submitted in its most recent Year 2 RPPR. The NIAID notified EHA that GoF research conducted under Grant Number 5R01AI110964-03 would be subject to the October 17, 2014, United States Federal Government funding pause, and that per the funding pause announcement, new United States Federal Government funding would not be released for GoF research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route. In the letter, the NIAID requested that EHA provide a determination within 15 days of the date of the letter as to whether EHA’s research under Grant Number 5R01AI110964-03 did or did not include GoF work subject to the funding pause.

10. In a letter dated June 8, 2016, EHA provided a response to the NIAID’s May 28, 2016 letter. EHA explained that the goal of its proposed work was to construct MERS and MERS-like chimeric CoVs in order to understand the potential origins of MERSCoV in bats by studying bat MERS-like CoVs in detail. EHA stated that it believed it was highly unlikely that the proposed work would have any pathogenic potential, but that should any of these recombinants show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than certain specified benchmarks involving log growth increases, or grow more efficiently in human airway epithelial cells, EHA would immediately: (1) stop all experiments with the mutant, (2) inform the NIAID Program Officer of these results, and (3) participate in decision-making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.

11. Based on the information provided by EHA, the NIAID concluded that the proposed work was not subject to the GoF research pause. In a letter dated July 7, 2016, however, the NIAID informed EHA that should any of the MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras generated under the grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain, EHA must stop all experiments with these viruses and provide the NIAID Program Officer and Grants Management Specialist, and WIV Institutional Biosafety Committee, with the relevant data and information related to these unanticipated outcomes.

Note that various statements in the above paragraphs are inconsistent with what Baric et al. state in their 2015 paper A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronavirus shows potential for human emergence—a research paper funded by the NIAID EcoHealth Grant “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”

As the authors state in the section on Biosafety and biosecurity:

Reported studies were initiated after the University of North Carolina Institutional Biosafety Committee approved the experimental protocol (Project Title: Generating infectious clones of bat SARS-like CoVs; Lab Safety Plan ID: 20145741; Schedule G ID: 12279). These studies were initiated before the US Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses (http://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf). This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH.

As I noted in my series of essays titled The Great SARS-CoV-2 Charade, one of the silliest lies told by Dr. Anthony Fauci has been his insistence that NIAID did not approve Gain-of-Function work by EcoHealth.

Fauci has repeatedly asserted this in a loud and vexed tone, as though he is outraged by the mere proposition. And yet, Ralph Baric and his colleagues—including Zhengli-Li Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—plainly state in their 2015 paper that their Gain-of-Function experiments, performed in Baric’s UNC lab and Zhengli-Li Shi’s lab in Wuhan, were grandfathered in, given that they were funded before the 2014 Pause.

Another statement (in paragraph 11 of the recent HHS Action Referral Memo) that deserves special scrutiny is the following:

In a letter dated July 7, 2016, however, the NIAID informed EHA that should any of the MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras generated under the grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain, EHA must stop all experiments with these viruses and provide the NIAID Program Officer and Grants Management Specialist, and WIV Institutional Biosafety Committee, with the relevant data and information related to these unanticipated outcomes.

Again, it’s tough to interpret this statement, given that Baric et al. had, by the own admission, already generated chimeras that “replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”

Let’s review what Baric et al. state in their Abstract about the functionality of the chimeric virus (named SHCOI4-MA15) they claimed to have generated. Using humanized mice (genetically modified to have primary human airway cells) as their experimental animals, the authors state:

Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.

To this day, no legal authority that I am aware of has investigated the question: What became of the the chimeras SHC014-MA15 and WIV1-MA15? The latter chimera was documented by Baric et al. in their March 2016 paper titled SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence—a chimera “that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone.”

What did the Wuhan Institute of Virology do with these chimeras? Did its researchers continue to modify and experiment with these chimeras?

Another exceedingly silly claim made by U.S. government officials—including members of Congress—is that the true origin of SARS-CoV-2 is likely to remain a mystery, given that the Chinese government and military will almost certainly never agree to perform a full and transparent investigation of their Wuhan Institute of Virology.

What did the U.S. government expect when it agreed to share cutting edge American biotechnology with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has long been known to be run by the Chinese military?

One grows weary of our U.S. government officials evading responsibility by pretending to be imbeciles or by revealing themselves to be true imbeciles.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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