Lew Rockwell Institute

The fires in Los Angeles have been the most devastating in the city’s history. A full account of the causes of the conflagration can’t be attempted here, but in this week’s column, I’d like to talk about the responsibility of environmentalism for what happened.

By “environmentalism,” I mean a movement that is hostile to human beings, their private homes, and to industrial growth. Some of its advocates want to do away with people altogether. Instead, environmentalists want to preserve the natural world in its pristine purity.

In Los Angeles and its surrounding communities, there is an abundance of lush vegetation.  Further, there is usually very little rain during the fall and winter seasons. LA does get some rain in the spring, but as Coim Toibin remarks, “In the spring, the rain makes the scrub and the brush grow stronger so when they get dry later in the year they are liable to burn more strongly.”  This problem is exacerbated by fierce Santa Ana winds that can rapidly spread any fire that has started.

In order to cope with these difficult circumstances, it is necessary to follow a policy of controlled burning. According to David Stockman, “The failure to do just such controlled burns is exactly what is behind the LA wildfire today. That is, a dramatically larger human footprint in the fire-prone shrub-lands and chaparral (dwarf trees) areas along the coasts has increased the risk residents will start fires, accidentally or otherwise. California’s population doubled from 1970 to 2020, from about 20 million people to nearly 40 million people, and nearly all of the gain was in the coastal areas.

Under those conditions, California’s strong, naturally-occurring winds, which crest periodically, as is occurring at the moment, are the main culprit which fuels and spreads the human-set blazes in the shrub-lands. The Diablo winds in the north of the state and the Santa Ana winds in the south can actually reach hurricane force, as has also been the case this week. As the winds move West over California mountains and down toward the coast, they compress, warm and intensify.

These winds, in turn, blow flames and carry embers, spreading the fires quickly before they can be contained. And on top of that, the Santa Ana winds also function as Mother Nature’s blow-dryer. As they come down the mountains toward the sea, the hot winds dry the surface vegetation and deadwood rapidly and powerfully, paving the way for the blowing embers to fuel the spread of wildfires down the slopes.”

A policy of controlled burning is needed to deal with this, but the environmentalists oppose this, because they want to keep as much of the lush vegetation in place as possible.  “We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

In short, if you don’t clear and burn-out the deadwood, you build-up nature-defying tinder-boxes that then require only a lightening strike, a spark from an un-repaired power line or human carelessness to ignite into a raging inferno. As one 40-year conservationist and expert summarized,

There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”

It is also necessary to supply vast amounts of water to the area, but again the environmentalists oppose this. The water might disturb the habitats of a few fish and snails. This is in their insane view, a bar to what is necessary to protect the lives and property of millions of people. David Stockman explains: “In this case, state and Federal politicians have simultaneously curtailed the supply of water available to Los Angeles firefighters in order to protect so-called endangered species. Specifically, southern California is being held hostage by sharp curtailment of the water pumping rates from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in order to protect the Delta Smelt and Chinook Salmon.”

Also, fire hydrants must be kept up-to-date and equipped to handle large scale blazes. Enough fire fighters must be hired to cope with potential emergencies. In a free society, hydrants and fire fighters would be supplied by the market, but we unfortunately do not live in a free society, and it is up to the government to take care of these matters.

But Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass is not interested in such matters. She was out of the city, on one of her perpetual junkets abroad, when the fires started, even though it was a matter of public knowledge that Los Angeles was in a dangerous period. The Los Angeles Times reported: “As the Palisades fire exploded in Los Angeles on Jan. 7, Mayor Karen Bass was posing for photos at an embassy cocktail party in Ghana, pictures posted on social media show.” She is, by the way, a revolutionary Communist: “Back in the 1970s, community activist Karen Bass went on at least 15 trips to Cuba, many with a group known as the Venceremos Brigade, a Marxist group started by the Castro regime to subvert American interests, weaken democracies, and spread communism around the world.”

As you would expect from such a person, Bass doe not care about public safety: “But Bass was accused of deploying sleight of hand to minimize the many very real dramas surrounding water that hindered efforts to douse the flames.

While the tanks were indeed full before the fire broke out, by Wednesday fire hydrants in Palisades had run out of water, as they are not designed for such mass-scale wildfires.

All of the three water tanks in Palisades and several fire hydrants temporarily lost water because of the high demand, as experts have explained the system is not built to fight major blazes.

The water system used to fight the Palisades fire buckled under the demands of what turned out to be the most destructive fire in city history, with some hydrants running dry as they were overstressed without assistance from firefighting aircraft for hours early Wednesday.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom is no better. As Mises Institute President Tom DiLorenzo says: “For the past two years, under the guidance/dictates of Nancy Pelosi’s nephew (aka governor of California), LA County has been sending firefighting equipment, including fire trucks, to Ukraine. Is it constitutional for a state to have its own foreign policy?  Is there really a line in the LA County budget for fire trucks for Ukraine?  Which LA County politicians ran on a platform of:  ‘Vote for me and I’ll give our firefighting equipment away to the dictator of Ukraine”?  Did anyone vote for this, or is the Newsom dictatorship really no different from the ones in Ukraine or North Korea?”

Let’s do everything we can to reverse the policies of these anti-human environmentalists!

The post Environmentalism and the Los Angeles Fires appeared first on LewRockwell.

Is a so-called Presidential “preemptive pardon” consistent with the intent and language of the Constitution? All that the Constitution says about the matter is this:

”…he (the President)  shall have the power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” {Article 2, Section 2} In the first important case to deal with these issues  ( Ex Parte Garland 71 U.S. 333, 1866) the Supreme Court (in the context of someone pardoned but still  excluded from the (state) practice of law) said the following:

“The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.”

And it is THIS interpretation of the pardoning power that was (still) used, for instance, in the “preemptive” pardoning of Richard Nixon who, although disgraced, had not been charged with any criminal offense against the federal government. Ditto for the Biden preemptive pardons.

My comments:

a. The original language in the Constitution never explicitly mentions any “preemptive” pardoning power. Moreover, the use of the term “offenses” in the Constitution appears to imply that something legal (some process; some finding; some  determination) has ALREADY begun or occured and that the presidential pardon applies to that offense or set of offenses. If this is correct, that would rule out any preemptive pardoning power.

b. Now the language from the 1866 case cited above (and the legal foundation for the notion that a preemptive pardon is Constitutional) clearly broadens the pardoning power beyond what the Founders wrote or likely reasonably intended. After all, an “offense” PRIOR to some legal proceeding,  is NOT an offense in any legal sense but only an “alleged (legal) offense.” Nowhere, however, does the pardoning power in the Constitution even hint that the President  could pardon someone  for some ALLEGED offense against the Government; or that THAT  power could somehow be “unlimited” and beyond all legislative review. It appears, then,  that the SC majority in 1866 pulled that far broader interpretation of the pardoning power right out of thin air or, more accurately, right out of a very different theory of post Civil War Presidential prerogatives.

The post Preemptive Pardons appeared first on LewRockwell.

The ‘strange defeat’ is that of Europe’s ‘curious’ inability to understand Ukraine or its military mechanics.

The essayist and military strategist, Aurelien, has written a paper entitled: The Strange Defeat (original in French). The ‘strange defeat’ being that of Europe’s ‘curious’ inability to understand Ukraine or its military mechanics.

Aurelien highlights the strange lack of realism by which the West has approached the crisis —

“ …and the almost pathological dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and actions. Yet, even as the situation deteriorates, and the Russian forces advance everywhere, there is no sign that the West is becoming more reality-based in its understanding – and it is very likely that it will continue to live in its alternative construction of reality until it is forcibly expelled”.

The writer continues in some detail (omitted here) to explain why NATO has no strategy for Ukraine and no real operational plan:

“It has only a series of ad hoc initiatives, linked together by vague aspirations that have no connection with real life plus the hope that ‘something [beneficial] will occur’. Our current Western political leaders have never had to develop such skills. Yet it is actually worse than that: not having developed these skills, not having advisers who have developed them, they cannot really understand what the Russians are doing, how and why they are doing it. Western leaders are like spectators who do not know the rules of chess or Go – and are trying to figure out who is winning”.

“What exactly was their goal? Now, responses such as ‘to send a message to Putin’, ‘complicate Russian logistics’, or ‘improve morale at home’ are no longer allowed. What I want to know is what is expected in concrete terms? What are the tangible results of their ‘messaging’? Can they guarantee that it will be understood? Have you anticipated the possible reactions of the Russians – and what will you do then?”

The essential problem, Aurelien bluntly concludes, is that:

“our political classes and their parasites have no idea how to deal with such crises, or even how to understand them. The war in Ukraine involves forces that are orders of magnitude larger than any Western nation has deployed on operations since 1945 … Instead of real strategic objectives, they have only slogans and fanciful proposals”.

Coldly put, the author explains that for complex reasons connected with the nature of western modernity, the liberal élites simply are not competent or professional in matters of security. And they do not understand its nature.

U.S. cultural critic Walter Kirn makes rather similar claims in a very different, yet related, context: California Fires and America’s Competency Crisis –

“Los Angeles is in flames, yet California’s leaders seem helpless, unmasking a generation of public investment in non-essential services [that leaves the Authorities floundering amidst the predicted occurrence of the fires]”.

On a Joe Rogan podcast earlier this month, a firefighter goes: “It’s just going to be the right wind and fire’s going to start in the right place and it’s going to burn through LA all the way to the ocean, and there’s not a f***ing thing we can do about it”.

Kirn observes:

“This isn’t the first fire or set of fires in Malibu. Just a few years ago, there were big fires. There always are. They’re inevitable. But having built this giant city in this place with this vulnerability, there are measures that can be taken to contain and to fend off the worst”.

“To fob it off on climate change, as I say, is a wonderful thing to tell yourself, but none of this started yesterday. My only point is this, has it done everything it can to prepare for an inevitable, unavoidable situation that perhaps in scale differs from the past, but certainly not in kind? Are its leaders up to the job? There’s not a lot of sign that they are. They haven’t been able to deal with things like homelessness without fires. So the question of whether all those things have been done, whether they’ve been done well, whether there was adequate water in fire hydrants, whether they were working at all, things like that, and whether the fire department was properly trained or properly staffed, all those questions are going to arise”.

“And as far as the competency crisis goes, I think that there will be ample material to portray this as aggravated by incompetence. California’s a state that’s become notorious for spending a lot of money on things that don’t work, on high-speed rail lines that never are constructed, on all sorts of construction projects and infrastructure projects that never come to pass. And in that context, I think this will be devastating to the power structure of California”.

“In a larger sense though, it’s going to remind people that a politics that has been for years now about language and philosophical constructs such as equity and so on, is going to be seen as having failed in the most essential way, to protect people. And that these people are powerful and influential and privileged is going to make that happen faster and in a more prominent fashion”.

To which his colleague, journalist Matt Taibbi, responds:

“But pulling back in a broader sense, we do have a crisis of competency in this country. It has had a huge impact on American politics”. Kirn: “[Americans] They’re going to want less concern for the philosophical and/or even long-term political questions of equity and so on, I predict, and they’re going to want to lay in a minimum expectation of competence in natural disasters. In other words, this is a time when the priorities shift and I think that big change is coming, big, big change, because we look like we’ve been dealing with luxury problems, and we’ve certainly been dealing with other countries’ problems, Ukraine or whoever it might be, with massive funding. There are people in North Carolina right now still recovering from a flood and having a very difficult time as winter comes, which it doesn’t in LA in the same way, or as winter consolidates itself, I guess”;

“So looking forward, it’s not a question of blame, it’s what are people going to want? What are people going to value? What are they going to prize? Are their priorities going to shift? I think they will shift big time. Los Angeles will be a touchstone and it will be a touchstone for a new approach to government”.

So we have this ‘divorce from reality’ and consequent ‘Competency Crisis’ – whether in California; Ukraine or Europe. Where lie the roots to this malaise? U.S. writer David Samuels believes this to be the answer:

“In his last days in office … President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war, a war that fused the security infrastructure with the social media platforms – where the war supposedly was being fought”.

However, collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, had made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy – and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices – in entirely new ways.

During the Trump years, Obama used these tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power centre for himself – one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party which he succeeded in refashioning in his own image, Samuels writes.

The ‘permission structure’ machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod (a highly successful Chicago political consultant), built to replace the Democratic Party was in its essence a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and ‘better’ beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure – effectively turning Axelrod’s construct into ‘an omnipotent thought-machine’, Samuels suggests:

“The term ‘echo chambers’ describes the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs deliberately created an entirely new class of experts who mutually credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible”.

The aim was for a platoon of aides, armed with laptops or smart phones, to ‘run’ with the latest inspired Party meme and to immediately repeat, and repeat it, across platforms, giving the appearance of an overwhelming tide of consensus filling the country. And thus giving people the ‘permission structure’ of apparent wide public assent to believe propositions that formerly they would never have supported.

“Where this analysis went wrong is the same place that the Obama team’s analysis of Trump went wrong: The wizards of the permission structure machine had become captives of the machinery that they built. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that could generate the velocity required to change the appearance of “what people believe” overnight. The newly minted digital variant of “public opinion” was rooted in the algorithms that determine how fads spread on social media, in which mass multiplied by speed equals momentum—speed being the key variable”.

“At every turn over the next four years, it was like a fever was spreading, and no one was immune. Spouses, children, colleagues, and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week. It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power”.

“In the end, however, the fever broke”. The credibility of Élites imploded.

Samuels account amounts to a stark warning of the danger associated with distance opening up between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged, and managed, from the White House. “This possibility opened the door to a new potential for a large-scale disaster – like the war in Iraq”, Samuels suggests. (Samuels does not specifically mention Ukraine, although this is implied throughout the argument).

This – both the Obama tale, as told by David Samuels, and Walter Kirn’s story of California – augment Aurelien’s point about Ukraine and European military incompetence and lack of professionalism on the field: It is one of allowing a schism to open up between contrived narrative and reality – “which”, Samuels warns “is to say that, with enough money, operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that they had never believed; or even heard of before: Were in fact not only plausible, but already widely accepted within their specific peer groups”.

It constitutes the path to disaster – even risking nuclear disaster in the case of the Ukraine conflict. Will the ‘Competency Crisis’ reaching across such varied terrain trigger a re-think as Walter Kirn – a writer on cultural change – insists?

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

The post The Competency Crisis Proliferating the West appeared first on LewRockwell.

Buckle up and hold on tight, because things are about to get really wild.  Immediately after taking the oath of office, Donald Trump is going to be faced with incredibly difficult decisions which could have enormous implications for every man, woman and child in this country.  There will be all sorts of people giving him all sorts of advice, and it won’t always be easy to distinguish the good advice from the bad advice.  So let us pray that he makes his choices wisely.  The following are 5 historic emergencies that Trump will be confronted with immediately as he enters  the White House…

#1 A Major War

Iran has gotten extremely close to being able to build nuclear weapons, and once they are able to do that it is inevitable that the Iranians will distribute such weapons to Hezbollah and other terrorist proxies.  Joe Biden had been considering a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear program, but he ultimately decided not to pull the trigger.  Now it is Donald Trump’s turn.  According to the Wall Street Journal, a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities has been under “serious review by some members of his transition team”…

President-elect Donald Trump is weighing options for stopping Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon, including the possibility of preventive airstrikes, a move that would break with the longstanding policy of containing Tehran with diplomacy and sanctions.

The military-strike option against nuclear facilities is now under more serious review by some members of his transition team, who are weighing the fall of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad—Tehran’s ally—in Syria, the future of U.S. troops in the region, and Israel’s decimation of regime proxy militias Hezbollah and Hamas.

Needless to say, if the U.S. and/or Israel takes out Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Iranians will go ballistic and there will be a major war in the region.

#2 A New Pandemic

If you thought the last one was bad, just wait until you see what is coming next.

According to NBC News, the Biden administration and Trump’s team have been working together to formulate a response to the “escalating bird flu outbreak spreading in the United States”…

Amid an escalating bird flu outbreak spreading in the United States, federal health officials have begun to brief members of the incoming Trump administration about how they’ve responded to the crisis so far.

“We sent them all of the information on our work,” said a Biden administration health official familiar with transition briefings within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It’s the first indication that the two administrations appear to be working together to prioritize the H5N1 response.

Apparently part of that response is 590 million dollars in additional funding “to push Moderna’s messenger RNA-based pandemic flu vaccine towards approval”…

The federal government has committed an additional $590 million to push Moderna’s messenger RNA-based pandemic flu vaccine towards approval, as the Biden administration, in its waning hours, ramps up preparations for a potential H5N1 avian influenza pandemic.

#3 Economic Trouble

Inflation is starting to really accelerate once again, and this is particularly true for food prices…

There isn’t one factor. Bird flu is killing chickens, cutting egg supplies and sending wholesale prices to a record. Extreme heat and dry weather in the world’s coffee-growing regions have sent the cost of brews surging. Chocolate and cereal makers have raised prices for their products, too.

It is a problem for consumers, who are still acclimating to a stretch of bruising inflation following the Covid-19 pandemic. Shoppers are picking up more store-branded groceries and scouring multiple stores for the best deals. Grocery prices in December were roughly 28% higher than they were five years ago, according to the Labor Department.

No president can magically zap the bird flu out of existence or cause it to rain in areas where it isn’t raining.

The truth is that there is no easy solution on the horizon, and prices on some key staples such as eggs are expected to go much higher in 2025…

During his 2024 campaign, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly made the promise that “prices will come down,” BBC reports, but according to two experts, that won’t be happening any time soon — at least when it comes to the price of eggs.

While eggs are already “40% more expensive now than they were a year ago,” KTLA notes, according to the Department of Labor, the raging avian flu epidemic means “it’s about to get even worse.”

The epidemic — which “has already led to the death of more than 100 million egg-laying hens” — according to the report, is expected to spike egg prices “as much as 20% more in 2025.”

#4 A Historic Natural Disaster

It is now being projected that the fires in the Los Angeles area will be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history by a wide margin.

Unfortunately, this is a crisis that is far from over, because extremely high winds are expected to return to southern California this week…

Los Angeles is bracing itself for more catastrophic wildfires this week as weather forecasters predict the return of gusting Santa Ana winds of up to 100 miles per hour.

More than 27 people have died and 22,000 buildings have burned in at least six wildfires since the first fire erupted on January 7.

#5 A Government At War With Itself

Donald Trump says that he wants to “drain the swamp” and make major changes to how the federal government operates.

That is great.

Unfortunately, about half of the people that run our federal agencies intend to resist what Trump will be trying to do…

When asked if they would most likely be supporting or resisting the Trump administration over the next four years, government managers were almost evenly split with 44% saying they would support the administration and 42% saying they would resist.

But the divide between those federal managers who would resist and those who would support the incoming Trump administration grew much sharper when respondents were questioned along party lines.

89% of Republican federal employees said they would either “somewhat support” or “strongly support” the administration, while 73% of Democrat bureaucrats surveyed said they would either “somewhat resist” or “strongly resist.”

Our federal government is literally going to be at war with itself.

If you think that transforming the largest government bureaucracy in the history of the world is going to be easy, you are just kidding yourself.

We are moving into a time of tremendous turmoil, and it won’t be pretty.

The good news is that 2025 is certainly not going to be boring.

The news cycle will be speeding along at a breathtaking pace, and I believe that we will witness one historic event after another during the next 12 months.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post 5 Historic Emergencies That Trump Will Be Confronted With Immediately as He Returns to the White House appeared first on LewRockwell.

The imminently former Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, recently told The New York Times that the federal government’s attempt to force practically everyone in the country to submit to being injected with the drugs it pushed on behalf of the legalized drug cartels commonly styled the “pharmaceutical industry” was absolutely warranted. Not only that, he pointed out it was nothing really new in that it was – in principle – something that had already been accepted in law as well  as in practice by most people.

“Should we require people to wear seatbelts?” 

Gotcha!

Becerra is right – in the sense that people are indeed required to wear seat belts and given that, of course they can “absolutely” be required to submit to pretty much anything else the federal government (that is, federal apparatchiks such as Becerra) decree is necessary because “safety” – or “public health,” which amounts to essentially the same thing.

This goes back a long way. At least 60 years, which was how long ago the federal government asserted the authority to be found nowhere in the Constitution to force car makers to force their customers to pay for seat belts in new cars, whether they wanted them (or to pay for them) being an irrelevance. Their “safety” – as defined by the apparatchiks of that long-ago day – became the justification.

Once that principle was established in law – and accepted in practice by an insouciant pubic that sighed and said – No big deal; I don’t have to wear the damned things – the federal government had the power to require that people wear them. This power was asserted not  long thereafter.

It is now, as everyone knows, an actionable offense – meaning, an armed government worker can legally force you to stop and “pull over” and force you to accept a piece of paper that says you owe the government money – for not wearing a seat belt. And if you refuse to wear it, you can be arrested and manacled and placed in a cage. This would have amazed Americans of 70 years ago, for whom such petty authoritarianism would have seemed unimaginable in America.

How long will it be before Americans are forced to wear a bib while eating?

Why not? The federal apparat has already asserted the power to force them to wear a “mask” while breathing. Is it not of a piece?

Does it not follow?

Of course it does. Becerra is right. Haughtily so, as his sneering comment to the Times conveys. How could anyone logically argue against the federal government’s pushing of “masks” and then drugs on people given the acceptance in law and practice of the federal government’s pushing of seatbelts on people?

This is a crucial point lost on many people, who view things – such as the federal government’s forcing of car companies to force car buyers to accept having to pay for seatbelts in cars back in the 1960s – as just a “small thing” without any connection to other things.

That is, without precedent-setting implications.

Lawyers such as Becerra (and Hamilton, 236 years before him) understand the importance of such precedents. They are how you expand upon precedents. They are how you move the ball forward.

This is why it is so important to never give them an inch. Because if you do, they will take a mile. Every. Single. Time.

No doubt it didn’t seem like a big deal, back in the ’60s to have to pay for seat belts you may not have wanted in that new car you just bought. The cost was slight and you could just sit on them rather than wear them. It didn’t seem worth going to war over.

How does it seem now?

Having accepted that seemingly minor thing, all those years ago, we are now afflicted by many more things, including the six air bags (at the least) all new cars now come “standard” with, as well as the car itself – which has become less a car and more a kind of mobile parenting and data-collection device that monitors and controls you at least as much as it conveys you. Cars have become oppressive rather than freeing and it can all be traced back to our accepting that it’s legitimate under the Constitution as well as moral for the federal government – i.e., for ugsome, sneering federal apparatchiks such as Xavier Becerra – to apply the coercive power of the government to force us to buy and then wear seatbelts.

And that is why Becerra is right about the federal government having established it has the power to force us to submit to being injected with “vaccines,” as the drugs pushed on the population by the government were despicably characterized.

Read the Whole Article

The post From Seatbelts to Here We Are appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Ukrainian commander in chief General Syrksi seems to have given up. Recent remarks of his suggest that he no longer sees a way to win the war. He is now simply waiting for the politicians to concede.

The Ukrainian military has recently started to move thousands of air-defense soldiers and logistic personnel into the infantry. People who were taught to detect, analyze and fight aerial targets get pushed into roles for which they did not receive training and are no qualified.

Syrski is justifying this as the only way to keep a sufficient number of men in front line trenches:

The army chief stressed that his order prohibits the transfer of highly qualified personnel who have undergone training and specialize in aircraft maintenance.

“Clearly, these are invested funds, specialists who have experience and are practically irreplaceable, on the one hand,” said Syrskyi.

“On the other hand, we fundamentally need personnel on the front, and we must maintain an adequate number of troops in our mechanized brigades. Unfortunately, mobilization capabilities do not meet this need.”

According to him, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are “reasonably” reducing the logistical component and part of the support in the military, as well as those involved in maintenance.

“Therefore, the headquarters know these tasks; they have done the calculations,” Syrskyi stated.

The number of freshly mobilized soldiers is lower than the number of losses. The military thus has to start to ‘eat itself’. The problems being caused by this will not be visible immediately but they will over time destroy the armies core functionality.

People have done all they can to avoid a service at the frontline. Commanders have been bribed to allow for their soldiers to do duty behind the front lines. Others deserted. There are thus plenty of superfluous logistic and headquarter staff that can be moved to put up a more serious resistance.

But in few week those reserves will have emptied too. Logistics will start to slow down and air defenses will fail to defend against even the most primitive drone attacks.

Syrski sees this coming. He knows that defending the country will not win the war (machine translation):

Ukraine will not be able to win the war while on the defensive.

This was stated by the commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Alexander Syrsky on the air of the telethon.

“You know, no matter how much you defend, you will still retreat. And we are forced to hold the defense and concentrate our forces, in fact, to keep along this front line,” said Syrsky.

Just two months ago Syrski was sounding more optimistic. He was still dreaming of and announced further counterattacks (machine translation):

The APU will not only stand on the defensive, but also counterattack.

This statement was made by the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Alexander Syrsky at a recent meeting with military bloggers. Details of the statement were given in his Telegram channel by the participant of the meeting, military Kirill Sazonov.

“Pokrovskoe and Kurakhovskoe directions. The situation is difficult. But it’s better than it was a week ago. Then it was really critical. Some units were retreating, leaving their positions, but there was no one to close them. Indeed, a crisis situation. But the issue is resolved, the reserves are deployed, the enemy’s plans are thwarted. Alexander Syrsky’s position: we must stop the enemy. But victory is impossible if the APU will work only in defense. We must seize the initiative and counterattack. We must and will. Where and who-you will see, ” wrote Sazonov.

Kurakhove has since fallen and Pokrovsk is about to be surrounded. No further Ukrainian initiative has been seen.

One can not counterattack when one lacks the troops to even fill up the front lines.

Syrski may finally come to grips with the ‘winning’ charade the Biden administration has all along played with Ukraine:

When Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago, President Joe Biden set three objectives for the U.S. response. Ukraine’s victory was never among them. The phrase the White House used to describe its mission at the time—supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes”—was intentionally vague. It also raised the question: As long as it takes to do what?
…
The future that Zelensky and many of his countrymen have in mind is one in which Russia is defeated. But in rallying the world to the fight, the implication Biden embedded in his own goals was that defending Ukraine against Russia is not the same as defeating Russia. So it is not surprising if that goal remains far from Zelensky’s reach.

A victorious Ukraine has never been an aim or priority in the proxy war the Biden administration has waged against Russia. Even its main ‘diplomat’ has never shown interest in peace (archived):

Mr. Blinken was less a peacemaker than a war strategist. Immersed in details of military hardware and battlefield conditions, he often argued against more risk-averse Pentagon officials in favor of sending powerful American weapons to Ukraine.

And when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark A. Milley, suggested in late 2022 that Ukraine should capitalize on battlefield gains by seeking peace talks with Moscow, Mr. Blinken insisted the fight should go on.

There is hope now, though only a slight one, that the incoming Trump administration will disavow the war in Ukraine and shut it down without any delay or escalation. The danger of proceeding otherwise is for Trump to get hooked to the war like Nixon became to Vietnam:

[Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon] advocates ending America’s all-important military aid to Kyiv, but fears his old boss is going to fall into a trap being set by an unlikely alliance of the U.S. defense industry, the Europeans and even some of Bannon’s own friends, whom he argues are now misguided. These include Keith Kellogg, a retired U.S. general who is Trump’s pick to be special envoy to Ukraine and Russia.

“If we aren’t careful, it will turn into Trump’s Vietnam. That’s what happened to Richard Nixon. He ended up owning the war and it went down as his war not Lyndon Johnson’s,” Bannon said.

If it would fully engage the U.S. might be able to delay the outcome of the war in Ukraine. But it will, like in Vietnam, be unable to change the inevitable result.

Trump should concede that Russia has won the war, remove all support from Ukraine, pull back the Europeans and wash his hands over the outcome.

This would give Ukraine a chance to again bind its fate to the east.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Trump and Ukraine Should Concede appeared first on LewRockwell.

Deus, qui beato Petro Apostolo tuo,
collatis clavibus regni cælestis,
ligandi atque solvendi pontificium tradidisti:
concede; ut, intercessionis ejus auxilio,
a peccatorum nostrorum nexibus liberemur.

O God, who, by entrusting to your apostle Peter,
the keys of the heavenly kingdom,
gave him the pontifical power to bind and to loose:
grant, through the help of his intercession,
that we may be delivered from the bonds of our sins.

–

Praised be Jesus Christ.

On January 18 the Church in Rome celebrates the feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, with which the authority that Our Lord conferred on the Prince of the Apostles finds in the chair its symbol and ecclesial expression.

We find traces of this celebration since the third century, but it was in 1588, at the time of the Lutheran heresy, that Paul IV established that the feast of the chair qua primum Romæ sedit Petrus would take place on January 18, in response to the denial of the presence of the apostle in the city of Rome. The other feast for the chair of the first diocese founded by St. Peter, Antioch, is celebrated by the universal Church on February 22.

Let me point out this important aspect: just as the human body develops antibodies when disease arises, so that it can be defeated when it is infected; so too the ecclesial body defends itself from the contagion of error when it occurs, affirming with greater incisiveness those aspects of dogma threatened by heresy. For this reason, with great wisdom, the Church proclaimed truths of the faith at certain times and not before, since those truths were hitherto believed by the faithful in a less explicit and articulated form and it was not yet necessary to specify them.

The sacred canons of the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea respond to the Arian denial of the divine nature of Our Lord, and are echoed by the splendid compositions of the ancient liturgy; the denial of the sacrificial value of the Mass, transubstantiation, suffrages, and indulgences are answered by the sacred canons of the Council of Trent, and along with them also the sublime texts of the liturgy.

Today’s feast responds to the anti-papal denial of the foundation of the Diocese of Rome by the apostle Peter, a feast that was desired by Paul IV precisely in order to reiterate the historical truth contested by Protestants and to strengthen the doctrine that derives from it.

The heretics and their neo-modernist followers, who have infested the Church of Christ for the past 60 years, act in the opposite way. And where they do not brazenly deny the Catholic Magisterium, they attempt to weaken it by being silent about it, omitting it, and formulating it in such a way as to make it equivocal and therefore acceptable even by those who deny it.

Almost everything that the Mystical Body had wisely developed over the centuries – and particularly during the second millennium of the Christian era – growing harmoniously like a child who becomes an adult and strengthens himself in body and spirit, has now been willfully obscured and censured, with the deceptive excuse of returning to the primordial simplicity of Christian antiquity, and with the unspeakable purpose of adulterating the Catholic faith in order to please the enemies of the Church.

If you take the Montinian Missal, you will not find explicit heresies in it; but if you compare it with the traditional Missal, you will find that the omission of so many prayers composed in defense of revealed truth was more than enough to make the reformed Mass acceptable even to Lutherans, as they themselves admitted after the promulgation of that fatal and equivocal rite. To confirm this, even the feasts of the Chair of St. Peter in Rome and Antioch have been combined into one, in the name of that cancel culture that the modernist sect adopted in the ecclesiastical sphere well before the woke Left appropriated it in the civil sphere.

On January 18, we celebrate the glories of the papacy, symbolized by the Cathedra Apostolica that the genius of Bernini artistically composed on the altar of the apse of the Vatican basilica, which is dominated by the alabaster window depicting the Holy Spirit and guarded by four doctors of the Church: Saint Augustine and Saint Ambrose for the Latin Church, Saint Athanasius and Saint John Chrysostom for the Greek Church.

In the original project, which has remained intact through the centuries, the chair was located above an altar, which the devastating fury of the innovators did not spare, moving it between the apse and the baldacchino of the Confession. Yet it is precisely in the architectural unity of altar and chair – which today has been deliberately erased – that we find the foundation of the doctrine of the primacy of Peter, which is founded on Christ, He who is the lapis angularis (cornerstone), just as the altar of sacrifice, which is also a symbol of Christ, is made of stone.

Read the Whole Article

The post Bergoglio Uses the Throne of Peter To Act as a Servant of Satan appeared first on LewRockwell.

When doctors in this movement speak at events about vaccines, by far the most common question they receive is, “Is vaccine shedding real?”

This is understandable as COVID-19 vaccine shedding (becoming ill from vaccinated individuals) represents the one way the unvaccinated are also at risk from the vaccines and hence still need to be directly concerned about them.

Simultaneously, it’s a challenging topic as:

•We believe it is critical to not publicly espouse divisive ideas (e.g., “PureBloods” vs. those who were vaccinated) that prevent the public from coming together and helping everyone. The vaccines were marketed on the basis of division (e.g., by encouraging immense discrimination against the unvaccinated), and many unvaccinated individuals thus understandably hold a lot of resentment for how the vaccinated treated them. We do not want to perpetuate anything similar (e.g., discrimination in the other direction).

•We don’t want to create any more unnecessary fear—which is an inevitable consequence of opening up a conversation about shedding.

•In theory, shedding with the mRNA vaccines should be “impossible,” so claiming otherwise puts one on very shaky ground.

Conversely, if shedding is real, we believe it is critical to expose as:

•Those being affected by it are in a horrible situation, particularly if everyone is gaslighting them about it and insisting it’s all in their head.

•It provides one of the strongest arguments to pull the mRNA vaccines from the market and prohibit the widespread deployment of mRNA technologies in the future.

For those reasons, Pierre Kory and I have spent the last year and a half trying to collect as much evidence as possible to map out this phenomenon with the following data sets:

•Dozens of extremely compelling patient histories1,2,3 from Kory and Marsland’s medical practice, including many responding to spike protein treatment.
•My own experience with patients and friends affected by shedding.
• I read large numbers of reports of shedding in (now deleted) online support groups.
•Roughly 1,500 reports from individuals affected by shedding we were able to collect.
•Extensive menstrual data compiled by MyCycleStory.

From that and the hundreds of hours of work that went into it (particularly reviewing and sorting the 1,500 reports), we can state the following with relative certainty:

1. Shedding is very real (e.g., each of those datasets is congruent with the others), and many of the stories of those affected by it are very sad.
2. People’s sensitivity to it dramatically varies.
3. Most of the people who are sensitive to shedding have already figured it out.
4. Mechanistically, shedding is very difficult to explain. However, now that new evidence has emerged, a much stronger case can be made for the mechanisms I initially proposed a year ago.

Note: if you have a shedding experience you would like to share (or wish to read through them), please do so here, where they are compiled.

Shedding Overview:

By far, the most common symptom of shedding is unusual and disrupted menstrual bleeding (which is also the most common COVID vaccine injury). This in turn, was the first thing that alerted me to the inconceivable possibility the vaccines could shed, as I quickly received many similar reports of highly unusual menstrual bleeding, which appeared to be due to exposure to someone who was vaccinated.

After this, the most common symptoms were headaches, flu-like illnesses, nosebleeds, fatigue, rashes, tinnitus, sinus or nasal issues, and shingles. Other less frequent symptoms are also repeatedly seen (e.g., palpitations, herpes outbreaks, and hair loss).

Additionally, many noticed they could immediately tell when they were in the vicinity of a shedder, typically either due to noticing a unique odor or symptoms immediately onsetting.

Generally speaking, the character of shedding symptoms were quite similar to long COVID and vaccine injuries, but typically were more superficial in nature, suggesting the body was reacting to a harmful external pathogenic factor rather than one already deep inside the body. More severe issues (e.g., cancers or heart attacks) also occurred, but these were much rarer than what you saw in the vaccine injured population, again suggesting shedding was primarily an external reaction. Interestingly, most of the (fairly varied) shedding symptoms overlap with the conditions DMSO treats (e.g., strokes), suggesting that DMSO’s key mechanisms of action (e.g., increasing blood flow, eliminating large and small blood clots, being highly anti-inflammatory, and rescuing cells from the cell danger response) are the exact opposite of what shedding does to the body.

Note: in the following sections, each superscript citation links to individual reports I’ve received about the phenomenon. I provided these citations to show how frequent many of these effects were, so that those who’d experienced them could see many others had too, and so that anyone who wants to research this has access to the primary data. The only shedding symptom I avoided comprehensively citing was abnormal menstruation, as so many reports were received, it was not feasible to compile all of them.

Shedding Patterns

In the same manner that there is a fairly high replicability in the symptoms individuals who are affected by shedding experience, there is also a fairly high congruency in the patterns of how they are affected. Specifically:

1. Some individuals are hypersensitive to shedders and can immediately detect when they are in the presence of a shedder or are on their way to developing harmful symptoms.

2. Others are less sensitive, but quickly notice specific characteristic symptoms consistently occur following shedding exposures (e.g., always feeling ill when a vaccinated husband returns from a long trip away, when going to church each week, when singing with their choir, or when taking a crowded route to work).

In some cases, they are able to identify a “super shedder” (amongst a group) who consistently made them ill, and in many cases they can identify the exact shedding incident that made them ill. Likewise, through tracking serial spike protein antibody levels (e.g., for patients undergoing treatment for long Covid or a vaccine injury) we’ve objectively corroborated that shedding exposures repeatedly worsen these patients (providing an explanation for why their symptoms “inexplicably” ebb and flow), that this can be seen objectively in their lab work and that spike protein treatments after shedding exposures clinically improve these patients.

Note: Pierre Kory’s practice has been able to determine that those they suspect are a shedder (e.g., a husband) test positive (through an antibody test) for a high spike protein levels and that eliminating the shedder from the patient’s life or treating the (asymptomatic) shedder with a vaccine injury protocol frequently significantly improves their patient’s recovery. Likewise, readers here have reported significant improvements from avoiding shedders—which sadly in some cases has required the more sensitive individuals to isolate themselves from society.

3. In the majority of cases, the effects of shedding are temporary and go away, but in a subset of people, they can last for months if not years.

4. Recognition of the shedding phenomenon has forced many to significantly change their lives. This included regretfully terminating a long-term romantic relationship, leaving their line of work (e.g., some massage therapists can no longer handle working on vaccinated clients), or only seeing unvaccinated healthcare providers (e.g., numerous people reported getting ill from vaccinated chiropractors or massage therapists, and we now periodically will have patients state they can only see us if we are unvaccinated).

5. The “stronger” the shedding exposure, the more likely shedding is to cause issues, but conversely, for more sensitive patients, “weaker” exposures also will. More substantial exposures include being around someone who was recently vaccinated or boosted (as shedding is strongest initially), being around more shedders, being in a confined space (e.g., a car) with a shedder for a prolonged period, or having close physical contact with a shedder.
Note: given all of this, I thought flying on airlines would be a significant issue, but I have only received two reports from readers where this was the case.

6. There appear to be some unexplained symptoms otherwise healthy patients now experience that are tied to shedding. However, it’s still often very challenging to tease out when shedding is the culprit due to how many variables are involved and the ambiguity of the subject (which is part of why so much detail has gone into this post so each of you can figure out if you are being affected by shedding).

Susceptibility to Shedding

In general, there are three categories of people who are susceptible to shedding (and in many cases these categories overlap).

The first are the sensitive patients (e.g., those who frequently react to chemicals or get injured by pharmaceuticals). For example, near the start of the vaccine rollout (before I was aware that shedding was an issue), I genuinely wondered if it was real as many of its claims were quite extraordinary but at the same time, were somewhat in line with what a highly sensitive patient (of whom I know many) would describe.

However, I’ve since received numerous accounts from sensitive patients identically matching hers along with similar but less extreme cases,12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 such as a sensitive osteopath who can no longer see vaccinated patients, or a susceptible nurse who shared: “I am so distraught. I went to school and trained for this work. I loved caring for my senior community, and now they’re all Covid vaccinated.”

Additionally, many of these individuals pointed out that they had the MTHFR genetic polymorphism, and attributed their sensitivity to it.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 While this is likely true (as MTHFR has long been observed to increase one’s likelihood of a vaccine injury), I am unsure how useful this data point is as there are many different MTHFR mutations that create varying susceptibilities (e.g., 60-70% of the population has an MTHFR mutation but most are not of the type that creates hypersensitivities).

Note: as I discuss here, sensitive patients are largely neglected and unrecognized by the medical system but frequently encountered in clinical practice. Typically in addition to being sensitive to environmental toxins or medical interventions, they are also very empathetic and aware of subtle human (or animal) qualities others miss. Generally, they tend to have an ectomorphic or Satvic constitution and are hypermobile (which as discussed here, plays a key role in why they tend to frequently experience vaccine injuries). Since publishing those articles, many readers here have shared they belong to that archetype and are more frequently injured (e.g., by shedding).

Due to these susceptibilities, those patients frequently have chronic illnesses such as mast cell degranulation disorder, multiple chemical sensitivities, EMF sensitivities, Lyme disease, mold toxicity, and fibromyalgia. These patients were more likely to avoid the COVID-19 vaccine (due to their previous bad experiences with pharmaceuticals) and more likely to be chronically debilitated by the COVID vaccine (or a COVID-19 infection). Tragically, we’ve also seen many people develop these sensitivities after a COVID-19 vaccine injury, and a few people have shared spike shedding caused them to develop environmental sensitivities (e.g., this reader lost the ability to eat meat—something I had previously only seen after tick borne diseases). Additionally, I received a report from someone who noticed environmental EMFs worsened their sensitivities to shedding.

The sensitive patients tend to be the most susceptible to shedding. I’ve seen numerous reports of individuals (e.g., consider this report from one of Pierre Kory’s patients) who can immediately tell if they are around individuals who have been vaccinated (e.g., because they immediately feel a “toxic” presence or feel a shedder injure them). Likewise, these patients tend to become ill from “weaker” shedding exposures.

Note: I consider myself to be a sensitive individual, but I have not had any issues being in close proximity to people (e.g., patients) who were recently vaccinated. Conversely, many of my sensitive female friends (who are less sensitive than me) have experienced notable effects from shedding (e.g., menstrual abnormalities), which suggests to me there is more to this picture than just having a “sensitive” constitution.

The second group is patients sensitized to the spike protein due to a previous vaccine injury or long COVID. These patients frequently find their symptoms worsen when they are around vaccinated individuals, and many have reported that their sensitivity to shedding increases with time.

Note: I believe the Cell Danger Response (discussed here) provides one of the best models to explain what happens to the patients in the first two categories (e.g., a persistent CDR accounts for many environmental sensitivities while conversely, treating the CDR is often very beneficial to these patients). Likewise, I also find a pre-existing impairment in zeta potential (discussed here) frequently predisposes these patients to these issues and that restoring the physiologic zeta potential often greatly benefits them. Finally, since the spike protein is an allergen that is highly effective at creating autoimmunity in the body, that also can explain why successive exposures to it increase one’s sensitivity to it (and likewise some of the most promising COVID-19 treatments simply use allergy medications).

The third group are the people who cannot effectively produce antibodies to the spike protein. I was initially clued into this from a study of vaccinated patients who developed myocarditis, which discovered that (unlike controls) their ability to develop a neutralizing antibody for the spike protein was impaired, leading to free spike protein circulating in their blood (whereas normally it would be bound to an antibody). Because of this, the spike protein being produced in their body is thus able to create havoc throughout it, and those patients become symptomatic after being exposed to a much lower concentration of the spike protein. It is important to note that while reactive to shedding, these patients are nowhere near as sensitive to shedding as the previously described “sensitive patients.”

Note: at the time of the disastrous smallpox campaign, many clinicians believed that those with a weakened immune system could not mount a response to the vaccine and in turn, were both more likely to be injured by it and to catch smallpox (both before and after vaccination). This led them to argue the vaccine’s “efficacy” was an artifact of the skin reaction it caused being a proxy for a functioning immune system, and I suspect the 2023 myocarditis study suggests something similar is occurring for the spike protein vaccines.

Additionally, while very rare, I have received a few compelling cases that suggest pets (e.g., cats, dogs, and parrots) can also be susceptible to shedding events..1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 If shedding did indeed happen there, it suggests that like human beings, certain animals are much more sensitive to shedding than others, and that the shedding agent has a mechanism of harm which is not dependent upon a human receptor (e.g., it adversely affects the physiologic zeta potential).
Note: since most of the symptoms of shedding are tricky to observe externally (e.g., fatigue or dizziness), it’s also possible that the “lower” incidence of shedding in pets is party due to only rarer events (e.g., cancer, heart attacks or hair loss) being observable by the owners, and that a much larger number of less severe shedding injuries have gone unrecognized.

Characteristics of Shedders

The most common observation with shedders is that they are dramatically more likely to shed soon after vaccination (depending on who you ask, this window ranges from three days to four weeks). However, more sensitive patients find they are affected by a shedder indefinitely and strongly disagree with a 2-4 week cutoff.

I believe this essentially matches what has been found in numerous studies—that following vaccination, spike protein production in the blood spikes and then declines but never reaches zero and appears to continue for months afterward.

Note: presently we do not know how long spike protein persists in the body as the vaccine mRNA was designed to resist degradation, and in each window that’s been looked at (e.g., 28 days, 30 days, 56 days, 187 days) the spike protein is still present in a portion of vaccine recipients. In fact, (still unpublished) research found it at 709 days post vaccination.

Additionally, quite a few people have noticed that shedding events (in the same location) are the most frequent and severe immediately following a new booster rollout, after which they gradually diminish until the next booster campaign.

It has also been observed that young and healthy people tend to shed more frequently (presumably since their body has a greater capacity to manufacture the spike protein), children shed the most, and the elderly shed the least frequently. Additionally, quite a few people have observed that shedding greatly varies by the individual (e.g., “I react to specific people I see at church”).

Repeatedly boosting appears to worsen shedding for three reasons:

•It causes patients to temporarily resume having high spike protein levels in their body.

•Successive boosting appears to increase the degree of shedding, which occurs when compared to what was caused by the previous injections.

•Quite a few holistic healers have shared that they believe the most recent boosters are more potent and hence cause more significant shedding than the earlier ones (which might be explained by the boosters now containing multiple strains of mRNA to cover the new variants).

In almost all cases, the shedding appeared from mRNA gene therapies. However, a few readers shared common shedding symptoms were triggered by J&J1 2 3 4 or AstraZeneca.1 2

Read the Whole Article

The post What We’ve Learned from a Year of Vaccine Shedding Data appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ridenour says Denmark has no legitimate authority to rule Greenland, which Copenhagen has treated for centuries with racist colonial arrogance.

Incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has boasted about annexing Greenland from Denmark – by military force if needs be.

Veteran journalist Ron Ridenour says, ironically, go ahead Trump, grab Greenland, take all of it.

It’s not that Ridenour is a fan of the new president or endorses U.S. imperialism.

Far from it, Ron Ridenour has been an outspoken critic of American imperialism for over 60 years as a journalist and author.

However, he sees value in the Greenland grab in that it exposes the fraud of the U.S. posing as a protector of NATO allies.

Ridenour has written extensively on what he calls Denmark’s abject servility to U.S. imperialism and NATO’s aggression. He points out that Denmark has been a loyal lackey in promoting the NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

Now, the U.S. “leader” (master) is snubbing Denmark’s so-called sovereignty over Greenland. The high-handed contempt of Trump towards Denmark is welcomed by Ridenour because it fatally corrodes the NATO alliance.

Ridenour says Denmark has no legitimate authority to rule Greenland, which Copenhagen has treated for centuries with racist colonial arrogance.

Trump’s ambition to annex Greenland for U.S. national security interests is an object lesson to NATO allies that they are ultimately dispensable.

If Trump goes ahead with the Arctic land grab, then the impact on NATO will shatter the illusions of the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

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

The post Grab Greenland? Go on Trump, Expose Fraud of U.S. Protection and Servility of Danish & NATO Lackeys appeared first on LewRockwell.

“In its final hours, the most CORRUPT Administration in American history is covering up Democrats’ trail of criminal activity.” — US Rep. Andrew Clyde 

The Criminal-in-Chief in his last criminal act has issued a “preemptive pardon” to 20 criminals. Mass murderer “Covid-vax Fauci” got one and so did the despicable Liz Cheney and all members of the Jan. 6 House Committee that conducted the unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions of American citizens who attended the rally for President Trump. The “law enforcement” officers who worked to turn the protest into a riot got preemptive pardons.

Biden alleges that his pardons should not be viewed as confirmation that any of the preemptively pardoned persons did anything wrong.  If this is true, why did Biden pardon them?  Indeed, Biden’s pardons convict them. He knows firsthand that they are guilty just as he is, and that is why he pardoned them. 

But did Biden pardon them?  There is no such thing as a preemptive pardon.  Pardons come after indictment or conviction, not before.  A preemptive pardon is an invention that is a product of the gradual transformation of a US president into a caesar who issues laws and rules independently of the legislature and Constitution.  

Having presided for four years over politics prevailing over our legal institutions, Biden declares his optimism “that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics.”

Having made Trump supporters and Trump himself the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions,” Biden justifies pardons for those who conducted the unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions” on the grounds that they  “do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.”

Keep in mind that Biden pardoned people on death row and 2,500 people convicted for drug offenses, but he could not find a single wrongful convicted January 6 protester to pardon. 

 I have little doubt that among the convicted murderers and drug offenders there are some innocent people, and I have little doubt that the January 6 rally attendees were prosecuted and convicted for political and propaganda reasons. 

Biden says he has tried to convince Trump not “to go back and try to settle scores.”  Here we have Biden, as usual, mischaracterizing the situation. To hold government officials responsible for violating and weaponizing law is not a political settling of scores. It is enforcing the law in order to prevent its weaponization in the future and to hold officials to the same laws that apply to everyone else. The last thing we want is a system in which officials have immunity when they break the law.

All of the perpetrators of the illegal prosecutions of Trump, his attorneys, and the January 6 Trump supporters must be indicted and held accountable. 

I doubt that Biden’s “preemptive” pardons are legal.  But if they are, we are still entitled to know the truth about the crimes.  Therefore, investigations and indictments should go forward. If they are found not guilty, they don’t need the pardon. If guilty, the pardon, if legal, protects them.  They certainly deserve a taste of the experience that they dished out to others.

The post The Biden Regime Was an Amazing Collection of Criminals appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Biden’s pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci may protect the former National Institutes of Health official from immediate criminal prosecution, but some critics say he is not completely out of legal jeopardy and that public sentiment might still condemn the man who became known during the COVID-19 pandemic as “Mr. Science.”

In the days before Biden offered the pardon to Fauci, along with other critics of Donald Trump, some experts who have followed Fauci’s career and handling of the pandemic, as well as members of the Trump transition team, reiterated their assertion that Fauci perjured himself on several occasions during the pandemic – especially regarding his agency’s links to the lab in Wuhan, China, that might have created the virus that causes COVID-19.

The pardon addresses any COVID-related offenses, and is backdated to 2014—the year a U.S. ban on so-called “gain of function” virus research took effect — research Fauci is accused of outsourcing to China.

Despite reporting that Trump is bent on revenge, the appetite among MAGA appointees for holding Fauci accountable hasn’t been particularly vocal. But former Senate investigator Jason Foster, who now runs the whistleblower nonprofit Empower Oversight, says that Biden’s pardon creates new legal jeopardy for Fauci. Sen. Rand Paul has vowed to continue investigating the COVID origins question, and sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Sen. Ron Johnson and House Republican investigators plan to do so as well. When testifying in those inquiries or answering written depositions, Fauci will be unable to dodge questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination. “They can ask him if he lied before, replough old ground,” Foster said. “And if he lies about any prior lie, he can be prosecuted for that or held in contempt.”

Andrew Noymer, associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine, said such hearings are necessary for scientific and historical reasons. “I’m hopeful that he will now come clean about everything he knows about the origins of the virus,” Noymer said. “For the sake of public trust in science – explaining what killed 20 million people – that a complete account is much more important than speculation about what criminal penalties he may have avoided.”

“These pardons will not stop Department of Justice investigations,” said one adviser to the Trump transition team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We expected this and look at it as a predicate to get truth from people who can no longer use the Fifth Amendment. Now we can bring every one of them in front of a grand jury.”

There is no consensus on Fauci’s handling of the pandemic. Legacy media outlets have promoted Fauci throughout the pandemic as “America’s doctor” who “sticks to the facts” and applauded him as “the nation’s top infectious disease expert.” When he retired from the NIH after five decades in 2022, the New York Times granted him space on its opinion page to advise the next generation of scientists, citing his own accomplishments.

Numerous social media outlets have provided a polar opposite perspective. Several X accounts have uploaded videos that show Fauci’s inconsistencies. For example, Fauci claimed in early 2022 interviews that he never recommended lockdowns, but later said he recommended shutting the country down. Independent journalist Matt Orfalea circulated another set of clips that show Fauci claiming he kept an “open mind” about how the pandemic started while alleging in others that the evidence points against a lab accident and “strongly” in favor of a natural spillover.

As Fauci’s flip-flops generated attention in Republican circles and on social media, he charged that such criticism was “totally preposterous,” adding, “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.”

Fauci’s many contradictory statements even caught the attention of a New York Times contributing opinion writer, Megan K. Stack, who chastised Fauci for “the largely one-sided nature of his public remarks” about the possibility the pandemic started from an accident at a lab his agency had helped fund – the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Initially, Fauci dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” the possibility of a Wuhan lab accident on a Feb. 9, 2020, podcast hosted by Newt Gingrich. Afterward, Fauci reversed himself, stating in several interviews that he had always kept an open mind.

Later reports zeroed in on Fauci’s secret involvement in prominent March 2020 research, called the “proximal origin” paper, that turned public and scientific sentiment against the possibility of a lab accident. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the paper concluded, adding, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Published in the prestigious Nature Medicine journal, “proximal origin” is the most-cited scientific paper of 2020.

Subsequent emails showed that Fauci helped guide the “proximal origin” paper to publication, as congressional probers found, “without revealing that he had been involved with its creation and had even, according to the emails, given it his approval.”

Distancing himself from his own emails, Fauci later told the Times that he wasn’t sure he even got around to reading the paper. But the House later released a multi-day deposition of Fauci where he was asked about his involvement in the “proximal origin” paper. Under oath, Fauci admitted to having received and read several drafts of the paper.

But while dissembling to the media is not a crime, lying to Congress is illegal. And the Department of Justice has two referrals from Congress already requesting that Fauci be prosecuted for lying under oath.

Read the Whole Article

The post Despite Biden Pardon, Fauci Still Faces Legal Perils appeared first on LewRockwell.

The January 2, 2025 Joe Rogan Experience interview with former Texas Governor Rick Perry and W. Bryan Hubbard who was the first chairman of the Kentucky Opioid Commission covered the topic of ibogaine. Many people are not aware of its healing properties as a psychedelic. It was classified in 1970 as a Class I drug later tied to the US Controlled Substances Act (CSA) so its distribution, sale and use is prohibited even for clinical research trials. The federal CSA was part of President Richard Nixon’s declared war on drugs (WOD).

Current treatment methods for people with opiate drug addiction(s) and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have not been encouraging over time. Why this excitement about a psychedelic called ibogaine? The limited published research shows promise in its use to heal people from opiate drug addiction, PTSD and other substance addictions.

Governor Perry’s disciplined excitement in the Joe Rogan interview (referencing the January 2024 Stanford University study) of very positive outcomes for people receiving it in a prescribed manner and medical oversight shows he is convinced of its effectiveness with the need for repeat treatments very low. No information from the interview was provided about ibogaine dosage, cost per dose and cost for clinical treatment.

“Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive compound found in the root bark of the Tabernanthe iboga, a shrub native to Central and West Africa. How ibogaine works in the brain is not well understood. It interacts with numerous neurotransmitters in the central nervous system, including components of the acetylcholine, serotonin, dopamine, glutamate, and opioid systems. Its effects are prolonged, beginning half an hour to three hours after ingestion and peaking after eighteen to thirty-six hours.” This information is from the Univertiy of Califronia Berkeley’s Center for the Science of Psychedelics. Here is the ibogaine molecule.

“Ibogaine can be dangerous. There are numerous reports in the scientific literature of people having fatal cardiac events after taking ibogaine. Because ibogaine can affect the heartbeat, it can be particularly risky for people with preexisting cardiac problems or when mixed with other drugs.”

“For centuries, members of the Bwiti religion have used iboga as a sacrament in rituals . . . “ Ibogaine’s use is new to nations since 1900 outside of the central Africa home of the Bwiti culture.

“Purified ibogaine hydrochloride was first introduced to European consumers in 1939 under the name Lambarène. It was sold in France until around 1970 as an antidepressant that could improve mood and physical strength, and was used by athletes and those recovering from illness. Ibogaine’s potential to interrupt drug addiction was first recognized in 1962 by Howard Lotsof, a heroin addict who experimented with ibogaine. The experience was so transformative Lotsof spent the rest of his life advocating for it as a cure for substance abuse.”

“Schedule I drugs are those that have the following characteristic according to the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA):

• The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
• The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical treatment use in the U.S.
• It has a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.

According to federal law, no prescriptions may be written for Schedule I substances, and they are not readily available for clinical use.” The US DEA web site describes five drug classification schedules.

The online Ibogaine Journal lists some countries where it can be accessed. Canada allows doctors to prescribe it with supervised medical use. Mexico has no specific laws on ibogaine making it a top spot for people looking for ibogaine treatments. “Its lack of strict rules pulls in those seeking different ways to treat addiction.”

European countries apply different ibogaine laws. “Belgium prohibits the possession, distribution, or production of ibogaine without explicit permission.” France and Sweden have criminalized it. Portugal decriminalized its possession in 2001. Doctors in Brazil can prescribe ibogaine since 2016. Costa Rica and Gabon allows its purchase and use. Ibogaine’s public access depends on country of residence.

The recent Joe Rogan interview about ibogaine’s efficacy should place political and public pressure on the US DEA to move it from Shedule I to a lower schedule so it can be available for US based clinical research trials leading to possible public benefits. The federal WOD’s unintended consequences continue today which no one imagined in the early 1970’s. It is time the federal government declare defeat in this part of the WOD and surrender to the reality of life.

The post Ibogaine Is Gaining appeared first on LewRockwell.

The GOP really is so schizophrenic as to be worthless.

The post New U.S. Senator Ashley Moody (R, FL): Promising and Thoroughly Depressing appeared first on LewRockwell.

Francis also adds that “the dignity and rights of migrants trump any national security concerns.”  Great.  Now he can tear down all his walls around the Vatican and empty out the Vatican coffers to feed and house the “newcomers” and members of ISIS.  Lead by example, Francis!  Don’t be like those hypocrites in Martha’s Vineyard.

The post Pope Francis: Trump’s Deportations are a “Disgrace” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

Jonathan Turley

The post In final fifteen minutes in office, Biden snatched infamy from the jaws of obscurity appeared first on LewRockwell.

It was Alexander Hamilton who invented the notion of “implied powers” of the Constitution which has morphed into the deceitful notion of “a living constitution” (aka whatever the politicians of the day say it is).  The constitutional amendment process be damned.

Hamilton, an inveterate statist, central planner, protectionist, central bank worshipper, and corporate welfare advocate, also proposed the following:  If the federal government does something that is unconstitutional, the fact that the government did it makes it constitutional.  Like waging wars without constitutionally mandated congressional declarations of war for example.

Now comes the issue of Brandon’s “preemptive” pardons of his son and all the rest of the Biden crime family.  Where this idea of “preemptive” pardons come from is Gerald Ford’s first time ever preemptive pardon of Nixon, who had not been charged with any crime.  There you go: another example of the Hamiltonian Constitution which has no basis in legality and is only in place because politicians who despise all constitutional limits on their powers like it and think they can get away with it.

The post The “Hamiltonian Constitution” versus the Actual Constitution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Infowars

The post Trump Vows to Declassify JFK, RFK and MLK Files appeared first on LewRockwell.

North Dakota is staunchly conservative, having voted Republican in every presidential election since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. So how is it that the state boasts the only state-owned bank in the nation? Has it secretly gone socialist?

No. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) operates on the same principles as any capitalist bank, except that its profits and benefits serve the North Dakota public rather than private investors and executives. The BND provides a unique, innovative model, in which public ownership is leveraged to enhance the workings of the private sector. It invests in and supports private enterprise — local businesses, agriculture, and economic development – the core activities of a capitalist system where private property and enterprise are central. Across the country, small businesses are now failing at increasingly high rates, but that’s not true in North Dakota, which was rated by Forbes Magazine the best state in which to start a business in 2024.

The BND was founded in 1919, when North Dakota farmers rose up against the powerful out-of-state banking-railroad-granary cartel that was unfairly foreclosing on their farms. They formed the Non-Partisan League, won an election, and founded the state’s own bank and granary, both of which are still active today.

The BND operates within the private financial market, working alongside private banks rather than replacing them. It provides loans and other banking services, primarily to other banks, local governments, and state agencies, which then lend to or invest in private sector enterprises. It operates with a profit motive, with profits either retained as capital to increase the bank’s loan capacity or returned to the state’s general fund, supporting public projects, education, and infrastructure.

According to the BND website, more than $1 billion had been transferred to the state’s general fund and special programs through 2018, most of it in the previous decade. That is a substantial sum for a state with a population that is only about one-fifteenth the size of Los Angeles County.

The BND actually beats private banks at their own game, generating a larger return on equity (ROE) for its public citizen-owners than even the largest Wall Street banks return to their private investors.

Why So Profitable? The BND Model

For nearly a century, the BND maintained a low profile. But in 2014, it was featured in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that the Bank of North Dakota “is more profitable than Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and hasn’t seen profit growth drop since 2003.” The article credited this success to the shale oil boom; but North Dakota was already reporting record profits in the spring of 2009, when every other state was in the red and the oil boom had not yet hit.

The average return on equity (ROE) of the BND from 2000 through 2023 (its latest annual report) was 19.51%. (ROE = net profit divided by shareholder equity.) Compare JPMorgan Chase (JPM), by far the largest bank in the country, with 2.4 trillion in deposits. Its average ROE from 2000-23 was 11.38% over the same period. For a detailed breakdown, see here.

Note that these respective returns are for shareholder/owners. The BND has only one shareholder, the state itself. State pension funds can buy stocks, but state general funds typically do not invest in them. Their money is held in banks as deposits, which pay a lower return than bank stock. The California Pooled Money Investment Account (PMIA), for example, held an average $166 billion in California state funds in fiscal year 2023-24, in a variety of investments including federal bills, bonds, notes and securities; time deposits and CDs; and corporate bonds and commercial paper. It yielded only 3.927% during that fiscal year. A state-owned bank on the BND model could have generated a five times higher return for the state.

How could the BND have outperformed JPM, the nation’s largest bank? Most important, it has substantially lower costs and risks than private commercial banks. It has no exorbitantly-paid executives; pays no bonuses, fees, or commissions; has no private shareholders; and has low borrowing costs. It engages in old-fashioned conservative banking and does not speculate in derivatives, so it has no losses or risk from derivative trades gone wrong.

The BND does not need to advertise or compete for depositors. It has a massive, captive deposit base in the state itself, which must deposit all of its revenues in the BND by law.  Most state agencies also must deposit there. The BND takes some token individual deposits, but it does not compete with local banks for commercial deposits or loans. Municipal government deposits are generally reserved for local community banks, which are able to use those funds to back loans because the BND provides letters of credit guaranteeing them. The BND also has a massive capital base, with a sizable capital fund totaling $1.059 billion in 2023, along with deposits of $8.7 billion.

Among other costs avoided by the BND are those for fines, penalties and settlements arising from government and civil lawsuits. Since the year 2000, JPM has paid more than $40 billion in total fines and settlements to regulators, enforcement agencies and lawsuits related to anti-​competitive practices, securities abuses and other violations; and it is still facing several hundred open legal cases.

The State’s Deposits Are Safer in Its Own Bank

The BND is not only more profitable but is safer than JPM. In fact federal data show that JPM is the most systemically risky bank in the country. The BND, by contrast, has also been called the nation’s safest bank. Its stock cannot be short-sold, since it is not publicly traded; the bank cannot go bankrupt, because all of the state’s revenues are deposited in it by law; and it will not suffer a run, since the state would not “run” on itself.

Compare JP Morgan Chase, which has over $1 trillion in uninsured deposits, the type most likely to be withdrawn in a crisis. In 2023, the FDIC insurance fund had a balance of only $116.1 billion – only 5% of JPM’s total deposits of $2.38 trillion. JPM also had major counterparty risk in the derivatives market, with $61 trillion in total derivatives or $628 billion in netted derivatives. That’s five times those of Credit Suisse, a SIFI (Systemically Important Financial Institution) which went insolvent in 2023.

Not just the Bank of North Dakota but North Dakota’s local banks are very safe, aided by the BND with liquidity, capitalization, regulation, loan guarantees, and other banker’s bank services. No local North Dakota banks have been in trouble during this century, but if they were to suffer a bank run, the BND would be there to help. According to its former CEO Eric Hardmeyer, the BND has a pre-approved fed funds line set up with every bank in the state; and if that is insufficient for liquidity, the BND can simply buy loans from a troubled local bank as needed.

Today state governments typically deposit their revenues in giant Wall Street banks designated as SIFIs, including JPM; but those banks are riskier than they appear. They “insure” their capital with interconnected derivatives backed by collateral that has been “rehypothecated” (pledged or re-used several times over). The Financial Stability Board in Basel has declared that practice to be risky, “as highlighted during the 2007-09 global financial crisis.” The five largest Wall Street depository banks hold $223 trillion in derivatives — called a “ticking time bomb” by the Bank for International Settlements — and they have a combined half trillion dollars in commercial real estate loans, also very risky in the current financial environment.

Under the Dodd Frank Act of 2010, a SIFI that goes bankrupt will not be bailed out by the government but will be recapitalized through “bail ins,” meaning the banks are to “bail in” or extract capital from their creditors. That includes their “secured” and “collateralized” depositors, including state and local governments. Under the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 and Uniform Commercial Code Secs. 8 and 9, derivative and repo claims have seniority over all others and could easily wipe out all of the capital of a SIFI, including the “collateralized” deposits of state and local governments. The details are complicated, but the threat is real and imminent. See fuller discussions here and here, David Rodgers Webb’s The Great Taking, and Chris Martenson’s series drilling down into the obscure legalese of the enabling legislation, concluding here.

Even if the SIFIs remain solvent, they are not using state deposits and investments for the benefit of the state from which they come, and often they are betting against the public interest. The BND, on the other hand, is mandated to use its revenues for the benefit of the North Dakota public. Other states would do well to follow North Dakota’s lead.

Read the Whole Article

The post Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game — The Bank of North Dakota Model appeared first on LewRockwell.

Sachs, professor at Columbia University, has advised presidents and heads of NGOs over a long career. He remains extremely well connected at the highest political and intelligence levels.

Rather than Israel being an extension of US policy in the region, Sachs declares that Benjamin Netanyahu is steering American policy with Israel’s wars in Gaza, Lebanon and even had a hand in earlier wars such as Iraq. He also argues that western countries, led by the US, and not Vladimir Putin, are ultimately to blame for starting Russia’s war in Ukraine. An advisor to UN Secretaries General and governments around the world, Sachs gives us some personal insights into his own experience of what he says was a CIA orchestrated coup in Haiti, and how he decodes the intentions of those he is certain are taking us ever closer to global nuclear catastrophe.

Sachs’ opinions are well worth listening to.

This originally appeared on MacleodFinance Substack.

The post Jeffrey Sachs’ View of US Trustworthiness appeared first on LewRockwell.

Federal agencies classify trillions of pages of documents each year—enough secrets to fill 20 million filing cabinets. Washington politicians and federal agencies routinely blindfold American citizens on the most important and most reckless decisions the government takes. As President Joe Biden told Special Counsel Robert Hur in late 2022, “We over-classify everything…. And 99.9% of it has nothing to do with anything I couldn’t pick up and read out loud to the public.”

The change in presidential administrations is the ideal chance for sweeping disclosures of pseudo-secrets that will provide a booster shot for American democracy.

President-elect Donald Trump should follow the precedent set by President Barack Obama. In 2009, Obama speedily released many of the secret George W. Bush administration legal memos that asserted that a president could declare martial law in the US and ignore the Fourth Amendment and other constitutional safeguards. Those disclosures helped portray Obama as a champion of civil liberties, regardless of his novel prerogative that presidents were entitled to assassinate American citizens who were designated as terrorist suspects. Unfortunately, Trump in his first term failed to open the files to disclose Obama’s biggest unconstitutional power grabs.

Federal secrecy is perhaps the most important bulwark of the Censorship Industrial Complex. Americans deserve to know how many blindfolds were slapped on Americans in recent years. The Supreme Court took a dive on the censorship issue last year by claiming that the victims did not have legal standing. It would be relatively simple to “correct” that decision by disclosing a torrent of cases of “Censors Gone Wild.” How many more humorous memes did the White House or federal agencies demand be suppressed? How many more internal emails or texts reveal White House appointees hellbent on muzzling critics regardless of the First Amendment?

Americans deserve to know whether federal agencies secretly targeted them as terrorist suspects. A year ago, the House Judiciary Committee revealed that, according to federal agencies, anything you purchase can be used against you. And if you didn’t want to be categorized as a “lone wolf” potential terrorist, you never should have bought that Bass Pro hat—one of the bizarre warning signs. If you bought a gun or ammo since 2021, federal bureaucrats may have automatically classified you as a “potential active shooter.” The shocking details of that surveillance scheme need to be exposed as quickly as possible. At the same time, the feds cast absurdly broad nets of suspicion on average Americans, potentially incriminating details of Biden family dealings with China, Romania, Ukraine, and other nations were kept secret. DC is one paradox after another.

The Founding Fathers recognized the perils of foreign entanglement but federal secrecy has shrouded the vast majority of details of recent US government blundering abroad. As I noted in an April 2023 Mises piece, practically the only candor regarding the Russia-Ukraine war occurred when secret documents leaked out revealing that the Ukrainian military was in far worse shape than the Biden administration claimed. The White House, State Department, and Pentagon were adamant that American citizens had no right to know how their tax dollars were being squandered in East Europe.

Since those leaks in early 2023, the US government apparently pulled plenty of strings and may have paid plenty of money to deter a ceasefire in that war. White House and State Department officials bluntly opposed any cessation in hostilities in Eastern Europe.

Opening files in the White House, Pentagon, State Department, and CIA could answer vital questions: Why was the US government seemingly doing everything possible to perpetuate the bloodbath? What steps, if any, did the White House take to prevent effective anti-fraud protections in the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid sent to Ukraine? Did Biden policymakers help perpetuate the Russia-Ukraine war to make Biden look tough or the world savior of democracy?

The Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, helped vaccinate Americans against blindly trusting any president seeking to con them into a foreign conflict. Unfortunately, that vaccination faded as decades passed. Opening files on the US intervention in Ukraine could make it far more difficult for future presidents to drag the US into a foreign conflict. As WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange observed: “If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth.”

President Trump must make opening the files a top priority because otherwise damn little sunlight will disinfect Washington. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has largely collapsed. Shortly before Trump’s first term, the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform bluntly admitted: “FOIA is broken.” Federal agencies have a backlog of hundreds of thousands of FOIA requests they haven’t answered and responses sometimes take years. Never forget that the Food and Drug Administration claimed it would need 75 years to disclose the Pfizer application for its covid vaccine that the FDA approved in 108 days. Unfortunately, such idiocy is practically Standard Operating Procedure inside the Beltway. Prior to the 2016 election, the State Department declared that it would require 75 years to comply with its FOIA request for emails from the top aides of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (at a time when Hillary was running for president). Perhaps the only thing more absurd is the pretexts offered for refusing to disclose documents. The Drug Enforcement Administration denied a FOIA request by someone seeking “information about his own kidnappers… because he did not have a signed waiver from the men who had held him hostage,” the Washington Examiner reported.

A boot from the Trump White House will open far more filing cabinets than endless appeals to FOIA denials. The new president can reap the gratitude of millions of Americans for speedily shedding light on the biggest covid controversies. Why did the Centers for Disease Control in 2021 delay divulging the failure of covid vaccines to prevent infections and transmission? Are there other details waiting to be unearthed about how federal agencies bankrolled the reckless gain-of-function that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and killed seven million people around the globe?

Sweeping disclosures of federal secrets and outrages are one of the best ways to break the dominance of Washington insiders. In a 2002 decision condemning the Bush administration’s mass secret arrests after 9/11, a federal appeals court declared, “When government begins closing doors, it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation.” Washington’s pervasive secrecy vests vast power in any official who chooses to selectively leak documents to spin public perceptions.

President Trump’s first administration was crippled by leaks—including former FBI chief James Comey’s personal memos that were delivered to the New York Times, leading to the unjustified appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller who roiled American politics for two years. Trump’s first impeachment was spurred by the 2019 leak of his phone call transcript with the Ukrainian president. Sweeping disclosures of unjustified secrets will undercut federal officials who might seek to undermine the new president with misleading selective leaks.

Secrecy is not a technical glitch in administrative regimes. The whole point of secrecy is to prevent citizens from controlling the government. To expect bureaucracies to “correct” excessive secrecy is like expecting kings to abdicate their thrones. There is no reason for citizens to trust secretive federal programs more than Washington trusts American citizens.

Pervasive secrecy defines democracy: people merely select their Supreme Deceivers. If trillions of pages of new secrets a year is not a perversion of democracy, why not simply keep secret everything that the government does?

Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned in 1967: “Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy.” Yet Americans are still told that they are governing themselves because they are permitted to vote for presidents who appoint bureaucrats who drop an Iron Curtain around federal machinations.

In his Farewell Address on Wednesday evening, President Biden warned: “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power.” During the pandemic, the biggest misinformation of them all was Biden’s promise that anyone who got the covid vaccine would never be infected with covid. Biden also declared, “The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.” Secrecy and lying are two sides of the same political coin. If Biden is worried about “lies told for power,” then he should not have perpetuated the secrecy regime that is an entitlement program for Washington liars.

Even libertarians and pro-freedom zealots who oppose Trump should support exposing all the recent abuses committed by Washington politicians and bureaucrats. Shocking Americans by exposing federal crimes could provide an anti-Leviathan vaccination. That could be effective regardless of whether the Food and Drug Administration ever approves that vax.

The post For Inauguration Day, Open Federal Files and Give Truth a Chance appeared first on LewRockwell.