Lew Rockwell Institute

The US has removed Syria’s Al Qaeda franchise from its list of designated terrorist organizations just days after the UK added nonviolent activist group Palestine Action to its own list of banned terrorist groups.

The western empire will surely find ways to be even more hypocritical and ridiculous about its “terrorism” designations in the future, but at this point it’s hard to imagine how it will manage to do so.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:

“Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Monday that the Trump administration is revoking the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda offshoot that took power in Damascus in December 2024.

“HTS started as the al-Nusra Front, which was the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria until the group’s leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is now Syria’s de facto president, rebranded. In 2016, Sharaa, who was known at the time as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, announced he was disassociating from al-Qaeda, and thanked the ‘commanders of al-Qaeda for having understood the need to break ties.’

“Sharaa renamed his group HTS in 2017 and ruled Syria’s northwestern Idlib province until he led the offensive that ousted former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the end of last year. The US has embraced the new Syrian leader despite his al-Qaeda past, which included fighting against US troops in Iraq.”

US Revokes Terror Designation for HTS, the Al-Qaeda Offshoot That Took Over Syria
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Syria #HTS #AlQaeda https://t.co/1uNEYYWAD0

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) July 7, 2025

This move comes as Sharaa holds friendly meetings with US and UK officials and holds normalization talks with Israel, showing that all one has to do to cease being a “terrorist” in the eyes of the empire is to start aligning with the empire’s interests.

So that was on Monday. The Saturday prior, the group Palestine Action was added to the UK’s list of proscribed terrorist groups under the Terrorism Act of 2000, making involvement with the group as aggressively punishable as involvement with ISIS.

The “terrorism” in question? Spraying red paint on two British war planes in protest against the UK’s support for the Gaza holocaust. A minor act of vandalism gets placed in the same category as mass murdering civilians with a car bomb when the vandalism is directed at the imperial war machine in opposition to the empire’s genocidal atrocities.

Even expressions of support for Palestine Action are now illegal under British law, leading to numerous arrests over the weekend as activists expressed solidarity with the organization. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, who is British, has been formally reported to UK counterterrorism police by UK Lawyers for Israel following the musician’s public statement saying “I support Palestine Action. It’s a great organisation. They are non-violent. They are absolutely not terrorist in any way.”

Roger Waters reported to counter-terror police after declaring support for Palestine Action

This is the ridiculousness of the country, it borders on the absurdhttps://t.co/W0p5FUlQ1k

— Esheru (@EsheruKwaku) July 7, 2025

So let’s recap.

Nonviolent protest against a genocide that’s being backed by the western empire: Terrorism. Banned. Nobody’s allowed to support this.

Being actual, literal Al Qaeda but aligning with the interests of the western empire: Not terrorism. Okie dokie. This is fine.

These hypocrisies and contradictions of the empire are worth drawing attention to because they clearly show that the empire does not stand where it claims to stand. For decades we’ve been told that western military explosives are falling from the sky in the middle east and Africa because there are terrorists there who need to be stopped, but it turns out “terrorism” is just a meaningless label that means whatever the empire needs it to mean at a given time and place.

Iran’s IRGC is labeled a terrorist group because the Iranian military is not aligned with the US empire. Israel’s IDF is not labeled a terrorist group despite its constant use of violence upon civilian populations in order to advance political goals. Palestine Action is labeled a terrorist group because it opposes the empire’s genocidal atrocities. Al Qaeda in Syria is no longer a terrorist group because it’s making nice with Israel and doing what the empire wants.

“Terrorist” just means “anyone who inconveniences the empire in any way.” It really is that simple.

_________________

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The post Imperial Hypocrisy About “Terrorism” Hits Its Most Absurd Point Yet appeared first on LewRockwell.

A New Approach for Elon Musk?

Considering the reality that power is an addiction for those feeding at the trough of government might and money, it was probably inevitable that Elon Musk’s crusade to root waste out of the American government would stall and prove unable to surmount the high barrier of congressional approval. Musk’s meltdown on social media over the failure of the United States Congress to codify his DOGE cuts into law was a popcorn-worthy entertainment event, but in terms of substance to adapt and pursue a new course to address America’s problems, its been something of a nothingburger. Insults, insinuations, and clever phrases do not change policy or direction of a country. Musk apparently believes that through these actions he will help stir up popular pressure on Congress to get the DOGE cuts through. However there are powers at play far more entrenched in the swamps of DC than he is. These are better positioned to ensure that those cuts never happen, even if it means the collapse of the imperialist system. To put it simply, Musk is outclassed in this battle on enemy ground. He caused some significant damage to the structures of the imperialists’ power (i.e.: the shuttering of USAID and certain other agencies), but long-term success was never an achievable outcome against entrenched opposition such as what he encountered.

With he and Donald Trump apparently parting ways, the question now arises as to what is next for Musk. The majority of his ideas to date regarding recovery from this setback has revolved around founding a new political party, but he is likely to quickly discover as the late Ross Perot did that that is easier said than done. Furthermore, though many people in America appreciate his work with DOGE, there are still significant concerns about certain other beliefs and projects which Musk has been dabbling in, such as Neuralink and other technocratic projects. These concerns are significant obstacles to getting general support across America for any broader agenda he might wish to accomplish.

There is another way for Musk to try and experiment more with his ideas. It is a route laden with risk and demanding a certain type of attention to detail which only control freaks could be expected to have. However Musk has often been described as thriving on taking risks. In addition, there are aspects to his personality which can be considered to be indicators of a control freak mentality which, some argue, has played a key role in his success to date. With this being the case, the scenario now about to be proposed may not be as far-fetched as some think.

This route would resolve many of the loose ends lying around in the aftermath of Musk’s departure from the Trump administration. It would bring resolution for Musk himself, and for the people who respect his intelligence, but also want his more controversial ideas contained to an extent for now until more research has been done. This route would call for Musk to withdraw to his recently incorporated little town of Starbase on the border of Texas and Mexico, where he has headquartered his space exploration company SpaceX. Once there he should build up infrastructure and make preparations for Starbase to become the North American continent’s first true example of what in Europe is called a “microstate.”

The term “microstate” (or “micronation” as the more accurate term) is a relatively recent addition to the political lexicon, meant to give a grouping label to those independent nations whose territory encompasses a very small plot of land. In Europe this would apply to countries such as Andorra, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, San Marino and Vatican City. Their small size enables the leaders to more easily communicate with the population and more quickly recognize problems when they arise. They are also easier to manage and keep functioning as opposed to over-large nations where bureaucracy and corruption eventually undermine the country’s political and economic foundations, bringing it’s existence to an end. Though they may have some limitations economically (i.e.: not very much farmland or natural resources), currently existing micronations have all managed to find their own ways to develop themselves economically and so keep the country functioning. These countries are a real life contradiction to the Elitist narrative that only large countries are viable politically. Their example provides a blueprint for how Musk should proceed into a future where the old political systems are disintegrating.

Using his SpaceX venture along with trade as the main economic foundation, Elon Musk should put pieces in place to declare the Independence of Starbase in the near-future. He can establish himself as the figurehead “Grand Duke” while allowing the citizens to run their own governance for the most part. He should then open Starbase for a period to welcome in all those who believe in his ventures and experiments who are also willing to become part of Musk’s new nation to help with developing these ideas. With this established, Musk will have carved out his own niche politically both for himself and his supporters. They can pursue their dreams and ideas without infringing or being infringed upon by other interests within the larger landmass of North America.

The viability of this independence venture would be helped by the fact that Starbase is strategically located where the Rio Grande river meets the ocean along the border of Texas and Mexico. With strong secession movements existing in both Texas and the northern provinces of Mexico, Starbase would be politically free to chart it’s own path regardless of what direction the independence efforts in the neighboring areas take. It can also offer friendship and business opportunities to both of it’s neighbors to use the Starbase facilities for space exploration ventures, which will likely be growing in importance and intensity through the twenty-first century. This would give Starbase the business it would need to keep it’s citizens thriving economically. Agreements respecting sovereignty, while providing for common self-defense help in the event of aggression from other powers, could also be brought about with these same neighbors. These would help ensure Starbase retains it’s independence while not being isolated either.

Will Elon Musk seriously consider this approach? It is hard to say at this point. However, as the man has proven himself very unpredictable in terms of direction since he first appeared on the public stage, it is fair to say that with him any direction is possible. Hopefully he is far-seeing enough to eventually recognize what many already have: namely that the Imperial Empire of DC is crumbling, and the original governing structures are beyond saving. Once he realizes that, this option may suddenly become a very viable one in his mind. An added benefit of him recognizing and pursuing this option would be that other potential micronations, such as Liberland in the Balkans, might finally be given the more serious treatment they deserve on the world stage.

Some weeks ago a “noticing” movement began to arise with respect to certain things unfolding in Trump World. First, attention was brought to the fact that Donald Trump had signed an executive order back in March directing that federal government agencies should seek to more readily share data with each other. This is a practice which had been discouraged in the past. There are real fears that a centralized database would make it easier for the federal government to find ways to persecute it’s citizens for exercising their rights if the government was opposed to certain viewpoints held by the individuals in question. Furthermore, it was revealed that the major technology company that was being tasked with centralizing this data was “Palantir”, a company specializing in surveillance technology, and owned by a Silicon Valley group including controversial tech oligarchs Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. This development alarmed many within MAGA world. It also raised serious questions as to what was really going on behind the scenes in the Trump administration by many who had supported and voted for Trump in the recent election. Though other members of the Palantir board attempted to reassure the public that the program was not nefarious or unusual, their responses still left many questions unanswered. These reassurance attempts were also largely unconvincing to those understanding the truth that the problem lies in the existence of the surveillance system itself, not in who is running it.

On the heels of this revelation, an overlooked provision which had been slipped into Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” came to more intense public notice. The provision banned all state governments in America from regulating AI for a decade, placed all control of AI integration in the federal government thus centralizing AI surveillance, and made provisions for AI to be integrated into certain federal agencies. With the Palantir surveillance model based in AI, many quickly realized that the states were being banned from taking steps against the unfolding of the centralized surveillance state. Faced with this revelation, some leading grassroots figures, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, quickly came out and condemned the ban, with Greene stating emphatically that she would oppose the bill specifically because of this provision. Leadership in the United States Senate attempted to assuage the fears raised by replacing the outright ban with a financial penalty for any state seeking to regulate AI. However, such half-hearted correction measures do not cut it with the public any longer after what was revealed thanks to the government’s COVID response.

With opposition growing to this implementation of a new stage of the surveillance state, especially within the MAGA constituency, it was apparent something drastic was going to be needed to undercut the opposition and get it through. Then suddenly, as if out of nowhere, riots abruptly erupted in Los Angeles surrounding Trump’s immigration agenda, taking the spotlight off the surveillance question and forcing law and order issues back into the forefront of the public’s attention. The riots have only intensified as the Trump administration has sent military force in to control the situation. Fears are now growing that the riots could spread across the country. Protests in San Francisco against Trump’s immigration agenda have turned violent and other cities across the country are also seeing growing protests which have the potential to turn violent.

A key technique for any advocates of centralizing government power is to use the power of emotions to overwhelm the truth of logic. That alone should make this sudden turn of events suspicious for those who believe in freedom. Fear is a key tool in the arsenal of those who push for government to assert more power, and seeing violence explode in the middle of an effort to combat a serious expansion of the surveillance state should make everyone very concerned. While some things can indeed be coincidences, America has reached a point where, as commissioner Jim Gordon told detective John Blake in The Dark Knight Rises: “You’re not allowed to believe in coincidence any more.”

Sources:

Will Secession Be the Real Winner in November?

This article was originally published on The State of Division.

The post Of Micronations and Coincidences appeared first on LewRockwell.

On about 20 September 2001, just ten days after the destruction of the World Trade Centre buildings on 9/11, recently retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark was visiting the Pentagon for meetings with Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz when he was assailed by another General whom he had formerly commanded.

This General advised General Clark that the US was going to attack seven countries in five years.

A few weeks later, a similar meeting between the same officers led General Clark to be confidentially shown a memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office earlier that day.

Handing Clark the memo, the officer reported

‘This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out 7 countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.’ Watch ‘US Plans for the Middle East’.

Video: Plans for the Middle East. US Army General Wesley Clark

Video: This Version of the Video by Hamza dated 2016, 02 24 differs from that initial version released by Democracy Now. It documents the 7 countries.

As history now documents, with the notable exception of the last country on this list – Iran – each of these countries (together with Afghanistan and Palestine) has been destroyed, to a greater or lesser extent, by military violence inflicted by the United States, often together with its NATO and/or other allies, and/or Israel. Needless to say, there has been zero accountability for these gross violations of international law.

Why did the United States want to ‘take out 7 countries’?

Why does the United States (and Israel) still want to ‘take out’ Iran?

Understanding Conflict

When tackling conflict at this level, it is imperative to understand the ‘conflict configuration’ as a preliminary step in addressing key elements of the conflict. This understanding will require research, listening to those involved parties who are accessible and keeping an open mind to third-party sources.

After all, if one does not understand the conflict – the primary and secondary parties to it (which might include ‘invisible’ parties driving conflicts from the background), the key and subsidiary issues at stake, the importance (intellectually, behaviorally, materially) of each of these issues to the various parties to the conflict, as well as why these issues are important – it is not really possible for a genuine resolution of the conflict (one in which each party to the conflict feels satisfied with the outcome so that it will stand over time) to be achieved.

But there is a deeper dimension to conflict that is routinely overlooked: The ‘emotional profile’ of the key parties. At its most extreme, this includes the sanity, or otherwise, of the conflicting parties, including those parties operating from the background. For one explanation that highlights the critical importance of emotions to conflict, see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

I emphasize the emotional component of conflict not only because it is central but because it makes it easier to perceive that if one or more parties to the conflict is emotionally damaged in one way or another (or even insane), then resolution of the conflict might require more than the processes ordinarily employed.

Conflict in West Asia

So I want to start ‘unpacking’ the conflict that has recently flared when Israel attacked Iran on 13 June 2025 – see ‘Israel Attacks Iran’ – followed by the US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities on 22 June – see ‘Trump: We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, and now, “peace”’ – and the immediately subsequent ceasefire agreement. See ‘Iran confirms ceasefire with Israel’.

Before proceeding, I want to emphasize that there are far more elements to this conflict than can be ‘unpacked’ in this one article.

And to simply note that both the Israeli attack on Iran and the US attack on Iran were illegal under international law.

But, as with the previous military assaults on countries in West Asia and North Africa in the 21st century, when international law has been violated, there have been no meaningful legal repercussions for these transgressions. Nor will there be.

There is no mystery about why this is the case even if many analysts considering these conflicts, significant numbers of ‘ordinary’ people and even some national leaders believe it should happen. To understand why, it is only necessary to understand how the world works. Without that understanding, any number of delusions will spread easily, and be accelerated by government and corporate media, throughout concerned communities. And vast amounts of effort will be wasted on initiatives in relation to the conflict that can go nowhere.

So How Does the World Work?

As I have explained many times previously, all major political and economic structures and processes were created by the Global Elite over past centuries using their extensive network of partners, fronts, agents and employees, including those deeply embedded in what many refer to as the ‘Deep State’: the key intelligence, bureaucratic, military, technocratic and lobbyist personnel who persist in countries independently of the (elected or otherwise) government of the day and the electoral cycle. Notably, a great deal of control is exercised through the banking system that functions internationally and within each country. You can read one account of this in Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until ‘You’ll Own Nothing.’

The central figures in this Global Elite are the members of the Rothschild family who have operated at the centre of this Elite since the late 18th century and exercise staggering control over many key aspects of the global economy, starting with banking, energy, weapons, mining, infrastructure (including railways), media and biotechnology.

Their estimated wealth exceeds $US100 trillion, dwarfing those ‘fortunes’ held by those ‘wealthy individuals’ – such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – misleadingly promoted as the ‘wealthiest’ by corporate media. See Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf pp. 487-8.

Since the beginning of their reign, the Rothschilds have acquired a vast global network of income-producing assets by investing, wisely and often illegally, in a phenomenal variety and number of ventures, usually leaving another name prominently on display of any newly acquired asset, including those acquired or partly acquired as a result of saving a corporation from bankruptcy. In this way, their ownership and control is concealed so that, for example, other prominent families who are known to be excessively wealthy, such as the Morgans and Rockefellers, are fronts for the Rothschilds but not widely recognized as such.

See Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War p.222. and

The Single Global Mafia: The Rockefeller Foundation’s multiple links to Zionism and military-industrial-financial neo-imperialism. p.5.

As noted above, two industries that the Rothschilds dominate are banking and the weapons industry.

And it is well-documented that the Rothschilds have helped finance both sides of most wars since the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century. In these circumstances, the Rothschilds profit from weapons sales to most or all parties to all wars as well as the loans to buy the weapons and the loans to pay for reconstruction post-war. Again, you can read an account of this in Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until ‘You’ll Own Nothing.’

Thus, as Niall Ferguson, an official biographer of the Rothschilds, has noted: by the late 19th century, direct Rothschild investment in major ‘armaments companies’ (now better known as weapons corporations) and related industries was substantial. He candidly noted ‘If late-nineteenth-century imperialism had its “military-industrial complex” the Rothschilds were unquestionably part of it.’ See The House of Rothschild – Volume 2 – The World’s Banker, 1849-1998, p. 579.

Beyond this, of course, effective Rothschild control of key global institutions – including the City of London, the Bank for International Settlements, the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve – and many critical industries, not to mention most national governments, was already giving it enormous power to reshape world order to suit its purposes before the advent of World War II. Consider the United States.

In his exceptionally detailed investigation into three major historical events of the C20th – the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the rise of Hitler – Professor Antony Sutton identified the seat of political power in the United States not as the US Constitution authorized but ‘the financial establishment in New York: the private international bankers, more specifically the financial houses of J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank, and in earlier days (before amalgamation of their Manhattan Bank with the former Chase Bank), the Warburgs.’

‘For most of the twentieth century the Federal Reserve System, particularly the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (which is outside the control of Congress, unaudited and uncontrolled, with the power to print money and create credit at will), has exercised a virtual monopoly over the direction of the American economy. In foreign affairs the Council on Foreign Relations, superficially an innocent forum for academics, businessmen, and politicians, contains within its shell, perhaps unknown to many of its members, a power center that unilaterally determines U.S. foreign policy. The major objective of this submerged – and obviously subversive – foreign policy is the acquisition of markets and economic power (profits, if you will), for a small group of giant multi-nationals under the virtual control of a few banking investment houses and controlling families.’ See Wall Street and The Rise of Hitler, pp.125-126.

Of course, control of national governments and key national institutions by powerful if obscured actors has long been the case and extends far beyond the United States as explained by preeminent historian Professor Carroll Quigley in his classic work published in 1966. See Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. pp.5-6.

‘[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations…

‘It must not be felt that these heads of the world’s chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers (also called ‘international’ or ‘merchant’ bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks.’

The Present

If we jump to the present, analyst Paul Craig Roberts makes an observation and poses a fundamental question:

‘Think about America’s waste of resources and prestige during the first quarter of the 21st century. Trillions of dollars spent destroying Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Somalia with zero gain. No one except military/security war profits got anything from these wars. There was no terrorist threat. Washington brought no one democracy, only destruction.

‘Think about the destruction Washington brought to entire countries for no purpose than Israel’s absurd idea of a Greater Israel. The millions of dead, permanently maimed, and dislocated people, many of whom have located in Europe and the US burdening those taxpayers with their upkeep. WHO BENEFITTED??’ See ‘President Trump’s Plan for the Middle East’.

‘Who benefitted?’ is indeed the question. As Roberts notes, it wasn’t the USA or its people. And it wasn’t the people of other countries, including those in Israel or NATO countries, either. And it certainly wasn’t the people in the countries destroyed.

So clearly it is time to shift the focus from those apparently driving this conflict – such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump, who have much to gain by appearing to drive it – to those parties who are actually driving it. This can done simply by asking: ‘Have Netanyahu and Trump benefitted, personally, from the joint Israeli-US attack on Iran?’

In the case of Netanyahu, and despite his well-documented corruption, he has been a faithful servant of the Zionist elite for decades routinely acting to implement their program throughout West Asia. And faithful servants, chosen for their role, are defended, whatever their ills.

As one article in the Jerusalem Post acknowledged, Miriam Adelson ‘and her late husband Sheldon were viewed as kingmakers, puppeteers, or just another set of billionaires trying to shape Israeli politics in their image. Their immense wealth, their influence over both Israel and the US, and – perhaps most of all – their endless support for Benjamin Netanyahu made them divisive figures’. They ‘pour[ed] hundreds of millions into Netanyahu’s political survival…. It turns out that when you have Miriam Adelson’s resources and access, you don’t just influence policy – you rewrite it.’ See ‘Dr. Miriam Adelson, the modern-day Rothschild Israelis have finally recognized’.

And what of Trump? Is he just someone’s puppet too?

In April 1990 ‘Trump made a bold bet on Atlantic City when he opened a third casino there – the colossal Taj Mahal…. Even riskier: He financed the project with $675 million in junk bonds at a 14% interest rate. Within months Trump was struggling to make the massive bond payments as Atlantic City floundered.’

Consistent with a business tactic they have employed for more than 200 years, through an agent (Wilbur Ross) the Rothschilds offered Trump ‘a prepackaged bankruptcy deal: Trump would give up 50% of his stake in the Taj but would receive better debt terms and would remain in control.’ As a result, ‘The Donald was back in business: He ultimately made similar deals for his other troubled properties.’ See ‘Getting Donald Out Of Debt: The 25-Year-Old Ties That Bind Trump and Wilbur Ross’.

As with all such deals with the Rothschilds, Trump continues to pay off his ‘forever debt’. These days, one way he does that is by deploying the power of his presidential position to serve their divergent ends as part of the payback. Thus, for example, while deceiving the Iranian leadership that he was negotiating with them, the subsequent evidence shows that Trump was finalising plans to attack Iran’s three nuclear sites – and precipitate events leading to regime change – through an intense bombing campaign. See ‘The Hidden Agenda behind Trump’s Attack on Iran’.

Moreover, as discussed by Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Drago Bosnic, certain evidence points to the notion that this strike was ‘political theatre’.

This evidence includes the facts that it would have taken months, at least, to plan and organize the attack and, more importantly, the damage from radiation release, if the attack had been fully successful, would have been more catastrophic than what happened following the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Watch ‘“Political Theater”: Trump’s Attack against Iran’.

This suggests that the real motive was, indeed, regime change. So what would have been the advantage of precipitating regime change in Iran?

As noted above, any consideration of Rothschild history must lead to an awareness that they precipitate wars to reshape world order where necessary and to capture control of resources, in whatever form these take. And its legacy of gaining control of such resources – including mineral resources such as oil and gas, gold, diamonds, rubies…. depending on the context – is well documented.

Thus, just as the war to expel the Palestinians from Gaza will, among other opportunities, open access for the Rothschilds to profit enormously by exploiting the gigantic Leviathan maritime natural gas resources in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza – see ‘The Geopolitics of Elite Insanity, Part 2: Creating Eretz Yisrael to Reshape World Order’ – regime change in Iran would open the possibility of the Rothschilds re-establishing their key role in the ownership and exploitation of oil and gas in Iran, which they lost following the Iranian revolution in 1979 when the assets of all foreign oil companies operating in Iran were seized. See ‘Iran’s Oil Nationalization: A Triumph Over Western Imperialism’.

It would also force open the possibility of Iran surrendering some or total control of the Central Bank of Iran which is not a member of the Rothschild-controlled Bank for International Settlements.

So who benefits from this war (given the long list of people who do not)? As has been the case for the past 200 years, the Rothschilds (and other Elite families) certainly do. And so do their agents beginning, in this case, with Netanyahu and Trump.

And that is the reason why this war is not over and it might go nuclear. Several commentators – including Mike Whitney and Scott Ritter – have noted this.

See:

‘Here’s Proof That Israel Lost the War (and signs that the conflict is about to resume)’ and

‘Will Bibi Ask Trump to Nuke Iran? Ritter Says “Yes”’.

Resisting War

For more than 100 years, millions of people have joined antiwar groups of various kinds. And for more than 100 years, some members of some of these groups have engaged in a range of activities to demonstrate their opposition to war, either as an institution or in a particular context.

However, the antiwar movement has been singularly ineffective in its impact in ending war as an institution. It has no comprehensive analysis of the institution of war (and no comprehensive analysis of violence, of which war is just one subset) nor, even within the confines of its various limited analyses (such as the feminist and socialist critiques), a comprehensive strategy to end war. For a fuller critique of the antiwar movement and an explanation of what is necessary to end war, see ‘Rage Against the War Machine: What Rage?’ If you want to understand the origin of violence which generates a vast range of outcomes, including war, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

Similarly, the antiwar movement has no shared critique of any particular war that is remotely adequate and no strategy to end any particular war including the ones in West Asia where a number – some ‘hot’, some ‘cold’ – are being fought at the moment.

Thus, devoid of an accurate understanding of the configuration of any war, including this war, it is not possible for the conflict underlying it to be resolved. And efforts to end it will be misdirected to actions that are strategically useless, such as protest demonstrations or public statements directed at Elite agents, in this case, governments or international organizations including the United Nations. See ‘International Days of Action Against War on Iran’ and ‘Urgent Appeal for Action Regarding Israeli Regime’s Unlawful Military Aggression Against Iran’.

In any case, of course, no state or group of states, or their international organizations, can or will attempt to hold the Rothschilds and other Elite families to account. These families operate beyond the rule of law and beyond constraint of any kind.

Thus, if we are to have any chance of ending this war or war itself, those of us who identify as ‘ordinary’ must take on these Elite actors and their agents ourselves.

And we can do this effectively if we undertake the challenge using sound strategy. You can read a list of strategic goals for ending wars by scrolling down this page to ‘Strategic goals that would be appropriate in a nonviolent struggle to end war’ and access the remaining details of a comprehensive strategy for doing so elsewhere on this website.

The power to end this war and all war is in our hands. Will we use it?

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post War in the Middle East, The Rothschilds appeared first on LewRockwell.

You know, if people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave. It shouldn’t be a prison.”

Who knew corrupt mass murderer Bibi Netanyahu is actually a closet libertarian?  Peace must soon follow, as the first and second greatest nations of the planet, Israel and the US, break bread on a theme of peace and prosperity, extolling the virtues of self-determination for all people.

Oh to be a Fight Club waiter at Monday’s night White House dinner, as the leaders and staffs of the two most fight-loving countries that have ever existed dine at US taxpayer’s expense, while ditching the US taxpayer’s will.

The food is probably good, but the relationship is toxic.

Trump, Biden-like and taking the Biden administration’s lead, keeps sending billions to Israel to decimate, depopulate and subsume Gaza, in pursuit of the Zionist lebensraum.  It is Donald Trump’s genocide now.

Principles like “do not steal” land, life, or liberty are noticeably absent, but if you read the papers, Trump and Bibi have a plan for Gaza that includes – or more likely solely consists of – “freedom” to “exit.” Trump and Bibi agree Gaza should not be a prison, despite being operated as one by the occupation power for decades, with a level of dehumanization that defines “mowing the grass” as a routine op to keep the numbers of Gazans down.

But Bibi was full of love for liberty, and respect for world peace – he even brought to Mr Trump a letter where he nominated the Orange Man for the Nobel Peace Prize.  Bibi explained, “He’s forging peace, as we speak, in one country, in one region after the other….[I’m] nominating you for the Peace Prize, which is well deserved, and you should get it.”

Given endless war, endless state deceit, meshed collusion in war by the billionaire classes on all sides for fun and profit, what can proponents of liberty take away from this dinner?

I think there are several key points we can work with.

First, for the state, every day is opposite day.  Israel, opportunistically founded as a political response to the extremities of Naziism in World War II, has transformed itself into the ideal Nazi nation.  As for the United States, the land of liberty has become a new kind of prison.  Citizen-prisoners are subsidized through fiat, their own and the state’s, and produce in the way the old Soviet Union produced, as the state bureaucracy demands and designs for payment in company scrip – mostly for the war and security state.

Second, our leaders, as Ambassador Chas Freeman observes in the linked video above, are simply delusional.  To be delusional is to believe things that are not true. It’s a broad brush, as easily applied to our own family members and neighbors as to our political leaders. But in Israel, and in the United States, the respective populations have been continuously instructed, through state media narratives, school and university systems, and their own mainstream political parties, to believe many things that are not true.  Naturally, American and Israeli history are favorably airbrushed, with major uncomfortable actions and events glossed over or ignored.  Yet, our understanding of history can be made more accurate, upon discovery.  This is why the question “What about Building 7” or calls to “Remember the USS Liberty”  are so powerful – they engage the individual to explore the global library.  But in terms of logic, math, economics, ethics and the analysis of history, we the people in the Second and First most important countries of the world are taught wrong, on purpose.

Of course, Americans should be free to leave the public schools without facing the wrath of the truant officer.  But Donald Trump himself, educated in a private school over 65 years ago, was taught the same garbage, and the same lack of intellectual critique, analysis, and exploration.  Trump states that his B-2 assault on three non-facilities in Iran with bunker busters halfway around the world is a Truman-esque feat, and should be lauded exactly as we have been taught to laud Truman’s experimental and unnecessary dropping of atomic bombs of two non-military cities in Japan, after the Japanese Army had already been defeated.

To be honest, Hiroshima was chosen as the target in 1945 because of the expected ability to study the resultant damage, based on a mountain range that would focus the explosion.  Nagasaki was an add-on to the original target list of five locations, as a replacement for Kyoto. This occurred because Harold Stimson, a predecessor to Pete Hegseth, had taken his honeymoon in Kyoto, and apparently had pleasant memories of the city.  It is, and was then, well understood that the two recipients of Fat Man and Little Boy were less military targets than civilian, and of the list of original target cities, the ones chosen contained the more civilians and less military industrial capability.  Eisenhower was right in 1960, in warning of the integrated industrial, scientific, and academic powers that influence the American way of war, and promote American intolerance of peace.

Third, the US government and its “friends” constitute a direct and immediate threat to American citizens. Many on the left and right are concerned that the American version of Bibi’s “free to leave” policy for “those who are not welcome here” or those “here illegally” will be applied, as it is today in “greater” Israel, to people who have every right to be where they are. Many on the left and right are sensing, and seeing, how quickly and easily the state can erect a full array of concentration camps, institute and fund a police state, and formally invalidate the First and Fourth Amendments.

Second Amendment advocates, and observers of the United States as a haven for personal arms and ammunition, correctly assume that a foreign army would be unable to conventionally conquer the US, or to effectively occupy it after a nuclear exchange. The US may, like Afghanistan, be a place where great powers go to die.  I’ll admit this is a comforting thought.  But if our own government, under any autopen in the Executive Suite, chose to reduce our country to ashes, it most certainly has home field advantage.  As we speak, much of the southern border is already under martial law lite.  This is accomplished through a “good cause” edict, via a vast network of US military bases, training areas, and federal/state land.  As of last year, the state owned 40% of total US territory, land where the Constitution is already suspended, land immediately available to a state at war.  The population of the US is concentrated on the east and west coast urban centers, and procedures to lock down cities and national trade and commerce, church and local politics are well established.  Eminent Constitutionalist John Whitehead explains how war fuels the surveillance state.  We must ask, to what end?  I think we already know, and it isn’t to keep us healthy and free to leave.

Thus, we observe a state dinner hosted by country #2 for country #1, where, as just like in the T-Bone Cafe, there is only one question, “What don’t you want.”  From the looks on the faces at the dinner, they are trying to decide if they don’t want the ultra-homogenized imitation liberty, or they don’t want yesterday’s political fellatio.  Bless their hearts.

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In 2017, when we were still attending the local Novus Ordo parish Mass (and about a year and a half before we discovered the Latin Mass), I wrote a blog post where I was wrestling with the ephemeral, lamenting planned obsolescence, and worrying about the faith of my young children in withstanding the cultural zeitgeist of secularism. There I wrote:

In many ways I fear the faith I am caring for, trying so carefully to preserve, maintaining its integrity and instilling the rituals and remembrances in our family life as my children are young, will be rejected when they come of age. “Sorry dad,” they will say, “we don’t want your stuff.” An old missal, a rosary polished from years of fingering—they’ll become like cherry armoires and cast-iron cookware: of no perceived use to them.

Everybody has their preferred style, but there is something to be said for a quality handmade chair, an old stone church, a set of steel hand tools because it carries with it a memory, a legacy, and a history. Non-denominationalism is the IKEA of worship and architecture today. It is modern, sleek, relevant, and sterile. Its roots do not run deep, the foundation like that of a vinyl-clad townhouse.

In the secular arena, modern progressives destroy everything they touch. They tear down with no real cohesive or thought-out plan of how to rebuild. They tear down the family and religion, statues and monuments, traditional sexual mores. They are impatient, and content to slap up temporary shanties until they can figure out what next thing comes next. Social change can’t happen fast enough. Out with the old, in with the new, until new becomes old and then off to the dump again.

But things get destroyed in the process. Timeless things, priceless things—immortal souls, traditional families, rituals and connections to our past and our ancestors and predecessors.

My prediction goes beyond furniture and housewares, beyond trends and tastes and kitchen renovations. When we hit the modern bottom, when the demons start to tip the scales and become too powerful, when the non-denominational particleboard gets wet and warped, when the trans-everything nonsense hits fever pitch…a few will start to pine for an ancient faith. They will go online to order and meetup; they will seek and they will not find (Jn 7:34) except in those pockets in which it has been preserved as the pearl of great price that it is, a soft glow of candles in stained glass windows in the darkness, shards of light reflecting off a gold monstrance in the sanctuary, the quiet ancient chant of plainsong beckoning behind thick solid wood doors. It will be exotic and intimidating, ethereal and forbidden, austere and arduous, foreign and yet completely familiar. The Faith of our fathers, the Faith handed down, the Faith communion that takes place in real time…it will be both old, and new.

What I didn’t realize then was we would be rounding the corner as a family a couple years later, finding a local pocket of those devoted to the usus antiquior. The rest, they say, is history—the 1962 Missal became our liturgical “docking station” where everything synched. We eventually began attending a diocesan Latin Mass every Sunday where we began to lay down roots. The hope was not that the Tridentine liturgy would be our salvation or the “silver bullet” that would guarantee the transmission of the Faith to our children as (eventual) adults; it simply seemed like a solid foundation, built on rock, that had stood the test of time for generations.

People attend the Latin Mass for a myriad of reasons. For some it may be ideological; for some, aesthetic. For many (like us), it recalibrates the needle of what it means to worship. We are not there to see friends (though we enjoy each other’s company outside the church after Mass). We are not there to “share a communal meal.” We are not there for entertainment or good preaching.

We enter into worship primarily as an act of sacrifice. In this, the “Mass of the Ages” expresses unequivocally its single-minded purpose. As Msgr. George Moorman states in The Latin Mass Explained, “Sacrifice answers the craving of human nature.” There is no ambiguity when one steps into a Latin Mass: this is Catholicism.

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Click Here:

Eugyppius

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Thanks, Johnny Kramer . 

The London Economic

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The Truth Is Out. In this episode of America’s Untold Stories, Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley are joined by two historic insiders—Robert Groden and Robert Tanenbaum—to break down the JFK assassination like never before.

Groden, the photographic expert behind the Zapruder film’s public release, and Tanenbaum, former Deputy Chief Counsel of the HSCA, reveal shocking insights based on their research. They detail why Lee Harvey Oswald was not the killer, what the U.S. government withheld for decades, and how the official narrative collapsed under new scrutiny. If you think you know the story of November 22, 1963—think again.

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On Locals with a private chat and afterparty https://unstructured.locals.com/post/…

Robert Groden’s books can be ordered from emailing directly to janetclair29 @ gmail.com

Robert Tanenbaum’s book “That Day in Dallas: Lee Harvey Oswald Did NOT Kill JFK” (affiliate link) https://amzn.to/4liSLRn

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George Giles wrote:

The space shuttle was a horrific disaster. While sucking up hundreds of billions of tax dollars it failed in every single specification that was its justification for existence. The shuttle’s ancillary behavior was all the astronauts it killed. The Soviet launch system has proven vastly safer and lower cost. Think about that.

Libertarian critic Doug Bandow said of the shuttle almost thirty tears ago “you would be hard pressed to find a more expensive way to put payload in orbit.”

Congress told NASA after the Challenger exploded to resurrect the Saturn V a bargain at only $10 million each. NASA replied that they cannot since the tooling and plans were gone. This was not an accident.

Nonetheless the space shuttle continues to punish the taxpayer. Trump’s One Bloated Horrific bill has $85 million buried in it to ship a shuttle from DC to Texas where it will be monument to fraud, waste and abuse. Still the taxpayer burden for this ‘icon’ will not end with delivery, but will be a continuing resolution where if outdoors will have to be maintained against the corrosive effects of sun and weather. If indoors it will require a large space requiring heat in winter and air conditioning in the nine month summer near Houston.

Surely President Trump as a conservative must have been drowsy when reading the 1100+ page bill as he would have removed this particular item as nonsensical.

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What is the biggest problem within Catholic marriages today? According to a traditional priest, it’s “effeminate” men.

By effeminate, he doesn’t mean a man who’s light in his loafers. He means a man who doesn’t spiritually lead his family, and so fails in his most important role.

Especially among traditional Catholics, much attention regarding marriage is given to the problems of feminism and wives’ call to submission. LifeSiteNews asked Father Adam Purdy, FSSPX, to what extent he sees feminism as a marital problem, versus the problem of overbearing husbands.

While he did not entirely dismiss either of these as real issues, he maintained that he sees much more often a “different problem” – that of men who are “weak,” “not virtuous,” and who don’t practice the virtue of religion, which is “the most important virtue for a husband and a father to have,” Purdy told LifeSiteNews.

This is the very crux of the marriage – because as the spiritual head of his family, it is the husband who is called to take the lead in his family’s practice of the faith.

What does exercizing the virtue of religion in the home look like for the husband (and father)? According to Purdy, setting a schedule in which “prayer and religion takes priority in the house” and leading his family in prayer are two major pillars of his spiritual headship.

“How often do we have situations where dad doesn’t pray with the family? Mom’s in charge of the rosary or mom’s in charge of morning prayers,” said Purdy, acknowledging that sometimes it may be necessary for mom to lead prayer when dad has to go out to work early, for example.

Fathers also don’t often ensure that prayer and religion are prioritized to begin with. “How many families don’t actually have a schedule? The only thing they have is dinner time, between five and six, and that’s it. Many families don’t say a family rosary,” Purdy noted.

It is critical that husbands make sure the family follows a rule of life, almost like that of a religious community, said Purdy. “There has to be a rule in the house, and most don’t have it. That’s the problem of the man.”

“How many families have silence? How many families have community prayer? How many families do reading? There are so many things that could be imitated from a monastery. But we’re listening to Mick Jagger on the way to school in the car. We’ve got the TV on at home all hours of the day,” observed Purdy.

He explained that fathers should take time out for activities that will help build the devotion of their family, the way a priest makes time for community activities like processions and picnics and formation talks, to foster the devotion of his flock.

More typically, religion ends up taking “a backseat to other things,” and this has bigger consequences than men realize, both for their own family and for society.

Most fundamentally, God is the true, deep, and lasting motivation to live a good – that is, virtuous – life. “How do you convince your children to be good if God isn’t the reason?” noted Fr. Purdy.

In addition, while God should take first place for His own sake, when He doesn’t come first, the result is a de facto disorder of priorities, in which other concerns become blown out of proportion and even secondary priorities may take a backseat to other interests, since religion directs and orders everything else.

Even more consequentially, the lack of proper order in a family does a disservice to society, because “the family is the building block of society,” and “You can’t build up society if you don’t have God first,” noted Purdy.

He pointed out that these men who have abdicated their spiritual headship are a product of our culture, which itself has “become effeminate” and “produces vice rather than virtue.”

Men’s neglect of their religious responsibility, then, also “merits eventually the scorn of the woman,” as well as her attempt to take over the religious leadership of the children “in spite of him,” which Purdy affirmed a woman must do if her husband is failing in that regard.

The prior also talked about what the husband’s proper approach to his wife should look like, and touched on disordered attitudes about this that can be found in traditional communities.

“There is a lot of abuse of the idea of the authority of the husband,” said Fr. Purdy, noting that such abuses include the ideas that “The woman is my servant; the woman doesn’t speak; the woman does all the work; the woman has to just do what I say.”

He cited an example he has seen of a husband who looks at his wife as “more as a servant rather than a helpmate,” and “more as one to be told what to do rather than to mutually enhance each other.”

For a proper model of leadership, the husband should look to Jesus Christ, since as St. Paul said in a letter to the Ephesians, the husband is called to love his wife as Christ loved His Church.

“He laid out His life for His Church. He has compassion and mercy for His Church. He gives us all the means to do good and to succeed and to grow stronger in everything spiritually. He’s the lifeblood of his Church. The husband in a way has to be that,” Purdy told LifeSiteNews.

And, in fact, Christ exemplified servant-leadership, with an attitude not that He is above certain tasks, but that says, “I’m going to be there with you. I’m going to be doing the same work that you’re doing. I’m also going to be getting my hands dirty.”

“That’s our Lord. A father has to be the same,” said Purdy. In so doing, he should seek to “alleviate some of the burden of his wife,” and not refuse certain household tasks because they are the woman’s domain.

“A lot of marriages don’t work because the man, when he comes home from work, he doesn’t realize” the burden of his wife, who has “been with five kids for 10 hours and is about ready to cry and pull her hair out at the same time.”

Purdy told LifeSiteNews how his father instilled in him and his siblings the attitude that one should seek to please one’s wife, by, for example, cleaning the house well together while his mom was away from home.

“How many guys are like that today? Not a lot,” Purdy noted.

A husband also demonstrates his love of his wife through simply giving her his time and attention. “I think that a woman thrives on recognition and acknowledgement and gratitude and honor and respect… every woman would like to know that she’s appreciated, that she’s loved. That her husband looks to spend time with her. And you see men that just don’t do that very well. They will come home and turn on a TV, and don’t even pay attention to their kids. It’s a failure, big time,” said Purdy.

This will foster his wife’s own love and support for her husband. She should seek to build him up, and never berate or belittle him which, according to Purdy, is the “worst thing a woman can do in an argument with her husband.” A wife is called most especially to practice the virtue of charity in her marriage, with both her husband and children, Father noted.

While it does not excuse the sins or faults of a wife, ultimately, the authority of the husband means that in a sense, the marriage starts with him.

“I put the burden of success in a marriage on the shoulders of the man, because he’s supposed to be the mind,” said Purdy. “He’s supposed to be able to calculate what it is that I can deliver to my spouse so that she will be the most. She will be in her glory. And if he does that, she does go into her glory. But when she’s in her glory, she turns it back to him. It’s like – for lack of a better word – a give and take.”

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The United Nations and its “human rights” bureaucracy are unhappy with American education — especially President Trump’s policies and proposals.

Instead of local or parental control, the UN is pushing for radical changes: more federal power, less educational choice, government oversight of private schools, and the promotion of controversial ideological content — all at taxpayer expense. It also wants education globally redefined as a UN-backed “human right.”

UN Investigates U.S.

The UN’s latest attack on U.S. education, parental rights, state and national sovereignty, and the Constitution came in the form of an investigation and “country report” to the UN’s dictator-dominated “Human Rights Council.” The outfit, which regularly praises mass-murdering regimes while condemning Western nations, frequently targets the God-given rights of Americans enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Among other demands on education, the United States needs more federal involvement in and oversight of government and private schools, not less, argued the senior UN official in her report last month following an in-depth investigation of U.S. education policy.

Blasting Trump’s efforts to shut down or at least reduce the power of the U.S. Department of Education, the UN bureaucrat claimed they would hurt low-income students, weaken “civil rights,” disrupt “higher learning,” and produce other alleged horrors.

“The loss of federal oversight could deepen inequities, harm marginalized students and undermine social mobility,” argued UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education Farida Shaheed, the radical Pakistani activist who investigated the United States.

The final report does acknowledge that under the U.S. Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, education is not a federal responsibility. However, it frames that as a problem. And it then proceeds to claim that the U.S. government is obligated under “international law” to impose the UN’s agenda on education nationwide anyway.

Perversion, Leftism & Racial Obsession Needed

Aside from blasting what remains of local control and decentralized policymaking on education across America, the UN special rapporteur also called for more ideologically driven mandates. The goal: Make sure children learn what the UN thinks they must learn.

States including Florida and Texas were singled out for passing laws trying to protect students — especially young students — from indoctrination with Marxist-inspired critical race theory; LGBT propaganda; diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender ideology; and sexually explicit material.

Shaheed claimed the laws produce a “chilling effect” undermining “inclusive education” — a euphemism for grotesque “sex education,” racial collectivism, and gender propaganda.

“Censorship laws restricting classroom discussions on race, gender identity and other ‘divisive concepts’ limit students’ access to critical knowledge,” she claimed, blasting state efforts to protect children from racial, sex, and gender indoctrination as “censorship.”

State and district policies keeping porn and other obscene material out of tax-funded schools are supposedly hurting children, too. “Book bans and content restrictions silence marginalized voices, preventing students from accessing a full and accurate understanding of history and social dynamics,” claimed the radical UN activist.

The Broader Push

It is all part of the broader UN push to standardize education globally. As outlined in UN agreements going back decades, one of its primary goals is to shift the attitudes and values of children toward UN-approved beliefs.

In an interview she did last year with the UN’s education agency, Shaheed brazenly called for governments to control what is taught. There is a need for governments to ensure “that standards are outlined that all private sector providers must adhere to in accordance with the right to quality education.”

Ultimately, education must teach children to become so-called sustainable global citizens, UN leaders and agreements have been saying openly since at least the 1990s. Agenda 21 and the 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) both state that clearly.

The UN Human Rights Council has long advocated for hijacking control over private schools, too. In fact, a decade ago, the dictator-controlled outfit claimed governments have an obligation to monitor and regulate all non-government education, even imposing government standards on all.

Tax-funded Universities & “Freedom”

The supposedly secular Pakistani activist-turned-UN “expert,” whose last name means martyr who dies for Allah or Islam, also slammed government efforts to rein in college campuses’ violent “pro-Palestine” riots funded by billionaire extremist George Soros and other insiders. Among other concerns, she denounced “disproportionate disciplinary actions.”

When it came to the escalating attacks against Jews, Shaheed claimed not to see it. “I do not know antisemitism is actually on the rise,” she responded when asked if she would be investigating one of the major issues that caused Trump to take on Harvard, Columbia, and other once-prestigious universities.

She expressed deep concerns over Trump’s efforts to protect taxpayers and students from rogue universities feasting on public money, too. Under the guise of “respecting institutional autonomy,” the UN rapporteur claimed the U.S. government is obligated to do what she said.

“While the Harvard case has drawn global attention, it is emblematic of a much broader pattern of coercive assault on academic freedom and institutional autonomy: from book and subject bans in schools to discriminatory censorship laws and punitive measures against universities, their students and faculty,” Shaheed said.

Blasting what she described as “criminalization” of student protests, Shaheed suggested that international legal mechanisms are required to override American policies developed by Americans. “The Special Rapporteur … has consistently expressed her serious concerns in allegation letters sent to the Government of the United States,” the report says.

Redefining Education as a Globalist “Human Right”

Among the most alarming demands by the UN rapporteur: a redefinition of education itself to bring American schools into line with the UN’s vision on “human rights” and “equity.” Those two loaded terms mean something very different to the UN than the traditional understanding held by Americans, of course.

“The Special Rapporteur strongly encourages the federal Government and all States to consider expressly recognizing education as a fundamental human right for everyone,” Shaheed said.

By contrast, consider the definition of education in the 1828 Webster’s dictionary, the first American dictionary. “To give children a good education in manners, arts and science, is important; to give them a religious education is indispensable; and an immense responsibility rests on parents and guardians who neglect these duties,” it says. (Emphasis added.)

For virtually all of human history, education of children has been a responsibility of parents. But under the UN’s agenda, indoctrination pretending to be education becomes a human right enforced at the barrel of a government gun.

“The right to education requires States [governments] to deliver free, quality, public education for everyone,” the UN’s final report declared (emphasis added). That is clearly an ominous call for forcing all children into federalized government “education” based on UN principles while marginalizing alternatives to government-controlled schools.

Incompatible Views

As stated above, the UN’s view of “quality education” would differ significantly from the views of everyday Americans. As the UN’s own agreements make clear, it believes children should learn globalism, environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, and even UN-approved “spirituality.”

Perhaps even more significant is the total incompatibility of the UN’s understanding of “human rights” with the traditional American and Christian understanding of God-given rights from the Creator. Under the biblical understanding and the American system of government, unalienable rights pre-exist government. Indeed, governments exist to protect those rights, not grant them.

Under the UN’s bizarre version of “human rights,” however, rights are granted by governments and can be restricted or abolished at will. Adding insult to injury, those fake government-imposed “rights” may “in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations,” according to Article 29 of the UN’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

In other words, the UN’s supposed human rights are the revocable, government-granted privileges of people to take from their neighbors by force, instead of the unalienable God-given rights protected by the Constitution.

Obviously, the two views on human rights are not just different — they are fundamentally incompatible with each other at a basic level. The fact that some of the world’s most brutal communist and Islamist dictatorships sit proudly on the UN Human Rights Council exemplifies the conflict well.

More Globalism Needed

The implications of this redefinition of education as a UN-granted human right are enormous. Consider Article 26 of the controversial UN “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the organization’s foundational “human rights” document. It states clearly that education must be “compulsory” and that it “shall further the activities of the United Nations.”

In short, if parents, private schools, tutors, and even government schools are not promoting the UN’s agenda in “education,” they are depriving children of their “human rights” enshrined in UN agreements. Depriving children of their UN-defined human rights is considered to be a serious offense.

The UN rapporteur has been very explicit on the issue of indoctrinating children with UN-backed ideologies. “There is a growing understanding of the need to embed sustainable development values … in educational processes, and efforts are being made to incorporate sustainable development principles into educational curricula to prepare students for the challenges of the future,” she said in a Q&A with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) last year.

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Who knows what to believe these days? Well, what would you expect after years, even decades, of anti-reality operations by everyone from the CIA to The New York Times to Harvard U. Is it any wonder that reality-optionality is making the people both apathetic and insane?

We are told now by the FBI that there is no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein ran a blackmail operation against the politicos of Western Civ, or that a “client list” existed, or that JE was murdered in his jail cell. It well might be true that there is no evidence, strictly speaking.

Messrs. Patel and Bongino, coming into office rather late in the Epstein game, were apparently left with big bag of nuthin. What else can they truthfully report? So, they had to put it out there, knowing a whole lot of people would be miffed. “We’ve got nuthin, sorry.” Were they chagrined to do that? Evidently so. Of course, this Epstein business has been going on for years and years and it is certainly possible that the most damning evidence has been destroyed by interested parties.

Personally, I find it implausible that absolutely nothing ever leaked, no video of, say, Tony Blair or Bill Clinton violating a child, if it ever happened. Everything else in our world leaks, eventually. And there were supposedly how many cameras around the Epstein properties, and how many thousands of hours of video recordings? There is more video of Bigfoot than of compromised Epstein bigshots. Just sayin’.

AG Pam Bondi, the FBIs boss, also has some ‘splainin’ to do. In February, she claimed to have the Epstein client list “sitting on my desk right now to review,” and hinted it would be released shortly. That material, when released, turned out to be the old dog-eared flight logs that have been circulating through every news outlet for years. Did she not know the difference between an alleged “client list” and the old flight logs? Let’s face it: seems kind of dumb. . . seems like the AG got played. . . and now the mob on “X” is having sport with her.

Among the miffed, apparently, is Elon Musk. At the height of his feud with Mr. Trump, on June 5, Elon put out a message on his “X” platform saying, “@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”. This intemperate utterance naturally prompts you to wonder: how (or what) might Elon know about any supposed Epstein evidence? At this point, the FBI might send somebody to inquire. Did Elon, who has more money than even Scrooge McDuck, somehow manage to buy up all those alleged blackmail tapes? Does he otherwise know where they might have disappeared to? Has he ever seen anything? Anyway, he didn’t produce any actual evidence.

Is Elon losing it, a little bit. His grip, that is. Mr. Trump thinks so. He declared over the weekend that Elon has “gone off the rails” . . . has become “a train wreck.” Well, what you can see in this very public, very regrettable cage-match between two giant public personalities is that Elon has lost his cool and the president has not.

For one thing, Elon is apparently incensed over the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) just signed into law because it ends the electric vehicle mandate left over from the “Joe Biden” regime, as well as the whopping $7,500 federal tax credit for new electric cars — loss of which which is apt to break Tesla’s business model. The bill also calls for sunsetting subsidies for battery production by 2028, meaning Tesla’s Powerwall business is likewise affected. Mr. Trump took pains to explain that he’d informed Elon from the get-go (and repeatedly) that all those subsidies were done for when he got elected.

Elon was visibly perturbed over the process that produced the OBBB, the proverbial political sausage-making (i.e., a nasty business you’d be appalled to watch). It appeared, he said, to un-do all of his DOGE spending cuts so laboriously made. Mainly, Elon deplored the failure to address the $36-trillion-plus national debt, widely recognized as a time-bomb on a short fuse liable to sink the whole USS United States. I will tell you a harsh truth: nobody will do anything about the national debt. The sheer math of our annual debt service is simply impossible. Our country is heading into some sort of bankruptcy proceeding, some kind of ferocious “work out” — as they say in the banking board-rooms.

Mr. Trump is betting that re-industrialization of the USA will produce enough of the right sort of growth — that is, production of real things of real value, as opposed to mere financial shenanigans — that the debt reckoning can be overcome somehow. Or mitigated. It’s a bold risk, and many pieces of the scheme are indeed falling into place: tariffs, bigly investment capital from foreigners, a general realignment of trade relations, tax reform, downsizing of government.

But a virulent opposition, the mad-dog remnants of the Democratic Party, seeks to wreck Mr. Trump’s program (and perhaps the USA altogether), and it is a miracle that the president has gotten this far with his plan. Personally, I’m doubtful that the energy resources will be there to underwrite this reindustrialization, but that is a topic for another day.

And now Elon, peeved as he is, proposes to bring another big obstacle onto the scene, his proposed new “American Party.” Looks like he is making a tactical blunder, and his distraught emotional demeanor suggests poor decision-making. Frankly, I’ve been concerned about Elon’s soundness-of-mind since he came on-board Mr. Trump’s band-wagon last summer. There was something peculiar about his spastic rompings on stage, his jerky movements, his garbly speeches. You wonder if all the talk about his world-beating “genius” has messed with his mind.

Also, frankly, I’ve long thought that attempting to colonize Mars was absurd, or at least premature. Shouldn’t we rather make an effort to demonstrate that we can live on this planet successfully before we venture off to a new one? After all, this Earth is perfectly suited to our needs and Mars is absolutely not. I doubt that even the most extreme transhuman program would avail to implant us up there.

To cut to the chase: the grandiosity of Elon’s plans, and the oddness of his public performances, suggests to me that he has gone a bit crazy in the pure sense of the word. This new party he proposes looks like a crazy play by a crazy person. He can throw zillions of dollars into it, and create a whole lot of political mischief, but what would that prove? How would that make him any better than such obvious villains as George Soros and Bill Gates?

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

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A few weeks ago I urged President Trump to make a deal with Iran that would satisfy his stated goal of no nuclear weapons production and would allow Iran to continue its lawful pursuit of civilian nuclear energy. The deal on the table, as described by the Iranian foreign minister himself, was a win-win “update” of Obama’s JCPOA “nuclear deal” that he could have avoided a costly and counter-productive war with Iran.

Unfortunately, the negotiations were cut short by an Israeli sneak-attack on Iran that led to a 12-day war that did not turn out as Israel imagined. This often happens in war, especially wars of aggression. After a day or so, Israel found itself overwhelmed by an Iran that proved to be more than capable of defending itself and Netanyahu called up Uncle Sam begging for assistance.

The resulting US bombing run on Iran’s nuclear sites did not lead to the end of that country’s capabilities, but to the expulsion of the UN monitoring organization and the emergence of Iranian “strategic ambiguity” regarding its program. In short, the bombing has blinded the world to what Iran may do in the future. That is not a win for Trump.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, the Iranian president confirmed what most people understood at the time: President Trump promised Iran that while they were engaged in negotiations the United States would not allow Israel to attack the country. With the sixth round of negotiations just two days away, however, Israel thumbed its nose at the United States and launched an attack on Iran anyway.

Considering that Israel’s “military capabilities” are almost entirely provided by the United States, this betrayal of its benefactor will surely go down as one of the most brazen acts of ingratitude of all time.

This week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington DC for the third time in Trump’s short second term in office. While we do not know what President Trump is telling him this time around, this might be the time to finally give Israel some “tough love” that many parents practice with their teenagers.

Donald Trump may be the most “pro-Israel” president we’ve ever had, but if he really wanted to help Israel he would make clear to Netanyahu that US support does Israel no favors. Continuing to spend tens of billions of dollars a year financing Israel’s war machine and backing up Israel’s attacks on its neighbors has not produced peace or security – much less prosperity – for Israel.

In fact, as soon as Israel attacked Iran so many Israelis tried to leave the country that Tel Aviv forbade its own citizens from leaving the country. Israelis are desperate to escape the wars of their own government’s making.

If President Trump really wanted to help Israel he would inform Netanyahu this week that not another US dollar would be sent to prop up his government. Not another missile or bomb would be sent. Not another American bullet would be available for Israeli soldiers to attack their neighbors or to shoot Palestinian civilians.

If Israel had to face the hard reality that it must learn to live with its neighbors instead of attacking them, the country may actually start seeing some peace and prosperity. Whatever the case, it is not our responsibility to finance the war machine of any foreign country. Time to put America first.

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Elon is upset with Trump and has decided to form his own party, the America Party. Trump responded the other day by suggesting it might be time to look into Elon’s rent-seeking over the years.

Just desserts couldn’t be sweeter.

Musk has made billions off the government. More finely, off of government spending and now he has the audacity to complain about government spending, a la the Big Beautiful Bill just passed by Congress. Perhaps because it does not contain enough spending that will benefit him. He certainly never complained about such spending before.

How much has the government spent on Space X? Whether one thinks it is worth spending money on rockets and such is not the issue. The issue is whether it is proper to spend other people’s money on it. More finely, whether it is morally justifiable to rob millions of Americans of their money in order to “fund” (note the bland terminology government uses that an honest mugger would never have the audacity to use) some project that puts billions into the pockets of a privately owned, for-profit company such as Space X. Musk is a billionaire and – supposedly a whiz at business. Well then, why doesn’t Musk use his own money to launch his rockets? Instead of using the government to force millions of Americans to “fund” his operations, why doesn’t he persuade investors to back them? If they are worth backing, why wouldn’t they?

Legitimate businesses do not need to rent-seek because they don’t have to.

This can be expressed another way. Illegitimate businesses rent-seek because they have to. Because if they didn’t rent-seek, they’d be out of business.

Tesla comes to mind. Elon built his business using government to extract rent from legitimate businesses, most especially the established car companies. They were effectively forced to buy what are styled “carbon credits” from Tesla because it was either do that or manufacture “zero emissions” electric vehicles that they knew they could not sell except at a loss. It cost them less to buy “credits” from Tesla, which the government counted in their favor, insofar as complying with the regulations that effectively required them to either manufacture “zero emissions” EVs themselves or get (that is, buy) “credit” for handing money over to Tesla for manufacturing them.

A lot of spending there, all of it forced by the government for the benefit of Tesla (and so, Elon Musk).

Tesla built its business in the same way that the larvae of a certain wasp feeds on the paralyzed but still living body of the “donor” insect that the parent wasp stung before laying its egg on the victim. The legitimate vehicle manufacturers – whose legitimacy derives from the fact that they sold what people wanted at a price that earned an honest profit – were thus forced to finance Tesla and the EV force-feeding generally.

Further feeding came in the form of tax kickbacks that greatly advantaged Tesla for many years because for many years, Tesla was the only major manufacturer of EVs. The government dangled tax kickbacks up to $7,500 to induce people to buy EVs and – for many years – that essentially meant Tesla EVs. Now, there is nothing evil about returning a portion of the money stolen from what are styled “taxpayers” (once again, note the deliberately bland terminology; as if paying taxes were like paying rent; i.e., as if it were a voluntary transaction). That is not the issue. The issue is that only some taxpayers got some of their money back – but only if they bought an EV, which for many years meant they bought a Tesla.

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Those who have claimed that there is no smoking-gun evidence in the CIA’s long-secret records relating to the JFK assassination can no longer make that claim. That’s because the CIA was just forced to release its records relating to CIA official George Joannides. For more than 60 years, the CIA, with the help of deferential U.S. federal courts, had succeeded in keeping its Joannides files secret. Until now.

No, I’m not referring to some videotaped confession by former CIA head Allen Dulles or any other CIA official confessing to having participated in the orchestration and carrying out of the assassination or the resulting cover-up. As I have long maintained, there is no reasonable possibility whatsoever that anyone within the national-security state would put something directly incriminatory into writing. That would be dumb, and one thing is certain — CIA officials back in the 1960s were not dumb. In fact, they were brilliant people and very good at engaging in their expertise of state-sponsored assassinations, cover-ups, and regime change.

What I’m instead referring to is circumstantial evidence, which, as every judge in the land will instruct juries, is just as valid and credible as direct evidence. It is circumstantial evidence, such as the fraudulent autopsy that the U.S. military establishment carried out on President Kennedy’s body, or the fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film that the CIA produced on the weekend of the assassination, that have convicted the national-security state of the Kennedy murder. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.)

Thanks to the release of the Joannides files, we now have more smoking-gun circumstantial evidence to add on top of the circumstantial evidence establishing the fraudulent autopsy and the fraudulent film.

The release of the Joannides records was reported this past Friday on Axios in an article entitled “CIA Admits Shadowy Officer Monitored Oswald Before JFK Assassination, New Records Reveal” by Marc Cavuto. It’s worth taking a pause in reading my article and going over to read Cavuto’s article to get an overall context of these particular long-secret records that have just been released.

It’s first necessary to put things into the overall context of the assassination plot. As I set forth in my books An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story and Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, central to the plot was the framing of Lee Harvey Oswald for the crime. That’s what Oswald meant when he stated that he was “a patsy.”

As the years and decades passed, it became increasingly clear that Oswald, who served in the U.S. Marines, was recruited to be an operative for U.S. intelligence, one who was trained to work under the cover of being a communist. That would explain why Oswald was not subjected to arrest, torture, indictment, prosecution, or even just an interrogation after he ostensibly defected to the Soviet Union and then returned to the United States with a Russian wife.

In October 1962, President Kennedy settled the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which he promised that the U.S. would not invade Cuba. This was almost certainly the point at which the national-security establishment decided that Kennedy posed a grave threat to national security and needed to be removed from office, given the Pentagon’s and CIA’s conviction that the Cuban communist regime posed a grave threat to U.S. national security.

Six months later, in April 1963, Oswald moved to New Orleans, where he made a big public hullabaloo to establish that he was a “communist.” Notice something important: Oswald had lived in Dallas for five months before moving to New Orleans and had made no big public hullabaloo in Dallas about being a communist. On the contrary, he hung out with rightwing people who had direct or indirect ties to U.S. intelligence or to the U.S. military-industrial complex.

While in New Orleans, Oswald went to work for the Reily Coffee Company, which was owned by a fierce anti-communist conservative. What are the chances that a fierce anti-communist conservative would hire a died-in-the-wool communist at the height of the Cold War? No chance at all!

While in New Orleans, Oswald made contact with an organization of fierce anti-Castro Cuban exiles called the DRE. While passing out pamphlets promoting a national pro-Cuba organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which the CIA and FBI were trying to destroy, Oswald got into a big public altercation with the head of the DRE. The altercation had the appearance of being a staged event designed to publicize Oswald’s communist bona fides.

Oswald was arrested for disorderly conduct and put into jail . While incarcerated, he requested to speak to a FBI agent. The request was granted and the FBI agent came to visit him in jail. How many regular people are able to pull off something like that?

Later, Oswald and the head of the DRE appeared on a public radio broadcast that publicized Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Union and his ostensible commitment to communism.

Two months after Oswald moved to New Orleans, in June 1963, while Oswald was still in New Orleans, Kennedy delivered his famous Peace Speech at American University, which essentially was a declaration of war against the national-security branch of the federal government. In that speech, JFK effectively declared an end to the Cold War and an intent to move America in a totally different direction — one that was based on establishing peaceful and friendly relations with Russia, Cuba, and the communist world. That, of course, was anathema to the U.S. national security establishment. JFK’s Peace Speech undoubtedly solidified the decision to remove JFK from office.

Four months after JFK’s Peace Speech, in September 1963 Oswald went to Mexico City, where he engaged in a big public hullabaloo in which he made contact with the Soviet and Cuban embassies. For those who are still convinced that the Russians or Cubans employed Oswald to assassinate Kennedy, it’s worth asking: If that’s really true, would they really want to advertise their connection to the assassin in such a big way?

After Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, the DRE immediately put out a press release stating that the president had been killed by a communist and detailing Oswald’s communist bona fides. The information in the press release was spread across the nation in the mainstream press.

But there was one significant thing that people didn’t know: The DRE was being supervised and generously funded by the CIA, specifically by CIA official George Joannides. For all practical purposes, the DRE was one of the CIA’s infamous front organizations.

It was former Washington Post reporter Jeff Morley who discovered in the 1990s Joannides’s role with the DRE. Morley sought Joannides’s records from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. The CIA refused to comply with the act. Morley sued the CIA in federal court for the records. The CIA fiercely opposed the lawsuit for more ten years. Ultimately, the U.S. federal courts, not surprisingly, deferred to the CIA by letting the CIA keep its Joannides records secret. The entire saga of Morley’s fight against the CIA for the release of the Joannides records is set forth in FFF’s book Morley v. CIA: My Unfinished JFK Investigation.

For decades, the CIA did its best to keep its role with the DRE secret. It also lied about Joannides’s role with the DRE to the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), and the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).

Oh, but it gets worse. During the HSCA investigation, the CIA called Joannides out of retirement to ostensibly serve as an innocent, good-faith liaison between committee investigators and the CIA. In reality, he served as an obstacle to the investigation of the CIA’s possible role in the JFK assassination.  Moreover, the CIA never revealed Joannides’ role in the DRE to the HSCA or, for that matter, to the ARRB.

It gets even worse. It turns out that the CIA awarded a medal to Joannides for his role with the DRE, his role as an obstacle with the HSCA, and for his lies and deception to official investigatory commissions.

So, what was going on here? Why did the CIA fight so fiercely for so long to cover all this up? Because the last thing the CIA wanted was for people to find out its role in setting up Oswald to take the fall for the assassination. Knowing the deeply seated Cold War fear of communists and communism that had been inculcated in the American people, the national-security state knew that the best thing it could ever do was to frame a “communist.” But obviously it would not be beneficial to the plot for people to know the role that the CIA had played in establishing the “communist” that was being framed.

With the fraudulent autopsy, the fraudulent Zapruder film, and now the incriminating Joannides files, the national-security establishment is guilty as charged beyond a reasonable doubt of the assassination of President Kennedy. There is no way around it, not even for the U.S. mainstream press, which, needless to say, continues hewing to the ludicrous lone-nut theory of the assassination.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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On April 2 U.S. President Donald Trump declared a ‘Liberation Day’ by introducing tariffs on nearly all imports to the United States.

I adred to predict:

The ‘invisible hand’ of the markets will respond to Trump’s moves by showing him a very visible finger.

The following days confirmed my take.

The tariff rates Trump announced were basically picked from hot air. The whole idea behind them were based on the weird theories of Steve Miran, the Chairman of Trump’s President Council of Economic Advisors. They did not make sense.

By April 9 the markets hit back:

Treasury yields spiked on Wednesday as investors bailed out of what has been perceived as the world’s safest instrument on expectations of crumbling foreign demand as tariffs take effect.
…
Yields settled down after China called for dialogue with the U.S. on trade, and then moved right back near the highs of the day after China said it was increasing its tariffs on the U.S. to 84%.
…
“Something has broken tonight in the bond market. We are seeing a disorderly liquidation,” said Jim Bianco, president and macro strategist at Bianco Research.

Shortly thereafter Trump had to pull back (archived):

The economic turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields, caused Mr. Trump to blink on Wednesday afternoon and pause his “reciprocal” tariffs for most countries for the next 90 days, according to four people with direct knowledge of the president’s decision.

Trump’s unsteadiness on tariffs increased the uncertainty of economic decisions. Uncertainty is a poison, suppressing real economic activities.

The Federal Reserve Bank St. Louis produces hundreds of economic statistics. It includes several which are measuring uncertainty:

bigger

That FRED graph only included February. The doubt about Trump’s economic policies had pushed it that high. The consequences of his tariff games were not yet visible.

Here is the current FRED overview graph of economic uncertainty. The index has reached a new record high:

bigger

When Trump had pulled back and announced his 90 days pause on tariffs, he and his advisors were hopeful that other countries would come to negotiate:

PETER NAVARRO:
…
So that’s what we set, knowing full well, knowing full well that a lot of countries would come right to us and want a bargain. We’ve got 90 deals in 90 days possibly pending here.

Up to today, two days before the 90 day pause on tariffs expires, no trade deal was done. There are three new ‘framework agreements’ – with the UK, Vietnam, and China – which are more or less just letter’s of intent but not agreements.

With the tariff pause ending, and no trade deals done, the Trump administration is forced to extend its tariff pause:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that the U.S. will revert to steep country-by-country tariff rates at the beginning of August, weeks after the tariff rate pause is set to expire.
…
CNN host Dana Bash responded to Bessent on Sunday, saying, “There’s basically a new deadline,” prompting Bessent to push back.

“It’s not a new deadline. We are saying this is when it’s happening,” Bessent said. “If you want to speed things up, have at it. If you want to go back to the old rate, that’s your choice.”

On Friday, Trump, too, referred to an Aug. 1 deadline, raising questions about whether the July 9 deadline still stands.

The Trump administration is also moving the goalposts. Instead of negotiating trade agreements with individual countries the administration will just send out letters of, so far, unknown content:

Trump said Friday that the administration would start sending letters to countries, adding, “I think by the 9th they’ll be fully covered.”

“They’ll range in value from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs, but they’re going to be starting to go out sometime tomorrow,” Trump said overnight on Friday. “We’ve done the final form, and it’s basically going to explain what the countries are going to be paying in tariffs.”

Trump said in a Truth Social post late Sunday evening that tariff letters would be delivered starting at noon on Monday.

There is only one country who’s people will have to pay those tariffs and the is the U.S. itself.

There is little reason for other countries to react in any other way to the U.S. than by imposing symmetrical tariff measures. For many of them U.S. markets are no longer important enough. That is why most countries have simply ignored the matter:

Bessent also said Sunday that “many of these countries never even contacted us.”

The whole Trump strategy of imposing tariffs to regain industrial activity and to impose its political aims on other countries have failed. China and the EU, the U.S. biggest trade partners, have not flinched. Others have followed their example.

Meanwhile the damage imposed by heightened trade uncertainty continues to accumulate. People are already paying higher prices.

A year from now, when the 2026 midterm elections come up, the damage from tariffs will be what really matters.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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Few (if any) people who served in the Kiev regime are as controversial as Oleksiy Arestovych (or Alexey Arestovich, depending on his rather unstable mood). He served as an advisor to the Neo-Nazi junta frontman Volodymyr Zelensky for around three years and became quite notorious due to his extremely inconsistent and rather “colorful” statements (euphemistically speaking). Arestovich is known (or should we say, infamous) for his highly charged rhetoric, ranging from outright deranged and extremist (such as his admiration for ISIS) to surprisingly realistic (such as the admission that the pathologically Russophobic United Kingdom sabotaged a peace deal in early 2022). The latter has become somewhat more prevalent in recent years, particularly after Arestovich left his position in the Kiev regime.

At some point, he even called Zelensky a delusional dictator (talk about an understatement), although this could be attributed to the neverending political power struggle in NATO-occupied Ukraine. Interestingly, while he’s seen as an extremist in Russia and is even prosecuted as such by the Russian legal system (for good reason, obviously), he’s also seen as a “traitor” by the Neo-Nazi junta, which has accused him of undermining “the constitutional order” and imposed sanctions on him as a result. Arestovich now resides in the United States, in what could be described as a “comfortable political exile”. However, what’s certainly “uncomfortable” are his statements (for the Kiev regime, obviously). Namely, he recently stated that Russia is using just 5% of its power and that “it could easily crush us, but chooses not to”.

Arestovich then went on to explain that the Kremlin is fighting on “easy mode” because it wants to “avoid overheating the Russian society”. He also stated that the idea of “a surprisingly strong Ukraine” comes from the fact that “Moscow is simply not fighting a real war, but a special military operation (SMO)”. Arestovich pointed out that the Russian military has only announced partial mobilization once and that its troops have regular rotation, unlike the Neo-Nazi junta forces, where soldiers are forced to fight for years. He also contrasted Russia’s “5% effort” with the Kiev regime’s use of 40% of its budget to wage the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict, clearly implying that “Moscow isn’t even trying yet” and pointing out that “700,000 Russian soldiers are fighting a million Ukrainians” (and still advancing on all fronts).

Arestovich then explained that if the Kremlin wanted to, it could “easily mobilize two million troops, ramp up military spending to full wartime levels and erase Ukraine from the map in three months”. His exact words include a rather colorful analogy, as he stated that the Neo-Nazi junta would be “crushed like a rotten walnut”. Arestovich admitted that “it’s clear Russia doesn’t want to destroy Ukraine, because it still sees Ukrainians as brothers, misguided and misled, but still part of the same historical and cultural space”. And indeed, this is evident in President Vladimir Putin’s regular statements about the clearly Russian origins of the vast majority of Ukrainians and the inextricable historical, cultural, religious, linguistic and even simple genetic ties between Russia and Ukraine (now mostly occupied by NATO invaders).

Arestovich argues that “Russia could turn this into a real war, the kind that leaves nothing standing, but chooses to fight with restraint, using volunteers and contracted soldiers rather than throwing its full weight into the fight”.

He also thinks that the Kiev regime is still surviving because of a combination of the political West’s massive investment to prolong this NATO-orchestrated conflict and the Kremlin holding back, rather than its own strength, arguing that the aforementioned Russian restraint stems from the desire to avoid widespread destruction in NATO-occupied Ukraine.

Arestovich also mentioned the infamous TCC and its kidnapping of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of regular Ukrainians in order to fill the ranks of frontline troops and contrasted that to Russia’s professional and all-volunteer military.

It should be noted that the timing of this particular statement is rather interesting. Namely, the Russian military is now targeting TCC offices en masse, thus preventing the brutal practice of kidnapping regular men off the streets. Ukrainians themselves are supporting this effort, with many providing the exact coordinates of the offices of this monstrous NATO-run criminal organization. These Territorial Centers of Recruitment and Social Support (TCR and SS or sometimes just TCR), better known under acronyms such as the TCC or TCK, were established with direct Western support (or should we say directive) to enforce conscription of regular Ukrainians and prolong this NATO-orchestrated war. Worse yet, the US-led political West keeps insisting that forced conscription should be expanded to also include Ukrainian teenagers.

Obviously, this makes the Neo-Nazi junta the primary tool of NATO’s genocide against Ukrainians, with the TCC serving as the main enforcer on the ground. The Russian military has long been collecting intelligence on TCC offices and its personnel, so it’s now targeting them with pinpoint precision, disrupting the Kiev regime’s ability to forcibly fill its ranks with more cannon fodder. Expectedly, the Neo-Nazi junta keeps complaining about this, particularly in recent days. TCC personnel are universally hated in NATO-occupied Ukraine, as they’re engaged in corruption, taking bribes to “exempt” the few who can afford it, while everyone else is subjected to utter brutality and effectively sentenced to death if they’re sent to the frontlines. Due to this, TCC personnel are seen as cowards, afraid to fight the Russians, but perfectly happy to force someone else to do it.

Moscow has long sought to neutralize the TCC, but this is much easier said than done, as this monstrous NATO-run criminal organization is one of the Kiev regime’s most heavily protected institutions. Its henchmen are effectively exempt from prosecution and essentially have a carte blanche to do whatever they please, as long as they keep the meat grinder running.

As the situation on the frontlines deteriorates, the Neo-Nazi junta is in panic mode and wants to prevent the total collapse of its defenses, so it needs more cannon fodder. The Russian military is certainly aware of this, so it launched these extremely well-coordinated long-range strikes that aim to prevent this. As previously mentioned, many Ukrainians themselves are helping by providing the exact coordinates of TCC offices, as they realize this could accelerate the end of this NATO-orchestrated war.

Source Infobrics.org

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Voters have always supported the politicians who they have recognized are offering the most freedom.

George Washington’s Federalist Party offered the force to keep the British government away. Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party offered continuing independence but also more freedom than the war-supporting Federalists. Andrew Jackson’s and Martin Van Buren’s Democratic Party offered smaller governments, no central banking, and no debt. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party offered freedom from slavery. Ronald Reagan offered freedom from 1970s inflation.

Voters have a system problem. Since the dawn of Progressive control, starting in 1894, the USA has not had a small-government major party. Fortunately for us, system design is a strong suit for Elon Musk.

Voters also have an off-the-shelf solution ready to use. The Constitution has rules to limit governments’ powers. The Constitution gives these rules force with elegant, multiple layers of sanctions: powers are separated and offsetting, so each separated power will limit others.

But from the founding of the nation until now, no party has been chartered to have an analogous constitution, so that at least one party and its representatives will be limited too. It’s high time that we create at least one such party.

A party that’s limited by a party constitution will be a major, credible advance.

A party constitution will be effective for limiting the party, and this in turn will make the Constitution effective for limiting the governments, because a party is a radically-smaller, much-more-controllable system. A party’s only appropriate power is to help its grassroots voters select good people to run for political offices. Good people will then turn and use their constitutional powers to limit others in governments.

Voters have been choosing between lesser evils, and what they’ve been getting left with has still been evil. Voters know that; voters live through that. Voters haven’t been able to see that they’ve had credible good options.

Elon Musk could easily get overpowered by donations from the cronies who are supported by our massive governments. Musk needs to spend well. Fighting it out in primaries—running cage matches to the political death, under the Republican Party’s rules of engagement, up against well-stocked cronies’ war chests—would be fighting at a severe disadvantage. It’s not desirable. And it’s not necessary. There’s a ready bypass.

A good party won’t need money to get people to hear about it. It won’t need money to smear opponents or scare voters.

Just underwrite the work of achieving and maintaining ballot access for a good party. Ballot access has been proven for years to be achievable, by various lightly-funded parties and independents in various races.

Voters are more than ready to vote for the candidates of a good party.

What voters need to see is that a party will be running candidates across the board in general elections, and that those candidates can be counted on to increase freedom.

Such a party won’t really be a third party; it will be the lynchpin of the second major party.

The dominant major party is the Progressives, who are made up of all Democrats and most Republicans. The second major party is the constitutionalists.

Currently, the constitutionalists’ ranks are being decimated by going along with Trump. Despite this, most Freedom Caucus members and allies would caucus with a constitutionalist party’s politicians. A new party need not fight for and take all the Republican-held territory at the outset. Most all of the people who have wavered would turn back and work seamlessly alongside a constitutionalist new party’s politicians.

The Constitution makes all the necessary actions legal, feasible, and ready to implement. Politicians who actually follow the Constitution will limit governments from day one, increasing freedom.

The Dutch Republic, and then the British Isles, and then the USA each proved spectacularly that an underdog’s resources can lead the world, given the right ideas and approaches.

Constitution support. Ballot access. The keys to a next surge up in freedom are well within reach for Elon Musk, and for we the people. Now, in our time, let’s get this done!

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