Lew Rockwell Institute

Remember a year ago when the US BORDER WAS WIDE OPEN and vast numbers of immigrant-invaders were being helped into our country by the Democrats?  NO FEDERAL JUDGE ANYWHERE DID ANYTHING ABOUT THE TOTAL FAILURE OF THE DEMOCRATS TO DEFEND US BORDERS.

NOW THAT THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS TRYING TO SEND THE ILLEGALS BACK, THERE IS NO END OF JUDGES AT WORK PREVENTING THE EJECTION OF THOSE WHO ENTERED ILLEGALLY.

The executive branch, which had been rising in power since the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime, is now unable to perform its lawfully required duty to protect America’s border without appealing to the Supreme Court for help against a politicized anti-American Democrat political operative in a judicial robe.  Large numbers of these despicable creatures have arisen to deny that the President of the United States has any powers of his office.  He must do what they say.

This is a massive change from the George W. Bush regime when President Bush declared his power to hold US citizens indefinitely on suspicion alone without evidence or due process or law.  The judiciary had nothing to say.

This is again a massive change from President Obama’s assertion that he had the power to execute American citizens on suspicion alone without due process of law.  The judiciary had nothing to say.

It is only when a president exercises his clear authority to deport illegal entrants into the US  that the judiciary opens its corrupt mouth.  I have no idea why MAGA-Americans and the Trump administration put up with an utterly corrupt anti-American, anti-white, collection of despicable robed tyrants.  Why aren’t they deported?  President Lincoln deported a US Representative who disagreed with Lincoln’s invasion of the Confederacy.

In the first months of the Trump administration we  have seen time and again judges assuming they are God exercising rule over the electorate.

This time, and there will be several more by tomorrow, Trump is appealing to the US Supreme Court for the judiciary’s permission for him to exercise the powers of his office.  In an office somewhere in the 50 states a robed political activist has ruled that Trump cannot deport illegals unless DHS (Department of Homeland Security) first satisfies an onerous set of procedures invented by the district court political activist “judge” to assess any potential claim under the Convention Against Torture. See here.

Tell me, MAGA-Americans, how the Trump administration can deport millions of illegal entrants under these conditions.  It cannot be done.

I conclude that no more than  perhaps a thousand or two of illegal entrants will ever be deported, which means that American white European ethnicity is being watered down and America  is being transformed into a multicultural Tower of Babel devoid of a common belief system and unity.  Essentially, America is being erased.  

The MAGA Revolution has been brought to heel by the judiciary which is enforcing a Tower of Babel upon America.  

The post Kritarchy Is Taking Over America appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Let there be loneliness, for where there is loneliness, there is also love, and where there is suffering, there is also joy.” – Clark E. Moustakas, Loneliness

As regular readers of this column may know, I like to begin each edition with a story from my life that I hope encapsulates the theme of the book I am featuring. When I started thinking about writing a column on loneliness, I’d sit down in my reading chair at home to quiet my mind or I’d go for a walk in my pleasant neighborhood amidst the fresh spring air and budding trees and search my memory for times when I felt lonely. As I thought back through my life in search of times of loneliness, I found that I either had none or that I had many. That is, it seems that either I’ve never been lonely, or I’ve been lonely most of my life and, like a fish in water, never really knew it because I had nothing else with which to compare it.

I do know that I’ve never felt lonely when I’ve been alone at my house or in some natural setting, such as a beach, or when I’ve gone on solitary retreats to a remote Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, or when I’d spent a month holed up in a ramshackle, off-the grid cabin on the rugged and gloriously desolate northern coast of Maine, far from the madding crowd. If pressed to recall times when I may have felt lonelier than others, it would have to be when I’ve been among other people—eating alone in boisterous restaurants, sitting in a crowded park, even walking down the sidewalks of New York City. So, when the evil ones rolled out the COVID-19 psyop with the lockdowns that were intended to isolate and atomize each of us into individual silos of lonely self-abnegation, thinking we’d eventually hate ourselves enough to give up our individual sovereignty and well-being, I never felt compelled to comply with the jab mandates that followed so I could return to socializing again.

I enjoy my own company or the company of my girlfriend or of a few close friends more than large gatherings of any sort. I’ve always felt this way. The smaller the group the better; and even those occasions are quite rare for me. All during the most rabid phases of the COVID-19 psyop throughout 2020 and 2021, I never felt that I had to trade in my individual autonomy and jump on the jabfest bandwagon to feel a part of any cause or group that was more valuable and more important than what I already had—and what I’ve always had as long as I can remember: a sense of self-possession.

At the time when the government was trying to ban any sort of socializing, I met some new, lovely, like-minded friends, and we got together regularly at our homes—unflappable, unafraid, unjabbed. Living our lives. But not according to the “new normal,” that charade of social distancing that was trotted out to “stop the spread” but was actually just one more nail in the coffin of civilization. Not that. But the old normal. And not one of us ever got sick with what was supposedly going around like wildfire and killing scores of victims all around the world. I knew it was a lie and so did the rest of us. As for myself, no one was going to be able to push me around or twist my arm or hold out some paltry reward like a carrot on a stick for me to chase—such as free doughnuts—to give me something I never wanted in the first place, then or ever.

On top of that, I soon figured out what was really going on and it had nothing to do with a public health crisis. It was a military operation designed to control us. I smelled it like you can smell the rain before the storm. I’d once lived in China and twice visited the Soviet Union. I learned from firsthand experience something about how totalitarian governments operate. So perhaps I’d had a kind of head start in putting together what would turn out to be millions of pieces of this multi-dimensional puzzle—a puzzle whose purpose was to bamboozle and terrorize the credulous masses. What I saw in China and the U.S.S.R. I saw happening here in America in the March 2020 assault on our sacrosanct ways of life, saw the actual threat to our democracy—not the fake threat of the populist movement ballyhooed by the lamestream media the past several years—unfolding before my eyes. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And as I tried to warn others, I saw my social circle, already small, shrink.

In just a few lines from her hefty 1948 tome, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt highlights the essence of what I saw happening with the COVID-19 psyop:

“Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

This awareness has not made my life any easier from the spring of 2020 and right up to the present. I felt—and still feel—the pain of being shunned by many friends who’d allowed themselves to get caught up in the web of lies. I know others who, through their comments here on Substack or via personal emails, since I began writing about the COVID-19 psyop in the fall of 2021, were also shunned by others for not submitting to the diktats of the powers-that-should-not-be. What’s been particularly painful for them to experience—and for me to read about—is the shattering of familial bonds, which was also intended by the evil ones as a key component in their takedown of our culture. For instance, some of those who’ve contacted me are older parents who reluctantly submitted to the trickster jab crusade only because their children would not let them visit their grandchildren without their first getting inoculated. I find such ignorant cruelty utterly unfathomable.

While billions not only submitted to these heinous demands, for whatever their reasons, there are others who fully backed them. Many of us witnessed with helpless despair in our hearts people and organizations of considerable influence whip up angry, unhinged mobs coalescing around the jabfest at every turn—on television news, in newspapers, on TV talk shows, in governments at every level, and among the leaders of our nation’s corporations, schools, hospitals, and nonprofit organizations. You name it, the lies were everywhere. And hundreds of millions of people fell for them. By now, we’ve all heard the tired excuse: We didn’t know. I knew. As did so many others. Our pleas for sobriety fell on deaf ears just as they would a raging alcoholic deep in his cups.

What was driving this insanity? I think it was more than merely the fear of getting sick and dying. Stella Morabito, in a 2022 book of hers that I read around this time last year, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide and Conquer, has this to say:

“It comes from a sense of alienation within the psyche of the individual who wants desperately to be a part of something. He wants to be part of an in-group, often associated with the slogan of being ‘on the right side of history,’ the group that will cure the supposed malady of social injustice. It’s a combination of alienation and the yearning to belong that is the true malady that sparks mob members into action.”

That’s what I think drove the madness, or at the very least fanned its flames.

Back in 1964, when I was 11 years old and Barbara Streisand crooned in the popular song “People” that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” I remember thinking, no, they aren’t. Maybe the song was trying to sell something, to conjure up some beatific vision of dependency, allowing others to define us and bestow value to the self. Although I did not know that then, I was still having none of it. Or maybe my pre-pubescent, developing brain had indeed picked up what I now understand to be the song’s schmaltzy, sentimental, subliminal messaging: Those who don’t need people are the unluckiest people in the world and something must definitely be wrong with you.

Years later, I read Henry David Thoreau’s book, Walden. It was there that I found something that did resonate with my soul. He writes, “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.” And I thought, yes, that’s it. These are the luckiest people in the world. And I’m happy that I can count myself among them. I’m not boasting. I’m not flattering myself. It’s merely the cloth out of which I am cut. Yet, I believe we can all learn how to savor solitude and find out why it’s important to deal with loneliness in a healthy manner.

Solitude and the sort of self-reliance and independent thought that Ralph Waldo Emerson writes about in his 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance,” nurture one another. Emerson writes:

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Co-conspirators in breaking free from the suffocating Victorian conformity of their day, Thoreau and Emerson were chums. Just shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, Thoreau built himself a hut on the north shore of Walden Pond, a small (64.5 acres) and in a surprisingly deep (102 feet at its deepest) glacial “kettle hole” two miles south of Concord, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1845 on land that Emerson owned. Thoreau stayed there for two years. Emerson even paid Thoreau a visit from time to time. In the summer of 1847, a little more than two years after Thoreau first settled in at Walden Pond, Emerson invited him to stay with his wife and children, while Emerson himself went to Europe. Thoreau accepted the offer. In September 1847, he left his cabin and never returned. But he paid homage to his experience in a little gem of a book, which was published in 1854, whose popularity remains to this day. (Walden Pond is now a protected part of the Walden Pond State Reservation. There is a replica of Thoreau’s cabin on the grounds. The original site of the cabin is marked by a pile of stones.)\

Looking back through the years, I wonder if I came into the world unknowingly prepared for the COVID-19 psyop, as well as the myriad of social, political, media, military, and geoengineering ploys and exercises behind the structural decimation of Western civilization leading up to it, some of which I was aware of as they were happening, others of which I’ve only more recently learned about in hindsight, and some of which I’m still discovering. It’s not been a sudden baptism by fire for me; it’s been more like a slow burn, clearing away all the distractions that grow like weeds and have hidden the truth from all of us. No matter when or how these revelations have found me—or I have found them—in a mutual embrace, what I’ve seen I can no longer not see nor deny the unsettling conclusion that the material world is run by psychopaths.

Since one of the primary objectives of the COVID-19 psyop was to secure once and for all the isolation and atomization of each of us in order to compel us to submit to its evil diktats—the lockdowns, the closures, the masking, the jab mandates—to “stop the spread” so we could get back the life they took away from us, I was preternaturally immune to the real virus that was going around. And that virus is the fear of loneliness.

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You’ve probably heard about the turf war between the federal government – Donald Trump – and the state of California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) over who gets to decree “emissions” requirements for motor vehicles sold in California.

And not just in California.

CARB is a state-level bureaucracy that operates effectively as a national one by emitting regulations for California that are followed by the vehicle manufacturers because so many other states have aped CARB’s regulatory emissions that they are effectively obliged to manufacture only “California compliant” vehicles. It would be too expensive to make cars for California and the dozen other states (including New York and most of the New England states as well as western states such as Oregon and Washington) that have aped California’s regulatory regime and then make another batch and sell those in the other states that have not aped California’s regulatory regime.

It would have been much better for the manufacturers if they’d not kowtowed to California in the first place, which is just what they did a long time ago.

CARB began emitting regulations back in the ’70s. The regs required additional hardware be added to new vehicles in order for them to be legal to sell in the state. The regs also limited what could be sold in the state. For example, while GM’s Pontiac division could sell you a new 1979 Trans-Am with the 400 Pontiac V8 and a manual transmission in 49 states, you could only buy the car with the Oldsmobile 403 V8 and an automatic in California, because it was the only drivetrain that was compliant with CARB’s regs. Similarly, certain parts could not be legally sold in CA either unless they carried a “CARB” approved number. (This is still the case today, by the way. There are a plethora of parts that cannot be purchased in CA and that are illegal to install, even if it can be proved they do not increase emissions. Legally, ther only thing that matters is whether they’re . . . legal.)

GM’s mistake – the industry’s  mistake – was to play along to begin with. That never works out – except to the benefit of your enemy. Arguably, what the vehicle manufacturers ought to have done – back in the ’70s – was to tell California its additionally onerous emissions regulations – which exceeded the federal EPA’s requirements – rendered it unfeasible for them to sell new vehicles in the state of California. That they could not justify the additional expense of adding equipment to cars sold only in California in order to be able to sell them legally in the state. This would very quickly have imparted pressure on California’s politicians to yank CARB’s chain because millions of Californians wanting to be able to buy a new car would have demanded it.

Instead, GM and the rest decided to pass the expense along to everyone else – by making all of the vehicles they sold everywhere else  “California compliant.” This included the expense of the winnowing of choices, such as the option to buy a new vehicle with a certain engine or a manual transmission. If it could not be made “California compliant,” it could not be purchased anywhere – because it was no longer available for sale anywhere.

This worked – for awhile – in that car buyers in other states just dug a little deeper and paid more for vehicles that were now all of them “California compliant” even if they didn’t legally have to be. But as always happens whenever you comply with bullies, the bullying increased. CARB decreed new regs requiring “zero emissions” (i.e., battery powered) vehicles be sold in ever-increasing percentages until only “zero emissions” vehicles can be (legally) sold in the state by 2035 . Other states aped CARB, setting the stage for a national de facto electric vehicle mandate, since the only vehicles that can comply with the “zero emissions” regulatory requirement are electric vehicles. (It doesn’t matter, legally speaking, that the manufacture of electric vehicles and the generation of the electricity that powers up their battery packs results in lots of “emissions” – of the dread gas carbon dioxide that some insist is causing the “climate” to “change.” All that matters, legally speaking is that these “emissions” do not emanate from a vehicle’s exhaust pipe.)

This does not work – or rather, won’t – because most people who do not live in California do not want to be forced to buy an EV and couldn’t afford one, even if they did. The vehicle manufacturers are aware of this, but they have complied themselves into a corner. How do they walk it back? It is no easy thing to do. It is on par with getting out of a bad marriage you knew going into it wasn’t going to be good. How much easier it would be now if you’d never reluctantly said “I do” to begin with.

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Tim McGraw wrote:

Hi Bumper,   Pope Leo and the IRS

Thanks for your excellent article on Pope Leo and the IRS. The story of Irwin Schiff’s treatment under “the law” by the IRS and a federal judge is horrific. There was no justice with the IRS. We all pay an exit tax either by renouncing our citizenship or when we die. The IRS wants it all.

The post Pope Leo and the IRS appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

The Mark 84, 2000 Pound Bomb

These are the big conventional bombs being used in wars today, including by Israel against Gaza. 

General Dynamics is the main supplier of the bombs. They have 26 bomb plants in the US and Canada. The main bomb plant appears to be in Camden, Arkansas. They had an explosion there last year:

Explosion at General Dynamics Plant in Arkansas

The bombs cost $16,000 each.

The post The Mark 84, 2000 Pound Bomb appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

The Abandon All Hope Pope.

See here.

The post The Depopulation Death Pope appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Responsible Statecraft

The post Surprise: CIA link to sketchy Israeli aid scheme appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Le Monde

The post In Israel, rhetoric dehumanizing Palestinians and calls for eradicating Gaza have become commonplace appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com

The post US Airstrikes in Somalia Have Surged Under Trump, On Pace To Break Record appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Covert Action Magazine

The post CIA Cold War Experiments Shattered the Minds of Countless Unwitting Victims appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Middle East Eye

The post Father killed, mother abducted and tortured: Gaza boy recounts Israeli raid appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Daily Beast

The post Opinion: The Most Terrifying Company in America Is Probably One You’ve Never Heard Of appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer . 

The post The MRI Surprise No One Is Talking About—Bret Weinstein’s Gadolinium Story appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  Johnny Kramer . 

The post Impossible Challenges appeared first on LewRockwell.

I’m guessing that Javier Milei can.

The post Can You Spell “Political Puppet”? How About “Political Kickback”? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Smith. 

The Guardian

The post Gaza’s youngest influencer aged 11 among children killed by Israeli strikes appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith.

The Guardian

The post Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert says his country is committing war crimes appeared first on LewRockwell.

Imagine a very likely scenario, of civil order collapsing and a martial law being imposed over the entire nation. As a survivalist, you cherish your personal freedom. Therefore, you should be concerned regarding what the safest place during martial law is.

In this article, I will list the safest places during martial law, as well as the best spots to hide your survival supplies. But first, a few words about martial law and what it means. Let us begin, shall we?

What Is Martial Law?

Martial law takes place when a government suspend everyday civil laws and rights. In some instances, a military is the one that imposes its control over the civilians. Martial law is declared during nation-wide or region-wide emergencies, such as war, natural disasters, civil unrest, and so forth.

According to the established U.S. legislations, a country-wide martial law can be declared by either the Congress or the President. In addition, any State Governor can declare martial law in their state. Similar laws can apply to almost any country, with varying levels of strictness of the said law.

Martial law is not a rare phenomenon by far. In the USA alone it was declared almost 70 times, while only 2 of these times are related to a war against a foreign nation. A large portion of these instances is, in fact, related to riots, civil unrest, or even labor disputes.

The situation can be even more harrowing outside the United States, especially in the countries where democracy and personal freedom are completely unheard of.

As you understand by now, martial law, even if it’s seemingly necessary, can hinder your rights, privacy, and independence. We will now take a look at what measures can be taken during martial law. Please keep in mind that I do not support physically resisting governmental or military forces.

Top 10 Safest Places During Martial Law

1. An Off-Grid Cabin or Tiny House

A small and remote house is the ideal location during martial law. This could be a cabin, a tiny house, or some sort of a secret retreat. It should be off the grid for two reasons:

• An off-the-grid house does not depend on external power sources, such as the national powerlines. You can produce your own energy by using solar panels, hydropower, or wind power. You can read more about these natural electricity sources from the linked articles. If you produce your own electricity independently, no one can control you by turning the power off.
• Every house and apartment usually have an address. Eventually this makes the things easier for the military and the government, as they go from door to door, checking on everyone. An off-grid house does not need to have an official address. You can remain almost anonymous and disappear off the grid, as you wait out whatever caused the martial law to be deployed.

A classic location: your bug out shelter or any other bunker can definitely function as a safe haven. You will need to ensure that it’s appropriate stocked with such supplies and items as:

• Water
• Canned and unperishable food
• Fuel for the generator. Alternatively, you can use a portable power station, it’s much more reliable and quieter.
• Spare clothes
• Radio
• Blankets
• First aid kit
• Self-defense weapons
• Flashlights

Once you have the place prepared, never disclose its location to anyone outside your small group. If the martial law is imposed, choose the most inconspicuous route to get to your bunker. Listen to the radio to stay updated when the things have cooled down and you can go back home. You will need a radio that does not require batteries and can last for a long time. I recommend getting American Red Cross Emergency Radio. It can be powered by hand crank or solar panel. This radio also includes a smart phone charger, flashlight, flashing beacon, and an alarm clock.

Unlike the specific places on this list, this one is a general recommendation. Staying away from other people and the cities could be the solution you’re looking for. As history proved time and time again, it’s not just the military or the invading forces that you should be concerned about. It’s also the people next door.

When the supplies run low, the unprepared people will start looting their neighbors. The civilized ones will quickly become uncivilized. The urban streets will be unsafe, with riots and looting everywhere. It’s understandable on some level, since everyone wants to survive. But it’s also a good reason to look for a shelter elsewhere, as far from the urban centers as possible.

That’s right, your house can be more than enough during the martial law period. Think about it, you already have all the supplies and comfort, why look for it in remote places? As long as you do not confront the authorities, you might do just fine by staying in your house.

The trick to staying home is laying low. Continue your life as if nothing happened. This might go against your beliefs, but your survival should be the priority. Stock your house with extra food and water, and simply behave “normally”. Going outside could be dangerous because of two major reasons: the military presence, and whatever disaster or disorder that forced the military presence to appear. Staying home could be the wisest thing to do.

If you don’t have a bunker, tiny house or cabin, any abandoned building might do. You still need to ensure that its location is as removed as possible from the military and governmental presence. If it’s outside the city, then it’s even better. This can be an abandoned factory, farm, barn, warehouse, and so forth.

Scout this location before deciding whether or not this will be your shelter. Ensure that it’s not visited by other people throughout the day. Check its general state and structure. Rotting or infested buildings are too unsafe to stay in.

Once you decide on a building, stash essential supplies there. This way, whenever you need to relocate, the supplies will already be there, waiting for you.

The mountains are a very secluded and inaccessible location. No law representative will bother climbing a cliff just to reprimand you for leaving the city.

Retreating to the mountains can also feel like going back to the roots, to your true self. While the martial law limits you as individual, the mountains free you. The air is fresh up there, and no law is enforced on you.

Of course, you need to be completely prepared to spend some time in that challenging environment, especially during the winter. The supplies might get very low and scarce. The weather makes it even more difficult, and you need to know how to treat frost injuries.

Read the Whole Article

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Folks who believe the current political atmosphere is uniquely hateful have forgotten the boundless vitriol prevailing a few decades ago. During the George W. Bush administration, Republicans relied on push-button rage to suppress all criticism of the war on terror. After I appeared on a 2006 Fox News panel and criticized the Bush administration’s secret illegal financial surveillance regime, I was peppered with hostile emails including this gem: “Every know-nothing lying jackass like you should be rounded up and gassed with the Iraqi poison gas that does not exist according to you.”

I’ve never enjoyed poison gas so I eschewed following that suggestion. Unfortunately, most media outlets remained reticent about publishing frontal attacks on President Bush’s most outrageous policies. So, with a hat tip to Monty Python and Jonathan Swift, I sought to satirize my seditious thoughts into print.

On August 27, 2006, the Los Angeles Times ran my “Modest Proposal: Coerce Congress to Tell the Truth.” That piece was accepted and deftly edited by assistant op-ed editor Matt Welch, who is now the Editor at Large for Reason Magazine. Following is a tweaked version of that piece.

What about Congress?

Do Americans deserve the truth about their members of Congress? If so, citizens should be entitled to use the most advanced fact-finding methods approved by the US government.

Many people are unaware of the revolutions sweeping American jurisprudence. In June, the Supreme Court condemned the Bush administration’s torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and declared that the president is “bound to comply with the Rule of Law.” The Bush White House was outraged and is browbeating Congress to enact legislation overturning that court ruling and unleashing its interrogators.

Last month, Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury notified Congress that the administration seeks to use “coerced confessions” in military tribunals at the Cuba base. Bradbury stressed that “there are gradations of coercion much lower than torture.” Those “gradations” veered away from a 400-year trendline against using brute force to determine facts in judicial proceedings.

Congress will likely pass Bush’s Enemy Combatant Military Commissions Act, approving heavy-handed measures to get the truth from people suspected of bad things. Under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, American citizens should be permitted to use the same methods to pry the truth out of their congressmen, many of whom are also suspected of bad things.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has approved a dozen extreme interrogation methods previously banned by the Pentagon, including hooding, forced nudity, and exploiting fear of dogs. When photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq leaked out in 2004, Sen. James Inhofe proclaimed that he was more “outraged by the outrage” than by the pictures of detainees forced to pile into a naked pyramid and a US Army private female dragging a naked Iraqi guy wearing a dog collar.

Inhofe should be blindfolded, put in a straitjacket, and left in a room full of crazed chihuahuas until he explains why the US military should not be constrained to follow the Anti-Torture Act of 1996.

The most iconic Abu Ghraib photo showed an Iraqi man covered in a shroud, standing on a box, with wires attached to his body as if he were awaiting electrocution. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist spearheaded the coverup of the CIA’s use of secret prisons that pummeled detainees. Frist could be similarly wired and attired and compelled to balance atop a rickety box until he explains why he believes the Geneva Convention prohibition on making detainees “disappear” is null and void.

Exposure to extreme cold is another favorite tactic for US interrogators, despite occasional detainee deaths from hypothermia. Sen. Joe Lieberman has been the biggest Democratic apologist for Abu Ghraib in the Senate. He could be strapped to a block of ice until he explains how scandals over Bush’s torture regime helps the US win hearts and minds in the Muslim world.

But if you really want the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then you can’t go wrong by replicating the Spanish Inquisition. Waterboarding involves strapping a person to a board and pouring water down their throat and over their nostrils to make them feel like they are drowning. CIA Director Porter Goss assured Congress that waterboarding is a “professional interrogation method,” not torture. CIA agents proved their professionalism by waterboarding one detainee more than 80 times—and didn’t kill him once.

Citizens should be permitted to bring splintery planks, leather straps, and water tanks to interrogate any member of Congress who denies the Iraq war is becoming a debacle. Any public interrogations of elected representatives should strictly follow the same rules that Bush proposes for military tribunals. Anyone could make anonymous accusations against a member of Congress, and no representative would be allowed to see or cross-examine their detractors. Secret evidence would be allowed but only if it incriminated the accused. Medical doctors would be on hand for any interrogation, ready to formally certify that any resulting fatalities were accidental.

Some people may object that giving Gitmo-style equal treatment to members of Congress could tarnish the dignity of democracy. But that is rather quaint, considering all the outrageous tactics that Congress has already rubber-stamped for Bush’s war on terror. Besides, no one is forcing politicians to approve the use of coerced confessions for everyone else in the world. They still have time to avoid reaping what they sow.

No Shame on Capitol Hill

My mockery failed to shame Congress into decency. In the following weeks, legislators rushed to approve Bush’s barbaric interrogation wish-list. The Boston Globe reported that “because of the Bush administration’s restrictive policy on sharing classified information with Congress, very few of the people engaged in the debate will know what they’re talking about.” Fewer than 50 members of Congress knew what actual interrogation methods were being debated. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)—Trump’s first attorney general—boasted, “I don’t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.” Legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick declared, “We’ve reached a defining moment in our democracy when our elected officials are celebrating their own blind ignorance as a means of keeping the rest of us blindly ignorant as well.”

On September 30, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act (MCA), retroactively legalizing torture that occurred prior to December 30, 2005. The act also blocked torture victims from suing the US government. In the weeks before the midterm elections, the Republican Party vilified any Democratic member of Congress who failed to vote for the MCA as a terrorist lover. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) claimed that Democrats who opposed the MCA had “voted in favor of new rights for terrorists.” Hastert’s cachet suffered after a federal judge condemned him as a “serial child molester” and sent him to prison for bank fraud.

Shortly after the MCA was signed, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that there was no such thing as habeas corpus rights for American citizens. Gonzales previously declared that President Bush enjoyed a “commander-in-chief override” regarding laws prohibiting torture.

The following year, the New York Times published classified documents revealing that the Bush torture program explicitly imitated Soviet interrogation methods from the Cold War, including manacling detainees in painful poses for long periods and pummeling them into submission. Gen. Barry McCaffrey complained, “We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA.” But shortly after Barack Obama became president, he effectively issued a blanket pardon for all US government torturers and torture policymakers (this means you, Dick Cheney).

In 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released a 600-page summary of its report on the CIA torture regime. CIA abuses included death resulting from hypothermia, rape-like rectal feeding of detainees, compelling detainees to stand long periods on broken legs, and thrashing them to stay awake for seven days and nights straight. In some cases, interrogators didn’t know the language of the person they were questioning so they compensated by beating the hell out of them. Psychologists aided the torture regime, offering hints on how to destroy the will and resistance of prisoners. Many detainees were innocent but that didn’t save their skin.

Ironically, after all the shocking disclosures about the Bush-era torture regime, some people still consider my 2006 Los Angeles Times satire to be in bad taste. Instead, plenty of folks likely agree with the conclusion of the Iraqi poison gas email dude: “The reason this country is so screwed up is because of arrogant liberal bastards like you who think they are just so much smarter than anyone else…. Your whole pathetic agenda is to attack the president. I think it is time for you to commit yourself you need serious help.”

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

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