Aggregatore di feed

In ancient Rome, interregnum was the term given to the period between stable governments when anything untoward might occur, and sometimes did – civil unrest, warfare between warlords, power vacuums and, finally, succession wars. But eventually the dust would settle and the victors, whoever they might be, would at some point restabilise the empire, often with a new map, showing the latest lines of geographic possession.

In 1929, the Italian Antonio Gramsci was in a fascist prison, writing about what he considered to be a new interregnum – a Europe that was tearing itself apart. He anticipated civil unrest, war between nations and repeated changes in the lines of geographic possession.

At that time, he was attributed as saying, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

And, of course, looking back from our vantage point in the twenty-first century, we have no difficulty in confirming that he was correct in his prognosis. The world war that followed brought forward the worst traits in mankind. The sociopaths of the world came centre-stage. By the time the dust had settled, tens of millions were dead.

What we do have difficulty with is recognizing that the same pattern is again with us. National leaders and their advisors are spoiling for war, building up weaponry, creating senseless proxy wars in other nations’ backyards and playing a dangerous game of “chicken” with other major powers.

This will not end well. It never does. Once the shoving-match has begun, it only escalates. At some point, whether it’s the false-flag assassination of an Archduke, as in World War I, or the false flag attack on Germany by Poland, as in World War II, we can always count on some excuse being created to justify diving headlong into war.

It’s also true that, when empires get into economic trouble that’s too far gone for any viable solution, a trick that’s always employed by political leaders to keep the citizens from removing them from their seats of power, is to start a war. A people will, if they believe their homeland is in peril, accept the “temporary” removal of their freedoms.

Even in the United States, the famed “Land of the Free,” political leaders have routinely imprisoned dissidents in times of warfare. People tend to get behind their leaders in wartime, no matter how undeserved that loyalty might be.

And so, now is the time of monsters, as Mr. Gramsci rightly stated. A time of uncertainty, when countries are in turmoil and would-be leaders are jostling for power with existing leaders. An interregnum.

Troubled times tend to bring out all the crazies – all the sociopathic-types that would find it hard to succeed in stable, prosperous times.

In such times, the average person becomes worried that things are not going to turn out well. That’s perfectly understandable. Unfortunately, most people lack both the imagination and the courage to cope with how the times are impacting their lives. They instead rely on others to provide a torch that might help them escape from the darkness.

Not surprising then, that every snake-oil salesman in town sees an opportunity to offer big promises – promises that he has neither the ability nor the inclination to fulfill.

At such times, the people of a country tend to become polarized, placing their faith in one political party or another, hoping that their party will “make the bad stuff go away.”

In the US we see, on the liberal side, promises for “free health care for all,” a guaranteed basic income, housing for those who cannot afford it, and an endless stream of promises that, if the government were to implement them all, they will not be able to pay for them, even with 100% taxation from those who presently pay tax.

On the conservative side, we see promises such as “Make America Great Again,” with tax rebates that do not rejuvenate the economy, breaks for firms that have expatriated, but do not fool them into returning, claims to cut budgets, only to increase them, and promises to eliminate debt, only to expand it.

To be sure, the problem begins at the top. But it doesn’t end there. It sifts down to the proletariat, who, unable to come up with constructive solutions, create their own monsters, trashing the shops and burning the cars of people who had no hand in creating the problem.

But surely this is just a one-off phase, in which the best and brightest are temporarily pushed offstage, but will soon return, yes?

Well, unfortunately, no. Historically, a period such as this one is followed by one of increased madness. Historically, the next step is societal breakdown. Riots, secessions and revolutions become commonplace, accompanied by economic collapse.

Out of these events come the worst monsters of all. It’s in the wake of such developments that the people of any country then turn away from those that made the empty promises and toward those who promise revenge against an ill-defined group who are characterized as having caused the problems.

That’s when the Robespierres, the Lenins, the Hitlers – the greatest monsters – are swept into power. They invariably deliver the same message – that they’ll seek out the aristocracy, the gentry, the patricians, and strip them of their positions and possessions.

Invariably the way that this shakes out is not that the average man rises up, taking his “fair share” of the spoils. Instead, the leaders take the spoils and the proletariat are reduced to an equality of poverty.

Our friend Mr. Gramsci found himself imprisoned by Benito Mussolini and died from illnesses incurred in prison. Unfortunately, his approach was to complain, but remain, as his country deteriorated around him. This proved, for him, to be the worst of choices.

And, so it is today.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post ‘Now Is the Time of Monsters’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

During the weeks ahead, I will be watching Israel and Iran like a hawk.  Prior to the 12 day war between Israel and Iran earlier this year, it was clear that something was up.  Now we are witnessing similar signs, and many experts are concerned that the very fragile ceasefire that was agreed to at the end of the 12 day war could soon collapse.  Iran is rebuilding their nuclear sites and is telling western countries that there will be no more negotiations.  On the other side, the U.S. and Israel have both pledged that Iran will not be allowed to rebuild their nuclear program.  In fact, on Sunday President Trump publicly threatened to bomb Iran again…

“They were going to have a nuclear weapon within a month,” Trump said. “And now they can start the operation all over again, but I hope they don’t because we’ll have to take care of that too if they do, I let them know that. You want to do that, it’s fine, but we’re going to take care of that and we’re not going to wait so long.”

Of course President Trump knows very well that Iranian officials have repeatedly stated that they will never give up their nuclear program, and satellite images prove that Iran has been conducting construction work at two very important enrichment facilities…

Three months after US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, new satellite images show signs of construction work at two of its key enrichment facilities.

An analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery captured by Maxar Technologies on 18 September reveals work on a new perimeter and tunnel south of the Natanz enrichment complex.

Multiple construction vehicles are visible in an area south of the complex while digging work appears to be underway. Images also show work to extend a perimeter around that same area.

The Iranians responded to Trump’s threat of more bombing on Monday.

They called the U.S. “a law-breaking country”, and they made it clear that there will be no negotiations…

Iran’s foreign ministry on Monday branded the United States a “law-breaking” country, rejecting any prospect of talks with Washington after US President Donald Trump warned he would again bomb Iran if it resumes nuclear activities.

Trump’s public remarks amounted to an admission of “a criminal and illegal act” that only reinforced America’s image as a violator of international law, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmail Baghaei said during his weekly briefing.

“It will be clear to the international community and to the Iranian nation that the United States is a law-breaking country,” Baghaei added. “We have no plan for negotiations.”

The Iranians have clearly made their choice.

So how long will Trump wait before he pulls the trigger again?

We were surprised by Trump’s timing during the 12 day war, and we may be surprised the next time it happens too.

If we bomb Iran, one of the first places that Iran will hit will be our base in Qatar.

Interestingly, President Trump recently signed an order that makes any attack on Qatar a “threat to the peace and security of the United States”…

President Donald Trump signed an order Monday offering a U.S. guarantee for Qatar’s security — a significant commitment for the rising non-NATO Arab ally.

“The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States,” the order, made public Wednesday, read in no uncertain terms.

“In the event of such an attack, the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures — including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military — to defend the interests of the United States and of the State of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”

Recently, the U.S. military sent a whole bunch of air tankers to our base in Qatar, and that created quite a stir.

Because the last time we witnessed a deployment of air tankers of this magnitude, Iran got bombed…

Behnam Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells the Daily Mail, while ‘correlation is not causation’, he can’t help but think of the last time there was a mass tanker deployment by the United States.

‘Soon after that something went boom in the Middle East. Critically, in Operation Midnight Hammer, the Trump administration executed a decoy or deception effort to mask the flight of the B-2 bombers to Iran,’ Taleblu said, emphasizing that he is the only US president in two decades to deploy over military force against Iranian nuclear facilities.

‘Big military movements on his watch are something to keep an eye on,’ Taleblu added.

Of course it is also possible that those tankers may have been deployed to assist Israel in new strikes against Iran.

As I discussed in a previous article, Iranian forces have already been put on high alert because Iranian leaders are extremely concerned that new attacks could happen at any moment.

And the Institute for the Study of War has come to the conclusion that those running Iran “believe that the ceasefire with Israel will collapse”…

Officials in Iran believe that the ceasefire with Israel will collapse and that conflict will resume in the future, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

The assessment by the Washington, DC think tank outlined how Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SCNC) had directed military and civilian officials to designate successors in the event of leadership disruption to ensure continuation in the event of war.

If at some point the Iranians are convinced that an Israeli strike is imminent, could they actually choose to strike first in order to get the upper hand?

Israeli politician Avigdor Liberman is convinced that this is the case, and he is urging Israeli citizens to “be careful and close to protected spaces” during Sukkot…

He urged Israelis to celebrate cautiously on the coming Sukkot, which starts Monday night and lasts for seven days: “Spend time with family and friends, but be careful and close to protected spaces.”

This year, the first day of Sukkot runs from the evening of October 6th to the evening of October 7th.

Needless to say, October 7th is a very significant date for Israel.

Two years ago, the war in the Middle East started when Hamas terrorists came pouring across the border.

It looks like the conflict in Gaza may be wrapping up, but things with Iran are a long way from being resolved.

Before Israeli leaders sign a comprehensive Middle East peace agreement, they want the threat that Iran poses to be completely neutralized.

So I think that we will soon see major events occur in the Middle East, and when that happens the entire globe will be shocked.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post Trump Is Threatening To Bomb Iran Again, But Israel May Beat Him To It appeared first on LewRockwell.

Everything before October 7 explains why October 7 happened, and so does everything that’s happened since.

Look at what happened before October 7 and you’ll see year after year of murder, oppression and abuse.

Look at everything that’s happened since October 7 and you’ll understand the kind of sadistic, psychopathic regime the Palestinians have been living under this entire time.

Israel supporters don’t want you looking at what happened before October 7, and they don’t want you looking at anything that’s happened since. They just want you to pretend history began and ended with a bunch of Hitlerite savages attacking innocent Jews for no reason.

Never forget October 7th 2023, that fateful day when Israelis were brutally massacred by Israeli tanks and Israeli helicopters and Israeli drones and Israeli soldiers and Israeli bullets, and also by Hamas a bit. pic.twitter.com/bwjdARVQ0p

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 7, 2025

And they don’t even want you looking at the day of October 7 too closely, either. Looking too closely at the events of that day bring up inconvenient questions about the Hannibal Directive and what percentage of the death toll was actually caused by the IDF firing on their own people. Inconvenient questions about the suspicious stock trading in the lead-up to the attack and the mountains upon mountains upon mountains of evidence that high-level Israeli officials allowed the attack to proceed undefended in order to advance the genocidal land grab we’re seeing advanced now.

They only want you looking at the parts of October 7 that make Israel look like an innocent little lamb who was attacked completely out of the blue and had no choice but to reluctantly respond with military force.

Forget the scorched earth incineration of the Gaza Strip.

Forget the bombed-out hospitals and methodically dismantled healthcare system.

Forget the hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza who’ve been deliberately starved to death.

Forget the fact that every relevant human rights institution on earth has determined that Israel is committing genocide, and that zero comparable humanitarian institutions have said it isn’t.

Forget the fact that human rights experts had been describing Gaza as a giant concentration camp or open-air prison for years prior to October 7.

Forget the fact that Israel had been routinely murdering Palestinian children and other civilians in the months prior to the Hamas attack.

Don’t look at any of that stuff. Just look at the stuff that makes Israel look like the victim.

That’s the story, anyway. Luckily, fewer and fewer people are buying into it.

The longer this genocide goes on for, the more the world has come to view October 7 as Israel reaping what it had long been sowing.

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post Everything Before and After October 7 Explains Why October 7 Happened appeared first on LewRockwell.

Washington politicians and bureaucrats are controlling much of your daily life. The more paternalistic government becomes, the more the state is a symbol of the superiority of some people over everyone else. How much wiser must some people be to entitle them to dictate how everyone else lives?

The President Is a Lot Smarter Than You Think was the book title of a 1973 collection of Doonesbury cartoons. The book cover showed a construction worker glaring at a college punk who did not appreciate the wisdom of the commander-in-chief. The cartoon was originally a jibe at diehard Richard Nixon supporters. But since then, the notion that government is smarter than it seems has become the mantra of many social scientists, editorial writers, and pundits.

Paternalism is fashionable in part because it is self-evident — at least inside the Washington, D.C., beltway — that Washingtonians are superior to the rest of the nation. But the paternalist calculus only works if one assumes that the paternalist class is composed of saints untouched by the self-interest, vanity, or vindictiveness that trademark other humans. Paternalism requires the illusion that the political-bureaucratic class has no motivation except serving humanity. In reality, the self-interest of the paternalists leads them to exaggerate their successes, hide their failures, and multiply their prerogatives.

In the same way that premodern political orders presumed that kings and aristocrats were innately superior to peasants, so today’s leviathan requires assuming that bureaucrats are vastly more proficient than private citizens. But it is not sufficient to show that government policymakers have more years of education or more graduate degrees than private citizens. Instead, paternalists need to prove that government officials are almost as superior to average citizens as zookeepers are to caged animals.

Contemporary paternalists presume that citizens will benefit even when policymakers do not know what they are doing. Champions of government intervention tend to focus solely on the mental and moral defects of private citizens and markets. Philosophy professor Sarah Conly, in a 2013 New York Times op-ed headlined, “Three Cheers for the Nanny State,” noted that an “enormous amount of study over the past few decades [shows] that we are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations.” Conly declared that people suffer from “cognitive bias. A lot of times we have a good idea of where we want to go, but a really terrible idea of how to get there.”

But private follies do not magically generate official wisdom. Niclas Berggrena, a Swedish economist, analyzed proposals for government intervention in 2012 and found that 95 percent of paternalist proposals “do not contain any analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers.” His study noted that propaternalist economists “simply assume that one set of actors [politicians and bureaucrats] is free from irrationality…. Political actors were assumed by many economists to be benevolent maximizers of a social welfare function.” Many of the articles that Berggrena analyzed were cited by Cass Sunstein, one of the most prominent paternalists and the Obama White House’s “regulatory czar” and a zealot for government “nudges.”

The disaster of public housing

The pretenses of paternalism are tricky to reconcile with the record of federal agencies. In 1934, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes promised that, thanks to the Roosevelt administration’s public housing program, “Our children will become healthier men and women. There will be a reduction in crime.” But public housing quickly became notorious as the most dangerous locale in many cities. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) conceded in 1979 that some public housing projects had crime rates 20 times higher than the national average. George Sternlieb, director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University, observed in 1982 that public housing creates “a moral and psychological bankruptcy” in “the people who live in it.”

Though public housing is routinely a social disaster, it is often a political success. In Chicago, city aldermen long resisted efforts to raze high-rise housing hells and replace them with smaller housing units. Public housing blocks were advantageous for politicians — even if the police refused to enter them because of sniper fire. As the Chicago Tribune noted, tenants in Chicago Housing Authority high-rises “were beholden to the [local political] machine for the very roofs over their heads.”

In 1994, the National Academy of Public Administration declared that if HUD was not operating “in an effective, accountable manner” within five years, “the President and Congress should seriously consider dismantling the department and moving its programs elsewhere.” HUD continued floundering long after that five-year benchmark. In 2011, the Washington Post compiled hundreds of satellite images to prove that HUD’s largest home-building program was a “dysfunctional system that delivers billions of dollars to local housing agencies with few rules, safeguards or even a reliable way to track projects.” HUD claimed to have no idea that billions of dollars of its grants had been misused. HUD ignored a barrage of complaints from individuals whose neighborhoods were harmed and property devalued by its nondevelopment debacles. The Post noted that HUD “has largely looked the other way: It does not track the pace of construction and often fails to spot defunct deals, instead trusting local agencies to police projects. The result is a trail of failed developments in every corner of the country. Fields where apartment complexes were promised are empty and neglected. Houses that were supposed to be renovated are boarded up and crumbling, eyesores in decaying neighborhoods.”

A cycle of violence

Government routinely blindfolds both itself and its victims. In 1985, the District of Columbia enacted the Youth Rehabilitation Act to expunge the criminal records and avoid giving harsh sentences to offenders under the age of 22. That law, sparked by concern about the high incarceration rate of black males, helps generate some of America’s highest homicide rates. Between 2010 and 2016, 121 offenders who previously received wrist slaps under that Youth Act were charged with murder. The D.C. government and its judges did not even bother tracking subsequent crimes by recipients of Youth Act sentences. As a result, the “cycle of violence has been largely shrouded from public view or oversight,” the Washington Post noted. The toll was exposed only after the Post created software to extract details of every D.C. criminal case since 2010.

The federal government shares the blame for D.C. carnage. In 1997, as part of a budget bailout for the District of Columbia, Congress took over the D.C. parole system and created the federal Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (CSOSA). The federally funded agency routinely fails to notify D.C. police when offenders vanish or otherwise violate the terms of their parole. Almost 1,500 violent crimes were committed by CSOSA-supervised offenders in 2016. CSOSA even ignored the fact that parolees routinely disabled their GPS monitor devices until one of its “clients” (as the agency calls its parolees) brutally raped a college professor in 2016. The Post noted, “About once a week, a D.C. offender under federal supervision ends up as either a victim or a suspect in a homicide investigation…. By August 2015, nearly half of the suspects that D.C. police were charging in killings were offenders under the supervision of CSOSA or were free pending trial.” The CSOSA refused to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Post seeking data on recidivism by its “clients.” CSOSA director Nancy Ware explained her agency’s leniency: “With our population, we want to give them the benefit of the doubt.” But hapless District residents receive no such “benefit of the doubt” from violent predators.

Smokescreens and deception 

Some federal agencies emit smokescreens that completely envelop their operations. In 2011, Defense Secretary Robert Gates lamented his failure to curb Pentagon waste: “My staff and I learned that it was nearly impossible to get accurate information and answers to questions such as ‘How much money do you spend?’ and ‘how many people do you have?’” Chuck Hagel, who became Defense Secretary in 2013, fought the same battle. In 2014, consultants brought in by the Defense Business Board quickly discovered $125 billion in bureaucratic waste. The Washington Post reported, “Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.” The study revealed far more outsiders on the payroll than previously suspected. For instance, “the Army employed 199,661 full-time contractors,” which “exceeded the combined civil workforce for the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development.” The report also revealed that “the average administrative job at the Pentagon was costing taxpayers more than $200,000 [a year], including salary and benefits.” After Hagel resigned as secretary in 2015, Pentagon leaders disavowed the study and resumed their regularly scheduled pleading of budgetary poverty.

The arrogance of the elite

Regardless of the perennial pratfalls of agencies like HUD and the Pentagon, many academics tacitly presume that the federal government is guided by a “brain trust.” That term was first showcased during Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign. Once he took office, he appointed supposedly the smartest people in the land to solve the nation’s problems. Most of the original brain trust were lawyers whose heavy-handed economic interventions produced more chaos than prosperity. But their faith in massive federal spending remained unshaken. As FDR’s team floundered, “brain trust” became a derisive label for arrogant policymakers.

Because most Americans are slackers on history, the Roosevelt administration did not permanently destroy the credibility of a federal “brain trust.” Citizens are still encouraged to believe that there are people smart enough to solve all the problems politicians create. Forty-nine percent of Americans favor “having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country,” according to a 2011 poll. The survey respondents did not specify which army or nuclear warheads the experts would use to enforce their judgments.

Actually, the type of experts trumpeted by the media perennially offer dreadful advice. Philip Tetlock, a University of California research psychologist, analyzed 82,000 predictions made over a 20-year period by 284 widely recognized political experts. In his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment, Tetlock found that experts’ predictions were “only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.” Tetlock noted “a perversely inverse relationship between indicators of good judgment and the qualities the media prizes in pundits.” In Washington, a reputation for wisdom suffices for a grasp of the facts. Experts achieve prominence thanks to their swagger and bluster, not their foresight. As long as experts err in favor of leviathan, their blunders are speedily expunged.

The policy elite, despite their credentials, routinely ignore the “lessons of history” that they piously invoke. Even worse, experts are biased in favor of government interventions that put them in the spotlight. For instance, members of the Council on Foreign Relations are consistently far more enthused about launching foreign wars than the American public. Leslie Gelb, a former top State Department official and one of the most prominent council members, confessed in 2009: “My initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility. We ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves.”

Omniscient paternalism

The Washington area has more certified experts per square mile than anywhere on earth. The District of Columbia has 120 times more political scientists per capita than the rest of the nation. But rather than producing “good governance,” the 3,200 political scientists and legions of other would-be Brain Trusters provide endless pretexts to further extend the federal sway.

In 1956, Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev, in a secret speech condemning the late Josef Stalin, denounced the establishment of a cult presuming that a ruler “supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior.” Contemporary political scientists eschew Stalinist assumptions to justify government interventions. Instead, they tacitly assume the existence of endless mini-Stalins, ready and able to take the helm of every new program. As a result, America is becoming a caretaker democracy in which rulers dupe and punish citizens for their own good.

Paternalism requires degrading assumptions about citizens and deluded assumptions about rulers. But the friends of leviathan have never proffered a cure for the blind spot at the core of their salvation scheme. As novelist Upton Sinclair quipped in 1935, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their power.

This article was originally published in the September 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.

The post Washington’s Brain Trust Mirage appeared first on LewRockwell.

Peter recently appeared on the Land Development Podcast to lay out a simple case: inflation is the central problem for the economy, and the market is already signaling that through the surge in precious metals and commodity prices. He ties that trend to current policy choices — tariffs, deficit spending and energy misallocation — and warns those choices will raise costs for ordinary buyers and borrowers.

He starts by noting how the market has rewarded holders of foreign stocks and commodities this year, including precious metals, and how that strength is showing up in client portfolios:

Of course, gold and silver stocks, a lot of silver stocks have tripled, quadrupled this year. Gold stocks have more than doubled. So it’s probably the best year that I’ve had as far as returns for my clients. Even my non-gold stocks, you know, my standard portfolios are up over 40% on the year. So it’s a great year to be invested in foreign stocks, in precious metals, commodities in general, I think.

Peter reads those moves in the precious metals complex as a direct signal about inflation — not as a speculative fad but as the market’s way of pricing in currency debasement. He points the finger at Washington’s policies, arguing that political promises to “get rid of inflation” collide with actions that create it:

I mean, gold is not almost $3,800 an ounce, because there’s not an inflation problem. Silver is not over 46, because we don’t have to worry about inflation. The precious metals are telling us that the thing that we should be worried most about is inflation. And that’s because that’s basically Donald Trump’s economic policy is to create inflation. Even though he campaigned on getting rid of inflation, his entire presidency is about making more inflation.

He explains why politicians tend to avoid the medicine that would actually cure inflation — the short, painful adjustments that markets require — and how that avoidance locks in worse long-term outcomes:

The reason he doesn’t want to actually solve the problems is because doing that brings about a severe recession that nobody can deny. It’s going to mean higher interest rates. It’s going to mean lower stock prices, lower real estate prices. A lot of companies are going to fail because they won’t be able to pay their debt. The government’s going to have to cut spending, including on entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and that’s going to anger a lot of voters.

Those policy choices have concrete effects for everyday purchases, not only for retirees or investors. Peter points to tariffs as a clear, immediate driver of higher costs in housing and construction materials, compounding inflation rather than solving anything:

If you buy a new home and you want some furniture, now there’s 30% extra tariffs on any of it that’s upholstered. So Trump keeps on slapping tariffs. We got them already on steel, on aluminum, and lumber. All the stuff that you need to build homes are not only more expensive because of the tariffs, but they’re going to be more expensive because of inflation, which is going to drive the cost of everything. So you’re not going to have a lot of new supply.

That makes the government’s recent tilt toward promoting cryptocurrencies even more baffling to Peter. He sees a political push to encourage retail buying of Bitcoin and other tokens as a kind of national-scale pump-and-dump that distracts from real investment in productivity, while wasting scarce energy resources that could serve AI development and data centers:

Now they’ve taken the Bitcoin pump and dump scheme and they’ve basically gone national with it where the government is doing the pumping. So the government is trying to help sucker people into buying Bitcoin or Ethereum or all these other you know alt coins … But it is very unfortunate that Trump is encouraging all this, because first of all I talked earlier about where’s the energy going to come from for AI. Well, we’re wasting a lot of energy mining all these tokens. So that’s one thing that we could give up.

This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.

The post Inflation Is the Threat appeared first on LewRockwell.

It was unexpected, but the advocates of generalized war, the Straussians, expelled from the governing bodies of the United States, have regrouped in intergovernmental organizations. To everyone’s surprise, they are present in the European Union, but especially in the United Nations and in the Contact Group on the Defense of Ukraine. Institutions dedicated to peace have been hijacked by the warmongers.

For nearly a year, President Donald Trump has been putting America back in order. He has reestablished the principles of equality before the law and merit-based promotion at the expense of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). He has slashed federal budgets for anything related to imperial spending and attempted to restore the military’s primary function: homeland defense.

At the same time, we all see how he is failing to achieve the peace he hoped for in Ukraine and Palestine. He is letting the Europeans fight not for Ukraine, but against Russia and Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition persisting in its program of a “Greater Israel,” that is, the annexation of its neighbors  [ 1 ] .

However, we fail to see the worst of it: the Straussians, who held the upper hand under George Bush Jr., Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, are still not defeated. They have retreated into two intergovernmental organizations: NATO and the UN.

Outside NATO, they have taken control of the Contact Group on the Defence of Ukraine (formerly the Ramstein Group), which, since 9 September, no longer meets alternately at the US military base in Ramstein and at NATO headquarters in Mons-Brussels, but now also in London.

They, along with Ukrainian intelligence, organized drone flights over Western and Northern European airports. They then pushed for the delivery of German Patriot missile batteries to Ukraine, after secretly organizing the transfer of the first batteries from Israel.

They are still the ones who falsified the reports of the UN General Secretariat on the meetings of the Security Council on 19 and 26 September  [ 2 ] . Contrary to these reports – which we were wrong to believe – the Security Council did not validate the return of sanctions against Iran. Moreover, it did not have the power to do so.

This summer, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom adopted a strange common position on the JCPoA, the nuclear agreement signed during the 5+1 negotiations with Iran. As a reminder, the United States led these negotiations ostensibly to end Iran’s military nuclear program and prevent the country from possessing an atomic bomb. After a round of discussions, the meetings were interrupted for a year while Washington and Tehran concluded a secret protocol about which we know nothing. Then the negotiations resumed and were immediately concluded by a treaty in Vienna. It is also important to remember that China and Russia, who participated in the negotiations, both attested that there had been no Iranian military nuclear program since 1988.

The JCPoA was validated by Security Council Resolution 2231 on July 20, 2015. As a result, the sanctions that the council had adopted against Iran were gradually lifted. However, by the following year, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany were questioning the agreement on the grounds that Iran was conducting research on missiles capable of delivering atomic bombs. Ultimately, on May 8, 2018, President Donald Trump (in his first term) decided to withdraw from the agreement on the grounds that it had not prevented Iran from increasing its military power in the Middle East. On September 19, 2020, Elliott Abrams, President Trump’s representative for Venezuela… and Iran, announced the reinstatement of US sanctions, allegedly by resorting to paragraph 11 of the resolution (” snapback mechanism  “). However, neither Washington, nor London, nor Paris, nor Berlin have ever attempted to resort to paragraph 36 of the JCPoA for the simple reason that they would have had to admit that they were wrong.

However, as Iran, China and Russia have been repeatedly saying for the past five years, the JCPoA was included in Resolution 2231. Therefore, it is not possible to activate paragraph 11 of the resolution without taking into account the commitments signed in the JCPoA  [ 3 ] . And these were initially violated by the Europeans and the United States. China stated: “The United States has re-imposed and continuously tightened unilateral sanctions against Iran and adopted maximum pressure measures. As a result, Iran has been unable to enjoy the economic benefits arising from the JCPOA and has been forced to no longer comply with part of its obligations under the JCPOA.”  [ 4 ] Under international law, there is no doubt that the mechanism of resuming sanctions must be considered a unilateral punishment against Iran and an unfair measure.

These legal considerations are not quibbles. Respect for them is essential to international law. There is a hierarchy of standards and one cannot apply a provision of a text without first applying that of a previous text which is linked to it  [ 5 ]

The fact that the UN administration falsified the minutes of two Security Council meetings, as evidenced by the verbatim transcripts of these meetings, leaves no room for doubt  [ 6 ] . This administration is no longer impartial, but is playing into the hands of the opponents of peace in the Middle East.

Do not imagine that the war supporters only control the UN press service. The day after the publication of the falsified summaries of the Security Council meetings, the General Secretariat drafted a “note verbale” (reference: DPPA/SCAD/SCA/4/25(1)) instituting sanctions against Iran as if they had been approved  [ 7 ] . Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia , the Russian Permanent Representative, almost choked. He immediately drafted a letter to the Secretary-General (reference S/2025/610) which he had distributed to the Security Council  [ 8 ] .

We are going through a situation where the General Secretariat, abandoning the impartiality of its function and the principles of international law, has aligned itself with the legal interpretation of two states, permanent members of the council, France and the United Kingdom.

We remember that in 2016, during the war against Syria, the number 2 of the UN, the American Jeffrey Feltman, and his assistant, the German Volker Perthes, had drafted in their office in New York not a peace plan, but a plan for the capitulation of Syria  [ 9 ] . I had commented on this document that I had analyzed for President Bashar al-Assad in my book Before Our Eyes . Taken aback by its content, most historians remained circumspect. The Syrian Arab Republic having been overthrown by the United Kingdom and Turkey. This secret document will be disclosed on the occasion of the publication of this book in German.

In 2016, the United Nations, formed in 1948 to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” was able, contrary to its official purpose, to act to overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic. It implemented the plan A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm [10]  , written by the Straussians for Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. It can therefore, once again, act for war.

This is likely what President Donald Trump was referring to in his speech to the 80th session of the General Assembly on September 23  [ 11 ] . In that speech, he did not criticize the UN in the name of “American exceptionalism”  [ 12 ] like other US presidents before him, but because it did not intervene in his peace efforts on different continents, in seven different conflicts.

We must understand what is happening today: the enemy is no longer Uncle Sam, it is still the Straussians  [ 13 ] , now within the United Nations and the Contact Group on the Defense of Ukraine. They still want to lead us towards generalized war. They now rely on the Israeli revisionist Zionists  [ 14 ] and the Ukrainian integral nationalists  [ 15 ] .

—

[ 1 ]  “  Netanyahu and Nazism  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , September 23, 2025.

[ 2 ]  ”  Security Council opposes continued easing of UN sanctions against Iran  ” and ”  Iranian nuclear: Security Council endorses return to UN sanctions against Iran by rejecting extension of 2015 resolution 2231  “, United Nations.

[ 3 ]  “  Russian position on the British-German-French interpretation of the “snapback”  ”, Voltaire Network, August 29, 2025.

[ 4 ]  “  Chinese position on the British-German-French interpretation of the “snapback”  ”, Voltaire Network , August 19, 2025.

[ 5 ]  “  Iranian protest against accusations from the United States, France and Ukraine  ”, by Amir Saeid Iravani, Voltaire Network , 5 August 2025. “  Russia’s warning to the UN Secretary-General  ”, by Sergei Lavrov, Voltaire Network , 27 September 2025.

[ 6 ]  Minutes of the meetings of the Security Council of 19 and 26 September 2025. United Nations S/PV.10001 and S/PV.10006 .

[ 7 ]  “  General Secretariat reinstates sanctions against Iran  ”, UN (General Secretariat), Voltaire Network , September 27, 2025.

[ 8 ]  “  Russia asks the UN to withdraw its sanctions against Iran taken in violation of the decisions of the Security Council  ”, by Vassily Nebenzia, Voltaire Network , September 29, 2025.

[ 9 ]  “  Germany and the UN against Syria  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Al-Watan (Syria), Voltaire Network , January 28, 2016.

[ 10 ]  “  A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Kingdom of Israel  ,” by Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, Voltaire Network , July 1, 1996.

[ 11 ]  “  Excerpt from Donald Trump’s speech at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly  ”, by Donald Trump, Voltaire Network , September 23, 2025.

[ 12 ]  Proceedings of the conference organized by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy: American Exceptionalism and Human Rights , Michael Ignatieff, Princeton University Press (2005).

[ 13 ]  “  Vladimir Putin declares war on the Straussians  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , March 5, 2022. “  The Straussian coup in Israel  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , March 7, 2023.

[ 14 ]  “  The veil is torn: the hidden truths of Jabotinsky and Netanyahu  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , January 23, 2024.

[ 15 ]  “  Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists?  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , November 15, 2022.

The post Straussians Take Control of the United Nations and NATO appeared first on LewRockwell.

“When they came in the middle of the night, they terrorized the families that were living there. There were children who were without clothing, they were zip tied, taken outside at 3 o’clock in the morning. A senior resident, an American citizen with no warrants, was taken outside and handcuffed for three hours. Doors were blown off their hinges, walls were broken through, immigration agents coming from Black Hawk helicopters … This is America.”—Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson

When the government can label anyone or anything an enemy in order to wage war, we are all in danger.

That danger is no longer theoretical.

In the same breath that the administration touts lethal military strikes against Venezuelan boats in Caribbean waters, federal agents are conducting coordinated militarized raids on homes in Chicago, rappelling down on apartment buildings from Black Hawk helicopters, dragging families out of their homes, separating children from their parents, and using zip ties to immobilize them—even citizens.

The message—spoken and unspoken—is that the government is on a war footing everywhere: abroad, at sea, and now at our front doors.

This “everywhere war” depends on a simple redefinition: call it a war, and the target becomes a combatant. Call the city a battlespace, and its residents become suspects.

What the White House is doing overseas to vessels it deems part of a terrorist network (without any credible proof or due process), it is now mimicking at home with door-kicking raids, mass surveillance, and ideological watchlists.

With the stroke of a pen, President Trump continues to set aside the constitutional safeguards meant to restrain exactly this kind of mission creep, handing himself and his agencies sweeping authority to disregard the very principles on which this nation was founded—principles intended to serve as constitutional safeguards against tyranny, corruption, abuse and overreach put in place by America’s founding fathers.

Take National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), for example.

NSPM-7 directs a government-wide campaign to “investigate,” “disrupt,” and “dismantle” so-called domestic threats, ordering agencies to pool their data, resources, and operations in service of this agenda.

What makes NSPM-7 so dangerous is not only its declared purpose but its breadth and secrecy. There are no clearly defined standards, no meaningful transparency, and no external oversight. The public is told only that the government will protect them—by watching them.

Yet the danger is not only in what the government hides, but in what it chooses to see.

Even more troubling is the way “threats” are defined.

What is being sold as a campaign to disrupt left-wing conspiracies has expanded to include ideology, rhetoric, and belief.

Clearly, this is not just another surveillance program.

NSPM-7 is a framework for rebranding dissent as a danger to be quashed.

The government has a long history of using vague definitions of “extremism” to justify ever-expanding control. Once dissent is rebranded as danger, every act of resistance can be swept into the government’s dragnet.

Whether through counterinsurgency tactics abroad or domestic militarization at home, the pattern is the same: dissent is rebranded as danger, and those who resist government narratives become subjects of investigation.

NSPM-7 merely formalizes this cycle of suspicion.

It also resurrects an old playbook with new machinery—COINTELPRO, digitized and centralized. The tools may be different, but the logic—neutralize dissent—is the same, now scaled up with modern surveillance and stitched together under executive direction. From there, the apparatus needs only a pretext—a checklist of behaviors, viewpoints, associations and beliefs—to justify recasting citizens as suspects.

For years now, the government has flagged certain viewpoints and phrases as potential markers of extremism.

To that list, you can now add “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-American,” among others.

What this means, in practice, is that sermons, protests, blog posts, or donor lists could all be flagged as precursors to terrorism.

Under this policy, America’s founders would be terrorists. Jesus himself would be blacklisted as “anti-Christian” and “anti-capitalist.”

Anything can be declared a war, and anyone can be redefined as an enemy combatant.

The definition shifts with political convenience, but the result is always the same: unchecked executive power.

The president has already labeled drug cartels “unlawful combatants” and insists the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict.”

The raids in Chicago and the White House’s evolving attitude towards surveillance confirm what follows from that logic: this war footing is not confined to foreign shores. It is being turned inward—toward journalists, political opponents, and ordinary citizens whose beliefs or associations are deemed “anti-American.”

By anti-American, this administration really means anti-government, especially when Trump is calling the shots.

According to local news reports, agents arrived in Black Hawk helicopters, trucks and military-style vans, using power tools to breach perimeter fencing, destroying property to gain entry, and zip-tying family members—including children—as they were separated and escorted from the building.

The imagery is unmistakably martial: a domestic operation staged and executed with battlefield methods.

This “everywhere war” lands on a country already saturated with domestic watchlists and dragnet filters.

Federal agencies have leaned on banks and data brokers to run broad, warrantless screens of ordinary Americans’ purchases and movements for so-called “extremism” indicators—everything from buying religious materials to shopping at outdoor stores or booking travel—none of which are crimes.

The point isn’t probable cause; it’s preemptive suspicion.

At the same time, geofence warrants and other bulk location grabs have exposed who went where and with whom—scooping up churchgoers, hotel guests, and passersby across entire city blocks—while a sprawling web of fusion and “real-time crime” centers ingests camera feeds, social posts, license-plate scans, facial recognition, and predictive-policing scores to flag “persons of interest” who have done nothing wrong.

This is how dissent gets relabeled as danger: by surrounding every American with the presumption of guilt first, and constitutional safeguards—if any—much later.

When merely looking a certain way or talking a certain way or voting a certain way is enough to get you singled out and subjected to dehumanizing, cruel treatment by government agents, we are all in danger.

When the president of the United States and his agents threaten to “intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country”—i.e., those who don’t comply with the government’s demands, we are all in danger.

When the police state has a growing list of innocuous terms and behaviors that are suspicious enough to classify someone a terrorist, we are all in danger.

Today it is drug cartels. Yesterday it was immigrants. Tomorrow it could be journalists, political opponents, or ordinary citizens who express views deemed “anti-American.”

With NSPM-7, the Trump White House is not merely amplifying surveillance power—it is institutionalizing a regime in which thought, dissent, and ideological posture become the raw material for domestic investigations and suppression.

Make no mistake: this is an unprecedented escalation in the government’s war on privacy, dissent, and constitutional limits.

Consider the secret phone-records dragnet operated for more than a decade across multiple administrations—formerly “Hemisphere,” now “Data Analytical Services.”

By paying AT&T and exploiting privacy loopholes, the government has gained warrantless access to more than a trillion domestic call records a year, sweeping in not only suspects but their spouses, parents, children, friends—anyone they might have called. Training on the program has reportedly reached beyond drug agents to postal inspectors, prison officials, highway patrol, border units, and even the National Guard.

This is how a surveillance apparatus becomes a governing philosophy.

A presidency armed with NSPM-7 can fuse that kind of dragnet data with interagency “threat” frameworks and ideological watchlists, collapsing the wall between intelligence gathering and political control.

This is how tyrants justify tyranny in order to stay in power.

This is McCarthyism in a digital uniform.

Joseph McCarthy branded critics as Communist infiltrators. Donald Trump brands enemies as “combatants.”

The mechanism is the same: redefine dissent as treachery, then prosecute it under extraordinary powers.

For those old enough to have lived through the McCarthy era, there is a whiff of something in the air that reeks of the heightened paranoia, finger-pointing, fear-mongering, totalitarian tactics that were hallmarks of the 1950s.

Back then, it was the government—spearheaded by Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee—working in tandem with private corporations and individuals to blacklist Americans suspected of being communist sympathizers.

By the time the witch hunts drew to a close, thousands of individuals (the vast majority innocent of any crime) had been accused of communist ties, investigated, subpoenaed, and blacklisted. Careers were ruined, suicides followed, immigration tightened, and free expression chilled.

Seventy-five years later, the same vitriol, fear-mongering, and knee-jerk intolerance are once again being deployed against anyone who dares to think for themselves.

All the while, the American police state continues to march inexorably forward.

This is how fascism, which silences all dissenting views, prevails.

The silence is becoming deafening.

What is unfolding is the logical culmination of years of bipartisan betrayals of the Bill of Rights, from the Cold War to the digital panopticon

What once operated in the shadows of intelligence agencies is now openly coordinated from the Oval Office.

For decades, presidents of both parties have waged a steady assault on the Constitution. Each crisis—Cold War, 9/11, pandemic—became an excuse to concentrate more power in the executive branch.

The Patriot Act normalized warrantless surveillance. The FISA courts gave secret cover for dragnet spying. The NSA’s metadata sweeps exposed millions of Americans’ phone records. Predictive policing and geofencing warrants turned smartphones into government informants.

Each measure, we were told, was temporary, limited, and necessary. None were rolled back. Each became the foundation for the next expansion.

Against this backdrop, NSPM-7 emerges as the next, more dangerous iteration.

What distinguishes it is not merely scale but centralization: the government has moved from piecemeal encroachments to a bold, centralized framework in which the White House claims the prerogative to oversee surveillance across agencies with virtually no external checks.

Oversight by Congress and the courts is reduced to a fig leaf.

This is how liberties die: not with a sudden coup, but with the gradual normalization of extraordinary powers until they are no longer extraordinary at all.

It is the embodiment of James Madison’s nightmare: the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the same hands.

From red-flag seizures and “disinformation” hunts to mail imaging, biometric databases, license-plate grids, and a border-zone where two-thirds of Americans now live under looser search rules, the default has flipped: everyone is collectible, everyone is rankable, and everyone is interruptible.

That is how a free people become reduced to databits first and citizens as an afterthought.

The constitutional stakes couldn’t be higher.

The Fourth Amendment promises that people shall be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. That promise is empty if the President can authorize the government to sweep up data, monitor communications, and track movements without individualized warrants or probable cause.

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, association, and press. Those protections mean little if journalists fear their calls are tapped, if activists believe their networks are infiltrated, or if citizens censor themselves out of fear.

Separation of powers itself is on the line. By directing surveillance policy across government without legislative debate or judicial review, the White House is usurping authority never meant to rest in a single set of hands.

The risks are not hypothetical.

COINTELPRO targeted civil rights leaders and dissidents. The NSA’s bulk collection swept up millions of innocents. Fusion centers today track and analyze daily life.

What was once shocking—the idea that the government might listen in on every phone call or sift through every email—is now treated as the price of living in modern America.

If those older, less centralized programs were abused, why would NSPM-7—with broader reach and weaker oversight—be any different?

This is not speculation. We have seen this progression before.

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued reports on so-called “rightwing extremism” that swept broadly across the ideological spectrum. Economic anxiety, anti-immigration views, gun rights advocacy, even the military service of returning veterans were flagged as potential red flags for extremism.

The backlash was immediate, and DHS was forced to walk back the report, but the damage was done: dissenting views had been equated with dangerous plots.

That same playbook now risks becoming institutionalized under NSPM-7, which consolidates ideological profiling into a White House-directed mandate.

Imagine a journalist investigating corruption within the administration. Under NSPM-7, their sources and communications could be quietly monitored.

Imagine a nonprofit advocating for immigration reform. Its donors and staff could be swept into a database of “domestic threats.”

Imagine an attorney representing a controversial client. Even attorney-client privilege, once considered sacrosanct, could be eroded under a regime that treats dissent as subversion.

These scenarios are not alarmist—they are logical extensions of a system that places no real limits on executive discretion.

With NSPM-7, the line between foreign and domestic surveillance blurs entirely, and every citizen becomes a potential target of investigation.

Unless “we the people” demand accountability, NSPM-7 will become the new normal, entrenched in the machinery of government long after this administration has passed.

We must insist that surveillance be subject to the same constitutional limits that govern every other exercise of state power. We must demand transparency. We must pressure Congress to reclaim its role and courts to enforce constitutional duty. Most of all, we must cultivate a culture of resistance.

The Bill of Rights is not self-executing; it depends on the vigilance of the citizenry.

Civil liberties groups have already sounded the alarm, warning that NSPM-7 authorizes government-wide investigations into nonprofits, activists, and donors. Law scholars call it a dangerous overreach, a program as vague as it is menacing. Even law firms, normally cautious about critiquing executive power, are voicing concern about the risks it poses to attorney-client privilege.

When so many diverse voices converge in warning, we should pay attention.

And yet warnings alone will not stop this juggernaut, because NSPM-7 is not simply about technology or data collection. It is about power—and how fear is weaponized to consolidate that power.

If we are silent now, if we allow NSPM-7 to pass unchallenged, we will have no excuse when the surveillance state tightens its grip further.

When ideas themselves become a trigger for surveillance, the First Amendment loses.

America has entered dangerous territory.

A government that answers only to itself is not a constitutional republic—it is a rogue state. And NSPM-7, far from securing our freedoms, threatens to extinguish them.

Unchecked power is unconstitutional power.

As U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan cautioned in a recent ruling: “The government’s arguments paint with a broad brush and threaten to upend fundamental protections in our Constitution. But ours is not an autocracy; it is a system of checks and balances.”

Those checks only function if we insist on them.

With congressional Republicans having traded their constitutional autonomy for a place in Trump’s authoritarian regime, the courts—and the power of the people themselves—remain the last hope for reining in this runaway police state.

Cognizant that a unified populace poses the greatest threat to its power grabs, the Deep State—having co-opted Trump and the MAGA movement—is doing everything it can to keep the public polarized and fearful.

This has been a long game.

The contagion of fear that McCarthy once spread with the help of government agencies, corporations, and the power elite never truly died; it merely evolved.

NSPM-7 is its modern form, and Trump a modern-day McCarthy.

That anyone would support a politician whose every move has become antithetical to freedom is mind-boggling, but that is the power of politics as a drug for the masses.

That anyone who claims to want to “Make America Great Again” would sell out the country—and the Constitution—to do so says a lot.

That judges, journalists and activists are being threatened for daring to hold the line against the government’s overreaches and abuses speaks volumes.

One of Trump’s supporters sent an anonymous postcard to Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee assigned to a case challenging the Trump administration’s effort to deny full First Amendment protection to non-citizens lawfully present in the United States. The postcard taunted: “Trump has pardons and tanks… What do you have?”

Judge Young opened his opinion with a direct reply: “Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works in a specific case.”

The judge then proceeded to issue a blistering 161-page opinion that hinges on the language of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

“No law” means “no law,” concluded Judge Young,

In other words, the First Amendment is not negotiable.

Non-citizens lawfully present in the United States “have the same free speech rights as the rest of us.”

This is the constitutional answer to NSPM-7’s everywhere-war logic.

When a president declares anything a battlefield and anyone a combatant, the First Amendment answers back: No law means no law.

It is not a permission slip the government can offer only to favored citizens or compliant viewpoints. It is a boundary the government may not cross.

So the question returns to us, the ones Judge Young addressed: “What do we have, and will we keep it?”

We have a constitutional republic, and we keep it by holding fast to the Constitution.

We keep it by refusing the normalization of the Executive Branch’s extraordinary overreaches and power grabs.

We keep it by insisting that dissent is not danger, speech is not suspicion, and watchlists are not warrants.

We keep it by demanding congressional oversight with teeth, courts that enforce first principles, and communities that resist fear when fear is used to rule.

In closing, Judge Young quoted Ronald Reagan’s warning, issued in 1967: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation  away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.”

Reagan’s words would be flagged under NSPM-7, but it doesn’t change the challenge.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the hard work of defending freedom rests as always with “we the people.”

Let’s get to it.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post Trump’s Everywhere War: An Insurrection Against the Constitution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Recently I explained that “Presidents have little control over their governments.”

The same holds for monarchs and “authoritarians.” There are many examples. I will use one in front of me at this moment as I reread Harry Elmer Barnes’ book, The Genesis of the World War.

World War I was planned by the French President, who wanted to recover Alsace-Lorraine, which Napoleon 3rd lost to Prussia in 1871, and the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador to France, who wanted to take from Turkey the Dardanelles Straits that connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. Their conspiracy to ignite a European war in order to achieve these goals was put in place over several years. The French president, Poincare, and the Russians, Foreign Minister Sazonov and Russian Ambassador to France Izvolski, were not confident to take on Germany and Austria-Hungary without British support. Consequently, they brought the British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey into their plot, without the awareness of the British monarch.

Once the alliances and reassurances among the war plotters were in place, the Russians and French arranged, encouraged, the Serbian assassination of the Austrian Archduke, successor to the throne, and his wife, and if not responsible seized on the assassination to set in motion the wheels of war. Russia took the line that it had to protect Serbia from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire’s retaliation and used Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia as an excuse to order Russian mobilization.

The three monarchs–the British King, the Russian Tsar, and the German Kaiser were first cousins, all being Queen Victoria’s grandsons. On receipt of a telegram from his German cousin warning that a European catastrophe awaited them if war broke out, the Tsar ordered the Russian mobilization to be halted, convinced that the mobilization would not serve to intimidate Austria but to provoke European war. The Tsar’s ministers told him it was too late to countermand the general mobilization, and it proceeded.

The Tsar had been left out of the plot and at best was only vaguely aware of what was afoot. Once the light dawned on the Tsar, he found himself unable to control the military zeal in his government. In a telegram to his German cousin he confessed his helplessness before the militarists:

“I foresee that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure brought upon me, and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war. To try and avoid such a calamity as a European war, I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies (Austria) from going too far.” The Tsar was asking Germany to restrain Austria’s actions against Serbia, which the Kaiser tried to do.

The Kaiser’s response to his Russian cousin’s telegram was: “A confession of his own weakness, and an attempt put the responsibility on my shoulders.”

The war, which resulted from the inability of the British, German, Russian monarchs, and French people to prevent it, destroyed Europe. The war destroyed the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and left Russia in the hands of Lenin. The deaths World War I inflicted on France and the British wiped out a generation of leaders, eliminated aristocrats, who at least had a system of honor whether or not they abided by it, from leadership, and turned the leadership over to “jackets and sheep” to use the apt term of Giuseppe Di Lampedusa. Britain was left so financially weak that it was easy for US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to use WW II to push the British aside and assume for the US dollar the role and power of the country of the reserve currency.

Germany, whose Kaiser tried to prevent WWI was held responsible for it. Consequently, at Versailles, Germany in violation of US President Wilson’s guarantee, was faced with territorial loss and unpayable reparations, which caused WWII and left Europe with Soviet rule over Eastern Europe.

Today the world faces an even more absurd situation. Israel, a tiny country with no resources except American money and protection, has Western foreign policy, and apparently also Russia’s, in its tiny hands. For a quarter century Americans have fought to destroy Arab nations for the sake of expanding Greater Israel. American soldiers were told by their lying government that they were dying and being permanently disabled to protect America from a non-existent Muslim terrorism, when in fact they were dying for Greater Israel.

Now we are on a new road to our destruction in pursuit of the Zionist American neoconservatives’ agenda of a hegemonic America and Israel.  Where is the leadership to stop it?

The post Our Existence Becomes Increasingly Tenuous by the Day appeared first on LewRockwell.

A few years ago I wrote a column titled “Be Angry,” in which I defended anger as a legitimate response to the many scandalous actions of Pope Francis. The proximate cause of the article was the appointment of then-Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández as head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith as well as some problematic papal selections for the Synod on Synodality, but those acts were just the latest in a string of scandals during the Francis pontificate. While I knew I was in danger of falling into the “angry trad” stereotype, I simply couldn’t pretend the last pontificate didn’t justify righteous anger.

I still think my anger was justified. Frankly, I’m still angry at the Francis pontificate: it was a disastrous reign that led many souls astray. Francis was akin to an abusive father, who attacked those most faithful to the Catholic religion. It’s understandable and reasonable for a child to be angry at a father who abuses him. As I wrote a few months after my “Be Angry” article, Francis had lost the benefit of the doubt. I also wrote that of course “we cannot let anger rule and control our hearts. Yes, be angry, but make sure it is a righteous anger.” Anger is a dangerous emotion, but it’s not always inappropriate.

Now we have a new Supreme Pontiff in Pope Leo XIV, and a lot of Catholics are starting to get angry with him, particularly after last week. And as weeks go, Leo did have a bad one. First, he seemed to suggest that Catholics who accept the perennial teaching of the Church regarding the permissibility of the death penalty were not “pro-life.” Then, he essentially endorsed Cardinal Cupich’s evil plan to give a lifetime achievement award to a pro-abortion Catholic politician. Finally, the pope presided over a weird environmental gathering in which he blessed a large block of ice. These actions produced many denunciations and much anger in Catholicland. Beyond last week’s actions, some Catholics are already assuming the worst regarding the pope’s first apostolic exhortation, due to be released on October 9, on the subject of the poor and social justice.

Although Leo clearly had some missteps last week (and will continue to have them in the future), I’m not angry and I don’t think other Catholics should be, either. Does this mean I’ve changed my attitude about anger since my previous column? Perhaps a bit, but moreso I believe the situations are not the same.

My columns on being angry and on Francis’ loss of the benefit of the doubt were published in 2023, a full ten years after Jorge Bergoglio’s election. He had a long history of undermining the faith and attacking the faithful. The catalog of problematic papal acts was large and growing. The potential for justified anger, in other words, had been perculating over a long period of time.

St. James in his epistle writes, “Know this, my beloved brethren. Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20, emphasis added). While justified and righteous at times, anger—particularly toward a pope—should not be the default reaction for a Catholic; it should be something that occurs only in extreme situations, and after serious contemplation and consideration. In the case of Pope Francis in 2023, even one who was very slow to anger realized that anger was justified. Pope Leo, on the other hand, has been Supreme Pontiff for only five months; being angry at him already is the definition of “quick to anger.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying one cannot be critical of certain words and acts of our Holy Father. But there’s a difference between careful, calm criticism and anger.

Why are people so quick to be angry at our new pope? Surely the society in which we live in party to blame. It promotes and platforms anger like never before. Social media in particular is fueled by anger: the algorithm rewards anger, so that’s what fills our timelines and influences our emotions.

Yet I don’t think that’s the main driver behind today’s anger at the new pope. I think it’s a hangover effect from Pope Francis. For twelve years the Catholic faithful endured a pope who was, as I’ve said, an abusive father; a man who palpably despised us and what we believe. Now we suddenly have a new father, and so all the emotional baggage from the last father, which is difficult to jettison, is transferred onto him. Any mistake Leo makes brings us back to our feelings toward Francis and projects those feelings onto Leo. This, however, is unfair and uncharitable toward our new Holy Father, and it violates the biblical command to be “slow to anger.”

I have no idea how the Leo pontificate will unfold, and it’s possible we’ll reach the point where it’s clearly justified to be angry at him. Yet Leo is not Francis. There’s no indication that he hates us or hates the traditions of the Church. To look for reasons to be angry with him is, first of all, counterproductive in addressing the crisis in the Church today, for it hides our legitimate criticisms behind a flurry of emotional outbursts. It’s also spiritually destructive to the soul who engages in unnecessary anger. What does it profit a man to fight for the Church and forfeit his soul?

We can lament papal mistakes, and we can urge the pope and other Church officials to more fully embrace the traditional faith as handed on to us, but let’s take a step back, remain calm in our criticisms, and carry on in the faith. Let’s follow the advice of St. James, to be “slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God.”

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post Slow to Anger appeared first on LewRockwell.

Once again the CDC put out the alarm with this headline:

CDC Endorses Standalone Chickenpox Vaccination For Younger Children

(Story reported by Epoch Times presented on Zero Hedge with no paywall, HERE).

“The CDC is now advising that children aged 1 (!!!) receive a standalone chickenpox vaccine, its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement.”

Question:

Is it possible someone – Anyone – at the CDC could just take a minute to see the fundamental flaw in their thinking? 

While we shouldn’t hold our breath for that happy event we can, at least, arm ourselves and our families with some solid knowledge to neutralize the CDC’s fear porn.

I highly recommend listening to this short video by Dr Sam Bailey, HERE.

Then, please review the excellent references Dr Sam provides.

Thank you.

 

The post New CDC Chickenpox Clown Show appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post What Does Trump Want In Venezuela? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw :

This is a good video. It shows how radial engine maintenance is done in the Amazon. I helped do a twin-engine change on a DC-3 in the US Virgin Islands in 1983. We used the same old WWII lifting cranes. The engines and propellers are fairly easy to remove and install. It’s the engine overhauls that are expensive. To do it right by overhauling the engine, replacing all the hoses and accessories, with overhauled propellers, is about $250,000 for both engines. It could be more.

The flight time between overhauls is probably about the same as for the Pratt & Whitney R-985, which is 1600 flight hours. My guess is that these DC-3s fly their engines and propellers until something breaks, then they fix it, and fly it until something else breaks. It’s a risky way to fly, but it’s cheaper than a total overhaul.

Flying on these DC-3s over the Amazon is very risky business.

And yes, you have to watch out for the kids around the airplane.

The post DC-3s flying in the Amazon appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Watch “The Gates of Hell Have Opened — Pope Leo XIV Prophecy Warning appeared first on LewRockwell.

Could Trump be on the right track with his recent criticism of Tylenol and its link to Autism?

Regardless of how Autism is defined, it’s clear that a large proportion of children today are not healthy. The problem has become so big that governments such as the Trump administration are being forced to say something.

But why is the issue of Toxic Vaccines not being addressed as the Main Problem with Autism?

And another thing …

Why is Trump being given a free pass when he had a starring role in the COVID-19 Fraud and – in spite of the overwhelming evidence that the Covid-19 Vaccines were Toxic – he still LOVES To “Do Business” with his corporate friends in the medico-pharmaceutical killing fields?

In this new 16 minute video, Dr Sam Bailey addresses these questions, which you can watch HERE. (Highly Recommended)

Also…from Mike Stone’s Substack article, The Trump Card:

Mike said,

“On the surface, it might appear that the long-standing concerns about vaccines and autism are finally being acknowledged. Many people see this as the breakthrough moment, a strategic move in a bigger plan to slowly awaken and lead the public out of the vaccine nightmare.

“For them, this is a victory worth celebrating.

“But I see it differently.

“While I agree that a mass awakening is happening, I do not believe those in power are the ones driving it.

“On the contrary, they are scrambling to control and redirect it in ways that ultimately serve pharmaceutical interests.

“The Tylenol scapegoat, presented alongside the roll-out of a new pharmaceutical “treatment” for autism, looks less like a win for truth and more like a calculated maneuver. 

“With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at what was actually said during this announcement—and consider whether it represents progress, or simply another sleight of hand that protects vaccines while expanding Pharma’s reach.”

The post Trump’s Tylenol Sleight of Hand appeared first on LewRockwell.

Come si ferma una guerra che rischia di diventare mondiale? Si impedisce che le tensioni arrivino al punto di attivazione dell' esplosione di energia. Dalla guerra in Ucraina sino alla carneficina del 7 ottobre in Israele, passando anche per altri conflitti settari in tutto il mondo, la pressione è montata progressivamente. Lo zampino degli inglesi è ovunque: dal fondamentalismo politico israeliano al fondamentalismo religioso islamico, la regione è stata caricata di così tanta “dinamite” sociale che basta una leggera pressione affinché scoppi (così come fecero nel primo novecento con l'Impero Ottomano per impedire che esso e Germania creassero legami commerciali tramite la ferrovia verso Baghdad). Non scordiamoci che è stata la falange qatarina di Hamas a innescare gli eventi che hanno portato ai fatti dell'ottobre 2023 e non senza aiuto dell'MI6 (il recente attacco a Doha da parte di Israele era un messaggio mafioso recapitato per conto USA). Israele, Palestina, Turchia, India, Pakistan, ecc. hanno tutti legami nel “sottobosco” statale che giungono fino a Londra. Le nazioni del mondo non sono monolitiche: al loro interno hanno correnti e fazioni, i confini statali servono solo come giustificazione affinché i contribuenti paghino le tasse. Ma come si disinnesca un conflitto religioso e dogmatico? Si cambia paradigma, soprattutto economico: ecco perché Trump parla di sviluppo immobiliare nella striscia di Gaza. Ecco perché ad esempio gli accordi di Camp David del '78 fallirono: non ebbe seguito un piano di sviluppo economico. Il primo viaggio di Trump in Medio Oriente è stato in Arabia Saudita, chiedendo loro di tagliare i ponti coi fondamentalisti islamici; l'attacco chirurgico in Iran è servito a mandare un messaggio che gli USA non si fanno impantanare in guerre altrui. Non fatevi fregare, quindi, non cedete alle divisioni e alla violenza. Chiedetevi sempre: “Cui prodest?” A chi giova inzeppare una regione con fondamentalisti di ogni risma? A chi ha come scopo il colonialismo, l'imperialismo, dominazione, guerra eterna. Agli inglesi non interessa niente di coloro con cui fanno accordi: sono solo asset in rapido deprezzamento da essere usati per i propri scopi.

______________________________________________________________________________________

di Andrew Korybko

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/lo-smantellamento-di-un-gruppo-di)

A metà giugno la Reuters ha riferito che l'amministrazione Trump aveva sciolto un gruppo di lavoro segreto inter-agenzia supervisionato da membri del Consiglio di sicurezza nazionale, ora dimessi, incaricato di formulare strategie per costringere la Russia a fare concessioni all'Ucraina.

Secondo le tre fonti ufficiali statunitensi rimaste anonime, il rifiuto finora espresso da Trump di intensificare il coinvolgimento americano nel conflitto ha fatto sì che questa iniziativa perdesse slancio, anche se in futuro potrebbe ancora potenzialmente fare marcia indietro.

In ogni caso l'aspetto più significativo dell'articolo della Reuters è che conferma che un gruppo segreto di funzionari delle burocrazie militari, di intelligence e diplomatiche degli Stati Uniti (ovvero lo Stato profondo americano) è stato creato per manipolare Trump e spingerlo a fare pressione sulla Russia, il che avrebbe potuto peggiorare le tensioni se avesse avuto successo. Altrettanto significativo è stato il suo fallimento finora. Ciononostante i piani da loro ideati potrebbero ancora essere attuati da elementi sovversivi dello Stato profondo americano, e qui sta il problema.

Secondo la Reuters: “Le idee spaziavano da accordi economici mirati a isolare alcuni Paesi nell'orbita geopolitica russa a operazioni segrete”; il primo scenario includeva una proposta per “incentivare” il Kazakistan a reprimere l'evasione russa delle sanzioni occidentali. Quel Paese si sta già spostando verso ovest da un po' di tempo, il che potrebbe rappresentare una sfida per Russia e Cina, come spiegato nell'estate del 2023, ma non sembra che da questo schema sia emerso nulla.

Il secondo scenario potrebbe essere stato collegato agli attacchi strategici con droni dell'Ucraina contro la Russia all'inizio di giugno. Nessuno può dire con certezza se Trump ne fosse a conoscenza in anticipo, ma la rivelazione della Reuters sull'esistenza di questo gruppo di lavoro nello Stato profondo americano dà credito a coloro che sostenevano il contrario. Dopotutto è del tutto possibile che l'operazione sia stata orchestrata da loro a sua insaputa, cosa che potrebbe aver detto a Putin.

C'è anche la possibilità che questi “sforzi di operazioni speciali segrete” includessero i  due complotti nel Mar Baltico, di cui ha messo in guardia il Servizio di intelligence estero russo.

Sebbene abbiano affermato che si trattava di sforzi congiunti britannico-ucraini, non si può escludere che i suddetti elementi sovversivi dello Stato profondo americano possano aver avuto un ruolo nella loro pianificazione e/o possano aver avuto pronto un piano dettagliato per fare pressione su Trump affinché intensificasse gli attacchi contro la Russia.

Lo smantellamento di questo gruppo di lavoro inter-agenzia nello Stato profondo americano alimenta quindi speranze di pace con la Russia e potrebbe in parte spiegare il recente pragmatismo dell'amministrazione Trump nei suoi confronti.

Il Segretario alla Difesa ha di recente annunciato che gli aiuti all'Ucraina saranno tagliati nel prossimo bilancio, mentre il Segretario al Tesoro ha messo in guardia contro nuove sanzioni anti-russe. Trump si è poi opposto a ulteriori sanzioni di questo tipo al G7, ha bloccato i tentativi di abbassare il tetto massimo al prezzo del petrolio russo e ha attaccato Zelensky.

Sebbene sia prematuro celebrare, dato che Trump potrebbe sempre cambiare idea o essere manipolato per indurlo a intensificare la sua linea d'azione, si tratta comunque di sviluppi positivi per la pace.

Resta da vedere se manterrà la barra dritta, ma ciò che conta è che sia tornato al suo approccio pragmatico, che era stato brevemente interrotto da una serie di post arrabbiati su Putin.

Lo scenario migliore è che egli sfidi con orgoglio lo Stato profondo americano costringendo finalmente l'Ucraina ad accettare le concessioni di pace richieste dalla Russia.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una mancia in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

Many people were shocked to see the identitarian left erupting in ghoulish celebration when news broke that Charlie Kirk had been assassinated. Students who despised Kirk’s political views were seen chanting, “We got Charlie in the neck.” The British sociologist Frank Furedi argues that these students are not confined to a radical unhinged fringe, nor do they merely represent “the acts of a few morons” as many people suppose.

Rather, the celebrations reflect a broader “fetish of savagery” on the left, driven by academic theories that treat violence as “an act of self-care” for members of venerated identity groups. Furedi warns that, “reactions such as these are not merely the actions of a few infantile or radicalised individuals, it is baked into the modern Leftist world-view.” The left has become so preoccupied with its own sense of moral fervor that today “leftism – especially in its identitarian, post-colonial form – is an explicitly violent ideology.” It regards violence as a “cleansing force” that will help it to purge the wrongs of colonialism, capitalism, and all forms of historical injustice against which modern academics rail. Furedi explains:

They have internalised the sensibility of victimisation, and from this identitarian perspective the so-called victims of the system are thought thoroughly justified in embracing the politics of violence. Just look at their response to the callous cruelty of Kirk’s murder, and observe how the conservative activist has been cast into the role of a non-person and how others are fair game to be targeted.

As the ideological standard bearers of the left descend into openly endorsing the death of their opponents and the destruction of what they see as an oppressive civilization, it becomes increasingly difficult for libertarians to defend the doctrine of individual liberty without being cast into the same ideological camp as the identitarians. The individualism of the “me, me, me” left has helped to drive the poisonous identitarian philosophy in which “misgendering is violence,” “racism is violence,” and “silence is violence.”

The term “individualism” has in any case always been viewed with wariness by conservatives, due to its overtones implying selfishness and hubris, and its seeming disregard for social norms and traditional values, and this only gets worse when the self-obsessed left endorse violence against anyone they perceive as conservative. In this context, defending individual liberty seems to many conservative observers to be nothing short of suicidal, as it seems to require them to “tolerate” the values and lifestyles of the communists whose goal is to destroy Western civilization. Some conservatives are already expressing doubts as to the value of protecting free speech when it extends to the free speech of the ghouls rejoicing in Kirk’s assassination.

The fact that the notion of individualism is now tarnished by its associations with selfish and violent identitarian groups therefore poses a challenge for modern libertarianism, especially since individual liberty with its doctrines of free speech and freedom from state control lie at the heart of the libertarian creed. In his 1971 New York Times op-ed “The New Libertarian Creed,” Murray Rothbard characterized libertarianism as “the tradition that once established America as the proud beacon-light of freedom, the tradition of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson and Garrison.” The byline read, “A renewed faith in the individual is the basis of the new doctrine.”

He depicted this focus on individual liberty as “a burgeoning split in the right wing” as neo-conservatives grew increasingly preoccupied with “militarism and empire.” Today, the split in the right wing is growing even deeper, as nationalist conservatives launch a campaign to impose “consequences” on their ghoulish opponents by getting them fired from their jobs. In this context they have little patience for the doctrines of individual liberty.

Rothbard concluded his “New Libertarian Creed” with an important point which may help to explain why the notion of individual liberty has gone so disastrously astray—he explained that the goal of libertarianism was “raising the standards of freedom and reason on which this country was founded.” His emphasis on the individual’s right to self-ownership was explicitly linked to these foundational standards. When individual liberty departs from reason it becomes grotesque, a sinister parody of itself, and fuels the deadly notion that violence is justified if anyone feels his individuality is being “disrespected” by his ideological opponents. This is now the hallmark of the identitarian left—that failing to respect their stated pronouns, or failing to respect their legacies of oppression and pay them their “reparations,” amounts to “erasing” them and thereby justifies them in being violent.

History reveals this problem to have deep roots. William Lloyd Garrison—who was admired by Rothbard for his commitment to abolitionism—was also violently attacked by mobs who were outraged by his declaration that the Constitution was “the most bloody and heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villainy ever exhibited on earth,” namely, slavery. Garrison’s denunciation of the constitution was deemed to be outrageous as it challenged the belief that America is a nation founded on the ideal of liberty. Hence, the abolitionists were often subjected to violent attacks. But many abolitionists, for their part, also embraced aggressive violence as a justified means of advancing their cause. John Brown—who committed cold blooded murder in the cause of abolitionism—was funded by New England liberal intellectuals, one of whom was a friend of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They believed violence against the Southern states was necessary to promote the cause of justice.

Even the pacifist libertarian Lysander Spooner, in his 1858 pamphlet, “A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, and To the Non-Slaveholders of the South,” defended the right of slaves to seize the property of their masters “by stratagem or force.” Today’s social justice warriors—schooled in critical race theories which treat “slavery” as synonymous with “racism”—believe that the violence of the abolitionist cause applies with equal justification to the enforcement of their own anti-racist ideals.

It is clear from these historical examples that violence permeating the cause of liberty is nothing new. But, as Rothbard explains in the Ethics of Liberty, violence is only justified in self-defense. Confusion has arisen because the boundary between aggression and defense has become blurred by convoluted identitarian theories in which violent mobs all believe themselves to be fighting “defense” against aggressors. As they see it, if violence is only justified in self-defense, that is their cue to don the mantle of social justice warriors fighting defense against tyranny, ignoring the fact that they are the ones committing aggressive acts against others. This problem of violence applies to all identity groups who believe they are fighting for the right to “live as who they are” and the right to bring “their real self” wherever they go. They want to be seen, heard, affirmed, celebrated, and even worshipped by everyone who has the misfortune to cross their path—or else.

Libertarians would agree that each person has a right to self-ownership, to live his life as he wishes without interference from the government or anyone else. As Rothbard put it, “Every individual as an independent acting entity possesses the absolute right of ‘self-ownership’; that is, to own his or her person without molestation by others.”

But problems begin when identitarians, many of whom identify as liberals or left-libertarians and claim to uphold individual liberty, forget that the right not to be molested by others also entails the duty not to molest others. They aggressively demand to have their individuality “respected” and issue edicts and ultimatums as to what they require from others as a mark of respect, on pain of violent consequences for non-compliance. It is difficult to think of a more perverse departure from “the standards of freedom and reason on which this country was founded” than a culture of individualism rooted in violence against one’s ideological opponents.

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

The post Individualism and the Violence of the Identitarian Left appeared first on LewRockwell.

Russia will have to end the war militarily on its terms for a lasting peace.

U.S. President Trump’s toying with the idea of supplying Tomahawk cruise missiles to the Kiev regime is not a good look. Not from the point of view of it causing a threat to Russia. It doesn’t. But rather, it shows that Trump is not serious about ending the NATO proxy war against Russia.

Thus, Russia will have to win the war militarily on the battlefield and present its terms for peace as the outright victor. Any chance of a negotiated settlement to the conflict with the Trump administration now seems remote.

When Trump welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15, our weekly editorial headlined: “Trump-Putin summit a breakthrough for peace, but the U.S. needs to end the war.”

The meeting in Anchorage was indeed a breakthrough for potential diplomacy, rather than the usual dead-end Western hostility towards Russia, and Trump appeared to understand the Russian position of addressing the root causes of the conflict.

However, two months on, Trump has shown no impetus to “end the war.” He could have done this by ending all U.S. military support to the Kiev regime. On the contrary, in the weeks since the Alaska summit, Trump has announced the supply of Extended Range Attack Missiles (ERAMs) to Ukraine. The ERAMs with a range of 500 km exceed what the Biden administration had offered. Trump approved the move because European NATO members would pay for the munitions, a cynical calculation that does not sound like a principled peacemaker.

So, Trump is not ending the war. He is maneuvering to get the Europeans to pay for it, that’s all. Trump’s problem is that he expected a quick, flashy peace deal with Russia to end the nearly four-year war in Ukraine – and to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize for being such a brilliant dealmaker. Such a Hollywood ending!

In reality, Trump and his administration have evidently no understanding or will to address the root causes of the proxy war. Their rhetoric acknowledges that it is a proxy war, but Trump and his aides are vacant when it comes to conducting serious negotiations about NATO’s historic aggression, NATO’s betrayal of post-Cold War promises, Russia’s strategic security concerns, and the rights of the Russian people faced with a NATO-weaponized genocidal Neo-Nazi regime on their borders. Trump’s superficial approach is betrayed by his erratic attitude and increasingly churlish comments about Putin and Russia.

The latest move by Trump, purportedly considering sending Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, and his reported authorization of sharing U.S. intelligence with the Kiev regime for targeting deep strikes inside Russia, does not add up. It sounds rather more like an empty bluff by a person whose oversized ego is bruised from Russia not playing along with his theatrical peace efforts.

For a start, the United States and its NATO partners are already sharing intel with the Kiev regime on targeting Russia with missiles and drones. And they have serious blood on their hands for doing so. Therefore, Trump’s “approval of intel-sharing” is nothing new. The way it is dramatically reported in the U.S. media suggests that Trump is hamming it up as some kind of leverage on Russia.

On the Tomahawk itself: as Putin acknowledged during a major public discussion at the Valdai forum in Sochi this week, the Tomahawks are a powerful weapon that can cause serious damage. The cruise missile has a range of 1,500-2,000 km with a warhead of 450 kg of explosive impact that can penetrate deep bunkers. But the subsonic weapon, dating from the 1970s, would be effectively neutralized by modern Russian air defenses. Also, the launching of Tomahawks is beyond the capacity of the Ukrainian forces. It is launched from warships and submarines. Is the United States willing to openly engage in firing long-range missiles into Russia?

As Putin also noted, even if Tomahawks were supplied, they would not change the battlefield situation in which the NATO-backed Ukrainian forces on the ground are rapidly losing territory along the entire 1,000-km front. NATO has lost the war. The Tomahawks are just another illusory “wonder weapon” that NATO and its propaganda media have touted before on many occasions without any military success. Recall F-16s, Leopard Tanks, Abrams, Challengers, Storm Shadows, SCALPS, ATACMS, and so on. They were all supposed to win the war, and they didn’t.

In any case, a Reuters report later this week, citing an “official source,” said it was unlikely for the U.S. to supply Tomahawks to Ukraine at this time because there are none to spare, with all existing inventory committed to U.S. Navy requirements. And with “peacemaker” Trump lining up to go to war on Venezuela and again on Iran, the Americans probably would do better conserving their stockpiles.

What this suggests is that Trump is acting as a big-mouth poker player who has very few cards to play, as he once admonished the Kiev puppet, Zelensky, in a White House spat. The American president is betting that his boorish tough talk and the hype about sending Tomahawks to Ukraine and “sharing intel” will somehow intimidate Russia to sit at the negotiating table and accept a half-baked peace deal, which is all about him winning a Nobel trophy and having his ego lit up with neon lights.

Trump’s talk about Tomahawks, if it were genuine, is “insanity,” as Scott Ritter pointed out this week.

But here’s the thing: Trump’s talk is not genuine, and that means his entire posturing about finding a peace deal in Ukraine with Russia is also not genuine. He is playing games for his ego and to simply shift the cost of war onto Europe.

Moscow cannot rely on the Trump administration to end the conflict based on a negotiated, honest solution of the root causes. The root causes stem from U.S. imperialist power and its European lackeys. Trump is way out of his depth in dealing with that.

Russia will have to end the war militarily on its terms for a lasting peace.

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

The post Trump’s Tomahawks… All bets Are Off on a Peace Deal in Ukraine appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the least appreciated aspects of medicine is the numerous frameworks that have been developed to understand how the body works and how to heal it. This, I believe is a result of conventional medicine having successfully branded itself as the one true path to understanding the body and each remaining approach being a “second-rate gimmick,” which at best, can sometimes assume a complementary role in healthcare.

However, if you study those other approaches, you will find each medical system excels at certain types of health problems, while struggling with others, so in many instances, knowing which medical model to jump to can be immensely beneficial to patients.

The modern approach to medicine is heavily biased towards a biochemistry model, where customized drugs are designed to stimulate or inhibit specific molecular targets (most commonly enzymes, frequently cellular receptors or ion channels, and less often, other aspects of the body, such as individual genes or inflammatory messengers). This approach, in turn, tends to excel for specific issues (particularly acute emergencies) but typically struggles with chronic ailments—something I attribute both to target molecules rarely being able to reach broad swathes of the body and partly due to living organisms being designed to adapt to excessive stimulation or inhibition of specific receptors and enzymes within the body.

Yet despite its frequent failures, we continue to rigidly adhere to that model of medicine. This I believe, ultimately is because therapies produced within this framework are highly specific to individual diseases (hence allowing many distinct patentable products), and in many cases (since they can only temporarily shift an enzyme or receptor) do not produce lasting cures—hence requiring perpetual purchases of them and thus recurring pharmaceutical sales.
Note: in many cases, disabling critical enzymes or receptors also creates a myriad of side effects (particularly over time as the body readjusts itself to accommodate this unnatural state).

All of this summarizes why, despite spending an ever increasing amount of money on Alzheimer’s research (e.g., the NIH spent 2.9 billion in 2020 and 3.9 billion in 2024), we have still failed to make any real progress on the disease. Furthermore, we only spend that much money on Alzheimer’s research because of how dire its costs are (e.g., last year it was estimated to cost the United States 360 billion dollars). Sadly, this figure only touches the surface of the social cost (as any relative of someone with Alzheimer’s can attest)—again making it so remarkable we still have not made any progress in the illness.

The Amyloid Juggernaut

The early history of Alzheimer’s research is as follows: In 1906, plaques in the brain were identified as the cause of Alzheimer’s disease, in 1984, amyloid beta protein was identified as the primary component of those plaques, and in 1991, genetic mutations in a protein that gives rise to amyloid beta was linked to inherited forms of Alzheimer’s disease—creating a widespread believe a cure for this devastating disease was at last at hand.

The existing dogma within Alzheimer’s research, hence, became that Alzheimer’s disease results from the buildup of amyloid plaques within the brain, which then cause brain damage that leads to Alzheimer’s disease. As such, the majority of research for treating Alzheimer’s disease has thus been targeted at eliminating these plaques, but unfortunately:

Hundreds of clinical trials of amyloid-targeted therapies have yielded few glimmers of promise, however; only the underwhelming Aduhelm has gained FDA approval. Yet Aβ still dominates research and drug development. NIH spent about $1.6 billion on projects that mention amyloids in this fiscal year, about half its overall Alzheimer’s funding. Scientists who advance other potential Alzheimer’s causes, such as immune dysfunction or inflammation, complain they have been sidelined by the “amyloid mafia.” Forsayeth says the amyloid hypothesis became “the scientific equivalent of the Ptolemaic model of the Solar System,” in which the Sun and planets rotate around Earth.

Note: frequently, when a faulty paradigm fails to explain the disease it claims to address, rather than admit the paradigm is flawed, its adherents will label each conflicting piece of evidence as a paradox (e.g., the French “paradox” clearly disproves the cholesterol hypothesis) and dig deeper and deeper until they can find something to continue propping up their ideology. For those interested, the key misunderstandings about cholesterol, heart disease, and statins are discussed here.

The consistent failure of the amyloid model to cure Alzheimer’s gradually invited increasing skepticism towards it, which resulted in more and more scientists studying alternative models of the disease. Before long, they found other factors played a far more significant role in causing the disease (e.g., chronic inflammation), and by 2006, this perspective appeared poised to change the direction of Alzheimer’s research.

In response, the amyloid proponents adopted the position that the shortcoming of their hypothesis was that the cause of Alzheimer’s was not the presence of amyloid plaques in general, but rather the formation of certain toxic oligomers (smaller clumps of amyloid beta). In turn, as dissent towards the amyloid hypothesis was reaching a critical mass, a 2006 paper (published in Nature) identified a previously unknown toxic oligomer, amyloid beta star 56 or Aβ*56, and provided proof that it caused dementia in rats.

This paper cemented both the amyloid beta and toxic oligomer hypotheses (as it provided the proof many adherents to the theory had been waiting for) and rapidly became one of the most cited works in the field of Alzheimer’s research. Its authors rose to academic stardom, produced further papers validating their initial hypothesis, and billions more were invested by both the NIH and the pharmaceutical industry in research of the amyloid and toxic oligomer hypothesis.

It should be noted that some were skeptical of their findings and likewise were unable to replicate this data, but rarely had a voice in the debate:

The spotty evidence that Aβ*56 plays a role in Alzheimer’s had [long] raised eyebrows. Wilcock has long doubted studies that claim to use “purified” Aβ*56. Such oligomers are notoriously unstable, converting to other oligomer types spontaneously. Multiple types can be present in a sample even after purification efforts, making it hard to say any cognitive effects are due to Aβ*56 alone, she notes—assuming it exists. In fact, Wilcock and others say, several labs have tried and failed to find Aβ*56, although few have published those findings. Journals are often uninterested in negative results, and researchers can be reluctant to contradict a famous investigator.

Sound familiar?

Amyloid Scandals

Fifteen years later, at the end of 2021, a neuroscientist physician was hired by investors to evaluate an experimental Alzheimer’s drug and discovered signs that its data consisted of doctored images of Western Blot protein tests (and therefore erroneous assessments of what oligomers were present within research subjects’ brains). As he explored the topic further, he discovered other papers within the Alzheimer’s literature had been flagged by Pubpeer (a website scientists use to identify suspect studies) for containing doctored Western Blots.

Before long, he noticed three of these papers had been published by the same author and decided to investigate their other publications. This led him to the seminal 2006 Alzheimer’s publication, which like the author’s other works, contained clear signs of fraud (again illustrating how criminals typically get caught because they repeated the same crime).

A subsequent investigation uncovered 20 papers written by the author, 10 of which pertained to Aβ*56, and many outside investigators, after being consulted, agreed that the images had been manipulated. A co-researcher came forward, stating that he had previously suspected the author of scientific misconduct (shortly before 2006) and not only withdrew his collaboration with the author but also declined to publish a study they had collaborated on, so he would not potentially be implicated in scientific misconduct.

Note: a major concern with the mRNA vaccines was whether they were stable enough to actually produce their intended product. Since Western Blots are used to demonstrate the presence of proteins, they were presented as proof of vaccine efficacy. When reviewing Pfizer’s regulatory submissions, we discovered that their Western Blots had been fabricated (and hence exposed this in January 2023, as, at the time, provable fraud was one of the few things that could derail the mRNA campaign)—but of course, were completely ignored.

The Amyloid Industry

One of the remarkable things about this monumental fraud was how little was done about it. For example, the physician who discovered it notified the NIH in January 2022, yet in May 2022, beyond nothing being done, the suspect researcher was awarded a coveted $764,792 research grant by the NIH (which was signed off by another one of the authors of the 2006 paper).

In July 2022, Science published an article exposing the incident and the clear fraud that had occurred, after which a few other independent voices attempted to draw attention to it (e.g., I did in October 2022). Despite this, the researcher was allowed to remain in his position as a tenured medical school professor. It was not until June 2024 that the 2006 article was retracted at the request of the authors—all of whom denied being at fault and insisted the doctored images had not affected the article’s conclusions (and likewise the amyloid field claimed this fraud had not refuted the amyloid hypothesis). Eventually, on January 29, 2025, during his confirmation hearing, RFK cited the paper as an example of the institutional fraud and wasted tax dollars within the NIH, and a few days later, that researcher announced his resignation from the medical school professorship (while still maintaining his innocence).

All of this, on the surface, is quite strange and illustrates how much the medical field was willing to walk in lockstep to protect the amyloid hypothesis, something I attribute both to how much many researchers have are dependent upon perpetual funding for it and also how profitable the potential amyloid market is (e.g., roughly 7 million adults have it, many of the therapies cost tens of thousands a year and in theory, they must be covered by Medicare, equating to hundreds of billion in annual sales).

Recently, the fate of the failed amyloid drugs appeared to be changing, as a new pharmaceutical (a monoclonal antibody) demonstrated some success in treating Alzheimer’s—something which was treated as revolutionary by the medical community, the pharmaceutical industry, and drug regulators, as all of them had been waiting for decades for a drug like that to emerge. In turn, the first new drug received accelerated approval (which the FDA proudly announced), due to the controversy surrounding the first one. The second received a quiet backdoor approval, while the third was partially approved a year and a half later.

Each year, Chase Bank holds a private conference for pharmaceutical investors, which sets the tone for the entire industry. In 2023 (the first in-person one since the pandemic), its focus (covered in detail here) was on the incredible profitability of the new Alzheimer’s drugs and the GLP-1s like Ozempic (which the FDA has also relentlessly promoted). While much could be said about the jubilation of that private conference, in my eyes, the most crucial detail was that the (widely viewed as corrupt) FDA commissioner was the keynote speaker, and a few days before the conference, had enacted the second backdoor approval.

However, despite the rosy pictures painted around the drugs (which each attacked different aspects of amyloids), they were highly controversial as:

• The FDA’s independent advisory panel, in a very unusual move, voted 10-0 (with one abstaining) against approving the first amyloid drug (which targeted amyloid plaques), then the FDA approved it anyways. In a highly unprecedented move, three of the advisors resigned, calling it “probably the worst drug approval decision in recent U.S. history.”

• That drug was priced at $56,000 a year—making it sufficient to bankrupt Medicaire, which attracted a Congressional investigation and led to each subsequent one being priced roughly half that amount (along with its price later being reduced to match that).

• Brain swelling or brain bleeding was found in 41% of patients enrolled in its studies. Additionally, headaches (including migraines and occipital neuralgia), falls, diarrhea, confusion, and delirium were also notably elevated compared to placebo.

• No improvement in Alzheimer’s was noted; rather one analysis found it slowed the progression of Alzheimer’s by 20% (although this could have been a protocol artifact rather than a real effect).

The second monoclonal antibody (which targeted amyloid precursors) had a slightly better risk benefit profile (only 21% experienced brain bleeding and swelling), and 26.4% reduction in the progression of Alzheimer’s was detected in the trail (which for context, translated to a 0.45 reduction on a scale where a reduction of at least 1-2 points is needed to create an impact which is in anyway meaningful for a patient).

The third monoclonal (which targeted amyloid plaques thought to be more pathologic) was also contested as it caused 36.8% of recipients to develop brain bleeding or swelling, like the other amyloid medications, frequently caused headaches and infusion reactions (e.g., nausea, vomiting, changes in blood pressure, hypersensitive reactions or anaphylaxis) and there were reasons to suspect the trial had overstated its benefits.

Given the controversy around the first two drugs, the third was met with widespread protest, but in a remarkable pivot, the FDA’s new advisory panel, voted unanimously in favor of it, despite it having a very similar mechanism, efficacy and toxicity to the previously unanimously rejected amyloid drug (which they attributed to it having a better trial design and guidelines for usage). It should hence come as no surprise that when the British Medical Journal conducted an independent investigation, they discovered that within publicly available databases, 9 out of 10 members of the advisory committee had significant financial conflicts of interest.
Note: the tenth individual who voted for the drug, the patient representative, did not exist within those databases and, therefore, could not be assessed.

In short, I believe it is fair to say that the amyloid drugs are effectively failed medications, both due to their side effects and negligible benefits. Fortunately, despite the aggressive promotion of them, despite Chase’s best attempts to promote the sector, the market somewhat recognized how bad they were, as the first drug had its price halved. Then it was withdrawn from the market as no one wanted it (making around 5 million dollars total), while the other two have had very modest sales (e.g., 295 million for the most popular one).

From this, three things stand out:

• These drugs consistently damaging brain tissue indicated either that their mechanism of action (triggering the brains immune cells to attach amyloids) would cause those immune cells also to attack the brain or that removing amyloid (regardless of the way it was done) damages brain tissue (suggesting amyloid has a protective effect for the brain) and damages brain blood vessels (e.g., because the amyloids patch vessel walls)—either of which strongly argues against the approach. Curious, I checked, and there indeed is evidence for all three of those occurring (and an active subject of discussion)—yet it has not deterred the usage of this therapy.

• An absolutely absurd amount of money and time has been wasted on this endeavor due to the medical field’s need to find a patentable drug.

• The focus on these lucrative drugs has diverted attention from other treatments that are more likely to help Alzheimer’s patients. In turn, the entire reason I wrote this article is because those treatments do indeed exist, and the harm from withholding them has been incalculable.

For example, after I posted a few articles about Alzheimer’s early in this publication’s history, I had numerous readers reach out to share that coconut oil, or coconut oil-derived MCTs, had significantly improved an ailing relative’s dementia. I checked, and found a randomized controlled trial that over 6 months, found 80% remained stable or improved—which for context, is better than what any of the amyloid drug trials showed, and more importantly, does not cause brain bleeds and costs a lot less than the annual (approximately) $30,000 cost for those drugs. I share this, not to claim coconut oil is the cure for dementia, but rather to highlight just how much the data from these drugs have been overvalued to create a new drug market.

Likewise, very few are aware of a 2022 study that should have revolutionized the entire Alzheimer’s field:

Note: Bredesen’s references for the above chart can be found here, here, and here.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Great Alzheimer’s Scam and the Proven Cures They’ve Buried for Billions appeared first on LewRockwell.

“The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie.” Guy Debord

We’re living in the golden age of Spectacle: whatever substance remains in politics is lost in the endless parade of outlandish political theater, finance is dominated by staged spectacles of media-savvy CEOs announcing the next trillion-dollar product, and online, all the world’s a stage for everyone’s spectacle.

French philosopher Guy Debord outlined the value of spectacle in a society and economy that is increasingly dependent on artifice rather than authenticity in his 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle.

Here is how Debord described his 1967 book in his 1988 follow-up work, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle: “In 1967, in a book entitled The Society of the Spectacle, I showed what the modern spectacle was already in essence: the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign.”

Debord is laying out a way to understand how society has become subsumed by economic forces, specifically markets ruled by the corporate-state.

This arrangement manages the populace by turning everything into a spectacle which in Debord’s view is not “real life,” it’s a representation that we passively accept without understanding how it transforms our identity and social fabric from “being” to “having,” i.e. buying and owning stuff that is a representation of who we are.

This representation is managed by technocratic expertise.

What we refer to as propaganda, marketing and narrative are for Debord all aspects of spectacle.

Spectacle as a simulation or facsimile of “real life” speaks to a profound alienation: we passively watch spectacle and take that passive consumption as “real life” without understanding it’s all managed to maintain the dominance of those benefitting from this arrangement.

This echoes many related ideas (for example, “The Matrix” films), simulacra being passed off as the authentic “real thing,” and Marx’s concept of alienation in which the worker has been disconnected (alienated) from the product/value of their labor.

The core idea here is that Spectacle is inauthentic, fake, a simulation, a substitution of representation for substance, that creates a peculiarly unreality. These are the themes I explore in my book Ultra-Processed Life.

The entire appeal of social media can be seen as personalizing Spectacle, as we each gain audience and influence by making ourselves and our lives into unreal representations, i.e. spectacles.

Here are some illuminating excerpts from Debord:

“Because spectacle replaces real life with a mere mediated representation of life that cannot be experienced directly, it provides a framework where mass deceptions and lies can consistently and convincingly appear as true.

It has recreated our society without community, and it has obstructed the ability to communicate in general. Such processes and their ramifications ultimately mean people cannot truly experience life for themselves: they have become spectators, bound to an impoverished state of unlife”

In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord explains that the economy subjugating society first presented itself as an “obvious degradation of being into having,” where human fulfilment was no longer attained through what one was, but instead only through what one bought and displayed. As society’s capitulation to the economy accelerated, the decline from being into having shifted “from having into appearing.”

With respect to knowledge, therefore, experts no longer have to be experts or have expertise, they only need to take on the appearance of expertise.

“All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organisation. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie.”

“The vague feeling that there has been a rapid invasion which has forced people to lead their lives in an entirely different way is now widespread; but this is experienced rather like some inexplicable change in the climate, or in some other natural equilibrium, a change faced with which ignorance knows only that it has nothing to say.” Debord

This reminds me of a comment French writer Michel Houellebecq made in an interview: “I have the impression of being caught up in a network of complicated, minute, stupid rules, and I have the impression of being herded towards a uniform kind of happiness, toward a kind of happiness that doesn’t really make me happy.”

Read the Whole Article

The post The Golden Age of Spectacle appeared first on LewRockwell.

For all the media hand-wringing over the government shutdown the fact is only approximately 750,000 of the over two million non-military federal workers are being furloughed. Most federal programs will continue operating, including the major entitlement and welfare programs. The national parks will remain open, if understaffed and with closed visitor centers. Unfortunately, the shutdown will not affect the military-industrial complex.

President Trump’s supposed “master plan” to implement mass firings of federal employees will only fire 16,000 employees.

Democrats are refusing to vote for a short-term continuing resolution unless it extends the increase in Obamacare subsidies that was part of the Biden-era covid relief legislation. Republicans, who for years campaigned on repealing and replacing Obamacare, are not opposing extending the subsidies. Instead, they are focusing on concerns the Democrats want to allow illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer-funded health benefits. Republicans are also emphasizing that they want to negotiate over extending the Obamacare subsidies, not simply shove them into a “must pass” continuing resolution. Republicans also want to ensure that laws barring illegal immigrants from receiving the subsidies are in place.

Republicans’ de facto embrace of the increased Obamacare subsidies, which were supposed to be a temporary increase to help Americans who lost their jobs because of the covid lockdowns, is a little noticed but major milestone in the history of Obamacare. For many years Republicans campaigned on a promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Opposition to Obamacare, along with opposition to the big bank bailouts and the cap and trade scheme, fueled the “Tea Party” movement, which led in the 2010 election to a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. In 2013, as the federal government was implementing Obamacare, Tea Party Republicans orchestrated a government shutdown. The argument was this was the last chance to repeal Obamacare because once it was fully implemented the number of people who would become reliant on the program would make Obamacare politically impossible to repeal.

These Tea Party Republicans were mocked for their efforts, but history has proven them right. Even though Donald Trump and many Republican candidates for House and Senate promised to repeal Obamacare in their 2016 campaigns, they never even held a vote on full repeal of the healthcare law. Instead, they pushed legislation repealing the “unpopular” parts of Obamacare even though the way the program was structured it was impossible for the popular parts to work without the unpopular parts. The legislation repealing the “unpopular” parts of Obamacare was opposed by some Republicans who had previously voted to repeal all of Obamacare.

In the 2018 midterm election, the Democrats then turned the tables on Republicans by running as champions of healthcare who would protect Obamacare from the Republicans. This helped them retake the House.

Now, the majority of Republicans appear ready to ratify President Biden’s increase in Obamacare subsidies. So, Republicans have gone from promising to repeal Obamacare to promising to repeal the “unpopular” provisions to de facto supporting the program.

Republican failure to effectively oppose Obamacare is because of failure to acknowledge that the pre-Obamacare healthcare system was seriously flawed because of government interventions. Therefore, a way to “fix” healthcare is via measures giving patients and providers control over the healthcare system, such as tax credits and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). Unapologetic advocacy of free markets is the only effective way to oppose big government schemes like Obamacare and advance liberty.

The post GOP Obamacare Surrender appeared first on LewRockwell.