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If the last twenty-five years have taught us anything, it’s that people who work in the government are absolutely abysmal at quantifying and managing the risks of their own ambitious schemes. Already in 2020, Dr. McCullough and I intuitively sensed that the COVID-19 mass vaccination program was a major gamble that would probably end up blowing up in the faces of the people who so aggressively pushed it.

To be sure, it would only eventually blow up in their faces if they allowed the truth of the matter to come out. For at least two years now, we have been in the cover-up phase of this criminal misadventure—not only in the United States, but also in the UK, Europe, and Australia.

C.J. Hopkins—an insanely persecuted American ex-pat author in Berlin—just mentioned on his Substack an extraordinary commentary in the Berliner Zeitung.

Please check out (below) my translation of this excellent essay.

Traffic light coalition cancels Corona investigation: Who would have thought?

Back in September, Lauterbach said, “Anyone who doesn’t review things seems like they have something to hide.” Is anyone surprised by the cancellation of this review? A commentary.

Ruth Schneeberger

“We need this review. I have called for it myself on several occasions,” said Karl Lauterbach less than a month ago in the ARD Report from Berlin. “If we don’t do it,” continued the SPD health minister, “then the impression will simply arise that we have something to hide. Therefore, such a review is necessary and should take place.”

Lauterbach would certainly have liked to have had a reappraisal carried out.

Lauterbach’s own coalition government has now denied him this wish. Some say to protect him.

Lauterbach himself has not exactly been at the forefront of the reappraisal process. In March, on the ZDF morning magazine, he rejected an inquiry commission because this type of reappraisal was “politically charged” and “right-wing groups” would turn the issue into an “ideological battle.”

Then came the RKI [Robert Koch Institute] protocols and the health minister changed his publicly stated opinion surprisingly quickly—not only with regard to their assessment, but also regarding purported “interference by foreign powers.”

At that point, he offered an assurance that he would have the protocols de-redacted as soon as possible—something that has not officially happened during his term of office to date. So now [we are told] he is in favor of a review of Corona policy.

However, the majority of his colleagues apparently do not want such a review. This week, the “traffic light” coalition agreed that there can be no political review of the pandemic in the current legislative period because they cannot agree on what form such a review would take.

This means that there will not be a review of the corona pandemic in this country before 2026, because there will be new elections in September 2025, and after that they will need to resuscitate the issue.

Review á la Citizens’ Council may therefore be discarded

Why is the government is refusing to review the situation?

The SPD’s justification is that the FDP refused to hold a Citizens’ Council. Well, what a surprise. Citizens’ Councils have recently produced such groundbreaking results. In other words, this political issue is simply too hot for the SPD. The actors who voted in favor of the compulsory vaccination are still in office.

Lately it’s become fashionable to reinterpret one’s own role in the pandemic, but in politics, this is more difficult to do than in other domains. Politicians’ votes from this period are public record unless they were secret votes. During the big debate in the Bundestag in April 2022 about compulsory vaccination, the voting behavior of the parties was recorded and is still circulating on the internet.

This is yet another reason why it is still vividly remembered that the SPD and the Greens voted almost unanimously in favor of compulsory vaccination, while everyone else almost entirely voted against. And so, is anyone really surprised that the SPD—which is already having a hard time—is calling off the political review of the pandemic?

There is so much to review—including the vaccination campaign

The voting behavior on compulsory vaccination is also such a popular meme because it shows the extent to which politicians were prepared to put the supposed common good above the possible well-being of the individual. Compulsory vaccination remains an intervention in the body over which the individual can no longer decide.

The fact that vaccination—contrary to all assurances at the time—can go horribly wrong is evidenced by countless vaccine victims, whose fate Karl Lauterbach now says he is touched by. Nevertheless, this does not really prompt him and his colleagues to take action.

To this day, we do not know exactly how many vaccine injured there are, and how they can be helped. We do know, however, that around 20 times more suspected cases were reported to the Paul Ehrlich Institute for corona vaccinations than for other vaccines.

We made it through the pandemic alright in Germany—everything is okay, right? Wrong. The bad consequences are merely poorly concealed. Trust in government, politics and institutions has been permanently damaged; some no longer even trust their own doctors.

The next pandemic is supposedly just around the corner?

A thorough review would also be very important because there are warnings everywhere about new pandemics that are certain to come, sooner or later. The World Health Summit in Berlin will be hotly discussing this prospect over the next three days.

It is ridiculous that the coalition would cancel the review under these circumstances, and the decision could potentially cost them their jobs. Their decision is also negligent.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post German Government Cancels Review of Pandemic Response appeared first on LewRockwell.

Christopher Columbus has become one of the most polarizing figures in American history. Our nation used to revere Columbus as one of America’s greatest heroes. Now, he’s one of the Republic’s greatest villains.

Leftist revolutionaries depict Columbus as a power-hungry maniac who wanted to enslave and annihilate the natives. Any honor of Columbus—whether it’s a statue or a holiday—must be torn down and replaced, according to the liberal revolutionaries.

In contrast, the Right depicts Columbus as a nationalist pioneer. The Right defends his legacy as that of a courageous pioneer whose actions led to the eventual formation of the United States of America. However, both sides miss a significant fact from Columbus’ life.

Columbus was not a genocidal villain or a nationalist explorer; he was a saintly man who wanted to win souls for Christ. Columbus should be revered as America’s saintly founder.

Columbus, indeed, was a man of Providence. From his landing in the Americas on the feast of Our Lady of Pillar on October 12, 1492, to the etymology of his name, Columbus’ life was guided by the hand of God. Christopher, which means Christ-bearer, and Columbus, which relates to the dove, the common symbol of the Holy Spirit, shows that his name reflected a great mission that God had bestowed on him.

Columbus did not fail to live up to his namesake. He sought to follow the command of the Great Commission and evangelize all the natives he encountered. Often, modern history books fail to discuss Columbus’ desire to evangelize, but this desire served as one of the primary factors for his mission.

An entry in his journal states,

I gave them many beautiful and pleasing things, which I had brought with me, for no return whatever, to win their affection, and that they might become Christians and inclined to love our King and Queen and Princes and all the people of Spain; and that they might be eager to search for and gather and give to us what they abound in and we greatly need. 

Columbus—like all Catholics at that time—understood that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church and that baptism is essential for salvation. Columbus’ first instinct was not to murder the natives but to save their souls. The pagan natives were in desperate need of a massive reordering of their culture, and Columbus provided them with the path to salvation. While many Spaniards wanted to exploit the natives, Columbus chose to defend their rights and dignity.

Pope Leo XIII recognized this zeal, as he wrote in Quarto Abeunte Saeculo, “Columbus resolved to go before and prepare the ways for the Gospel, and, deeply absorbed in this idea, gave all his energies to it, attempting hardly anything without religion for his guide and piety for his companion.”

In a field full of prideful men and arrogance, Columbus remained the shining light for all men to imitate. Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in Admiral of the Ocean Sea that

Columbus was a Man with a Mission, and such men are apt to be unreasonable and disagreeable to those who cannot see the mission…He was Man alone with God against human stupidity and depravity, against greedy conquistadors, cowardly seamen, even against nature and the sea.

Read the Whole Article

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Do you want to live in a society where you are required to have your face scanned wherever you go?  If not, you may want to speak up now while you still can.  As you will see below, the U.S. government is aggressively expanding the use of facial recognition technology for identification verification purposes.  For now, the use of facial recognition technology will be optional.  But as we have seen before, once a voluntary option is adopted by enough people our leaders have a way of making it mandatory.  Of course it isn’t just our government that is pushing facial recognition technology.  It is popping up throughout our society, and given enough time it would literally be everywhere.

Login.gov is billed as “a single sign-on solution for US government websites”, and now users of Login.gov will be given the option to use facial recognition technology to verify their identities…

An online hub for Americans to access benefits and services across the federal government is giving its users a new option to sign on.

The General Services Administration will begin offering facial recognition technology as an option for users of Login.gov, a one-stop for government-provided public services, to verify their identities.

GSA’s Technology Transformation Services announced Wednesday it will allow Login.gov users to verify their identity online through facial technology that meets standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s 800-63-3 Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2) guidelines.

We are being told that this will help reduce identity theft and fraud, and I don’t know anyone that likes identity theft and fraud.

But do we really want to live in a dystopian world where our faces are constantly being scanned all the time?

I certainly don’t.

We are being told that this new facial recognition system will rely on “best-in-class facial matching algorithms”…

After months of testing and a delay in 2023, users will now be able to verify their identity using a ‘proven facial matching technology’ approved by the General Services Administration, which will follow the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and will rely on ‘best-in-class facial matching algorithms’

All of this sounds really creepy to me.

And this is certainly a way for the government to start getting all of our faces into a giant database.

Login.gov already has more than 100 million users, and lots of them will inevitably choose the “convenience” and “security” of facial recognition…

Federal agencies use Login.gov for people to verify their identities when logging in to access government benefits and services. The offering has over 100 million users already across over 50 federal and state agencies, and this news could affect how future users have to verify their identity to access information and benefits.

“Proving your identity is a critical step in receiving many government benefits and services, and we want to ensure we are making that as easy and secure as possible for members of the public, while protecting against identity theft and fraud,” said GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan in a statement.

For now, you will still be able to use other identification verification options.

But once most people start using facial recognition, those other options could easily be taken away.

Sadly, it isn’t just the government that we need to be concerned about.

AI programs such as ChatGPT have turned out to be quite adept at identifying faces…

Using “a crafted prompt designed to bypass the safeguard mechanisms of ChatGPT,” the researchers were able to test the program’s biometric capabilities – which they found to be significant.

“Our study reveals that ChatGPT recognizes facial identities and differentiates between two facial images with considerable accuracy,” says their summary. “Additionally, experimental results demonstrate remarkable performance in gender detection and reasonable accuracy for the age estimation tasks.”

Even more alarming is what a couple of Harvard students have been able to accomplish.

They integrated PimEyes facial recognition software into a pair of Meta’s smart glasses, and they were able to instantly pull up the personal information of strangers by scanning their faces…

Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses offer an iconic wearable packed with some smart features that allow users to engage in a hands-free experience. Two Harvard students have integrated smart glasses with a facial recognition system that helps automatically dox strangers and access their information in public.

According to 404media, the facial recognition system called I-XRAY can be used to retrieve information such as phone numbers, addresses, or even social security numbers of strangers. All the user needs to do is look at the person. While software capabilities have been making the rounds, it is the hardware running the software that has been the talk of the town, which is Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.

Nguyen and Ardayfio created I-XRAY using Meta’s smart glasses along with PimEyes facial recognition software, which is currently the largest search engine. The entire system of fetching information on the individual is automatic, and the smart glasses start digging the data as soon as the face is in the frame.

If we stay on the current trajectory that we are on, it would likely only be a matter of time before this sort of technology is everywhere.

Can you imagine what criminals could do with this?

A predator would not even need to follow you home.  He could just scan your face without you even realizing it, and by scanning your face he could get your address, your phone number, and a whole host of other private details about your life.

A lot of people out there just don’t get it.

In a society without any privacy, the bad guys can always find you.

Of course in a society without any privacy, there would be no hiding from tyranny either.

When facial recognition technology is literally everywhere, there will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

Every time your face is scanned, your location will be known.

Needless to say, most people already carry around phones that constantly monitor where they are anyway.

But as the Big Brother surveillance grid that is being constructed all around us becomes even more pervasive, it won’t be too long before there is literally no opting out.

I have been a very vocal advocate for privacy for over a decade, but during that time our privacy rights have been greatly eroded.

Now is the time to take a stand, because once our privacy rights are completely gone it will be nearly impossible to get them back.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post The U.S. Government Is Dramatically Expanding the Use of Facial Recognition Technology appeared first on LewRockwell.

di J.R. MacLeod

Il sistema monetario e bancario svolge un ruolo importante nelle economie contemporanee. La conoscenza di come funziona questo sistema dovrebbe essere diffusa il più ampiamente possibile, ciononostante il sistema educativo istruisce a malapena i suoi studenti su questo argomento, se non per niente. Questo articolo colma questa lacuna fornendo una panoramica di base di come funziona oggi il sistema bancario. Il lettore potrebbe anche essere interessato a studiare la discussione sui sistemi alternativi, tuttavia questo articolo si concentrerà solo sulla descrizione del sistema dominante.

Operazioni di mercato aperto e sistema bancario a riserva frazionaria

La banca centrale ha il monopolio sull'emissione di banconote, ovvero di valuta fisica. La differenza tra il valore nominale della valuta creata e il costo per produrla è chiamata signoraggio e dà un profitto al sovrano monetario, in questo caso la banca centrale. Le banconote delle banche centrali non sono rimborsabili in nient'altro che in sé stesse: sono create dal nulla. È probabile che la valuta fisica prodotta dalle banche centrali sarà parzialmente sostituita dalle valute digitali delle banche centrali (CBDC) nel prossimo futuro. Svolgeranno molte delle stesse funzioni della valuta fisica e manterranno caratteristiche come il signoraggio.

Le banche centrali sono in grado di acquistare asset dagli attori di mercato. Lo fanno firmando un “assegno” a sé stesse, o creando dal nulla un deposito a vista. Questi assegni vengono creati per decreto della banca centrale e sono convertibili solo in banconote ufficiali. Quando la banca centrale acquista asset dalle banche normali utilizzando questi assegni (che ora sono elettronici), le banche commerciali tengono questo denaro in riserva nei propri conti che detengono presso la banca centrale. Quando la banca centrale acquista asset da altri attori di mercato, gli assegni finiscono nello stesso posto. Colui che riceve l'assegno lo deposita presso la sua banca ed essa, a sua volta, lo deposita nel suo conto presso la banca centrale. Gli assegni finiscono inevitabilmente come riserve detenute presso la banca centrale. Tali assegni, chiamati riserve monetarie presso la banca centrale, funzionano come depositi a vista, o crediti nei confronti della banca centrale, quindi faranno sempre parte dei suoi conti.

Le riserve monetarie nella banca centrale rappresentano la moneta del settore bancario; è il tipo di moneta che la banca centrale e le banche normali usano per fare affari e regolare i saldi tra loro. In particolare le banche normali con un eccesso di riserve le prestano ad altre banche normali con riserve insufficienti.

Questi acquisti di asset sono chiamati operazioni di mercato aperto. In genere l'asset più comune acquistato dalla banca centrale è il debito pubblico. Ciò dimostra la stretta relazione tra banche centrali e stati, poiché le banche centrali creano denaro per finanziare l'attività statale.

I clienti delle banche ordinarie possono ritirare i propri depositi sotto forma di valuta fisica. Per adempiere a questo obbligo, le banche ordinarie richiedono la consegna di valuta fisica alla banca centrale, la quale riduce il loro saldo delle riserve presso di essa. La valuta fisica e le riserve monetarie nella banca centrale costituiscono la base monetaria.

Poiché i clienti delle banche normali in genere non richiedono l'utilizzo di tutto il denaro nei loro conti in una volta, esse concedono prestiti con l'obiettivo di avere riserve sufficienti a soddisfare il volume di prelievi che i loro clienti effettuano, piuttosto che avere riserve sufficienti a soddisfare completamente i propri conti di deposito, ovvero tutto il denaro che i clienti potrebbero richiedere in una singola volta. Se la banca centrale crea nuovo denaro e aumenta le riserve di una banca normale acquistando un asset da essa, la banca normale, a sua volta, creerà ancora più denaro concedendo prestiti ben superiori alla quantità di nuove riserve che riceve. Le banche normali e i loro clienti fanno affari tra loro, quindi il denaro viene costantemente moltiplicato, poiché con ogni nuovo deposito che esse ricevono cercheranno di creare anche nuovi prestiti. Questo processo è noto come riserva frazionaria, poiché le riserve delle banche normali sono solo una piccola frazione delle loro passività di deposito.

Questo sistema centralizzato di creazione del denaro rappresenta una piramide invertita. La banca centrale piramida le riserve monetarie in cima alla sua capacità di creare valuta fisica; le banche normali, poi, piramidano i depositi a vista in cima alle loro riserve presso la banca centrale.

Altri strumenti di politica monetaria

Obblighi di riserva — La banca centrale ha il potere normativo sulla quota di riserve che le banche ordinarie devono mantenere. Questo potere può influenzare la politica monetaria, con obblighi di riserva più elevati che portano a una minore offerta di denaro e obblighi di riserva più bassi che portano a una maggiore offerta di denaro.

Assicurazione sui depositi — La banca centrale garantisce i depositi dei clienti delle banche normali fino a un certo limite. Lo scopo di questo strumento è quello di tentare di prevenire le corse agli sportelli, in cui i clienti percepiscono che una banca normale sta operando su una base di insolvenza, ovvero senza riserve sufficienti per soddisfare i propri obblighi di deposito, e quindi essi tentano di recuperare il loro denaro dallo stock di riserve che la banca possiede. La banca centrale che garantisce questi conti può dare maggiore stabilità a un sistema bancario a riserva frazionaria, ma crea anche un azzardo morale.

Finestra di sconto — La banca centrale ha il potere di prestare riserve monetarie alle banche normali attraverso la cosiddetta finestra di sconto. Questa è stata la principale giustificazione iniziale per la creazione delle banche centrali, affinchè agissero come “prestatori di ultima istanza” per quelle banche che si fossero improvvisamente ritrovate in difficoltà. Il tasso d'interesse per questo strumento è in genere impostato più in alto del tasso che le banche normali chiedono quando si prestano a vicenda le rispettive riserve monetarie. Questo per garantire il suo ruolo come opzione di emergenza.

Pagamento degli interessi sulle riserve — Un'aggiunta relativamente recente alla cassetta degli attrezzi della banca centrale è la linea di politica di pagare interessi sulle riserve monetarie detenute dalle banche normali nei conti presso la banca centrale. Lo scopo di questo strumento è consentire a quest'ultima di acquistare asset senza avere un forte impatto sull'inflazione dei prezzi, o sui tassi d'interesse. La banca centrale crea nuove riserve monetarie e le inietta nel sistema, ma finché la banca centrale paga un tasso d'interesse più elevato sulle riserve detenute presso di essa, rispetto al tasso che le banche normali guadagnano prestandosele a vicenda, le banche normali lasceranno gran parte di queste nuove riserve in deposito per guadagnare passivamente. Ciò significa che le banche normali promuovono un effetto moltiplicatore minore sul nuovo denaro e l'inflazione dei prezzi è di conseguenza inferiore a quanto sarebbe accaduto altrimenti. Inoltre la banca centrale può influenzare il tasso che le banche normali si addebitano a vicenda sui prestiti delle riserve modificando il tasso che paga sulle riserve parcheggiate presso di essa.

Tipi di asset acquistati — I diversi tipi di asset acquistati dalla banca centrale avranno diversi tipi di effetti sulla politica monetaria e sull'economia in generale. A parità di condizioni, l'acquisto di oro da parte della banca centrale tenderà a rafforzare la credibilità e la stabilità della valuta nazionale. L'acquisto di più debito pubblico finanzierà una maggiore attività da parte dello stato. L'acquisto di una specifica classe di asset darà maggiore impulso all'azienda sottostante, nonché al settore dell'economia in cui opera.

Mercato dei pronti contro termine — “Repo” fa riferimento agli accordi di riacquisto. Si tratta di un metodo di finanziamento a breve termine in cui un'azienda vende asset, in genere titoli di Stato, e accetta di riacquistarli in una data futura a un prezzo leggermente più alto. La differenza di prezzo costituisce un tasso d'interesse in funzione della preferenza temporale. La banca centrale interviene nel mercato dei pronti contro termine tramite operazioni di mercato aperto e linee di prestito, utilizzando le riserve monetarie presso di essa. Questi interventi influenzano l'offerta di denaro e, di conseguenza, il tasso d'interesse nel mercato dei pronti contro termine.

Conclusione

Questo articolo fornisce una panoramica del sistema bancario moderno e della creazione di denaro. In quanto tale, ritengo che sia accurata, ma ci sono ovviamente più dettagli nei processi descritti sopra e ci sono ulteriori strumenti impiegati dalla banca centrale per creare denaro e influenzare il sistema bancario più ampio. Ci sono anche molti problemi con questo sistema. Per prima cosa, la capacità di creare denaro dal nulla e prestarlo a interesse richiede la creazione di altro denaro in futuro per rimborsare il capitale e gli interessi. Questo è uno dei concetti archiviati sotto il termine generico di usura.

Fortunatamente esistono anche idee alternative che mirano a evitare i problemi del nostro sistema attuale. Per una discussione completa riguardo al sistema bancario moderno e alla relativa creazione di denaro, ai suoi problemi e alle alternative, consiglierei di iniziare da Understanding Money Mechanics di Robert Murphy. Un altro testo eccellente è The Case Against the Fed di Murray Rothbard .

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

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Many people oppose the free market because it leads to inequality of wealth and income. It is unfair, they say, that some people have vastly more money than others. Some defenders of the free market respond that these inequalities, while undesirable in themselves, make the poor better off than they would be otherwise, and so should be accepted. Another argument made by defenders of the free market is that restricting inequality would interfere liberty, so that, although inequality is bad, we have to put up with it.

While it is true that inequality makes the poor better off and that restricting inequality interferes with liberty, these are not the best arguments that defenders of the free market should use. They accept that inequality is bad, but we should reject this assumption. There is nothing bad about inequality.

People are unequal in every dimension of their being, including weight, height, muscle build, intelligence, and so on. This just the way the world is. Why should we try to change it? People who attempt this have a grudge against the world. They are not satisfied with the way God created it.

And of course they can’t succeed. As the great Murray Rothbard points out, absolute equality is impossible. No two places on earth, for example, offer precisely the same view.

If we shouldn’t defend the free market by arguing that it decreases equality, what should we do? Fortunately, there are many better arguments available. I’m going to list a number of them, but if you want more details, you should read Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market and Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action.

One of the best of these arguments is that the free market makes possible mutually beneficial gains from trade. If I have something that you want and you have something I want, we can make an exchange, so we are both better off. But what if our exchange makes someone else worse off? This question is a version of the “externalities” or “market failure” argument. The claim is that some of our activities, including trade, impose costs on others. If so, this indicates a failure to define property rights. Once we do so, the so-called “problem” dissolves.

This obviously raises another question. How do people acquire property rights? The best answer is given by Rothbard, further developed and extended by the great Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Everybody owns himself and, given that the earth starts out unowned, he can “mix his labor” with the land and thus acquire it.

Before leaving externalities aside, we should note another important argument. People who talk about externalities want the government to correct them, but what reason is there to think that the government will change things so that the supposedly “correct” amount is produced? There is every reason to think that the government will make matters worse.

There is an assumption that we have been making so far that should now be dropped. This assumption is that in deciding what sort of economic system to adopt, we have a choice. We can pick the free market, socialism, or some intermediate system that is a mixture of the free market and socialism. For any developed economy, this is not so, as Mises proved in his famous article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920), expanded into his great book Socialism. Mises proved that without free market prices, economic calculation is impossible. Entrepreneurs cannot tell whether their investments are profitable. So, they are unable to use their resources efficiently. If they cannot do this, the economy will collapse into chaos.

Further, there is no third system intermediate between the free market and socialism. Interference with the market fails to achieve the ostensible goals of its supporters. Minimum wage laws create unemployment. Price controls lead to shortages. Faced with failure, the interventionists must either return to the free market or intervene again, in an effort to remedy the defects of the previous intervention. If this is continued, there will be no free market left. The result will be full-scale socialism, which has already been shown to be impossible.

How did the socialists and interventionists respond to Mises’s conclusive demonstration that their schemes cannot work? They denied the existence of economic laws that restricted what they could do. As Mises says in Human Action, “It is a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the debates concerning the essence, scope, and logical character of economics to dismiss them as the scholastic quibbling of pedantic professors. It is a widespread misconception that while pedants squandered useless talk about the most appropriate method of procedure, economics itself, indifferent to these idle disputes, went quietly on its way. In the Methodenstreit between the Austrian economists and the Prussian Historical School, the self-styled ‘intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern,’ and in the discussions between the school of John Bates Clark and American Institutionalism much more was at stake than the question of what kind of procedure was the most fruitful one. The real issue was the epistemological foundations of the science of human action and its logical legitimacy. Starting from an epistemological system to which praxeological thinking was strange and from a logic which acknowledged as scientific–besides logic and mathematics–only the empirical natural sciences and history, many authors tried to deny the value and usefulness of economic theory. Historicism aimed at replacing it by economic history; positivism recommended the substitution of an illusory social science which should adopt the logical structure and pattern of Newtonian mechanics. Both these schools agreed in a radical rejection of all the achievements of economic thought. It was impossible for the economists to keep silent in the face of all these attacks.”

Thus, it’s the free market or nothing. We are fortunate that the only economic system is on that benefits everybody through the chance of making mutually advantageous exchanges.

This point leads to another argument we can use to defend the free market. In the free market, it’s to my advantage that others do well, because they can offer more goods and services to exchange. This will promote peace between nations. Why go to war with people who are making you better off?

Given the abundance of excellent arguments in favor of the free market, there is no need to use argument that accept the enemy’s premise that equality is a good thing. Let’s do everything that we can to support the genuine arguments in favor of the free market, as best expounded by Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises.

The post Why Equality Is Bad appeared first on LewRockwell.

Since the job that was actually assigned to [the Fed] by Congressman Carter Glass back in 1913 is now vestigial and long gone, and the financial system has been flooded with massive liquidity for decades on end, it might well be time to declare victory and let the free market take care of jobs, growth, inflation and prosperity. — David Stockman

Let’s take a closer look at the job Congressman Carter Glass assigned to the government’s new central bank, the Federal Reserve System, created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

The first thing to notice is it’s a creature of government, not the market, otherwise there would be no need to support the Fed with a legislative act, which gave it the status of a state-backed cartel.

It’s crucial to understand that the push for central banking was part of the Progressive Era feature of business partnering with government in its war against competition.  Mergers on the free market had failed for various reasons, including internal conflicts among members, challenges from new entrants in the market, and new competing markets altogether, such as the new motor vehicle industry that emerged in 1893 and by 1895 saw “thirty American manufacturers producing 2,500 motor vehicles.”  It became evident that large industries needed to partner with government to establish their cartels.  As historian Gabriel Kolko explains:

The net effect of federal legislation, and usually the intent, was to implement the economic-political goals of some group within an industry. The pervasive reality of the period is big business’ control of politics set in the context of the political regulation of the economy.

Big bankers’ goal in reform was a law that would authorize a central bank to create a more inflatable (“elastic”) currency and control uniform rates of inflation among member banks.  In this way banks would avoid currency drains and hoped to reduce the likelihood of those dreaded and embarrassing bank runs.

The six-week Panic of 1907, triggered by Knickerbocker Trust Company’s president, Charles T. Barney, inaugurated the movement for a radical revision of the US monetary system.  Barney had joined with two other speculators in a failed attempt to corner the market on copper, sparking a run on Knickerbocker.  The Trust sought aid from J. P. Morgan but based on its lack of solvency Morgan refused.  After losing $8 million in withdrawals Knickerbocker closed its doors but the fear was already spreading to national banks.  The New York Stock Exchange suffered a shocking rise in call money interest rates, and only Morgan’s ability to function as a central bank over a two-week period saved several trust companies and kept the NYSE open.

It was no surprise that the Panic hit the NYC trusts first.  By law, the trusts held “a low percentage of cash reserves relative to deposits, around 5 percent, compared with 25 percent for national banks. Because trust-company deposit accounts were demandable in cash, trusts were just as susceptible to runs on deposits as were banks.”

What was the economy like in the late 19th century?

The message we hear today is deflation is bad — but bad for whom?  From 1870-1912 the dollar had an average annual deflation rate of -0.71, producing a cumulative price change of -25.95%.  Dollar holders increased their wealth just by holding dollars, as it only took $0.74 in 1912 to buy what $1.00 would in 1870.  According to the St. Louis Fed, during the same period the economy increased total physical production by 550%, yielding one of the most prosperous economies in history.  But during the years preceding the anticipated crisis, 1900-1907, bank credit expansion produced a cumulative price increase of 11.90%.

Because the solution they sought required a federal charter, the bankers united with politicians, who they already knew socially, to agitate for a central bank.  The ultra-secret meeting at Jekyll Island in November of 1910 therefore consisted of six of the most influential bankers and politicians of the day, representing an estimated one-fourth of the world’s wealth.  Long denied as a groundless conspiracy theory the meeting was confirmed in 1935 by one of the attendees, Frank Vanderlip, President of National City Bank (Citibank) and a century later celebrated publicly by the Fed itself, “in a remarkable show of both contempt and hubris.”

Paul Warburg, a partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co who had an extensive background in European banking, was the chief architect of the plan that emerged from Jekyll, but for political reasons it bore the name of another attendee, Nelson W. Aldrich, a Republican Senator from Rhode Island and Chairman of the National Monetary Commission.

The initial plan, which with only non-essential changes became the Federal Reserve Act, consisted of a National Reserve Association located in Washington that would preside over fifteen major regions.  Private bankers from the regions would elect the forty-five board members in Washington, with each region electing no more than four members — thereby eliminating the possibility of Wall Street control.  The attendees’ challenge was to secure political backing for the plan while avoiding any suggestion that it was a scheme of Wall Street.

Playing the politicians

What followed from 1910 to the bill’s passage in 1913 was an exercise in mass psychology.  The Jekyll attendees promoted the plan among bankers and the public through articles and speeches.:

A special monetary conference of all business organizations, convened by the National Board of Trade in January, 1911, passed a resolution, written by Warburg, endorsing the Aldrich Plan. At the beginning of February twenty-two key bankers from twelve cities met in Atlantic City to consider the Aldrich Plan. Sessions were closed, and all the conference publicly declared at the end of three days’ discussion was that it endorsed the plan and would actively support it.  (Kolko)

On the political side, progressive Democrats were winning favor with the public, Republican President William Howard Taft and former president Theodore Roosevelt were fighting over reforms, with the progressive Roosevelt deciding to run against him as a third party candidate in the election of 1912.  The Republican split helped Democrat Woodrow Wilson win, with socialist Eugene Debs, the fourth candidate, gaining nearly a million popular votes.

With the Democrats running the show in Congress and the White House, the Aldrich Bill now faced a political firing squad, though in name only.  Who better to pick up the issue of banking reform than the Democratic Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Congressman Carter Glass of Virginia, who by his own admission had virtually no technical knowledge of banking?  To provide guidance and actually write the bill he hired a young economics professor from Washington and Lee University, H. Parker Willis.

In a House report of September 9, 1913, Glass and his committee announced their reasons for rejecting the Aldrich Bill:  It lacked adequate government control; it threw voting control into the larger banks; there was “extreme danger of inflation” in the bill; and it had “dangerous monopolistic aspects.”

All of it true, of course.

Then he presented his own bill, drafted by Willis, which in every important detail was the Aldrich Bill brought back from the dead.  Warburg, to assuage the cartel’s worries and establish himself as the real author of the bill, published a side-by-side comparison of the Aldrich and Glass proposals.  Not only were they in agreement on all essential provisions, but in some cases were identical in wording.

With many of the biggest names on Wall Street objecting to the Glass-Owen Bill (Robert D. Owen was the sponsor in the Senate) and having been previously exposed during the Pujo hearings as constituting a powerful “Money Trust,” the proposed legislation seemed like the perfect antidote to Wall Street influence in banking.  When President Wilson, himself a banking neophyte, signed Glass-Owen into law on December 23, 1913 it had the support of the majority of Congress.  Had government finally solved the problem of monetary inelasticity?  Perhaps the problem had been invented.

Returning to Mr. Stockman’s suggestion that it might be time for the Fed to “declare victory” and let the free market work, he wants nothing less than to save civilization.  But Fed inflation is too opaque a method of theft and too much loved by those who profit from it for our overlords to get rid of it.

The post How the Bankers Outfoxed the Politicians appeared first on LewRockwell.

It appears that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan and Special Counsel Jack Smith are not done yet in releasing material in advance of the election. In a previous column, I criticized the release of Smith’s  180-page brief before the election as procedurally irregular and politically biased, a criticism shared by  CNN’s senior legal analyst and other law professors. Nevertheless, on Thursday, Judge Chutkan agreed to a request from Smith to unseal exhibits and evidence in advance of the election.

The brief clearly contains damning allegations, including witness accounts, for Trump. The objection to the release of the brief was not a defense of any actions taken on January 6th by the former president or others, but rather an objection to what even the court admitted was an “irregular” process.

As discussed earlier, Smith has been unrelenting in his demands for a trial before the election. He has even demanded that Donald Trump be barred from standard appellate options in order to expedite his trial.

Smith never fully explained the necessity of holding a trial before the election beyond suggesting that voters should see the trial and the results — assaulting the very premise of the Justice Department’s rule against such actions just before elections.

To avoid allegations of political manipulation of cases, the Justice Department has long followed a policy against making potentially influential filings within 60 or 90 days of an election. One section of the Justice Department manual states “Federal prosecutors… may never select the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election.”

Even if one argues that this provision is not directly controlling or purely discretionary, the spirit of the policy is to avoid precisely the appearance in this case: the effort to manipulate or influence an election through court filings.

With no trial date for 2025, there is no reason why Smith or Chutkan would adopt such an irregular process. The court could have slightly delayed these filings until after the approaching election or it could have sealed the filings.

If there is one time where a court should err on the side of avoiding an “irregular” process, it is before a national election. What may look like simply an adversarial process to some looks like oppo research to others.  Delaying the release would have avoided any appearance of such bias.

For Smith, the election has long been the focus of his filings and demands for an expedited process. Smith knows that this election is developing into the largest jury verdict in history. Many citizens, even those who do not like Trump, want to see an end to the weaponization of the legal system, including Smith’s D.C. prosecution. Trump has to lose the election for Smith to be guaranteed a trial in the case.

Chutkan has given the Trump team just seven days to oppose her order. That would still allow the material to make it into the public (and be immediately employed by the media and Harris campaign) just days before the election. The move will only increase criticism that this looks like a docket in the pocket of the DNC.

It is telling that, once again, the timing just works out to the way that is most politically impactful. Many are left with a Ned Flanders moment of “well, if that don’t put the “dink” in co-inky-dink.”

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

The post Adversarial Process or Oppo Research? Judge Agrees To Release More Trump Material Before the Election appeared first on LewRockwell.

On September 27, my father’s birthday, a devastating storm- Hurricane Helene- cut a swath of destruction through six states, with the most damage occurring in western North Carolina. Many residents of western North Carolina didn’t even have flood insurance. With good reason. The area wasn’t considered a flood zone.

I’m sure almost everyone reading this has seen the heart wrenching videos, of residents reporting how they witnessed close family members being washed away. How they’d lost their homes. Lost everything. But most significantly, how they’d witnessed, or experienced themselves, FEMA, local law enforcement, and the National Guard, doing all they could to prevent rescue efforts. If this seems incomprehensible, it is. Untold numbers of average, good hearted Samaritans showed up, ready to help out their fellow citizens. And the “authorities” prevented them from doing that. One guy flew his own helicopter to rescue an elderly couple in the mountains. He left his co-pilot, who was his son, behind as he took the woman down first (he didn’t want to have too much weight in the craft). Law enforcement threatened to arrest him if he went back up and rescued her husband, and picked up his son. As Howard Cosell used to say, “Hard to believe!”

I have said that Americans seem to have no tipping point. After all, they have tolerated a corruption that the world has never seen before, for many decades. Without a whimper of protest. If a multitude of accounts, from those on the site of the disaster, all saying the same thing- that governmental authorities are impeding efforts, not facilitating them- don’t present a tipping point, what exactly would? If they promoted some ridiculous rapper calling himself King Herod, who was running for public office on a pledge to demand the first born of every family in America, would that be enough? If they ordered you to ask permission of the local police force before deciding to drink alcohol inside your own home, would that be enough? Is that really much worse than telling your White kindergartner that he/she should feel guilt about his/her “White Privilege?” Or stocking Gender Queer in the school library?

Everything about the tragic event in North Carolina seems planned. Coordinated. Contrived. Nothing about a tropical storm that turns that deadly that quickly seems natural. I’m no meteorologist, but I do know that hurricanes seem to cause the most devastation the closer to the ocean they are. This one wasn’t close to the ocean. There were mountains there that probably never thought they’d see a hurricane. And now Hurricane Milton is on the way. Once again, it will target areas where most of the population supports Trump. That’s odd for a random hurricane to be so politically biased. I live several states up the coast from Florida, but I’ll stay indoors because it’s likely that Milton won’t like “conspiracy theorists” very much, either. I’m getting really fatigued over all this “extreme” weather. It didn’t used to be so common. Kind of like autism. Maybe I’ll call it Chronic Weather Fear Porn Syndrome.

In his song Louisiana 1927, Randy Newman talked about how “they’re trying to wash us away.” Indeed, it does seem like the weather- and whoever it is that is controlling it now- has something against the common riffraff. I don’t recall a single instance of a hurricane or a tornado demolishing gated mansions anywhere. But they’ve hit plenty of trailer parks. Newman devoted an entire LP to the great Huey Long, Good Old Boys. Huey’s great-granddaughter didn’t even know about that until I told her. I hope she bought the album. Huey used the fact that the city leaders of New Orleans had blown up the levy during the flood, thereby causing many to lose businesses and homes, as a campaign issue. We would hear the same claim almost eighty years later during Hurricane Katrina, when some “wacko” Black residents claimed that the authorities had blown up the levies. Well, they’d done it before.

The “crazy” residents of New Orleans also claimed that the police were firing at them. And not because some of them were looting stores. In the 2010 Haiti earthquake, we heard more fantastic allegations. Did they use Nikola Tesla’s invention of an earthquake machine? Why couldn’t they have used his free energy discovery instead, I wonder? At any rate, the Clinton Foundation was deeply involved, and the conspiracy folks were all over that, connecting them to human trafficking there. Activist Monica Peterson later traveled to Haiti to investigate the trafficking claims, and wound up hanged in November, 2016. That happens to a lot of those associated with the Clintons. It’s a Body Count thing, you wouldn’t understand. Rumors were that Hillary also helped rig a Haitian election to help her brother’s company. Well, how hard can it be to rig an election in Haiti? Look at what they’re doing here.

We all remember those pictures of residents on top of their roofs in New Orleans, waving in vain for someone to rescue them. Dubya was rightfully criticized for taking two days to respond to the catastrophe. That was inexcusable enough, but the Biden/ Harris administration took a week. You have to come up with a new adjective to describe that. Inexplicable? Befuddling? Criminal? Evil? Biden, being the president, was pretty much invisible, as he usually is. It’s unknown if he even comprehends what happened. Countess Cackula was photographed in front of a laptop on I guess Air Force Two, with the earphones unplugged. Not clear what she was doing. She did appear, to advise the survivors to apply online for the generous $750 that FEMA was providing. If that doesn’t seem like much to you, you don’t understand Bidenomics. Cackula didn’t explain how they’d apply since the storm knocked out all power.

As Randy Newman noted, apparently thousands of these poor souls were literally “washed away” by this super storm that was almost certainly created through manipulation of the weather. Trump lost a lot of votes there, and these dead people will not be among the increasing number of the dearly departed who make their presence known at the polls. Dead voters seem to almost exclusively favor the Democrats. Never having been a dead voter, this is something I can’t pretend to understand. I mean no disrespect to those who lost their lives so senselessly here, or to the grieving loved ones they left behind. I have to try and find humor in these things. It’s the only way I can write about them. Initially, a paltry 500 troops were sent to the area, which was another tremendous slap in the face to the people there. Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. troops were sent to the Middle East at the same time.

If you had any doubts about how your government feels about you, how it values your life, their response to Hurricane Helene should tell you all you need to know. They don’t care about you. In fact, they hate you. You are the “worthless eaters” Henry Kissinger spoke so fondly of. And they’re all eugenicists, so this is natural. They want as many of you to die as possible. It’s just logistics to determine how best to do that. A deadly “warp speed” vaccine? Yes, that will cull the herd nicely. Strategically placed weather disasters? Sure, and if anyone questions them, just attribute it all to “Climate Change.” I never even heard of “hurricane season,” or “category 4 or 5” when I was young. Well, when you have a 24 hour Weather Channel, with lots of oldsters obsessed with the weather watching, you need some exciting weather. Mild and sunny doesn’t cut it any more. Sure, viewers may have heart attacks. That’s just collateral damage.

Say what you will about Donald Trump, but he visited Georgia- also impacted by Helene- within hours. It isn’t known if Trump bought McDonald’s for anyone there, as he did after the huge, and now completely forgotten environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. Trump roundly criticized North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper. Somebody gave Joe Biden an electroshock treatment, and he was revived long enough to declare that Trump was “lying” about the government’s failed response to the emergency. Biden claimed that it was “disinformation” to report that FEMA had spent a billion on migrants. But that’s what FEMA- not a “conspiracy theorist”- says on their own website. He claimed that FEMA wasn’t only giving $750, when there is video of Vice President Cackula bragging about it. So all those residents are lying, just like Trump. FEMA’s doing a great job. Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia.

That was a theme in mainstream media coverage as well. That relief efforts were being hampered by “disinformation.” Coming, I guess, from all those actual residents. Or the private citizens who were trying to rescue people, and give them supplies, but were prevented from doing so by representatives of our beloved government. Maybe those residents were “fake news.” Crisis actors, if you will. All of our identical, “competing” news outlets are parroting the party line. One headline blared: “After the Deluge, the Lies: Misinformation and Hoaxes About Helene Cloud the Recovery.” No, I think what’s “clouding” (I guess the writer liked puns) the recovery is the government authorities stopping it from happening. CNN gasps about the White House’s “desperate scramble” to “swat down hurricane misinformation.” Somewhere, Hillary Clinton is snickering, “See, I told you we need to prosecute this stuff.”

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The post America 2.0- A Category 5 Disaster appeared first on LewRockwell.

Imagine a man rolling a bowling ball down the alley and knocking over some pins. There is nothing extraordinary about this imaging. Now imagine the pins at the end of the alley rolling the bowling ball back toward the bowler. Now this is an extraordinary image. This is also precisely what has occurred with Hurricane Milton. The storm system generated off the coast of Mexico and targeted Florida. Hurricane alley sent the storm back up the alley….

Weather manipulation has been around in some form since at least 1947. Lorenz, known for the Butterfly Effect, talked about weather manipulation in the 1960s. There are plenty patents and documents regarding weather manipulation.

Recently, Dane Wiggington of GeoEngineeringwatch.org appeared in this interview on retired colonel Douglas MacGregor’s podcast to discuss weather warfare and the targeting of Appalachia area of North Carolina with Hurricane Helene. Dane stated that he spoke with legislators in North Carolina and presented evidence of weather warfare to them:

“I have an hour conference call yesterday with the representatives and senators from the Carolinas, and we presented the data to them to answer their questions about how this manipulation occurs,” Wigington said.

“They realized this was not a natural event. They’re trying to digest the fact that their states were literally under assault from weather modification operations that are clearly connected to the DoD operations.”

“They’re in shock. Because when you realize you’re literally at war with those who control the federal government, how does one digest that?”

In this interview with Attorney Todd Callender, Todd reports that not only do the patents exists, there are also laws that codify weather manipulation. Callender predicted that weather warfare will continue, not only in the form of storms, but also fires and other manmade disasters masquerading as natural phenomenon. This appears part of the larger goal to exterminate most of the human race.

The mass murder in North Carolina and parts of Tennessee are summarized well in this article by Dr. Peter Breggin and his wife Ginger Breggin. Supplies have been blocked and confiscated rather than allowed to aid the people suffering from the devastation. Private individuals with helicopters and other vehicles have been threatened with arrest if they try and save people.

FEMA claims to lack money and resources, yet its widely reported that it subsidizes illegal aliens. In the 30 days prior to Hurricane Helene the federal government gave 8 billion to subsidize death in destruction in Ukraine, and another 8.7 billion to subsidize death and destruction in Israel and the Middle East. Literally, politicians are stealing from the people in Appalachia and giving their money to illegal aliens and to subsidize unnecessary wars that could lead to world war. Apparently, this twisted campaign of murder and destruction is partly driven by lithium deposits in Appalachia area of North Carolina that is desired by the DOD. The short-term effect on the elections should be an obvious agenda as well.

The use of weather warfare emboldens government, disempowers the individual, creates a permanent state of crises, and furthers the anti human narrative that climate change is unnatural and humans are a parasite on this planet.

Still, weather warfare may not be enough. A recent DoD directive reported on InfoWars.com expands domestic military authority to include lethal force:

“Defense Intelligence Components may provide personnel to assist a Federal department or agency, including a Federal law enforcement agency, or a State or local law enforcement agency when lives are in danger, in response to a request for such assistance, in accordance with the following approval authorities..

(a) Provision of personnel to support response efforts for civil disturbances, which may also require Presidential authorization.

(b) DoD response to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high-yield explosive incidents.

(c) Assistance in responding with assets with potential for lethality, or any situation in which it is reasonably foreseeable that providing the requested assistance may involve the use of force that is likely to result in lethal force, including death or serious bodily injury. It also includes all support to civilian law enforcement officials in situations where a confrontation between civilian law enforcement and civilian individuals or groups is reasonably anticipated.

Pointing out the obvious, the federal government has claimed for as long as I remember that it would be unlawful to place the military on the border. Apparently, the federal government considers it lawful to use the military to kill American citizens on American soil.

Consider that the directive states that the use of force is being justified if lives are in danger and in response to biological incidents. Imagine during the height of COVID the use of lethal force by the military targeting the unvaccinated or those refusing to quarantine or wear a mask.

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Was it the wrath of grapes, or just another New York Times fake news story? The full-page article was written by two mugs, a man and a woman, who even had the audacity to allow their byline to appear, surely a new low in mendacity of a nonstory. Needless to say it had to do with a black man, not surprisingly one accused of rape, abduction, violence—you name it, he’s done it against women. Step forward the Diddler, aka Puff Daddy, or Sean Combs.

The Times coverage of black artists, black athletes, black politicians, and even black criminals (in a very positive way, mind you) takes up most of its pages. Here’s the article’s opening line on Puff Daddy: “In the 2000s, few events held the cultural cachet of the White Party given by Sean Combs…” Cultural cachet? Where do these two morons writing such outrageous garbage come from? Deepest, yet undiscovered, Africa, or another planet altogether? Puff Daddy and culture are like comparing the Gulag archipelago to a wellness retreat in Palm Beach. Sean Combs was, is, and always will be a violent criminal whose parties were attended by lunch-bucket pilferers, assorted body snatchers, smiling wallet lifters, and bald-faced phonies, not to mention out-and-out gangsters and killers. Yet because of the color of his skin, the mendacious Times compares his parties to some 19th-century Vienna ball attended by nobles and aristocrats. Thankfully, for those who are dumb enough to read the Times, there were accompanying pictures that somehow contradicted the ass-licking tone of the piece: Mostly black people in white, the only one I recognized was that arch hustler and proven liar Al Sharpton, a man as far as I know not related to Prince Metternich or the Princes Schoenburg.

“The shameless gimmickry, smuttiness, and stupidity of such writing does not need any explaining; it’s pure Times.”

Never mind. Here’s Puff Daddy’s response to some rude comments about his parties: “It’s disappointing to see the media and social commentators twist these unique cultural moments into something they were not.” This sentence must have been heavily edited, because the one time I had the bad luck to hear this bum talking, I was anchored in St. Tropez and his ghastly rental gin palace dropped anchor next to me, and I could hear him using the f-word before, after, and in the middle of every word. He then goes on, always according to the mendacious Times, “that shaming celebrities who attended, taking videos and photos out of context, and trying to link these events to false allegations is simply untrue.” Good for you, Puffy, not a single f-bomb; my, how you’ve changed.

His lawyer has stated that although an imperfect person, Puffy is not a criminal. If his lawyer says so it must be true, and I must be mistaken. But I’m writing about the ghastly Times, not the rapist-cum-beater of women and crypto-homosexual. The bloodhounds are trying to sniff out who the A-list man in bed with Puff Daddy is, in noble pursuit of the truth. It makes one rather ashamed to be called a journalist, but such are the joys of modern American culture, and that goes for Britain also. (The Brits are even worse, pretending to be shocked, shocked at such goings-on.) That Puff Daddy had a broad reach is undeniable, but reaching for celebrities isn’t exactly the same as reaching for cultural cachet. The Hamptons, where most of the White Parties took place, are dotted with private clubs, beach clubs, tennis clubs, and gentlemen’s clubs. They are necessary in order to keep out hoi polloi, or down-and-dirty scoundrels like Puff Daddy. And I would bet my bottom dollar that not a single person belonging to any of the proper clubs in the Hamptons has ever set foot in one of Puffy’s orgies, cultural cachet or no cultural cachet.

In an era of insane disinformation, this description of Puff Daddy’s parties stands out for its mendacity and slavishness to celebrity. It’s like comparing a paintball-gun-splatter paint job to an El Greco. But leave it to the Times to euphemize a black gangster’s torture of women. Imagine if a Trump voter had been accused of similar horrors; the Sulzberger gang would have run out of newsprint with special editions.

And another thing: This unmentionable antiwhite and anti-right sheet accused Trump last Sunday of planning to seek revenge against his enemies in case he wins the presidency. What I find amusing is that the accusation fits exactly what the Biden administration has done to Trump by dragging him through court after court and trying to bankrupt him with fines. In other words, what the administration has already done to Donald Trump, the Times is predicting a newly elected Donald will do to his opponents. It is like listening to children arguing who did what to whom. And there are people who still take the Times seriously.

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The post Party Lines appeared first on LewRockwell.

This past Monday was the anniversary of the Hamas military assault against the occupation forces of Israel and the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza—and now the West Bank and Lebanon.

As Scott Ritter said in an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano on Monday, “The world will never be the same. What happened a year ago today has forever changed the world.”

Ritter is absolutely right. As Scott also said in that interview, “The world now sees Israel as the genocidal apartheid state that it has always been.”

I truly pray for Scott Ritter’s safety. Without a doubt, he is among the most courageously truthful spokesmen on the national stage today. There is no one in America with more knowledge of the military and geopolitical affairs of the Middle East—especially Israel—than Scott Ritter. But along with his vast knowledge and experience, he possesses lionlike courage to tell the truth about the Zionist state.

Remember that Ritter was once a solid supporter of Israel—as was I. Scott’s eyes were opened to the truth of Zionist Israel via different circumstances than mine, but only God can remove the scales of blindness from a man’s heart—especially the strong delusion (2 Thessalonians 2:11) of Zionist Israel—so I rejoice in Scott’s clear vision of truth regarding the Zionist state by whatever means it came.

What Scott reported in his interview with The Judge is MUST-VIEWING. I urge readers to watch the complete interview. This column focuses on some of the salient parts of that interview.

Ritter:

This is about part of the global realignment. I mean, let’s be honest. The Israeli-American relationship is an unnatural relationship when it comes to the geopolitical balance. It’s at odds with the natural sense of balance that exists in the Middle East. Israel is…I was going to say an abomination, which it is, but it’s also a cancer. It’s a cancerous tumor attached to the Middle East that disrupts the natural functioning of everything, and it’s sustained by its relationship with America.

The world now sees Israel as the genocidal apartheid state that it has always been but has somehow fooled us all into believing it didn’t exist. And they see America as a nation that has totally lost touch with its founding principles: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.

If that’s truly what America stands for—statements written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence—then why do we support a nation that commits genocide, that’s an apartheid state, that thinks it’s okay to kill women and children by the thousands as part of collective punishment in total disregard for international law?

The fact that the world is seeing Israel for what it is: a cancerous tumor that has to be excised. You can’t allow cancer to continue to survive in the human body; it must be excised. And this is what’s going to happen to Israel. It won’t be violent. I believe Israel will probably die from self-immolation. It’ll collapse from within.

Israel has become, Zionism has become, a notion that’s no longer compatible with civilized society. And you’re going to see people turning their back on Israel, and you’re going to start to see Israelis flee Israel. And at some point in time, when a sufficient number of Israelis have fled Israel, it’ll become demographically impossible to sustain, and that will be the end of Israel. That’s the future of Israel.

Israel has never been weaker and more unstable than it is today. And it’s solely because of the so-called leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. When the history of the decline of Israel is written, Benjamin Netanyahu will be the man who destroyed Israel singularly. He’s the man who made it happen.

As I listen to Scott Ritter, it’s almost like he’s watching my sermons, though I doubt that he is. But as you read the last paragraph above, compare it to my three-message trilogy on one DVD entitled End-Time Israel, especially the last message in that trilogy entitled Jerusalem Was Ground To Powder Once: Could It Happen Again?

Ritter continues:

Israel can be wiped out tomorrow. Iran is prepared to fire 2,000 missiles against Israel in a span of time encompassing just a few hours. These missiles would destroy the entire infrastructure of Israel. I’m talking about every power plant, every water purification plant, anything that deals with modern civilized society will be eliminated, because it can’t be defended, and there’s nothing Israel has to fall back upon. They will literally be put back into the Stone Age. And that’s not using nuclear weapons. Three to five nuclear weapons takes Israel off the face of the earth. There will be no Israel. That’s the reality of Israel today. That’s the weakness that Benjamin Netanyahu has brought upon the Israeli State and the Israeli people.

Policy-wise we continue to labor under the pretense that we can influence the Israelis, even though we’ve been lied to by them over and over again. We know what Israel’s policies are. Nothing Israel is doing is taking us by surprise. But we like to believe that the United States can put pressure on Israel. So, I’m not going to say that our diplomacy was a facade. What I’m going to say is, it was dangerously naive and very deceptive of us, because diplomacy isn’t just about what we’re trying to get Israel to do; it’s what we led the Iranians and Hezbollah and Hamas to believe we could get Israel to do. And they bought into it.

Hassan Nasrallah agreed to a ceasefire right before he was murdered by the Israelis. This ceasefire was brokered by the gentleman you [Judge Napolitano] just mentioned, this dual citizen.

Ritter is speaking of Amos Hochstein, an official of the State Department who was born in Israel and fought for the IDF, but now has dual citizenship and holds the office of Deputy Assistant to the President.

Back to Scott:

So, today no one trusts the United States. We will never be trusted in the region again on issues of this nature because it is clear that we cannot control Israel. Israel will do whatever it wants to do. And, more importantly, we know what Israel is getting ready to do, and yet we’re pretending to the rest of the world that we can somehow contain this problem. We can’t. Israel is literally out of control.

Michael McFaul, former US Ambassador to Russia, was on a panel sometime, I believe, last year with John Mearsheimer. And Mearsheimer called him out and said, “That means you lied to the Ukrainians.” And he said, “Of course we lied. That’s what we do. Put on your big boy pants. This is what we do.” It’s not what we do, Mr. Ambassador. You can’t be an ambassador if you lie. Your job is to represent your nation, to tell the truth. You don’t have to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God all the time, but you don’t lie. But we have become a nation of liars. This is what we do. Tony Blinken is a liar. Jake Sullivan is a liar. Joe Biden is a liar. When the president of the United States, the commander in chief, is a liar, who can trust us? Who can trust us? Nobody!

Joe Biden, you lost face; you lost all credibility. Donald Trump, I’m warning you: Stop lying.

But American leaders lie. That’s what we do. The American public has come to accept it, and we’ve forgiven them for it. We keep voting them in.

Telling a lie when you’re the leader of the United States of America, either as the commander in chief or as a member of the cabinet, Tony Blinken as the Secretary of State, should be automatically disqualified for any future leadership position and should lead to the immediate nullification of you as a leader, because you’ve just disgraced not only the oath you took but you disgraced the people you represent.

After the “Christian” Mike Pompeo—the darling of the Religious Right—was CIA Director, in a public presentation he laughingly acknowledged how he violated his West Point honor code, which says that “a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Pompeo cavalierly told his audience: “I was the CIA Director. We lied, we cheated, we stole.” And Christians in his audience gleefully laughed and applauded.

Time after time, we see evangelicals casting aside every Biblical/Christian principle of human decency given to us by the Lord Jesus Christ and His apostles in God’s Holy Word in order to accommodate and facilitate the worst kind of human conduct—including murder and genocide—committed by Republican politicians. But then those same evangelicals become righteously indignant when Democrats commit the exact same crimes.

Back to the interview:

Napolitano: Last week Dr. Gilbert Doctorow started a small firestorm with you and others on the show when he argued that the United States uses Israel to kill Arabs rather than Israel using the United States to fund its expansion of its land area. Is there any argument to be made for Professor Doctorow’s argument that the United States is using Israel to kill Arabs?

Ritter: We’ve killed far more Arabs than Israel ever has. So, I disagree with him completely. This is what happens when you have businessmen turned academics speaking about issues of the military. The United States is fully capable of killing Arabs anytime, anyplace. We never hesitate to kill Arabs. We don’t need Israel to kill Arabs. What we need Israel to do is create a force of instability in the region. It’s easy to kill Arabs. We do it on a daily basis. We can starve them to death; we can blow them up with bombs. We’ve done it. We’ve killed millions of Arabs. Again, far more Arabs have died because of the United States than because of Israel. So, this is a totally incorrect analysis, because it’s predicated upon a factually incorrect notion that we need Israel to kill Arabs. We kill Arabs better than anybody in the world. We’ve proven that.

Napolitano: Why have we killed Arabs?

Ritter: Because we don’t care about them. They’re not people to us. Look at the terms we use. We call them ragheads. We call them sand you-know-what. We speak of them derisively. We disrespect their religion. We have no appreciation for their culture. We don’t view them as human beings, whether they live far away or even here at home. How many Americans actually have gone out to a mosque to meet the local imam and speak to his following? How many Americans have actually reached out to a Palestinian-American community or Syrian-American Community to say, “Hey, we’d like to get to know you more.” I have. I’ve been invited into their homes, to restaurants, to sit down and break bread with them. These are amazing people; these are human beings. And once you realize that, you realize how evil our policy is towards the Middle East, because we treat them like human animals, just like the Israelis do.

Madeleine Albright didn’t blink when she was told that the sanctions of the United States have killed 500,000—that’s a half a million—Iraqi children. And she said that that’s a price we’re willing to pay. That tells you everything you need to know about how the United States views Arabs. When we’re willing to tolerate the death by starvation and disease of a half a million Iraqi children to fulfill our policy objectives, it means we have no regard for Arab life.

Faithful readers have heard me relate my personal experiences with meeting and interacting with Palestinian Christians when I traveled and spoke throughout Palestine. But I’ll say it again here. These people were among the gentlest, kindest, most compassionate and Christ-like people I have ever met—anywhere.

Yet, America’s evangelical “Christians” condone, justify and cheer on the wanton mass murder of these wonderful people, including some of the sweetest and most tenderhearted women, children and elderly gentlemen on earth. And then those same evangelicals have the audacity to go to church on Sunday and talk about how much they love Jesus. It’s absolutely nauseating!

Napolitano: What do you think will stop the Israeli war and genocide regime?

Ritter: The collapse of Israel from within. That’s ultimately what’s going to do it. I mean there’s a chance if Israel does go forward with an attack against Iran, and I believe that they know how foolhardy that would be, because Iran’s not bluffing. Even an attack against non-critical infrastructure will generate an infrastructure-destroying response by Iran, which will destroy Israel, and that’ll be the end of it. Because people can’t live in Israel if there’s no electricity. They can’t live in Israel if there’s no running water. They moved to Israel to be comfortable, to have jobs, to live in the land of milk and honey. And this forever war, because that’s what Israel is going to be locked into now by defining the conditions of victory with Hamas and Hezbollah that cannot be met, Israel is doomed for a forever conflict. The 60,000 will never return to the North; the 20,000 will never return to the South. Israel will never be the same, and people will start fleeing Israel. And once they start fleeing Israel in sufficient numbers, the demographics dictate the end of Israel. And that’s the future of Israel.

Christians are commanded by our Lord to be busy preaching the Gospel, building and edifying the Body of Christ and being the salt of society—”bringing the nations to the obedience of faith.” (Matthew Henry, 1662 – 1714)

Rapture-watching Christian Zionists are busy all right: busy watching for the Rapture—especially watching Israel as the great sign of the Rapture. EXCEPT, they are blind to the thefts, murders, rapes, ethnic cleansings, terrorism and genocides committed by Israel. Of those matters, they see NOTHING!

Think about this: When King David (the man after God’s own heart) began plans to launch an unjust war of aggression in 2 Samuel 24, God killed 70,000 of David’s men in divine judgment, and had not David repented, God would have destroyed the entire nation, including Jerusalem.

If God would judge King David for his willingness to fight an unjust war, how dare Christian Zionists cheer when a pathological mass murderer like Benjamin Netanyahu commits acts of genocide and crimes against humanity in Palestine?

Ever since 1948, Prophetic Dispensationalists have been watching Israel for signs of the Rapture. Take Israel out of the equation, and they have no prophecy doctrines. NONE!

Right now, Rapturists are going WILD with all kinds of outlandish prophecy teachings.

But the reality is, the collapse of the Zionist State is inevitable—and perhaps imminent. The question is not “If?” but “When?”

People, wake up! Zionist Israel is NOT Biblical Israel. The land of Palestine does NOT belong to Netanyahu and his thuggish, murderous Zionists. There is NO everlasting kingdom for national Israel. There is NO promise of perpetuity for the Zionist state. There is NO promise of blessing for those who bless Zionist Israel. And there is NO pre-Second Coming rapture.

It is all a lie! A fraud! A devilish deception!

For one thousand years before 1948 (when Zionist Israel became a state), Christians, Muslims and Jews lived in peace side by side in the land of Palestine. After the Zionist state collapses, the Palestinian state that takes its place will prayerfully be a peaceful home for Christians, Muslims and Jews once again.

But what will happen to evangelicals after the collapse of Zionist Israel? Their entire faith system, which is totally dependent upon Israel-based prophecy doctrines, will be shattered.

Perhaps, in the sovereignty of Almighty God, the scales of blindness will then fall off the bewitched (Galatians 3:1) believers who are deceived by the false doctrines of Christian Zionism, and they will be able to see the glorious New Covenant of Jesus Christ once more.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

The post ‘The World Now Sees Israel as the Genocidal Apartheid State That It Has Always Been’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

U.S. President Joe Biden refuses to answer until after November 5th the question of whether the U.S. will officially be at war against Russia.

As I explained on September 27th, headlining “UPDATED: The U.S. Presidential election is now overwhelmingly about whether to go to WW3 for Ukraine. This dwarfs every other issue.”, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had announced on September 25th that any nation which would bomb anywhere “deep” in Russia (such as The Kremlin) or would allow Ukraine’s armed forces to use that nation’s weapons in order to do so, would immediately experience Russia’s retaliation for having done that. This report was a follow-on to my September 13th “Biden might decide today whether to initiate WW3 against Russia.”, which stated that Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer was to meet privately that day with Biden to request his permission to allow Ukraine to use in that way the missiles which Britain had supplied to Ukraine, and that the White House gave a clear indication that it was not going to say yes to Starmer’s request. On September 15th, I issued an “UPDATE #4” to that article, which indicated that Biden’s answer to Starmer had been to the effect of “not yet,” but that all of the UK’s top leadership were united in all Parties urging that he say yes as fast as possible.

I must confess that I took Biden’s response to mean that he didn’t want to quit the war in Ukraine before the voting on Election Day November 5th, but to do it instead after (when that announcement wouldn’t affect the election’s outcome). For example, on October 8th I optimistically headlined “NATO has begun its death-spiral.”

However, today on October 10th, Politico headlined “Ukraine allies meeting postponed after Biden pulls out over Hurricane Milton”, and reported:

A summit of allied countries aimed at coordinating more military support for Ukraine set for Saturday Oct. 12 has been postponed following the cancellation of U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to Germany.

At the end of a three-day trip to Germany, Biden was due to chair a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a loose alliance of more than 50 countries known as the Ramstein Format, named for the air base in which it is usually held.

“The October 12, 2024 event is postponed,” the U.S.-managed Ramstein Air Base said in an emailed note on Wednesday. “Announcements about future Ukraine Defense Contact Group meetings will be forthcoming.”

In other words: he does want WW3, but not before November 6th. This is why he cancelled the October 12th meeting, which would have prematurely forced Biden’s hand. He wants to win this election, and then to go to war against Russia.

The October 12th meeting was supposed to announce further increases in the U.S. empire’s support for Ukraine against Russia. If Biden had until now been intending to attend that crucial meeting in order to have it agree to continue and to extend but not increase the existing support to Ukraine, which would avoid WW3, then he definitely would have attended, in order to have that outcome and thereby leave the domestic political situation unchanged and unaffected by that war. That scenario would have publicly committed the U.S. to keeping in place his present policy of adhering to “Putin’s red lines.” But now that Biden has shocked everyone by canceling the meeting altogether, the sign is far more ominous: that whenever this meeting WILL occur, Biden is going to say yes to the WW3 chorus — and that this is going to happen AFTER November 5th.

The general public might not be conscious of the fact, but nuclear weapons exist for a country so that if ever that country has a war that it will lose without using nukes, those weapons will be available to be used in order to avoid defeat. Ukraine’s Government right now wants the U.S. to back it up in that way so as to prevent what increasingly looks to be an inevitable defeat by Russia. Biden has repeatedly said publicly that Russia will lose this war; Ukraine will win it. The U.S. and its colonies have already spent over $400 billion so that it will. This is an existential war for both Ukraine as (since 2014) an American colony, and Russia as an independent country. It is not an existential war for America as an independent country. But it is for the U.S. as the largest-in-history empire; so that Biden is now making the decisions not only for his country but for his empire. This is what the concept of American global hegemony is all about. Biden’s duty as America’s President is to do what its Founders had authorized an American President to do. No “Emperor” in modern times has any right to exist as such, and therefore no ‘duty’ as an Emperor. If President Biden will use the powers of an American President in order to preserve and extend an American empire that America’s Founders never authorized to exist, then he will be a traitor.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.).

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

The post Biden’s Plan Calls for WW3 To Start After Election Day appeared first on LewRockwell.

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It seems obvious to me that Jorge Bergoglio is an evil man. You and I can determine this. This is evident by his words actions and fruits. His words are heretical—at best (practicing non-Christian religions are salvific qua non-Christian); his actions are evil (promoting known sodomites, mocking and gaslighting those who refused to wear the satanic sacramental, the mask, and morally mandating billions of people to inject themselves with a dangerous experimental drug for no good reason). His fruits are rotten (one word: chaos). “Ye shall judge them by their fruits.”

Whether Bergoglio is the Pope or not is something you and I both can and cannot determine. You and I can determine it because he is certainly a heretic, and as the evidence of his pattern of words and actions clearly indicates, in lieu of an official trial that would determine it authoritatively and definitively, a formal one. And the evidence also clearly indicates that he was never Pope, because Benedict XVI never resigned. So, if one just looks with one’s eyes and thinks with one’s intellect, informed by what is actually the case, as much as one can discover what that is by research and thinking, and relying on the research and thinking of good-willed and faithful Catholics more informed and educated than oneself, one can see that the evidence indicates there has been no Pope of the Catholic Church since Benedict XVI’s death in 2022.

You and I cannot determine this, of course, because you and I are not the Church, and only the Church can officially declare a vacant seat and a pope an antipope. But in the meantime, since reason itself seems, beyond a reasonable doubt, to lead to the conclusion that Bergoglio is maliciously evil and is not the Pope, and we are morally obliged to obey reason, we are permitted to judge that he is evil and not the Pope, and make this judgment public. Mark Mallett disagrees with this, and has tried in private correspondence to make me feel guilty and evil for, as he calls it, “judging the Pope.” His arguments are fallacious, tendentious, and based more upon fear than reason. But Ed Mazza agrees with me, or rather I agree with him, for he’s the better scholar on this question, perhaps the best there is right now.

Just about all, perhaps all, who think, more or less, the way I do about Bergoglio (at the least that he is really bad news and a very bad pope, perhaps the worst of them all) are self-styled traditionalists. They also tend to agree with my condemnation of the status-quo normie Catholicism of your typical suburban parish, which really sucks, as well as my view of the official narratives of, say, secular liberalism, World War II, IXXI, and the Scamdemic, all of which I judge to be ideological lies and psy-ops. But I am not a traditionalist. In fact, I despise traditionalism, as I do all ideologies. Conversely, about all, perhaps all, who criticize traditionalism (but for the wrong reasons) tend to defend heretic Bergoglio and stupid normie Catholicism, parrot and defend all the official narratives, and consider just about every one of my judgments to be “antisemitic” and a “conspiracy theory.” So, I earnestly ask: Is there anyone out there who despises both the “look-at-my-beard-and-big-family” pharisee “Catholicism” of, say, Kennedy Hall and the “look-at-my-anti-antisemitism” kneel-to-the-world nauseating “Catholicism” of Mike Lewis? Perhaps there are some 1958-sedevacantists who do, but the price they have paid for is a pathological inner-circle pride and downright insanity, not to mention the mortal sin of schism—they hate Kennedy Hall because he isn’t insane or schismatic enough for them. Benedict XVI-Communio-Balthasar-Catholic-World-Report Catholics, such as Larry Chapp, do disdain both traditionalism and progressivism, for the right reasons, but they hate—and slander relentlessly—even more Catholics like E. Michael Jones and Candace Owens, and it’s precisely because of the truths they tell and the names they name, truths and names that they are either too cowardly to tell and name or just too brainwashed, or they just find it helpful to their career and prestige to slander those whose independence from the Catholic establishment allows them the freedom to speak truth to power. They tell the truth, or at least ask forbidden questions, about deep-state events and psyops, and the infiltration and corruption of the human element of the Church by the ideology of “antisemitism,” which has nothing to do with its real meaning, race-based hatred and the unjust treatment of Jewish people, but with its everchanging definition by the Anti-defamation League, with a common core of being whatever those in power who happen to be both criminal and Jewish consider a threat to their power. Such truth-telling, even though in accordance with all actual Catholic teaching and practice and based upon, at worst, eminently debatable claims and facts, and best, evidentially true claims and facts, is a priori declared by these over-educated academic types to be “conspiracy theory” or “insane” or “antisemitic.” It’s incredible how smart and informed they are on some topics, the more abstract and theological ones, and so stupid and brainwashed on others, where the theological rubber meets the geo-political road. Nevertheless, Jones sees nothing good in devotion to the TLM, he defends Bergoglio almost as much as Mike Lewis, and he will not tolerate even the possibility of 2022 sede.

All of these camps are either tainted with or fully possessed by ideology, and to the extent that they are, they are anti-Catholic and will, if the ideology is embraced knowingly and unrepentantly, lead their adherents to hell. Extreme progressivism and radical traditionalism are fully possessed by antithetical ideologies, of course, but since they are both thoroughly ideological, they are more similar than different, two sides of the same coin, mirror images of one another, reactionary co-dependent doubles. They are like the opposite vices in Aristotle’s virtue scheme, which have more in common than the virtue against which they find their identity. For example, rashness and cowardice are opposites, but they are both more similar than different in comparison to courage.

The extereme progressivists and traditionalists hate each other, for neither of them is Catholic at all. As for the less ideological and thus still sane and Catholic (for now, at least, for even a little ideology tends to metastasize) the “conspiratorialist” Catholics, who tend to lean traditionalist, are despised or ignored by the professorial Catholics, who also lean traditionalist or at least non-progressive, even though their philosophical and theological and cultural truth-telling and ideological unmasking should make them friends and fellow soldiers in the culture war and lead them to the same conclusions as the conspiratorialists regarding deep-state narratives. And the professorial Catholics, whose philosophcal and theological sophistication and depth would grealty enhance and complement the research of the conspiratorialists, are looked at with suspicion or ignored by them. The extreme Where Peter Is progressives and 1958 sede traditionalists hate them all, the conspiratorial, professorial, and normie traditionlist Catholics, lumping them all together as one evil brood because they don’t gush about modernity and the synod and hate Trump and the pro-life movement enough, on the one hand, or because they don’t think that Benedict XVI, John Paul II, and St. Faustina were devils incarnate, on the other.

What was the Pharisees’ paradigm? It was ideological, and  made them hate and desire to destroy Jesus and persecute His followers. We are the God-appointed leaders of the Jews! Our paradigm is the very Revelation of God, for we are and must be the epitome of loyalty, piety, courage, and devotion to God! Well, yes, it was and they were—if Jesus was only a human being. If he was God, however, then their virtues become vices, and the “Jews,” as St. John calls those Hebrews who rejected Jesus, become, not God’s Bride, but the devil’s prostitute, not the Church of Yahweh, but the “synagogue of Satan.” Saul was a prisoner to such an ideological paradigm, and nothing but an unforeseen, undesired-indeed, violent encounter with who, to his diseased spirit and intellect, was the radically other, a Jewish man claiming to be God, could liberate him. If Saul had been allowed to remain in the isolated, blinded paradigm of the “Jewishdom” of his day, the way in which some traditionalist Catholics would like to remain in the isolating “Christendoms” of their neuroses, fears, and gnostic certainties, his blindness would never have been revealed to him, and he would never have become St. Paul, the apostle to the Jewish other, the Gentile. Christ Himself had to break Saul out of his idolatrous paradigm, which was indeed not one of authentic Mosaic Judaism but a rabbinical, proto-Talmudic fanaticism of purely human origin. This had to occur violently against his will, but we have the chance to invite Christ freely into our minds, by inviting the salvific “others”—ones that we would rather not meet— into our intimacy as they are providentially “forced” upon us by Our Lord in our modern pluralistic world—as neighbors, or as bedridden, illiterate, nineteenth-century nobodys through which Jesus has given the world the greatest grace since the Incarnation, the grace of Living in the Divine Will.

We need this gift, because as the Antichrist approaches, prepared for by the apotheosis of his Great Reset worldly minions of which we have had a foretaste in the totalitarian plandemic, on pause for now by about to replay at a much higher speed and volume, he will rule over and exploit and annihilate all our paltry paradigms. We will all be in the position of the Apostles when the Truth Incarnate asked them each personally: “Who do you say that I am?” At that moment, no paradigm will do, no out-of-context proof-texting and quote-mining to prove your judgment will suffice, and no tribal in-house ideology, no matter how “traditional,” will help you. Listen up, Kennedy Hall. Shave your beard and attend the Novus Ordo. That’s a first step to saving your soul from hell.

Let us all prepare ourselves now for that moment by destroying our idols and relativizing our paradigms, with the knowledge that when it all comes down, we are all personally responsible for recognizing, loving, and obeying Truth, and although we are tradition-constituted rational animals who can only make rational judgments within and by the help of inherited and chosen paradigms of thought, we are required and enabled ultimately to transcend these paradigms by God Himself, who wants to know whom we really love at the core of our hearts, a place beyond any paradigm, however “traditional,” where God and Reality meet us intimately and immediately. Let us prepare for this meeting, for it is coming soon.

This originally appeared on Scamdemic Resistance.

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Climate Change Racketeers have incentivized the media to blare the talking point that human-induced climate change has made Atlantic tropical storms more powerful than they were in the past.

Sediment studies indicate that major hurricanes have been blasting through the Atlantic for centuries, and were especially strong during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum or the Medieval Climatic Anomaly—a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region that lasted from c. 950 to c. 1250.

Christopher Columbus recorded two “violent hurricanes” in the years 1494 and 1495, the latter sinking three of his ships anchored in La Isabela harbor (now the Dominican Republic). Major hurricanes were a headache for the Spanish Treasure Fleet, sinking multiple treasure-laden galleons in the years 1622, 1715, 1733 and 1750. I grew up dreaming of finding one of these treasures in the Florida Keys. Mel Fisher beat me to it when he found the Atocha that sank in the Keys in the hurricane of 1622.

By far the deadliest hurricane in history was the Great Hurricane of 1780, which is estimated to have killed 22,000. Wikipedia provides a decent, succinct description:

The Great Hurricane of 1780 was the deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record, as well as the deadliest tropical cyclone in the Western Hemisphere. An estimated 22,000 people died throughout the Lesser Antilles when the storm passed through the islands from October 10 to October 16. Specifics on the hurricane’s track and strength are unknown, as the official Atlantic hurricane database only goes back to 1851.

The hurricane struck Barbados likely as a Category 5 hurricane, with at least one estimate of wind gusts as high as 200 mph before moving past Martinique, Saint Lucia, and Sint Eustatius, and causing thousands of deaths on those islands. Coming in the midst of the American Revolution, the storm caused heavy losses to the British fleet contesting for control of the area, significantly weakening British control over the Atlantic. The hurricane later passed near Puerto Rico and over the eastern portion of Hispaniola, causing heavy damage near the coastlines. It ultimately turned to the northeast and was last observed on October 20 southeast of Atlantic Canada.

The death toll from the Great Hurricane alone exceeds that of many entire decades of Atlantic hurricanes.

On a technical note: wind strength on Barbados was estimated from damage to solid structures and debris such as straw that was found embedded in tree trunks. Seasoned naval officers also recorded their observations of the storm’s stupendous strength.

Studying history gives us a sense of perspective about the human condition. Understanding the calamities, tragedies, and errors of the past equips us to recognize when people in positions authority are distorting reality in the pursuit of their selfish interests.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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The Fed has been the source of booms, busts, and the ongoing impoverishment of Americans since the Fed’s founding.

This is why a new, critical look at the Federal Reserve is needed, and why the Mises Institute is now happy to bring you this new documentary on the Fed.

Playing with Fire provides a look at how the Fed uses its expanding power to damage our economy, increase inequality, and to impoverish ordinary Americans. The film also looks at how much the Fed has expanded its own power since the Financial Crisis of 2008.

Featuring interviews with Ron Paul, Tom DiLorenzo, Joseph Salerno, Mark Thornton, Jim Grant, Alex Pollock, and Jonathan Newman, Playing with Fire explains what the Fed is, where it came from, and why it is so dangerous. Perhaps most importantly of all, Playing with Fire shows why we need to end the Fed altogether.

The post Playing with Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the most indelible images of November 22, 1963 is the Secret Service (SS) confrontation with Dallas medical officials concerning the removal of JFK’s body from Parkland Hospital.  That  scene has been recounted in hundreds of  books and articles about the assassination and had its most vivid portrayal in  Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK”. It has left an impression on the public memory that would be hard to erase or alter. But is it an accurate account of events?

CONFRONTATION AT PARKLAND

The conventional  retelling of the Parkland confrontation goes something like this: The Secret Service had taken custody of JFK’s casket and intended to leave Parkland Hospital for Love Field and the flight back to Washington.  But Earl Rose, the Dallas medical examiner, steadfastly refused to release the body claiming (correctly) that Texas law required an autopsy after any murder.  At that point, SS Agent Roy Kellerman and several staunch JFK associates (who were part of the casket removal team) strongly dissented and attempted to persuade Rose–rather forcefully at times–to make an exception in this case; Rose still refused.  After much arguing and even some serious threatening (with a show of weapons?), Earl Rose was shoved aside and the SS contingent with JFK’s casket briskly departed Parkland.

This is a dramatic scenario  but is it a full account of that confrontation? Well, NOT exactly. It is true that the Secret Service and several close Kennedy confidants wanted to leave Parkland Hospital with JFK’s casket shortly after Kennedy was pronounced  dead (at 1:00) and that medical examiner Earl Rose asserted that Texas law required an instate autopsy. A clear stand-off ensued. Dr. Kemp Clark, the head of neurosurgery at Parkland (who signed President Kennedy’s death certificate), at first attempted to mediate the stand-off by pleading with Rose to step aside and let the casket team (and Mrs. Kennedy) leave Trauma Room One and return to Washington.  Rose steadfastly refused.  Failing that, a telephone call was (reportedly)  placed to Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade for a legal opinion on the matter. (Wade would later visit Parkland that  afternoon to check on his close friend, John Connally.)  Wade advised Earl Rose that, given the extraordinary circumstances,  he (Wade) had no objection to an immediate casket exit; yet Rose  remained unpersuaded.

At this point it was suggested (probably by Dr. Burkley, JFK’s doctor) that a Texas Justice of the Peace (J.P.) be brought into the hospital in order to convince Rose to release the body to the Secret Service. Eventually  a  young J.P, named Theron Ward did arrive at Parkland–after about a 20 minute delay–but his feeble efforts to resolve the autopsy controversy  failed miserably. Indeed, at one point Theron Ward instructed SS Agent Kellerman that he (Ward) believed that he had a clear “legal duty to  order an {instate} autopsy” of JFK.  End of discussion. “It’s just another homicide as far as I’m concerned” he is reported to have said.  Well it was at THAT point that Roy Kellerman and  Kenny O’Donnell (and several other Kennedy associates) became extremely agitated (to put it mildly) and began to swear and then shove and then steer JFK’s casket past several Dallas policemen  and down the corridor toward the hospital exit. Matters  were  on the verge of becoming seriously physical (the SS casket team was leaving now no matter what) when  a belated call with D.A. Henry Wade  confirmed  (again)  that  Dallas  had “no {legal} objection” to the removal of JFK’s body from its jurisdiction. Finally, the frustrated medical examiner stepped (or was shoved) aside–after more than 40 minutes of serious acrimony–and the casket team left  Parkland Hospital at approximately 2:00.

THE AUTOPSY LOCATION DECISION

Some assassination critics have claimed that this heated confrontation at Parkland was some sort of clandestine effort by the national security apparatus and even Lyndon Johnson himself to take control of JFK’s corpse and whisk it back to Washington for some sort of fraudulent autopsy. Perhaps.  On the other hand, there is a far more personal and reasonable explanation for what unfolded at Parkland andshortly afterward.

JFK had just been assassinated in Dallas and there was simply no way that Kennedy’s SS personnel and his fiercely loyal “Irish mafia” (spearheaded by Kenny O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien) were about to leave the body of their beloved  “boss” behind for an autopsy at Parkland or some undetermined Texas funeral home.  No way, not ever.  Besides, Jackie Kennedy herself had made it perfectly clear that she was not flying back to Washington without her deceased husband. She is reported to have said at one point during the trauma room confrontation:  “Why can’t I get my husband back to Washington?”  And, “I don’t want Jack to go to any awful funeral home.” From a personal perspective, therefore, it would have been inconceivable for the SS and Kennedy loyalists to have left the murdered President and his blood-stained widow  behind in Dallas on November 22nd. No way, not ever.

Once on the plane, Jackie was approached by Dr. Burkley (JFK’s doctor and a part of the casket removal team) who explained that the President’s murder did, nonetheless,  require an official autopsy and that it probably should be done at a military hospital for security purposes. He told her that the most logical options for that procedure were secure  facilities at either Walter Reed or at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.  Walter Reed was  an “Army” hospital and it certainly would have worked; but Jack Kennedy and the entire Kennedy family were  entirely “ Navy.”  So Jackie agreed with Dr. Burkely that “of course” the  autopsy of her husband should be done at Bethesda.

******

In closing,  the ultimate legal decision to allow JFK’s casket to be removed  from Parkland  Hospital (and Texas) was likely made  by Dallas District  Attorney Henry Wade (with a forceful assist from Kenny O’Donnell and Roy Kellerman).  In addition,  the decision to perform the official autopsy at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland may have had less to do with any deep state skullduggery (a possibility, of course) and more to do with reasonable security concerns and with the personal history of the fierce Kennedy loyalists and the wishes of the grieving widow.

The post JFK Assassination: The Parkland Hospital Confrontation appeared first on LewRockwell.

I have previously written about Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, calling it “the most successful military raid of this century.”

I have described the Hamas action as a military operation, while Israel and its allies have called it a terrorist action on the scale of what transpired against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

“The difference between the two terms,” I noted,

is night and day — by labeling the events of October 7 as acts of terrorism, Israel transfers blame for the huge losses away from its military, security, and intelligence services, and onto Hamas. If Israel were, however, to acknowledge that what Hamas did was in fact a raid — a military operation — then the competency of the Israeli military, security, and intelligence services would be called into question, as would the political leadership responsible for overseeing and directing their operations.

Terrorism employs strategies that seek victory through attrition and intimidation — to wear an enemy down and create a sense of helplessness on the part of the enemy. Terrorists by nature avoid decisive existential conflict, but rather pursue asymmetrical battle which pits their strengths against the weaknesses of their enemies.

The war that has gripped the Levant since Oct. 7, 2023, is not your traditional anti-terrorism operation. The Hamas-Israeli conflict has morphed into a conflict between Israel and the so-called axis of resistance involving Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansarullah (the Houthi of Yemen), the Popular Mobilization Forces, i.e. militias of Iraq, Syria and Iran. It is a regional war in every way, shape, or form that must be assessed as such.

The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz noted in his classic work, On War, that “war is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.”

From a purely military perspective, the Hamas raid on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, was a relatively minor engagement, involving a few thousand combatants from each side.

As a global geopolitical event, however, it has no contemporary counterpart.

The Hamas raid triggered a number of varied responses, some of which were by design, such as luring the Israeli Defense Forces into Gaza, where they would become trapped in a forever war they could not win, triggering the dual Israeli doctrines governing military response to hostage taking of the “Hannibal Doctrine” and the Israeli practice of collective punishment, the “Dahiya Doctrine.”

Both of these doctrines put the IDF on display to the world as the antithesis of the “world’s most moral military” by exposing the murderous intent ingrained into the DNA of the IDF, a propensity for violence against innocents which defines the Israeli way of war and, by extension, the Israeli nation.

Prior to Oct. 7, 2023, Israel was able to disguise its true character to the outside world, convincing all but a handful of activists that its actions in targeting “terrorists” were proportional and humane.

Today the world knows Israel as the genocidal apartheid state it really is.

The consequences of this new global enlightenment are manifest.

Changing the ‘Face of the Middle East’

President Joe Biden, on Sept. 9, 2023, during the G20 summit in India, announced a major policy initiative, the India-Middle East-European Economic Corridor, or IMEC, a proposed rail, ship, pipeline and digital cable corridor connecting Europe, the Middle East and India.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, commenting on Biden’s announcement, called the IMEC “a cooperation project that is the greatest in our history” that “takes us to a new era of regional and global integration and cooperation, unprecedented and unique in its scope” adding that  it “will bring to fruition a years-long vision that will change the face of the Middle East and of Israel.”

But because the world now sees Israel as a criminal enterprise, the IMEC looks for all intents and purposes to be no more — the greatest cooperation project in Israeli history that would have changed the Middle East likely will never reach fruition.

For one thing, Saudi Arabia, a key player in the scheme, having invested $20 billion in it, says it will not normalize relations with Israel, necessary for the project, until the wars end and a Palestinian state is recognized by Israel, something the Knesset voted earlier this year would never happen.

The demise of the IMEC is just part of the $67 billion economic hit Israel has taken since the Gaza conflict began.

Tourism is down 80 percent. The southern port of Eilat no longer functions because of the anti-shipping campaign run by the Houthi in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Workforce stability has been disrupted by the displacement of tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes because of Hamas and Hezbollah attacks as well as the mobilization of more than 300,000 reservists. All this combine to create a perfect storm of economy-killing issues, which will plague Israel so long as the current conflict continues.

The bottom line is that, left unchecked, Israel is looking at economic collapse. Investments are down, the economy is shrinking, and confidence in an economic future has evaporated. In short, Israel is no longer an ideal place to retire, raise a family, work…or live. The biblical “land flowing with milk and honey,” if it ever existed, is no more.

This is an existential problem for Israel.

For there to be a viable “Jewish homeland,” demographics dictate there must be a discernable Jewish majority in Israel. There are just short of 10 million people living in Israel. About 7.3 million are Jews; another 2.1 million are Arabs (Druze and other non-Arab minorities comprise the reminder.)

There are some 5.1 million Palestinians under occupation, leaving a roughly 50-50 split when looking at the combined totals between Arab and Jew. An estimated 350,000 Israelis hold dual citizenship with an EU country, while more than 200,000 hold dual citizenship with the United States.

Likewise, many Israelis of European descent can easily apply for a passport simply by showing that either they, their parents, or even their grandparents resided in a European country. Another 1.5 million Israelis are of Russian descent, with many of those holding valid Russian passports.

While the main reasons for maintaining this dual-citizen status are convenience and economic, many view the second passport as “an insurance policy” — a place to run to if life in Israel becomes untenable.

Life in Israel is about to become untenable.

Escape From Israel 

Israel had already suffered from a growing emigration problem derived from dissatisfaction with the policies of the Netanyahu government — some 34,000 Israelis permanently left Israel between July and October 2023, primarily in protest over the judicial reforms being enacted by Netanyahu.

While there was a spike in emigration immediately after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks (some 12,300 Israelis permanently emigrated in the month following the Hamas attack), the number of permanent emigrants in 2024 was around 30,000, a drop from the previous year.

But now Israel is being bombarded on a near-daily basis by long-range drones, rockets, and missiles fired from Hezbollah, militias in Iraq, and the Houthi in Yemen. The Iranian ballistic missile attack of Oct. 1 vividly demonstrated to all Israelis the reality that there is no viable defense against these attacks.

Moreover, if the Israel-Iran conflict continues to escalate (and Israel has promised a retaliation of immense proportions), Iran has indicated it will destroy Israel’s critical infrastructure — power plants, water desalinization plants, energy production and distribution centers — in short, Israel will cease being able to function as a modern nation state.

At that point, insurance policies will be cashed in as hundreds of thousands of Israelis holding dual passports vote with their feet. Russia has already told its citizens to leave. And if millions of other Israelis who qualify for European passports opt to exercise that option, Israel will face its ultimate nightmare — a precipitous drop in the Jewish population that skews the demographic balance decisively toward non-Jews, making moot the notion of an exclusive homeland for the Jews.

Israel is rapidly becoming unsustainable, both as a concept (the world is rapidly tiring of the genocidal reality of Zionism) and in practice (i.e., economic and demographic collapse.)

The Changing View From the US

This is the current reality of Israel — in one year’s time, it went from “changing the face of the Middle East” to being an unsustainable pariah whose only salvation is the fact that it has the continued support of the United States to prop it up militarily, economically, and diplomatically.

And herein lies the rub.

That which made Israel attractive to the United States — the strategic advantage of a pro-American Jewish enclave in a sea of Arab uncertainty — no longer holds as firmly as it previously did. The Cold War is long gone, and the geopolitical benefits accrued in the U.S.-Israeli relationship are no longer evident.

The era of American unilateralism is fading, rapidly being replaced by a multi-polarity with a center of gravity in Moscow, Beijing and New Delhi. As the United States adapts to this new reality, it finds itself engaged in a struggle for the hearts and minds of the “global south” — the rest of the world outside the EU, NATO, and a handful of pro-Western Pacific nations.

The moral clarity that American leadership seeks to bring to the global stage is significantly clouded over by its ongoing unquestioned support for Israel.

Israel has, in its post-Oct. 7, 2023, actions, self-identified as a genocidal state totally incompatible with any notion of international law or the basic precepts of humanity.

Even some Holocaust survivors recognize that modern-day Israel has become the living manifestation of the very evil that served as the justification for its creation — the brutally racist ideology of Nazi Germany.

Israel is anathema for everything modern civilization stands for.

The world is gradually awakening to this reality.

So, to, is the United States.

For the moment the pro-Israeli lobby is mounting a rear-guard action, throwing its weight behind political candidates in a desperate attempt to buy the continued support of their American benefactors.

But geopolitical reality dictates that the United States, in the end, will not commit suicide on behalf of an Israeli state that has lost all moral legitimacy in the eyes of most of the world.

There are economic consequences attached to American support for Israel, especially in the increased gravitational pull of the BRICS forum, whose growing list of members and those who are seeking membership reads as a who’s who of nations fundamentally opposed to the Israeli state.

The deepening social and economic crisis in America today will create a new political reality where American leaders will be compelled by electoral realities to address problems which manifest on American soil.

The day when Congress can allocate billions of dollars without question to oversees wars, including those involving Israel, is coming to an end.

Political operative James Carville’s famous adage, “It’s the economy, stupid” resonates as strongly today as it did when he penned it back in 1992. To survive economically, America will have to adjust its domestic and international priorities, requiring conformity not only with the will of the American people, but a new, law-based international order which largely rejects the ongoing Israeli genocide.

Apart from die-hard Zionists who will hold out in the unelected “establishment” of government civil service, academia, and mass media, Americans will gravitate toward a new policy reality where unquestioned support for Israel is no longer accepted.

This will be the final straw for Israel.

The perfect storm of global rejection of genocide, sustained resistance on the part of the Iranian-led “axis of resistance,” economic collapse and realignment of American priorities will result in the nullification of Israel as a viable political entity. The timeline for this nullification is dictated by the pace of collapse of Israeli society — it could happen in a year, or it could unfold over the course of the next decade.

But it will happen.

The end of Israel.

And it all began on Oct. 7, 2023 — the day that changed the world.

Reprinted with author’s permission from Consortium News.

The post The Fall of Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

This has now reached the point that corporations and institutions are in effect “mining what remains of our trust” to boost profits / private gains.

Social cohesion is another ill-defined concept which is core to social and economic stability, despite the difficulty of measuring it. As with social trust, we sense its presence and its decay rather than measure ups and downs with any precision. Social trust is a core component of social cohesion, and we sense the decay of both, even if there is no easy metric to chart.

When did our trust in our core institutions start unraveling? Perhaps the more insightful question is: when did our institutions lose our trust? For trust is not just given, it is for institutions–government, healthcare, higher education, industry, media, etc.–to gain or lose by their actions and the disconnect between their claims and the reality.

In the broad sweep of recent history, the trust earned by institutions in the 1940s and 1050s began unraveling in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1970s. For many Americans, the inconsistencies of the official version of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 were deeply troubling. Similar inconsistencies arose in the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

If the public wasn’t being given the full story, why not? Was it really “national security,” or were institutional malfeasance and cover-ups what was actually going on?

The war in Vietnam was another source of institutions losing trust. Between the claims of victory just ahead, the 5 o’clock follies and body counts, the “splendid little war” transmogrified into a big, dirty war that could no longer be contained within the neat narratives established in the “good war” of World War II.

The majority of Americans still wanted to believe in the rightness of their government and the causes of American policy, but many others had suffered complete disillusionment and loss of trust in the official accounts.

Watergate fueled the disillusionment as cover-ups increasingly appeared to be the primary modus operandi of all institutions. This disillusionment increased as the Church Committee revealed the politicization of the nation’s law enforcement agency, the FBI, and the illegal domestic activities of the FBI and the nation’s premiere intelligence / covert action agency, the CIA, both of which sought to suppress critics of the war in Vietnam with illegal means.

While the conservative movement openly derided government competence in the 1980s, the big, bad government continued expanding regardless of whether “conservatives” or “liberals” were nominally in charge. The federal government’s footprint was reduced in President Clinton’s campaign to “reinvent government,” and the federal budget briefly enjoyed surpluses in the Internet boom years, but since then the expansion of government and institutional /corporate power has continued unabated.

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I’ve written many words on the authoritarian tendencies of Germany in particular and the modern Western state in general. It is the main focus of my blog. Whenever I describe some new repressive development, as I did on Wednesday, I receive always the same kinds of comments. Readers tell me that fascism must be returning to Germany and that our inherent National Socialist tendencies are manifesting themselves yet again. Others write that this is all happening because in Europe we do not have the American Bill of Rights, which means that we cannot fend off rapacious state bureaucrats with our guns. Many say that we did not draw sufficient lessons from our earlier experiences with totalitarianism.

Now, I fully agree with the spirit of these remarks. I too want to live in a world where the state does not arbitrarily house-arrest me and inject me with experimental medical substances whenever some virus is making the rounds. Precisely for these reasons, I think it’s important to understand why our states act the way that they do, and to develop an accurate perspective on state behaviour in general. This means clearing away some old myths. “Totalitarianism,” for example, is a caricature that liberal thinkers adopted in the postwar period to describe rival illiberal nationalist and communist ideologies. There are no self-identified totalitarians anywhere and no body of explicitly totalitarian political theory exists. What is more, modern-day German authoritarianism is basically the opposite of Nazism and is rooted in profound antifascist sensibilities. And while I have nothing against the right to bear arms (and would happily see this right reintroduced to the Continent), it is not the political panacea many seem to think it is. To beat back the state, you need something else entirely – something that is just as eagerly suppressed in the United States as it is here in the Federal Republic.

All of these theses owe something to the classical liberal perspective – the Western ideological tradition that emphasises freedom, individual rights and equality before the law. Many of my readers are classical liberals, and that’s totally fine. If I do not entirely share your views, that’s not because I want to take away all of your rights and freedoms. It’s rather because I think liberalism makes a variety of empirically incorrect claims about human nature, and also that it seriously misunderstands state power. Thus liberal mechanisms for binding the state have failed, and long association with the ruling elite has changed the nature of liberalism itself. Classical, negative-rights liberalism – where the state mainly locks up violent criminals and defends private property rights – has become defunct everywhere, precisely because it is inconvenient for people in charge. Elites have replaced it with positive-rights liberalism instead, where the state spends vast sums on social welfare programmes, sends your kids to Drag Queen Story Hour and blames white people for disproportionate black criminality. This successor ideology uses many of the same words and claims to be interested in many of the same things, but is in fact an entirely different animal.

In what follows, I will try to describe state authoritarianism objectively – not from within the world of liberal assumptions, but from outside and sub specie aeternitatis. The truth is that modern liberalism, although it has retained much of its anti-authoritarian rhetoric, has presided over massive expansions to state power. To the extent Westerners have enjoyed more freedom from state harassment than East Europeans under communism or Germans under National Socialism, that has less to do with liberalism itself than with other supervening factors that have made the elevation of liberalism to a civic religion possible in the first place. If you’re truly interested in freedom and personal autonomy, it’s worth thinking about what is necessary to make states actually back off and leave you alone in reality, whatever ideology their leaders espouse.

I think many elements of liberalism make it hard to conceptualise authoritarianism, so I will begin with the former and proceed to the latter:

1) Liberalism in its negative classical form and its positive modern form is a universalising ideology. By this I mean that it makes claims on behalf of all peoples and all political systems everywhere. While it can be hard for adherents of universalising ideologies to understand that their ideologies are not, in fact, universal, the effort is very much worth it, because it brings many things into focus. Liberalism is both a relative newcomer to the long history of human politics and also highly unusual. Even today, at the height of its influence, liberalism is native only to a small minority of the world’s population. Europeans spent much of the 20th century imposing liberalism throughout Asia and Africa, in all the same lands where they had spent the 19th century preaching Christianity. Throughout all of this territory liberalism remains a set of political beliefs imposed from the outside. Even in core European countries like Germany, liberalism is relatively young and has a fraught and uncertain record. This perspective guards against the easy assumption that something which is not liberal must therefore automatically be communist or fascist. Most people do not identify with liberalism and there is a wide range of non-liberal and illiberal political thought out there.

2) Because liberalism claims to oppose the authoritarianism of the state, liberals automatically equate the absence of liberalism with authoritarianism. If it were not for liberal principles, they believe, we would be suffering at this moment under some unimaginably totalitarian dystopian illiberal regime. Conversely, they equate all manifestations of state authoritarianism immediately with a relapse to some rival, more primitive illiberal political system. When the state cracks down, they assume that it must be because of Nazism or whatever. I unreservedly accept that comparisons like these serve an important polemical purpose. They highlight the hypocrisy of our rulers and that really hurts, or they wouldn’t expend so much effort to discourage people from arguing in this way. Nevertheless, I think these arguments are incorrect analytically. As we learned during Covid, even liberal systems are capable of overt authoritarian interventions in the most personal and intimate areas of our lives.

3) The objective perspective becomes very important here. Subjectively and from within liberal ideology, it is tempting to argue that self-described liberal polities must not be liberal whenever they produce illiberal results. Society, however, is very complex, and we must be open to the possibility that even liberal systems can lead to authoritarian or illiberal places, despite or even because of the best liberal intentions of everyone involved. If we shrug off these unwelcome outcomes with “real communism has never been tried”-style dismissals, we risk blinding ourselves to how liberalism functions in reality. Liberalism, for example, is a fundamentally oppositional ideology. It is always arrayed against real or imagined ideological enemies. A lot of present German political authoritarianism is baked into our 1949 Basic Law, which establishes this Orwellian monstrosity we call “defensive democracy” full of mechanisms that our founders hoped would prevent illiberal communist and illiberal fascist subversion. This is why we have the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and it is why a great part of the political debate in the my country is consumed with weird histrionics about which political positions should be legally and socially acceptable in the first place. Positive-rights liberalism is even more authoritarian, as it commits itself to guaranteeing specific social outcomes. Recognising ever more arcane political rights, like the right to survive a viral infection, causes very unsettling illiberal outcomes, which however derive directly from (positive) liberal premises.

4) We should not, however, overestimate the influence of ideology. Human civilisations, always and everywhere, exhibit clear hierarchical features, and in all of them political power invariably accrues to a confined oligarchy, whatever ideological beliefs anybody espouses. This is as true of dictatorships as it is of liberal democracies. In the former, power is not in fact exercised by a single strong man, but is actually wielded by an entire elite class, whom the dictator merely represents in public and to outsiders. In the latter, the people are not in fact sovereign, as oligarchic rule quickly adapts to overcome the minor obstacles posed by such things as elections and the rule of law. Liberal ideology does exercise an influence on politics, but this influence is far subtler and also much stranger than its proponents allow. I hope, someday soon, to write a book about this.

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