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The Enduring Power of Nazi Derangement Syndrome

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 19/05/2025 - 05:01

The National Socialist German Workers Party had a rather short life span, existing from 1920-1945. With that “Socialist” word in there, you’d think that it designated some kind of far Left, Bolshevik inspired movement. But from the very beginning, the Nazis- as they came to be known to the world- were depicted as extremely right-wing.

There seems to be no credible evidence that the National Socialists ever called themselves Nazis, and present day “extremists” contend that it was a derogatory term coined by influential German journalist Konrad Heiden, who was predictably enough a Jew. The court historians counter by claiming that in 1926, propagandist extraordinaire Josef Goebbels used the term “Nazi-Sozi” as an abbreviation for National Socialists. Knowing what I do about the absolute lack of credibility on the part of the court historians, I am naturally dubious about this. Thus, I think it’s far more likely that Leftists devised the term as a slur. I suppose it’s “anti-Semitic” just to wonder about this. Like many German Jews, Heiden would later flee to America, where he not surprisingly found a New York publisher for the first critical biography of Adolf Hitler, which recounted the Nazi persecution of anonymous Jews.

Adolf Hitler rose to power on the basis of the horrific German economy, which was devastated even beyond what Americans saw during the worst of the Great Depression. Following World War I, Germany became the first known nation in the history of warfare to be forced to pay those who defeated them on the battlefield. These economic sanctions were so onerous that, as hard as it is to believe, they continued to be paid until 2010. Now, I don’t believe that Hitler, a frustrated artist, started an organic revolt of the common people. Antony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler did an admirable job of documenting the great powers that were behind him. There has seldom been a grass roots movement in any country without those great powers financing, coordinating, and manipulating it. But much of Hitler’s rhetoric still attracts followers today, and there are obvious parallels to America 2.0.

It is impossible to determine the truth about Hitler. He is the most demonized figure in the history of the world. Was he Catholic? Actually Jewish himself? A believer in the occult or fierce defender of Christianity? Did he really have one testicle? Was he having sex with his own niece? Was he gay? Or did he remain a virgin until his fake suicide in 1945? I suppose it’s to be expected that such a thoroughly demonized man is unlikely to be portrayed as a tireless lover of countless beautiful women. The hatchet job on him was so thorough that, in one dramatization of his life, I think from the 1990s, the World War I veteran (he was a genuine war hero) was shown beating his little dog to death after his entire regiment, except him, was wiped out by the Allies. In other words, he would have been the only witness to killing his dog. Obviously, Hitler never confessed to that. And yet viewers shook their heads in disgust.

While Goebbels is credited with being a Hall of Fame propagandist, Hollywood’s own anti-Nazi propaganda seems to have been far more successful and long lasting. Charlie Chaplin turning to the camera at the end of The Great Dictator, breaking the fourth wall, pleading with America to join the war against “fascism,” and pledge the flesh and blood of their own youngsters. The Three Stooges, with Moe’s own demeaning caricature of Hitler. Bugs Bunny and other cartoon stars. Everyone from Jack Benny and Carole Lombard to Tarzan was battling Nazis on the screen. I’ve documented the efforts of the Roosevelt administration to get America involved in the new European war, just like Charlie Chaplin wanted, in my books Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963 and American Memory Hole: How the Court Historians Promote Disinformation, which culminated in the Pearl Harbor false flag.

How can we possibly know the truth about Hitler? Could he really have been the good guy in World War II? I wouldn’t say that, but we know that Stalin, FDR and Churchill were certainly not good guys. Hitler pointed out the obvious to the German people, who were struggling under desperate economic circumstances. Jews held a wildly disproportionate amount of power in the German media, literary and film industries. Sound familiar? Did he really propose a Hollywoodish-sounding “Final Solution?” Who knows? I don’t speak German, and while I can sometimes distinguish the word “Juden” in his wild, arm raving rants, I have no idea what he was really saying. I’ve read what he said about usury, and agree with him that it is always a very bad thing. The Catholic church used to consider it a mortal sin. He had a valid point about the land that had been taken from Germany at the Versailles conference following WWI.

Regardless of the reality of the 1930s and 1940s, in 2025 everyone considers “Nazi” to be the ultimate slander. It’s the word both the Left and the Right use to denigrate the hopelessly wrong or evil people they disagree with. Excessive police power is routinely referred to as “Gestapo tactics.” When the word dictator is uttered, people think of Hitler. Not Stalin. Or Mao. Or Pol Pot. Or Robert Mugabe. Hitler, and his Nazis, are in a class by themselves, eighty years after they disappeared from the world. Some of them were executed, after unprecedented “justice” at Nuremberg. Others supposedly committed suicide. Still others, like Rudolph Hess, were given unfathomably harsh lifetime prison sentences. And then there were the fortunate ones, who were brought into America under Operation Paperclip, to start NASA and help convert the OSS into the CIA. Some Nazis are more equal than others.

The Nuremberg Trials took the concept of victors punishing the vanquished even further than the Versailles Treaty. Now, not only could you enact financial penalties upon a losing army, you could prosecute them in a court of “law.” For “war crimes,” which was a heretofore unheard of term. As some have noted, war itself is a crime. Kind of a precursor to the even more Orwellian “hate crimes.” The Nuremberg Trials were so far beyond the pale that many distinguished Americans opposed them, including Edgar Eisenhower, attorney brother of the president, Supreme Court Justice Harland Fiske Stone, and Senator Robert Taft, whose opposition to this “legal” lynching was cited as one of the Profiles in Courage by then Senator John F. Kennedy in his book, who objected to the proceedings himself. I humbly suggest that I was the first American in decades to take this position, as I did in Crimes and Cover-Ups.

After Germany surrendered and World War II finally ended, part of the terms of the surrender was that the National Socialist Party would be banned forever. There can never be another Nazi party in Germany. So, considering they were exorcised from any future Germany, it seems strange that millions of people continue to believe there are “Nazis” alive and well today. These are the same people who used to make fun of Elvis or Bigfoot sightings. And, of course, they regularly ridicule those of us who have faith in the “magical being in the sky.” I don’t know how many reputable Bigfoot sightings there have been, but when was the last Nazi discovered in the wild? I mean actual National Socialist, not someone who criticized Israel or talked about the international bankers. Ironically, the Head Nazi Hitler and perhaps others were hidden away in Argentina for decades, covered up by all the obsessed Nazi hunters.

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Who Was True Executive of Biden Admin?

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 19/05/2025 - 05:01

A segment of former President Joe Biden’s October 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur was just released.

As ZeroHedge pointed out:

Biden couldn’t remember details such as when his son Beau died, when he left office as vice president, what year Donald Trump was elected, and why he had classified documents in his possession that he shouldn’t have had.

According to Axios, which released the recording, Biden frequently slurred words or muttered, and “appears to validate Hur’s assertion that jurors in a trial likely would have viewed Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Hur elected not to prosecute Biden for mishandling classified documents … angering Republicans as Trump was facing his own charges of mishandling classified information.

It’s also of course notable because the MSM insisted Biden was “sharp,” and slammed Hur’s assertions as politically motivated.

Jake Tapper is obviously lying when he claims in his new book that President Biden’s mental incompetence—caused by advanced senile dementia—was concealed from him. Anyone with ordinary powers of perception and common sense could see it. In their characteristically vulgar way, the commentators at Fox have made the former president’s dementia an object of mocking derision.

Both approaches to this story fail to plumb its dark and disturbing depths. The audio interview with a special prosecutor is significant because the federal law officer’s conclusion—euphemistically phrased as “elderly man with a poor memory”—that the former president was not liable for his conduct because he was non compos mentis.

Who was the de facto executive during President Biden’s presidency? Recall that his presidency included COVID-19 vaccine mandates and grave threats to national security including an unsecured southern border, a proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia, and tens of billions of taxpayer money and valuable weapons sent to Ukrainian oligarchs.

Obviously the U.S. Constitution was suspended for—at the very least—the last year of Biden’s presidency. During this period, an unidentified person or persons held de facto executive power to make decisions about grave matters of public safety, including decisions that escalated the risk of nuclear war.

We live in a very strange era in which we are presented with stunning corruption of such vast dimensions that much of the public struggles to comprehend it. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the Biden administration would have been perceived by educated adults as something akin to Richard Condon’s 1959 thriller, The Manchurian Candidate.

Now it’s the subject of mendacious dumb-bunny Jack Tapper’s new book—even though Tapper himself played an instrumental role in the very cover-up that he now pretends to regard as the “Original Sin.”

If there were any justice in this broken world, the Biden administration de facto executives would be discovered, tried for treason, and face the death penalty if found guilty.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

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The United States of America, as We Have Known it, Has Been Destroyed by the US Supreme Court

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 19/05/2025 - 05:01

“The Supreme Court has just ruled that the worst murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and even those who are mentally insane, who came into our Country illegally, are not allowed to be forced out without going through a long, protracted, and expensive Legal Process, one that will take, possibly, many years for each person, and one that will allow these people to commit many crimes before they even see the inside of a Courthouse. The result of this decision will let more CRIMINALS pour into our Country, doing great harm to our cherished American public. It will also encourage other criminals to illegally enter our Country, wreaking havoc and bedlam wherever they go. The Supreme Court of the United States is not allowing me to do what I was elected to do. Sleepy Joe Biden allowed MILLIONS of Criminal Aliens to come into our Country without any “PROCESS” but, in order to get them out of our Country, we have to go through a long and extended PROCESS. In any event, thank you to Justice Alito and Justice Thomas for attempting to protect our Country. This is a bad and dangerous day for America!” — President Trump, Truth Social, May 16, 2025 at 5:59 PM

As I predicted, the liberal-left, committed as it is to the establishment of a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel, used the mindless judiciary to protect “rights” of non-citizens who broke the law by entering the country illegally. The judges defined the preservation of America in terms of defending “rights” for illegals who are not US citizens to use US courts to evade enforcement of US law. No one knows where these American rights of non-Americans came from, but the morons on the Supreme Court are defending them. The Supreme Court’s ruling against America in favor of illegal aliens  reads like the babel of an insane asylum. Which is what the court is.  Instead of standing when judges enter the courtroom, they should be pelted with rotten tomatoes and rotten eggs.  There is no reason to respect them as they do not respect America and its Constitution. Most of them are activists for overthrowing traditional America.

The judiciary has also created a fourth branch of government, the civil service or executive branch employees, who the judiciary has now made independent of presidential control.

So, five months into the presidential  term, my prediction has come true that the Democrats, committed as they are to the replacement of white racist Americans with people of color, would use the courts to defeat the will of the people as expressed in the presidential election.

Americans do not realize, despite the over-abundance of evidence, that they have been in a civil war for many years.  That a civil war was underway became completely and totally clear in 2016 and again in 2020 and again during the Biden regime’s illegal prosecutions of Donald Trump and falsely accused and incarcerated “insurrectionists.”  That the US Department of Justice and federal courts could be used to imprison American patriots who protested a stolen presidential election demonstrated for even morons to see that the Democrat liberal-left was committed to overthrowing America.

Parents in every state had the evidence before their noses every day of the school year.  In place of education, white kids were taught, and still are, that they are racists, along with their parents and grandparents, that they might have been born into the wrong body, that gender is unrelated to biology and determined by self-declaration. Parents who resisted sex change operations for their underage children risked losing them to seizure by Child Protective Services.  Young kids were being sexualized at an early age, taught how to give oral sex and to copulate. The Democrats heavily into pedophilia are creating receptive children for themselves. Merit was abandoned as a basis for admission to quality schools for the gifted and as the basis for graduation, resulting in the destruction of the educational experience once offered to the gifted, people America certainly needs. Corporations and even the military sidelined hiring and promotion for white heterosexual Americans in order to give illegal preference to DEI. Corporate advertising promoted, and still does, miscegenation. Democrat political jurisdictions permitted Antifa and Black Lives Matter to loot and burn white business areas of cities and refused to prosecute.  Laws were passed that reduced the accountability of people of color for crimes.

For these and many other reasons enough of the insouciant American population saw the light and responded by electing an American as president.  It only took 7 Supreme Court justices and a sprinkling of Democrat federal district judges to defeat the American people’s uprising.

Americans need to understand that the Supreme Court with its ruling has destroyed America.  A country that cannot defend its borders and that cannot deport illegal entrants is described in Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, a description of the fate that awaits white Americans, but Americans cannot stop scrolling their cell phones long enough to read a book that tells their future.

If Americans understood what awaits them, it is possible that they could save themselves if there was a massive violent uprising, but the people are too weak-minded and weak-willed to save themselves even if they could face up to the threat.

With my prediction that Trump’s agenda would be blocked proven true, I am encouraged to offer another prediction.  The Democrats will steal the mid-term elections.  The RINO Republicans, media, and judiciary will help them in order to get rid of Trump.  Next, President Trump will be successfully impeached, and he and members of his government and supporters will be prosecuted.  White heterosexual Americans will be discriminated against in every aspect of life.  All who protest will face charges.  The United States of America is about to disappear.

My backup prediction is that the American Establishment will override the Democrat liberal-left, because the ruling establishment sees Trump as an effective agent for their construction of an American neo-colonial empire consisting of Greenland, Panama, Gaza, and the Middle East (see today’s companion article.)  This opens up new avenues of plunder for the ruling elite.  The destruction of American unity that the Democrat liberal-left has achieved plays into the hands of the elite as the absence of unity prevents constraints on their privatization of government.  Now that I think about it, my backup prediction could well be the most likely one.

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The Trade Truce Won’t Save the Dollar

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 19/05/2025 - 05:01

On Thursday’s episode of The Peter Schiff Show, Peter unpacks the recent stock market rally that followed news of a temporary truce in the US-China trade war. He warns that investors are misreading the situation by ignoring deeper threats to the economy, such as the ongoing global move away from the US dollar and misguided government subsidies that risk driving personal debt even higher.

Peter opens the show with a skeptical look at the so-called win for the Trump administration in its standoff with China, pointing out that the underlying threat was never properly addressed:

Okay, well, we’ve had a pretty good relief rally in the stock markets over the last several days. Ever since we got a truce in the trade war, or maybe more appropriately a surrender than a truce, although that’s not the way the Trump administration is promoting this so-called win. But when you strip off all of the jargon, that’s basically what happened. I mean, Trump diffused the bomb, but it’s a bomb that he set. And the fact that he diffused it has caused investors to enthusiastically buy stocks.

Peter sees the market’s optimism as misplaced, arguing that the economic reality is far weaker than many are willing to acknowledge. He believes that the trade tensions may have eased, but only because the US quietly stepped back from its most aggressive tariffs:

The reality is they’re expecting too much, because I think the economy is going to be a lot weaker. Yes, we’re not going to have the worst case scenario. The 145% tariffs aren’t going to stay in place, or even anything close to that on China. And I doubt the reciprocal tariffs that were unveiled on Liberation Day on the rest of the world are going to come back. I mean, it seems to me that what Trump is aiming for is about a 10% tariff on most countries, and maybe a little bit higher than that, on stuff coming in from China.

He cautions that, while the tariff news has stolen headlines, investors are ignoring the real threat: de-dollarization. Peter highlights that American policies especially sanctions and aggressive financial measures have encouraged other countries to reduce their reliance on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency:

But I think investors are missing out on the big picture here because the tariffs aren’t really the problem. I mean, they were a problem, but they’re not the problem. The real problem is the trend of de-dollarization and the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency is in jeopardy because we have certainly brought the dollar status to the forefront. I think in a bigger way than Biden did with the Russia sanctions. I mean, that was certainly a slap in the face, an alarm bell warning to the rest of the world, hey, you got to get out of dollars because that is your vulnerability.

Turning to the world of speculative assets, Peter notes that Bitcoin has failed to rally alongside stocks, suggesting a shift in investor appetite for risk. He uses the example of Coinbase s brief surge after its inclusion in the S&P 500 to illustrate that, even with  good news,  the broader crypto sector appears stagnant:

I mentioned on the last podcast that Bitcoin didn’t seem to be going along for the ride and that’s continued. Even though the stock market has rallied over the course of the week. Bitcoin has not. And Bitcoin right now is around 103 and change, and that’s where it’s been. It hasn’t made a new high and it’s kind of been going sideways and maybe it’s about to roll over. It got some good news in that Coinbase was added to the S&P 500 and rose about 20, 30% over the first couple of days, although it was down today quite a bit.

Peter wraps up his analysis with a warning about the economic consequences of government-subsidized debt. He singles out a new potential tax provision that encourages Americans to borrow even more for car purchases. Rather than fostering real economic growth, he argues, this policy inflates prices and increases household indebtedness, all risks that taxpayers ultimately bear:

One of the provisions of this bill, which I think is a very bad idea, and it’s an idea that Donald Trump came up with, is the 10% deductibility for you up to 10,000. You can deduct on your income tax the interest that you pay on an auto loan, as long as the car was assembled in the US, then not to be manufactured here. It’s got to be assembled here, right? A lot of the parts are imported. But you can deduct the interest on the car loan. Now, why is that? Why does the US government want to subsidize people to go out and borrow money to buy cars? That’s a bad idea. It’s bad economics. 

This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.

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The Ball’s in Trump’s Court After the Latest Istanbul Talks

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 19/05/2025 - 05:01

The mixed signals that he sent on Friday suggest that he hasn’t made up his mind about what to do.

The first bilateral Russian-Ukrainian talks in over three years were held in Istanbul on Friday after Zelensky agreed, likely under pressure from Trump, to Putin’s proposal from the week prior. They didn’t result in the unconditional 30-day ceasefire that Ukraine demanded nor did Ukraine agree to withdraw from the entirety of the disputed regions like Russia demanded, but they did agree to a prisoner swap and to hold another round of talks sometime in the future. They therefore weren’t for nothing.

Most importantly, Russia and Ukraine were able to show Trump that they’re interested in peace after he signaled his increasing impatience with the US’ hitherto unsuccessful mediation between them, which could result in him either “escalating to de-escalate” or simply walking away from the conflict. Prior to making his fateful choice about the future of American involvement, Trump will likely hold talks with Putin, at the very least over the phone but ideally in person sometime in the coming weeks.

After all, the ball’s now in his court after the Russian and Ukrainian positions have proven to be irreconcilable, so Russia will either inevitably obtain its maximum goals by continuing to rely on military means to that end or the US will double down on support for Ukraine in order to prevent that outcome. The only realistic compromise would be if the US successfully coerces Ukraine into withdrawing from some or all of the disputed regions in exchange for Russia agreeing to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire.

The US hasn’t yet attempted that even though it could have tried doing so anytime over the past three months since Trump returned to the White House, however, thus leading to the aforesaid scenario branch. It therefore remains unclear exactly what Trump will do. On the one hand, he just threatened Russia with “crushing” sanctions, but he also just complained about the billions that the US “pissed away” in support of Ukraine. It accordingly looks like he himself hasn’t yet decided how to proceed.

“Escalating to de-escalate” would entail enormous financial and strategic costs, the latter with regard to potentially offsetting his planned “Pivot (back) to Asia” for more muscularly containing China and even risking World War III in the worst-case scenario. At the same time, walking away would lead to him owning what could then soon become one of the West’s worst geopolitical defeats. The middle ground between these extremes could be strictly enforced secondary sanctions against Russia’s energy clients.

To elaborate, the aim would be to pressure China and India into drastically curtailing their imports, the first as a “goodwill gesture” after Trump’s newly announced “total reset” in their ties and the second as a means to signal its worth to the US in the hopes that Trump reconsiders his incipient pivot to Pakistan. Nevertheless, one or both might still refuse to comply or secretly continue to purchase large amounts of Russian energy, thus forcing the US to either turn a blind eye or worsen ties by sanctioning them.

A blend of these scenarios could see Trump threatening Zelensky with a clean break from this conflict if he doesn’t withdraw from Donbass while threatening Putin with strictly enforced secondary sanctions if he doesn’t accept a (unconditional?) 30-day ceasefire in the event that this happens. Calls could then be made to Xi and Modi to inform them of his plans in the hope that they’ll convince Putin to agree. Such a proposal would be the most pragmatic one from the US’ perspective and could lead to a breakthrough.

This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

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What DOGE Didn’t Touch

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 19/05/2025 - 05:01

The high was nice while it lasted. But False Hopium is an ephemeral drug.

In the first few weeks, we were maddened – but also gladdened – by the disclosures regarding how our money (which is forcibly extracted from us) was “wasted” on various execrable things by USAID and the subsequent closing of USAID. How grand! But the high caused us to forget about our money – which of course has never been given back. What does it matter to a man who has been mugged how the mugger spends the money he’s stolen?

This is the DOGE dodge – and it worked, for awhile. People – especially people who wear the Red Hat – were cheered by the thought that Elon Musk, that arch rent-seeker and endorser of carbon taxes – was making the mugger (government) more “efficient.” This being of a piece with “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Not less government – or lower taxes. Just more efficient government. Including a more efficient (AI driven) system of income extraction. Instead of some wiggle room to “get away” with paying something less than “your fair share,” a more efficient system that knows exactly how much you earned so as to assure you are forced to pay precisely what the government says you “owe.”

Is it not astounding? The inheritors of 1776 now generally accept that they owe a large portion of what they worked to earn to the state. And do not object, provided their money is spent efficiently. How long before they stop objecting to penetrative rape, provided the rapist is skilled and makes sure the victim orgasms?

Back to DOGE. It is interesting to note that none of its attentions were focused on the most wasteful and extravagant expenditures of our money – on what is ludicrously styled “defense” spending. This country not having had to defend itself since December the 7th, 1941.

Interestingly, that was around the time the War Department became the Defense Department and – since that time – has gobbled up about 15 percent of the money we’re forced to pay to the mugger (government). This goes to pay for such things as several aircraft carrier battle groups and an estimated arsenal of 10,000 nuclear weapons – which are as needed for “defense” as traffic cops need full Fallujah kit to hand out speeding tickets.

If we were actually talking about defense – as opposed to offense – the amount of money that is sluiced to Boeing and Raytheon and various other “defense contractors” (some of which is then sluiced to purchase the politicians who vote to continue the sluicing) could probably be reduced by two-thirds and every American taxpayer (a term that is obnoxious in that it suggests the paying was done voluntarily) could be issued a refund much larger than the $5,000 payment that was briefly, tantalizingly dangled in front of the dupes – who’ve already forgotten all about it. Just as they appear to have forgotten all about Epstein’s list and the “COVID” criminals who have not and likely never will pay for their crimes.

There has been no attempt by DOGE to make “defense” spending more efficient. Probably because Musk is very much in the process of transitioning to his new grift, which involves getting the government to subsidize rockets rather than electric vehicles.

It’ll be very efficient, of course.

But there won’t be less of it. Except insofar as what’s left in our pockets. And of the freedom we’ll never get back by expecting those who’ve taken it from us to give it back to us.

This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.

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Why You Wouldn’t Last 24 Hours in Medieval Times

Lew Rockwell Institute - Dom, 18/05/2025 - 20:04

Writes Tim McGraw:

Hi Lew,

Well, obviously, our ancestors made it through Medieval Times. Mine survived on whisky and beer with the odd animal and vegetable thrown into a stew. That’s pretty much my diet today. Pizza is just some flat dough with some mystery ingredients on top. Some dried apples were around for Vitamin C.

It was probably a healthier diet back then than the frozen food we eat today.  The beer was better, too.

 

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What LRC Readers Are Buying This Week

Lew Rockwell Institute - Sab, 17/05/2025 - 05:01

LewRockwell.com readers are supporting LRC and shopping at the same time. It’s easy and does not cost you a penny more than it would if you didn’t go through the LRC link. Just click on the Amazon link on LewRockwell.com’s homepage and add your items to your cart. It’s that easy!

If you can’t live without your daily dose of LewRockwell.com in 2025, please remember to DONATE TODAY!

  1. Treason From Within: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy 
  2. 50 Things Every Young Gentleman Should Know Revised and Expanded: What to Do, When to Do It, and Why
  3. January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right
  4. The Modern Pioneer Cookbook: Nourishing Recipes From a Traditional Foods Kitchen
  5. The Intentional Father: A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage and Character
  6. The Magic Coin
  7. Excavating the Evidence for Jesus: The Archaeology and History of Christ and the Gospels 
  8. How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
  9. Out of the Silent Planet (1) (The Space Trilogy) 
  10. An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought 
  11. Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World
  12. Slam Dunk Job Search: 6 Steps to Landing Your Ideal Job in Any Market
  13. The Covid Scam: Man made pandemic, Fake crisis, True greed, Future world government
  14. Money, Sound and Unsound
  15. Bodypower: Secret of self-healing
  16. Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life
  17. The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age
  18. The Technological Society
  19. Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings 
  20. Super Easy Carnivore Diet Cookbook: Effortless, High-Protein, Low-Carb Recipes for Meat Lovers

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How War Propaganda Has Fueled American Foreign Policy for a Century

Lew Rockwell Institute - Sab, 17/05/2025 - 05:01

The New York Times this week reports that the Trump administration has canceled many grants that were to fund “research” on “misinformation.” This is being presented by the media as a dastardly deed that will supposedly allow the spread of misleading or false information through various media channels.

Of course, if there were any genuine interest in studying the most egregious efforts to spread misinformation, media outlets like the Times would study themselves and their friends in the regime. After all, few organizations have been more complicit than the national American media and the US foreign policy establishment when it comes to spreading much of the worst propaganda in American history. I say “worst” because this propaganda has often been used in service to the worst ends: to gin up support for a variety of wars resulting in the deaths of thousands—sometimes even hundreds of thousands—of innocents.

Relatively recent media-regime partnerships in propagandistic misinformation include the “Russiagate” hoax, various efforts to obscure US meddling in Ukraine, and the nearly nonstop drumbeat of “news” stories over the past twenty years designed to push for regime change in various countries from Venezuela to Russia to Libya and to Syria—where the Assad regime, according to US design, was recently replaced by Islamist terrorists. And then, of course, there is the nonstop stream of misinformation designed to prop up the State of Israel and obscure its many war crimes. And let’s not forget the fictional “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq which the US presented to the United Nations as established fact.

Throughout all this, the interventionist “foreign policy blob” in Washington received near universal support from its friends at publications like the Times and the Washington Post.

The United States did not invent these tactics. Over the past 100-plus years, however, perhaps no regime was more innovative than the British when it came to inventing “facts” designed to manufacture popular consent for wars and more foreign intervention. The United States has done its best to adopt similar methods, however, and creating invented narratives in service to the regime’s foreign policy goals is now standard operating procedure for the American state as well.

The Great War: The Turning Point

Throughout history, most great powers world have long lied to buttress their war efforts, but these efforts greatly increased in magnitude and sophistication during the twentieth century, mostly with the assistance of increasingly centralized organs of mass media.

For an insightful narrative on how this new “propaganda state” developed, we can consult the works of historian Ralph Raico, who suggests that the true turning point came with the First World War when the British regime, with the help of the media, engaged in a propaganda campaign of impressive effectiveness. Specifically, Raico posits that modern wartime propaganda began with “the Belgian atrocity stories of 1914, which was maybe the first great propaganda success in modern times.”

The stories of which Raico speaks were part of a concerted British campaign to wildly exaggerate German aggression in Belgium and to send the message that the Germans were a barbaric race unlike the civilized French and British people of Europe. It was mostly based on an official British government report known as the Bryce Report. The report made countless unsubstantiated claims about mass rapes, children with their hands cut off, violated nuns, and Canadian soldiers crucified on barn doors. This produced horror and anti-German zealotry around much of the world.

But there was one problem: it was nearly all based on lies. Raico writes:

What is the story of the Belgian atrocities? The story of the Belgian atrocities is that they were faked. They were fabricated. They were phony. The pictures were photographed in particular buildings which are known in Paris. Th stage sets were designed by designers for the Parisian opera. The stories were made up out of … whole cloth and spread by British propaganda as another weapon in the war—especially in the war for the minds of the neutral countries. …[T]his turns a good deal of public opinion against the Germans.

Raico adds one especially ironical note, and quotes historian Thomas Fleming, who according to Raico,

to his credit, mentions that the real cases of people, including children, with their hands cut off occurred in the Congo beginning in the 1880s, at the behest of the Belgian king Leopold II. Because of their great extent and nearly incredible cruelty, it’s those that deserve to be called “the Belgian atrocities.”

Chief among those neutral countries that were targets of British propaganda, of course, was the United States.

The British regime was desperate to have the Americans enter the war on the American side, and the British almost spared no trouble or expense convincing the Americans that the British were fighting against an enemy of untrammeled malice. The program was very successful. Raico notes that an

ingrained bias of the American political class and social elite was galvanized by British propaganda. On August 5, 1914, the Royal Navy cut the cables linking the United States and Germany. Now news for America had to be funneled through London, where the censors shaped and trimmed reports for the benefit of their government. Eventually, the British propaganda apparatus in the First World War became the greatest the world had seen to that time; later it was a model for the Nazi Propaganda Minster Josef Goebbels. Philip Knightley noted:

British efforts to bring the United States into the war on the Allied side penetrated every phase of American life. . . . It was one of the major propaganda efforts of history, and it was conducted so well and so secretly that little about it emerged until the eve of the Second World War, and the full story is yet to be told.

The Americans Adopt British Methods

Ultimately, the British propaganda effort worked and the United States government enthusiastically entered the war on the side of Britain. This went against what was still a very large portion of the American public’s antiwar preferences, but the British had won the American elites over to their side.

After all, as the British effort mounted, even the Republican party’s leadership began pressuring Woodrow Wilson to take a more hardline anti-German stance. As Raico puts it “Americans, who devoutly wished to avoid war, had no spokesmen within the leadership of either of the major parties.”

Once the US entered the war, the US’s implemented its own propaganda barrage, and now it took on an additional dimension of outright censorship. For this, the media and the nation’s intellectuals were enlisted to push the war message, and, as Raico writes

public schools and the universities were turned into conduits for the government line. Postmaster General Albert Burleson censored and prohibited the circulation of newspapers critical of Wilson, the conduct of the war, or the Allies. The nation-wide campaign of repression was spurred on by the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, the U.S. government’s first propaganda agency.

Just one example of the regime’s capture of educational institutions could be found in how The New York Times praised the President of Columbia University for dismissing faculty members who opposed the regime on conscription.

American Propaganda After the Great War

The Second World War brought another resurgence in war propaganda, and this time, American cooperation with British forces was virtually guaranteed ahead of time. By 1939, Roosevelt was comfortable promising King George VI “full support for Britain in case of war,” as Raico puts it.

By 1940, even before the US entered the war, The US government was working hand in glove with the British government to convince Americans of the necessity of US involvement in the war. As Raico notes, the full extent of this collaboration was covered up for decades, although,

In 1976, the public finally learned the story of William Stephenson, the British agent code named “Intrepid,” sent by Churchill to the United States in 1940. Stephenson set up headquarters in Rockefeller Center, with orders to use any means necessary to bring the United States into the war. With the full knowledge and cooperation of Roosevelt and the collaboration of federal agencies, Stephenson and his 300 or so agents “intercepted mail, tapped wires, cracked safes, kidnapped, . . . rumor mongered” and incessantly smeared their favorite targets, the “isolationists.” Through Stephenson, Churchill was virtually in control of William Donovan’s organization, the embryonic U.S. intelligence service. Churchill even had a hand in the barrage of pro-British, anti-German propaganda that issued from Hollywood in the years before the United States entered the war. Gore Vidal, in Screening History, perceptively notes that starting around 1937, Americans were subjected to one film after another glorifying England and the warrior heroes who built the Empire. As spectators of these productions, Vidal says: “We served neither Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis; we served the Crown.”

Vidal was so impressed—in a bad way—by the continued success of British propagandists in this effort that he remarked:

For those who find disagreeable today’s Zionist propaganda, I can only say that gallant little Israel of today must have learned a great deal from the gallant little Englanders of the 1930s. The English kept up a propaganda barrage that was to permeate our entire culture…. Hollywood was subtly and not so subtly infiltrated by British propagandists.

Raico describes how closely the US and the UK collaborated in these efforts, and how successfully. By 1941, there was no doubt where the US regime would come down on the war issue. The primary question by then was how much Roosevelt would be able to drum up American hostility against Japan. In this respect, of course, he succeeded quite well.

A general worldview favoring endless international intervention was supplemented and cemented in the American mind for decades afterward by the ultimate purveyors of propaganda: the government schools. First and foremost was an effort to ensure that executive power was unlimited in international affairs claimed by Roosevelt and his successors. Raico writes:

Back in 1948, Charles Beard already noted the dismal ignorance among our people of the principles of our republican government: American education from the universities down to the grade schools is permeated with, if not dominated by, the theory of presidential supremacy in foreign affairs. Coupled with the flagrant neglect of instruction in constitutional government, this propaganda . . . has deeply implanted in the minds of rising generations the doctrine that the power of the president over international relations is, for all practical purposes, illimitable.

The US propaganda apparatus became less focused on British concerns after the war, but was deftly turned toward promoting US regime interests during the Cold War. In his work on the Truman years, Raico notes that by the late 1940s, Truman was also pressing for fresh hostilities, including open warfare, against the new enemy, the Soviet Union. Those who resisted, especially Republicans form the Taft wing of the party, were accused of being Stalin apologists.

In this, Truman, in what had become a well established pattern of American life, was assisted by elite journalists at media outlets. Raico notes:

Truman’s campaign could not have succeeded without the enthusiastic cooperation of the American media. Led by the Times, the Herald Tribune, and Henry Luce’s magazines, the press acted as volunteer propagandists for the interventionist agenda, with all its calculated deceptions. (Thee principal exceptions were the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times–Herald, in the days of Colonel McCormick and Cissy Paterson.) In time, such subservience in foreign affairs became routine for the “fourth estate,” …. Overwhelmed by the propaganda blitz from the administration and the press, a Republican majority in Congress heeded the Secretary of State’s high-minded call to keep foreign policy “above politics” and voted full funding for the Marshall Plan.

Voices in favor of peace were shouted down and banished from public discourse. Historian Steven Ambrose sums up the Truman-media victory:

When Truman became president he led a nation anxious to return to traditional civil-military relations and the historic American foreign policy of noninvolvement. When he left the White House his legacy was an American presence on every continent of the world and an enormously expanded armament industry. Yet so successfully had he scared hell out of the American people, the only critics to receive any attention in the mass media were those who thought Truman had not gone far enough in standing up to the communists. For all his troubles, Truman had triumphed.

By the end of the Truman years, the pattern was well established, based largely on the earlier efforts of British propaganda that was developed years earlier. Here were all the elements of manufacturing consent that would be employed during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the arms wars of the 1960s and 1980s, and the new “regime change” wars of the post-Cold War world.

In this, we perhaps find the answer to a question posed by Raico during one of his lectures:

Isn’t it funny how, with the possible exception of Vietnam, all of America’s wars have been justified and have been right and good? I mean, what are the odds of something like that? A major power’s every war has been good, and the enemy has always been unbelievably horrible?

He already knew the answer. It was the state’s propaganda that made it possible for Americans to believe that virtually every new war is some kind of crusade against evil. Thanks to propaganda, the American thinking on foreign policy—which, in an earlier age had been more pragmatic and less moralistic—had taken on its modern tone of quasi-religious righteousness.

Indeed, in this contrast with America prior to the twentieth century, and the concomitant degeneration into an era of total war, we get some hint of just how much a century of relentless propaganda has fashioned the American mind.  Only in examining its history can we hope to fully understand the insidiousness and effectiveness of these methods. It is necessary to also have knowledge of their origins and this allows us to better understand the transformation that took place in the first third of the twentieth century as the American mind became accustomed to a nonstop and creeping propaganda that is still so present in American foreign policy today.

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

The post How War Propaganda Has Fueled American Foreign Policy for a Century appeared first on LewRockwell.

Building Coalitions and Overcoming Division

Lew Rockwell Institute - Sab, 17/05/2025 - 05:01

During my life, I’ve been involved with numerous marginalized groups opposed to something horrific being done by the establishment (including many that had nothing to do with medicine). Throughout that, I’ve seen those groups (many of which I deeply believed in) fragment and fracture again and again. As such, I’ve put a lot of thought into why this always happens and became much more selective about confronting these conflicts since it’s rarely productive to engage with them.

One of the few things that still gets to me is when I see people I know are remarkably dedicated to a cause (and frequently made significant sacrifices for it) be torn apart by the people they’re trying to help. This is in part because I feel its unjust, but more because I know so many instances of idealistic leaders who genuinely wanted to do the right thing, but gradually had their hearts close down (hence becoming like typical politicians) because of all of the attacks they’d received over the years. As such, while there have been a lot of people I’ve wanted to defend due to the vitriol they’ve received, the only people I’ve directly spoken up for were Calley Means and Robert Malone.

Note: years ago, I knew someone who worked in Libya’s government for decades with Gadaffi (a highly eccentric dictator who was known for diverting Libya’s oil wealth to its people and creating one of the highest standards of living in the region until NATO took him out in 2011). One of the things he shared with me was that in his younger years, Gadaffi was very idealistic and eager to do all he could for Libya, but after surviving numerous failed assassination attempts, gradually became much more bitter and closed down.

Recently, an unexpected announcement shook the MAHA community—Trump’s November Surgeon General nominee Nesheiwat (who MAHA briefly protested for a few days due to her past COVID vaccine promotion and then forgot about) was replaced with Casey Means. After hearing about this, my first thought was a huge sigh of a relief which was immediately followed by “oh dear, this going this is going to stir up a lot of drama.”

Note: everyone I’ve spoken to who’s directly connected to the HHS wants Casey Means as the Surgeon General (due to her ability to communicate to the public and her genuine interest in MAHA) and feels that she is the best candidate they have that can pass a Senate confirmation.

The Origins of Evil

One of the main debates throughout human history has been where evil comes from and if humans are intrinsically good or evil. My own conclusions from decades of considering this are as follows:

• Many of the detestable things I see play out on the national stage I’ve seen very similar variants of occur in many smaller groups I’ve belonged to.

• Most of the horrific things we see happen have occurred throughout history in many different societies, suggesting evil is an intrinsic aspect of humanity.

• While many things we are seeing now are appalling, the degree of cruelty and depravity we witnessing now is much less than it was earlier in recorded history. However, while this general evolution of human consciousness and regard for ethics is profound, it is counterbalanced by the fact modern technology has made it possible for small numbers of people to commit cruelty and destruction on a scale that never before was possible.

• Many of the worst things people do are not due to malevolence but rather strong emotions, egos never wanting to be wrong and deeply ingrained fixations.

• In many cases, you can link a horrific action someone does to an unresolved trauma in the past (or in some cases a neurological injury such as those caused by the DPT vaccine). In many others, you can see how media propaganda or spiritual forces (both on an individual or societal level) can precipitate evil in those who are unbalanced enough to be susceptible to these subtle influences.

• In many cases, people are not fully conscious of their actions, and due to outside influences or retained patterning, will frequently force themselves to say or do things they are internally conflicted about.
Note: years ago, I read an excellent body language book on detecting deceit and then began gently asking people who displayed clear signs they were conflicted about what they’d just said to see if they actually believed it, and found in most cases, they did not (but frequently did not realize until I pointed it out).

• Some of the worst things which have happened throughout history were well-intended but ended up being catastrophic because their advocates could not see the full picture (e.g., why the action was a bad idea) and refused to change course once their peers or real-world results showed them they were causing more harm than good.

• Generally speaking, most people want to do the right thing and help others, but due either to their circumstances or the difficulty of doing the right thing, most won’t. Likewise, the majority of people I observe do “evil” things I do not deem to be evil people who wish to harm others.

• In most cases, evil follows a slippery slope, so once people acclimatize themselves to doing something wrong (e.g., for the “greater good” or to protect a “vital” institution), their resistance to doing it again gradually each time they repeat the act.

• It is very easy to design social systems which uses some combination of the previous to force well-intentioned people to do bad things and many institutions do just that.

• A small portion of the population does not have this resistance to hurting others, commonly characterized with labels such as “sociopaths” or “psychopaths” which for context are defined as:

Psychopath (0.5-1% of the population): A person with a severe form of personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy, shallow emotions, manipulativeness, and a tendency to engage in calculated, predatory behavior. Psychopathy is often considered to have a biological or genetic basis, with traits present from an early age.

Sociopath (1-4% of the population): A person who exhibits similar antisocial behaviors but whose traits are thought to be more environmentally influenced, often developing due to trauma, abuse, or social factors. Sociopathy is often less severe than psychopathy and may involve more impulsivity.

Note: psychopathy often goes hand in hand with narcissism and Machiavellianism.

• While some people take joy in hurting others (e.g., masochists) I find most of these monsters don’t wish to hurt others, they just have no concerns if others need to suffer for them to get want, hence making apathy far more destructive than malice.

• One of the major flaws in government is that its structure is extremely vulnerable to psychopathic individuals grabbing the reins of power and then forcing everyone else to go along with their prerogative. Because of this, I believe the best form of government humanity has developed is one of checks and balances where those individuals are continually forced to compete with each other for power (hence preventing any one of them from going to far off the deep end).

Note: the major problem with a bureaucracy full of robust checks and balances designed to impede government abuse, is that it also ofter prevents anything from getting done (which in turn begets corruption as that is often the only way to move things through the bureaucracy).

Black Pills

“Taking The Red Pill” is a cultural idiom from the Matrix where the main character was given the choice to fully awaken to the nightmare around him everyone had lied about or lull himself back into a complacent reality which ignored all of it.

Once people become aware of the scale of problems around them, it frequently leads to a sense of despair, and in time, this hopeless realization began being referred to as “being black-pilled.”

One of the recurring themes in any alternative movement is there will be a black-pilled subset of the group which shoots down any proposal to make things better under the logic such as “it’s futile to ever make things better so if you try to, you’re just getting scammed,” “all the things being proposed are actually distractions to keep us from fixing the real problem,” or “the person proposing this terrible proposal is actually an enemy trying to sabotage the movement.”
Note: a key point often missed by this crowd is that there are a lot of people within the system who want to help and in many cases have spent years waiting for the chance to.

In turn, while initially I was immensely intrigued by understanding the full scale of how twisted the world was, as time went on, I got more and more frustrated by people who only wanted to complain about things but never fix them, so like many others I know who wanted to make things better eventually parted ways with many of those overly black-pilled groups. Likewise, over the years, I’ve known many black-pilled people who’ve complained about everything in the world for decades as their personal life, in tandem, fell apart (despite the issues in it being easily addressable).

Presently, I believe the black-pill is incredibly seductive because it:

• Gives you a way to feel in control of your environment (by declaring it’s hopeless to do anything) and superior to others (by knowing a secret truth they don’t know). Likewise, I believe this validation explains why individuals who believe in a black-pill (or outlandish interpretation of existing data) will so aggressive in trying to get others to submit to adopting their perspective.

• Emotional and mental patterns are self-sustaining and much more comfortable to repeat than repattern. As such, black-pills have a strong subconscious appeals to individuals with pre-existing trauma or longstanding marginalization (hence causing them to accumulate in marginalized groups).

• Since they rely upon speculative inferences (e.g., that someone we’ve trusted is actually our secret enemy), black pills are essentially impossible to disprove, and as such, always provide an endless stream of attention grabbing content for those who need it even if they’ve repeatedly make false allegations in the past.
Note: since this “works” tabloid media (and in some cases the MSM) also often does it.

For all of these reasons, I try to avoid diving into most black-pills, and when I catch myself starting to, I take a step back and inevitably find that tendency is simply an expression of my own current frustration with the world. As such, I instead try to focus on (truthful) things that give people hope and actionable steps to make things better.

Note: people will often be the meanest to those they are the closest to, as it’s a safe space for them to displace their unresolved frustrations without fear of being retaliated against for their hostile behavior (and likewise they can expect to be listened to). In parallel, I find something similar often occurs to leaders in groups.

Wedging

One of the most reliable methods to handicap an opposing side is to split it into two (or more) factions and have those factions fight against each other over the split rather than having everyone focus on the bigger issue they all share. This tactic has been used again and again throughout history (e.g., a strong case can be made that much of the white-black animosity in America originated from a 1676 rebellion where both poor white indentured servants [essentially slaves] and black slaves united against the colonial elite, after which the plantation owners passed a variety of laws to create divisions against whites and blacks so they would never join together again to rebel).

A variety of terms exist for this process, and in the last few years, many have noted that this splintering has plagued the medical freedom movement. Robert Malone for example recently wrote a detailed piece on it (using the terminology Balkanization in reference to the perpetual armed conflict which followed splitting up the Balkan peninsula into smaller rival states).

See: Cyber Balkanization- Welcome to the Splinternet

Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said to them…

Read more

In politics, wedge issues are contentious one which divide a political base (e.g., transgenderism on the left), and then much like a wedge against wood, will split the base along its fault lines into rival factions once enough force is applied to the wedge.

In turn, one of the recurring themes I’ve run into ever since this newsletter started getting traction was people demanding I take sides on a highly divisive issue, either of which would divide and alienate many of the people here.

Note: a common “double” wedge, is that salacious gossip about someone’s target (e.g., a leader) that sows doubt will first be seeded throughout a group and then once it’s entrenched, be followed by attempts to force everyone to pick a side on that person. What’s fascinating to me is how many different scales I’ve seen this same dynamic play out on (e.g., I knew two people in a small group I belonged to who were friends, then had a falling out, after which the psychologically imbalanced one spent months doing this in an increasingly extreme fashion to the other person [e.g., they repeatedly tried to drag me into it] before moving onto something else).

Unfortunately, once these rumors are planted, people often forget how they started, so even if the original lie is refuted, the emotional impression it created persists. For example, a few months ago “to help RFK” a large influencer, citing unnamed sources, broke a nonsensical story (based off an already debunked story) about how RFK was being sexually blackmailed into silence by Israel that would be proven by a media firestorm over in the next few days (causing it to go viral). We called it out at the time and the predicted firestorm (the proof for these allegations) never happened, leading to the lie quickly being forgotten. However, the emotion behind it stuck and as a result, many in the black pill crowd are still attributing all of RFK’s “treasonous” actions (e.g., not immediately banning all vaccines) to him being blackmailed by some unspecified party.

From engaging with the people who tried to tried to “wedge” me, I’ve noticed three common subsets of them:

1. There were those who seemed to be acting in good faith, but had a force and rigidity to their mind akin to the edge of a blunt axe (hence why I prefer the term “wedging”).

2. A portion of the people were engaging in bad faith and seemed to be primarily motivated to tear people down (e.g., to build themselves up or attract monetizable followers to their brand).

3. A portion seemed to be bots that were there to split people apart.

Note: black-pilled people and people who try to wedge groups tend be a very vocal minority. As such, they create the impression far more feel that way than actually do (which, in turn, leads to content producers feeling pressured to appease that audience and hence creates a self-reinforcing cycle of negativity you often see in the alternative genre).

Read the Whole Article

The post Building Coalitions and Overcoming Division appeared first on LewRockwell.

Why America Doesn’t Need ‘Allies’

Lew Rockwell Institute - Sab, 17/05/2025 - 05:01

The title is a bit crude and is deliberately mocking in tone. But it has to be because there is a deeply-entrenched, almost sacred presumption embedded in the nation’s foreign policy catechism that “allies”, “alliances” and “coalitions of the willing” are the be-all-and-end-all of enlightened, necessary and effective foreign policy.

American policy-makers and diplomats perforce should therefore never leave these shores for the wider world without them. This dogma perhaps reached its epitome in Secretary of State James Baker’s “coalition of the willing” during the utterly pointless first Gulf War of 1991 and has plagued us ever since. Unfortunately.

In fact, the truth is more nearly the opposite–so it needs to be stated coarsely, almost defiantly. To wit, allies in today’s world are mostly an albatross, completely irrelevant to the military security of the American homeland and a major source of unnecessary friction and even outright conflict among the nations.

In a word, America is such an outsized economic and military Hegemon that all the little and mid-sized nation’s it has lined-up in formal and de facto alliances are inherently incentivized to pursue policies that minimize their own defense investments—even as they are also encouraged to throw diplomatic caution to the winds. That is, Washington’s “alliances” enable the domestic politicians or elected governments of these small allies to be more aggressive or confrontational vis-a-vis the “bad guys” designated by Washington than they surely would be if operating only upon their own steam.

For instance, the former Estonian prime minister between 2021 and 2024, Kaja Kallas, and now foreign affairs chief for the EU has been a loud-mouthed, vitriolic critic of Russia and hardline supporter of sending other people’s money [i.e. yours] to the support of the equally pointless proxy war against Russia on the Ukrainian steppes.

Of course, with a population of just 1.3 million, GDP of barely $40 billion and armed force of 8,000, Estonia amounts to a cipher of an ally in the scheme of things. So it does absolutely nothing for America’s homeland security, even as it has emboldened Kallas to become a loud irritant to the Big Bear of a country next door.

Then again, if there were no such thing as NATO and the Article 5 military shield of the US, do you think Kallas would be noisily whooping it up for Zelensky? Would her people have tolerated her posturing as little David waving a sling-shot at the Goliath next door?

We dare say the very opposite would have prevailed. Estonia and its leader would have taken care to make nice to their extra large sized neighbor—as small countries have done from times immemorial.

And if making diplomatic nice and conducting mutually beneficial economic commerce wasn’t working for some reason, although it almost always does, they would have been obligated to arm themselves to the hilt. That is, mobilize 10-25% of GDP for defense, if necessary, rather than the pittance of 2.9% of GDP that Estonia actually spends. In turn, that would establish deterrence—the standing up to a potential aggressor the heavy cost in blood and treasure it would be obligated to face in breaching the borders and sovereignty of a smaller neighbor.

And, no, for crying out loud, the 21st century world is not unique when it comes to the relationships between big, small and middle sized nations. What we described above as making nice in diplomacy and economics and making deterrence clear is actually the way the world of nations is supposed to work, and, prior to the rise of the Hegemon on the Potomac, actually usually did.

Most certainly the gods of history have not conferred upon Washington’s politicians and apparatchiks a mandate to befriend and safeguard  from one end of the planet to the other every Little Guy from the heavy breathing of nearby Big Guys.

Indeed, in a world not dislocated by the Hegemon on the Potomac no one would think to describe the reckless foolishness of Kiev in militarily attacking and brutalizing the Russian speaking populations of the Donbas after the Maidan Coup of February 2014 as an “inspiration”. It was actually stupid beyond belief—something that neighbors not addled by the Hegemon’s military shield or egged on by the CIA, NED, USAID, the State Department and Pentagon would have no problem recognizing and observing.

Indeed that observation applies to the whole passel of little countries that have been admitted to NATO since the turn of the century.  For instance, when it comes to the five  small Balkan countries that do not even share the Black Sea shorelines with Russia, here is the pitiful military capacity and defense heft (measured as % of GDP) that they bring to America’s homeland security.

In order to put this pittance of military manpower in perspective, moreover, we first note by way of comparison the size of police forces in major US cities. While these domestic police men, women and theys may eat too many donuts on the job and thereby fail any combat readiness tests, when it comes to sheer human muscle the city police forces listed here outrank most of what these Balkan “allies” bring to the table.

Size of Police Forces In Major US Cities:

  • New York City: 36,000.
  • Chicago: 13,100.
  • Los Angeles: 10,000.
  • Philadelphia: 6,500.

This is by way of saying that all of the above cities have bigger forces of men in blue than do most of the small the NATO allies depicted below, where we show their active military manpower and their defense spending as a % of GDP.

  • Croatia: 14,300/1.8% of GDP.
  • North Macedonia: 8,000/1.7% of GDP.
  • Slovenia: 7,300/1.5% of GDP.
  • Albania: 6,600/1.7% of GDP.
  • Montenegro: 2,350/1.6% of GDP.

Clearly, these countries are not shaking in their boots about the Russian Bear. In the most recent year of red hot proxy war between NATO and Russia on the hapless steppes of the Ukraine, none of these five even bothered to spend 2% of GDP on defense!

Indeed, even the bigger fry positioned cheek-by-jowl with Russia on the Black Sea didn’t evince any greater fear of the Bear. Romania spends only 2.2% of GDP on defense and its voters just elected a president who wanted to make friendly with Putin—which democratic chosen leader was, of course, ixnayed by Romania’s “allies” in Brussels and Washington.

Likewise, Bulgaria spends but 2.2% on defense, as well. And, understandably, Serbia has not even seen fit to join NATO. Well, not since its capital was bombed to smithereens in 1999 by NATO war planes, owing to its insistence that Kosovo not be severed from its sovereign territory owing to the writ of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Even then as Russia’s firm ally in the region, Serbia spends about 2.3% of GDP on defense and has about 28,000 active men in uniform in its armed forces. That is, Serbia’s neutral forces total about the same as the combined military might of the five small fry on the Adriatic side of the Balkans.

Moreover, it also turns out that these five wee NATO members actually spend about the same pittance for military capabilities as is hoovered-up by Ukraine-bordering Hungary and Slovakia. The former spends about 2.0% of GDP on defense while the latter’s military spending is 2.1% of GDP. Yet both governments next door to the  Russian Bear are militantly opposed to the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and successfully get along with Moscow quite well!

In short, none of these countries really seem to fear the Russian Bear or they would be spending double digit percentages of their GDP making themselves so well armed as to make a unappetizing meal for the alleged aggressor in Moscow. To the contrary, they have either joined NATO to get into the Atlantic Club or have simply eschewed the opportunity (Serbia) or gone along for the ride (Hungary and Slovakia).

The point is, extending NATO to the Balkans was a stupid joke perpetrated by Warfare State apparatchiks in Washington and Brussels. It does absolutely nothing for America’s homeland defense militarily, while enabling Russia’s small next door neighbors to spend a pittance for defense and from time to time squeak-up to the Bear in a provocative manner that they would not dream of doing on the strength of 8,000 lightly armed soldiers of their own.

Of course, the same thing is true up north on the Baltic. The three Baltic republics both experienced and do remember their decades of Soviet occupation. Yet their present day budgetary statements make abundantly clear that they do not really perceive post-communist Russia to be the same existential same threat at all. That’s why they spend nickels and dimes on make-pretend militaries, even as their politicians like Kallas demagogue about Putin in order to stir up the home voters and incur the favor of the warmongering neocon apparatchiks who dominate the NATO and the EU.

Still, no countries with the wafer-thin military capacities depicted in the numbers below truly fear their Russian neighbor. If they did, with or without NATO, they’d put their budgetary dollars where the unfortunate rhetoric of some of the loud-mouthed politicians lies.

Armed Forces Size and Defense % of GDP:

  • Lithuania: 14,100/2.8% of GDP.
  • Estonia: 7,700/2.9% of GDP.
  • Latvia: 6,750/2.4% of GDP.

In short, the Donald’s observations about the state of the world usually amount to a random collection of the true, the false and the foolish. But in the case of all these pipsqueak NATO allies he surely hit the nail on the head.

Washington’s “Allies” in The Baltics

That is to say, all of these allies are far more trouble than they are worth. The military security of the American homeland can be secured by an invincible strategic nuclear triad based on bombers, land-based ICBMs and its deep sea nuclear subs–none of which require foreign bases or foreign “allies”. That, and a powerful conventional Fortress America defense of its shorelines and air space would more than do the job of maintaining the military security of the American homeland in today’s world.

Neither of these military capabilities are enhanced in the slightest by the pipsqueak allies that have been drafted into NATO since 1999. Nor in today’s world is there any risk that a larger power as economically lame as Russia or Ponzi-based as Red China could attack, conquer and roll-up tens of trillions of GDP, military age manpower and defense production capacities among large numbers of their small fry neighbors.

Indeed, both Russia and China well know that the cost of invasion, conquest and pacification in today’s world would not remotely be worth the candle. That’s perhaps why the answer to the question as to how many countries Red China has conquered in the last four decades is, well,  zero!

To the contrary, what America’s 750 bases and 160,000 servicemen positioned abroad from Japan to Germany, Italy and the UK actually amount to are dangerous “trip wires”designed to:

  • Provide an excuse for US defense contractors to sell weapons to the allied nations where US forces are based.
  • Create an excuse to meddle in foreign conflicts owing to the fact that American servicemen are in harms’ way.

Suffice it here to note that during the heyday of America’s development as the greatest nation on earth—from the cancellation of the treaty with France in 1797 to the ratification of the NATO Treaty in 1949—America had no alliances, no military treaties and no allies empowered to provoke conflicts with their neighbors on the understanding that Uncle Sam had their backs.

He didn’t and during those 152 years everything worked out for America as well as any nation in history before or since. And absolutely nothing has changed to alter the wisdom of Washington and Jefferson about avoidance of Entangling Alliances.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

The post Why America Doesn’t Need ‘Allies’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Cool?

Lew Rockwell Institute - Sab, 17/05/2025 - 05:01

“Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” Jim Comey, former FBI Director wrote on Instagram about the message “86 47” laid out in seashells on the sand that he came across, innocently. You’d have to ask yourself: what was “cool” about that, exactly? Especially if, as Mr. Comey claimed on X soon after, that he didn’t know what it meant. Are things that you don’t understand “cool”? Is it just “cool” to learn that you can spell stuff out with seashells? (Who knew?)

Maybe he was surprised to learn that people other than Jim Comey fans might see his cute coded clip and conclude that it wasn’t such an innocent little gag. “47,” of course, refers to Donald Trump in the cavalcade of US presidents. Among the not-strrictly-fans was DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who went on TV hours later and said that Mr. Comey should go to prison for it — in so many words. You must suppose she meant after the appropriate procedures: an FBI deposition, a grand jury, an indictment, a trial. After all that, we’d probably get to the bottom of what JC meant by “cool.”

Now, it happens that in this new milieu of memes flying around every which way, the code “86 47” is not a complete mystery. It is apparently employed casually in settings where angry citizens gather to denounce the president. “86” is a term in restaurant kitchens when there is no more of an item that a waiter just brought in an order for. “Eighty-six on the monkfish, Carla,” the line-cook might yell. Apparently, mobsters like the phrase, too, for its pithiness: “Ay, somebody, go eighty-six that stronzo Rocco Vaselino, already! He ain’t paid da vig in a munt.” Soon, there will be no more of Rocco, you see. He will be food for the hellgrammites in the soil of the Jersey pine barrens. . . .

As DNI Gabbard pointed out — in case no one noticed — there have been two recent assassination attempts on Mr. Trump. It is a fact well-known to police psychologists that would-be assassins are curiously suggestible to prompts floating around in the zeitgeist. They tend to take them as commands. Go do this. And if anyone was a commanding figure, it would be Jim Comey, towering hero of the early anti-Trump resistance. Thus, it appears that Mr. Comey called for there to be no more of Mr. Trump. Not cool.

Also, not so cool, in the grand annals of the resistance, is the new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by journalists (cough cough) Jake Tapper (of CNN) and Alex Thompson (Axios). The book purports to explain how the entire governance apparatus of the USA hid the mental decline of “Joe Biden,” the phantom president. Realize, please, that the news media is a vital part of that apparatus, and has been since the invention of the printing press, with its crucial role (until lately) as a regulating mechanism on the engine of public affairs.

In fact, it is precisely the role of the news media to notice things that public officials try to hide, so as to keep citizens apprised of what is really going on. And that is exactly what the news media intentionally declined to do during the four years of “Joe Biden.” But then, at least half the country, seeing “Joe Biden” in action on video, did not fail to notice his ever-worsening feeble bewilderment. Tapper and Thompson seek to shift the blame for this game of Pretend onto the gremlins behind the scenes in the White House who ran the “Joe Biden” show.

Tapper and Thompson are lying, of course, and in exactly the same brazen way as the bigwigs in the Democratic Party who sponsored this treasonous fraud. Jake Tapper, for one, stated repeatedly on-the-air from 2021 onward that “Joe Biden” was a capable and effective chief executive and denounced anybody who tried to argue otherwise. Just as Thompson, while accepting the Award for Overall Excellence at the White House Correspondents’ Annual Dinner in April, lied saying, “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story.” Really? Then what, exactly, was “excellent” about his reporting? See this.

They also missed the story as to how the White House gremlins behind “Joe Biden” were wrecking the country with open borders, election fraud, drag queens in kindergarten, censorship, lawfare, and a colossal stream of secret grift from taxpayers through USAID-linked NGO’s to Democratic Party foot-soldiers like Stacey Abrams. The more plausible story — the truth, actually — is that the companies many reporters worked for, the old big newspapers like The New York Times and the WashPo, and the cable-news channels such as (especially) CNN and MSNBC were losing their audiences until they discovered that Trump Derangement was the only way to stave off complete failure.

Once they got going with that business model in 2016, they wrecked the news media’s credibility. And virtually everything after that has been an ongoing cover-up for their dishonorable malfeasance and the crimes of the party they fronted for. But the levers of power are in other hands now. There will be consequences for government officials who go to war against the people of this land, committing sedition and treason. Suggesting the murder of a president on social media is no light matter. By the time this blog is up, officers of the Secret Service may be visiting Mr. Comey at home. No need to batter down the front door with guns drawn, though. That would be so un-cool.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

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Is Christian Nationalism the Solution to the Frailty of Liberalism?

Lew Rockwell Institute - Sab, 17/05/2025 - 05:01

Conservative movements are often depicted as unyielding and uncompromising; dangerously incapable of adaptation when new ideas come to light. This image of the political right is rooted in a number of misconceptions. In reality, modern conservatives are often far too compromising – Far too willing to go along to get along. None of us wants to be seen as a dictator.

Perhaps the most important and defining characteristic of conservatives (at least in the US) is a regard for freedom, but ONLY freedom that is tempered by responsibility. When leftists (or libertarians) scrutinize the conservative ideal they usually reach back around 50 years to the days of evangelical censorship – The attempts to shut down the porn industry, temper the gay agenda in media, warn about satanic references in movies and violence in video games.

This was the era of the Christian “busybody” and a lot of people made fun of them for it. To be clear, they were wrong in some instances, but as our current predicament in the west proves, they were right about many things, too.

The supposed balance to the evangelicals was Liberalism. Most liberals today are certainly not the staunchly individualist and freedom minded people they once were. In fact, the majority of them joined woke activists without question or kept their mouths shut while the far-left pulled a speed run into Orwell’s 1984.

Perhaps in a desperate attempt to save their ideology from losing all relevancy, some liberals slipped over to the center and criticized the woke mob. Most of them didn’t have the balls to jump into the culture war until a few years ago. Those of us in the conservative sphere had already been exposing the existential dangers of post-modernism, futurism and luciferianism for decades.

Centrist liberals say they want to temper the political left’s addiction to Marxism and Communism. As recent events have proven, they are simply not up to the task of controlling their political cousins. The woke movement spread like a cancer throughout the entire liberal body and they bowed in fealty. The only thing that stopped the rot was the right wing finally taking a stand and going on the offensive.

With conservative principles currently gaining momentum there is a chance that America could actually turn back the clock on mores and social cohesion to a time when traditional values were held in much higher regard. This can only be a good thing in my opinion, but it requires a reconsideration of our concept of personal liberty. Maybe some behavior needs to be reined in? Maybe total unchecked chaos and limitless individualism is a bad thing?

Liberals warn that conservatives are gaining too much power after the success of MAGA in last year’s elections and therefore we must be kept in check. Their argument? The woke left is beaten, but now the world must put a leash on the “woke right”.

The “woke right” label in itself is a rather remedial and silly attempt to divert popular discussion away from traditional values (a development that hasn’t taken place in the US in a long time). Morals, nobility and responsibility might become “cool” again, and liberals simply can’t have that.

They argue that their way (a continued idealization of individualism without taking inherent narcissism, psychopathy and the mentality of mobs into account) is the best way. However, we have seen where liberalism without boundaries ends. The cult of chaos (wokeness) is simply a natural extension of the liberal ideal. They demand an end to ALL restrictions, even the restrictions of objective truth.

They want total open multicultural expansion, unfettered freedom to interpret biology and morality according to subjective preference, unchecked sexual deviancy, no consequences whatsoever for their actions. Liberals are not as far from this end of the spectrum as they pretend. They don’t like cultural structures and rules either. They don’t like collective limitations (unless they control those limitations). They don’t even believe in evil; they only believe in circumstances.

Conservatives now stand atop the fray of the culture war and many of us are suggesting that, in order to prevent the nightmare of wokeness (or something even worse) from ever happening again, we might need to instill some enduring rules of social conduct. The liberals in turn are freaking out. They especially seem to despise Christian Nationalists who want to bring America back to an era of carefully defined moral order.

A decade ago I might have agreed with this concern, at least in part. I’m not fond of the idea of a theocracy in which the church rules the state. I also agree that most people have a conscience outside of biblical teaching (If we didn’t then humanity would have gone extinct long ago).

That said, Christian Nationalism does not require theocracy, and if you do have a conscience then you should already be in agreement with most Christian fundamentals anyway. Living in a society where Christianity is more widely embraced wouldn’t make any difference for you. It would only be incompatible if a person harbors post-modern delusions that view Christianity as the enemy. If that’s the case, you shouldn’t be living in America anyway. All you have to do is go elsewhere.

I think liberals need to acknowledge that they are a product of a very narrow moment in time and that time is fading. For most of American history Christianity was the preeminent cultural compass. The US was always Christian and nearly all of our leaders were Christian. America has in fact always been a Christian nation and Christian Nationalism was the norm. Christians are still the majority today (62%) despite the endless negative campaign to shut them down.

As recently as the 1990s, over 90% of all Americans identified as Christian. Things have only changed in the past 30 years, and they have done so dramatically to the negative.

In light of the unfettered horrors of wokism I’m increasingly convinced that Christian doctrine is a necessary firewall designed to filter out otherwise malicious ideological malware. If the progressives (and their liberal counterparts) are not kept in check by someone, then the woke march could repeat by the next generation.

So, what is to be done?

The underlying debate is this – Should one group define western culture above all others and defend it against existential threats. Are Christian Nationalists that group? I would say yes to both questions, because of America’s spiritual history and the fact that there’s no other viable alternative. Do we continue to allow liberals to anoint themselves the arbiters of American culture? Or, do we try something different?

Is this hard-right position also “woke right”? The term “woke right” is often linked back to Kevin DeYoung’s 2022 review of Stephen Wolfe’s book The Case for Christian Nationalism. In his article entitled “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism” he argues that:

Besides trafficking in sweeping and unsubstantiated claims about the totalizing control of the Globalist American Empire and the gynocracy, Wolfe’s apocalyptic vision—for all of its vitriol toward the secular elites—borrows liberally from the playbook of the left.

He not only redefines the nature of oppression as psychological oppression (making it easier to justify extreme measures and harder to argue things aren’t as bad as they seem), he also rallies the troops (figuratively, but perhaps also literally?) by reminding them they’re victims. “The world is out to get you, and people out there hate you” is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed…”

…If critical race theory teaches that America has failed, that the existing order is irredeemable, that Western liberalism was a mistake from the beginning, that the current system is rigged against our tribe, and that we ought to make ethnic consciousness more important—it seems to me that Wolfe’s project is the right-wing version of these same impulses.”

While DeYoung’s analysis seems to be coming from a sincere place and he does defend Christian culture as an important part of American life, his analysis requires a certain level of ignorance to stay afloat. Liberals and left leaning Christians refuse to consider one important factor:

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

The entire premise behind the notion of the “woke right” requires that none of the threats above prove to be real. That there is no globalist conspiracy to destroy the west and Christianity. That the subversion of conservative principles is imagined. That there is no white replacement in the US and Europe. That conservatives are not being oppressed and that tribal organization against our attackers is unwarranted or impractical.

DeYoung (and most liberals) prefer passive Christianity. If Christians had thought like DeYoung in the Middle Ages, the entire west would have been wiped off the face of the Earth by Muslim invaders centuries ago. Instead, they took direct action to save themselves. The issue is not even particularly nationalist in origin, it’s only that nations are the easiest barrier to rally and defend. At bottom, Christians must at times act to prevent their own erasure.

Wokeness is largely about false witness – Leftists claim they are being oppressed when they are provably not. The political right cannot be woke because the western world and Christianity are indeed under constant attack. This is not debatable.

In Europe today, the war on Christians and conservatives (or populists) is evident and it is undeniably systemic. Europeans have been under siege by engineered mass immigration from the third-world. Most of the migrants come from places (Islamic) that despise Christianity and view personal liberty as an aberration or heresy. The governments of France, Germany, England and Romania are actively imprisoning right leaning political opponents and silencing them online, all in the name of liberal democracy.

In the US, woke zealots and the global elites have used everything from mass censorship to medical tyranny to mob violence to shut down and terrorize the political right. The Biden Administration made multiple public proclamations declaring conservatives a domestic threat to democracy. We were accused of being insurrectionists. We were painted as terrorists, and all we did was ask questions and demand truthful answers. This isn’t an exaggerated tale of victimhood conjured up for sympathy, it’s just the facts.

The debate over Christians and conservatives taking direct action instead of waiting around for the next crisis reminds me of a fascinating film directed by Bill Paxton called ‘Frailty’. If you haven’t seen it then I recommend doing so before I spoil it for you here.

In the movie, Bill Paxton plays a father with two sons living a relatively normal life as a devout man with a good heart. One day, he approaches his sons with a terrifying tale: He was visited by an angel from heaven that told him he has been chosen for a mission to destroy evil. The evil, he says, is enacted by demons that take the form of human beings. He claims that God has demanded that he and his sons remove these demons before they do anymore harm.

The youngest son believes his father without question and in full faith. The older son does not and asserts that the man might be going dangerously insane.

What follows is an escalating conflict between father and son as Bill Paxton begins to kill the people he believes are demonic. When he touches them, he says he can see the crimes they’ve committed. The older son refuses to participate in the murders and tries to sabotage Paxton’s efforts. Finally, Paxton accuses his oldest of being a demon as well. The boy eventually kills his father in order to stop the murders.

Plot Twist: Bill Paxton really did receive a vision from God. He really was killing demons, and his eldest son was also a demon the whole time.

Liberals who perpetuate the woke right narrative remind me of the oldest son in Frailty. They play at being even handed, fighting to keep the scales of power from tipping in either direction. In truth, they are blinded by their own self righteousness and their belief that there is no such thing as evil. The rest of us see it, but if we try to do something about it these same people obstruct and sabotage and accuse us of “becoming monsters to defeat the monsters”. They allow the sparks of woke chaos to survive.

Should western civilization be allowed to discriminate? Should we be able to refuse to associate? Should we have the right to be tribal (like everyone else) and deny entry to malicious cultures and ideologies? Is our heritage valid and enduring? Is Christian Nationalism the solution to the woke luciferian agenda? It seems to me that the elites want conservatism dead so badly that it must be a threat to them.

We ARE fighting demons, and a culture without a spiritual consensus is a dying culture. Christian Nationalism was the natural default of American society for centuries. Many people who are not Christians are still perfectly capable of living and thriving within such a society as long as they don’t try to tear it down. The Overton Window has merely been rigged so far to the left that any return to the old standard sounds like madness; it is in fact the most sane thing we could possibly do to save our country.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

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Kennedy Faces Insufferable Congressmen

Lew Rockwell Institute - Sab, 17/05/2025 - 05:01

I think the following image from yesterday’s hearing of the House Appropriations Committee—where HHS Secretary Kennedy was questioned about his budget cuts— is worth a thousand words.

It’s long been observed that “clothes make the man” (or woman) in the sense that one’s choices for producing an outward appearance are an expression of one’s judgement about what is fitting and appropriate.

I know that New Haven isn’t exactly a fashionable place, but her outfit and coiffure are suitable for a 13-year-old girl going through a Cyndi Lauper phase, and not an 82-year-old Congresswoman.

The Committee understands the NIH has been running a taxpayer money-sucking racket for disbursing hundreds of billions to all manner of beneficiaries and interest groups that have little to do with promoting public health.

These assorted crooks are upset about Kennedy shutting off the spigot, so they’ve sicced the sartorial horror show, Rep. DeLauro, on the unfortunate Secretary. As I write the above sentence, I think it would work better in verse:

The assorted crooks are super upset,

About Secretary Kennedy shutting off the spigot,

So they’ve sicced the sartorial horror show,

Rep. DeLauro,

On the unfortunate Secretary,

To his sorrow and woe.

After facing the psycho clowns in the House, Kennedy attended an afternoon hearing before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee to face the insufferable chairmen, Bill Cassidy from Louisiana,—i.e., the “Vaccine Cartel’s Man in the Senate.”

Senator Cassidy demonstrated his expert knowledge by proclaiming;

The Secretary said no vaccines, except for COVID, have been evaluated against placebo. For the record, that’s not true. Coronavirus, measles, and HPV vaccines have been, and some vaccines are tested against previous versions, just for the record.

What the Senator didn’t mention—and what very few people understand—is that vaccine trials do NOT include experiments in which those who receive the vaccine and those who receive the placebo are challenged with the pathogen to see if the vaccine actually works.

Efficacy of the vaccine is estimated by whether or not the trial participant contracts the illness while going about his business in the world in which the pathogen is thought to be prevalent.

As the reader may sense, this leaves enormous room for manipulation and chicanery, especially if the disease in question—such as COVID-19—is frequently mild and even sub-clinical among vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.

The last challenge experiments were conducted by Drs. Thomas Francis and Jonas Salk while testing the first influenza vaccine on residents of the Eloise Mental Hospital and Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan in the winter of 1942-43.

Democratic Senator Christopher Murphy of Connecticut proclaimed that Kennedy had not lived up to his commitment to Cassidy and the committee during his confirmation hearing.

As soon as you were sworn in, you announced new standards for vaccine approvals that you proudly referred to in your own press release as a radical departure from current practice, and experts say that departure will delay approvals. You also said, specific to the measles vaccine, that you support the measles vaccine, but you have consistently been undermining the measles vaccine. You told the public that the vaccine wanes very quickly… and said that the measles vaccine was never properly tested for safety. You said there’s fetal debris in the measles vaccine.

All true,” Kennedy shouted back. “I’m not going to just tell people everything is safe and effective if I know that there’s issues.”

Many in the medical freedom movement have expressed impatience with Secretary Kennedy and suggested that he isn’t moving fast enough to counter the Vaccine Cartel. They should always bear in mind that the Cartel is the most powerful mafia organization in history.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

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The Great Simmering in the West

Lew Rockwell Institute - Sab, 17/05/2025 - 05:01

People all over the world are worried about the future.  While regional wars continue to fester, the prospect of global war weighs heavily on many.  However, likely belligerents are not all foreign aggressors.  Nearly a century of globalization has erected a web of clunky international institutions that wield tremendous power while disregarding sovereign borders.  Concomitantly, mass immigration has transformed once-homogenous national populations into stews of many competing cultures and religions.  Battle lines forming inside nations are more serious than those forming among them.

Self-described “futurists” such as Bill Gates and Yuval Harari believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace most humans in the workforce and that a small cadre of global “elites” must centrally manage humanity’s transition to general “uselessness.”  With A.I. entities independently running machines and becoming exponentially smarter and more competent in their tasks, entire industries will transition from human to synthetic labor until all industry surrenders to A.I.

As emerging robotics programs have demonstrated, no profession will be immune to the next generations of A.I.-equipped machines.  Robots will pick the fields, police the streets, and perform complex medical surgeries.  A.I. can already write legal briefs that pass muster and screenplays that are at least as interesting as anything Hollywood produces these days.  Engineers, architects, and chemists are competing against machines that can process a thousand lifetimes of computations before their human counterparts finish morning coffee.

Men such as Gates and Harari see this future galloping toward us and view its implications as self-evident.  As human producers are replaced, human “value” will dwindle.  No longer sustaining even a fraction of their cost through their own labor, human beings will become extraneous to the creation of wealth and permanent drains on the global State.

The task of the global State, in turn, will be to construct a system capable of selecting a small number of “elites” to oversee the system from one generation to the next, while maintaining control over a rump of “useless eaters” permitted to live in State-designed shelters and survive on State-allocated rations.  For those parts of the population not chosen to live as wards of the State, life will be hard.  War, famine, and disease will make survival difficult.  Those struggles, combined with global programs discouraging childbirth and exacerbating infertility, will induce a Malthusian “solution,” in which much of the world simply dies off.

This is a dark vision.  No matter how much globalist “elites” paint this future as “progress,” it is nothing less than a carefully planned planetary genocide.  As with all terrible genocides, it targets not just the human body, but also the human mind and soul.  It means to wear down the “useless eaters” until they hate themselves and pity their tormentors for having to put up with them.

Have you read about any of the heartbreaking stories involving vulnerable individuals who have been encouraged to commit suicide by taking advantage of Canada’s legalized “Medical Assistance in Dying”?  Often patients’ only ailments are loneliness and depression.  Before they die, many apologize for being burdens on society.  The Canadian government has the gall to applaud victims for their selflessness!  Eighty years after the Nazis summarily executed the physically and mentally disabled for being “drains” on the State, the Canadian government lacks the requisite historical literacy to feel shame!

Yet the Canadian government is hardly alone in embracing policies that deny the innate value of human life.  All Western nations have been busy cultivating a culture of death.  Abortion, once considered the unlawful taking of a life and morally condemnable, is celebrated as some kind of twisted civil right that empowers the strong to kill the weak.  Transgenderism, a mental illness that indulges self-hatred, has mutated from a rare psychological condition into a euphoric movement with fashionable promoters intent on silencing worried parents, hypnotizing medical professionals, and grooming children toward a depressing future involving castration and bodily mutilation.  Young people — particularly women — are encouraged to forgo families and concentrate on professional careers.

Marriage is demeaned as a “patriarchal” and “homophobic” institution of the past.  Monogamy is ridiculed as unnatural, while promiscuity is encouraged.  Having children is criticized as a “selfish” act that will only exacerbate man-made (i.e., fake) “climate change.”  Central bank–engineered inflation has made the cost of rearing a child so exorbitant that even healthy married couples often put off parenthood until it’s too late.

Under the mutually reinforcing guises of protecting civil rights, advancing feminism, protecting the environment, and dismantling forms of oppression, the West has ushered in a disorienting era in which biological reality, marriage, motherhood, parenthood, and the family unit are under sustained attack.

The devastating results of such policies were entirely predictable.  Birth rates have plummeted.  The Sexual Revolution fundamentally reoriented Western culture away from values that promote and cherish life.  Government welfare programs are now insolvent and headed toward total financial ruin because the youngest generations are too small to support the oldest.  If planetary depopulation was the goal, post-WWII Western globalists mostly succeeded in crippling their own nations.

Read the Whole Article

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While Trump Speaks of Ukraine Peace, Washington Opens a Second Front Against Putin

Lew Rockwell Institute - Sab, 17/05/2025 - 05:01

The US House of Representatives Has Passed the MEGOBARI Act (HR 36) that places Georgia, now an independent country and once a province of the Soviet Union, under American protection.  Washington has to protect free and fair elections in Georgia from Russia and protect Georgia’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity from further Russian aggression.”

There has been NO Russian aggression against Georgia.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union caused by the Politburo’s house arrest of Russian President Gorbachev, Russia under Yeltsin accepted Washington’s dismemberment of the Soviet Empire.  Soviet republics, some of which had not ever been independent states, such as Ukraine, were turned by Washington into New Countries.  

In 2008 a Georgian Army trained and equipped by Washington invaded South Ossetia, a Russian protectorate and a part of Georgia that did not want to exit Russia.  Russian peacekeepers were killed, and this brought Putin, inattentive as always, back from the Chinese Olympics to send in the Russian Army. The American equipped and trained Georgian Army was totally defeated within a few hours, and Georgia was in Putin’s hands.  What did he do?  He released Georgia to themselves and took his army home.

How is this Russian aggression?

As is obvious the members of the US House of Representatives are completely ignorant and uninformed morons.  America, as Mark Twain said, elects morons to represent them. And that is what Americans have. We are governed by morons.

Protecting Georgia from Russia is the excuse for Washington to take over Georgia, and, of course, bags full of money will facilitate the process by being handed over to key members of the Georgian government.

So what we have here is Washington’s effort to open a second war front against Russia.  Adam Dick with the Ron Paul Institute gives us a reliable indiction of what is happening.  See this.

So, what do we make of this?  On the one hand Trump is pursuing peace negotiations in Ukraine with Russia.  On the other hand, Washington is preparing another Maidan, this time in Georgia.

How stupid are the Russians?  Did they learn nothing from the Minsk Agreement?  Is the Kremlin blind to the obvious fact that Washington is sequencing its wars with Russia and China by pulling out of Ukraine, turning it over to Europe, so that Washington can focus oChinaThis is the policy described  by West Mitchell in Foreign Affairs.  Why has no one but myself and John Helmer commented on this revealing article?

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How To Make Your Mind Harder for the Propagandists To Manipulate

Lew Rockwell Institute - Sab, 17/05/2025 - 05:01

The worst mistake you can make when reading the news is to assume there’s a good reason why the mass media report on something in the way that they do. That there’s a good reason why Israel-Palestine gets framed as a complex and morally ambiguous issue with no clear path forward, even though it all looks pretty self-evident to you. That there must be a valid and legitimate reason why one story gets more coverage than a seemingly far more important story, like how the release of one Israeli-American hostage is currently getting far more news media coverage than the deliberate starvation of an entire enclave full of civilians.

In reality there is no valid and legitimate reason why such things are covered the way they are. The coverage happens in the way that it happens because it serves the information interests of Israel and the western empire, and for no other reason.

So much western ignorance is facilitated by the manipulative way the imperial media report on what’s going on in the world. People assume that because they’re not hearing about a given issue all the time or in a particularly urgent tone of reporting, it must not be an especially important matter that needs their attention. They assume that if one side of a conflict isn’t framed as being clearly in the wrong, then it must not be.

Westerners assume that if the world were experiencing another Holocaust, another Transatlantic Slave Trade, another Cuban Missile Crisis, they would hear about it in the news at an appropriate level of urgency. But that simply isn’t how it works. The only reason the western public is ever told about anything bad that happens at a high level of frequency and urgency is when it is convenient for the western empire, like when Russia invaded Ukraine. When that happened it was the main story in every western outlet for ages, and Russia was clearly framed as the evil aggressor, with all the NATO aggressions which provoked the invasion going completely unmentioned.

When people hear the word “propaganda” they tend to think it means the same thing as “lies”, but that’s not accurate. The domestic propaganda that westerners are fed by the powerful does not typically consist of whole-cloth fabrications, but rather of distortions, half-truths, manipulated emphasis, and lies by omission.

Most of the worst things the US and its allies are doing in the world are reported accurately by the western press at certain times and in certain publications, but they simply are not given any emphasis and amplification after those brief mentions. If you look at the hyperlinks I cite in my articles to describe the criminality of the empire it’s usually either straight out of the mainstream press or some other independent author who’s citing mainstream news reporting. The difference is that I regularly spotlight those admissions, while the imperial media will mention them once halfway down an article somewhere and then let the daily news churn carry it away down the memory hole.

Western propaganda doesn’t consist so much of manipulating what gets reported but how it gets reported. How often something gets mentioned. How often the perpetrator of an abuse is explicitly named. The type of language used to describe a given offense. These adjustments might sound insignificant when they are described, but when put into practice across the board they are extremely effective at shaping public perception of world affairs.

The only way to get around this is to maintain an acute awareness of what’s being reported while ignoring distorting factors like frequency, emphasis and tone. You have to just focus on the raw data of what’s being reported about what the empire is up to from day to day without allowing your perception to be colored by the way in which that data is reported. If you come across a key piece of information about the empire’s criminality you’ve got to hold onto it and remember its significance for yourself, because the imperial press sure aren’t going to remind you. They’re going to be acting like it never happened by next week.

It’s bizarre once you start noticing how much of a disconnect there is between reality and the mass media’s reporting on world events. They’ll occasionally mention actual important things, but there’s no accurate sense of proportionality to any of it. It’s like if you were at a restaurant with a friend and a waiter’s uniform caught fire, and your friend just casually mentioned “Oh that guy’s on fire” before going back to talking about the meal for the rest of the conversation while the guy burned to death at the other end of the room. It is utterly surreal.

So one of the most important things you need to do to maintain a truth-based worldview is to take complete control over your own understanding of the importance of the pieces of information which come across your field of vision. You can’t rely on others to tell you how important they are, because all the most amplified and influential voices in our society are working to manipulate your understanding of their importance, and most ordinary people you’ll interact with are being manipulated by those voices to some extent. Public political discourse is overwhelmingly dominated by these distortions.

You’ve got to interpret the urgency and importance of information for yourself. By standing on your own two feet and looking at the raw data with fresh eyes before it gets jumbled around by the imperial spin machine, you make your mind much harder to bend to the will of the empire.

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Trump Skewers Neoconservative Interventionist Foreign Policy

Lew Rockwell Institute - Sab, 17/05/2025 - 05:01

The leader of the free world just announced that America’s long-standing interventionist foreign policy hasn’t done the world any favors.

President Donald Trump’s Middle Eastern tour through Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates has generated a lot of headlines, mainly for the hundreds of billions of dollars in business it’s generating. But something else significant happened this week. Tuesday, during his address in in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the president lambasted the neoconservative-prescribed foreign policy that has put American taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars and destabilized entire regions of the world.

Wrecking Rather Than Building

Trump said on Tuesday:

The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions … failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad. … In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.

Trump also suggested it’s been bad policy to try to take out every tin-pot despot and tyrant who poses no threat to the U.S., saying:

In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins. … I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment. My job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.

Moreover, the American president suggested it is time to end America’s long-standing obsession with turning Middle Eastern countries into Western-style “democracies” and let them flourish as they are — whether they be theocracies, monarchies, or dictatorships disguised as monarchies.

A Vibrant Middle East

Trump views an economically vibrant Middle East as one the U.S. can do business with, instead of one in which America’s military ends up mired in unwinnable conflicts. He told the audience:

A generation of new leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together — not bombing each other out of existence.

In addition to securing hundreds of billions of dollars in business deals with the three nations he visited, the president backed up his sentiment with the announcement that he planned to lift the sanctions on Syria. He admitted that his decision was influenced by his “good friend,” the prince of Saudi Arabia. The news was met with a standing ovation.

This is not the first time Trump has indicated a desire to dial back America’s presence around the world. At the very beginning of his presidency, only a few months ago, he sent shock waves through the international world when he announced that America would no longer serve as Europe’s bodyguard. He and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said it was time for Europe’s rich nations to learn once again how to protect themselves. Since then, major European nations — including Germany and a coalition of Nordic nations — have begun making moves to boost their defense systems.

The Founders’ Noninterventionism

What Trump is describing, and hopefully follows through with, sounds more like the foreign policy America’s founding generation prescribed than the one practiced over the last century. The first U.S. president dedicated the final portion of his farewell address to warning the American people about foreign intervention. In his September 19, 1796, address, George Washington highlighted Europe’s propensity for conflict and cautioned against getting involved in it. He said America should avoid permanent, entangling alliances, and should strive to always remain neutral. Prescribing a foreign policy in which the U.S. lives in peace with all nations, a policy in which America conducts business with any country that’s willing without regard for its politics, he said:

Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and Morality enjoin this conduct. … It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a People always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. … The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little Political connection as possible.

Nearly 25 years later, on July 4, 1821, John Quincy Adams, the son of the second president and who would become president himself four years later, reiterated the importance of a noninterventionist foreign policy. He said:

[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. … She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own … she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. … She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

What Washington and Adams advocated is obviously not what the U.S. has practiced, at least not since the 19th century. After World War II, the United States emerged as the undisputed most-powerful nation in the world. Unlike Europe, its landscape and economy were unscathed by the ravages of war. In fact, the war so greatly disturbed the industrial capabilities of Europe’s most advanced nations that it opened up massive opportunities for America to fill the gap.

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