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David Martin wrote:

Call me “far right.”  Tucker Carlson insults New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern as the lady with the big teeth while gleefully reporting her resignation

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I note that House Republicans have approved a $4.5 trillion tax cut plan, offset by $2 trillion in spending cuts. They are also seeking to raise the debt ceiling.

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Question 1: Did Israel Kill JFK?

Was Israel involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? (Is there any hard evidence or is it mostly conjecture?). And if Israel was involved, then what was the alleged motive?

Ron Unz—Although there exists no smoking gun proof implicating Israel and its Mossad in the JFK Assassination, there is an enormous mass of circumstantial evidence that they played a central role in the conspiracy, and they certainly stood very high with regard to means, motive, and opportunity.

Moreover, no other organization has such a remarkably long and bold record of very high-profile political assassinations, with many of the targets having been important Western leaders, even including American presidents.

Yet as I emphasized in one of my earliest 2018 articles on the subject, for more than thirty years after JFK’s death almost no one had ever suggested any possible Israeli involvement.

For decades following the 1963 assassination, virtually no suspicions had ever been directed towards Israel, and as a consequence none of the hundreds or thousands of assassination conspiracy books that appeared during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had hinted at any role for the Mossad, though nearly every other possible culprit, ranging from the Vatican to the Illuminati, came under scrutiny. Kennedy had received over 80% of the Jewish vote in his 1960 election, American Jews featured very prominently in his White House, and he was greatly lionized by Jewish media figures, celebrities, and intellectuals ranging from New York City to Hollywood to the Ivy League. Moreover, individuals with a Jewish background such as Mark Lane and Edward Epstein had been among the leading early proponents of an assassination conspiracy, with their controversial theories championed by influential Jewish cultural celebrities such as Mort Sahl and Norman Mailer. Given that the Kennedy Administration was widely perceived as pro-Israel, there seemed no possible motive for any Mossad involvement, and bizarre, totally unsubstantiated accusations of such a monumental nature directed against the Jewish state were hardly likely to gain much traction in an overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry.

However, in the early 1990s highly-regarded journalists and researchers began exposing the circumstances surrounding the development of Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Seymour Hersh’s 1991 book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy described the extreme efforts of the Kennedy Administration to force Israel to allow international inspections of its allegedly non-military nuclear reactor at Dimona, and thereby prevent its use in producing nuclear weapons. Dangerous Liaisons: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn appeared in the same year, and covered similar ground.

Although entirely hidden from public awareness at the time, the early 1960s political conflict between the American and Israeli governments over nuclear weapons development had represented a top foreign policy priority of the Kennedy Administration, which had made nuclear non-proliferation one of its central international initiatives. It is notable that John McCone, Kennedy’s choice as CIA Director, had previously served on the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower, being the individual who leaked the fact that Israel was building a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium.

The pressure and financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel by the Kennedy Administration eventually became so severe that they led to the resignation of Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in June 1963. But all these efforts were almost entirely halted or reversed once Kennedy was replaced by Johnson in November of that same year. Piper notes that Stephen Green’s 1984 book Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel had previously documented that U.S. Middle East Policy completely reversed itself following Kennedy’s assassination, but this important finding had attracted little attention at the time.

Skeptics of a plausible institutional basis for a JFK assassination conspiracy have often noted the extreme continuity in both foreign and domestic policies between the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, arguing that this casts severe doubt on any such possible motive. Although this analysis seems largely correct, America’s behavior towards Israel and its nuclear weapons program stands as a very notable exception to this pattern.

An additional major area of concern for Israeli officials may have involved the efforts of the Kennedy Administration to sharply restrict the activities of pro-Israel political lobbies. During his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had met in New York City with a group of wealthy Israel advocates, led by financier Abraham Feinberg, and they had offered enormous financial support in exchange for a controlling influence in Middle Eastern policy. Kennedy managed to fob them off with vague assurances, but he considered the incident so troubling that the next morning he sought out journalist Charles Bartlett, one of his closest friends, and expressed his outrage that American foreign policy might fall under the control of partisans of a foreign power, promising that if he became president, he would rectify that situation. And indeed, once he had installed his brother Robert as Attorney General, the latter initiated a major legal effort to force pro-Israel groups to register themselves as foreign agents, which would have drastically reduced their power and influence. But after JFK’s death, this project was quickly abandoned, and as part of the settlement, the leading pro-Israel lobby merely agreed to reconstitute itself as AIPAC.

These new disclosures about the bitter, hidden political struggle between the Kennedy Administration and the Israeli government over the latter’s secret nuclear weapons development program caught the attention of Michael Collins Piper, a longtime journalist at The Spotlight, and he soon began exploring the possible connection to the Kennedy’s subsequent assassination.

Pursuing that lead, Piper quickly amassed a great deal of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Israeli Mossad together with its American collaborators had probably played a central role in the 1963 killing in Dallas, evidence that previous assassination researchers had missed or perhaps deliberately ignored. For example, Green’s very mainstream 1984 book had noted:

Perhaps the most significant development of 1963 for the Israeli nuclear weapons program, however, occurred on November 22 on a plane flying from Dallas to Washington, D.C., as Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Within a few months Piper had produced the manuscript for the first edition of Final Judgment, his seminal work presenting and documenting the Piper Hypothesis, by far the most controversial and explosive analysis of one of the most infamous world events of the twentieth century.

As I began reading some of the most popular and important books in the Kennedy assassination genre by leading researchers such as David Talbot, James W. Douglass, and Roger Stone, I noticed that they carefully excluded any mention of Piper’s work, apparently regarding it as just too radioactive to even acknowledge. Similarly, Piper’s close friendship with attorney Mark Lane, the founding father of JFK assassination conspiracy studies, may have severely clouded the latter’s treatment in the movement that he himself had done so much to create.

Final Judgment went through a number of a reprintings following its original 1994 appearance, and by the sixth edition released in 2004, had grown to over 650 pages, including numerous long appendices and over 1100 footnotes, the overwhelming majority of these referencing fully mainstream sources. The body of the text was merely serviceable in organization and polish, reflecting the total boycott by all publishers, mainstream or alternative, but I found the contents themselves remarkable and generally quite compelling. Despite the most extreme blackout by all media outlets, the book sold more than 40,000 copies over the years, making it something of an underground bestseller, and surely bringing it to the attention of everyone in the JFK assassination research community, though apparently almost none of them were willing to mention its existence. I suspect these other writers realized that even any mere acknowledgement of the existence of the book, if only to ridicule or dismiss it, might prove fatal to their media and publishing career. Piper himself died in 2015, aged 54, suffering from the health problems and heavy-drinking often associated with grim poverty, and other journalists may have been reluctant to risk that same dismal fate.

As an example of this strange situation, the bibliography of Talbot’s 2007 book contains almost 140 entries, some rather obscure, but has no space for Final Judgment, nor does his very comprehensive index include any entry for “Jews” or “Israel.” Indeed, at one point he very delicately characterizes Sen. Robert Kennedy’s entirely Jewish senior staff by stating “There was not a Catholic among them.” His 2015 sequel is equally circumspect, and although the index does contain numerous entries pertaining to Jews, all these references are in regards to World War II and the Nazis, including his discussion of the alleged Nazi ties of Allen Dulles, his principal bête noire. Stone’s book, while fearlessly convicting President Lyndon Johnson of the JFK assassination, also strangely excludes “Jews” and “Israel” from the long index and Final Judgment from the bibliography, and Douglass’s book follows this same pattern.

Furthermore, the extreme concerns that the Piper Hypothesis seems to have provoked among JFK assassination researchers may explain a strange anomaly. Although Mark Lane was himself of Jewish origins and left-wing roots, after his victory for Liberty Lobby in the Hunt libel trial, he spent many years associated with that organization in a legal capacity, and apparently became quite friendly with Piper, one of its leading writers. According to Piper, Lane told him that Final Judgment made “a solid case” for a major Mossad role in the assassination, and he viewed the theory as fully complementary to his own focus on CIA involvement. I suspect that concerns about these associations may explain why Lane was almost completely airbrushed out of the Douglass and 2007 Talbot books, and discussed in the second Talbot book only when his work was absolutely essential to Talbot’s own analysis. By contrast, New York Times staff writers are hardly likely to be as well versed in the lesser-known aspects of the JFK assassination research community, and being ignorant of this hidden controversy, they gave Lane the long and glowing obituary that his career fully warranted.

When weighing the possible suspects for a given crime, carefully considering their past patterns of behavior is often a helpful approach. As discussed above, I can think of no historical example in which organized crime initiated a serious assassination attempt against any American political figure even moderately prominent on the national stage. And despite a few suspicions here and there, the same applies to the CIA.

By contrast, the Israeli Mossad and the Zionist groups that preceded the establishment of the Jewish state seem to have had a very long track record of assassinations, including those of high-ranking political figures who might normally be regarded as inviolate. Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State for the Middle East, was assassinated in 1944 and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator sent to help resolve the first Arab-Israel war, suffered the same fate in September 1948. Not even an American president was entirely free of such risks, and Piper notes that the memoirs of Harry Truman’s daughter Margaret reveal that Zionist militants had tried to assassinate her father using a letter laced with toxic chemicals in 1947 when they believed he was dragging his heels in supporting Israel, although that failed attempt was never made public. The Zionist faction responsible for all of these incidents was led by Yitzhak Shamir, who later became a leader of Mossad and director of its assassination program during the 1960s, before eventually becoming Prime Minister of Israel in 1986.

If the claims in the 1990s tell-all bestsellers of Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky can be credited, Israel even considered the assassination of President George H.W. Bush in 1992 for his threats to cut off financial aid to Israel during a conflict over West Bank settlement policies, and I have been informed that the Bush Administration took those reports quite seriously at the time. And although I have not yet read it, the recent, widely-praised book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by journalist Ronen Bergman suggests that no other country in the world may have so regularly employed assassination as a standard tool of official state policy.

There are other notable elements that tend to support the Piper Hypothesis. Once we accept the existence of a JFK assassination conspiracy, the one individual who is virtually certain to have been a participant was Jack Ruby, and his organized crime ties were almost entirely to the huge but rarely-mentioned Jewish wing of that enterprise, presided over by Meyer Lansky, an extremely fervent supporter of Israel. Ruby himself had particularly strong connections with Lansky lieutenant Mickey Cohen, who dominated the Los Angeles underworld and had been personally involved in gun-running to Israel prior to the 1948 war. Indeed, according to Dallas rabbi Hillel Silverman, Ruby had privately explained his killing of Oswald by saying “I did it for the Jewish people.”

An intriguing aspect to Oliver Stone’s landmark JFK film should also be mentioned. Arnon Milchan, the wealthy Hollywood producer who backed the project, was not only an Israeli citizen, but had also reportedly played a central role in the enormous espionage ring to divert American technology and materials to Israel’s nuclear weapons program, the exact undertaking that the Kennedy Administration had made such efforts to block. Milchan has even sometimes been described as “the Israeli James Bond.” And although the film ran a full three hours in length, JFK scrupulously avoided presenting any of the details that Piper later regarded as initial clues to an Israeli dimension, instead seeming to finger America’s fanatic home-grown anti-Communist movement and the Cold War leadership of the military-industrial complex as the guilty parties.

• American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words

For those interested in reading Piper’s very lengthy analysis, the 2005 edition of his seminal work is available on this website in convenient HTML format.

• Final Judgment
  The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy
  Michael Collins Piper • 2005 • 310,000 Words

This edition actually incorporates several much shorter works, originally published separately. One of these, consisting of an extended Q&A, describes the genesis of the idea and answers numerous questions surrounding it, and for some readers might represent a better starting point.

• Default Judgment
  Questions, Answers & Reflections About the Crime of the Century
  Michael Collins Piper • 2005 • 48,000 Words

One of the tiny handful of later writers willing to embrace and promote the Piper Hypothesis has been Laurent Guyénot, a leading French conspiracy-researcher. Although I might not necessarily endorse every particular element, I would strongly recommend his 2019 book The Unspoken Kennedy Truth as the best single exposition of the Israel/Mossad case for the JFK Assassination. This paperback summarizes all the important information and is short enough that it can easily be read in just a day or two. His 2018 article on the same subject covers the same information in much more abbreviated form:

• Did Israel Kill the Kennedys?
  Laurent Guyénot • The Unz Review • June 3, 2018 • 9,900 Words

Guyénot also presented this same controversial material in the form of a 2022 documentary available on YouTube. Although perhaps too hagiographic, “Israel and the Assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers” likewise constitutes the best video introduction to that subject.

Candace Owens wraps up the entire story in 3 minutes:

At this stage, if you don’t fully agree that Israel Mossad was the main culprit behind JFK assassination, then you’re either blackmailed, reetarded, bribed, and/or jewish. pic.twitter.com/ZNwXepIdd6

— Machiavelli (@TheRISEofROD) March 21, 2025

Read the Whole Article

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Here is a typical example, from the largely U.S.-Government-controlled AP:

“Trump intel officials testify on threat from drug cartels as Dems press them on leak of attack plans”

AP, 25 March 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration’s top intelligence officials stressed to Congress the threat they said was posed by international criminal gangs, drug cartels and human smuggling, testifying in a hearing Tuesday that unfolded against the backdrop of a security breach involving the mistaken leak of attack plans to a journalist.

The annual hearing on worldwide threats before the Senate Intelligence Committee offered a glimpse of the new administration’s reorienting of priorities. It comes when President Donald Trump has opened a new line of communication with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and has focused national security attention closer to home to counter violent crime that officials link to cross-border drug trafficking.

“Criminal groups drive much of the unrest and lawlessness in the Western Hemisphere,” said Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. Atop a long list of national security challenges, she cited the need to combat cartels that she said were “engaging in a wide array of illicit activity, from narcotics trafficking to money laundering to smuggling of illegal immigrants and human trafficking.”

Different parties prioritized different issues

The hearing occurred as officials across multiple presidential administrations describe an increasingly complicated blizzard of threats.

In the committee room, it unfolded in split-screen fashion: Republican senators hewed to the pre-scheduled topic by drilling down on China and the fentanyl scourge, while Democrat after Democrat offered sharp criticism over a security breach they called reckless and dangerous. …

The AP there is insinuating that the “fentanyl scourge” is a plot by China’s Government (which America’s Government actually wants to overthrow or at least weaken), but it is nothing of the sort.

The January 2020 U.S. DEA report “Fentanyl Flow to the United States” said

As Beijing and the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region (SAR) place restrictions on more precursor chemicals, Mexican transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) are diversifying their sources of supply. This is evidenced by fentanyl shipments from India allegedly destined for Mexico. On May 4, 2018, the Hong Kong SAR updated their drug law to control the fentanyl precursors 4-anilino-N-phenethyl-4- piperidine (ANPP) and N-phenethyl-4-piperidone (NPP) as well as the synthetic opioid U-47700. This matches China’s scheduling of ANPP and NPP on July 1, 2017. The move by the Hong Kong SAR is considerable, since synthetic opioids produced and shipped from China may transit the Hong Kong SAR en route to the United States. Effective May 1, 2019, China officially controlled all forms of fentanyl as a class of drugs. This fulfilled the commitment that President Xi made during the G-20 Summit. The implementation of the new measure includes investigations of known fentanyl manufacturing areas, stricter control of internet sites advertising fentanyl, stricter enforcement of shipping regulations, and the creation of special teams to investigate leads on fentanyl trafficking. These new restrictions have the potential to severely limit fentanyl production and trafficking from China. This could alter China’s position as a supplier to both the United States and Mexico.

The Brookings Institution’s expert Anda Felbab-Brown’s lengthy testimony to America’s almost solidly neoconservative Congress on 23 March 2023, “China’s role in the fentanyl crisis” was (consistent with Brookings’s being among the leading neoconservative think tanks) hostile toward China, but nonetheless admitted that:

In the case of fentanyl and its precursor chemicals, small and middle-level actors in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries also appear to be the key perpetrators of regulatory violations and source for Mexican criminal groups. In the case of fentanyl and its precursors, Chinese triads – mafia-like organized crime groups — do not dominate drug production and trafficking. …

Inducing Cooperation from China

With the Chinese government, Washington can continue to emphasize Beijing’s interests in China’s reputation as a global counternarcotics policy leader and leverage multilateral fora such the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the International Narcotics Control Board. The United States should also continue to emphasize China’s self-interest in preventing the emergence of a devasting synthetic opioid epidemic in the country as the prescription of opioids in China grows, even though Beijing has thus far been dismissive of these concerns. And Washington should continue requesting that China take down websites that sell synthetic opioids illegally to Americans or to Mexican criminal groups.

So: the AP’s insinuation that China’s Government is hostile to the United States is a lie. China is (like every nation except America’s own) in economic competition with the U.S., but it is not a hostile power as the U.S. Government and its propaganda-media deceive their public to believe, unless — and except to the extent that — the U.S. Government’s hostility toward China will necessitate its becoming so (in which case the aggressor would be the U.S. regime, and not the Chinese Government).

There have been three major credible and well-researched articles published online about the notorious CIA Operation Mockingbird, which the CIA started by its Frank Wisner under President Truman in 1948 as part of Truman’s plan for the U.S. Government to ultimately take control over the entire world — Truman was the very first neoconservative.

Carl Bernstein, who led at the Washington Post in exposing President Nixon’s Watergate scandal, managed to get his “The CIA and the Media” published on 20 October 1977 by Rolling Stone (before that too became neocon), wrote:

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc. …

Other major news organizations. According to Agency officials, CIA files document additional cover arrangements with the following news‑gathering organizations, among others: the New York Herald‑Tribune, the Saturday‑Evening Post, Scripps‑Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers Seymour K. Freidin, Hearst’s current London bureau chief and a former Herald‑Tribune editor and correspondent, has been identified as a CIA operative by Agency sources), Associated Press,9 United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald. Cover arrangements with the Herald, according to CIA officials, were unusual in that they were made “on the ground by the CIA station in Miami, not from CIA headquarters.

“And that’s just a small part of the list,” in the words of one official who served in the CIA hierarchy. …

THE CIA’S USE OF JOURNALISTS CONTINUED VIRTUALLY unabated until 1973 when, in response to public disclosure that the Agency had secretly employed American reporters, William Colby began scaling down the program. In his public statements, Colby conveyed the impression that the use of journalists had been minimal and of limited importance to the Agency.

He then initiated a series of moves intended to convince the press, Congress and the public that the CIA had gotten out of the news business. But according to Agency officials, Colby had in fact thrown a protective net around his valuable intelligence in the journalistic community. He ordered his deputies to maintain Agency ties with its best journalist contacts while severing formal relationships with many regarded as inactive, relatively unproductive or only marginally important. In reviewing Agency files to comply with Colby’s directive, officials found that many journalists had not performed useful functions for the CIA in years. Such relationships, perhaps as many as a hundred, were terminated between 1973 and 1976.

Meanwhile, important CIA operatives who had been placed on the staffs of some major newspaper and broadcast outlets were told to resign and become stringers or freelancers, thus enabling Colby to assure concerned editors that members of their staffs were not CIA employees. Colby also feared that some valuable stringer‑operatives might find their covers blown if scrutiny of the Agency’s ties with journalists continued. Some of these individuals were reassigned to jobs on so‑called proprietary publications — foreign periodicals and broadcast outlets secretly funded and staffed by the CIA. Other journalists who had signed formal contracts with the CIA — making them employees of the Agency — were released from their contracts, and asked to continue working under less formal arrangements. …

Another of these reports was by the UK’s Spartacus Educational, which said:

Media assets will eventually include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc. and 400 journalists, who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens. The CIA had infiltrated the nation’s businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950’s. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale with figures like George Herbert Walker Bush from the “Skull and Crossbones” Society.

Many Americans still insist or persist in believing that we have a free press, while getting most of their news from state-controlled television, under the misconception that reporters are meant to serve the public. Reporters are paid employees and serve the media owners, who usually cower when challenged by advertisers or major government figures. Robert Parry reported the first breaking stories about Iran-Contra for Associated Press that were largely ignored by the press and congress. …

The third such report to be mentioned here was the tepid one from the New York Times on 26 December 1977, headlining “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.”, which simply noted that among “The C.I.A.’s Network of Correspondents” was “Associated Press.”

Although very few AP reporters, such as Robert Parry and Matt Lee, did occasionally violate the censorious norms of U.S. mainstream ‘journalism’, the rest have been — and almost 100% of the time on news regarding international relations have been — basically mere spokespersons for the U.S. Government against Governments that it wants to overthrow and replace. This is how such news-topics as China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela (and, in former years, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and dozens of other countries that the U.S. succeeded at destroying) have been so deceitful for so long in the U.S.-and-allied press as to convey to the domestic population deeply false impressions about those foreign Governments — Governments that are the targets of U.S. imperialism. And this is a major reason why the American people do not overthrow and replace the American Government: Americans have false views resulting from our lying ‘news’-media and academic ‘experts’ they hire to give credibility to their constant lies.

Journalists who won’t take it any more get pushed out. Almost all of the best ones have been.

For a successful career in mainstream journalism throughout the U.S. empire today concerning international relations, a prerequisite is to pump the neoconservative (i.e., pro-U.S.-empire) line. Typical again of this is the AP ‘news’-report that was cited and linked-to at the opening of the present article, which noted also

the U.S. government’s longstanding national security concerns, including international terrorism and the threat she said was posed by countries including Russia, China, Iran, China and North Korea. China, for one, has heavily invested in stealth aircraft, hypersonic weapons and nuclear arms and is looking to outcompete the U.S. when it comes to artificial intelligence, while Russia remains a “formidable competitor” and still maintains a large nuclear arsenal.

The false insinuation there is that economic competition between nations is PURELY a zero-sum or “win-lose” game — can’t be a positive-sum game (one that improves both sides: win-win). It is, in other words, viewing all of international economics as being basically military: conquest of, and theft from, the weaker nation — exploitation and never cooperation (except in an essentially military sense, such as in NATO). That is the neoconservative viewpoint, and it is routinely insinuated throughout the U.S. empire.

Furthermore: that excerpt pretended that China isn’t being virtually forced by the American regime to “heavily invest in stealth aircraft, hypersonic weapons,” etc. — that China has NO RIGHT to protect itself from U.S. aggression.

The fundamental assumption of propaganda is that one’s public are stupid. In order for that to work, the media and the educational system must keep them that way.

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

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It should be obvious by now that the Donald’s north star is “winning” and nothing else, and that he keeps score by whatever metric is handy. On trade, the scorecard is simply the bilateral merchandise trade balance of whichever country comes to mind at any given moment, and, crucially, whether the balance figure has a plus or minus sign in front of it.

That’s been the sum and substance of Trump’s trade philosophy ever since he started opionating about the issue in the national media in the 1980s. Yet even though “winning” has its virtues in sports, tiddlywinks and many other aspects of life, the bilateral trade balance with each of the 193 countries which buy or sell goods of some type or another in the USA is about the closest thing to meaningless statistical noise as you can find.

For instance, by the Donald’s standard the US appears to be beating the shit out of the 20 small countries listed below. In 2023 US exports to this group were 10X larger than imports from them, meaning that America was “winning” big time: The combined trade surplus of +$4.1 billion represented fully 83% of the two-way turnover with these countries.

As is evident in the chart below, however, these “losers” on the Trumpian game board had almost no exports to the US. That’s because apparently the American markets for seashells (Micronesia), molasses (Belize), coconuts (Samoa), root crops (Tonga), rum (Barbados) etc. are just not that large.

At the same time, there is also a bit of hidden cheating in the bulging US export stats. To wit, some of these countries appear to have a strong affinity for “buy America” because, well, they are mandated to make purchases exclusively from the US owing to stipulations of the USAID and food for peace programs!

That is, it was US taxpayers who actually bought some of these “exports” in behalf of the 20 small fry listed below.

In any event, the combined $4.1 billion US surplus with these nations amounts to just 0.1% of the $5.1 trillion of total US trade turnover with the world and barely 0.01% of GDP. So that’s a “win”, but one that is most surely irrelevant to most everything.

 U.S. Merchandise Trade with 20 Small Countries, 2023 ($millions)

Then again, here is the box score for America’s largest 20 trading partners. The total turnover was $4.0 trillion in 2023, representing 77% of America’s two-way trade volume with the world. Yet, in Trumpian terms, this group is chock-a-bloc with American trading losses.

In fact, the US had very large trade deficits with 13 of its 20 largest trading partners, with each generating negative balances of $45 billion or greater. These major deficit countries included the EU-27, Mexico, Canada, China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan and India, and when you add in four more countries with which the US had significant trade deficits in 2023, the total score was decidedly lopsided.

To wit, the 13 large deficit partners sent $2.47 trillion of imports to the US, while buying only $1.27 trillion of exports from America. Consequently, the trade deficit with these 13 nations was $1.20 trillion or fully 32% of the $3.74 trillion of total trade turnover.

By contrast, the seven largest countries with which the US had surpluses didn’t amount to that much in the scheme of things. US imports from these countries totaled $88 billion while US exports to them posted at $161 billion.

So that brought about a $73 billion surplus or “win”. Yet total trade turnover with these surplus countries amounted to just 4.8% of the US worldwide trade turnover in 2023, while the surplus amounted to just 0.3% of GDP.

Importantly, the “all other” nations category shown below, which represents about 170 smaller countries, also generated a net surplus on the US trade account of $87 billion, representing 11.3% of total trade turnover of $2.16 trillion with these countries.

US Trade With Top 20 Trading Partners and Worldwide In 2023 (billions)

Needless to say, the data in the two tables above raises some fundamental doubt about the Donald’s theory that America’s giant trade deficits are owing to a world market which is crawling with foreign cheaters and unfair tariffs. It turns out that in one and the same world, the US has giant deficits with essentially a baker’s dozen of countries (13) and a modest net surplus with the balance of 180 or so countries with which American companies do business either buying or selling merchandise goods.

In a word, the 13 big deficit countries ($1.2 trillion) accounted for 72% of total US trade turnover (imports + exports). The rest of the world, by contrast, accounted for $1.44 trillion or 28% of US worldwide turnover but generated a $150 billion surplus or 10% of total turnover.

So the question recurs: Are all the Bad Guys that Donald Trump rails about mainly in the 13 biggies listed above, while the balance of the 180 countries of the world are generally fair traders, as measured by the US surpluses (on net) with them? Or is the story considerably more complicated?

We will go with the more complicated route, but do so by dividing the question in two:

•  Is the alleged cheating mainly a matter of tariff barriers that could be countered, at least in theory, on a tit-for-tat basis as per Trump’s pending April 2nd reciprocal tariffs?
• Or does the problem mainly lie outside of the tariff arena–either in NTBs (nontariff barriers) abroad or counterproductive economic and monetary policies at home?

What we can show below regarding the first question is that whatever the degree of “unfair” trade that may exist in the world market today, it is not owing to tariff barriers. The Donald’s rants about 350% dairy tariffs in Canada or 10% automotive tariffs in Europe or 50% motorcycle tariffs in India, are simply a case of “gotcha” argumentation. In fact, these horror stories either do not actually exist or are largely irrelevant to the big picture.

In this context we should also note that “unfair” foreign tariffs would largely impact US exports by pricing US goods out of home markets, whereas unfair NTBs such as lavish government subsidies, tax credits and regulatory protections of domestic exporters would tend to swell US imports from foreign countries.

To be sure, foreign export enhancing NTB’s could in theory be compensated for by quantifying their value to foreign exporters and adding that to the Trumpian reciprocal tariff, as some in the administration have suggested. Yet attempting to quantify and defend the incorporation of NTBs in the reciprocal tariff levies would be a process nightmare of epic proportions, even as it would fill the Swamp with massive new opportunities for corrupt lobbying and grift.

For present purposes, however, we can start with the tariff practices of the 13 bad guys in the table above. In 2023 the US had exceedingly large deficits with two of the biggest, Mexico and Canada, where the combined trade deficit was a staggering $321 billion or 22% of the $1.45 trillion of total trade turnover with the two countries on America’s border.

Then again, the case that these unbalanced outcomes were NOT caused by tariff barriers is straight-forward and totally undebatable. To wit, owing to the Donald’s own USMCA (nee NAFTA) not one dime of tariff was levied by Canada or Mexico on the $564 billion of US exports to these countries.

So, yes, there was a huge trade imbalance, but tariffs have absolutely nothing to do with it—even as the Donald never stops ranting about Canada’s 150% to 350% dairy tariffs, for instance. But for want of doubt, here again is the information on the dairy TRQs that govern the export of US dairy products to Canada.

In 2024 Canada did not collect one single Canadian dollar or US dollar or even plug nickel of tariff revenue from US dairy exporters of the four leading dairy export products—fluid milk, butter, cheese and skim milk powder.

That’s right. The tariff on US dairy exports of these four products was zero, nichts, nada and nothing, respectively.

And the reason for that lies in the so-called TRQs (tariff rate quota) that the Donald himself negotiated with the Canadians in the course of attaining his ballyhooed USMCA deal in 2020.

These TRQ arrangments, of course, are Rube Goldberg devices of the kind that anti-free market govenrment bureaucrats love to tinker with, and the Donald’s were no exception. So what they negotiated was a “tariff free” amount of US dairy export volumes up to a specified quota level, after which the huge Canadian dairy tariffs the Donald keeps referencing in his trade rants would become effective.

These TRQs, in turn, were to be phased in over six year—so by 2024 they were almost fully effective. Yet on the four leading dairy products listed in the table below, US export volumes did not reach the quota level in any of them. Therefore, no tariff was applied to nearly 71 million pounds of US dairy exports to Canada last year, meaning that the Donald keeps ranting about a problem that he had already fixed himself!

For instance, consider the largest category, which is fluid milk right off the cows’ teats: The Trump quota was 91.9 million pounds but US exports in 2024 amounted to only 34.7 million pounds or 37.7% of the allowable amount that can come in tariff-free. And in the case of cheese, the ratio was much closer at 95.6%, but still no tariff cigar; and so on for butter and skim milk powder, as well.

In all, the Donald’s own quota amounted to 136.9 pounds in 2024, but US exports only reached 70.5 million pounds or half of the quota on these four products. So the remaining headroom under the quota for Wisconsin or New York state dairy farmer supporters, as the case may be, is considerable.

2024 Application of Trump’s TRQ Deal To Four Leading US Dairy Exports to Canada

And yet, this isn’t even the half of it. As it happens, the average value of these US dairy exports in 2024 ranged between $0.50 per pound for fluid milk, to $1.20/lbs for SMP, $2.00/lbs for cheese and $2.50/lbs. for butter. The long and short of the math, therefore, is that America’s tariff-free dairy exports to Canada in these four categories amounted to $83.7 million in 2024, which, in the scheme of things, is not even a fly on old Bessy’s ass.

As it happens, during 2024 US goods exports to Canada totaled $349 billion and goods imports from Canada were $413 billion, leaving a merchandise trade deficit of $63 billion. So the dairy piece of the picture is a mere pimple. The export figure for the four products analyzed above amounted to just 0.02% of total US exports to Canada.

The story is nearly the same on the next biggie—the $158 billion US deficit with the EU in 2023, which deficit amount to 21% of the $750 billion of two-way trade with Europe. Here again, the Donald rails about the 10% EU tariff on autos and farm products, but, alas, that’s only part of the picture.

On an overall basis, in fact, the average EU tariff rate on imports from the US was just 1.5%. That’s because in the largest categories of imports from the US—LNG, petroleum, coal, machinery, pharmaceuticals, electrical machinery, and optical/medical equipment— tariff rates are essentially zero.

Even in the case of the $20 billion of “vehicle” imports from the US it turns out that the average tariff rate for this product class was just 5%, not the 10% that the Donald is always ragging about. That’s because other items recorded under the “vehicles” heading—auto parts, trucks etc—have modest tariffs of 2-4%.

Likewise, in the scheme of things US processed food and farm commodity exports to the EC are not large at $27 billion or 7.3% of total imports from the US, albeit the tariff levels are 10% and 5%, respectively.

Still, on the $368 billion of EU imports from the US in 2023 import duties amounted to just $6 billion-–a figure which can hardly be considered a serious “tariff barrier” to US exporters.

EU Imports from the United States, 2023 (Billion $)

The table below shows the same 12 product categories for US imports from Europe, which in total amounted to $511 billion in 2023. Again, much of the trade was taxed at zero or negligible levels, including farm commodities at an average of 2.0%.

The only significantly higher US tariff is the 25% duty on pick-up imports, which still result in an average vehicle category tariff of 3% owing to the fact that passenger cars are tariffed at 2.5% along with low charges for auto parts, as well. Consequently, the average US tariff on imports from Europe was 2.0%, which generated about $10 billion of duty collections.

The most salient feature of the two charts, however, is the average for the 12 itemized product categories. That is, the 1.94% average tariff imposed by the EC on imports from the US (shown above) was barely a tad higher than the 1.60% average tariff (see below) imposed by the US on the identical slate of products coming in from Europe.

U.S. Imports from Europe, 2023 (billions $)

Needless to say, any notion of a reciprocal tariff with the EC wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans based on the above numbers. For instance, if the levy were based on all imports, the US would actually owe the EC a payment equal to 0.5% or $2.5 billion on EU imports into the US of $511 billion. Or if it were imposed only on the 12 identical products, Europe would owe a reciprocal fee of 34 basis points or $1.2 billion.

Either way, of course, these figures amount to nothingburgers. Indeed, the whole idea of a reciprocal tariff is pure nonsense if applied to the actual tariff rates of major trading partners. Indeed, even in the case of the mercantilist oriented partners in Asia, there simply isn’t any factual basis for the Donald’s misbegotten tariff-barriers theory.

For instance, here is the data for Japan’s imports from the USA. Most of these imports are tariffed at zero, and average 1.5% across all commodities. Again, processed foods and farm commodities are a bit higher at 5% and 10%, respectively, but the weighted average of 1.5% for all products is actually lower than the average US rate of 2.0%.

Still, the loud White House squawking about Japan’s 700% tariff on rice is largely irrelevant. It’s a sore thumb aberration owing to Japan’s rice culture and the dominance of agricultural interests in its political system. But the rice tariff and a few other outliers on import volumes too small to even show up in the table below do not remotely account for the chronic US trade deficits with Japan.

 Japan Imports from the United States, 2023 ( Billion)

Nor is Japan an aberration among the so-called mercantilist exporters of East Asia. In the case of South Korea, the same pattern prevails: Most of the $72 billion of imports purchased from US suppliers was tariffed at a zero rate, with a 5% rate for farm commodities and foods.

Again, were the Donald’s reciprocal tariff to be applied on the entire slate of merchandise trade, the US would owe an equalization fee to South Korea. Based on the numbers for 2023 for the 12 common categories, that would amount to 33 basis points or the trivial sum of $0.2 billion.

South Korea Imports From The United States. 2023 (billions $)

The chart for Taiwan below, reinforces the pattern. The only material tariff on the 12 major product lines is, again, that on farm commodities and processed foods.

Overall, therefore, the effective Taiwanese tariff on the $39 billion of imports purchased from US suppliers was 2.0%, which is exactly the same rate as the US applies to its foreign imports. Of course, no reciprocal tariff would be owed by either side under the Donald’s impending new global trade regime.

Taiwan Imports From the United States, 2023 (billions $)

In the case of India’s $42 billion of imports from the US in 2023, the tariff rate was slightly higher than the global norm, posting at 6.0% for all products and 3.89% on the 12 common product categories used in this analysis.

In this context it needs be noted that the ballyhooed 50% India tariff on motorcycles doesn’t make any difference to the overall two-way trade, where India’s exports to the US at $81 billion tower far above the $42 billion of imports from the US shown below.

The fact is, the motor cycle markets are vastly different between the two countries and the US just doesn’t make rides that are suited to the large India market. That is to say, a high tariff on products that US based factories do not make is not a cause of the 2:1 import/export imbalance in the US trade accounts with India.

As it happens, India’s motorcycle market is the world’s largest by volume, with around 17-20 million units sold annually. It’s dominated by small-displacement bikes (100cc to 250cc), which are affordable, fuel-efficient, and suited to India’s infrastructure and consumer needs.

This 100cc-150cc market it dominated by Hero Splendor and Bajaj Pulsar, which make lightweight bikes in the 100-150 kg weight range—with 10-25 horsepower, top speeds of 80-120 km/h and mileage of 50-70 km/liter. These are commuter-focused bikes which are priced in the $1,000-$2,000 USD range and mass-produced locally in India based on vast economies of scale.

By contrast, the U.S. market is much smaller (547,000 units sold in 2023) and skewed toward larger, premium bikes and “hogs”. These rides come with 600cc-1800cc engines (e.g. Harley-Davidson Street Glide, Indian Chief). The typical bike weigh 3-4X more than India’s bikes, sports 70-120 horsepower and is built for highways and leisure.

These American bikes also get far lower lower mileage at 15-20 km/liter; cost 10-15X more at $10,000-$30,000 USD; and target leisure-time enthusiasts, not mass commuters. The principal US manufacturers— Harley-Davidson (Wisconsin), Indian Motorcycle (Polaris, Iowa/Minnesota), and smaller players like Zero (electric, California)—simply have no product offering suitable for the India market, high tariff or not.

India Imports From The US, 2023 (billions $)

Finally, even in the case of China there is undoubtedly a whole lot of communist economics-based cheating going in its trade imbalance with the US, but its not owing to tariffs on US imports to China.

The only thing that China tariffs heavily is motor cars, but given the immense size of the local market, neither the US Big Three, the European majors or Elon Musk have attempted to import their way into this giant market. Instead, from the get go they have chosen to build locally owing to cheap labor, adjacency to the retail market and communist manipulation of the retail licensing and sales process.

But that’s not a tariff barrier, either. The very different problem of trading with a state-dominated communist economy won’t be solved by reciprocal tariffs in any event.

China Imports from Worldwide Trade, 2023 ( Billion)

So, hey, folks get ready for either a trade Demolition Derby or a giant fissile on April 2nd. That’s when the Donald’s swell new plan for a “reciprocal tariff” with our trading partners is slated to be implemented, but as evident in the above the loudly mentioned skipping of the April Fools date for its inception may prove to have been driven by a lot more than PR or superstition.

Indeed, the Donald’s whole enchilada of “reciprocal trade” has surely arisen out of ignorance of the facts and a twisted view of global trade. As we indicated at the start, Trump erroneously believes that the trade balance with any country is a measure of winning or losing, and that a deficit proves nefarious actions and cheating by the other side—so, not surprisingly, his press secretary was hammering away again yesterday at this false theme:

“If you look at the rates of tariffs across the board that Canadians have been imposing on the American people and our workers here, it is egregious,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in response to reporters claiming the tariff threats coming from President Trump are ‘egregious.’

Referring to a tariff chart, Leavitt went on to highlight how American cheese and butter already face a nearly 300% tariff, and further referred to other countries like India imposing a 150% tariff on American alcohol. Japan imposes tariffs on rice at a shocking 700%.

“President Trump believes in reciprocity and it’s about dang time that we have a president who actually looks out for American business and workers,” she furthered. “All he’s asking for at the end of the day is fair and balanced trade practices and unfortunately Canada has not been treating us fairly over the last several decades.”

Needless to say, the Trump fanboys are repeating the same erroneous refrain, as per below from Jesse Waters at Fox News:

Trump is purposely being unpredictable. He’s trying to throw off trading partners to keep them on the defensive so they don’t know where he’s coming from and come to the negotiating table faster.”

It appears that his chief economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, and others successfully lobbied Trump to abandon his campaign pledge for an across-the-board tariff on all U.S. trading partners, and to opt instead for reciprocal trade plan that would allow room for other nations to negotiate lower tariffs with the U.S., according to people familiar with the discussions.

But pursuit of reciprocal trade would be a giant waste of time and completely unimplementable in the real world. It would likely just incite a global trade war and economic demolition derby beyond imagination.

Actually, if the Donald is bound and determined to have a tariff, then he should go back to an across-the-board levy on all imports from anywhere on the planet and call it a “Revenue Tariff” just like those of the 19th century.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

The post Fallacy of Reciprocal Tariffs appeared first on LewRockwell.

[Editor’s note: In this selection from The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought, Ralph Raico introduces the idea that western Europe was unique in how it approached the power of civil government and sought to limit it. As we will find later in this chapter, Raico sets the origins of the West’s embrace of freedom in the Middle Ages a period characterized by political decentralization and a salutary conflict between civil governments and church power.]

Now, the first thing to say about liberalism is that it arose in Europe, specifically in Western Christendom. This is the Europe that grew up in communion with the Bishop of Rome, at one time or another, so that the history of Europe and the history of liberalism are intimately intertwined. The question of why this should be the case has given rise to an enormous literature. This approach to trying to find out why Europe was different, why Europe was distinctive, is sometimes called the institutional approach of economic historians. This phenomenon could be called “the European miracle,” after the title of a book by one of the major authors of this approach, E.L. Jones, the Australian economic historian.1 The miracle in question consists in a simple but momentous fact: it was in Europe that human beings first achieved per capita economic growth over a long period of time. In this way, European society eluded the Malthusian trap, and this enabled new tens of millions— hundreds of millions really—to survive, and it enabled the population as a whole to escape the hopeless misery that had been the lot of the great bulk of the human race in earlier times. The question is, Why Europe? Why is Europe in this way set apart from other great civilizations: China, India, Islam, and so on? Geographic factors played a role, no doubt, but I think that Mises put his finger on the essential point when he wrote the following:

The East lacked the primordial thing, the idea of freedom from the state. The East never raised the banner of freedom, it never tried to stress the rights of the individual against the power of the rulers. It never called into question the arbitrariness of the despots. And first of all, it never established the legal framework that would protect the private citizens’ wealth against confiscation on the part of the tyrants.2

Mises was not primarily an historian. In my view, on the basis of what I know, he was the greatest economist of the twentieth century. On the other hand, he had this ability to put his finger on the solution to some historical problem in a way that other professional historians weren’t able to do. We’ll see when we discuss the Industrial Revolution later on the same thing there. Now, the question is still, Why was Europe in this kind of position? Now, one of the authors in this general school of thought—it’s an international movement: Americans, British, French, or Australians—is Jean Baechler of Paris. Baechler’s pioneering work pointedly expressed this, as he said,

The first condition of the maximization of economic efficiency is the liberation of civil society with respect to the state. The expansion of capitalism owes its origins and raison d’être to political anarchy.3

We’ll see what that means. Among others who have developed this is Douglass North, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in this area in economic history. North wrote, “It was precisely the lack of large scale political order that created the environment essential to economic growth and ultimately human freedoms” in Europe.4 Now, this institutional approach was adumbrated by John Hicks, the Nobel laureate in economics in the late 1960s. But the essentials of the view were sketched by the great economic historian—now emeritus from Harvard—David Landes, who, by the way, is no particular classical liberal. But he’s a good historian in a book of his called The Unbound Prometheus. Landes said,

There were two factors that set Europe apart from the rest of the world, the scope and effectiveness of private enterprise and the high value placed on the rational manipulation of the human and material environment. . . . The role of private enterprise in the West is perhaps unique, more than any other factor that made the modern world.5

Still, why was there the scope and leeway for private enterprise? Landes also points to the radical decentralization of Europe, what Baechler had called political anarchy and this is what he writes:

Because of this crucial role in a context of multiple competing polities (the contrast is with empires of the Orient and the Ancient World) private enterprise in the West, possessed a political and social vitality without precedent or counterpart.6

Now, of course, it wasn’t a linear progression to some kind of a libertarian utopia. However, we’re talking relatively and in contrast with other civilizations. Keep that in mind. There’s radical decentralization based on a context of multiple competing polities. Baechler, as others might well have written, says that this is the crucial nonevent of European history. After the fall of Rome, no empire was able to arise in Europe to establish hegemony over the Continent. There was no universal empire, although this was tried from time to time. Instead, Europe developed into a mosaic of kingdoms, principalities, city-states, ecclesiastical domains, and other political entities. Within this system, it was highly imprudent for any prince to attempt to infringe the property rights in the manner that was customary elsewhere in the world. And these authors—again I want to emphasize—they’re not “doctrinaire,” if you want to call it that, libertarians or free market people for the most part. They’re simply very good historians and they talk about the customary behavior of states as based on predatory taxation and continual confiscation. States throughout history have acted like the Mafia does in some neighborhoods: what they would very often do is pick out somebody who rises above the rest, who has higher assets—a successful doctor or small businessman—and then the extortion starts with him. This is what states have typically done through history: confiscations and predatory taxation. States apply taxation to the victim to the degree it’s possible. Sometimes, in the case of the late Roman Empire, taxation went beyond what even was natural, was rational, even for the predatory state. The victim died from excessive taxation or regulation and inflation.

What does the decentralization of Europe have to do with this? It created the indispensable condition for what we’re calling the European miracle and that is the possibility of exit—the term used by these scholars. For example, suppose you’re a successful businessman in Antwerp or Amsterdam, and suppose that you were pressed by the state and the state was confiscating or heavily taxing your assets. In Western Europe, you could “exit.” You could exit without leaving the whole cultural area of Christian Europe. You didn’t have to go to a totally different civilization. You could go across the North Sea to England, you could go down the Rhine river to the Archbishopric of Cologne. This possibility of exit held generally among the Italian city-states. It was very easy to go from one to another, depending on how the state was treating you there. This did not hold in every case, but it was a constant factor, and the possibility of exit created limitations to what the state could do to its productive citizens.

Now, this story goes back many centuries. It goes back into the Middle Ages and, by the way, this historical interpretation I’m giving you has also been the basis of the works of other scholars. The great Peter Bauer, for instance, in his work on economic development in Europe, vis-à-vis economic development of the third world, simply assumes this basic interpretation of why Europe grew rich.7 Paul Kennedy of Yale, in that book on the rise and decline of the great empires, assumes as his basis this interpretation.8 Or William McNeill of Chicago and his other synthetic works on European history assume this as a correct interpretation.9 And Peter Bauer said in one of his essays that this economic development goes back at least seven to eight centuries, which means the heart of the Middle Ages.10 So, we have to examine something about the Middle Ages to explain why Europe was different. In fact, it is in the Middle Ages that what we call Europe— not the geographical continent, but Europe, the civilization—came into existence.

Here, there are a number of important factors. Feudalism—that is, the European version of feudalism—played a role. In Russia, for instance, there was a nobility; however, it was based on state appointed dukes, archdukes, counts, etc. In Europe, feudalism was based on a contractual relationship between powerful lords and the king—contractual; that is, there were obligations and duties on both sides. Already, by this time, some limits were placed on what the prince or the king might do. Within each of these realms, which were relatively small anyway, there was often a struggle between powers, and this gave rise to distinctive European institutions. Again, this was part of what made Europe different.

There were representative bodies, representing the taxpayers, which didn’t exist in other civilizations. There were parliaments. In France, the Estates-General or the provincial estates. In Castile, there was the Cortes. These bodies existed throughout Europe. There was, I think, no area of Europe that didn’t have such a parliamentary representative body. Certainly, the different parts of the Low Countries did; Scandinavia also. Castile had a Cortes, as I mentioned, but there was also a Cortes in Aragon. There was a Parliament in Sicily, in Naples, and the German states, and in Hungary, and in Poland.

Princes often found their hands tied by charters of rights, which they were forced to grant their subjects. The Magna Carta is the best known of these, but there’s a famous similar document called the Joyous Entry of Brabant, which each ruler of what is today Belgium and the Netherlands and Holland had to agree to on his ascension to power. This stipulated that no new taxes were to be imposed without the consent of the various diets of the different parts of what are today Belgium and the Netherlands. No new customs contrary to the traditions of the areas were to be introduced; there were to be no foreign office holders, and so on. In other words, we had in that very important area of the Low Countries something similar to the Magna Carta.

Now, perhaps more crucial than anything else in the whole distinctive development of Europe was the existence of a powerful international church whose interests were not synonymous or often really compatible with the interests of the state. Lord Acton, who was a Catholic, emphasized this, but it’s not something that you have to be a Catholic in order to agree to. It’s a question of what is actually the historical development. You could be a freethinker, you could be a Protestant, and as a matter of fact, today there are scholars who are not Christians at all who think that the role of the Catholic church was crucial. Things are different when we’re talking about the post-Reformation or especially the post–French Revolution church. At that later point, you found a state of the church coming closer to the state— coming closer especially to Catholic rulers and church and state, each using the other.

—

1 See Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 118

2 Ludwig von Mises, Money, Method, and the Market Process (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), p. 311.

3 Jean Baechler, The Origins of Capitalism, trans. Barry Cooper (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), pp. 77, 113.

4 Douglass North, “The Rise of the Western World,” in Political Competition, Innovation and Growth: A Historical Analysis, ed. Peter Bernholz, Manfred E. Streit, and Roland Vaube (Heidelberg: Springer, 1998), p. 22

5 David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 15.

6 Ibid.

7 P.T. Bauer, From Subsistence to Exchange and Other Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

8 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage, 1987).

9 William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Forces and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

10 Bauer, Dissent on Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 277, 299–302. Bauer in several examples notes that disparities in economic development between western Europe and other regions begin in the Middle Ages. This acceleration of economic development in medieval Europe provides insight into modern economies, and Bauer concludes that “a working knowledge of European and Mediterranean economic history since the Middle Ages is helpful to the understanding of social and economic transformation in many parts of the contemporary world” (p. 277).

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

The post What Made Europe Different appeared first on LewRockwell.

You understand, all these lawsuit shenanigans with select federal judges from Woke-crazed districts like Boston, San Francisco, Rhode Island, and the DC Beltway are aimed at provoking a second civil war. The objective is to burden Mr. Trump with so many restrictions on the executive that the country can’t be governed without declaring a national emergency.

This is the Democratic Party’s desperate strategy to stay alive: to preserve the flow of taxpayer money to its minions stuffed into the organs of government like cancer cells, and the vast network of NGOs that employ its agents and spread its sickness. The Democratic Party is a malignancy within the republic and the money is the blood-flow that feeds it.

DOGE is the chemotherapy that has starved some of the worst tumors, such as USAID. Chemotherapy is always hard on the patient. Cancer is a very tough and resourceful enemy of a healthy body, and fights back by any means available. Ultimately, it seeks to kill the body it has come to inhabit — in this case, the body-politic of the USA. We are fighting for the life of our republic against a demonic enemy.

The Democratic Party displays exactly the characteristics that human beings traditionally associate with pure evil. Above all, it lies about everything that it does. It lies, of course, in order to deceive you, so that you won’t understand how it is working to vanquish you and your posterity (your kids and their future). RussiaGate, Covid-19, the Ukraine War, all were marinated in lies. The lies operate through the perversion of language, so you won’t understand what is being said. For instance: that the Democratic Party is working to save our democracy. That howler persists in their every public performance.

The Democratic Party controls the major organs of information: The New York Times, CNN, Hollywood. They are the conveyers of lies, bamboozling the body politic to divide and conquer it. The Democratic party is a bad faith legion enlisted to defend the Father-of-Lies, America’s Deep State (a.k.a. the blob). That information regime is failing now along with the Democratic Party. The Deep State is failing with them. They are the parasites that kills its host. They intend to kill the republic as they go down.

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is supposed to function like an immune system for the body politic, defending it against political sickness. The current organized action in the federal judiciary against the executive is a grave sickness induced by the Deep State that must be corrected by the SCOTUS. We await that corrective action — a sweeping decision in reply to 100-plus lawsuits — that the chief executive is in-charge of the executive department and that his prerogatives to manage the staffing and actions of the executive agencies can’t be arrogated by federal judges.

So far, obviously, the SCOTUS has not yet come to issue that decision. Many of you worry that they will fail to, because Chief Justice John Roberts appears to be somehow under the influence of the Deep State. Let’s have a look. Sheldon Snook is Special Assistant to Chief Justice Roberts, and is deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the SCOTUS. Sheldon Snook is married to Mary McCord. Ms. McCord has been a leading actor, via her various roles in the Deep State, in the seditious operations against President Trump since 2017.

As Acting Attorney General for National Security in 2017, Mary McCord, turned James Comey’s FBI jihad against National Security advisor Mike Flynn into a malicious and ultimately unsuccessful prosecution. (The DOJ dropped the charges, which Judge Emmet G. Sullivan refused to execute, thus necessitating a pardon from Mr. Trump.)

Mary McCord was instrumental in the DOJ’s dishonest FISA application to surveil Carter Page (when Judge James Boasberg sat on the FISA Court). Ms. McCord quit the DOJ to become a counsel to the committee in the first impeachment of Donald Trump. In that role, she assisted Norm Eisen, the Chief Counsel to committee Chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Norm Eisen has gone on since that time to become the chief coordinator of lawfare operations against Mr. Trump. Mary McCord remains a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council, sponsored by George and Alex Soros. Sheldon Snook remains at John Roberts’ right hand.

Do you find these connections disturbing? Do they suggest where Justice John Roberts may stand in the war between the Deep State and President Donald Trump? I suppose we are going to find out.

So, if the SCOTUS upholds the arrogation of executive powers and prerogatives by federal district judges, don’t expect Mr. Trump to roll over for that decision. It may come to pass, as per all the above, that he will be constrained to declare a national emergency to vacate the Deep State actors who are trying to make it impossible for him to govern, establishing special tribunals to disarm them. This, of course, will be seen by the Deep State and the Democratic Party as cassus belli, an excuse to declare war against the president. We seem to be headed in that direction. There will be friction, heat, and light.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Bedlam, Pending appeared first on LewRockwell.

If sitting in front of a machine and pulling a lever or pushing a button like a cocaine rat is your idea of fun, then something called “gaming” is probably for you. The dopamine high is enhanced as you slowly lose all your money.

Face it: casinos are tacky and sad. Go into one on Thanksgiving morning and watch the forlorn push the buttons or pull the levers. Odds are—odds? yes, you can bet literally on anything now—someone is there losing their rent money.

The Sands, owned by mega GOP donor Miriam Adelson, wants to open a casino literally next door to one of the crown jewels of American higher education, the University of Dallas. My friend Patrick Fagan calls UD “the finest Catholic university in the country.”

The Sands is spending millions to get this done. According to The Dallas Morning News, “Miriam Adelson…is pumping millions of dollars into over 100 Texas lobbyists…with the hopes that they can turn the momentum in gambling’s favor.” She has spent $13 million in recent Texas primaries. You see, casinos are now illegal in Texas. And they have a target right on the forehead of the University of Dallas.

The University of Dallas is an oasis of higher learning, a core program that turns out well-formed, intellectually curious, and remarkably accomplished young people. As Catholic scholar George Weigel says, “the Dallas core curriculum—a rigorous set of required humanities courses usually spread over the first two years of college—is both the most demanding and rewarding such core in the country. Period.”

Weigel points out the amazing real-world academic success of the University of Dallas:

In 2019, UD grads had an 84% medical school acceptance rate: twice the national average, 21% higher than Cornell in 2016, higher than Duke in 2017 or Dartmouth in 2020, and higher than Penn, Johns Hopkins, and USC in recent years. Moreover, UD was first in the country in the percentage of its math and statistics majors who later earned doctoral degrees in those fields. 

The University of Dallas does this against a dominant culture that opposes and often mocks the Western tradition brought to us by Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. And now, UD may have to do this chockablock with one of the cathedrals of American addiction, a gambling emporium.

Gambling addiction is on the meteoric rise in America. How could it be otherwise? Casinos are everywhere—including, like porn, in the palm of your hand. If you wanted to bet on a game back in the day, you had to go to a casino for their “sports book.” However, in 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, making online sports betting legal in 21 states. Now betting apps are everywhere, advertising constantly: FanDuel, BetMGM, Fox Bet, and even Disney has DraftKings. They convince the kids to bet like those we used to call “degenerate” gamblers, that is, people who will bet on anything and everything.

The kids are lured into elaborate “parleys” where you bet on the exact confluence of events in a game. Like most gambling, but especially this kind, it is a truly thrilling sucker’s bet. The kids get a high all the while getting fleeced by the big-money boys.

Sports betting rose 69 percent in the single year after legalization and another 270 percent in the first quarter of 2021. According to Stephen Marche in The Atlantic, gambling revenues will barrel past $44 billion and approach the amount spent on books, music, and movies combined. Presumably, this includes the billions coughed up by the Swifties last year.

This is nothing less than predatory gambling, the joining of government and big business to reach into the farthest and deepest corners of mom and dad’s pocket, to pluck out every last shekel and convince them all along, “Ain’t this fun?” And looky there, Lady Gaga has a residency.

And now the predators want to come and dirty up the area around this jewel called the University of Dallas. The site under consideration used to house the Dallas Cowboys, and UD students could flash their student IDs and get in after halftime. It’s been an empty lot for a long time, but now it may be a casino that will inevitably bring crime. Wherever casinos appear, crime rates rise, both crimes against property and persons.

A twenty-year study—granted, from years ago—shows this is true. The study was carried out during the pox dawn of coast-to-coast border-to-border casinos. When casinos open, aggravated assault spikes, rape spikes, and so does robbery. Murder goes down. Go figure. Larceny goes up. Burglary goes up. Auto theft goes up. The study demonstrates that “after five years, 8.6% of the observed property crime and 12.6% of the violent crime in casino counties are due to casinos.”

It is a dead certainty that The Sands will sully the sight lines from UD to downtown Dallas. Is it really going to be 50 stories tall? It is a dead certainty that some kid will be robbed on the campus, dorms will be broken into, some girl will be raped, and lots of kids will walk over to The Sands and lose their tuition money.

Read the Whole Article

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For all three years of the war between Moscow and Kyiv Europe has held to the pro-Ukrainian stance. Neither the lack of major progress of the Ukrainians on the battlefield, nor the internal crisis, experienced by the EU member states due to providing assistance to Kyiv, made the European leaders deviate from the initial political line. Europe even decided to distance from its long-standing ally, the US, that had reconsidered its top foreign policy priorities, and act on a stand-alone basis without the US support or approval despite probable aggravation of their bilateral relations.

Thus, smelling danger from the US focus on rapprochement with Russia, the European Commission unveiled the White Paper, the document on the rearmament of the member states and defense industry development. The document highlights that Europe must be ready for large-scale military actions in its territory because of the threat coming from Russia in case the latter prevails in the war in Ukraine. Despite ever-growing number of the Europeans, unsatisfied with the current policy, that among others instigated a migration crisis of an unprecedented scale, Brussels still insists on allocation of great sums of money from the budget, turning a blind eye on the existing domestic problems. The recently unveiled document on the rearmament is no exception either. It foresees annual supplies of air defense systems, large-caliber weapons and ammunition, as well as providing support for the Ukrainian defense by means of single source contracts.

With regard to all privileges and opportunities provided for Kyiv, Europe seems to be trying hard to persuade its people and partners that Ukraine is a vital ally and assistance to this belligerent country must be top priority. By these actions the European leaders take strides to substitute the expenditure of the EU funds not on the internal problems of the member states but on Ukraine, that is no part of the block. Furthermore, it turns out that Europe makes efforts to prolong the war by all means in the view of the positive prospects after the talks between Russia and the US.

The European Union is unlikely to need a half-ruined country that will require several annual budgets to be restored. Its primary interest is to weaken one of the key players on the global stage as much as possible, and to achieve this goal, as we can see, Europe is set for acting against the interests of its citizens. Furthermore, the European Union is likely to undermine the authority of Donald Trump, who promised to put an end to all wars, to interfere with his rapprochement with Russia and derail the signing of a peace treaty.

The latest events and decisions, taken by the EU, indicate that Europe has set a course for the direct participation in the war on the side of Ukraine. And reconsideration of the defense strategy, as well as the already started rearmament are just part of the preparation stage.

The post Has Europe Set a Course for War? appeared first on LewRockwell.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.” — President Dwight D. Eisenhower

In the 1960s and 1970s when the US actually had an enemy, though possibly one of our own making, there was a peace movement.  It might well have come from left-wing professors in the universities who did not think racist America was worth defending. 

In the first quarter of the 21st century, a period of many American wars of choice, there is no peace movement.  In her book Joan Roelofs asks:

“Why is there so much acceptance of and so little protest against our government’s illegal and immoral wars and other military operations? Why is there mostly silence about the death and destruction that wars and even the preparation for war inflict on people, including the troops, and on the environment?  Why is there so little concern about the potential for the extinction of human and other life posed by nuclear war, now seen as an ‘option’ by the US and other militaries?”

Her answer is in her title: The Trillion Dollar Silencer.  You might think that the money goes for weapons, but much of it is used to purchase universities and faculties, think tanks, nonprofit organizations, state and local governments, media, contractors, and foreign governments.

The Department of Defense tentacles reach everywhere. With so many so dependent on DOD handouts, there is no one left to protest.

Roelofs’ research is exhaustive.  She packs an amazing amount of detail including names and monetary amounts in 200 pages. For example, Roelofs explains how the CIA salts money around. The CIA creates dummy foundations and makes grants to them.  The dummy foundations then make grants to legitimate foundations, and the foundations pass the money on to the CIA-designated groups.

President Eisenhower warned about the growing power of the military/security complex. Nothing was done about it.  The power has grown so great that the Department of Defense cannot pass an audit, and several trillion dollars are unaccounted for.  You might remember that whatever it was that hit the Pentagon on 9/11 managed to hit and destroy the offices housing the documents and experts who were  searching for where the money had gone, thus bringing the investigation to an end.

In the final chapter Roelofs asks “what can be done?”  Her suggestions lack effectiveness.  Her book was written prior to the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency.  My suggestion is for someone who can to get the book into DOGE hands.  The Trillion Dollar Silencer traces the money flows through so many hands and places that it will save the DOGE staff much work and leave them astonished by the many non-defense uses of defense funds.

It takes character and determination to correct a bad situation.  America’s predicament is that corruption is so pervasive that challenging it results in career destruction.  People have mortgages, car payments, kids in school.  Taking exception to corruption is a road to poverty.  Perhaps Trump and Musk will be able to do something, or perhaps the Democrat judges will save the day for institutionalized grift.

The post Preparing for War Is an American Institution appeared first on LewRockwell.

• Be confident and make brief eye contact. Don’t look like a victim but check your ego and show respect.
• Maintain situational awareness. Scan waists and hands for weapons.
• Learn what gangs are active in your area, how to identify members.
• Learn what kinds of crimes they commit and how it goes down. Understanding that, you can reduce both your risk and your exposure to it.
• Caches give you the ability to start over should you be forced by a superior force to capitulate or flee.

Gangs

When readers were asked what the greatest threat was in their neighborhoods, the number one answer was … gangs! I can’t say I’m surprised at that.

Gangs are already a serious problem in the US today, with more than a million and a half members of street gangs, but in the chaos and disorder of emergencies, gang membership skyrockets, making gangs an even bigger problem whenever the rule of law gives way to anarchy.

At times like these, people want to know that somebody has their back, so the stress, volatility, and change that accompanies catastrophes drives people to group up. Prison gangs are a well-known example of this behavior.

Situational Awareness & Avoidance

Learn what gangs are operating in your area and how they operate. Each gang has its own SOP and its own IFF (Identification Friend or Foe). Depending on the type of gang, they may use colors (hats, T-shirts, bandannas) or tattoos. Biker gangs, for example, will often wear sleeves (tattoos on their forearms) with symbols that carry meanings to anyone familiar with them. Catalogs of gang tattoos are available from various law enforcement agencies online. Download catalogs and research gangs active in your area. The gang units of police departments and correctional facilities sometimes have online resources such as catalogs of gang tattoos where you can look them up and decipher their meanings.

In an area of Brazil that I visit, two of the local gangs are called Estados Unidos (United States) and Al-Qaeda. And the EU (US) gang used the US Flag as their colors, which I found out when I brought Zippo Lighters emblazoned with the US Flag to give away as souvenirs. I wanted to bring something made in the USA but could have caused trouble for people I liked if they used them in public.

On situational awareness, in the favelas (slums), Brazilian gangs employ low-tech methods to warn the residents of raids by the police or by rival gangs. Chief among these fireworks touched off by lookouts. They are cheap and effective. When people hear them, they know to get behind hardcover because bullets are about to fly.

Two examples of SOP of Brazilian gangs are robbing buses and kidnapping. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuban communist revolutionaries experienced major cashflow problems. One of their solutions was to train operatives to carry out kidnappings for ransom, some of which took place in Brazil. Some claim that when the communist kidnappers were caught and imprisoned, they trained Brazilian criminals to carry out kidnappings, but judging by the SOP, I think the idea was more largely disseminated through the media, giving small gangs the idea that they could make money by pulling off kidnappings for ransom, mostly without professional training.

Aware of the fact that local gangs kidnap foreigners to make money, I investigated restraint escape and SERE techniques, started restraint escape training, and integrated restraint escape gear into my EDC.

In the bus robbery scenario, armed thugs board a bus. One puts a handgun to the driver’s head to stop the bus and the other walks from one end of the bus to the other with a backpack or bag. He instructs everybody to drop their wallet, cellphone and jewelry in the bag. If someone doesn’t hand it over and he feels like they are holding out, he unceremoniously shoots that individual in the head and moves to the next person.

Where possible, use superior situational awareness to avoid problems. That doesn’t mean that when you see them, and they see you, you stop, turn around and head in the other direction. That will make you look like prey, triggering a predatory pursuit response. You wouldn’t do that with a dog and it won’t be any more effective here.

Do what you should be doing anytime you come in sight of another on the street, scan their waist and hands for weapons.

Reduce Risk & Exposure

Understanding the SOP greatly improves one’s chances of surviving this type of robbery, not to mention limiting exposure to lose. To mitigate risk in this scenario, as well as muggings, my wife and I, employ various techniques:

• Don’t Say, “What?” – Understand criminal SOP and stay alert. Even if you speak the same language (more or less), it may be hard the slang of some thug’s slang. Just hand over what you have. My brother-in-law was walking with some Americans one night and this very situation happened. The gangbanger lifted his shirt to show them his handgun, one of the Americans didn’t have his head on a swivel and didn’t understand what was happening or what the guy he was asking. It didn’t go like the scene in Pulp Fiction Jules tell the kid to, “Ask me, ‘What!’ one more time!” either. The banger got frustrated and shot the guy in the head. Fortunately, he lived and made a full recovery, but gunshot wounds to the head don’t always work out like that.
• Report Binder Money Clips – When carrying a lot of cash, break it up into smaller amounts instead of rolling it in a single, easy to find roll of cash. That way you lose some of your money, not all of it. With minor modification, the handles on the report binder clips can open a range of handcuffs and it’s easy to pinch one-off.
• Drop Wallet – Put some expired credit cards and a believable amount of cash in a wallet so you have a wallet to drop in the bag.
• Decoy Cell Phone – Robberies and muggings are so common that quite a few locals save their old cellphones when they upgrade. They carry their old cellphone in their hand or back pocket and their new cellphone goes in their waistband, at least while out on the street.
• Don’t Wear Expensive Jewelry – This should just be common sense, but then every time I look at an EDC group or an EDC lineup on Uncrate, all the jewelry, expensive watches, and matching everything make me wonder. I suppose you could have that rare survival situation in Beverly Hills or on 5th Avenue in Scottsdale, where you need to impress some gold digger while simultaneously saving the day but why would you want to? And carrying a bunch of expensive accessories makes you a target everywhere else.
• Carry Concealed – If things do go sideways, sometimes your chances of survival are better if you fight. Train regularly and learn when it’s better to fight and when it’s better not to. I carry concealed in the USA, but for the time being Brazil is a non-permissive environment, so I only carry what I can get away with there. Fortunately, Brazil has a new president and his platform included the restoration of gun rights, which Brazilians voted for in a referendum. Unfortunately, last time around, they voted a corrupt socialist regime into power that refused to approve any permits, arguing that the country had enough police to protect the citizens.

Respect

Gangs are usually trying to control what they see as their territory. When you disrespect a gang banger, you might as well break out the dueling pistols because it’s the modern-day equivalent of removing your glove to slap him across the face with it or insulting a gentleman in public. Only he and his buddies are going to jump you five to one. Once you disrespect him, he has no choice but to act or he’ll lose face with other gang members, pissing away hard-earned street cred.

When you encounter someone on the street that you think might despite what you may have heard, don’t avoid eye contact. Walk confidently, make brief eye contact and give one of them a curt nod to acknowledge their presence. Don’t scowl or frown in disapproval, but don’t smile either. Give them the respect they are looking for. If challenged, verbalize the message, “I’m not disrespecting you.”

Read the Whole Article

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Davidson College officials have launched an investigation into a student, Cynthia Huang, the president of Davidson College’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom. In two separate incidents, Huang spoke out against Palestinian and transgender claims.  In a disciplinary  letter, Mak Tompkins, Davidson’s director of student rights and responsibilities, wrote that she was accused of spreading “misinformation” that could foster Islamophobia and transphobia.

Huang has previously received death threats from peers for criticizing abortion, according to the site College Fix. However, Davidson is investigating her because she distributed a pamphlet last fall titled “Five Myths About Israel Perpetrated by the Pro-Hamas Left” that argued that Palestinians are not a distinct people and rejected the premise of a Palestinian state.  She was also faulted for social media comments by YAF about Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, whose gender was controversial during the 2024 Olympics.

Huang has refused to yield and cited, in an op-ed, incidents of being threatened and harassed for her conservative views on the liberal campus.

Her account is all too familiar for many of us in higher education. As I discuss in my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” administrators are often on a hair-trigger when it comes to conservative speech while turning a blind eye to inflammatory rhetoric.

I have defended faculty who have made an array of disturbing comments on “detonating white people,” denouncing police, calling for Republicans to suffer,  strangling police officers, celebrating the death of conservatives, calling for the killing of Trump supporters, supporting the murder of conservative protesters and other outrageous statements.

Yet, liberal professors and students tend to enjoy the full protection of academic freedom and free speech. Indeed, at the University of California campus, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.

The support enjoyed by faculty on the far left is in sharp contrast to the treatment given faculty with moderate, conservative or libertarian views. Anyone who raises such dissenting views is immediately set upon by a mob demanding their investigation or termination. Conservatives and libertarians understand that they have no cushion or protection in any controversy, even if it involves a single, later deleted tweet.

One such campaign led to a truly tragic outcome with criminology professor Mike Adams at the University of North Carolina (Wilmington). Adams was a conservative faculty member with controversial writings who had to go to court to stop prior efforts to remove him. He then tweeted a condemnation of North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper for his pandemic rules, tweeting that he had dined with six men at a six-seat table and “felt like a free man who was not living in the slave state of North Carolina” before adding: “Massa Cooper, let my people go.” It was a stupid and offensive tweet. However, we have seen extreme comments on the left — including calls to gas or kill or torture conservatives — be tolerated or even celebrated at universities.

Celebrities, faculty, and students demanded that Adams be fired. After weeks of public pummeling, Adams relented and took a settlement to resign. He then killed himself a few days before his final day as a professor.

I do not see anything in the Huang material that is not protected speech. The rationale that it is “misinformation” is revealing in that sense. Davidson is objecting to Huang’s views as simply wrong, enforcing a familiar orthodoxy in policing what administrators deem to be information or misinformation.

Higher education is based on the free flow of ideas, including those that challenge orthodoxy. Some of the greatest social and scientific breakthroughs came only after intellectuals were declared heretics or charlatans. Even if Huang escapes punishment, she will be subjected to an investigation as a chilling message to others who may not want to face such public scrutiny or controversy.

Davidson should instead investigate the handling of this matter and expressly bar the use of disinformation and misinformation as the basis for such disciplinary actions.

This originally appeared on JonathanTurley.org.

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Pro-Israel lobbies and organizations got what they paid for in 2024.  Hundreds of millions of dollars of pro-Zionist donations to the Trump campaign and Trump-aligned PACs helped elect Trump, and every important appointment, and some less important ones are vocal Israel-firsters.  Pre-existing massive military and other aid from the US taxpayer to Israel has been expanded under Trump.  Avid Zionists lead the State Department, the Pentagon, and direct national intelligence.  Zionist Steve Witkoff serves as the President’s envoy and chief diplomat in the two major wars the US has been supporting for years, wars Trump wants to resolve in the first half of his last term.

Why, it should be almost perfect, from an AIPAC point of view: a completely controlled executive branch, and a 99% controlled US Congress!  The only Republican member of Congress without an AIPAC handler is Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, and both parties have seen its Israel-questioning members successfully primaried or otherwise replaced.

We should be seeing celebrations in the lobby headquarters, and a kind of confidence that I saw way back in 2002 when Israeli generals owned the Pentagon, with full and on-demand access to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

But instead of celebrating, the lobby has huddled and mustered. It’s working over the lower level appointee process now, with its Senate investment Tom Cotton leading the charge against those they see as unreliable.  Their unhinged reaction to the appointment of realist Ridge Colby as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy is telling.

Stefanik is now out as a potential US Ambassador to the UN – the reason?  Unlike AIPAC which draws mightily from both parties to get their initiatives, Trump needs more reliable Republican votes and a bigger margin.  In other words, AIPAC has created a 99% pro-Israel Congress, yet, the Christian Zionist they needed in the UN has to be sent back to Congress because Trump needs her there.

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff is in trouble with the Republican Jewish Coalition now, based on his frank and open conversation with Tucker Carlson last week.  Their complaint is addressed by a welcome tweet from JD Vance saying “The people sniping at him are mad that he is succeeding where they failed for 40 years.  Turns out a lot of diplomacy boils down to a simple skill: don’t be an idiot.”

Witkoff is getting heat from the Jewish war lobby for being “fooled” by Putin and “fooled” by Hamas, and they want Rubio to conduct all the negotiations.  Bless their hearts, of course they do!

The recent Signal chat kerfluffle is interesting.  Signal is a commercial, open source, encrypted messenger app, and its security design and record is good.  In 2022, there was a hack of an unrelated cloud server that created a short-lived ability to impersonate a Signal user.  This particular breach could have been, and is, prevented by use of the Signal registration lock feature.  The Pentagon has policies on Signal app usage, and obviously the inclusion of former IDF soldier and neocon journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in the Principals Small Group chat lies outside of those policies, as does the kind of information being chatted about – a Congressionally undeclared war against Yemen, US war-fighting for Israel, and the administration’s raw contempt for peace in the Middle East, and for Europe’s lack of gratitude for “all the US does” to secure Europe’s dwindling trade and security trade interests. Max Blumenthal’s take at The Gray Zone is clear, and he calls out Goldberg correctly, in a way that the bumbling SecDef tried to.

What we do know is that the Signal “leak” wasn’t a whistleblower attempt – Goldberg has few Constitutional principles and only opposes Trump’s foreign policy when it deviates from that of Netanyahu.  We also know that a normal journalist who stumbles on government information important for taxpayers to know about, keeps the source open and protects it.  He does not quickly remove himself (as Goldberg did) from that unique source of information.  What a goldmine for a Pulitzer, had Goldberg been interested in that kind of reward!  We also know that in the time between the leaked chat and the subsequent attack on Yemen, days went by as several normally quiet and unknown Senators on the Intelligence Committee became extraordinarily well-prepared to attack DNI Gabbard and CIA Director Ratcliffe on the topic during the Trump’s first annual threat estimate presentation.  Warner nearly flubbed his lines, but it was a remarkably good show from Senators we rarely hear from. It also served to de-emphasize and distract from whatever was in that Estimate – including Iran isn’t making the bomb, and is a NPT signatory, unlike Israel which makes plenty of them and refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Furthermore, Gabbard and Ratcliffe were not the preferred candidates for Israel, so making them look incompetent, rogue, or otherwise needing to be replaced is part of a time- honored agenda for the Israel lobby.  Gabbard is honest, and while exceedingly pro-Israel she prefers peace and diplomacy over fighting someone else’s war.  Ratcliffe, while “good on Israel” is known as an America Firster, and more interested in a future conflict with China, something that would necessarily detract from fighting and subsidizing Israel’s endless wars.

Where was National Security Director Waltz – who would have thunk he’d miss the presentation of the National Threat Estimate?  He had added Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat, he’s not sure how, and he was in Greenland when Gabbard and Ratcliffe were facing the orchestrated wrath of suddenly security-conscious Senators.  Not surprisingly, AIPAC was Congressman Waltz’s top contributor between 2017 and 2024.

All is not well in Israel’s western capital.  Increasingly, AIPAC is dependent on Christian Zionists and lying politicians who will take their money but fail to completely deliver (although Waltz clearly did his part lately).  Even Huckabee – a rare Christian Ambassador to Israel – is not trusted by the various Israel lobbies for reasons that demonstrate a small but growing schism between American and Israeli jews, and Zionism in general.  AIPAC is finding it more difficult to recruit new generations of activists in the US. Increasing calls to publicly identify dual citizens in the US Congress, and to register AIPAC under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) are being heard.

Almost 20 years ago, John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt published a groundbreaking assessment of the influence of the Israeli lobby to jeers, condemnation and threats.  Today, everyone in Washington is in general agreement with that paper, casually reveal that influence, occasionally even complaining about it.  Today, Israel fights the BDS movement in the US through state and federal legislation.  It demands major restrictions on American speech, expression and assembly for those who dare to consider the Zionist state a brutal colonizer, warmongering, genocidal or racist, undeserving of our military or political assistance and support.  Two years before the latest US-funded genocide in Gaza, 37% of American Jews between 18 and 29 believed US is too supportive of Israel, while only 16% of American Jews over age 65 felt that way.  Trend lines like these are not good for organizations like AIPAC.

Trump thus far has refused to fire anyone over the Signal fiasco, despite the preparation and preference for this solution from the “lobby.”  If Waltz is safe, no doubt Ratcliffe and Gabbard are as well.   Trump’s sensitivities to spies in his midst, his concept of personal loyalty, and his simple and blessed inability to be bullied all work against AIPAC.  Trump’s ending of war in Ukraine with a settlement and ceding of territory could be applied to Israel.  Trump’s demand that Europe pull its own weight financially and defensively could be applied to Israel.  His preference to protect America here, via border control, revitalizing US industry, and designing Golden Domes all speak to ideas of America First, a desire to reduce foreign influence/spying and a shift away from American imperialism toward realism. These ideas, if applied to US-Israel policy, would end the current lop-sided relationship, and raise the costs of Zionism far beyond what Israel could afford on its own.

No wonder the Israel lobby is cranky.

The post Is AIPAC Getting What They Want in DC? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Carus Michaelangelo wrote:

Lew,

Thanks for sharing the Ayn Rand quote Roderick Long posted. Funny, the political class is more than happy to impose ever-more controls as fast as they can have them, but we peons must be satiated by gradual reductions in controls. Rothbard long ago exposed the fallacies of reverse Fabianism—the State’s tendency is to grow, not shrink, so gradualism in destatizing is doomed from the start. But more centrally, the only way for it to work is to move fast enough that your changes cannot be undone before you’ve completed them. 

The post Roderick Long appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Greg Privette:

Hi Lew,

I have been thinking about the current move to eliminate pennies. This discussion was in the news several years ago also. I do not remember the exact time frame but it was another period of commodity price inflation. At that time the MSM was discussing elimination of both the penny and the nickel because the value of the metals involved in their production had begun to exceed the face value of the coins. I remember telling people at the time that after more than a hundred years we finally had some part of our currency that was actually worth its face value and even though it was the lowest denominations it was driving the politicians and media nuts. Certainly the last thing anyone would want is to have currency that is actually worth what the government says it is worth! I think this bothers them because it reveals the effects of the constant devaluation of the currency.

The current discussion on eliminating pennies once again revolves around the “cost to government” of producing them. Since when did the monetary cost of anything matter to government? They only costs they care about are political costs. There would be real cost to many retail businesses though. I am not sure what it would involve, but surely all retail businesses would have to make some type of software changes in order to round every sale up to the nearest 5 cents. It makes me wonder if the real reasoning behind this is to give more retail businesses an excuse to begin refusing cash altogether and push people toward accepting the idea of 100% digital payments. I think it is important to remember the big banks and their subordinates in government hate cash.

The post Eliminating the penny appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

The most principled peacemaker in the House of Representatives, Congressman Thomas Massie, was recently interviewed about the Trump administration’s military strikes on the Houthis. 

See here.

The post Thomas Massie Interview: Houthi Strikes Not America First appeared first on LewRockwell.