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Charlie Kirk and America’s Long History of Assassinations

Although the September 10th assassination of Charlie Kirk was horrifying, the death of that young conservative activist was merely the latest in a long history of such high-profile killings in our deeply troubled society.

Just a few months earlier, an agitated gunman had shot and killed Melissa Hortman, the former Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives along with her husband. Earlier this year, an individual outraged over health insurance policies had killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Robert Thompson. Last year, gunmen had twice unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Donald Trump as he campaigned for the White House. Back in 2017, a deranged leftist gunman had seriously injured House Republican Majority Whip Steve Scalise and three others, while a half-dozen years earlier, an equally deranged right-wing gunman had critically wounded Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six others.

In 1972 Arthur Bremmer had shot and permanently crippled presidential candidate Gov. George Wallace, in 1975 Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore had separately tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, while in 1981 John Hinckley Jr. had similarly targeted President Ronald Reagan. In 1978 former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White had killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, while in 1980 Mark David Chapman had shot to death Beatles star John Lennon.

Successful, very high-profile American assassinations had been even more common during the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert both died by assassins’ bullets during those years, as did black leaders Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The latter’s white racialist counterpart was George Lincoln Rockwell, and he too was assassinated in that same decade.

Beginning with President Abraham Lincoln’s killing in 1865, the list of American political assassinations has been a very long one, filling an entire 12,000 word Wikipedia page despite even omitting some of the cases listed above.

Although assassinations have been quite common throughout American history, the reverberations of Kirk’s death still dominate our media headlines nearly a dozen days after the crime, perhaps partly because the killing of a charismatic 31-year-old seemed like such a terrible, senseless tragedy. I am not aware of any past American political assassination in which the victim had been so young.

Prior to his tragic death, I’d paid very little attention to Kirk so the bare facts I knew about him were minimal. After dropping out of college at the age of 18, he had founded Turning Point USA, then spent the next dozen years building it into one of the largest grassroots political organizations in America. As a result, he’d become a hero to millions of youthful conservatives, many of whom regularly listened to his daily political podcast. His stature in Republican circles was enormous and I was shocked to learn that knowledgeable journalists such as Max Blumenthal expected him to eventually mount a serious campaign for the presidency, perhaps even running as soon as the 2028 election cycle.

But when I considered the long list of high-profile American political assassinations in our national history, I noticed that certain aspects of Kirk’s killing seemed to set it apart from the overwhelming majority of the others. A few days after Kirk’s death, I published an article in which I discussed my conclusions.

Meanwhile, the actual circumstances of Kirk’s killing raised all sorts of questions in my mind.

From media reports I soon discovered that Kirk had received many death threats over the years. Therefore, he had taken steps to ensure that he was extremely well protected against any such attack, surrounding himself with a professional security detail while also wearing body-armor. But none of that availed him against the sniper who killed him with a single, well-placed shot, hitting him in the neck from a distance of around 200 yards.

Over the years and the decades, considerable numbers of prominent Americans had been targeted by an assassin’s bullets but almost none of them had ever been killed in such a classic manner. Instead, a large majority of the victims were shot at close range with simple handguns, and the deranged attackers were often immediately apprehended at the scene.

Consider the case of last year’s killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Robert Thompson by someone angry over health insurance policies, with the corporate executive shot as he entered a midtown Manhattan hotel, totally unprotected against any such attack. Earlier this year, a Minnesota state representative and her husband had both been killed at home by an agitated gunman who merely knocked on their front-door.

Indeed, I would suspect that Kirk was better protected against any lethal attack than well over than 99% of all the American elected officials, senior corporate executives, billionaires, and Hollywood celebrities who constitute the most likely targets. Thus, his killing demonstrated how easily almost any of our public figures could be slain by a determined attacker. Many such influential individuals may certainly take this lesson to heart, perhaps leading them to support severe crackdowns on our civil liberties in order to reduce their personal risks.

Even last year’s two unsuccessful assassination attempts against Trump during his presidential campaign seemed far less professional than Kirk’s killing. In each case, the carelessness and incompetence of the attacker was balanced out by the severe security lapses of Trump’s Secret Service team.

A sniper firing at long range seems the most classic sort of professional political assassination but the last such examples that come to my mind were the 1960s killings of JFK and MLK…Just as with the Kirk assassination, the killing of Kennedy in Dallas also involved a heavily-guarded public figure slain by a sniper who initially escaped…So in many regards, the closest historical parallel to Kirk’s assassination was that of JFK sixty-two years earlier.

When was the last time that an American public figure has been successfully assassinated while wearing body-armor and surrounded by a security detail? It’s been a staple of countless Hollywood films, but I’m not sure it’s ever previously happened in real life. Combine that with the single shot fired and Kirk’s killing might rank as the most professional political assassination in modern American history. That’s a pretty impressive achievement for an agitated 22-year-old pro-tranny activist whose grandmother claims may have never previously fired a gun.

• The Assassination of Charlie Kirk
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 15, 2025 • 6,000 Words

In the week since I wrote that piece, the widespread claims that Kirk was wearing a bullet-proof vest or body-armor turned out to be mistaken, but I think that the rest of my analysis still stands, with the closest match to Kirk’s killing being the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. But whereas Kirk was killed by a single bullet, at least three shots had been fired at Kennedy, one of which went completely wild, even though the sniper was firing from roughly half the distance.

So all things considered, Kirk’s killing would indeed seem to rank as probably the most professional political assassination in modern American history. Over the decades, I’ve frequently seen examples of very well-protected American VIPs targeted for death by a distant sniper firing a scoped rifle. But all of those scenes had played out in films and television shows, while almost nothing like that had ever happened in real life.

Kirk’s Bitter Rupture with His Pro-Israel Backers

I’d only first begun paying any attention to Kirk two months before his death. A huge national controversy had erupted over Trump’s reversal on his promise to release the government files on Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail ring, and I’d been greatly impressed by the remarkably courageous speech that Tucker Carlson had made at the national convention of Kirk’s TPUSA organization. As I wrote at the time:

Former FoxNews host Tucker Carlson is probably the biggest figure in today’s fragmented media landscape and a crucial supporter of Donald Trump. But he and many others like him have strongly denounced the administration’s reversal on the release of the Epstein files.

The largest youthful pro-Trump organization is called Turning Point USA, and Carlson happened to give a speech to the huge audience at their annual convention a few days after Trump’s decision. He dramatically declared that that not a single person he knew in DC doubted that Epstein had been running a blackmail operation on behalf of the Israeli Mossad, and despite that controversial statement his speech drew widespread cheers. This suggests that his remarks—and the positive reaction they attracted—may themselves mark “a turning point” in what had been decades of uniformly pro-Israel sentiments among American conservatives. So ideas once marginalized or considered entirely forbidden may now apparently be freely discussed, sometimes even attracting widespread support, and this may be the most important lasting legacy of the current political firestorm over the Epstein files.

Video Link

Indeed, given Carlson’s words only the most willfully blind could fail to connect such Mossad operations with the unwavering levels of support that Israel has long enjoyed from our members of Congress. Over the last couple of years, nearly the entire rest of the world has reviled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as one of modern history’s worst war-criminals, now under indictment by the International Court of Justice for his horrific ongoing massacre of Gaza’s helpless civilians. But when he has visited Congress, the trained barking seals of that political body have provided him endless standing ovations. Obviously the money and media deployed by the Israel Lobby explain most of this behavior, but the powerful role of blackmail has almost certainly supplemented those factors.

The notion that many of our own elected officials are being ruthlessly blackmailed by a foreign power must surely outrage most patriotic Americans, and the increasing circulation of these ideas may eventually have important consequences. Just a few days after Carlson’s remarkable speech, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the fiercest MAGA partisans in Congress, surprisingly joined with Democrats Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two of her most leftwing colleagues, in voting to cut U.S. funding for Israel. This resolution only attracted a handful of supporters, but small cracks in a dam sometimes presage much larger breaks.

• American Pravda: Jeffrey Epstein, the Franklin Scandal, Pedophilia, and Political Blackmail
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 28, 2025 • 12,300 Words

I’d always regarded Kirk as an absolutely committed supporter of Israel and the Zionist project, much like almost all other American conservatives. Therefore, I had been shocked by Kirk’s willingness to provide Carlson with such a high-profile platform to make a speech taking such a contrary position.

Indeed, a few days ago Carlson revealed that Kirk had strongly encouraged those very controversial remarks.

Tucker Carlson shares the unforgettable backstage moment when Charlie Kirk looked him in the eye and told him to “go all the way” with his raw feelings about Iran and Epstein.

Charlie knew Tucker’s words would upset his donors, but he gave him the green light to speak freely at… pic.twitter.com/SwDAHU3i7O

— Vigilant Fox (@VigilantFox) September 17, 2025

Although I can’t quite remember the details, during the weeks that followed I’d gotten a strong impression that Kirk was becoming much more publicly critical of Israel, perhaps even starting to follow the political trajectory of his longtime friend Candace Owens, who had originally come from a very similar ideological background.

Therefore, when the media suddenly announced that Kirk had been killed in such a highly professional assassination with the sniper cleanly escaping, my thoughts turned in suspicious directions.

Early the next morning, the police announced that they had recovered the rifle used from a nearby wooded area, apparently left behind by the assassin as he fled the scene. The shells had been marked with various leftist slogans, including support for trans-rights, suggesting the apparent motive for killing the young conservative leader. But none of this assuaged my much darker suspicions.

Over the decades, Israel and its Mossad intelligence service had committed an enormous number of political assassinations all around the world, eliminating their real or perceived enemies with unmatched skill and subtlety. In January 2020, I’d published a very long article on that topic that heavily drew upon Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman’s highly authoritative 2018 volume, whose contents I summarized in an early paragraph:

The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Times suggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other nation. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s body-count greatly exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman’s extremely long book.

But in the last few years, this campaign of Israeli political assassinations had gone into extreme overdrive, successfully striking down such huge numbers of targets that I published an additional article three months ago.

• Zionist Israel as the Assassination Nation
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 23, 2025 • 11,800 Words

Therefore, a few hours after hearing of Kirk’s death, I decided to very gingerly raise these possibilities with someone well situated in conservative circles who personally knew Kirk, and I was shocked by his response. Although I had never mentioned Israel by name, he unequivocally told me that everyone in Kirk’s circle, even including important Trump Administration officials, suspected that Israel had probably killed the young conservative leader.

While such beliefs might not necessarily be correct, I was astonished that they were apparently so widespread without even any hints reported anywhere in the mainstream or conservative media.

Read the Whole Article

The post Israel, Charlie Kirk, and the 9/11 Attacks appeared first on LewRockwell.

Note: The following interview was published in Poland, in the journal POLONIA CHRISTIANA, in March 2016—over nine years ago. It was conducted by Dr. Michal Krupa of Dr. Boyd D. Cathey. Below is a translation. In March 2016 Donald Trump was set to wrap up the Republican primary season with additional wins, sealing his nomination.  With that in mind the interview ranged over the hopes—and fears—that I felt back then. Some of those goals were achieved, but many were not, as we now know. We are now in President Trump’s second term, so it may be useful to look back at what many of us believed and prayed could happen nine years ago. It seems evident that we—our nation—has much further to go if we are to re-capture, to re-establish the original constitutional liberties and faith that once enabled the Framers to create our nation.

—————————————————————————–

TRANSLATION (in English):

1. You reacted strongly to Pope Francis’s recent critical words, which were clearly directed at Donald Trump. Can you elaborate why you believe the pope’s words were a mistake?

Yes, the problem here appears to reflect a kind of historical and theological amnesia among many post-Vatican II Catholic leaders. Historically, and certainly from a theological perspective grounded in both Natural Law and traditional Catholic teaching, the position that a country, a nation, has the right to control its borders and to regulate who enters, is both legitimate and consistent. Indeed, in many respects such a traditional view is based on the principle that a constituted state is modeled, if you will, on the microcosm of the family. The family is the basic, God-given building block in and of a society. The state reflects that organic and natural composition on a national level. Just as the family has the natural right to regulate who its members are and who becomes a member of it, so, too, does a state. There is absolutely nothing anti-Catholic about this position, and there are numerous popes and theologians who have ratified that position.

Pope Francis has a way of throwing out controversial statements carelessly and informally in the presence of eager news reporters. In too many cases, those statements, while certainly informal and off-the-cuff, do not truly reflect the traditional positions of the church. In the case of Donald Trump and his positions on illegal immigration, or, for that matter, on Muslims coming to the United States, his views in no way contradict Catholic teaching from over the centuries. Indeed, the fact that the Vatican Press Office felt the need to clarify Francis’s initial statement only confirmed that Trump was correct in what he has said, and that, indeed, what he said is consistent with the historical positions of the Church.

2. There are many critics of Donald Trump on both the establishment left and right and in the mainstream conservative movement. How does a traditional Catholic and American patriot, like yourself, explain his support for the GOP frontrunner? What issues has he touched upon that appeal to you?

The major questions for me are, first, the issue of illegal immigration, its effects on my country, and what should be done to address this problem; and, second, the absolute necessity to challenge the increasingly managerial and authoritarian duopoly—that is, the control by political elites over the American nation. Historically, the United States was established as an aristocratic republic, indeed, somewhat like historic Poland. The founders of this nation and the framers of our Constitution understood that pure democracy, with a mass of citizens directly at the mercy of a powerful political establishment and all of its persuasive power, would very likely lead to the kind of oligarchy that we now have in the United States. Most of our founders understood this, and our original Constitution incorporated their insights, leaving to the separate states the ability to largely govern themselves. Indeed, and many people do not know this, most of the original thirteen states in the American union had established churches, most had property qualifications for voting and to hold office. My own state of North Carolina required office holders to be of the Christian faith until 1868. The franchise was limited to those with a real interest in the republic because, as the great observer Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his Democracy in America, the tendency in history is for democracies to be transformed into dictatorships.

For the past half century, and actually since the end of the American War Between the States (1861-1865), the American nation has been on a pathway to increasingly centralized control and the decay and lessening of what we as Catholics would call subsidiarity. Politically, this has meant the rise of just two powerful political parties, which, between them, control the political process and also create the rules that ensure that they continue in power.

This year Donald Trump, for all his rough manners and his checkered career and past unorthodox positions, is the only candidate to stand outside the dominant political dialectic. All the others, in one way or another, are part of it. Many Americans are willing to overlook Trump’s past history if he can succeed in radically upturning the present system, which is so dependent on financially powerful interest groups and on dividing the citizenry into “block votes,” who are in reality bought off by the political class.

As a traditional Catholic, I firmly believe in the traditional social and political teachings of the Church on subsidiarity and distributive justice in society. The most important need today in the American political sphere is to overturn the political apparatus, the control not only politically, but also culturally, by the establishment and its managers who direct our nation diametrically away from our roots in Western Christian tradition.

I have written previously that Donald Trump is no “shining Christian knight on horseback,” but he does perhaps represent a strong necessary medication that could clear away the establishment debris that suffocates us. He might well be an imperfect Samson who could bring down the latter-day Temple of the Philistines, so that future generations may have the opportunity to re-construct a truly Christian Commonwealth. This may well be why so many traditional Catholics are attracted to his candidacy.

3. “National Review”, the once revered flagship of American conservatism, which at one time published such giants as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, has strongly come out against Trump, even devoting an entire issue to this theme. From where does this opposition stem from? Is “National Review” still a truly rightist and conservative outlet?

The National Review, founded back in the mid-1950s, was once the unchallenged vehicle for American conservative thought (along with quarterly Modern Age, founded by Dr. Kirk).  But since the late 1970s and early 1980s, not just the National Review, but the history of “movement conservatism” in the United States, has radically diverged from its older positions on many questions. Kirk, whom I knew well for twenty-seven years and for whom I was his assistant for a time, by the time of his death in April 1994 did not recognize the magazine that he once wrote for.

Let me explain. I think useful here to offer some recent history about “movement conservatism” in the United States.

In 1953 Russell Kirk published his path breaking and seminal volume The Conservative Mind, and gave voice to a critical understanding of Anglo-American conservatism, and of the existence of a veritable conservative intellectual tradition in America. And throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, that older conservatism was the most attractive and exciting beacon in American intellectual life, drawing to its banners the most accomplished writers and journalists, in journals like Modern Age and the (old) National Review.

Kirk’s evocation of conservatism included an understanding of the supreme importance of tradition and custom in the existence of a nation.  America, Kirk insisted, was not founded on a democratic, hegemonic ideology, but as an expression and continuation of European traditions and strong localist, familial and religious belief. Undoing or destroying the legacies and heritage of our ancestors would be fatal to the nation.  Conservatives should also celebrate local traditions, customs, and the inherited legacies of other peoples, and not attempt to destroy them. “Conservatism,” as Kirk explained it, encompassed an inherent distrust of liberal democracy, staunch opposition to egalitarianism, and an extreme reluctance to commit the United States to global “crusades” to impose American “values” on “unenlightened” countries around the world.

The United States had no business in trying to impose its system of government or its culture on other nations of the globe. Egalitarianism and democracy were not, he added, conservative principles; and, indeed, the Founders of the American republic understood that egalitarianism and expansive democracy could well lead to the actual loss of liberties. The variety of intermediate social institutions in society—the family, the church, the professional associations, schools and colleges—provided a necessary buffer between individuals and the natural tendency of the central state to enlarge its powers. And religion, in particular Christian religious belief, was an essential cement that bound all generations together, the living and the dead, in an organic whole.

Beginning in the 1970s and into the Reagan years, newer voices—the self-denominated Neoconservatives, or “Neocons”—migrated into the movement, and many of these voices came from the Trotskyite Left, many traumatized by the revelations of unspeakable Soviet brutality. Represented by such luminaries as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, at first they were welcomed by the custodians of the Old Right in the struggle against world communism and collectivism. With strong academic connections and financial sources, the Neocons soon took control of most of the older conservative foundations, think tanks, and publications, and they did so with an iron hand, reminiscent of older days, when their Marxism was readily visible. And, more significantly, through this control of most “conservative” institutions, especially those centered in Washington, D. C., they very soon began to provide experts and advisors to the national Republican Party and its candidates. Their dominance manifested itself in organs such as the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and in publications like Commentary, The Public Interest, and National Review (which shed its previous attachments to the older conservatism). The advent of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, with Fox News television, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and the New York Post as its notable voices, cemented this influence, which manifested itself abundantly in post-Reagan GOP policies and prescriptions.

And almost immediately their essential base principles, which remained over on the philosophical Left, clashed with the precepts and principles of the older conservatives.  The principles which so characterized the Old Right were replaced with an ideological zeal for the very opposite of those principles. Older conservative icons such as Southerners John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, included prominently in Kirk’s pantheon of great conservatives, were, due to their opposition to egalitarianism, expelled from the Neoconservative lexicon, to be replaced by Abraham Lincoln, and later figures such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Lincoln, who was not included in Kirk’s pantheon, became the new and real “Founder” of the American republic, as the editor of the post-William Buckley National Review, Rich Lowry, contends. The civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, with its far-reaching and radical court decisions, was pronounced to be “conservative,” and, at the same time, Southern conservatives, such as the brilliant Mel Bradford, and anti-egalitarians, such as Dr. Samuel Francis, were purged out of the “movement.” Scholars such as Bradford, Joseph Sobran, and the internationally-recognized political scientist/historian, Paul Gottfried, had their careers attacked, were denied well-deserved professional positions, and were banished from formerly conservative publications and access to the largesse of formerly conservative foundations.

The Neoconservative template bears an uncanny resemblance to its older Marxist/ Progressivist internationalist narrative, which, in effect, has never been fully discarded. Let me cite just one very striking example from writer Stephen Schwartz of the “new” National Review. Pay particular attention to his praise of Marxist internationalism and Trotsky:

“To my last breath, I will defend Trotsky who alone and pursued from country to country and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling to Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, and who had the capacity to admit that he had been wrong about the imposition of a single-party state as well as about the fate of the Jewish people. To my last breath, and without apology. Let the neofascists and Stalinists in their second childhood make of it what they will.” [see Paul Gottfried’s commentary on Takimag.com, April 17, 2007]

In the execution of their policies, the Neocons and their Republican mouthpieces have led the American republic into unwinnable and extremely unwise wars everywhere, in the name of international crusades for democracy. They have scorned the older conservatism that rejects egalitarian nostrums, liberal democracy, feminism, and all the hoary stream of aberrations that have come from those barbarities.  They zealously, with near religious desire, seek to remake this nation, with “amnesty” and accepting millions of illegals who will transform and radically alter our culture (which is already under severe attack). They have enacted global trade and commercial deals that have destroyed native American manufacturing and eliminated millions of American jobs, shipping them overseas. Even more, these very same Neocons (and their GOP camp followers) have warmed to and even endorsed same sex marriage, transgenderism,  and “moderate” feminism (i.e., in the National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and from their pulpits at Fox News, etc.), views which were once considered anathema to historic conservatism

4. Trump is looking stronger and stronger with each passing day. If he wins the majority of states on Super Tuesday, he will most likely seal the nomination. Do you expect the Republican establishment to try and manipulate the convention process in order to knock out the Donald?

I will not be surprised if such a maneuver is attempted by some in the Republican establishment who believe they deserve a certain noblesse oblige and deference from those of us out in the country who do not belong to the Inside-the-Washington–Beltway elite. However, if Trump does appear headed to the nomination, I also expect a number of these Republican elites and political bosses to attempt to cozy up to him, that is, to attempt to at the least limit the kind of damage to them that he might well inflict. It will very interesting to watch this process. Trump is self-funding his campaign, and he owes nothing to the establishment, so I suspect that financial allures will not affect him. He has promised to place successful businessmen (like himself) in high positions, and has a way of rebuffing the kind of sycophantic approaches that most of our politicians are susceptible to.

5. In Poland recently there has been a revival of interest in the late Russell Kirk, for whom you worked as an assistant. What aspects of Kirk’s thought in your opinion deserve universal recognition in the countries and societies of former Christendom?

Kirk’s interpretation and exposition of Anglo-American conservatism owes very much to his understanding that true conservatism must incorporate and incarnate essentially Western Christian tradition. In The Conservative Mind (most especially in the early editions) he sums up several fundamental principles that characterize American conservatism, and these can be seen equally in the traditions and heritage of most historically Christian European peoples and nations. Fundamentally, a country is an historically organic continuum, in which its customs and traditions, its race and language, its laws, and its religion, over centuries secure not only civic order and justice, but also a rich and nourishing culture. In Europe, and also in the United States, the living inheritance of our faith is the central element that has created our culture, and it is, to paraphrase the great Spanish Catholic Marcellino Menendez y Pelayo, the only culture we have. We discard, or pervert, or destroy this inheritance at severe risk. Kirk reminds us that once a noble and ennobling tradition is destroyed, it is extremely difficult to reconstruct it. Yet, he also reminds us, with the poet Robert Frost,

“For, dear me, why abandon a belief

Merely because it ceases to be true.

Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt

It will turn true again, for so it goes.

Most of the change we think we see in life

Is due to truths being in and out of favour.”  [from the poem, “The Black Cottage”]

If there is to be a rebirth of Europe, indeed, a rebirth of the Faith, then the words of Russell Kirk, his understanding of the critical role of our religious heritage, of our historic social and familial institutions, and of our inherited legacy, could play an instructive and valuable role. Such a rebirth would not be easy by any means, but our faith teaches us that miracles and miraculous events do happen in history. As most of your readers know well, it was King Jan Sobieski and his small army (including those noble Winged Hussars) at Vienna in 1683 who literally saved Europe from being overrun by the Islamic hordes of Kara Mustafa. By many standards the annihilation of the Muslim invaders was miraculous. And who is to say that the petitions of the faithful will not again be answered?

The post Trump – Is He a Remedy for the Establishment? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Following in the shameful footsteps of both Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney continues pledging support and money (which Canadians desperately need) to Ukraine, to prolong the proxy war against Russia.

Carney chose Ukrainian Independence Day to voice the Canadian government’s continued pledge to support Ukraine. As he landed in Kiev on August 24, Carney posted on X, “On this Ukrainian Independence Day, and at this critical moment in their nation’s history, Canada is stepping up our support and our efforts towards a just and lasting peace for Ukraine.”

Later in the day he posted, “After three years at war, Ukrainians urgently need more military equipment. Canada is answering that call, providing $2 billion for drones, armoured vehicles, and other critical resources.” This latest pledge brings Canada’s expenditure on Ukraine since February 2022 to nearly $22 billion.

Further, he pledged to potentially send Canadian or allied soldiers, stating, “I would not exclude the presence of troops.”

Pause for a moment to examine the utter lack of logic behind these statements: For “peace” for Ukraine, Canada will support further war to ensure more Ukrainian men are ripped off the streets and forced to the front lines, where they will inevitably die in a battle they didn’t sign up for.

Like his European counterparts, Carney’s insistence on prolonging the war is in contrast to Russia’s position of finding a resolution.

I recently spoke with former Ambassador Charles Freeman, an American career diplomat for 30 years. Speaking of how the Trump administration, “began in office by perpetuating the blindness and deafness of the Biden administration to what the Russian side in this conflict has said from the very beginning,” he outlined the terms that Russia made clear in December 2021, “and from which it has basically not wavered.”

These include: “neutrality and no NATO membership for Ukraine; protections for the Russian speaking minorities in the former territories of Ukraine; and some broader discussion of European security architecture that reassures Russia that it will not be attacked by the West, and the West that it will not be attacked by Russia.”

It’s worth keeping in mind that Canada has been one of the main belligerents in Ukraine, funding and training Ukrainian troops for many years before the 2022 start of Russia’s military operation.

Canada’s training of Ukrainian troops included members of the notorious neo-Nazi terrorists of the Azov regiment. Former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland proudly waved a Banderite flag in 2022. She was also proud of her dear grandfather, who was a chief Nazi propagandist.

In 2023, the Trudeau administration brought to speak in the Canadian parliament a Ukrainian Nazi, Yaroslav Hunka, who had been a voluntary member of the 1st Galician Division of the Waffen SS – well known for their mass slaughter of civilians.

Carney, in light of this, is merely keeping with the tradition of Ottawa’s support of extremism – including Nazism – in Ukraine (and in Canada). This support is not at all about protecting Ukrainian civilians.

Supporting Ukrainian war crimes

Canada’s continued support to Ukraine makes it complicit in the atrocities Ukraine commits.  I myself have documented just some of Ukrainian war crimes in the Donbass, in 2019 and heavily throughout 2022.

These include deliberately shelling civilian areas (including with heavy-duty NATO weapons), slaughtering civilians in their homes, in markets, in the streets, in buses; peppering Donbass civilian areas with internationally prohibited PFM-1 “Petal” mines (since 2022, 184 civilians have been maimed by these, three of whom died of their injuries); and deliberately targeting medics and other emergency service rescuers.

Ukraine has also heavily shelled Belgorod and Kursk, targeting civilians, as well sending drones into Russian cities, killing civilians and destroying infrastructure.

Less detailed are Ukraine’s crimes against civilians in areas under Ukrainian control. These crimes – including rape, torture and point-blank assassination – come to light with the testimonies of terrorized civilians in regions liberated by Russia.

Bring the government spending home

The social media fervor of Ukrainian hashtags and flags has died down considerably since 2022. Now, you see more and more Canadians demanding their government stop fueling war and start spending money to take care of Canadians.

Carney’s campaign pledges included easing the cost of living in Canada, yet he has taken no concrete actions to do so. In the many understandably angry replies to Carney’s latest tweets about supporting Ukraine, Canadians are demanding accountability.

“Mark Carney stop pretending you’re fighting for “freedom and sovereignty.” You just signed off on $2 BILLION of Canadian money for Ukraine while Canadians can’t even afford rent, food, or heating,” reads one of numerous such replies. “Veterans are abandoned, fentanyl floods our streets, and families collapse under inflation. You stand on foreign soil preaching about democracy while selling out the very people you’re supposed to serve. That’s not leadership that’s betrayal. Canadians never voted for this. You don’t speak for us.”

Scroll through replies to Carney’s Kiev stunt and you’ll find Canadians opposed to the wasting of still more money needed in their home country.

The most glaring hypocrisy is that while Carney wrings his hands over Ukraine, he utterly ignores the ongoing Israeli starvation and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, supported by the Canadian government.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

The post Canada Keeps Bankrolling Ukraine’s War Crimes appeared first on LewRockwell.

It looks like our liberal friends wanted to use the firing of Jimmy Kimmel as a narrative to neuter the Charlie Kirk assassination. That was then. But now, after the speech by Charlie’s widow, Erika Kirk, who cares?

Up until the morning of September 21, 2025, our liberal friends demanded to define the Narrative, whether it was the glorious success of the New Deal, the horrible lies of Joseph McCarthy, the death of JFK as right-wing hate, the racism of Barry Goldwater, the guilt of Richard Nixon in Watergate, the dunce-ness of Ronald Reagan, the greedy bankers of 2008, the innocence of George Floyd, the collusion of Trump with Russia, the armed insurrection of January 6, the helplessness of transgenders.

But now Erika Kirk has spoken.

Before today we were taught to believe the Mass Media Narrative on anything.

And so, we were to be taught, the firing of Jimmy Kimmel counts as a “frenzy of right-wing cancel culture.”

Really? A word from the chairman of the FCC equals wall-to-wall right-wing cancel culture?

I guess I live in an ideological bubble. I had no idea that right-wing cancel culture was a thing. Is it currently sweeping Hollywood, the universities, public education, the NGO Industrial Complex? Or what?

But now that Erika Kirk has spoken, who cares?

Here is what the “frenzy of right-wing cancel culture” means. It means that our liberal friends are in a frenzy of fear that they won’t dominate the Narrative, as they have for the last century.

This is the great question at the present moment. Will the liberal Narrative prevail, once more, or have we reached the end of an age?

But now that Erika Kirk has spoken, who cares?

As the liberal narrative fails to define the present moment, a new age in America dawns.

And up until this moment, our liberal friends had no idea. Read this piece reporting on the Slack channel for NYTimesies:

@Newsroom: Hey all, does anyone know or have access to someone who goes to church and/or knows something in re churchgoing/god etc. for the piece we’re working on about the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder?

Really? You NYT experts don’t have your IC-adjacent embedded contacts reporting regularly from the far-right churched insurrection sector so you can cancel it?

Reply: I think my son knows someone who has a friend who has a cousin who has a roommate in Bed-Stuy who (I think) went to Alabama State.

Three degrees of separation, just to be safe from those TPUSAers.

Here’s a suggestion for you NYTimesies. Think about what it means that the memorial for Charlie Kirk filled a sports stadium with hundreds of thousands outside, and that everyone who is anyone attended, from Elon Musk to Donald Trump.

What does it mean?

It means that the energetic young TPUSAers that spoke at the Charlie Kirk memorial are about a standard deviation smarter than you NYTimesies.

And their words were nothing, compared to the words of Erika Kirk.

So you can understand what is happening, I’d like to suggest that you NYTimesies ponder the meaning of the three most recent media ages, suggested by Martin Gurri in The Revolt of the Public.

First, there was the Age of Gutenberg, when intellectuals could read and write and publish printed books. The intellectuals dominated the world in the Age of Revolution.

Second, there was the Age of One-Way Mass Media, in which we humans saw the bloodiest wars and regimes in world history. That’s the thing about mass media — like the New York Times. The educated class gussies up the Narrative, the Mass Media blasts it out, and off the Doughboys and GIs go to war.

Third, we are now in the Age of Two-Way Media, in which the one-way world of one-way propaganda is living on life support, and an energetic organization like TPUSA can create its own narratives and ideas and communicate with the world out of the range of the New York Times Slack channel.

And a guy like Charlie Kirk, son of an architect who never went to college, can create a national movement in ten years and the NYTimesies on the New York Times Slack channel still know next to nothing about it.

We are At the End of an Age according to John Lukacs, the end of the Modern Age that began five hundred years ago.

Twenty years ago, Lukacs wrote that the Modern Age at its height was the Age of the Bourgeois, for its minds and creators were mostly of bourgeois origins and status that replaced the nobles of the Middle Ages.

I say that the new age will be an age of the ordinary. The future will belong to energetic youngsters like the TPUSAers we saw and heard at the Charlie Kirk memorial. And his widow, Erika Kirk.

It’s okay, NYTimesies. We forgive you.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post It’s the End of the Age, NYTimesies appeared first on LewRockwell.

In today’s world we need to be vigilant and prepared for sudden changes in our environment which may be brought on by Mother Nature or Political Activities. We all want to protect our family from harm, and preparedness for disaster emergencies should be one of our top priorities. I’m not advocating that you pack up your family and move to some isolated location to hide from the world, but I am offering simple preparations for ice storms, floods, hurricanes, or terrorist activities will make your existence much more palatable during the disaster.

1. Be prepared – Yes, the first thing on the list is to use the list to be prepared. It is one thing to take a glance at the list, but unless you actually put this list into a workable plan for your family, then reading this is just wasted time on your part. Just making the preparations will give you a sense of calm when faced with the disaster.

This sense of calm will work in your favor because you will be less likely to be one of the hordes of people acting in a reactionary, fear driven, panic when the reality of the disaster is recognized (usually when the news anchors start saying things like “This is going to be bad.”… or… “We can’t stress enough the dangerous nature of this storm.”… or… “Here is video of people fighting over the last of the bread at this grocery store.”… or… “The police have lost control of this area of town.” While the crowds are rushing to the grocery store and emptying the aisles of bread and milk, you will be safely at home making last minute preparations to keep yourself and your family safe.

Because I realize that there is a definite cost factor in making these preparations, I will try to prioritize the items on the list as to which are absolutely necessary and which ones can be added as funds are available. Any item with an * next to it is a priority item and needs to be included from the beginning. To my Prepper Friends, I do realize that this list will not satisfy your need to prepare for any and all situations and it is only a short term duration solution, so don’t pounce on me with a long list of items that you think I have left off. It is intentionally a short, condensed list which is meant to help an average family through a short term disaster situation, not a nuclear holocaust. I also have not addressed any need for firearms or ammunition.

A big part of the preparation is being organized. There will be enough things to be concerned with when the situation presents itself, trying to remember where all of your supplies might be stored should not be one of them. Buy one of the following. We will be storing everything possible in them, so your preparedness items will be readily available to you when you need them.

a. Storage Locker* – Find a well built, heavy plastic storage locker that is large enough to hold a lot of gear, but still small enough to fit in the trunk of your car or the bed of your truck. This is not one of those plastic storage bins that people use to store winter clothes in during the summer, this thing needs to be a bit more durable than that. Find one with handles to make it easier to move into and out of your vehicle. Most stores like Academy will have them starting at about $20.

b. Backpack* – This is not a child’s school backpack. Go to the camping section and find one that is well made, durable, and large enough to hold lots of stuff. Don’t worry about it being too big, we are not going to have to backpack across the Grand Canyon with it, and my experience is that you ALWAYS need more space to store stuff. The starting price for a good one will be around $39, but if you can only afford a back-to-school type backpack, go ahead and get it, we can always upgrade later.

2. Shelter from the weather – Unexpected disasters will likely subject you to the elements. This could be due to a fast developing situation where you are caught away from home when the disaster strikes, or it could result from a storm that has caused widespread power outages, broken windows in your home, or taken off a portion of your roof. Exposure to the weather is not just annoying, it can be dangerous. The combination of being wet and cold is deadly.

a. Polyethylene tarp – These come in a variety of sizes and are quite inexpensive. (a 6×8 tarp is only about $5 if you check some camping supply stores). These are great for keeping out the weather if windows are broken during a storm. They can also be used for a makeshift tent if you happen to be caught out of your home when the disaster strikes. They will be great for keeping you dry and holding off the wind. Get 3-4 of them. Put them in your storage locker.

b. Plastic rain poncho* – One for every member of your family, plus a few extra (they are cheap (as little as $1) and will get torn when being worn for any length of time). Get the kind that fold up into a small pouch. Put into your backpack.

c. Quart – ½ Gallon sized plastic zip-lock bags* – These will be used to store some of the items on this list as well as storage of food and medicines. These are important, but cheap. Put in the storage locker.

d. Wool, Cotton, Fleece pullover or Hoodie – One for every member of the family. My preference would be wool, but anything is better than nothing. They are about $12 each for Haynes brand at most stores. If the power goes out, or if you are caught away from home, the cooler temps at night are deceptively dangerous. One main goal is to stay dry and warm. Roll up and place into a zip-lock bag and then put in your backpack.

e. Extra wool or cotton socks* – Two or three pair for every member of the family. Style is not important here, regular white tube socks are just fine (about $8 for a pack of 3). Cheap, but a fresh change of socks can do wonders, and will help keep your feet more healthy and comfortable during the disaster situation and can act as emergency mittens if needed. I can’t say enough about taking care of your feet. I know it sounds trivial, but it is not. Put unopened packs into zip-lock bags and then into your backpack (keeping them dry is key).

f. Change of clothes* – A complete change of clothes for each member of the family. This is not time for a fashion statement, we are after durability and function here. Long pants (blue jeans) and a long sleeve shirt. Don’t forget a change of underwear. Also include a pair of shoes that you would be comfortable wearing for long periods of time. An old pair of tennis shoes might be the answer. Really no costs here, we are going to use clothes we already have in the closet, but probably don’t wear because it has a stain on it, or it is not a color we wear often. Put in the storage locker.

g. Sleeping Bag – One for each member of the family. In this case, I am recommending a specific product, SOL Emergency Bivvy Bag* (do a Google search for stores selling it). Sells for about $17 each but packs up very small and will save your life. Much smaller than a standard sleeping bag (starting price, around $20). If you have the room for a sleeping bag for each person, by all means get them. Store the SOL Emergency Bivvy Bag in your backpack, and the Sleeping bags in a single location near where you will store the backpack and storage locker.

3. Safety and Security – There are several items that you will need to make sure that you and your family remain healthy and safe.

a. Medical Kit – You should get two kits.

I. The first is a small, compact first aid kit* that can easily be stored in a zip-lock bag and placed in your backpack and are designed to take care of minor medial issues like blisters, splinters, sprains, etc. They sell for less than $20.

ii. The next is a more complete kit, sometimes called a trauma kit. It contains more supplies and tools and is usually marketed as a Sportsman’s First Aid Kit, or an Outdoors Adventure Medical Kit (starting price is about $49). Store this in your storage locker.

b. CPR Training* – At least one person in your family needs to be CPR certified. The Red Cross and American Heart Association offer classes on a regular basis, but usually charge for the certification class ($70-$110). Most fire departments also offer classes but these classes do not provide a certification needed to fulfill any job requirements (usually free).

c. Know your evacuation routes* – Think about where you could go if you had to quickly leave your home due to the disaster. Keep in mind the destinations that would be appropriate for the situation (going to stay with your Uncle on the coast may work well if your home is threatened by a fire, but is not a good idea if you are fleeing a hurricane). Get an old fashioned paper map ($5-$10) and learn how to read it, don’t rely on your navigation app to get you anywhere, the system could be down due to the disaster. Have more than one route mapped out for each destination, roads may be impassable and you may need to find a secondary route. Keep the map in your vehicle.

d. Make a list of contacts* – Everyone in the family should have a list of important contacts they carry with them. Make sure you include numbers for your office, your partner’s office, your children’s schools, day care, doctors, and close family members. Include the numbers of your health and home owner’s insurance companies, as well as your policy numbers. On this list include information of any medical condition and medications needed for all family members (for young children, also include the date of birth). Also designate a family member or friend that will serve as the point-of-contact if your family is separated. Choosing someone out of town is a good idea because they may be less likely to be experiencing the same issues in their area as you are experiencing in yours. Put this list inside of a zip-lock bag and place in your backpack (and an emergency contact list in your child’s school backpack).

e. Money – In disaster situations, ATM’s, credit cards and debit cards may not work or may not be accepted by merchants. Have a stash of emergency funds available in cash. It doesn’t need to be lots of money, but make sure that you have both small bills and some change (probably quarters) already packed in your backpack. The amount that you choose is up to you, but I suggest that it is enough to get a tank of gas, a few meals for the family while on the road, or buy some last minute item needed for the situation at hand.

4. Food and Water – It is a good idea to have a minimum of three days’ emergency supply of food* on hand at all times. My preference would be two weeks. Keep in mind that this does not mean regular full blown meals, these are meals during emergency situations. If you are remaining at home and the power is gone, here are some guidelines to follow:

a. First, use perishable goods from the pantry (apples, bananas, oranges, potatoes, hard packaged salamis, sausages, pepperoni, etc.) and food items in the refrigerator. Do not open the freezer!

b. Second, use the items stored in your freezer. Limit the number of times the freezer door is opened. Foods stored in a well-stocked freezer will still have ice crystals in the center even after two days of no power and will be safe to eat. Place zip-lock bags ¾ filled with water into the freezer so that you will have ice bags already in the freezer if the power goes off. These bags will fit into the spaces between items and will help keep them frozen and safe for longer periods of time after the power is out.

c. Third, use non-perishable items from the pantry. If you don’t already have them on hand, these are also the things you want to stock up on if you have a warning that a storm is headed your way. Don’t worry about bread and milk. The following items should be a part of your emergency supply because will last a long time and will be a perfect supplement for your family’s nutrition: Peanut butter, nuts, canned meats, canned vegetable soups, canned fruits and vegetables, dried fruits, instant cereals that only require water, white rice, hard candy and canned nuts, crackers, trail mix, granola bars, power bars, sports drinks.

d. Water is essential for life. It is also needed for cleaning utensils, cooking, bathing, and brushing teeth. Maintaining personal hygiene is a top priority in a disaster situation. Not only does it keep you physically healthy, but it gives you a morale boost as well. Store your water near the storage locker so that you know exactly where it is when the disaster strikes.

I. A minimum of one gallon of water per family member per day. This will supply the needs of each person for personal hygiene. This water can be stored in plastic containers and filled when making last minute preparations for the disaster (time permitting). I suggest getting several 5-gallon collapsible containers* from the camping supply store (about $7). When not in use, they take up very little space. While water supplies are usually not totally disrupted during storms, the water supply may become contaminated. If these containers are filled at the beginning of the storm or disaster preparation, the water will be good for personal hygiene or for drinking (if needed) for several months.

ii. Bottled water for drinking packaged in small containers is great for almost any situation. They can be included in a backpack, carried in your pocket, or loose in the vehicle for use at any time. A case of bottled water can be as little as $2 at the grocery store and has a relatively long shelf life.

5. Tools – There are certain things that you need to have on hand to be prepared for a disaster situation. Place these in the storage locker.

a. Flashlight – Having working flashlights is a must. Do not make the mistake of buying flashlights for your disaster kit and then using them around the house. If you do, then you will inevitably find them with dead batteries when they are needed most. Get several LED flashlights with a minimum brightness of 15-20 lumens*. If you have children, get a multi-pack of LED flashlights. This will give them something to keep them from being scared of the dark and a light that they can play with and will keep them from playing with your flashlights. Both single flashlights and small multi-pack flashlights can be found for as little as $5 each.

b. Extra Batteries – In many flashlights, the batteries are good for about 12-16 hours of use. Get enough spare batteries to replace the batteries in your flashlights 5 times.

c. Manual Can Opener – If the power goes out, you need to have a way to open the cans in your pantry.

d. Moist Towelettes – These are useful for all kinds of personal hygiene and cleaning household surfaces.

e. Garbage Bags* – Tall kitchen bags are probably the best size to use. You do not want any garbage to build up in your home.

f. Dust Masks – In the aftermath of a disaster gas explosion, earthquake, hurricane, volcano, tornado, tsunami, winter storm, terrorist attack, flood, fire, accident or other emergency, contaminants may be released into the air. It is important to have an air filtration mechanism such as a dust mask or particulate air filter.

g. Pry Bar – In an emergency situation, the basic reason for having a pry-bar is to open a door or window. If water, or heat from a fire, causes wood to swell, or an earthquake causes a door to jam, or a file cabinet or book case keeps the door closed, and we must get through it, having a pry-bar is the only way to go. The flat bar type, 18″ – 24″ in length is just fine and should cost $10-$15 for a quality one.

h. Fire Extinguisher* – Get a small to medium sized ABC extinguisher, available for $15 – $20.

I. Channel Lock Style Pliers – A quality channel lock pliers of at least 10″ length is a must for your disaster tool box. Do not buy a cheap one, it will not work properly and will slip when you need it most. They are available for as little as $15 at most hardware supply stores (Home Depot, Lowes, etc).

j. Adjustable Wrench – You need to have a quality adjustable wrench in your disaster tool box, and it needs to be at least 10″ in length to be able to have the leverage that you might need. They are available from the hardware supply stores for about $12 each.

k. Screwdriver Set – Get a basic screw driver set that has various sizes and both flat and Philips style tips. Again, a quality set is important, because a cheap set will not hold up at all. A basic 10 piece set will cost approximately $20 at any hardware supply store.

l. Claw Hammer – This tool is one of those multi-purpose tools that you will find quite useful. Available from $10 everywhere.

m. Camping Style Cookware – If the power goes out you may find the need to cook on a camp fire or in your fireplace. You will not be able to use your everyday cookware for this, and something as simple as a hot cup of coffee in the morning can make a huge difference in your day.

I. Dutch Oven – a Dutch oven will provide you with a great meal that you can cook right on an open flame, such as your fireplace.

ii. Coffee Pot – Get an enamel coffee pot, you will be glad you did. You will be able to make coffee, tea, or even just boil water for use in cooking.

n. Multi-tool – A Leatherman style Multi-tool will be the solution for a multitude of situations and is available for around $15 at most camping or hardware supply stores.

o. Folding Knife – There is no need to buy a giant knife like the one Crocodile Dundee used in the movies. A folding knife with a blade length of 4 inches is just fine. Make sure that the blade locks open so that you can use it more safely. Starting at $15 at most camping supply stores.

This is a good starting point for your family disaster preparedness. It is only a starting point, there is so much more that you can do to be prepared. However, if you do nothing more than the things on this list, you will be far ahead of many others who will be floundering around when the time for action comes.

This article was originally published on Ultimate-Survival.

The post First Things You Need To Do Right Now To Be Prepared for a Natural or Man-Made Disaster appeared first on LewRockwell.

It refuses to end. Synoding, that is. That clever term is George Weigel’s and captures the whimsical inanity of the Bergoglian invention of synodality. In a recent essay of Mr. Weigel’s in that estimable journal First Things, he was rather irenic about the past aims of synodality. To me, he was straining a bit too far for my theological tastes. But bending over backward seems to have become a signature métier for Mr. Weigel. But a man of his intellectual stature should know that the problem with bending over backward is that you soon find yourself unable to stand straight again.

O yes, synoding. Restrain your laughter (or fear) as I present an enticing morsel from the official Pathways for the Implementation of the Present Phase of the Synod 2025-2028:

We recall that the purpose of the Synod is not to produce documents, but to plant dreams, draw forth prophecies and visions, allow hope to flourish, inspire trust, bind up wounds, weave together relationships, awaken a dawn of hope, learn from one another and create a bright resourcefulness that will enlighten minds, warm hearts, give strength to our hands.

This bears as much resemblance to Catholicism as a seven-year-old’s birthday party. More woefully, it has as much to do with religion as astrology has to do with astronomy.

But synodality is the most recent in a long line of embarrassing experiments of the past half century. It seems as though the Church’s leaders have one rule: if an experiment has failed because of its absurdity, the next one must be made more absurd.

An older generation of Catholics can bear this out. They must admit an embarrassing familiarity with such lovelies as: Call to Action, Nuns on the Bus, The Archdiocese of Los Angeles Religious Education Congress (still enduring with all the risibility of an octogenarian wheelchair race), Confessional Rooms, Lenten Rice Bowls, The St. Louis Jesuits, Liberation Theology, Seamless Garment and multi-colored clerical shirts. But that is only a sampling. Others have mercifully been forgotten or should be.

The net effect of these experiments is empty pews, shuttered churches, desolate seminaries, and the almost entire collapse of religious orders. A more dramatic case in point is the decades-old détente the European bishops conducted with Islam. It has resulted in wrenching violence, the burning of churches, and the near disappearance of any Catholic presence.

Only yesterday the once papabile Cardinal Parolin warned Catholics to not tip over into intolerance due to the murder of Charlie Kirk. Imagine him preaching that about blacks garroted by the Ku Klux Klan, or homosexuals thrown from the tops of buildings by Muslim jihadists. In reality’s piercing light, the benighted cardinal’s words are shown for the oratorical litter they are.

To this failed cardinal we have the words of venerable Fulton Sheen:

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance—it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broad minded.

Imagine, most Catholic priests spoke with that kind of crystalline Catholic logic 70 years ago. Now they babble in the accommodating Parolin patois.

All this endless assembly line of synodal novelties betrays nothing less than a tiring of God. He is a consuming fire, and this crowd has turned Him into an afterglow of fading embers. The Church’s mission is entirely supernatural, and the language of the supernatural is uttered with the crackling tongues of fire given to her at Pentecost. She also wields the supernatural tools in her sacred traditions as she has for millennia. These tried-and-true weapons have been successful in bringing the liberating Gospel of Our Lord to every continent.

Now, she trades that divine proclamation for the junk language of synodality.

The synodalist eschews those weapons given to us by a triumphant conquering Christ, in exchange for the shiny new baubles of the zeitgeist.

The cringeworthy march of synodality epitomizes a parlous weariness with God. The incongruities could not be more conspicuous.

How does “planting dreams” accord with, “But God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ; by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14). Or can anyone explain how “planting dreams, and drawing forth prophecies and visions” is consonant with, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32).

How will the hyper-psychologized purring of “inspire trust, bind up wounds, weave together relationships, awaken a dawn of hope” possibly accord with the summoning words of Christ: “All power is given me unto heaven and on earth.  Go ye therefore and teach all nations…. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:18-20). How does the synodolist reconcile himself to Christ’s jolting words, “Think not that I am come to bring peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34).

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The renaming of the Defense Department should have surprised no one. Donald Trump is an incipient fascist doing what such figures do. Surrounded by a coterie of illiberal ideologues and careerist sycophants, he and his top aides have dispensed with pretense and precedent, moving at breakneck speed to demolish what remains of the battered façade of American democracy.

In eight months, his second administration has unleashed a shock-and-awe assault on norms and institutions, civil liberties, human rights, and history itself. But fascism never respects borders. Fascists don’t recognize the rule of law. They consider themselves the law. Expansion and the glorification of war are their lifeblood. Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini put it all too bluntly: the fascist “believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace… war alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it.”

Pete Hegseth is now equally blunt. From the Pentagon, he’s boasting of restoring a “warrior ethos” to the armed forces, while forging an offensive military that prizes “maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” The message couldn’t be clearer: when the U.S. loses wars, as it has done consistently despite commanding the most powerful military in history, it’s not due to imperial overreach, political arrogance, or popular resistance. Rather, defeat stems from that military having gone “woke,” a euphemism for failing to kill enough people.

The recent rechristening of the Department of Defense as the Department of War was certainly a culture-war stunt like Trump’s demand that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the Gulf of America. But it also signaled something more insidious: a blunt escalation of the criminal logic that has long underwritten U.S. militarism. That logic sustained both the Cold War of the last century and the War on Terror of this one, destroying millions of lives.

When Hegseth defended the recent summary executions of 11 alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers on a boat in the Caribbean, he boasted that Washington possesses “absolute and complete authority” to kill anywhere without Congressional approval or evidence of a wrong and in open defiance of international law. The next day, in responding on X to a user who called what had been done a war crime, Vance wrote, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” It was the starkest admission since the Iraq War that Washington no longer pretends to operate internationally under the rule of law but under the rule of force, where might quite simply makes right.

While such an escalation of verbiage — the brazen confession of an imperial power that believes itself immune from accountability — should alarm us, it’s neither unprecedented nor unexpected. Peace, after all, has never been the profession of the U.S. military. The Department of Defense has always been the Department of War.

American Imperialism and “Star-Spangled Fascism”

The U.S. has long denied being an empire. From its founding, imperialism was cast as the antithesis of American values. This nation, after all, was born in revolt against the tyranny of foreign rule. Yet for a country so insistent on not being an empire, Washington has followed a trajectory nearly indistinguishable from its imperial predecessors. Its history was defined by settler conquest, the violent elimination of Indigenous peoples, and a long record of covert and overt interventions to topple governments unwilling to yield to American political or economic domination.

The record is unmistakable. As Noam Chomsky once put it, “Talking about American imperialism is like talking about triangular triangles.” And he was hardly the first to suggest such a thing. In the 1930s, General Smedley Butler, reflecting with searing candor on his years of military service in Latin America, described himself as “a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism… I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests… I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”

Historically, imperialism and fascism went hand in hand. As Aimé Césaire argued in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, fascism is imperialism turned inward. The violence inherent in colonial domination can, in the end, never be confined to the colonies, which means that what we’re now witnessing in the Trumpian era is a reckoning. The chickens are indeed coming home to roost or, as Noura Erakat recently observed, “The boomerang comes back.”

In their insatiable projection of power and pursuit of profit, Washington and Wall Street ignored what European empires had long revealed: that colonization “works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him… to degrade him.” English novelist Joseph Conrad recognized this in his classic nineteenth-century work of fiction, Heart of Darkness, concluding that it wasn’t the Congo River but the Thames River in Great Britain that “led into the heart of an immense darkness.”

Imperialism incubates fascism, a dynamic evident in the carnage of World War I, rooted, as W.E.B. DuBois observed at the time, in colonial competition that laid the foundations for World War II. In that conflict, Césaire argued, the Nazis applied to Europe the methods and attitudes that until then were reserved for colonized peoples, unleashing them on Europeans with similarly genocidal effect.

War is Peace

In the postwar years, the United States emerged from the ruins of Europe as the unrivaled global hegemon. With some six percent of the world’s population, it commanded nearly half of the global gross domestic product. Anchored by up to 2,000 military bases across the globe (still at 800 today), it became the new imperial power on which the sun never set. Yet Washington ignored the fundamental lesson inherent in Europe’s self-cannibalization. Rather than dismantle the machinery of empire, it embraced renewed militarism. Rather than demobilize, it placed itself on a permanent global war footing, both anticipating and accelerating the Cold War with that other great power of the period, the Soviet Union.

The United States was, however, a superpower defined as much by paranoia and insecurity as by military and economic strength. It was in such a climate that American officials moved to abandon the title of the Department of War in 1947, rebranding it as the Department of Defense two years later. The renaming sought to reassure the world that, despite every sign the U.S. had assumed the mantle of European colonialism, its intentions were benign and defensive in nature.

That rhetorical shift would prove inseparable from a broader ideological transformation as the Cold War froze geopolitics into rigid Manichean camps. President Harry Truman’s March 1947 address to Congress marked the start of a new global confrontation. In that speech, the president proclaimed the United States the guardian of freedom and democracy everywhere. Leftist movements were cast as Soviet proxies and struggles for national liberation in the former colonial world were framed not in the language of decolonization and self-determination but as nefarious threats to American interests and international peace and security.

In Europe at the time, a civil war raged in Greece, while decisive elections loomed in Italy. Determined not to “lose” such countries to communism, Washington moved to undermine democracy under the guise of saving it. In Greece, it would channel $300 million to right-wing forces, many staffed by former fascists and Nazi collaborators, in the name of defending freedom. In Western Europe, Washington used its position as the world’s banker to manipulate electoral outcomes. In the wake of the 1947 National Security Act that created the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA (the same bill that renamed the War Department), the agency launched its first large-scale covert operation. In 1948, the U.S. would funnel millions of dollars into Italy and unleashed a torrent of propaganda to ensure that leftist parties would not prevail.

Across the Third World, the CIA perfected that template for covert interventions aimed at toppling democratic governments and installing pliant authoritarians. The overthrow of Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 marked the beginning of a series of regime-change operations. More assassinations and coups followed, including of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The utter contempt for democracy inherent in such actions was embodied in National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s remark: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

In the aftermath of each intervention, Washington installed anticommunist dictators who had one thing in common: they murdered their own citizens, and often those of other countries as well, dismantled democratic institutions, and siphoned national wealth into personal fortunes and the coffers of multinational corporations.

By the 1980s, the CIA was bankrolling proxy wars spanning the globe. Billions of dollars were being funneled to the Afghan mujahideen and Nicaraguan Contras. In both Afghanistan and Nicaragua, those U.S.-backed “freedom fighters” (or, as President Ronald Reagan termed the Contras, the “moral equals of our founding fathers”) deployed tactics that amounted to scaled-up terrorism. The mask occasionally slipped. As historian Greg Grandin has noted, one adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff described the Contras as “the strangest national liberation organization in the world.” In truth, he conceded, they were “just a bunch of killers.”

“The Greatest Purveyor of Violence”

As with the CIA, the not-so-aptly-renamed “Defense Department” would oversee a succession of catastrophic wars that did nothing to make Americans safer and had little to do with the protection of democratic values. Within a year of its renaming, the U.S. was at war in Korea. When the North invaded the South in 1950, seeking to reunify a peninsula divided by foreign powers, Washington rushed to intervene, branding it a “police action,” the first of many Orwellian linguistic maneuvers to sidestep the constitutional authority of Congress to declare war.

The official narrative that the communists launched the war to topple a democratically elected government in the South obscured its deeper origins. After World War II, Washington installed Syngman Rhee, an exile who had spent decades in the United States, as South Korea’s leader. He commanded little popular legitimacy but proved a staunch ally for American officials determined to secure an anticommunist foothold on the peninsula. Far from embodying liberal democracy, his regime presided over a repressive police state.

In 1948, two years before the war, an uprising against Rhee’s corrupt rule broke out on Jeju Island. With Washington’s blessing, his security forces launched a brutal counterinsurgency that left as many as 80,000 dead. Far from an aberration, Jeju epitomized Washington’s emerging Cold War policy: not the cultivation of democracies responsive to their citizenry (with the uncertainty that entailed), but the defense of authoritarian regimes as reliable bulwarks against communism.

The Korean War also marked a growing reliance on air power. Carpet bombing and the widespread use of napalm would reduce the North to rubble, destroying some 85% of its infrastructure and killing two million civilians. As future Secretary of State Dean Rusk would later admit, the U.S. bombed “everything that moved in North Korea.” The only “restraint” exercised was the decision not to deploy atomic bombs, despite the insistence of Air Force General Curtis LeMay who would reflect unapologetically, “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off… 20 percent of the population.”

A remarkably similar pattern unfolded in Vietnam. As revealed in the Pentagon Papers, the United States initially backed France in its attempt after World War II to reimpose colonial rule over Indochina. After the French forces were defeated in 1954, the partition of the country ensued. Elections to reunify Vietnam were scheduled for 1956, but U.S. intelligence concluded that the North’s communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, would win in a landslide, so the elections were cancelled. Once again, Washington placed its support behind the unpopular, repressive South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, chosen not for his legitimacy but for his reliability in the eyes of American policymakers.

The result was a futile slaughter. The U.S. would kill well over three million people in Southeast Asia and drop more than three and a half times the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as were used in all of World War II. That orgy of violence would lead Martin Luther King Jr., in 1967, to denounce the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” The same has held true for nearly the entire span of the past 80 years.

Empire or Democracy

The human toll of the Cold War exceeded 20 million lives. As historian Paul Chamberlin calculated, that amounted to some 1,200 deaths every day for 45 years. To call such an era “cold” was not only misleading but obscene. It was, in truth, a period of relentless and bloody global conflict, much of it instigated, enabled, or prolonged by the United States. And its wars also produced the blowback that would later be rebranded as the “War on Terror.”

The names of America’s adversaries may have changed over the years from Hitler to Stalin, Kim Il-Sung to Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein to Xi Jinping, but the principle has remained constant. Washington reserves for itself the unilateral right to intervene, violently and antidemocratically, in the affairs of other nations to secure what it considers its interests. The reversion of the Defense Department to the War Department should be seen less as a rupture than a revelation. It strips away a euphemism to make far plainer what has long been the reality of our world.

We now face a choice. As historian Christian Appy has reminded us, “The institutions that sustain empire destroy democracy.” That truth is unfolding before our eyes. As the Pentagon budget tops one trillion dollars and the machinery of war only expands in Donald Trump’s America, the country also seems to be turning further inward. Only recently, President Trump threatened to use Chicago to demonstrate “why it is called the Department of War.” Meanwhile, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, or ICE, is set to become among the most well-funded domestic “military” forces on the planet and potentially the private paramilitary of an aspiring autocrat.

If there is any hope of salvaging this country’s (not to speak of this planet’s) future, then this history has to be faced, and we must recover — or perhaps discover — our moral bearings. That will require not prolonging the death throes of American hegemony, but dismantling imperial America before it collapses on itself and takes us all with it.

This article was originally published on TomDispatch.com.

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Some two decades ago, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a major Islamic conference.  Instead of uttering the usual platitudes about Muslim unity, I rebuked the Muslim World for doing nothing to prevent the massacre of Bosnians by Serb forces and the mass rape of Bosnian Muslim women.

The only Muslim nations who had done anything to help Bosnia’s terrorized Muslims were Iran and Albania.  Then military-ruled Turkey, the second largest power in Europe, did almost nothing to help Bosnia.  If Jews were being raped or murdered, Israel’s armed forces would have gone into action to rescue them, I asserted.

Not surprisingly I was never invited back to address another Islamic gathering – except for one proud moment last year when I was made a member of Afghanistan’s Pashtun Bangash tribe.  A taxi driver refused to take money from me last week and said, ‘you are now an Afghan.’  For me, that is a badge of honor.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a possibly important accord this week.  Possibly, I say, because recent history is replete with empty security agreements between the Saudis and Pakistan.

Israel’s recent air attacks on Doha have clearly jolted the Saudis into fearing they might face more Israeli attacks similar to the ones recently suffered by Iran.  Israel appears determined to crush the feeble Arab powers of the region and impose its pax Judaica there.  To many in the Mideast, the power-drunk Trump administration appears to have become an arm of Israel’s extreme right-wing government.

The immensely rich but militarily feeble Saudis are clearly taking shelter with the terribly poor but militarily powerful, nuclear armed Pakistan – which they should have done long ago. Looking back, we recall when the late President Zia ul-Haq (whom I wrote about last week) commanded a division of crack Pakistani troops tasked with protecting Saudi Arabia’s royal family.

This should happen again. There is a small force of Pakistani troops in Saudi Arabia, and more across the Arab World.  Pakistan’s military numbers over 600,000 men.

The question remains: will Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella be used to cover Saudi Arabia? That seems unlikely for now because Saudi Royal, with its seas of money and many airbases, remains a pillar of US government power.  US arms sales to Saudi are a keystone of US military production and directly influence the rich but powerless Gulf states.  Egypt, the only Arab power worthy of note, remains subservient to US demands.

But if Israel advances its interests in the Arab World, the Saudis might invoke support from Pakistan.  But Pakistan might develop its own appetite for Arabian oil, as will surely Israel.  So too could Turkey, which appears to have taken over much of Syria and deeply hungers for oil, of which it has none.  There is also the huge question of India-Pakistan nuclear rivalry.

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Hoppe wrote:

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Lew,

Some good news for all the mothers with autistic children who persisted and persuaded RFK Jr. to start investigating the link between autism and vaccines. RFK, Jr. and President Trump held a press conference where they announced the HHS will be studying all possible causes of autism including vaccines. My favorite part was when they said the Amish don’t have autism because they don’t take vaccines. 

See here.

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