The Great Tom Massie
Donald Trump published the following on “Truth Social” about the heroic Congressman Tom Massie, in response to Massie’s voting against Trump’s budget proposal: “Thank you to the House Freedom Caucus for just delivering a big blow to the Radical Left Democrats and their desire to raise Taxes and SHUT OUR COUNTRY DOWN! They hate America and all it stands for. That’s why they allowed MILLIONS of Criminals to invade our Nation. Sometimes it takes great courage to do the right thing. Congressman Thomas Massie, of beautiful Kentucky, is an automatic “NO” vote on just about everything, despite the fact that he has always voted for Continuing Resolutions in the past. HE SHOULD BE PRIMARIED, and I will lead the charge against him. He’s just another GRANDSTANDER, who’s too much trouble, and not worth the fight. He reminds me of Liz Chaney before her historic, record breaking fall (loss!). The people of Kentucky won’t stand for it, just watch. DO I HAVE ANY TAKERS??? Anyway, thank you again to the House Freedom Caucus for your very important vote. We need to buy some time in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. Unite and Win!!! (italics removed)
Was Trump justified in what he said? Of course not! Trump continually campaigned on the promise to cut spending, but the budget proposal he supports was much higher than that of President Obama, as the great David Stockman has pointed out: “But for crying out loud, Donald, Congressman Massie has actually read every line of this 110 page abomination and knows that it provides spending authority of $1.658 trillion, which is 47% more than Big Spender Obama’s last budget. It will virtually cancel every dime DOGE has allegedly saved.”
Massie wasn’t disturbed by Trump’s threat, posting on Twitter that “Doesn’t work on me. Three times I’ve had a challenger who tried to be more MAGA than me. Doesn’t work. None busted 25% because my constituents prefer transparency and principles over blind allegiance.”
Massie is sound on Covid: “I have a bill to end the COVID jab mandate for legal immigrants, but Trump just suspended the mandate.” “Hallelujah!” he added. The representative also slammed former President Joe Biden in a separate post for initially approving the requirement. “But the reality is this: President Biden invented this cruel and unscientific mandate without congressional approval, so President Trump could end it today with his pen,” he wrote.” “I will sign an order to stop our warriors from being subjected to radical political theories and social experiments while on duty,” Trump said. “It’s going to end immediately. Our armed forces will be able to focus on its sole mission: defeating America’s enemies.”
Trump says he wants to end America’s involvement in the Ukraine war, but we are still shipping arms to Ukraine, and Trump has rescinded his withdrawal of American intelligence to guide Ukraine in its missile strikes. After Zelensky accepted Trump’s demands, he has indicated that if Putin does not agree to a cease fire, there will be dire consequences for Russia. All Trump cares about is that Zelensky kowtows to him. Massie, on the other hand, favors an immediate withdrawal of all arms shipments and financial aid to Ukraine. “Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) were the only lawmakers who voted against four bills on Wednesday that either reprimanded Russia and Belarus or supported Ukraine more than ten weeks into Moscow’s war. Greene and Massie were the only two lawmakers to vote “no” on three of the four bills. The fourth piece of legislation received resistance from 56 Republicans. All four bills passed through the House with bipartisan support. The GOP duo was the only opposition to the Russia and Belarus Financial Sanctions Act, which asserts that foreign entities and individuals under the jurisdiction of U.S. institutions are required to comply with sanctions the Biden administration has slapped on Moscow and Minsk. Reached for comment about his votes against the legislation, Massie told The Hill that the bills he objected to would put Americans at risk and lengthen the Russia-Ukraine conflict, among other claims. “Congress has voted for ten bills now that will put US citizens at risk, prolong the conflict in Ukraine, waste tax-payer money, increase domestic food and energy prices, and draw us further into this conflict. I have voted against all of them,” he wrote in a statement.”
As everybody knows, the heart of Trump’s economic policy is support for tariffs. Tariffs are ruinous for American consumers and an assault on a basic principle of the free market. As our great Mises Institute President Tom DiLorenzo has written, “There’s a saying in economics that a tax on imports is also a tax on exports. This is because if America’s foreign trading partners are impoverished by protectionist tariffs, they will then have fewer dollars with which to purchase American goods in international trade, especially agricultural products. This will obviously harm American exporters and their employees and communities. This is also patently unfair. There is nothing more anti-populist than protectionist tariff taxes. President Trump has repeatedly stated with great excitement that with his impending huge tariff tax increases “we,” meaning the federal government, are “going to take in A LOT of money.” Well now. Since when has it been the priority of the Trump administration to drain the pockets of American consumers and businesses with tariff taxes so that the federal bureaucracy can become even more enlarged and bloated than it already is? Isn’t that a flat contradiction of all of President Trump’s campaign promises, not to mention the professed goal of the DOGE?”
Massie is opposed to tariffs. As Steve Hanke, one of the foremost authorities on free trade, has noted, Masse said that “[Tariffs] create a whole industry of lobbyists who come to Congress looking for exemptions from these tariffs… It becomes a nightmare.” Hanke added that Massie is one of the few on Capitol Hill who understands how the CORRUPT tariff system works.
Massie also wants a complete shutoff of US aid to Israel. The left-wing magazine The Nation has noted the anomaly that Massie often votes against his fellow “conservatives” on aid to Israel: “But on matters of war and peace, he often sides with progressives, positioning himself as a libertarian-leaning Republican who opposes US military interventionism and military aid packages for foreign countries, including Israel. That stance has drawn sharp criticism from neoconservatives in general, who worry about the return of the sort of old-school Republican isolationism that reflexively opposed military interventions and foreign aid packages, and in particular from AIPAC, which has objected to his many votes against aid to Israel, as well as his rejection of resolutions backing Netanyahu’s government. Leading up to the Kentucky GOP primary on May 21, the AIPAC-affiliated United Democracy Project spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on attack ads against the incumbent. One such ad announced, “Israel, the Holy Land, [is] under attack by Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Congressman Tom Massie. Massie responded by calling out the attack ads, arguing that the “AIPAC superPAC just bought $300,000 of ads against me because I am often the lone Republican for freedom of speech, against foreign aid, and opposed to wars in the Middle East.” And Republican primary voters rallied to his defense, giving the incumbent three-quarters of the vote in the contest against his two rivals, including a former contender for the state’s Republican gubernatorial nomination. Massie said the results were a message for AIPAC, declaring on election day, “AIPAC, your smear campaign on this American has backfired.” He also said the result was a signal to his party’s leadership in Washington. “I don’t vote for wars, and I don’t vote for foreign aid,” Massie said. “That puts me apart from most of my colleagues in Washington, D.C., but hopefully my colleagues will see that you can get 75 percent of the vote back home if you just represent those things in the Republican Party.”
Let’s do everything we can to support Thomas Massie’s fight for the free market and a non-interventionist foreign policy! As the great Dr. Ron Paul has said, “He happens to believe that you’re supposed to follow your oath of office; it’s no more complicated than that.”
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Trump Shows His True Colors
It didn’t take long for Donald Trump to show his true colors.
Trump won a landslide election last November primarily on the promise to STOP America’s “stupid” wars. It is now obvious to everyone that, while Trump might be able to negotiate a deal to stop the war in Ukraine—a war that Russia has already won—he is decidedly intent on accelerating and expanding U.S. wars in the Middle East.
But as soon as I tell the truth about the morbid duplicity of Trump’s mind and the moral derangement of Trump’s heart, evangelicals ferociously respond with examples of the “good” things he is doing, as if any of that erases the evil he is inflicting on both America and the world.
Evangelicals are eaten up with the disease of Prophetic Dispensationalism and see Trump as a harbinger of their eschatology. Prophetic Dispensationalism is a moral and spiritual cancer that befalls the brain and hardens the heart. And it is an epidemic among evangelicals.
I well remember when I was a young pastor. I heard several prominent fundamentalist/evangelical pastors use James 5:20 to justify any act of wickedness they might commit in the same way that they use Genesis 12:3 to justify every act of wickedness that Zionist Israel does commit.
James 5:20 says, “Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins.” (KJV)
Their interpretation of this verse was that if a Christian was a “soulwinner” and won people to Christ, God would “hide” the “multitude” of the soulwinner’s “sins.” In other words, as long as a Christian was a soulwinner, none of his sins mattered—no matter how vile and wicked they might be.
That’s the same mindset of today’s Trump toadies. As long as Trump is doing something right, he cannot be condemned for anything he does wrong.
But Donald Trump has chosen a course that could lead America into World War Three and turn our constitutional republic into an authoritarian dictatorship where the fundamental mark of a free society—the freedom of speech—is eviscerated.
Regarding the latter point, Judge Andrew Napolitano and Professor John Mearsheimer (West Point, U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, PhD Cornell University, professor, University of Chicago) had this exchange:
Professor John Mearsheimer: The truth is, Judge, that the single greatest threat to freedom of speech in the United States, at this point in time, is Israel and its supporters here in the United States. It’s truly amazing the extent to which Israel’s supporters are going to enormous lengths to shut down free speech, not only on university campuses but all across the country.
Judge Napolitano: Unbelievable. I forgot to play this clip a few minutes ago. This is the boss of Marco Rubio, the boss of Attorney General Bondi, the boss of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem talking about the freedom of speech.
President Donald Trump video clip: And I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It’s back.
Mearsheimer: I’m actually surprised at the extent to which Trump and his administration are suppressing free speech. I mean, I knew it wouldn’t be perfect once he took office, but I’m amazed.
This case that you’re referring to involving this gentleman at Columbia University is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s just all sorts of activities taking place on the part of the government to shut down free speech, especially with regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
We have a huge problem here. And the idea that Donald Trump is facilitating free speech and taking off all obstacles to free speech is laughable.
Indeed.
Regarding the former point, George Galloway and Col. Douglas Macgregor had this exchange:
Col. Macgregor: I think Netanyahu is practicing American foreign policy through ventriloquy. He’s simply moving Trump’s mouth, and Trump is saying what he wants him to say.
And that is unfortunately, tragically, the perception in the United States: that Trump is not a free actor. That he is simply a puppet. And the puppet master is Netanyahu.
George Galloway: It is quite extraordinary to the extent that there is video, I’ve seen it, you will have too, of Trump actually pulling his [Netanyahu’s] chair out, having him sit down and then pushing his chair in like you would do to your good wife. This is the president of the United States practically waiting at table on a visiting politician, moreover, one for whom there’s an extant international arrest warrant.
Col. Macgregor: Well, remember that President Netanyahu does not simply represent six plus million Israeli Jews. He represents Jewish international power and capital. And so, he is treated differently for that reason, if none else.
It would be a mistake to say, “Why is President Trump allowing himself to be manipulated or exploited by this man who represents so few people?” That’s a mistake. This is a larger concentration of capital and power that he represents. And Trump knows that, and he’s dependent upon it. He was dependent upon it to get elected. So, now he’s doing what they elected him to do.
Again, it didn’t take long.
Whatever the Trump/Musk Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cutbacks might be, we already know that Trump has ZERO intention of reducing overall government spending. He just rammed a stopgap spending bill through Congress that keeps federal spending at Joe Biden levels. Conservatives don’t want to remember that Trump added over $8 trillion to the national debt during his first term in office—the same amount as Biden. But consider that Trump’s spending didn’t include federal expenditures for underwriting the Covid tyranny.
Whatever money Trump wants to save by terminating Ukraine’s cash cow, he intends to throw into an expanded U.S. war in the Middle East.
Israel has (illegally) stopped its ceasefire with Gaza and resumed the genocide (using the bombs and missiles, etc., that Trump shipped to Israel after becoming president) while, at the same time, Trump launched massive bombing raids on Yemen, killing mostly innocent women and children.
Max Blumenthal told Judge Nap that Trump owns the Gazan slaughter, that he (Trump) admitted to unleashing “this slaughterhouse in Gaza . . . on the civilian population.”
Trump is Joe Biden’s eidolon.
On Trump’s war in Yemen, Dr. Ron Paul writes:
Over the weekend President Trump ordered a massive military operation against the small country of Yemen. Was Yemen in the process of attacking the United States? No. Did the President in that case go to Congress and seek a declaration of war against the country? No. The fact is, Yemen hadn’t even threatened the United States before the bombs started falling.
Last year, candidate Trump strongly criticized the Biden Administration’s obsession with foreign interventionism to the detriment of our problems at home. In an interview at the Libertarian National Convention, he criticized Biden’s warmongering to podcaster Tim Pool, saying, “You can solve problems over a telephone. Instead they start dropping bombs. Recently, they’re dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don’t have to do that.”
Yet once in office, Trump turned to military force as his first option. Since the Israel/Hamas ceasefire plan negotiated by President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, Yemen has left Red Sea shipping alone. However, after Israel implemented a total blockade of humanitarian relief to citizens of Gaza last week, Houthi leaders threatened to again begin blocking Israel’s Red Sea shipping activities.
That was enough for President Trump to drop bombs and launch missiles for hours, killing several dozen Yemeni civilians – including women and children – in the process.
After the attack, Trump not only threatened much more force to be used against Yemen, but he also threatened Iran. His National Security Advisor Mike Waltz added that the US may start bombing Iranian ships in the area, a move that would certainly lead to a major Middle East war.
Like recent Presidents Bush and Obama, candidate Trump promised peace after four years of Joe Biden’s warmongering and World War III brinkmanship. There is little doubt that with our war-weary population this proved the margin of his victory. Unfortunately, as with Bush and Obama, now that he is President, he appears to be heading down a different path.
Or actually the same path.
Trump is quickly proving that his campaign rhetoric about being a “peace president” was a bald-faced lie. Trump is merely the latest in a long line of puppet presidents. As Col. Macgregor said, “[Trump] is simply a puppet. And the puppet master is Netanyahu.”
Even Scott Ritter, who is strongly predisposed to supporting Trump, had fiery words for Trump after he began bombing Yemen. Here are excerpted comments during his interview with Judge Napolitano:
Trump is an idiot.
It isn’t going to work, Mr. President.
And what’s going to happen is one of two things. One, you’re going to look foolish, because you’re going to have to back down when your secretary of defense says, “We can’t escalate any further without putting 700,000 boots on the ground. That’s a major invasion that will cause the entire region to blow up. Oil prices will spin out of control, and your economy will crash and you’re finished, Mr. President. You’re done. Everything you’re trying to do. The American people will not tolerate $120 oil, because they can’t economically. All the changes you’re making are predicated upon a foundation of economic stability, which will not be here if you throw oil security/energy security out the window by going to war with Iran. Stop it.”
Or, he will actually go to war, thinking that somehow American bombs ordered by Donald Trump take on some sort of angelic property and blow up with greater violence and more terror than any other bomb ever made. And then the Iranians will shut down the Strait of Hormuz, blow up American installations, destroy Israel and invite an American nuclear retaliation. And boom, the man who thought he was going to get the Nobel Peace Prize will go down in history as the greatest warmonger in modern history.
The Zionist Deep State that put Joe Biden in office in 2020 to assist Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza put Donald Trump in office in 2024 to assist Israel’s war against Yemen. And you can take this to the bank: Attacking Yemen is just the first phase in the Zionist plan to attack Iran. Donald Trump was put in office to wage the U.S./Israeli war against Iran.
Perhaps RumorMillNews.com has the best summary of what we’re talking about today:
Has Trump gone insane, or is it just his rabid Zionism getting the best of him?
Maybe the question is moot, since Zionism is a disease that leads to insanity.
At the same time that Trump is supposed to be negotiating with Putin for peace in Ukraine, I see headlines such as this, today, from George Eaton’s news update:
“Trump says every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon as being fired from Iran.”
“JUST IN – Trump threatens Iran for any further Houthi attack.”
“U.S. WARNED IRAQ OF IRAN STRIKE UNDER TRUMP.”
“Iranian media is reporting that at least 4 Iranian missile ships have crossed the Strait of Hormuz, with protection from the IRGC navy.”
“Trump orders sending 35 warships and 1,750 US Marines to the Middle East.”
“Iran’s armed forces remain on high alert, prepared for “full-scale defense and a severe counterattack” against enemy interests in the Middle East, Iran’s Nournews said.”
And finally, from White House spokeswoman Caroline Labate: “The Israeli attacks were coordinated with us, the gates of hell are about to open, and President Trump is unafraid to defend our ally and friend, Israel!”
So is she referring to the Israeli bombing of displaced Palestinians living in tents on the streets of Gaza that were set ablaze last night? I can see no other point of reference, and this is certainly a new one on us.
Is Trump’s blind ego riding so high that he is unaware of what Iran can do?
Zionism is a disease similar to Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump has it bad, and I hope that because of his illness, it doesn’t end badly for all of us. [Emphasis added]
And while I’m trying to keep up with all of these rapidly unfolding developments in a struggling attempt to keep readers fully informed, I must include statements made by the quintessential Jewish Zionist, Professor Alan Dershowitz. These statements are at once foreboding and realistic for the State of Israel.
I’m not going to be as optimistic as the last four speakers. We have survived in the past. That doesn’t mean we are going to survive in the future.
The United States will survive. That is for sure, no matter who is in charge. We have a system of checks and balances; it’s working. The United States will survive. Israel’s survival is not guaranteed.
These statements come from the mouth of one of the world’s leading antichrist Zionists, Alan Dershowitz: “Israel’s survival is not guaranteed.” Indeed, it’s not, contrary to the erroneous belief of America’s Christian Zionists. But it is truly incredible to hear this from the mouth of one such as Dershowitz.
To see just a smidgen of factual information confirming what Dershowitz said, watch this short 1-minute video.
If you watch Dershowitz’s address, you will hear him castigate the eminent Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein. Accordingly, I will let Professor Finkelstein respond for himself:
Netanyahu is an accurate representative of Israeli society. It’s not as if he is an excrescence, that’s the fancy word for like an artificial outgrowth. He’s not an excrescence. The fact that he is the longest-sitting prime minister of Israel, there’s a very good reason for it, because he is an obnoxious, self-righteous Jewish supremacist. And that is a reflection of 95% of Israeli society: obnoxious, Jewish supremacists, self-righteous society. Netanyahu is less an orchestrator than he is a reflection of Israeli society.
Unlike the people of America who voted for Trump due to his promise to end America’s “stupid” wars, evangelicals voted for Trump due to his rabid support for the warmongering State of Israel. In other words, Trump was elected by two groups of voters that were polar opposites, each group voting for the same man for reasons completely counter to the reasons of the opposite group.
Wouldn’t it be ironic for the Christian Zionists who voted for Trump due to his rabid support for Israel to wind up becoming the instruments of the destruction of the Zionist state, which even Alan Dershowitz admits is very feasible?
As the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD was required by God for the Early Church to understand Christ’s New Covenant, so, too, the destruction of the Zionist state (as speculated by Scott Ritter above) might be required by God for the Western Church to understand Christ’s New Covenant, because the truth of Christ’s New Covenant has been lost to America’s evangelicals since 1948.
It would appear to be more than poetic justice if God were to use Donald John Trump as He used Titus Flavius Vespasianus.
Regardless, very quickly after being inaugurated, President Donald Trump has shown his true colors.
Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.
The post Trump Shows His True Colors appeared first on LewRockwell.
Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays?
My 10th grade English class had devoted a semester to the works of William Shakespeare, and that seemed appropriate given his place in our language and our culture.
During those months, I’d read about a dozen or so of his plays and had been required to memorize one of the most famous soliloquies in Macbeth. Even today, decades later, I discovered that I could still recite it by heart, a fact that greatly surprised me.
By common agreement, Shakespeare ranks as the towering, even formative figure of our globally-dominant English language, probably holding a position roughly comparable to that of Cervantes for Spanish and perhaps Goethe and Schiller for German. Many of the widespread phrases found in today’s English trace back to his plays, and in glancing at Shakespeare’s 12,000 word Wikipedia article, I noticed that the introduction described him as history’s foremost playwright, a claim that seemed very reasonable to me.
Although I’d never studied his works after high school, over the years I’d seen a number of the film versions of his famous dramas, as well as some of the Royal Shakespeare Company performances on PBS, and generally thought those were excellent. But although my knowledge of Shakespeare was meager, I never doubted his literary greatness.
During all those years I remained only dimly aware of the details of Shakespeare’s life, which were actually rather scanty. I did know that he’d been born and died in the English town of Stratford-upon-Avon, which I’d once visited during the year I studied at Cambridge University.
I’d also vaguely known that Shakespeare had written a large number of sonnets, and a year or two after my day trip to his birthplace, there was a long article in the New York Times that a new one had been found. Shakespeare’s stature was so great that the discovery of a single new poem warranted a 5,000 word article in our national newspaper of record.
I’m not sure when I’d first heard that there was any sort of dispute regarding Shakespeare’s personal history or his authorship of that great body of work, but I think it might have been many years later during the 1990s. Some right-wing writer for National Review had gotten himself into hot water for his antisemitic and racist remarks and was fired from that magazine. A few years later my newspapers mentioned that the same fellow had just published a book claiming that Shakespeare’s plays had actually been secretly written by someone else, a British aristocrat whose name meant nothing to me.
That story didn’t much surprise me. Individuals on the political fringe who had odd and peculiar ideas on one topic might be expected to be eccentric in others as well. Perhaps getting fired from his political publication might have tipped him over the edge, leading him to promote such a bizarre and conspiratorial literary theory about so prominent a historical figure. The handful of reviews in my newspapers and conservative magazines treated his silly book with the total disdain that it clearly warranted.
I think about a decade later I’d seen something in my newspapers about that same Shakespeare controversy, which had boiled up again in some other research, but the Times didn’t seem to take it too seriously, so neither did I.
A few years later, Hollywood released a 2011 film called Anonymous making that same case about Shakespeare’s true identity, but I never saw it and didn’t pay much attention. The notion that the greatest figure in English literature had secretly been someone else struck me as typical Hollywood fare, pretty unlikely but probably less so than the plots and secret identities found in the popular Batman and Spiderman movies.
By then I’d grown very suspicious of many elements of the American political history that I’d been taught, and a couple of years after that film was released, I published “Our American Pravda,” outlining some of my tremendous loss of faith in the information provided in our media and textbooks, then later launched a long series of a similar name.
But both at that time and for the dozen years that followed, I’d never connected my growing distrust of so much of what I’d learned in my introductory history courses with what my introductory English courses had taught me during those same schooldays. Therefore, the notion that Shakespeare hadn’t really been the author of Shakespeare’s plays seemed totally preposterous to me, so much so that I’d even half-forgotten that anyone had ever seriously made that claim.
However, last year a young right-wing activist and podcaster dropped me a note about various things and he also suggested that I consider expanding my series of “conspiratorial” investigations to include the true authorship of the Shakespeare plays. He mentioned that the late Joseph Sobran had been a friend of his own family, explaining how that once very influential conservative journalist had been purged from National Review in the early 1990s and then published a book arguing that the famous plays had actually been written by the Earl of Oxford, while various other scholars had taken similar positions. That had been the 1990s controversy I’d largely forgotten.
I told him that I’d vaguely heard of that theory over the years, probably even reading one or two of the dismissive reviews of that Sobran book when it appeared, but had never taken the idea seriously. Indeed, during my various investigations of the last decade or so, I’d concluded that something like 90-95% of all the “conspiracy theories” I’d examined had turned out to be false or at least unsubstantiated and I expected that this one about Shakespeare was very likely to fall into that same category. But almost all of my recent work had focused upon politics and history and I thought that a short digression into literary matters might be a welcome break. So I clicked a few buttons on Amazon and ordered the Sobran book as well as another more recent one he’d recommended to me on the same topic, then forgot all about it.
As an outsider to the literary community, I found it extremely implausible that for centuries the true identity of the greatest figure of the English language had remained concealed from all the many hundreds of millions who spoke that tongue, or the multitudes who watched his famous plays performed, or studied his works at universities. How likely was it that until a couple of decades ago, none of our greatest writers, critics, and literary scholars, numbering in the many dozens or more, had ever suspected that all the Shakespeare plays had actually been written by someone else?
But one reason I was much more willing to consider investigating this matter was that since the 1990s my opinion of Sobran had considerably improved. At the time he’d published his book, I’d barely been aware of him, but after his bitter Neocon enemies had stampeded America into our disastrous Iraq War following the 9/11 Attacks, he and all those others who had previously warned of their growing political influence and subsequently suffered at their hands had greatly risen in my estimation.
Furthermore, my content-archiving project of the early 2000s had included all the issues of National Review, and I’d discovered Sobran’s enormously important role in that conservative flagship publication, cut short when the Neocons had forced Editor William F. Buckley Jr. to purge him.
In sharp contrast to my own background, Sobran himself had originally begun his career in English literature before switching to conservative journalism in the 1970s and a year or two ago I’d briefly described his unfortunate fate:
Although the name of Joseph Sobran may be somewhat unfamiliar to younger conservatives, during the 1970s and 1980s he possibly ranked second only to founder William F. Buckley, Jr. in his influence in mainstream conservative circles, as partly suggested by the nearly 400 articles he published for NR during that period. By the late 1980s, he had grown increasingly concerned that growing Neocon influence would embroil America in future foreign wars, and his occasional sharp statements in that regard were branded “anti-Semitic” by his Neocon opponents, who eventually prevailed upon Buckley to purge him. The latter provided the particulars in a major section of his 1992 book-length essay In Search of Anti-Semitism.
Oddly enough, Sobran seems to have only very rarely discussed Jews, favorably or otherwise, across his decades of writing, but even just that handful of less than flattering mentions was apparently sufficient to draw their sustained destructive attacks on his career, and he eventually died in poverty in 2010 at the age of 64. Sobran had always been known for his literary wit, and his unfortunate ideological predicament eventually led him to coin the aphorism “An anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.”
Sobran had been a nationally-syndicated columnist and a regular commenter on the CBS Radio network, so his personal fall was a considerable one. Given that he’d written his Shakespeare book just a few years after his final ouster from National Review, he still had retained some of his previous standing, helping to explain why this work had been reviewed in several publications albeit unfavorably, rather than simply ignored.
When the Shakespeare books I’d ordered eventually arrived, I set them aside and only much later finally got around to reading them. As I did so, I was quite surprised at what I discovered.
Published in 1997, Sobran’s Alias Shakespeare was quite short, with the main text only running a little more than 200 pages, and although I began it with extreme skepticism, the 15-odd pages in the Introduction quickly dispelled much of that.
The author started by emphasizing that nearly all the mainstream Shakespeare scholars have always dismissed as ridiculous any doubts about the authorship of the plays, and he himself had taken that same position, including during his years of graduate school, when he had focused on Shakespeare studies.
Moreover, once he eventually became suspicious of this conventional view and began investigating the topic, he “entered a bizarre world of colorful people, totally unlike the academic world.” Their various theories of authorship included Francis Bacon, a wide variety of different British noblemen, and even Queen Elizabeth I, and these numerous activists often bitterly quarreled with each other. Yet Sobran argued that it was important to remember that “so many important discoveries have been made by dubious scholars, intellectual misfits, and outright cranks.” Meanwhile mainstream scholars had almost entirely ignored the Shakespeare authorship issue, claiming it didn’t exist.
Sobran’s attitude seemed a very reasonable one on that controversial literary subject, and he maintained that same judicial tone throughout the book, often emphasizing his uncertainty on many of the issues that he was raising.
Although I’d assumed that only cranks and fringe eccentrics had ever questioned Shakespeare’s authorship, I was very surprised to discover that over the last century or two the list of such “heretics” included many of our most illustrious English-language literary figures and intellectuals, including Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, John Galsworthy, Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Nabokov, and David McCullough. Some of our most notable actors and dramatists, especially those known for their Shakespearean roles were also skeptics: Orson Welles, Sir John Gielgud, Michael York, Kenneth Branagh, and Charlie Chaplin. A few years after the publication of Sobran’s book, Sir Derek Jacobi, a renowned Shakespearean actor, provided the Forewords to other books taking that same position. Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Antonin Scalia were also numbered among the Shakespeare skeptics.
Obviously, all these eminent literary, dramatic, and intellectual figures might easily be mistaken, but as an ignorant outsider who had barely been aware that any serious dispute even existed, I read the rest of Sobran’s book with far more of an open mind than when I’d turned the first page.
The telling point that Sobran made in his first chapter was that aside from the huge corpus of the literary works commonly attributed to him, our solid knowledge of Shakespeare’s life and activities is so scanty as to almost be non-existent, mostly consisting of a tiny handful of short business records and documents showing that he had once testified in a minor lawsuit. This was hardly what we would expect of such a towering literary figure.
Although his movements and places of residence were largely unknown, we did know that he ended his days back home at Stratford, living there for at least five years and perhaps a dozen. From that period came his last will and testament, which constituted the only written artifact we have from his entire life, running just 1,300 words. That document is very puzzling, giving no indication that he had ever owned a single book or any literary manuscript. There were no signs of any intellectual interests or literary patrons, and the style was so plodding and semi-literate compared to some other testaments of that era that it seemed difficult to believe that it could have been written or dictated by one of the greatest stylists of the English language.
As Sobran pointed out, that will included three of Shakespeare’s six surviving signatures, all of which were quite irregular, hardly what we would expect from someone who wrote so frequently. Indeed, a document expert cited by a leading Shakespeare scholar claimed that all of Shakespeare’s signatures were probably made by different hands. Since we have no solid evidence that Shakespeare ever attended grammar school, this suggested the astonishing possibility that Shakespeare may have been unable to write his own name. Indeed, both of Shakespeare’s parents, his wife Anne Hathaway, and his daughter Judith were apparently illiterate, signing their names with a mark.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, whether literary figures or otherwise, not a single letter written by Shakespeare has ever been found despite enormous research efforts, nor a single book that he had ever owned.
Although Shakespeare would have certainly ranked as one of Britain’s leading literary lights, he never offered any public tribute nor statement at the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 nor at the accession of her successor James I, and when he himself died in 1616, no one in London seemed to have taken any notice of his passing.
As Sobran emphasized, although Shakespeare lived and worked for 51 years in Britain, much of that time in the London metropolis, he seemed almost to have existed as a ghost, apparently invisible to nearly all his contemporaries. Numerous thick Shakespeare biographies have been published by various scholars, but aside from the inferences they drew from the enormous body of literary work attributed to him, their contents were almost entirely based upon speculation, given the near total absence of any known facts.
A central problem raised by all those who doubted that the plays were actually written by the actor from Stratford was that the plots and descriptions heavily relied upon far-reaching knowledge of classical history and foreign countries, Italy in particular, while their supposed author certainly had no higher education.
One very surprising fact that I’d never previously known was that all the published plays and other literary works had sometimes been released anonymously, sometimes under the name “Shake-Speare” including the dash often used for pseudonyms in that era, or sometimes under the name “Shakespeare.” Meanwhile, the man from Stratford and his entire family, including both parents and children, almost always spelled their names “Shakspere.”
Elizabethan spelling was often irregular, but it seemed rather odd that the man we today believe was the famous playwright apparently never used the name under which his plays were published or that we today call him. This sharp distinction has conveniently allowed the books and articles of these Shakespeare dissenters to easily distinguish in their text between the “Shakespeare” who was the author of the plays and the “Shakspere” who was the obscure inhabitant of Stratford.
Consider an amusing rough analogy. Samuel Clemens was one of America’s greatest writers, with all of his works published under the pen-name of Mark Twain. But suppose those facts had not been widely known at the time, and a generation or two later, after all those aware of Twain’s true identity had passed from the scene, literary experts had located an obscure Southern businessman named “Mark Tween,” and convinced themselves that he had actually been the famous author.
In effect, Sobran and his allies were arguing that for the last several centuries the literary establishment of the English-speaking world has been suffering from one of the most egregious cases of mistaken identity in all of human history, with most of its tenured faculty members perhaps being too embarrassed to ever even consider that possibility.
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Entangled Alliances
“It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”
– George Washington
“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations. Entangling alliances with none.”
– Thomas Jefferson
Flowers bloom, pollen builds, and temperatures rise. Bees bounce from bush to blossom, as branches burst with birds and buds.
On the Vernal equinox, the earth enjoys a fleeting balance. Dark and light, bull and bear, red and white… all continue the eternal quest for an elusive crown.
But some stories are inordinately skewed, certain coins show only one side. In this brief moment of precarious equilibrium, let’s even the scale with some forbidden thoughts.
Origin Story
The Second World War is the origin story of the international “rules-based order”.
A global conflagration that took 70 million lives, unleashed nuclear weapons, laid waste to much of the world, and caused eight decades of proxy conflicts is known as “the good war”.
Its supposed “moral” is that liberal alliances are needed, and must deploy force to thwart acts (or potential acts) of rogue aggression or racial prejudice.
This has been called the “load-bearing myth” of World War II. It’s the basis for every subsequent military intervention, and for obligating Americans to defend Israel no matter what.
For these reasons, the greatest catastrophe in human history can never be questioned. Nor can we remind each other that it started a couple decades earlier, by intervention rather than reticence.
We must assume it’s always Munich 1938… but never Sarajevo 1914. The former lesson is almost always misunderstood. The latter is frequently forgotten, and repeatedly re-learned.
That seems to be happening again.
Those who think it unwise to continue the Ukraine war are maligned as sniveling cowards and a craven appeasers… just as anyone who questions US support for Israel’s government is reflexively smeared as an implicit “anti-semite” (if not an overt one). It’s easier to dismiss skeptics by impugning their motives than to engage them by addressing their arguments.
Those who want to end the killing in Ukraine are derided as “Neville Chamberlains”. This is a tired tactic, but a predictable one.
Whether Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, or Vladimir Putin… anyone who dares defy US hegemony becomes a new “Hitler”, to be aggressively resisted by wannabe Churchills.
But invoking “Chamberlain” is an odd insult, particularly from people who insist “we” must fight to defend the Ukraine.
Neville Chamberlain wasn’t the peacenik they presume. He was the Prime Minister who gave the disastrous security guarantee to Poland. The “Chamberlains” in the current conflict are those who would do the same for the Ukraine.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of them. Many condemned President Trump for daring to talk to Putin, much less deal with him. But that’s diplomacy. It’s what leaders are supposed to do.
Eisenhower hosted Khrushchev, Roosevelt held summits with Stalin, Reagan dealt with Gorbachev, and Nixon met with Mao. All were wise to do so. Yet when Trump spoke to Putin, his domestic enemies and global “allies” pitched a fit.
Which raises a broader question.
Loaded Word
How are western Europeans, the Ukraine, and Israel (which was peopled mostly by eastern Europeans) “allies” of the United States? What do they do for us?
They buy weapons, receive “aid”, and funnel cash to compliant politicians and connected corporations. This has been going on since the Marshall Plan. But political payoffs and corporate welfare do nothing for most taxpayers who foot the bill.
Three years ago, few Americans had heard of the Ukraine. Had it vanished, they’d never have known.
Why should they? Unless they’re from there or (like me) have a wife who is, why would they care?
Would they die to defend Donetsk? Does who rules Luhansk affect their lives?
Of course not. The location of a boundary between Russia and the Ukraine (or whether even there is one) makes no difference to them. Nor should it.
Yet Americans in forlorn towns and crime-ridden cities are somehow obliged to preserve (or expand) arbitrary borders between distant peoples. Not just on the Ukrainian steppes, but in western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.
On the other side of the Black Sea (which is 6,000 miles from the United States), our “Greatest Ally” keeps enticing us into trouble. Last week, President Trump attacked Yemen. This act not only contradicted what he said about prior administrations a few months ago. It was also unconstitutional (as if that matters).
Even worse, it was a war crime that killed innocent civilians… ostensibly in response to Houthi strikes on Red Sea shipping.
But the Houthis hadn’t attacked American vessels. They’d harassed Israeli ones, and put a major port out of business.
They did so in reaction to the US-funded Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. The Houthis set their sights on US ships only after Trump ordered strikes on Yemen.
Instead of getting the hell out of this tumultuous region, the president upped the ante and made matters worse. He said he’d hold Iran accountable for any future Houthi attacks, risking a wider war on behalf of our “ally”… against a country posing no threat to the United States.
Acting as if Boston or Baltimore had been bombed, Trump’s press secretary announced that
“all those who seek to terrorize not just Israel, but also the United States of America, will see a price to pay. All hell will break loose.”
Of course, no one had “terrorized” America. And most who’d do so would be incited by the US government enabling what Israel does.
Whether or not you support Israel, this is obvious. Everyone knows it. But it’s not supposed to be said. Nor are the consequences allowed to be acknowledged.
As with attacks on innocent people anywhere, those on Israelis are indefensible. Yet they (should) have nothing to do with the United States.
But because the US government sticks its nose where it doesn’t belong, American citizens are needlessly endangered by the inevitable blowback.
In a world of self-imposed tripwires, the one in Israel is the most prominent example of how a misguided alliance turns another country’s priorities into America’s problems. In the Middle East and Europe, the US government is a spider spinning webs to ensnare itself.
I can see why our “allies” would welcome this arrangement. I would too if I were them. But we’re not them.
Any country we call an “ally” is usually an albatross. They cost money we don’t have to cause problems we don’t need.
Let’s be honest. If we stopped being “allies” with Israel, Ukraine, or western Europe (or anyone, for that matter), which side would be worse off?
Even the word “ally” is loaded. Allied for what? Against whom? The appellation presumes an enemy. It’s another weird relic of the Second World War, invoked whenever our meddlers implore us to make another mess.
The “Axis” epithet is wielded the same way. Mussolini’s descriptor is hurled to evoke fear of scary countries we’re supposed to loathe. George W Bush famously revived it when he lumped Iran, Iraq, and North Korea into an imbecilic “Axis of Evil” to justify war on Iraq after a bunch of Saudis attacked the U.S.
Foreign Affairs (naturally) used it to describe collaboration among Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. How odd that these nations might work together to guard against governments that express eagerness to destroy each of them.
As always, language is instructive. Why aren’t China, Russia, and Iran referred to as “allies” of each other? Why aren’t the Europeans and Israelis part of an American “axis”?
Perhaps for the same reason the Russian incursion into Ukraine is an “unprovoked attack”, but US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Serbia, Grenada, Panama, and Vietnam were “self-defense”.
The True Isolationists
This isn’t to imply Americans should isolate themselves. International interaction and exchange should be free and open, with force reserved only for self-defense from imminent threats. By not butting into everyone else’s affairs, the US would face few of those.
The true “isolationists” are proponents of wars and sanctions that limit trade and inhibit travel. They cower behind economic embargoes, divisive alliances, and kinetic conflict. Non-interventionists shun such seclusion, advocating peace, commerce, and honest friendship with every country.
John Quincy Adams, who drafted the Monroe Doctrine (which stipulated not only that Europeans stay out of America’s hemisphere but that the US not meddle in theirs), famously asserted that
“America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
In the northern hemisphere, the heat rises and shadows shorten. We embrace the light and spurn the dark. It’s time to tend our own garden, and stop picking weeds from other farmers’ fields.
This originally appeared on Premium Insights.
The post Entangled Alliances appeared first on LewRockwell.
The Stablecoin Trap: The Backdoor to Total Financial Control
The walls are closing in on your financial freedom—but not in the way most Americans believe.
While the debate rages over the future threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), a far more insidious reality has already taken hold: our existing financial system already functions as a digital control grid, monitoring transactions, restricting choices, and enforcing compliance through programmable money.
For over two years, my wife and I have traveled across 22 states warning about the rapid expansion of financial surveillance. What began as research into cryptocurrency crackdowns revealed something far more alarming: the United States already operates under what amounts to a CBDC.
- 92% of all US dollars exist only as entries in databases.
- Your transactions are monitored by government agencies—without warrants.
- Your access to money can be revoked at any time with a keystroke.
The Federal Reserve processes over $4 trillion daily through its Oracle database system, while commercial banks impose programmable restrictions on what you can buy and how you can spend your own money. The IRS, NSA, and Treasury Department collect and analyze financial data without meaningful oversight, weaponizing money as a tool of control. This isn’t speculation—it’s documented reality.
Now, as President Trump’s Executive Order 14178 ostensibly “bans” CBDCs, his administration is quietly advancing stablecoin legislation that would hand digital currency control to the same banking cartel that owns the Federal Reserve. The STABLE Act and GENIUS Act don’t protect financial privacy—they enshrine financial surveillance into law, requiring strict KYC tracking on every transaction.
This isn’t defeating digital tyranny—it’s rebranding it.
This article cuts through the distractions to expose a sobering truth: the battle isn’t about stopping a future CBDC—it’s about recognizing the financial surveillance system that already exists. Your financial sovereignty is already under attack, and the last off-ramps are disappearing.
The time for complacency has passed. The surveillance state isn’t coming—it’s here.
Understanding the Battlefield: Key Terms and Concepts
To fully grasp how deeply financial surveillance has already penetrated our lives, we must first understand the terminology being used—and often deliberately obscured—by government officials, central bankers, and financial institutions. The following key definitions will serve as a foundation for our discussion, cutting through the technical jargon to reveal the true nature of what’s at stake:
Before diving deeper into the financial surveillance system we face today, let’s establish clear definitions for the key concepts discussed throughout this article:
Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)
A digital form of central bank money, issued and controlled by a nation’s monetary authority. While often portrayed as a future innovation, I argue in “Fifty Shades of Central Bank Tyranny” that the US dollar already functions as a CBDC, with over 92% existing only as digital entries in Federal Reserve and commercial bank databases.
Stablecoin
A type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value by pegging to an external asset, typically the US dollar. Major examples include:
- Tether (USDT): The largest stablecoin ($140 billion market cap), managed by Tether Limited with reserves held by Cantor Fitzgerald
- USD Coin (USDC): Second-largest stablecoin ($25 billion market cap), issued by Circle Internet Financial with backing from Goldman Sachs and BlackRock
- Bank-Issued Stablecoins: Stablecoins issued directly by major financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase (JPM Coin) or Bank of America, which function as digital dollars but remain under full regulatory control, allowing programmable restrictions and surveillance comparable to a CBDC.
Tokenization
The process of converting rights to an asset into a digital token on a blockchain or database. This applies to both currencies and other assets like real estate, stocks, or commodities. Tokenization enables:
- Digital representation of ownership
- Programmability (restrictions on how/when/where assets can be used)
- Traceability of all transactions
Regulated Liability Network (RLN)
A proposed financial infrastructure that would connect central banks, commercial banks, and tokenized assets on a unified digital platform, enabling comprehensive tracking and potential control of all financial assets.
Privacy CoinsCryptocurrencies specifically designed to preserve transaction privacy and resist surveillance:
- Monero (XMR): Uses ring signatures, stealth addresses, and confidential transactions to conceal sender, receiver, and amount
- Zano (ZANO): Offers enhanced privacy with Confidential Layer technology that can extend privacy features to other cryptocurrencies
Programmable Money
Currency that contains embedded rules controlling how, when, where, and by whom it can be used. Examples already exist in:
- Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) that restrict purchases to approved medical expenses
- The Doconomy Mastercard that tracks and limits spending based on carbon footprint
- Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards that restrict purchases to approved food items
Know Your Customer (KYC) / Anti-Money Laundering (AML)
Regulatory frameworks require financial institutions to verify customer identities and report suspicious transactions. While ostensibly aimed at preventing crime, these regulations have expanded to create comprehensive financial surveillance with minimal oversight.
Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) / Patriot Act
US laws mandate financial surveillance, eliminate transaction privacy, and grant government agencies broad powers to monitor financial activity without warrants. These laws form the legislative foundation of the current financial control system.
STABLE Act / GENIUS Act
Proposed legislation would restrict stablecoin issuance to banks and regulated entities, requiring comprehensive KYC/AML compliance and effectively bringing stablecoins under the same surveillance framework as traditional banking.
Understanding these terms is essential for recognizing how our existing financial system already functions as a mechanism of digital control, despite the absence of an officially designated “CBDC.”
The Digital Dollar Reality: America’s Unacknowledged CBDC
The greatest sleight of hand in modern finance isn’t cryptocurrency or complex derivatives—it’s convincing Americans they don’t already live under a Central Bank Digital Currency system. Let’s dismantle this illusion by examining how our current dollar already functions as a fully operational CBDC.
The Digital Foundation of Today’s Dollar
When most Americans picture money, they imagine physical cash changing hands. Yet this mental image is profoundly outdated—92% of all US currency exists solely as digital entries in databases, with no physical form whatsoever. The Federal Reserve, our central bank, doesn’t create most new money by printing bills; it generates it by adding numbers to an Oracle database.
This process begins when the government sells Treasury securities (IOUs) to the Federal Reserve. Where does the Fed get money to buy these securities? It simply adds digits to its database—creating money from nothing. The government then pays its bills through its account at the Fed, transferring these digital dollars to vendors, employees, and benefit recipients.
The Fed’s digital infrastructure processes over $4 trillion in transactions daily, all without a single physical dollar changing hands. This isn’t some small experimental system—it’s the backbone of our entire economy.
The Banking Extension
Commercial banks extend this digital system. When you deposit money, the bank records it in their Microsoft or Oracle database. Through fractional reserve banking, they then create additional digital money—up to 9 times your deposit—to loan to others. This multiplication happens entirely in databases, with no new physical currency involved.
Until recently, banks were required to keep 10% of deposits as reserves at the Federal Reserve. Covid-19 legislation removed even this minimal requirement, though most banks still maintain similar levels for operational reasons. The key point remains: the dollar predominantly exists as entries in a network of databases controlled by the Fed and commercial banks.
Already Programmable, Already Tracked
Those who fear a future CBDC’s ability to program and restrict money use miss a crucial reality: our current digital dollars already have these capabilities built in.
Consider these existing examples:
- Health Savings Accounts (HSAs): These accounts restrict spending to approved medical expenses through merchant category codes (MCCs) programmed into the payment system. Try to buy non-medical items with HSA funds, and the transaction is automatically declined.
- The Doconomy Mastercard: This credit card, co-sponsored by the United Nations through its Climate Action SDG, tracks users’ carbon footprints from purchases and can shut off access when a predetermined carbon limit is reached.
- Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards: Government assistance programs already use programmable restrictions to control what recipients can purchase, automatically declining transactions for unauthorized products.
These aren’t theoretical capabilities—they’re operational today, using the exact same digital dollar infrastructure we already have.
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International Law Is Now Suspended, if Not Eliminated.
PART ONE: The essence of international law is progressive.
A law cannot exist if there are individuals or organizations that fall within its scope but which stand “above the law” — can’t be prosecuted no matter how flagrantly they violate it. EQUALITY BEFORE THE LAW IS THE FOUNDATION-STONE OF LAW, and if any exceptions can be allowed, those are ONLY the ones that are stated IN the law as being NOT within its scope — and, thus, the fundamental principle of law is that a law exists ONLY if all individuals or organizations that fall within its scope are subject to investigation and prosecution if they violate it. Otherwise, it’s NOT a “law.” To call it a law is false. The United States Government and its colonies such as Israel can’t be prosecuted for violating international law no matter how flagrantly they violate it. Consequently, international law no longer exists. What DOES exist, then? The traditional ethic does: Might makes right.
For example: Whatever happened to the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ’s) so-called ‘investigation’ by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into South Africa’s detailed 99-page fully documented case that Israel’s leaders are committing ethnic cleansing if not genocide in Gaza? The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved) article “South Africa’s genocide case against Israel” asserts that
On 5 April 2024, the court set the schedule for comprehensive submissions of legal opinions by South Africa and Israel. The time limit for the South African memorial was set to be 28 October 2024, and for the Israeli response 28 July 2025.[122] South Africa filed its memorial on 28 October 2024.[123][124][125] In accordance with the ICJ’s rules, the memorial is not public. It contains over 750 pages of text and over 4,000 pages of exhibits and annexes.
Consequently, in this legal case, presented by South Africa, which was accepted by the ICJ (International Court of Justice) on 29 December 2023, the jurists will commence their consideration of Israel’s defense, starting on 28 July this year, which might be already after the crime (whatever it might be) has been completed.
On page 93 of the 99-page pdf (or p. 184 of the 194-page document) of the South African filing of the case, is the following:
D. The Risk of Irreparable Prejudice and Urgency
136. The Court “has the power to indicate provisional measures when irreparable prejudice could be caused to rights which are the subject of judicial proceedings or when the alleged disregard of such rights may entail irreparable consequences”557. In particular, the Court has the power to indicate provisional measures “if there is urgency, in the sense that there is a real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice will be caused before the Court gives its final decision”558. As the Court recently confirmed, “[t]he condition of urgency is met when the acts susceptible of causing irreparable prejudice can ‘occur at any moment’ before the Court makes a final decision on the case”559.
137. For the purposes of its decision on a request for the indication of provisional measures in a case involving allegations of violations of the Genocide Convention, “[t]he Court is not called upon . . . to establish the existence of breaches of the Genocide Convention, but to determine whether the circumstances require the indication of provisional measures for the protection of rights under this instrument”560, as “found to be plausible”561. As held by the Court, this does not require it to “make definitive findings
That prior Court expressed its concern that “there is real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice” meaning in this case genocide and-or mere ethnic cleansing “will be caused (by Israeli troops armed and guided by American weapons and satellite intelligence, but note here that ONLY Israel and NOT the U.S. is being ‘investigated’ by this Court; so, immediately — because of this inequality before the law — this is not a court of law, but of prejudice in favor of Joe Biden etc.; so, this is already a quasi-court involved with quasi-law) “before the Court gives its final decision,” which will therefore settle nothing but instead create interminable debate because that “decision” will be received as propaganda instead of as anything worthy of respect.
That exemplifies the actual non-existence of international law.
We still live in a Might-makes-right world, NOT (not yet, at least) an international-law world. Why is this?
PART TWO: The source of people’s ethics is an allegedly holy inerrant Scripture.
Every religion is based upon an allegedly holy inerrant Scripture, which contains the unchangeable laws or “commandments” of some anthropomorphized Deity or Almighty ‘God’, such that the “good” is defined as serving that ‘God’ — adhering to its commandments — not serving regular people (THEREFORE: Democracy is impossible in ANY nation whose Government, including its Constitution, recognizes some religion’s “Holy Scripture” as being the SUPREME law in that land — it’s a theocracy instead of a democracy; no other document, than that Scripture, can actually BE its Constitution, because that function, as being the basis for the nation’s laws, has already been ceeded to that Scripture).
Furthermore: unlike any Constitution in any democratic country, any such ‘holy Scripture’ is presumed to be inerrant and therefore cannot even possibly be amended — no provision in it says how its basic laws (the Constitution) may become changed; and, so, though every democratic Constitution allows for Amendments, NO ‘holy Scripture’ can allow any, at all.
What is the DEFINING attribute of “God”? Is it “good”ness? In numerous instances, ‘holy Scripture’ says “God” ordered the extermination of an entire category of people — such as Caananites, and such as homosexuals. No, certainly, the defining attribute isn’t “goodness.” Is it instead power — the idea that the Deity is “The Almighty” — the very personification of power? Obviously yes, because ‘God’ is traditionally described as having created the universe — a creation-story is normally included in any ‘holy Scripture’. So: virtually all religions, which is to say every organized faith-based community, worships POWER: the principle that “Might makes right” is literally at its very foundation. Consequently: if EQUALITY BEFORE THE LAW IS THE FOUNDATION-STONE OF LAW, then under any RELIGIOUS law, INEQUALITY before the law is the very foundation-stone of law; and, so, religious law is the exact opposite of “law” in the sense of any democracy. Not only is that not “natural law” (it cannot be accepted as constituting “law” in, say, physics, or biology — not in any of the sciences), but it is FORCED “law,” imposed in order to serve the deity, instead of to serve the public. So, it is entirely artificial: it is, indeed, fraudulent.
Though fraudulent, it is the way human society still and currently IS.
On page 72 of the pdf (p. 142 of the document) of South Africa’s 99-page submission against Israel, appears this:
On 28 October 2023, as Israeli forces prepared their land invasion of Gaza, the Prime Minister [Netanyahu] invoked the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, stating: “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember”446. The Prime Minister referred again to Amalek in the letter sent on 3 November 2023 to Israeli soldiers and officers447. The relevant biblical passage [1 Samuel 15:3] reads as follows: “Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses.”448.
In other words: their ‘God’ has commanded them to exterminate the Palestinians. This commandment is stated not only in 1 Samuel, which isn’t within their allegedly inerrant and holiest of all Scripture, the first five books of the Bible, which is in every synagogue and is called the Torah, but it is likewise commanded several times ALSO inside the Torah itself, such as:
Here are some of those specific biblical passages that ARE in the Torah (and therefore even MORE binding upon Jews than is 1 Samuel):
Genesis 15:18-21
“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the Euphrates, including the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, the Caananites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”
Deuteronomy 7:1-2
“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance: the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. You must put them all to death.”
Deuteronomy 7:16
“Destroy every nation that the Lord your God places in your power, and do not show them any mercy.”
Deuteronomy 20:16-18
“When you capture cities in the land he Lord your God is giving you, kill everyone. Completely destroy all the people: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has ordered you to do. Kill them so that they will not make you sin against the Lord by teaching you to do all the disgusting things they do in the worship of their gods.”
Israel’s Government takes such passages as ‘justifying’ what they do to Palestinians. And the vast majority of Israelis agree with that viewpoint. America’s Government says it doesn’t like what Israel is doing, but nonetheless continues to provide almost all of the weaponry and satellite intelligence in order to do it, and is therefore co-equal with Israel in doing this genocide, but (since America pretends to be not a theocratic nation [and our Constitution is entirely secular, so anything at all theocratic in the U.S. Government would actually be traitorous], and not even an aristocratic nation, but instead a democratic nation — though it now IS actually an aristocratic nation) alleges that it isn’t participating in the genocide. That allegation by the U.S. Government is clearly a lie.
Following after that in South Africa’s case against Israel, are many similar biblical citations by other top Israeli officials. Also, some of Israel’s traditional heroes are cited, such as (p. 76 or 150):
— Israeli army reservist “motivational speech”: On 11 October 2023, 95-year old Israeli army reservist Ezra Yachin — a veteran of the Deir Yassin massacre during the 1948 Nakba — reportedly called up for reserve duty to “boost morale” amongst Israeli troops ahead of the ground invasion, was broadcast on social media inciting other soldiers to genocide as follows, while being driven around in an Israeli army vehicle, dressed in Israeli army fatigues: “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live . . . Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbour, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him . . . We want to invade, not like before, we want to enter and destroy what’s in front of us, and destroy houses, then destroy the one after it. With all of our forces, complete destruction, enter and destroy. As you can see, we will witness things we’ve never dreamed of. Let them drop bombs on them and erase them.”477
The descendants of “the Hittites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites” and of “the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, … the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, … [and of] the Girgashites” had been allegedly ordered by ‘God’ to be exterminated, but not all of them actually were exterminated; and, so, now, the Israelites — with American assistance — are trying to complete the job, starting with the residents in Gaza.
Consequently, the facts of this case are indisputable that Israel is indeed committing ethnic cleansing if not outright genocide in Gaza; but, how will the ICJ, and then the ICC after it, be dealing with the case: As expressing biblical law; or instead as expressing international law?
The strongest existing sign of the answer to that question will now be documented here:
The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved) article on Julia Sebutinde focuses on her being a female Black who rose from Uganda’s middle class to become now the ICJ’s Acting President after her having entered Edinburgh University’s Law School in 1990, graduated with a Master of Laws degree in 1991, and then being awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws there in 2009, after her being pushed forward by the U.N.; and, then on 13 December 2011, Sebutinde received an absolute majority of votes in both the Security Council and the General Assembly, and thus was declared elected to join the ICJ, which she now heads. Though the Wiki article does make mention of her “Plagiarism controversy” (“Her dissenting opinion has been accused of plagiarizing from pro-Israel sources,[25][27] as well as plagiarism from Wikipedia and the BBC. According to a Palestinian researcher at the Doha Institute, Majd Abuamer, “at least 32 percent of Sebutinde’s dissent was plagiarised”.[28]”), she is otherwise held to be not controversial. But here is the reality:
——
https://x.com/_ZachFoster/status/1883555090465804702
Conversation
Zachary Foster [Princeton U. historian of Palestine]
@_ZachFoster
Breaking: the President of the International Court of Justice (@CIJ_ICJ), Julia Sebutinde, plagiarized sections of her dissenting opinion (https://icj-cij.org/node/204162) in which she voted against all provisional measures of South African’s case of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
On p. 6, Sebutinde writes: “”The name “Palestine” applied vaguely to a region that for the 400 years before World War I was part of the Ottoman Empire.”
This sentence was plagiarized word for word from a 2021 article published by Douglas J. Feith by the
titled, “The Forgotten History of the Term “Palestine,” (https://hudson.org/node/44363) in which he writes:
““Palestine” applied vaguely to a region that for the 400 years before World War I was part of the Ottoman empire.”
It gets worse. Sebutinde plagiarized the next two sentences as well. She writes:
“In 135 CE, after stamping out the second Jewish insurrection of the province of Judea or Judah, the Romans renamed that province “Syria Palaestina” (or “Palestinian Syria”). The Romans did this as a punishment, to spite the “Y’hudim” (Jewish population) and to obliterate the link between them and their province (known in Hebrew as Y’hudah). The name “Palaestina” was used in relation to the people known as the Philistines and found along the Mediterranean coast.”
These 2 sentences were also plagiarized from the same Feith piece, in which he writes:
“In 135 CE, after stamping out the province of Judea’s second insurrection, the Romans renamed the province Syria Palaestina—that is, “Palestinian Syria.” They did so resentfully, as a punishment, to obliterate the link between the Jews (in Hebrew, Y’hudim and in Latin Judaei) and the province (the Hebrew name of which was Y’hudah). “Palaestina” referred to the Philistines, whose home base had been on the Mediterranean coast.”
Sebutinde make a pitiful attempt to change a word here or there, but this is a textbook case of plagiarism. Feith’s piece is not cited in her legal opinion, even though she copied and pasted multiple sentences from the piece.
What a joke of judge. She’s making a mockery of the ICJ and should be removed immediately.
Zachary Foster
@_ZachFoster
It gets worse. She also plagiarized at least 4 sentences from The Jewish Virtual Library (https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/myths-and-facts-israel-146-s-roots#:~:text=In%201937%2C%20a%20local%20Arab,for%20centuries%20part%20of%20Syria.%22…).
Here are the 4 sentences from Sebutinde, and then the 4 sentences from the Jewish Virtual Library immediately following:
1. Sebutinde: “Prior to the
Show more
Zachary Foster
@_ZachFoster
Correction: In the first tweet in this thread, I should have noted, the dissenting opinion (w/the plagiarism) was with regard to the “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” I
Show more
Kitt
@Kittfornow
“She’s making a mockery of the ICJ and should be removed immediately.”
That she chose Douglas Feith to plagiarize from should in and of itself should be grounds for removing her immediately.
automne
@jepresume
wow! this is brilliant! congrats!
- Zachary Foster
@_ZachFoster
Follow
Historian of Palestine | Ph.D @Princeton
| Palestine Newsletter & Courses ↓
——
by Louis Matheou, 20 February 2025
On 14 January, the Ugandan judge Julia Sebutinde, a devout Christian Zionist accused of plagiarising pro-Israeli sources to defend the occupation of Palestine, was appointed acting president of the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague. The only justice to oppose all six provisional measures the court issued last year in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, Sebutinde’s record raises serious concerns about impartiality amid efforts to hold Israel accountable for its grave violations of international law.
Sebutinde’s appointment comes at a decisive moment for the global legal order, as UN experts warn that states’ widespread failure to uphold their legal obligations towards [i.e., on regard to prosecuting] Israel threatens the very foundation of international law.
Novara Media spoke to legal experts about what Sebutinde’s appointment means.
The deciding vote.
The first African woman to sit on the ICJ, Sebutinde was appointed as the court’s acting president after Nawaf Salam left the role in January 2025 to become prime minister of Lebanon. As vice-president at the time, Sebutinde automatically assumed the responsibilities of the presidency.
The president of the ICJ holds a variety of procedural powers that could allow them to influence the genocide case in favour of Israel, should they decide to.
If judges cannot reach a majority decision in deliberations – including final judgments and provisional measures – the president casts the deciding vote. And even if the court rules that genocide has been committed in the Gaza Strip, the president can still influence the wording of the final judgment in ways that limit the ruling’s impact.
If they choose, the president can appoint the drafting committee of the final judgment. They will also preside over final revisions to the text. In this process, the president could dilute the ruling’s wording and narrow its scope to shield Israel from more severe legal consequences and enforcement measures. This could allow the court to acknowledge genocide whilst setting an extremely high threshold for proving that Israel is directly responsible. However, this is a worst-case scenario.
The president can, however, steer cases in more understated ways.
Jeff Handmaker is associate professor of legal sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. “Given the subtleties in how the ICJ conducts its work,” he told Novara Media, “it is not difficult to imagine how Sebutinde’s evident bias in favour of Israel would influence her by administering the trial in a manner favourable to Israel.”
“This soft power she would hold could manifest, for example, in: the limiting or extending of speaking times allocated during court sessions, deadlines imposed for filing of pleadings, the ability to make corrections to a legal filing, the furnishing of copies to the respective state parties or drawing on experts and witnesses.”
It is possible that Sebutinde may serve the remainder of Salam’s term, which is due to last until February 2027. If she does, she will oversee the crucial period in South Africa’s genocide case: Israel is set to present its defence brief by July 2025, and whilst the court has not yet specified an exact date for the final judgment, it will probably fall within the current presidential term.
Handmaker suspects, however, that the ICJ is unlikely to leave Sebutinde in the role that long. “It is more likely that, in order to preserve the integrity of the court’s independence and impartiality in the eyes of the international law community and the general public, a fresh election will be held,” he said.
Yet even if Sebutinde’s term is short, she could influence the court’s business significantly. Given her judicial record, which has consistently reflected her deeply held Christian Zionist beliefs, this has already generated deep concern among those advocating for Palestinian liberation.
‘Extreme views.’
Sebutinde is a member of the Watoto church, a Pentecostal Christian community based in the Ugandan capital of Kampala and founded by Pastor Gary Skinner, a dedicated Christian Zionist. Skinner trumpets an impending “end times” – a series of events culminating in the second coming of Christ, including the return of the Jews to Israel.
Sebutinde has explicitly acknowledged the influence of the Watoto community on her worldview and her legal practice: “Godly values of integrity, honesty, justice, mercy, empathy, and hard work that the Skinners and Watoto church instilled and nurtured in me over the years account for who I am today, and have immensely contributed to my incredible career as a judge in Uganda and a judge at the International Court of Justice.”
Whilst judges inevitably hold views based on cultural and religious influences, Handmaker warns that “the extreme religious and ideological views of Sebutinde, which include extensive biblical references in her dissenting judgements, align closely with the standpoint of the Israeli government, rather than emanating from her professional role as a senior judge and president of the ICJ.”
Judge Sebutinde declined Novara Media’s request for comment.
Standing with Israel.
In January 2024, the ICJ issued six provisional measures to Israel, including orders to prevent genocide in Gaza and allow humanitarian assistance into the Strip. The measures received near-unanimous backing from the 17-judge panel – even Israeli judge Aharon Barak supported two of the six measures.
But one judge voted against every single measure: Sebutinde. So extreme was her opposition to the provisional measures that Uganda’s ambassador to the UN, Adonia Ayebare, publicly distanced the Ugandan government from Sebutinde.
In her dissenting opinion against the ICJ majority, where she was obliged to provide a full and conscientious legal justification for her decision, Sebutinde largely disregarded South Africa’s extensive legal arguments.
Sebutinde argued that there were “no indicators of a genocidal intent” by Israel and that “the controversy or dispute between the state of Israel and the people of Palestine is essentially and historically a political or territorial (and, I dare say, ideological) one … not a legal one calling for judicial settlement.’”
Six months later, in her dissenting opinion against the ICJ’s landmark advisory opinion that found that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank violates international law, Sebutinde went further. She cast doubt on the existence of Palestine as a distinct historical territory, claiming that the name “Palestine” only “applied vaguely to a region that for the 400 years before World War I was part of the Ottoman Empire.” Sebutinde then reproduced Zionist narratives of the biblical “bond” of the Jewish people to ancient Israel, citing the Old Testament to trace this “from prehistory to the end of Ottoman rule.”
Shahd Hammouri, senior legal consultant at Law for Palestine and lecturer in law at the University of Kent, rejects Sebutinde’s reasoning. She told Novara Media: “There’s nothing in international law that says that you get to claim land on the premises of how you interpret religion – otherwise I could start a religion tomorrow morning and claim the United States as spiritually my land.”
Plagiarising Zionists?
Yet Sebutinde’s written judgments do more than reflect the influence of her Christian Zionist beliefs. They appear to have been partly plagiarised from pro-Israeli sources. Historian of Palestine Zachary Foster has alleged that significant sections of Sebutinde’s dissenting opinion against the ICJ’s advisory opinion on Israel’s West Bank occupation were lifted from pro-Israel commentators and advocacy groups.
In her account of the “historical nuances” of the Israeli occupation, Sebutinde appears to have copied several sentences from an opinion piece written by US neoconservative Douglas J Feith, an avowed Zionist and a former under-secretary of defense, often referred to as the architect of the Iraq war. Sebutinde then seems to lift four sentences nearly word-for-word from a page of the Jewish Virtual Library, an online encyclopedia published by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, a non-profit organisation created to “strengthen the US-Israeli relationship”.
Later in the opinion, when discussing the failures of a two-state solution, Sebutinde repeats several sentences almost verbatim from a video produced by PragerU, a rightwing media outlet whose CEO, Marissa Streit, previously served in the Israeli military intelligence unit 8200. The video’s narrator, David Brog, is the executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, a group dedicated to resisting the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement on North American campuses, and the director of Christians United for Israel. …
——
I wrote yesterday about the Maccabee Task Force, to explain how the bi-national Israeli-Amercan thirty-billionaire who donated over $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign has gotten from him the type of policies toward Israel and Palestinians that she had wanted. Among the masses, America might be somewhat theocratic, but among the billionaires, America is actually an aristocracy, and Trump is now serving them (or at least the Republican billionaires) as their king.
Both Jews and Christians accept this Scripture (the Bible and especially the Torah in it) as reflecting ‘God’s Will’ — Commandments, even. Whom does this leave out? Non-Jews, and non-Christians, of course — and this includes almost all Palestinians (who instead were there damned by that ‘God’). Thus, on 22 January 2025, I headlined “Trump has already doomed his Presidency.”, because his chosen U.N. Representative is just like Sebutinde is, and supports the genocide in Gaza for the same reason she does. This is what happens with a religious-based ethic — not with an ethic that’s fit for democracy.
FDR’s plan for the U.N. (he invented the U.N. but he died and Truman got to control the writing of its Charter and so it failed) included a Charter (or Constitution) that would define “aggression” and firmly outlaw it, and which would also in other ways produce an ENFORCED body of international laws, in a democratic federal republic of the world’s nations, which would constitute a REAL world Government, with Legislative, Judicial, and Executive branches, an authentic global democracy of nations. This is what would be needed in order to transform from the existing might-makes-right world to instead a world that would serve the people and NO clergy and NO aristocracy (except perhaps WITHIN nations, because such a U.N. would concern ONLY inter-national — and NO national, or “intra-national” — laws). Either we will get FDR’s plan, or we will get chaos.
This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.
The post International Law Is Now Suspended, if Not Eliminated. appeared first on LewRockwell.
Kosovo, America’s ‘Mafia State’: The US-NATO-EU Support a Political Process Linked to Organized Crime
The unilateral independence of Kosovo was declared in February 2008. The Bush administration had detached Frank Wisner Jr., the son of the legendary CIA Frank G. Wisner who led the CIA-MI6 coup d’Etat against Iran in 1953.
Frank G. Wisner Jr. was entrusted in establishing the “legal framework” of Kosovo which was conducive to establishing a so-called “Sovereign State.”
Kosovo is a member of the Bretton Woods institutions. Kosovo seeks membership of NATO, the EU and now Interpol.
The Interpol Executive Committee has decided that the application of Kosovo for membership in Interpol would be put on the agenda of the General Assembly to be held in Beijing, China, from 26 to 29 September 2017, Government of Kosovo stated Monday.
In a bitter irony, Kosovo president Hashim Thaci is still on the list of Interpol in relation to his links to organized crimes and the drug trade. Last February [2017] president Thaci requested the secretary-general of Interpol, Juergen Stock, “to cancel warrants for the detention of former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters who are wanted in Serbia over war crimes allegations.”
Kosovo is a mafia state which is supported by Washington and NATO. Criminals are the ideal heads of state. They obey orders from their puppet masters.
The accession of Kosovo to Interpol of a territory run by criminals?
Hashim Thaci was arrested more than 20 years later and indicted for war crimes. His criminal record was known and documented in 1998-99.
The following article was first published by Global Research in February 2008.
—Michel Chossudovsky, June 23, 2017
“Our orientations are clear. The building of the state of Kosovo, economic development, economic and social well-being and rigorous measures against corruption, organized crime and negative behavior, so we can have improved security and integrate Kosova into European Union structures.” —Hashim Thaci, chairman of the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), Prime Minister of the Kosovo provisional government, former KLA leader and known criminal, now in prison in The Hague.
“The PDK, led by Hashim Thaci, former Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] commander, took control of many municipalities after the war. The party has close links with organized crime in the province.” —The Observer, 29 October 2000
“Mr. Thaci, nicknamed “the Snake” during his KLA days, is a sharp-suited 32-year-old former rebel commander with poor oratory skills, links to organized crime and a determination to preserve relations between his party and the United States.” —The Scotsman, 20 October 2000
“I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists.” —US Special Envoy and Ambassador Robert Gelbard
“The KLA [formerly headed by Hashim Thaci] is tied in with every known Middle and Far Eastern drug cartel. Interpol, Europol, and nearly every European intelligence and counter-narcotics agency has files open on drug syndicates that lead right to the KLA…” —Michael Levine, former official of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
“Hashim Thaci founded the “Drenica-Group” an underground organization that is estimated to have controlled between 10% and 15% of all criminal activities in Kosovo (smuggling arms, stolen cars, oil, cigarettes and prostitution).” —Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
***
The US, the EU and the UN are supporting a Kosovo government headed by a known criminal, Prime Minister Hashim Thaci [then President of Kosovo].
The position of Prime Minister was created under the “Provisional Institutions of Self-Government (PISG)” established by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK).
Under a UN mandate, the purpose of the provisional government was “to provide ‘provisional, democratic self-government’ in advance of a decision on the political status of Kosovo.
What this signifies is that the United Nations has not only set the stage for an “Independent” Kosovo government in violation of international law, it has also installed a Kosovo government integrated by the members of a criminal syndicate. All three Kosovo Prime Ministers, Ramush Haradinaj, Agim Ceku and Hashim Thaci, are war criminals.
The Kosovo Democratic Party headed by former KLA Commander Hashim Thaci is essentially an outgrowth of the former Kosovo Liberation Army.
US-NATO covert support to the KLA goes back to the mid-1990s. In the year preceding the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, the KLA was quite openly supported by the Clinton administration.
KLA leader Hashim Thaci was a protégé of Madeleine Albright. He was chosen by Albright to play a key role on Washington’s behalf at the 1998 Rambouillet negotiations.
The links of the KLA to organized crime have been documented by Interpol and the US Congress. The Washington Times in an article published in May 1999 describes the KLA and its links to the Clinton administration as follows:
Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army [headed by the current Kosovo Prime minister Hashim Thaci] , which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden — who is wanted in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 persons, including 12 Americans.
The KLA members, embraced by the Clinton administration in NATO’s 41-day bombing campaign to bring Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to the bargaining table, were trained in secret camps in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere, according to newly obtained intelligence reports.
The reports also show that the KLA has enlisted Islamic terrorists — members of the Mujahideen –as soldiers in its ongoing conflict against Serbia, and that many already have been smuggled into Kosovo to join the fight. ….
The intelligence reports document what is described as a “link” between bin Laden, the fugitive Saudi millionaire, and the KLA –including a common staging area in Tropoje, Albania, a center for Islamic terrorists. The reports said bin Laden’s organization, known as al-Qaeda, has both trained and financially supported the KLA. (Washington Times, May 4, 1999)
The Christian Science Monitor in an August 14, 2000 report describes the criminal network controlled by Thaci:
UN police suspect that much of the violence and intimidation has come from former KLA members, especially those allied with Hashim Thaci, the former KLA leader and head of the Democratic Party of Kosovo, one of the KLA’s political offshoots.
In one recent incident, the shop of an LDK activist in Mr. Thaci’s home village was sprayed with automatic gunfire – the second such attack since November.
Thaci’s party potentially has much to lose in the elections, which are for municipal offices only. After Serb forces withdrew last year, the KLA occupied town halls and public institutions across Kosovo and set up its own provincial government.
Although the UN has gradually asserted its own authority and placed representatives of other political groups in local governments, in places like Srbica ex-KLA members affiliated with Thaci’s party still exercise virtual complete control.
“These guys are not going to give up power that easily,” says Dardan Gashi, a political analyst with the International Crisis Group, a US-based research organization with an office in Pristina.
UN police also suspect organized crime is involved in some of the violence. They say that criminal groups engaged in racketeering, smuggling, and prostitution rely on close links to some people in power. The prospect of losing these connections – and the income they generate – may make them ill-disposed toward the LDK.
Officials say the problem is the worst in the Drenica region of Kosovo, the KLA’s heartland and a stronghold of Thaci’s party. Srbica, where Koci is the local LDK president, is one of the main towns in Drenica. (emphasis added)
The Heritage Foundation: Support the KLA-KDP, Despite Its Criminal Connections
The Heritage Foundation in a May 1999 report acknowledges that the KLA is a criminal organization. It nonetheless called for the support of the KLA by the Clinton administration:
Should the U.S. harness the KLA’s military potential against Milosevic’s brutal regime, despite the KLA’s unusual ideological roots and apparent ties to organized crime? … The KLA does not represent every group seeking an end to Milosevic’s brutal campaign and is known to have committed some atrocities of its own, it is the most significant force resisting Yugoslav aggression within Kosovo. Moreover, the scale and scope of its crimes have been dwarfed by the systematic campaign of terror unleashed by Yugoslav military, paramilitary, and police forces inside Kosovo. which Washington has done consistently since the 1999 war. (Heritage Foundation Report, 13 May 1999)
Shunning the KLA now will deprive the United States of the benefits of cooperating with a resistance force that is capable of ratcheting up the pressure on Milosevic to negotiate a settlement (Ibid)
The Heritage Foundation supports the Kosovo Democratic Party (KDP) which is integrated by former members of the KLA.
The KDP has retained its links to organized crime. This position of the Heritage Foundation broadly summarizes the attitude of the “international community” in relation to Kosovo. More recently, the Heritage Foundation, which plays a behind the scenes role in the formulation of US foreign policy, has been pushing for Kosovo “Independence”
Hashim Thaci
The evidence amply confirms that the prime minister of Kosovo [now president] never severed his links to organized crime.
A known criminal is being protected by the United Nations: He was arrested in Budapest in July 2003 on an Interpol warrant and was immediately released, following a request from the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). This is not an isolated event. There is evidence that the UN Mission and its international police force have protected the former KLA, which in the wake of the 1999 NATO bombing was relabeled the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) under a formal UN mandate.
According to Serbian Justice Minister Vladan Batic,
“the prosecution at the Hague war crimes tribunal has over 40,000 pages of evidence against former Kosovo Liberation Army leader Hashim Thaci.” (quoted by Radio B92, Belgrade, 3 July 2003)
In April 2000, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright “ordered The Hague chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte to omit from the list of war crime suspects Hashim Thaci” (Tanjug, 6 May 2000). Carla del Ponte subsequently claimed that there was not enough evidence to indict Thaci on war crimes.
More generally, the UN Mission has acted as an accessory in protecting a criminal syndicate.
In November 2003, criminal proceedings against several former KLA commanders were initiated in Belgrade. These included Hashim Thaci, Agim Ceku and Ramush Haradinaj. Both Haradinaj and Ceku’s names are on Interpol lists.
The post Kosovo, America’s ‘Mafia State’: The US-NATO-EU Support a Political Process Linked to Organized Crime appeared first on LewRockwell.
France Can’t Deploy New Air-Launched Nuclear-Tipped Missiles Before 2035
Earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron proposed his country take over America’s role as the “nuclear protector” of the “old continent”. Apparently, the French nuclear umbrella would encompass the entire EU and “deter Russia”. Macron tried to justify this by claiming “[President Vladimir] Putin is now threatening all of Europe” and declared that “Russian aggression knows no borders”. He insisted the EU/NATO “needs to prepare”.
It would seem he’s trying to fill the power vacuum as the US is looking to shift its strategic focus to China and the Asia-Pacific. The endemically and pathologically Russophobic United Kingdom seems to be supporting the French initiative, as it falls perfectly in line with its strategy of pushing continental powers against each other.
However, while Paris is daydreaming about “protecting all of Europe”, the reality of its capabilities shows that it can barely defend itself. Namely, during a visit to Haute-Saône, Macron confirmed “the arrival of the new version of the ‘Rafale’ fighter jet” at Air Base 116 in Luxeuil-les-Bains, which will reportedly benefit from a modernization investment of €1.5 billion ($1.64 billion).
According to local media, the French president wants to “make Air Base 116 in Luxeuil-les-Bains, in Haute-Saône, the site for the future ‘Rafale’ models, the key components of nuclear deterrence”. During a speech delivered on March 18, Macron also announced that France would “increase and accelerate orders for ‘Rafale’ jets,” which he said was “an imperative in the face of the geopolitical shift”.
However, there’s just one problem – the two new “Rafale” squadrons (around 40 aircraft in total) won’t be deployed to Air Base 116 in Luxeuil-les-Bains before 2035. According to Macron, 2,000 military personnel and civilians will need at least ten years to join the base that’s slated to be modernized. He also added that “Luxeuil-les-Bains will be the first base to host the next version of the ‘Rafale’ and its hypersonic nuclear missile by 2035”, calling it “a symbol of the renewal of the modernization of our nuclear deterrent”.
The hypersonic missile Macron is referring to is almost certainly the ASN4G (Air-Sol Nucléaire de 4ème Génération, literally meaning 4th generation nuclear air-to-ground (missile)). The weapon is a nuclear-armed, scramjet-powered, air-launched hypersonic cruise missile.
The ASN4G is still under development by MBDA, with assistance from the ONERA. It’s slated to replace the ASMP (Air-Sol Moyenne Portée, literally meaning medium-range air-to-ground), a nuclear-tipped, ramjet-powered, air-launched supersonic cruise missile (maximum speed up to Mach 3). Depending on the version, the ASMP can have a range of up to 600 km, while the ASN4G is expected to increase this to at least 1,000 km.
The French military defines this as a “pre-strategic deterrence role”. The missile is expected to be deployed on the upcoming “Rafale F5”. The claim that the ASN4G will be hypersonic means that it’s supposed to fly at speeds exceeding Mach 5, although the exact figure is yet to be disclosed. Macron also claims that its development is “not linked to the international context”.
This is rather difficult to believe, as Air Base 116 in Luxeuil-les-Bains is the closest to the German border, which prompted many media outlets to portray this as a “signal that France could deploy strategic weapons in defense of the EU/NATO”. The fact that Macron made the announcement from that base implies it was used to promote this idea. Paris has three other air bases that house parts of its nuclear arsenal: Saint-Dizier (Haute-Marne), Istres (Bouches-du-Rhône) and Avord (Cher).
Only the first one (located in northeastern France) is relatively close to Germany. The other two are located in southern and central parts of the country, respectively. On the other hand, Air Base 116 in Luxeuil-les-Bains is also a part of the so-called “permanent security posture”.
Paris says that the aircraft stationed at the base can be deployed to “national, multilateral or NATO missions, notably over the Baltic States” and that it “plays a key role in air security, both on national territory and in the airspace of allies, particularly on [NATO’s] eastern flank”. This is certainly a concerning prospect, as it means the new “Rafale” jets armed with the ASN4G nuclear-tipped missiles could be deployed along Russian borders.
Military sources report that the new missile can fly between Mach 6 and 7. Although far behind Russian hypersonic weapons, it could still cause a dangerous escalation. On the other hand, the 2035 timeframe is not exactly reassuring for either France or other EU/NATO members (provided there are no delays, which is common when it comes to such complex systems).
Meanwhile, Moscow has at least a dozen hypersonic weapons already in service, including the air-launched 9-S-7760 “Kinzhal” missiles, multirole, multi-platform 3M22 “Zircon”, as well as the ground-based “Oreshnik”. In addition, there are at least that many under development, including for Russia’s battle-proven, next-generation Su-57 multirole fighter jets.
Even the Kremlin’s first-generation hypersonic missiles such as the 9M723 of the “Iskander” system exceed the capabilities of the French ASN4G (which, as previously mentioned, is a decade away in the best-case scenario). In other words, Paris is trying to play a game of “nuclear chicken” with Moscow while still at least ten years away from deploying remotely similar weapons that the latter has had in service for nearly a decade (“Kinzhal” was inducted in 2017).
Not to mention that the resurgent Russian military operates a much more potent thermonuclear arsenal – by far the largest and most powerful in the world. In fact, the difference between the number of warheads in Russia and the US is larger than the combined arsenal of the UK and France (around 500). London and Paris both have SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles), with the latter also operating nuclear-capable aircraft, including the aforementioned “Rafale”.
Still, this is a lower level of deterrence than in countries like Russia, China, India and the US which have nuclear triads (aircraft, submarines and land-based missiles), without even considering the size of Moscow’s strategic arsenal which is upwards of a dozen times larger than the combined Franco-British stockpile.
This originally appeared on InfoBrics.
The post France Can’t Deploy New Air-Launched Nuclear-Tipped Missiles Before 2035 appeared first on LewRockwell.
Voice of America Has No Place in a Free Society
Statists are up in arms over President Trump’s decision to terminate the Voice of America and other U.S. government propaganda outlets that fall under the control of a federal entity called the U.S. Agency for Global Media. USAGM also encompasses Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Martí.
Statists are saying that these propaganda outlets have long been great promoters of freedom. Harkening back to World War II, they say that Voice of America was a worthy competitor to propaganda being published by the Nazi regime. They say that ever since World War II, the U.S. governmental propaganda outlets have also been an important voice for freedom in countries under totalitarian or authoritarian rule.
But a fundamental question must be asked: What business does a government in a genuinely free society have owning a propaganda outlet? Sure, I understand that Nazi Germany had a great propaganda program led by Joseph Goebbels. But does that mean that in order to fight Nazism, the U.S. government needed to have its own propaganda program to compete against that of Nazi Germany?
Undoubtedly, Voice of America and the rest of the U.S. propaganda outlets have long praised “capitalism” and criticized “socialism” in their broadcasts. But how do they reconcile that position with U.S. government ownership of a radio station? Isn’t a government owned radio station a socialist project?
Moreover, one can be fairly certain that these U.S. propaganda outlets refrained from condemning discomforting programs and activities of the U.S. government itself. For example, while one could undoubtedly find all sorts of pronouncements condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, my hunch is that one would never find any condemnation of the U.S. government’s invasions and wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. For that matter, I’m fairly certain that Voice of America has never criticized the role that NATO played in provoking the Russia-Ukraine war.
I’m also willing to bet that there has never been any condemnation of the multiple regime-change operations, both at home and abroad, on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, including by coups and assassinations. For that matter, I’ll bet that they have also been silent when it came to U.S. practices like torture and indefinite detention during the much-vaunted “war on terrorism.”
While I’m sure there have been plenty of criticisms of communist Cuba, especially through Radio Martí, my hunch is that silence was the approach toward the Pentagon’s and CIA’s torture center, prison camp, and kangaroo judicial system on the U.S. side of Cuba.
In fact, one could easily be forgiven for viewing Radio Martí as part of the U.S. government’s decades-old quest for regime change in Cuba. Has Radio Martí ever condemned the never-ending efforts by the U.S. national-security state to effect regime change in Cuba, including through its decades-old brutal economic embargo, its many assassination plots, and its acts of terrorism inside Cuba? I would venture to say no.
Socialism is bad whether it’s being in engaged in by National Socialist Germany, communist regimes in Cuba, China, North Korea, and Vietnam, the United States, or any other country. Trump is right to dump the U.S. government-owned propaganda outlets into the trash bin of history. They never should have been brought into existence.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
The post Voice of America Has No Place in a Free Society appeared first on LewRockwell.
My Time in the Reagan Administration
When I was an economics professor, I often wondered if what my faculty colleagues and I were teaching students about economic policy had any validity. I left Stanford University, went to Washington, D.C., and joined the congressional staff in order to experience how policy is made. In the House, I helped Rep. Jack Kemp introduce supply-side economics to his colleagues. I became chief economist of the House Budget Committee on the Republican side, and then staff associate for Senator Orrin Hatch on the Joint Economic Committee.
My success in explaining to Congress that there was an alternative to Keynesian demand management, which had no solution for stagflation, led to President Reagan appointing me assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy. Having learned how policy is made (and unmade), I now had the assignment to implement a new one.
The story of my experience is useful to economists. As one of my graduate professors, Ronald Coase, used to tell his class, “It would help economists to occasionally look outside the window of the box they keep themselves in.”
The conflict between merit and redistribution that is characteristic of the American political system and the influence of established explanations are not the only problems confronting a policymaker, especially if he is introducing a new approach. As Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, “There is nothing more difficult, more perilous or more uncertain of success than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things.”
Intra-party Power Struggles, Not Economics, Are the Main Influence on Policy
One of the many problems a policymaker faces is that policies affect different interest groups in different ways. Some benefit, some don’t, and I don’t mean just in a material or economic way. Most of the things that influence economic policy have nothing to do with economics. They have to do with power. The party establishments that control the parties intend to stay in control. The organized interest groups that control the party establishments intend to continue in control.
Few Americans understand that the main political fight is not between the two parties but within the administration of the party in power. Within the parties the fight is over who controls the party. When the fight is between the establishment and a populist rival like Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump, it can get very nasty.
During the first year of the Reagan administration, much of the battle was between President Reagan and his Treasury allies (primarily me and Secretary Don Regan) on one side and Reagan’s chief of staff, Jim Baker, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Murray Weidenbaum, and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director David Stockman on the other.
The fight within the Reagan administration had its origin in Reagan taking the Republican nomination for president away from the establishment’s candidate, George H. W. Bush, former CIA director. Reagan was considered an outsider, and he was “dangerous” because the Republican establishment could lose its grip on the party to a populist whose basis was in the people and not in the organized interest groups.
Reagan was advised that he must take the defeated George H. W. Bush Republican establishment into his administration or suffer the fate of Barry Goldwater, who rejected Nelson Rockefeller after he defeated him in the Republican presidential nomination. Consequently, the Republican establishment helped the Democrats defeat Goldwater, the Republican populist candidate.
Nancy Reagan judged by appearances, and Bush’s man, Jim Baker, a polished dresser, presented to Nancy a better image than Reagan’s laidback California crew to be standing by her husband. Baker was appointed chief of staff. So, from the start Reagan and his supporters in the administration were handicapped by an establishment operative being chief of staff of the Reagan Revolution.
Only Reagan had offered a solution to the problem of “stagflation.” It was called supply-side economics. Lacking a solution to offer during the campaign for the nomination, Bush termed Reagan’s policy “voodoo economics.” This, of course, played into the hands of the Democrat opposition and the liberal media determined to undermine President Reagan as a Grade B movie actor who believed in fairy tales about tax cuts paying for themselves.
Supply-Side Economics and Its Foes
The aspersion Bush cast on Reagan’s policy had some traction in Republican ranks because of Republicans’ traditional fear of budget deficits. Republicans such as Bob Dole and George H. W. Bush believed that budget deficits resulting from reduction in taxes would stimulate consumer spending, raise inflation and interest rates, crowd out private investment, and worsen the stagflation that emerged from Keynesian demand management during the Carter administration. Traditional Republicans had been well indoctrinated by Keynesian economists—whom, paradoxically, the Republicans opposed—that fiscal policy such as reductions in tax rates only affected the demand side of the economy. They believed that a tax rate reduction could only add to inflationary pressures by adding to consumer demand.
Many on Wall Street saw it the same way as Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. The two main Wall Street economists—Dr. Doom and Dr. Gloom (Henry Kaufman and Albert M. Wojnilower)—stayed busy at work creating hysteria over the “coming Reagan deficits.”
Volcker was also obsessed by the belief that the deficits resulting from the tax rate reduction would fuel the already high inflation. Volcker’s concern was apparent in Treasury’s meetings with him. The Treasury found Volcker immune to under- standing the administration’s assault on stagflation by shifting the aggregate supply schedule instead of the aggregate demand schedule. The Treasury asked Volcker to gradually reduce the growth rate of money as the tax rate reductions, delayed at Stockman and Weidenbaum’s insistence, came into effect.
Having attended Volcker’s meeting with his outside advisers, I advised Secretary Regan that Volcker, fearful of being blamed for the higher inflation he believed the tax rate reduction would cause, would throw on the monetary brakes and into recession we would go before the tax rate reductions would go into effect. As OMB director, David Stockman was relying on inflation to offset the effect on tax revenues of the tax rate reduction (the tax system was not indexed at the time of Stockman’s forecasts) and thus balance the budget; the deficits implicit in Stockman’s inflation assumption and in Volcker’s monetary policy would be blamed on Reagan’s supply-side policy, which economists considered a threat to their investment in Keynesian macroeconomics. Ears would be closed to the Treasury’s explanation. The Treasury, lacking a dynamic revenue model, used the static revenue forecast that a dollar of tax cut would lose a dollar of revenue and, therefore, spelled out the deficits. Stockman hid the deficits with his high inflation forecast. Volcker then collapsed the money supply, and the drop in nominal GNP exposed Stockman’s deficits. A dishonest liberal media blamed the deficits on a mythical Treasury claim, a claim which it never made, that the tax cuts would pay for themselves.
Art Laffer and Jude Wanniski talked at times of tax cuts paying for themselves by expanding the revenue base. Walter Heller made the same point in behalf of the Kennedy tax rate reductions. In testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on February 7, 1977, Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Kennedy administration, said: “Did it [the Kennedy tax rate reduction] pay for itself in increased revenues? I think the evidence is very strong that it did.” Economists with a redistributive agenda, hostile media, and politicians attributed statements made by Laffer and Wanniski to the Treasury and to Reagan. Laffer and Wanniski were trying to calm Republican fear of budget deficits by pointing out that incentives can improve the tax base. The Laffer Curve does not say tax cuts pay for themselves. It merely illustrates that there are two tax rates that will produce the same revenues: a high tax rate on a small base and a low tax rate on a large base.
Walter Heller, who as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers had championed President Kennedy’s large reduction in tax rates, said that Reagan’s similar tax rate reduction would inject too much inflationary purchasing power into the economy and asked, “How can the economy absorb that big an expansionary punch without aggravating our already intolerable inflation?” (Wall Street Journal, February 10, 1981). He didn’t ask this question when he was championing the Kennedy tax rate reduction.
Everyone, except Reagan, the Treasury, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, was still operating inside the Keynesian box. None had bothered, Fed chairman Paul Volcker least of all, to listen to the explanation that reductions in the marginal rate of taxation shifted the aggregate supply schedule and resulted in more production for the same money supply. The way to beat stagflation was to increase output relative to money, and inflation would decline. It is always difficult to introduce a new way of thinking. People have a vested interest in existing dogma because that is where their human capital is invested.
Another way of looking at the policy issue is that supply-side economics differed from the interest rate theory of the cost of capital. We were able to show that taxation substantially affects the cost of capital, whereas the cost of capital is inelastic with respect to changes in interest rates (Roberts, Robbins, and Robbins 1986). I have often wondered if economists missed the effect of taxation on the cost of capital because capital theory developed prior to the income tax.
Noting the rate at which liberal media was building opposition to Reagan’s supply-side policy, budget director David Stockman concluded that Reagan would not succeed and moved into the Republican establishment balanced-budget camp which had no solution to stagflation. Jim Baker thought that a small tax rate reduction—5 percent—would be sufficient for the administration to declare a victory, while not being large enough to add significantly to the budget deficit, inflation, and interest rates. Baker perceived the opportunity to use the media to portray the Bush people as modifying Reagan, which would position them for taking credit for Reagan’s successes and solidify the establishment’s hold on the Republican Party, thereby keeping Rep. Jack Kemp at bay.
Losing Some Battles but Winning the War
The problem was Reagan didn’t go for it, and neither did I. Without retelling the story in my book (Roberts 1984), Jude Wanniski summed up 1981 in his Polyconomics newsletter: “If there is anyone who deserves a supply-side medal with oak-leaf cluster it is Craig Roberts.” I lost some skirmishes, Wanniski said, but I won the war. And I did get the medal, in fact two of them—the U.S. Treasury’s silver medal for “outstanding contributions to the formulation of U.S. economic policy” and the French Legion of Honor for “the restoration of economic science and policy after a half century of state interventionism.”
By August 1981, Reagan’s tax bill was passed into law. With my job done, there was nothing left for me to do in the Treasury. Normally, when a president signs a bill, those responsible for its successful passage are invited to a White House signing ceremony and given one of the pens used to sign the bill into law. As his way of letting me know that I wasn’t appreciated, Jim Baker or his deputy Richard Darman “forgot” to invite me to the signing ceremony. Reagan noticed and sent me the lovely letter that is displayed on the “About” page of my website (Roberts n.d.). The letter, of course, is worth more than a signing pen, and I thanked Jim Baker for it.
There was talk of shifting me to the Federal Reserve Board. Reagan confidant Justin Dart, Rep. Jack Kemp, Chase Manhattan Bank chairman and CEO George Champion, and other influential confidants of Reagan’s were behind it. It would have caused Volcker a heart attack. But Don Regan and I saw that it wasn’t yet time for me to go. Jim Baker and David Stockman were already at work controlling the narrative placed in the media that Reagan would repudiate his “excessive” tax rate reduction in his January 1982 State of the Union message. This, of course, ensured that no work or investment decisions would be made on the basis of a tax reduction whose life might be short-lived. Despite media reports that the tax reduction would be repealed, Volcker was nevertheless at work strangling the money supply.
Stockman began secret interviews with a left-wing journalist, William Greider, aimed at discrediting Reagan’s economic policy. A victory was being turned into a defeat. Jim Baker argued that even a small tax reduction could be successfully pre- sented as a Reagan victory. For Baker the issue was political perception, not fixing the economy. The threat to Reagan’s economic policy was serious, because his other agenda— an end to the Cold War—was based on the success of his supply-side policy. The George H. W. Bush Republican establishment had Reagan’s presidency set up to go up in flames.
Whereas I had managed to keep the percentage reduction in marginal tax rates from being significantly molested, I had been unable to block Stockman’s insistence that the tax rate reduction be phased in over three years, with the first reduction being limited to 2.5 percent, which was cancelled by the high rate of inflation, as the income tax was not indexed for inflation at that time. Phased in over three years, the tax reduction would be cancelled by the inflation rate. The tax rate reduction needed to hit all at once to have its impact. But Stockman and Jim Baker had Senate Republicans and Republican business leaders all in a huff about deficits. They wanted to raise taxes instead of lowering them. For Republicans, the solution to every economic problem was to balance the budget. It was this mindlessness with which I was at war.
Stockman’s argument was, of course, the budget deficit. Phasing in the tax rate reduction would produce a smaller deficit. Additionally, inflation by raising nominal incomes would raise nominal GDP and produce more tax revenues to cover the deficit. Stockman was relying on inflation to balance the budget by pushing taxpayers into higher tax brackets. This was not the president’s policy, as I pointed out to Stockman.
I told Stockman that he was hiding deficits behind his high inflation projections, but that inflation was going to collapse either as a result of the supply-side policy if we were able to secure the Fed’s cooperation, or from the Fed in fear of our policy slamming on the brakes and bringing on recession, which the Fed did. Volcker’s recession collapsed GDP and tax revenues and created budget deficits that were promptly blamed on the tax cut, which, being delayed, had yet to be implemented. The “Reagan deficits” were the Volcker deficits and the Stockman deficits covered up by Stockman’s high projected inflation rates. Over the next years, the inflation rate collapsed, instead of hitting all-time highs as Wall Street and academic economists had predicted.
It is a myth that the Treasury said the tax cuts would pay for themselves. The Treasury’s official position, based on its traditional static revenue model, was that every dollar of tax reduction would lose a dollar of tax revenue. But the initial deficits would fade with the expansion that followed, unless spending was left out of control. We kept reminding people that the agenda was to cure stagflation, not to balance the budget. The tax system had to be used to increase the quantity supplied at every price by increasing the cost of leisure in terms of forgone current income and increasing the cost of current consumption in terms of forgone future income.
During the autumn of 1981, immediately following the passage of the tax rate reductions, the battle raged inside the administration to whittle down or even totally repeal the supply-side reduction in marginal tax rates. The George H. W. Bush part of the administration had turned against the Reagan administration’s victory.
It was the Treasury against Stockman at OMB, the White House chief of staff, the vice president, and the Council of Economic Advisers. As neither side would yield, three times the decision was taken to the White House. Each time Ed Meese and President Reagan’s men sided with the Treasury. As soon as the presidential delegation left the room, Jim Baker would ask Don Regan, “Don, can’t the Treasury make a better case?” And it would start all over again. After the third time, Regan asked me why Reagan didn’t fire those who didn’t hear his decisions. My answer was that Reagan was very non-confrontational and was relying on the Treasury. I think it was December when Regan told me he had had enough and was going to Florida. “It’s in your hands.”
Triumph and Departure after Reagan’s 1982 State of the Union Address
The morning of Reagan’s State of the Union address in January 1982, the lead article on the Wall Street Journal’s front page, a plant by Baker or Stockman, said that Reagan was going to back away from his irresponsible tax cut in his State of the Union speech.
Roger Mudd, the anchor for NBC News in those days, called me. “Craig,” he said, “it looks like you are going to be repudiated tonight and the supply-side policy cast aside.” I had just finished reading Reagan’s State of the Union address, as the speechwriters had sent it over for my approval. I advised Roger not to take that line because Reagan was not backing off his policy. Roger laughed. Convinced that supply-side economics and I were done for, he offered to set me up in a room in the Capitol with a television so I could watch my repudiation in Reagan’s State of the Union speech, and he would come in immediately after Reagan’s address and we would go live on national TV as NBC’s lead interview on the president’s speech. He was surprised when I accepted.
In his State of the Union address Reagan delivered a stinging rebuff to his OMB director and chief of staff. Strongly reaffirming his commitment to his economic program, Reagan declared: “The doubters would have us turn back the clock with tax increases that would offset the personal tax-rate reductions already passed by this Congress. Raise present taxes to cut future deficits, they tell us. Well, I don’t believe we should buy their argument” (Reagan 1982).
Having heard the opposite of what he expected, Mudd was shaken. Immediately we went live: “Craig, the president has just repudiated the advisers who tried to get him to raise taxes. They have egg all over their faces! What can they do?” I replied, “They can wipe the egg off their faces and get back on the president’s team.” Within seconds of my statement, my wife got a furious call from a Stockman aide whose voice she recognized: “We are going to get Craig and all his friends.” Being a British lady, she was upset at the barbarity of the American government in Washington. I had served the president, which was my duty, not the establishment, and the establishment was going to “get me.”
At the White House press conference the next morning, the first question Larry Speakes had to answer was, “Is Jim Baker still employed today? . . . He led the losing fight, and the general who gets beaten usually gets thrown out.”
Reporters and columnists began telling the story of how senior aides had worked to undermine congressional and business support for the president’s program. In a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal on February 2, 1982, reporters Rich Jaroslovsky, Ken Bacon, and Robert Merry told how Baker and Stockman operated against the president by building “momentum with leaks and pressure.”
I knew that Reagan could not throw out his vice president’s right-hand man, who had done so much to undermine the president of the United States, and that Reagan was stuck with Baker until Reagan’s second term, when Don Regan would take over as chief of staff. I knew that Baker, Stockman, Darman, and Larry Kudlow would use their friends in the media to destroy my reputation. I had done my job. Harvard University Press wanted the story. A prestigious chair was created for me, and I had no intention of spending years in internal administration fights. I explained the situation to Secretary Regan and President Reagan, and they agreed to keep my departure a secret so that the media could not make it look like I was driven out of the administration. Reagan said he would ensure that I escaped alive. He said he had further need for me in the future. I left and eased into the new William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. Later Reagan appointed me to a secret presidential committee to assess the CIA’s opposition to Reagan’s plan to end the Cold War. This is another story, one that brought me up against the CIA.
Thwarting Continued Assaults on Reagan’s Policies from within the Party
My second victory over the establishment was as short-lived as my first victory. I was no longer in the Treasury to beat back the third assault from within the Reagan administration on Reagan’s supply-side policy. The assault was not coming from the Democrats. It was coming from the Republican establishment.
Determined not to be defeated in their agenda to “moderate” Reagan, by April 1982 Baker and Stockman were marching Reagan into a tax increase by lying to him that it was a tax reform, not a tax increase. They left the reductions in the personal income tax rates alone and focused on the business tax cut added to the Kemp-Roth bill by Treasury undersecretary Norman Ture. The business tax cuts consisted of accelerated depreciation.
The U.S. tax code specifies the years over which various kinds of business investments can be depreciated. Some of the schedules were very long, and inflation had eroded their real values. Something needed to be done to shorten the write-off periods. It is possible that too much was done to improve the situation for business, and that the pendulum had gone too far in the other direction. Nevertheless, this was a “tax reform” Reagan could accept as it left his personal tax rate reductions alone.
Cleverly, Stockman and Baker tied Reagan conservatives’ demand for spending cuts to the tax increase. They told Reagan the tax increase was a necessary part of the deal for the Democrats to accept spending cuts. The taxes rose and so did spending.
Stockman was not content to mislead President Reagan only about taxes. He also misled Reagan about spending bills in order to discredit Reagan with Republican senators and humiliate him with overridden vetos. Stockman chose a spending bill that funded popular programs such as jobs for the elderly to help them make ends meet, which was funded $2 billion less than Reagan had requested. Stockman told Reagan that the appropriation was a “budget-buster” in order to get Reagan to veto the bill. Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Mark Hatfield said, “By no responsible account can this be called a budget-buster.” Many saw that Reagan was being manipulated by his chief of staff and budget director. Senator Mark Andrews declared, “Frankly I’m getting sick and tired of David Stockman and his mirror acts. . . . He’s not serving the nation well, he’s not serving the president well, he’s not serving his party well” (Dewar 1982).
Even Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill called on Stockman to resign for failure to keep the president correctly informed about the spending bills. Jim Baker had to be aware of Stockman’s perfidy, but he protected Stockman, who remained in office doing as much damage as he could to the Reagan Revolution. It was like what Trump’s appointees did to him during his first term.
Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, columnists who closely watched the Washington scene, saw the tax increase as Baker’s attempt to portray supply-side economics as a failure and thus to remove Jack Kemp as a contender for the presidential succession. Others concluded that Reagan was not sufficiently involved to take control of his policy. The liberal-left columnists had a field day.
The administration of Reagan’s successor, President George H. W. Bush, again raised taxes, and their target this time was the personal income tax rates. As Reagan and I were absent the scene, they had a free hand. Nevertheless, although they raised the personal tax rates, they left them significantly below the rates that prevailed prior to the supply-side reduction in Reagan’s personal tax rate reductions. Even today, the tax rates are lower than they were prior to the Reagan tax rate reduction.
The real value of the Reagan tax cut was due to Senator William Armstrong’s amendment and to my success in bringing the administration on board with Senator Armstrong’s amendment, which had passed the Senate, to index the personal income tax for inflation. Over time even a low rate of inflation would inflate all incomes into the top bracket. In the House, the Democrats had come up with their own supply-side tax cut. White House speechwriters were looking for a way to differenti- ate Reagan’s tax cut bill from the Democrat one that cut rates more in the first two years. My principal deputy, Steve Entin, produced a graphic showing that indexing provided the dramatic comparison that the White House was seeking. Reagan was delighted. He used it in his television address just prior to the vote. Reagan quipped that the Democrat’s tax cut is larger “if you’re only planning to live two more years.” Without indexing, inflation eroded the benefit of the Democrat tax cut bill.
I can take satisfaction that my efforts, together with those of my Treasury colleagues, the White House speechwriters, and White House economist Martin Anderson, forty-four years ago in behalf of a supply-side economic policy have had a positive impact for four decades. Subsequent policymakers who offshored jobs, destroyed supply chains and the tax base of manufacturing and industrial states, created monopolies, financialized the economy, and weaponized the dollar, thus setting in motion the loss of the dollar’s role as reserve currency, have a great deal to answer for. For me, I can point to an enduring success. If the top marginal tax rates were still 70 percent on investment income and 50 percent on earned income, we would hardly have an economy at all.
The Permanence of the Supply-Side Revolution
There was no significant difference between the Kennedy tax cut in 1964 and the Reagan tax cut in 1981. The only difference is in the economic interpretation of tax rate reductions.
In the Keynesian view, a tax rate reduction stimulates consumer demand by leaving more money in the pockets of consumers to spend. The result is a rise in aggregate demand that leads to an increase in employment and investment in order to meet the higher demand, but it can also result instead in inflation with prices instead of output and employment rising if high tax rates discourage increases in output.
In the supply-side view, a tax rate reduction changes two important relative prices that cause an increase in aggregate supply. One of the prices is the price of leisure in terms of forgone current income. Lowering tax rates raises the cost of leisure in terms of the income you give up by, for example, taking Friday afternoons off. If you are in a 50 percent marginal tax rate, you only get to keep 50 cents of each additional dollar you earn. If the tax rate is cut to 30 percent, you get to keep 70 cents of each additional dollar you earn. Thus a lower tax rate makes leisure more expensive and encourages more labor supply.
The other price is the price of current consumption in terms of forgone future income. If you deplete your income in consumption instead of saving and investing, you forgo higher future income from investments not made. If the tax rate on investment income is 70 percent, each dollar of investment income only brings you 30 cents. If the tax rate is lowered to 50 percent, the reward to saving and investing rises to 50 cents for every dollar earned. Therefore, a reduction in the tax rate on investment income makes current consumption more expensive in terms of forgone future income and encourages more investment.
Whereas Keynesian demand-side economists believe fiscal policy such as changes in tax rates only affects aggregate demand, supply-side economists point out that some fiscal policies, such as changes in tax rates, directly affect aggregate supply. The supply-side revolution resulted from the realization after decades of demand management that fiscal policy directly affects aggregate supply. The Keynesian policy of stimulating consumer demand with Federal Reserve money creation while restraining output with higher tax rates resulted in stagflation. The supply-side solution was to remove the disincentives to work and invest caused by high tax rates.
Paul Samuelson, the top-of-the-line Keynesian economist in those days, agreed with the supply-side correction of fiscal policy. But he wondered how powerful the supply-side effect would be. Was it strong enough to have a significant effect? Paul Evans, a Stanford University economist, had already answered Samuelson’s question. I asked the Treasury staff to re-estimate Evans’s work on the impact of the Kennedy tax rate reduction on consumption and saving. Had the Kennedy tax cut caused consumption to rise or saving to rise? The empirical record was clear. Consumers spent a smaller percentage of their lower-taxed incomes. There was a marked increase in the real volume of personal saving following the Kennedy tax cut, and the saving rate, which had been declining during the early 1960s, rose sharply. It remained high for a decade, until rising marginal tax rates from a non-indexed tax system pushed it down. It was clear that the Kennedy tax rate reduction worked because of its supply-side effects.
The two tax rate reductions in the latter half of the twentieth century kept the American economy alive. The Kennedy tax rate reduction in 1964 slowed the erosion of America’s economic potential, and the Reagan tax rate reduction in 1981, married with the indexation of the tax rates, boosted the economy’s potential. A return to sound economic policies that focus on boosting productivity in the long run would help return the country to the strong growth path it enjoyed during the Reagan era.
References
Dewar, Helen. 1982. Senate Joins House, Overrides Reagan Veto. Washington Post, September 10.
Heller, Walter. 1977. Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, February 7.
Reagan, Ronald. 1982. Address Before a Joint Session of Congress Reporting on the State of the Union, January 26.
Roberts, Paul Craig. n.d. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/pages/about-paul-craig-roberts/.
_______, 1984. The Supply-Side Revolution. Harvard University Press.
Roberts, Paul Craig, Aldona E. Robbins, and Gary F. Robbins. 1986. The Relative Impact of Taxation and Interest Rates on the Cost of Capital. Technology and Economic Policy, edited by Ralph Landau and Dale Jorgenson. Ballinger.
VOLUME 29, NUMBER 4, SPRING 2025, pages 693-703
https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_29_4_10_roberts.pdf
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Paul Craig Roberts, who played a crucial role in enacting the tax cuts of the 1980s and in forging the political emergence of supply-side economics, reflects on his experience in Washington. He emphasizes that intra-party power struggles, not economics, are the main influence on policy. — Editor, The Independent Review
Paul Craig Roberts is chairman of the Institute for Political Economy. He had academic careers as senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University; journalism careers as associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week; government careers as a member of the U.S. congressional staff and as assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration; and business careers as a director of industrial and financial companies.
The post My Time in the Reagan Administration appeared first on LewRockwell.
U.S. Farmers Are Under Siege? Food Security Crises Going on in the U.S
According to- Anthony Hernandez: U.S. farmers are under siege, but these attacks are also happening worldwide. The first farmers to receive governmental interference in the Amish community, a self-sustaining pioneer-type community, grow their food, make their foods, make furniture, and other products. They are Bible-believing people who stay on their own but also sell their products to stores and sell foods at farmer’s markets and roadside stands. –Full report…
If the society broke down into city states because of one of the many risk facing us came to fruition, why assume this would end farmer markets? The farms at risk for extreme weather and Global Warming, higher heat and drought and floods are large maga-farms with mono-crops that do not grow sustainably. They lack the soil depth and health and risk another dust bowl in the least.
Organic farms and permaculture farms are resistant to weather extreme and bounce back more easily. This is because they grow many crops along side perennials, have strong soils because the emphasize sustainability over profit. Many small farms though monocrop of annuals are small enough, surrounded by trees and other small farms growing different crops which helps yield stronger soils mostly because they cannot afford so many herbicides and fertilizers so most fall back on manure which is usually plentiful and cheap at least out here.
So most small farms are somewhat sustainable, even alley, and roof top ones are. And though a few also will likely fail for many reasons (economics ironically is the likest), most will survive. Yet many potential crisis we face today as they faced last time we were in a like Gilded Age or oligarchy, Its the jobs that fail and this includes banks and supermarkets.
But farmers market might if those farms that survive have enough to sell and people they want to sell to have money or can barter for food instead and the government just doesn’t seize this. Of course this assumes the crisis is that the capitalistic system collapsed again as it did a century ago. If this was worse likely governments would collapse at the federal level of loose control of most of the states.
How state governments survive depends on, how close they were to the event. Martial law might follow and this scenario is the seizing risk. Another risk is roving bands taking food before it can be sold and killing farmers.
Yet farm communities likely would build community in the chaos and have protection from neighbors who do not farm and are job less (likely for part of harvest). Still the farmers markets in this scenario would be insulated and limited to those in those communities.
This didn’t happen during the great depression yet farms food stayed out in the farm areas and fed people there mostly as transpiration broke down. This is why so many people in cities starved. Those in the country did far better. So farmer’s markets might still exist, yet can you afford them or if bartering offer something they can use living so far away?
Additional:
What would happen if there was no farmers markets in the United States?
If there were, for no good reason, no farmers markets, then farmers and their consumers would get together and create them!
Because that is where they came from; fulfilling a need.
With the end of the petroleum age facing us in the next decade or two, expect farmers markets to become more and more popular. The growing uncertainty about the quality and healthfulness of industrially-produced food is creating a growing “know your food producer” movement.
The forces arrayed against farmers markets are formidable. Basically, the entire industrial food industry has absolutely no interest in being cut out of consumers’ lives, which is what farmers markets do, by fostering direct-to-consumer relationships with food producers. In fact, they are spending lots of lobbying money to put an end to farmers markets.
Case in point: a dozen or so years ago, the BC Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Rory McAlpine, barnstormed the province, warning consumers about how dangerous the meat supply was, because, y’know, just any farmer could slaughter, butcher, and sell meat to just any consumer. Heaven forbid!
Forget for a moment that not a single case of farm-butchered food poisoning had been reported to the BC Centre for Disease Control. Not. A. Single. One. People who eat their own food tend to have safe food, unlike the guy who would never eat in the burger joint that he had worked at. But the politicians and their industrial-farming buddies had to protect the public!
So McAlpine put a system into place whereby all meat was required to go through provincially-licensed and inspected abattoirs. (That’s Canuck for “slaughterhouse.”) Our small island, once renown for its lamb, saw our meat production slashed by about 70% over the next few years. We held bake sales and other fund raisers and raised $700,000 to put an abattoir on the island in an attempt to stop the economic drain — money that could have been spent on schools, hospitals, libraries, or perhaps even a four-season farmers market structure.
Having accomplished his master’s bidding, McAlpine left politics and got a cushy, newly-minted job as “Head of Government Relations” for Maple Leaf Meats. Less than two months later, Maple Leaf killed two dozen meat consumers with tainted meat!
You could not make this stuff up. Any editor or publisher would say, “Not credible.” But it happened.
Consumers are increasingly dissatisfied and untrustful of the industrial food system. If there were no farmers markets, you would be forced to eat whatever the industrial food system and their government pansies allow you to eat.
This originally appeared on EarlKing56.family.blog.
The post U.S. Farmers Are Under Siege? Food Security Crises Going on in the U.S appeared first on LewRockwell.
In Movies We Understand That the Genocidal Child Murderers Who Blow Up Hospitals Are the Villains
Remember in The Dark Knight when we all applauded the Joker for heroically blowing up a hospital?
Or remember when we watched Star Wars and cheered for the protagonist Darth Vader as he destroyed a planet to punish the rebel scum for daring to resist him?
How about when we watched Schindler’s List anxiously hoping the Nazis would be able to thwart the diabolical scheming of the villain Oskar Schindler to prevent them from committing genocide?
Or when we watched Avatar and cheered for the interstellar megacorporation and its army of mercenaries to displace the indigenous people of Pandora to steal their land?
Israel just blew up Gaza’s only cancer hospital (the Joker style).
The IDF has been occupying this hospital for over a year, using it as a military post, & now shamelessly claims it was a “Hamas compound”
How can any sane person trust Israel when they always lie so blatantly? pic.twitter.com/LRtSycyoJN
— Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) March 21, 2025
Or when we watched The Pelican Brief hoping the heroes would find some way to kill Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington to stop them from reporting the truth about their crimes?
Or when we watched The Pianist and wept at the evil Jews attacking innocent Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?
Or when we watched The Lord of the Rings and booed the villainous men, elves and dwarves fighting to survive a siege by Saruman’s heroic army of orcs?
Or when we watched V for Vendetta on the edge of our seats worried that the government would fail to stomp out the rebellion, suppress the truth from coming out, and impose more authoritarian measures on the people?
Or when we watched Revenge of the Sith and cheered for the hero Anakin Skywalker mass murdering children in order to wipe the Jedi out of existence?
This order is clear-cut evidence of a crime against humanity: https://t.co/LzTPYkD6qb
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 22, 2025
Yeah, I don’t remember that either.
Nobody seems to have trouble figuring out who the real villains are when it’s happening in the movies. The narrative managers and spinmeisters make it a lot harder to sort out the villains from the victims in real life.
Normally it’s misguided to view any conflict as simply evil villains murdering innocent victims, but not with Israel and Gaza. It’s an apartheid state that’s backed by a globe-spanning empire, raining bombs onto a giant concentration camp packed full of children because they’re the wrong ethnicity.
It’s pretty black and white, actually.
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
The post In Movies We Understand That the Genocidal Child Murderers Who Blow Up Hospitals Are the Villains appeared first on LewRockwell.
Transparency on what is in the food we eat
Writes Wayne Goodfellow:
A good start by Robert Kennedy Jr, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The post Transparency on what is in the food we eat appeared first on LewRockwell.
DOGE Blocks 52 Million Earmarked For WEF
Writes Gail Appel:
It’s a beautiful day!
See here.
The post DOGE Blocks 52 Million Earmarked For WEF appeared first on LewRockwell.
Arrested Columbia University Says He is a Political Prisoner
Ginny Garner wrote:
Lew,
Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was protesting for a free Palestine and against the end to genocide in Gaza when he was arrested. He was a negotiator for Columbia United Apartheid Divest demanding the university divest from any company that does business with the Israeli military. Khalil has written an article from his detention facility in Louisiana.
See here.
The post Arrested Columbia University Says He is a Political Prisoner appeared first on LewRockwell.
Wisconsin “teacher” comments on Trump disallowing biological men in women’s sports
Writes Johnny Kramer:
This may be the best two-minute ad against government schools that I’ve ever seen; imagine sending your child to be “educated” by someone like this.
The post Wisconsin “teacher” comments on Trump disallowing biological men in women’s sports appeared first on LewRockwell.
Larry David vs The World
Thanks, Johnny Kramer.
The post Larry David vs The World appeared first on LewRockwell.
Conspiracy Theorists Were Right About Israel’s Ties to JFK Assassination
Thanks, Ginny Garner.
The post Conspiracy Theorists Were Right About Israel’s Ties to JFK Assassination appeared first on LewRockwell.
Huge Structures Discovered Over 1.5 Miles Below Great Pyramid of Giza
Thanks, Ginny Garner.
The post Huge Structures Discovered Over 1.5 Miles Below Great Pyramid of Giza appeared first on LewRockwell.
The medical Nazis of New Zealand versus the brilliant Dr. Sam Bailey
Click Here:
The post The medical Nazis of New Zealand versus the brilliant Dr. Sam Bailey appeared first on LewRockwell.
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