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Everyone will agree that the American tax system is a mess. Taxes are far too high, and the patchwork system is so complicated that even IRS officials don’t understand it. Hence the evident need for some sort of dramatic, even drastic, reform. As often happens, a group of dedicated and determined reformers has arisen to satisfy that need. But before we embrace this new gospel, we should heed the old maxim about jumping from the frying pan into the fire, and also remember the warning of the great H.L. Mencken, who defined “reform” as “Mainly a conspiracy of prehensile charlatans to mulct the American taxpayer.” And we should also bear in mind that all acts of government, however wor­thy they may seem, have a way of winding up solving no problems and only making matters worse.

Working within current tax realities, the reformers’ plans are varied and change nearly daily, as they meet conflicting political pressures. But whether they be Kemp-Kasten, Bradley-Gephardt, the Treasury plan of fall, 1984 (Regan, or Reagan I), or the final Reagan plan of spring, 1985 (Reagan II), there is one common and seemingly simple goal: that every person or group should pay the same proportional tax on their net income, and that all deductions, exemptions, and shelters be abolished in the name of this uniform proportional tax (a “flat tax with no exemptions”).

The flat tax reformers have much in common with militant ide­ologues that we have become all too familiar with in the twentieth century. In the first place, they are egalitarians in this case, assuming it to be sinful or at least grossly “unfair” for any person or group to escape the scythe of the great uniform tax. Second, and along with this egalitarianism, they assume in brusque and lordly fashion that they alone represent and embody the “general interest,” and that all objections to a uniform flat tax may be quickly dismissed as the self-interested croakings of the “special interests.” It doesn’t seem to matter if the “special interests” encompass most of the American populace; they must be unceremoniously swept aside to achieve the flat tax paradise. The fact that most of the impetus for this and other reforms comes from academic economists puts the icing on the flat tax cake. Academic idealists have always been accustomed to sweeping aside everyone else’s interests and concerns as petty and “special,” while they speak automatically for the larger interests of mankind. At best, the reformers cavalierly overlook the enormous amount of harm and pain they will inflict in the course of their grandiose reform.

One example: the flat tax would impose an enormous amount of harm and damage on every American homeowner. In their wisdom, the flat taxers have decided that deduction of interest payments on your mortgage is a “subsidy” granted by the tax system, and that your true net income would permit no such deduction. They have also concluded that the unwitting homeowner also enjoys another “subsidy” from the government: failure to tax his “imputed rent”; that is, the amount that he would have had to pay in rent if he had been renting the house instead of owning it. One of the many prob­lems with the latter proposal is that the poor homeowner is never able to pay his “imputed” taxes; no, his taxes would have to be paid in cold cash, even though his income is “psychic” and not earned in money. But we press on. A third body blow to the homeowner would be the flat taxer’s insistence on eliminating federal tax deductions for state and local taxes, most of which are property taxes on one’s home. Thus, we have a three-fold tax increase inflicted on the home­owner, and the effect of this one-two-three punch would be a perma­nent lowering of the market value of one’s home, which consists of the present value of expected future returns from the house.

These are but a few of the many grave consequences and dam­ages that would flow from the reformers’ measures. But the reform­ers literally do not care; no pains (almost invariably suffered by others) must be permitted to block or delay the speedy achievement of their Utopia. Any alterations are only grudging concessions to the fierce resistance of the “special interests” to the advent of the flat taxers’ New Jerusalem. Thus, the Regan plan of fall, 1984 (Reagan I), proposed to increase drastically the capital gains tax, toward the ideal of raising it to the precise level of the income tax, and also suggested a sharp lowering of oil depletion allowances. Great resis­tance was offered to the plan by risky venture capitalists, who would be particularly crushed by a high capital gains tax, and by the similarly damaged oil interests, always considered sinister in the popular imagination. As a result, the reformers were forced to aban­don these two aspects of their Grand Plan in Reagan II. But in the long run, these forced retreats are not important; their goal—a uni­form across-the-board flat tax—always remains the same.

But why is this plan so grand? So vitally important that our pain and hardships should be treated as nothing? Here the reformers offer little argument. Basically, their reasons boil down to two: their tax system would be simple (you could calculate your tax on a post­card), and above all, it would be fair.

The Argument for Simplicity

Making out your taxes, the reformers claim, would be simplicity itself. No more back-breaking work trying to figure out what’s going on, no more hiring tax lawyers or accountants. But the sweet sim­plicity of the argument can be disposed of very quickly. In the first place, anyone who wants simplicity can have it now, by using the short E-Z form, and two-thirds of Americans do so at the present time. So then the question to ask is: why do one-third of us choose complexity by spending many painful hours over the complex form, and why do we hire expensive lawyers and accountants to aid us? Surely, not because we love complexity and expense for their own sakes, but because we believe that there are things in life worse than complexity, and one of them is paying more taxes! We are willing to suffer some complexity in order to lower some of our monstrous tax burden. And by eliminat­ing our deductions, exemptions, shelters, and so on, the reformers are imposing compulsory simplicity against our wishes. They are truly what the great nineteenth century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt said of the statist intellectuals of his day, “terrible simplifiers.”

But the joke is on us, for the reformers’ system would really in no way be simple. We would still have to go through a complex and murky maze. For the key to the flat taxers is that the uniform proportionate tax is to be levied on all net income. But what is net income? The answers are far from simple, and good arguments can be found on either side. The interesting and crucial fact is that, on each of these arguments, the flat taxers invariably come down against the harried taxpayer, and in favor of bringing ever more of our income and assets into the greedy maw of the taxing Leviathan State.

Thus, are “capital gains” income? The reformers say yes, and call for taxing it to the same extent as ordinary income. Western Europe has not gone down the economic drain partly because its capital gains taxes have always been far lower than its income taxes, but this fact does not and cannot count in the harsh calculus of our reformers. Should capital gains be taxed as they accrue on our books or only as they are realized in cash? Once again, the reformers opt for accrual, grabbing our assets at an earlier date, and heedless of our problem of paying taxes in money while our “gains” have only accrued in our psyche or on paper. Are the losses in our tax shelters phony, or should they be treated as real losses to write off our income? The reformers insist that they are phony, and that therefore they must be disregarded when our taxes are estimated. But who is to say so? Who is to say that if I buy a horse farm in Virginia, and suffer losses, that these are losses I welcome in order to reduce my taxes? Who is equipped to look into my heart and mind and find out if these losses are “genuine” or not? And since when has the IRS acquired occult powers, along with the rest of its totalitarian armamentarium?

And what about the cherished American institution of the three­martini lunch? Reformers from Carter to Reagan have tried to crush that lunch, and to claim that these are not genuine or worthy business expenses. Net income is arrived at by deducting costs from gross income. But is the three-martini lunch a “genuine” cost of business, or is it a sneaky way of earning income that is not subject to tax? Who knows? Who knows how much genuine business, if any, is conducted at such lunches? Once again, the reformers know! And they know that such deductions can be swept away.

And there is the problem of the corporation. Corporations are entities. Should their income be taxed at the same rate as personal income? Economists have come to recognize that there is no living thing called a corporation. A corporate income tax is a double tax upon stockholders, first as a “corporation,” and next upon their personal income. But while economists have been increasingly call­ing for abolition of the corporate tax, the reformers have in their wisdom decided that since all entities’ income must be taxed uni­formly, the corporate income tax must be included and even raised if necessary to be taxed at the same rate.

None of these arguments is simple, but it’s instructive that in each and every case, the reformers have come down fiercely on the side of including all these incomes or assets in the taxation category. Their bias in favor of tax, tax, and more tax should be clear by now.

The Argument for Fairness

The major argument of the flat taxers is that it is “fairness” that demands a swift forced march toward their ideal. “Fairness” is worth almost any cost. But it is strange that this ethical argument comes from a profession (academic economists) who have made a career of loudly proclaiming that all of their doctrines are “value-free sci­ence” that have nothing to do with ethics. So when did they become expert ethicists? Indeed, the fairness argument is generally and blithely assumed to be true, after which the reformers can gleefully denounce every resister to higher or broader taxes as embodiments of sinister “special” interests.

One argument holds that fairness demands that everyone pay his or her equal share of the “services” of government. Let us set aside for a moment the surely important point that these “services” are often dubious, are inordinately expensive, and sometimes mean that the taxpayer is forced to pay for his own surveillance and oppression. Since when does “fairness” demand that everyone pay the same proportion of his income for a good or service? Mixed in with the argument for fairness is the view that government should do nothing to penalize one industry or occupation, or subsidize another. This neutral-to-the-market argument puts the flat taxers in the guise of militant adherents of free enterprise. This sounds admirable, but why does it imply that every­one should pay the same proportion of his income? When David Rockefeller and I buy a loaf of Wonder Bread at the supermarket, each of us pays the same price; no one is there to inspect our annual incomes and levy a proportionate fine. No one forces Rockefeller to pay $1,000 for a loaf of Wonder Bread, just because his income is a thousand times that of the next man. The free market tends toward uniform and equal pricing for each product; one price for everyone, whatever that person’s race, creed, class, color, or income. Why should it suddenly be different for taxes? In short, a quiet but highly important change has here been made in the concept of “equal,” from equal and uniform price for all on the free market, to equal proportion to income in the hands of the flat taxers.

“Subsidy” True and False

At the heart of the fairness and neutral-to-the-market assumptions of the flat taxers is their express desire to eliminate subsidies, which are assumed to be both evil and non-neutral to the free market. The prob­lem here is an equivocation on the term “subsidy.” It’s certainly true that our tax and budget system is riddled with subsidies, properly defined as taxing one group of people to line the pockets of another, or robbing Peter to pay Paul. If you or I are taxed to subsidize tobacco growers, or highway builders, or contractors, or welfare recipients, then these are indeed subsidies, cases where productive people are being robbed by the government to support groups who function, in effect, as parasites upon the producers. These are subsidies that should be elimi­nated forthwith. But what about, say, deductions for payment of interest on mortgages, tax credits for investment, or deductions for payment of state and local taxes? In what sense are they “subsidies”? Instead, what is really happening here is that some people—homeowners, investors, or state and local taxpayers—are graciously allowed by the government to keep more of their own money than they would have otherwise. I submit that being allowed to keep more of your hard-earned money is not a subsidy in any true sense; it simply means that you are being fleeced less intensely than you would have been. If a robber assaults you on the highway, and is about to run off with all of your funds, and you persuade him to let you keep some bus fare, is he “subsidizing” you? Surely not. Being allowed to keep your own money can scarcely be called a subsidy.

We are now able to see through two very different senses of the concept of “special interest.” It is all too true that the tobacco planter or the highway contractor who eagerly demands government funds are special interests aggressively dedicated to fleecing the taxpayer. But the investor, or the homeowner, or the venture capitalist, or whatever, who lobbies to be able to keep ‘more of his own money is a “special interest” in a very different sense. They are resisters properly dedicated to defending their own rights and assets against government assault. “Special” they might be, but they are, whether they know it or not, engaged in the noble effort of defending the rights and the freedoms of all of us against assault and depredation.

By focusing on defenders of their property and rights as alleged subsidy-seekers, the flat taxers are engaging in a strategy of “divide and conquer.” The reformers have taken a growing movement of rebellion, resentment, and call for lower taxes and split the taxpayer forces by encouraging one set of us to seek out and persecute the other set. The flat taxers have managed to shift the focus of discussion from “lower taxes for all” to the proposition: “If you want your taxes to be lower, seek out and confiscate the assets of those bad people whose taxes are ‘unfairly’ low.” The focus becomes raising the other guy’s taxes instead of lowering yours and everyone else’s. This clever ploy of the high taxers unfortunately seems to be working.

The flat taxers like to proclaim their plan to be “revenue-neutral,” that is, the overall tax burden will not change. The lowering of some taxes on upper income groups, then, must be offset by “broadening the base,” or by extending the tax burden to more people and sources of income. But who is to guarantee that once the base is broadened, and more income sources are brought under government’s sway, it will not follow its natural proclivities and once again raise taxes for everyone?

What Is a Loophole?

It is ironic that the slogan “close the loopholes,” which used to be a hallmark of left-liberalism, has now been adopted by the Reagan administration and by the flat taxers. The great free-market economist Ludwig von Mises once rose up in a conference on taxation that devoted much energy to the closing of tax loopholes, and asked the crucial question: “What is a loophole?” He answered that the as­sumption of the loophole theorists seemed to be that all of every­one’s income really belongs to the government, and that if the government fails to tax all of it away, it is thereby leaving a “loop­hole” that must be closed. The same charge applies to the deduc­tions, exemptions, credits, and all the other loopholes out of a flat tax so condemned by our tax reformers.

Let us now consider the vexed question of ending deductibility of state and local taxes—a vital point to our reformers—because ending deductibility will provide a huge bonanza for our federal tax collectors. The flat taxers argue that by allowing deductions, the citizens of low-tax cities and states are “subsidizing” the citizens of high-tax states, and that an end to deductions will put all regions on a plane of fairness and uniformity. Governor Mario Cuomo, on behalf of the notoriously tax-oppressed citizens of New York, ac­cepted the charge of subsidy, and then eloquently threw it back to the critics of New York, asking, in effect, “What’s wrong with a sub­sidy? Are you against the citizens of New York subsidizing tobacco farmers in North Carolina, or subsidizing highway contractors in Iowa?” As a rare consistent supporter of left-liberalism, Cuomo was able to reveal the hypocrisy of those whose attacks on subsidies habitually suffer from a convenient double (or triple) standard. Be­ing a left-liberal, Cuomo was not equipped to go one step fur­ther—to step outside the mammoth subsidy system and ask the crucial question: Are Iowans really subsidizing New Yorkers under deductibility? Or are the oppressed and cruelly taxed New Yorkers being spared from being doubly taxed on their own income? The average New Yorker is not responsible for his high taxation; he suffers unwillingly under the highest sales, income, and property taxes in the country. Why should he suffer more than the average Iowan? What is so “fair” about that?

The Reagan administration supporters of ending deductibility offer a pragmatic or strategic argument in reply. If you tax New Yorkers higher up by eliminating deductions, then they will rise up and roll back New York state and city taxes to the lower Iowan level. This is the old the-worse-the-better argument that unfortunately, in addition to being strategic rather than moral, never seems to work. One of the main arguments for bringing in the income tax in the early twentieth century was that now, in contrast to the indirect tariff, everyone would directly feel such a tax, and therefore the public would rise up to keep taxes low. Obviously it didn’t work that way. Instead, we kept and increased tariffs, and we exploited a new tax source and raised it to gigantic and crippling proportions.

“Fairness”: Equal Slavery

One dramatic way of looking at our tax system in relation to the question of subsidy or fairness is to assume for a moment that this is 1850, and that the question arises in the North as to what should be done with slaves who had managed to escape from the South. Let us assume that both sides of a growing debate are ardently in favor of freedom and are opposed to slavery. Group A hails the slaves’ escape and advocates setting them free. But Group B argues as follows:

We are, of course, just as ardent a champion of slave freedom as the people of Group A. But we believe it is unfair for one group of slaves to escape, while the remainder of their brothers and sisters remain in slavery. Therefore, we hold that these escapees should be shipped back into slavery until such time as all the slaves can be freed together and simultaneously.

What would we think of such an argument? To call it specious would be a kindly understatement. But I submit that believers in the free market are arguing in precisely the same way when they say that all taxes must be uniform, and that all specific tax deductions or exemp­tions must be canceled until such time as everyone’s taxes can be reduced uniformly. In both cases, the egalitarians are arguing not for equal freedom but for equal slavery or equal robbery in the name of “fairness.” In both cases, the rebuttal holds that the enslavement or plunder of one group can in no way justify the enslavement or plunder of another, be it in the name of fairness, equity, or whatever.

The Argument for Misallocation of Resources

The most sophisticated argument of the flat tax reformers is that deduc­tions, exemptions, and loopholes distort the allocation of resources from what it would be on the free market, and therefore should be abolished. This is an integral part of the neutrality-to-the-market argument, and is particularly insidious, because it makes the reform­ers appear to be knowledgeable and dedicated adherents of the free market. Let us take, for example, two credits or deductions: an investment tax credit, and an energy credit. The reformers argue that the result of the “subsidy” of tax credits is that more resources are now going into investment or energy, and less are going into other areas, than would on the free market, and that therefore these credits should be eliminated.

It is true that more resources are now going into investment, energy, and a slew of other areas, than would have in a purely free market system. But the reformers leave out a crucial point: what is the alternative? If investment, energy, or other credits or deductions are abolished, resources will not automatically go into more produc­tive areas; instead, they go into government, via higher taxes. In short, the alternatives to energy credits are not merely Energy or All Other Consumption and Investment. They are threefold: Energy, Other Forms of Expenditure, and Government. And a higher tax will simply be wasted, thrown down the rathole of unproductive and profligate government spending. In short, there is no waste—no misallocation—like government; anything else would be an im­provement.

The Way Out of the Mess

The policy conclusions that flow from our analysis are diametrically opposed to those of the flat taxers. In looking at the history of reform and at the arguments of the flat taxers, one can almost sympathize with Richard L. Doernberg, professor of law at Emory University, who throws up his hands and concludes that “We have a lousy system; let’s leave it alone or it will get worse.” Doernberg urges that the current tax code, as bad as it is, should remain precisely the way it is forever, so that at least people will know the score and be able to plan around its provisions.

But we can do better than that. We have to look differently at taxation. We have to stop looking at taxes as a mighty system for achieving social goals, which merely needs to be made “fair” and rational in order to usher in Utopia. We have to start looking at taxation as a vast system of robbery and oppression, by which some people are enabled to live coercively and parasitically at the expense of others. We must realize that from the point of view of justice or of economic prosperity, the less people are taxed, the better. That is why we should rejoice at every new loophole, new credit, new manifestation of the “underground” economy. The Soviet Union can produce or work only to the extent that individuals are able to avoid the myriad of controls, taxes, and regulations. The same is true of most Third World countries, and the same is increasingly true of us. Every economic activity that escapes taxes and controls is not only a blow for freedom and property rights; it is also one more instance of a free flow of productive energy getting out from under parasitic repression.

That is why we should welcome every new loophole, shelter, credit, or exemption, and work, not to shut them down but to expand them to include everyone else, including ourselves.

If, then, the standard for proper reform is to lower any and all taxes as much as possible, how might government services be supplied? To answer we must take a very hard look at government services. Are they “services,” or are they embodiments of repression? Or are they “services,” at best, that no one really wants? And if they are genuine services, wouldn’t they be supplied more efficiently, as well as voluntarily, by private enterprise? And if our friends the tax reformers are so all-fired concerned about the free market, shouldn’t they answer this question: Why not put your emphasis on privatizing and thereby drastically lowering/eliminating government services? Wouldn’t that be really neutral to, and consistent with, the free market? How do we explain the fact that if we go back to the earlier years of our nation, the level of government spending and taxa­tion—even adjusted for inflation and population growth—was enor­mously less, on every level of jurisdiction, than it is today? And yet the Republic survived, and even flourished.

We must, in short, get past the tax reformers’ favorite ploy of revenue neutrality. Why must total revenue remain the same? In­stead, it should be lowered drastically, and as much as possible.

We now return to the old question of “fairness”: if there are any taxes or government spending left after our drastic cuts, how should the remaining taxes be levied? Here we reopen the point that fairness is the closest possible approximation to neutrality toward the free market. One method would be user fees, so that only direct users would pay for a service and there would be no extra coercion on non-users. For the rest, we should look at the free-market system of one price for a good or service. We might then suggest a system not of equal proportional income tax, but of equal tax, period. This is the age-old system of the “head tax,” in which every citizen pays an equal amount each year to the government, in payment for whatever services may have been conferred upon him from governments’ existence during that year. The abolition of the income tax would mean the end of snooping and surveillance by the IRS as well as the elimination of vast economic distortions and oppression caused by the system; the end of sales and property taxes would also be a great boon to the freedom and prosperity of Americans.

We would then and only then have a tax system that truly, and at long last, fulfilled the proclaimed goals of our flat tax reformers. For here would be a system that would be truly simple, truly fair, and genuinely neutral to the free market. Short of that goal, we could settle temporarily for former Congressman Ron Paul’s (R-TX) inter­esting variant of the flat tax proposal: reducing all income tax rates to 10 percent, while at the same time keeping all existing deductions, credits, and exemptions. The principle should be clear: to support all reductions in taxes, whether they be by lower rates or widening of exemption and deductions; and to oppose all rate increases or ex­emption decreases. In short, to seek in every instance to remove the blight of taxation as much as possible. Here is one reform, at least, that could not fall under Mencken’s definition of a plot to injure the American taxpayer.

[Reprinted from The Logic of Action Two (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1997). Available in The Rothbard Reader.]

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I write a lot about conspiracies. And you can’t have conspiracies without conspirators. But I’m also interested in the pathological personalities that exist in every community, outside the influence of any shadowy and nefarious organization. Especially the ones who appear “normal” in every way. Until.

The case of John List is more frightening to me than all the 9/11s and JFK assassinations put together. List was a fine, upstanding member of society, a successful accountant who lived in a New Jersey mansion with his family, including his elderly mother. He was a devout Lutheran who also taught Sunday school. After losing his job in 1971, List didn’t tell his family, and pretended to go to work each day. He began skimming money from his mother’s bank account to pay the mortgage. On November 9, List abruptly shot and killed his three children, aged 16, 15, and 13, his wife, and his 85 year old mother. In an incomprehensibly grisly detail, List had gone to his older son’s soccer game, cheered for him, drove him home, and then murdered him. He left a note to his pastor, bizarrely thinking he would understand. List then vanished for eighteen years, before being found through America’s Most Wanted, living under another identity, with a new wife, in Virginia.

Another very religious person, Andrea Yates, committed the most horrendous murder I’ve ever heard of. Yates had supposedly struggled with “post partum depression,” one of those chic maladies no mother could ever have contracted until the late twentieth century. Despite this alleged illness that comes after having a baby, Yates continued to have children. On June 20, 2001, she paraded her five little children, one by one, into the bathtub, where she methodically held them underwater until they stopped breathing. This wasn’t a case where she snapped; the last one fought for his life, but she was bigger and drowned him, too. Then she laid them out neatly on the bed. Like List, she seemed to believe that killing them ensured their place in heaven. I guess she wasn’t worried about her place. Her husband was nearly as nutty, defending his wife, and acting upbeat at the funeral. Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

So how do the John Lists and Andrea Yates of the world lead normal lives, managing to avoid killing anyone for decades, then suddenly snap and murder those closest to them? Is this what the old timers meant by someone being possessed by a demon? How many incidents have happened where a child- almost always a son- suddenly goes off and kills his parents and siblings? A fourteen year old Alabama youth drunkenly phoned the police in 2019, to report that he’d killed his parents and three very young siblings. He’d apparently just found out that his mother was actually his stepmother. Seems like a bit of an overreaction. In 2024, a sixteen year old in New Mexico also drunkenly confessed to killing his family; both parents and two siblings. I suppose you have to get drunk after going full Satanic like that. There are so many cases like this. Knowing that makes even the best parents shiver a little.

Husbands have killed wives, and wives have killed husbands, after long and outwardly very happy marriages. Spouses kill each other for the most ridiculous reasons; like a $20,000 insurance policy. To free themselves to marry someone else. Why do you have to kill? Half of all marriages end in divorce. No one will ostracize you. And these are just the ones who get caught. Knowing how dim-witted the average police department and local FBI are, you have to think that plenty of criminals were smart enough to elude them. The D.C. snipers tried everything they could to get the attention of the authorities, calling the FBI tip line and being hung up on, even alerting them to a note they’d left tacked to a tree at one crime scene, which the CSI people- who as we all know from Hollywood screenwriters are incomparably brilliant detectives- had somehow failed to notice. They just kept looking for a phantom white van.

The D.C. snipers were eventually cornered at a highway rest stop. Not by the police, but by an alert trucker who managed to keep their vehicle blocked in, while notifying law enforcement. Which took so long to arrive that the snipers almost escaped. Remember when they locked Boston down, in a prelude to “COVID,” to search for the alleged Boston bomber? The patsy was only captured after an alert homeowner notified the Keystone Kops. So if a woman with “post partum depression,” or a former soldier with “PTSD,” or maybe some rich guy with “executive burnout,” is triggered to kill those closest to him, you can’t expect much from the authorities. So many missing persons cases remain unsolved, in large measure due to the incompetence of those entrusted to solve them. So it’s a pretty good time to be a serial killer, or some seemingly nice person that suddenly turns into a violent, demented caricature.

So what sends more chills up your spine; our leaders engaging in occult rituals under a giant owl at Bohemian Grove, or a nice, religious fellow who painstakingly kills his entire family one day? Secret yearly meetings at Bilderberg, or a mother leaving her two toddlers strapped in car seats, while she pushed the car into a body of water, like Susan Smith? The media, of course, was more concerned with her blaming a fictional Black guy than anything else. Is Bill Gates more terrifying than Andrea Yates? Who would you rather be stuck in a dark alley with; Henry Kissinger or Dennis Rader, the BTK killer? Rader had a family, and lived an entirely normal life. Except that every so often, he would viciously murder a random victim. We know that Gates, and George Soros, and the Rothschilds are evil. But are they worse than that co-worker in the next cubicle, who was well liked by everyone until they found the bodies in his backyard?

That’s the truly chilling thing; those of us who are “awake” to all the corruption pretty much know who the bad guys are. But what about your quiet, unassuming neighbor who always exchanges polite greetings? And then one day, ends the lives of all his closest loved ones? Remember the guy who laced Tylenol with poison many years ago, killing several people? That’s certainly a less direct, but perhaps even less understandable brand of evil. Or if those urban legends are true, and some smiling, cookie baking mothers really did pass out apples with razor blades in them to trick or treaters. I guess the old radio show, that used the tagline, “who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” knew what it was saying. I just know there seems to be a lot more of these kinds of psychopaths than there are, for instance, kindly millionaires secretly giving money to those in need. Like John Beresford Tipton on The Millionaire.

You’d think that the Illuminati- or whatever they call themselves- would be interested in these twisted characters. Maybe even they’re afraid of that kind of ticking time bomb. My friend Victor Hugo Vaca claims that there is a renowned surgeon in Baltimore, whom he has fearlessly named, that is a genuine serial killer. This is a more disturbing variant on all the patients killed by non-serial killer surgeons. Or anesthesiology nurses like Bill Clinton’s mother. Presumably, they don’t do it on purpose. This guy does. So who knows how many others there could be? They’ve caught nurses and other hospital workers who had been piling up victims. They would claim “mercy” killings, as opposed to the List-Yates types, who attribute it to their very confused religious dogma. And then there was Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Lovingly nicknamed Dr. Death by his fellow interns. Millions thought of him as a hero.

Because law enforcement often doesn’t get its man/woman or they/them, I sometimes wonder if the guy with an odd look in the store, who holds his stare a little too long, might be one of these murderers who got away with it. There’s bound to be plenty of them out there. I do have quite an imagination. That’s the novelist in me. Jack the Ripper was never caught, although most of us who have studied that subject believe this was because of some kind of Royal Family connection. I don’t think The Boston Strangler was Albert DeSalvo, and after he was conveniently murdered in prison, we’ll never know. Or all the recklessness, which unintentionally ended lives. My elderly in-law was killed by a hit and run driver walking home from the store. Manslaughter, to be polite. They never found the culprit. I don’t know how you live with something like that on your conscience. Just driving away and going on with your life.

So many individuals cross the ultimate moral line in the sand, that it seems obvious they don’t fear ever being judged. I don’t mean by our supremely flawed earthly injustice system. I mean by God. Some of the most horrific killers, such as List or Yates, were supposedly faithful Christians. They couldn’t really have believed in God, could they, and committed patricide, matricide, or whatever you call it when you eliminate your entire family? It’s like the priests molesting altar boys. Do they still tell themselves they are faithful apostles of Christ after doing that? I saw one of those Investigation Discovery programs, where a friendly married pastor was caught having an affair with a much younger girl. She became pregnant, and he killed her. What else was a pastor to do? Then went right on with his sermons, lecturing others. I think he buried her body in his yard, and helped look for the killer. These true psychopaths often do that; help search for the person they murdered. What can explain that?

I sometimes fret that there is a real Room 101, which in Orwell’s 1984 represented the place where they took you and confronted you with your greatest fear. I think Winston Smith’s greatest fear was rats. But I think my greatest fear is being involved in one of these mind boggling tragedies. I don’t know- were other husbands whose wives wound up murdering them for a pretty modest insurance policy any more naive than me? Of course, I don’t think my wife would ever plot to knock me off, but those other husbands (and wives) probably didn’t think so, either. I am haunted by what those List children, or Andrea Yates’ young kids, were thinking when the person they trusted the most in the world suddenly turned into a demon. My father was a bitter drunk who was angry at the world, but I never could picture him murdering us. Those parents who did commit such an unspeakable crime don’t appear to have been angry drunks.

We’ve all met people that we wonder about. In the back of our mind, we can imagine them having killed someone, or one day killing. We wouldn’t be surprised if they found something while searching their house. I probably would have been suspicious of John Wayne Gacy, but then again I’ve always found clowns to be creepy. Ted Bundy fooled everyone. It’s not like the super villains we all know and love. I can easily believe that Hillary Clinton, for example, was recorded torturing a child on Anthony Weiner’s still unavailable laptop. We know there is international child sex trafficking, what the late Dave McGowan dubbed the Pedophocracy. So if you’ve gone that far, to exploit and rape frightened children, then is it that hard to accept that you’d be willing to kill them? Snuff films are popular with someone. Okay, I admit that those who produce and “cast” snuff films are worse than the random ticking time bombs.

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In the midst of so much technological and social change this century, it is strange to remember that there are a couple hundred ancient tribes on Earth that have maintained unique cultures by isolating from the rest of the world.  They know nothing of President Trump, European war, McDonald’s, or K-pop.  They aren’t arguing over digital IDs, carbon rationing, personal pronouns, tariffs, China’s intellectual property theft, or Ukraine’s borders.  To the best that we can tell, their societies operate as they have for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

For much of the last five hundred years, explorers and settlers did not particularly worry about preserving the indigenous cultures with which they came into contact.  On the contrary, most felt they had a moral duty to spread their own civilizational values around the world.  It was only after we had assimilated nearly every hidden tribe on the planet that we began to ask questions and pull back.  Over the last forty years, prevailing opinion has held that by forcing “modernity” upon isolated peoples, we not only risk deleting distinct cultures, but also risk deleting valuable parts of our shared human story.

Needless to say, nobody is advocating today that multiculturalism should take precedence over these ancient tribes’ self-determination.  In fact, nations go to great lengths to respect hidden peoples’ sovereignty.  Every once in a while, some “outsider” is killed after getting too close to one of these groups, yet no punitive measures are undertaken in response.  Authorities in Brazil, Bolivia, India, and Indonesia use such incidents as stark warnings to keep misguided visitors away.

For decades, proponents of globalism have torn down national borders, mocked the moral tenets of certain religions, and dismissed the concerns of communities that would rather maintain their own traditional values.  Many of the same international institutions that protect Amazonian tribes from outside contact are outright hostile to the special cultures that bind citizens of unique nation-states.  The European Union imposes its values upon Hungarian, Polish, and Italian natives.  In many parts of the West, prosecutors target Christians who work to save unborn children from abortion procedures.  When Democrats control the federal government, they relocate huge numbers of foreign migrants into small towns throughout the United States.  Government agents do not attempt to understand local beliefs, and they certainly do not ask permission from local residents before upending their lives.  “Outsiders” who see themselves as wise and all-knowing marginalize anyone who gets in their way.

Kind of makes you wonder whether one of Klaus Schwab’s regal successors in the World Economic Forum’s expanding technocratic dynasty will decree a few centuries from now that some small tribe in Kansas, Missouri, or Tennessee should be protected from outside influence in an effort to safeguard the otherwise lost knowledge of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Locke, or Jefferson.  Maybe Christians will continue to be persecuted and killed around the world until some future do-gooding globalist convinces the aristocrats at the United Nations that a small tribe of Christ’s followers should be “allowed” to continue practicing their “exotic” faith.  Perhaps Western civilization must first be demolished before cynical globalists take an anthropological interest in its numerous achievements.  Maybe adventurous explorers a half-millennium from now will hike to the outskirts of American “free zones” where the natives are rumored to have original ideas, write new books, and question A.I.-generated beliefs.  Perhaps those free peoples will have the good sense to raise their weapons and chase colonizing globalists far away.

Language is a sneaky beast.  It allows us to categorize every detail we see, yet it reduces the infinitude of our observations to mere words.  Phrases can be beautiful or ugly.  Sentences can quicken heartbeats or steal breaths.  Speeches can move listeners to their feet or reduce them to tears.  The duality of language — its capacity to unleash great and terrible things — makes it both a blessing and a curse.

Globalism is a secular religion that specializes in the manipulation of language.  It does not seek to explain the world truthfully, but rather to condition people to believe whatever its ecumenical priests need them to believe.  It does not persuade, but conquers.  It oppresses.  And because its allegiance is not to truth, but to power, it revels in inconsistency.

The globalists have lectured us about the contradictory threats of “global cooling” and “global warming” for half a century — never humbled by their false predictions but always certain that new regulations and taxes are the answer.  The globalists told us that the Soviet Union’s empire was bad and that national self-determination was good; now they tell us that the European Union’s empire is good and that national self-determination is bad.  The globalists argued that WWII was necessary to preserve Western civilization and defend Europe from foreign invaders; now they argue that Western civilization should be destroyed and that native Europeans should be replaced with foreigners.  When we started fighting wars on “terror” decades ago, all our enemies were overseas; now globalists insist that homegrown “terrorists” are the real “threat.”  Globalists told us that the U.S.-backed ousting of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 was not a violent insurrection against a legitimately elected government but rather a “Revolution of Dignity.”  Those same globalists told us that unarmed Americans protesting election fraud at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were part of an “insurrection” attempting to “overthrow” the federal government!

Globalism is not a coherent worldview.  It is the malleable sludge of incompatible priorities that change from one decade to the next — depending upon where the most power can be accrued and where the most money can be made.  Its chief quality is hypocrisy.  It stands for no greater principle than the preservation and enrichment of its most ardent defenders.

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U.S. military officials say they are prepared to “go far, deep and big” if negotiations over a nuclear deal with Iran go south. Meanwhile, Iran’s military is bracing for war. And while tensions between the two nations — three if you include Israel — are running high, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has already told President Donald Trump that Iran isn’t building nuclear weapons.

U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi held talks in Oman on Saturday. U.S. officials described them as “productive,” and Iranian officials said they were “positive so far.”

On Sunday, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told FOX News’ Maria Bartiromo that Trump “is dead serious” about prohibiting Iran from building a nuclear weapon. Hegseth said his boss wants the deal done peacefully, but added that he’s open to doing it the hard way as well:

But he’s also dead serious that if we can’t figure this out at the negotiating table, then there are other options to include my department to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear bomb. We hope we never get there. We really do. What we’re doing with the Houthis, and what we’re doing in the region, we’ve shown a capability to go far, to go deep, and to go big.

.@SecDef: “[@POTUS is] dead serious that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon … He’s also dead serious that if we can’t figure this out at the negotiating table, then there are other options.” pic.twitter.com/oVwUw16AcC

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 13, 2025

Trump has lobbed a slew of military threats against Iran.

In September, during his reelection campaign, he said eliminating Iran’s belligerence could mean “We are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens.”

On March 30, he said that if Iran “[doesn’t] make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”

Trump also threatened Iran before approving attacks against the Houthis in Yemen earlier this month. He said:

Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN. And IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire.

Another round of talks is also scheduled to take place in Muscat, Oman, at the end of this week.

Iran’s Nuclear Program

Tehran says its nuclear program is solely for civilian use, mainly for energy and medicine production. But Western powers do not believe this, and given Iranian leaders’ past rhetoric, they’re not willing to take a chance.

Iranian leaders have made statements in the past implying that Israel should be wiped off the map. The best light in which those comments have been interpreted is to mean that the nation of Israel has no right to exist because of the deceptive and violent way it came into existence in the mid-20th century. The worse interpretation, and most common in the West, is that Jews should be wiped off the face of the earth. Moreover, Iran has a penchant for supporting terrorist groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. For these reasons, Israel and the West, among other nations, feel it’s best that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons.

The “Nuclear Deal”

Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPAO) deal — or better known as the Iran Nuclear Deal — signed by President Barack Obama in 2015 and ended by Trump in 2018, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium only up to 3.67 percent purity. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says Iran now has 275kg of uranium enriched to 60 percent, far beyond what’s needed for civilian use. Nuclear weapons need uranium enriched to 90 percent purity. Should Iran’s enrichment continue, many worry they could have everything needed to build a nuclear weapon within 18 months.

But on the U.S. side, the messaging seems almost contradictory. Late in March, DNI Gabbard said during a hearing held by the Senate Intelligence Community that Iran is not building nuclear weapons. She said:

The [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapon program that he suspended in 2003. The IC continues to monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program.

But Gabbard also admitted, in that same hearing, that Iran’s uranium enrichment was “at its highest levels” and was “unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”

What America Wants From Iran

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz has said that Trump wants Iran’s nuclear program to be fully dismantled. This is the only position Israel finds acceptable as well. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained what that looked like:

We go in, blow up the facilities, and dismantle all the equipment, under American supervision and execution.

However, Iran has indicated it will not consider getting rid of its nuclear program entirely. And on Saturday, Witkoff didn’t bring it up. Instead, it is said he prefers a “verification program” with restrictions that reduce fears of nuclear weaponization.

Israeli Influence?

Early last week, Trump reinforced the suspicion that at the center of this potential war lies Israel. He said:

If it requires military, we’re going to have military. Israel will obviously be very much involved in that, be the leader of that.

Israel understandably feels threatened by a nuclear-armed Iran. As noted earlier, Iranian leaders have not been shy about their opposition to the Jewish nation.

But there’s a suspicion that Israel is trying to cajole the United States into doing its dirty work. Israeli leadership has painted Iran and its proxies as a threat not only to itself, but to the United States. On July 25, 2024, Netanyahu, while addressing the U.S. Congress, said, “Iran’s axis of terror confronts America, Israel and our Arab friends.”

Former Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich said Netanyahu told him years ago that Israel needed the United States to take care of Iran.

Also, U.S. B-52 bombers capable of delivering nuclear bunker-busting bombs have taken part in joint exercises with the Israeli Air Force in preparation for a potential strike at Iran’s underground nuclear sites.

And Trump’s decision to pull out of the JCPAO agreement is suspected to have been significantly influenced by Israel. Netanyahu has publicly excoriated the Iran Nuclear Deal and praised Trump at length for exiting it.

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Those who created SARS-CoV-2 and concealed its true origin are part of the same Military-Industrial-Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex that created the mRNA vaccines. This is approximately the same Complex that persistently baited the Russian Bear into taking military action in Ukraine so that the U.S. could wage a proxy war against Russia, using the bodies and blood of Ukrainian men to fight it.

This morning I saw talk of conscripting Ukrainian women to add the nation’s females to the cannon fodder. Rest assured, the beautiful wives and mistresses of Ukrainian oligarchs will not be on the conscription roll. Instead they will be drinking champagne and shopping for luxury handbags on the Cote d’Azur using U.S. taxpayer money.

A massive propaganda-brainwashing campaign has prevented most Americans from seeing that both the Covid vaccine program and the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine are satanic enterprises, pursued by people who worship power and money and are animated with contempt for ordinary humanity.

If you don’t like the word “Satanic,” then consider the word “Mephistophelean.” Goethe captured this spirit of nihilistic power seeking in the character of Mephistopheles in his play Faust, who introduces himself as follows:

I am the spirit that constantly negates!

And rightfully so, for all that comes into being,

Deserves to be destroyed.

It would be better if nothing came into being.

So, everything that you call sin,

Destruction, in short, evil,

Is my actual element.

Goethe was one of the most insightful observers of nature and man in history, and he knew what he was talking about. The Mephistophelean spirit may, at any time, animate the people who hold power and money. This has clearly been the case among the terrible people who erected the twin death cults of Covid Vaccines and the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

To understand what I mean by this, watch the hideous avatar of power-seeking, Hillary Clinton, in the following video:

Clinton is what the Russians and Ukrainians call a Baba Yaga, a supernatural witch who flies around in a cauldron. Both armies are using a killer nocturnal drone named after this mythic creature. Also called a Vampire Drone, it uses infrared to hunt enemy soldiers at night.

During this Holy Week, we urge President Trump to end these twin death cults. Everything else is of secondary importance.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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The most profound and ominous aspect of the controversy surrounding the deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García to El Salvador is that the Trump administration has figured out a way to circumvent the right of habeas corpus, not just for foreigners but also for the American people.

Why is that important? Because without habeas corpus, a right that stretches all the way back to Magna Carta in 1215, there is no free society. As British and American legal scholars have maintained for centuries, habeas corpus is the linchpin of a free society.

For example, freedom of speech is a fundamental right that the federal government is prohibited from taking away. Let’s assume that one day, an American citizen castigates President Trump for policies he has adopted. A few days later in the middle of the night, Homeland Security agents bash down his door, take him into custody, and incarcerate him.

That’s where habeas corpus comes into play. The victim, through his lawyer, files a petition for a writ of habeas corpus with a federal judge. The judge issues the writ, which a U.S. Marshal serves on the person who is holding the critic in jail. The writ commands the custodian to immediately produce the critic in court. At the habeas hearing, the judge orders the government to show just cause as to why it is holding the critic. When it fails to do so, the judge orders the immediate release of the critic. The critic walks out of the courtroom a free person.

Thus, it is the right of habeas corpus that enforces the right of freedom of speech and the exercise of other rights. Without habeas corpus, people’s rights become a dead letter. That’s how important habeas corpus is.

The Framers understood the critical importance of habeas corpus to a free society. That’s why they enshrined it in the Constitution.

The right of habeas corpus developed over centuries of resistance by the British people to the tyranny of their own government. For example, after Magna Carta, English common law courts developed and applied the writ against the king’s arbitrary imprisonment of English citizens. In 1679, Parliament adopted the Habeas Corpus Act, which clarified and codified much of what English courts were doing from the 13th century through the 17th century.

Needless to say, rulers who have dictatorial proclivities hate habeas corpus. They don’t want any judicial interference with their decisions to incarcerate people who question their decisions, who they sometimes refer to by the label “terrorist.”

In the midst of the Civil War, for example, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, which enabled military officials to arbitrarily arrest and incarcerate critics of Lincoln. When the Supreme Court declared Lincoln’s act unconstitutional, Lincoln simply ignored the ruling.

After the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon and the CIA established a torture and prison camp at their base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The reason they established it in Cuba was because they figured that it would be totally independent of U.S. judicial interference and the U.S. Constitution, including habeas corpus. The Supreme Court ultimately held otherwise, declaring that Gitmo remained within the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary.

But the presumption of habeas corpus is that the federal courts have jurisdiction over the officials alleged to be unlawfully holding the person. That’s where the arrangement that Trump and El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele have entered into comes into play. With this extremely clever — even ingenious — arrangement, Trump has figured out a way to circumvent the centuries-old right of habeas corpus.

Let’s assume that Trump initiates a real war with, say, Iran, much like President Bush initiated a war with Iraq. Trump declares a “national emergency.” Following the precedent set by President Wilson during World War II, Trump decrees that criticism of his war will not be countenanced. Anyone who violates his decree will be punished severely.

If a military commander starts taking people into custody, there is no problem, right? All that that the victims need to do is have their lawyer secure a writ of habeas corpus from a federal judge, right?

Not anymore. What would happen instead is that some well-armed military unit will bash down the door of the critic’s home in the middle of the night. They then take the critic into custody and quickly whisk him to a nearby airport, where a waiting military plane immediately flies him to El Salvador, where he is delivered into the clutches of Salvadoran officials who then incarcerate and torture him as a “terrorist.”

What then? Nothing. The accused “terrorist” remains in that Salvadoran prison being tortured and there is nothing anyone can do about it. U.S. officials, including the president, will say that they no longer have control over the critic. They will say that he is now under the sovereign control of a foreign nation. They will say that they have no power to issues orders to officials of another nation-state.

By the same token, the U.S. federal courts have no power over a foreign regime. The president of a foreign country can ignore rulings of U.S. courts to his heart’s content.

Once 25 or 50 American critics are whisked away in the dead of night and suddenly find themselves in El Salvador’s brutal prison the next day, I will guarantee you that silence will quickly spread across the land. Very few people will dare criticize the president or his war effort.

Whatever might be said of President Trump, he is clearly a very smart man. He has now displayed his brilliance by developing a practical way to circumvent a right that stretches back centuries — the right of habeas corpus. Time will tell whether it produces a subservient, silent, and even supportive populace, much like what has happened in other nations throughout history.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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The rise of Nazism in Germany was accompanied by the rise of its armed militants. These were used to fight opposing political parties and militia formations. They were ruthless.

The units were later known as the Waffen-SS:

After release from prison Hitler decided that he needed a paramilitary group to protect him personally. That group should be steadfastly faithful and loyal to him alone; not least to protect him from possible SA intrigues. Therefore Hitler established a personal bodyguard in his hometown München (Munich). Initially this group numbered only ten men with one officer. It was first called “Stoßtruppe Hitler” (Shock Troops Hitler). Again the title derived from divisional assaults groups from World War I. Later it was renamed “Schutz Staffel” (SS or Protection Squad).
…
By 1932 the SS had some 30,000 men, …
…
In March 1935 Hitler renounced the Treaty of Versailles and announced the expansion of the German Army and the formation of the SS Verfügungstruppen (SS VT or SS special purpose troops) as the core of a full military division. This unit was financed by the police budget to counter any Army fears.

After the start of the war the ‘armed evil’ grew further:

By 1939, four regiments (Standarten) had been organized.
…
During the following winter and spring, regiments that had fought in Poland were expanded into brigades and later divisions. … These three divisions were to be the nucleus of the Waffen-SS in its subsequent rapid expansion.
…
At the end of 1940, the Waffen-SS numbered slightly more than 150,000 men. By June 1944, it had grown to 594,000. Intended as an elite force, the Waffen-SS evolved due to the exigencies of war from the original SS concept of a military organization imbued with Nazi ideology and loyalty to Hitler into a polyglot force of decreasing combat effectiveness.

The Waffen-SS was not part of the regular army. It had its own financial resources. It recruited and trained its own officers through Nazi youth organizations. These were ‘true believers’ .

There are a lot of parallels between the rise of the Waffen SS and the Ukrainian Nazi formation known as Azov.

Azov started as a violent hooligan gang in Kharkov. It mixed nordic myth and Nazi ideology. It found rich oligarchs as sponsors and in exchange provided them with the necessary muscles to solve ‘business conflicts’. It has its own youth organization and international network.

Already in 2014, after the U.S. instigated a coup against the elected government of Ukraine, the fascist background of the newly installed government was shining through. Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, selected by the State Department’s Victoria Nuland, designated the Russian speaking people in east Ukraine who opposed him as “subhumans” i.e Untermenschen in Nazi speak.

In December 2014 the BBC(!) warned of the growing Nazi menace in Ukraine:

the ultra-nationalists have proven to be effective and dedicated fighters in the brutal war in the east against Russian-backed separatists and Russian forces, whose numbers also include a large contingent from Russia’s far right.

As a result, they have achieved a level of acceptance, even though most Ukrainians are unfamiliar with their actual beliefs.

The volunteer Azov Battalion is a case in point.

Run by the extremist Patriot of Ukraine organisation, which considers Jews and other minorities “sub-human”, external and calls for a white, Christian crusade against them, it sports three Nazi symbols, external on its insignia: a modified Wolf’s Hook, a black sun (or “Hakensonne”) and the title Black Corps, which was used by the Waffen SS.

Azov is just one of more than 50 volunteer groups fighting in the east, the vast majority of which are not extremist, yet it seems to enjoy special backing from some top officials:

• • Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and his deputy Anton Gerashchenko actively supported the parliament candidacy of Andriy Biletsky, the Azov and Patriot of Ukraine commander
  • Vadim Troyan, another top Azov official and Patriot of Ukraine member, was recently named police chief for the Kiev region
  • Mr Korotkykh is also an Azov member

Ukraine’s media have been noticeably silent on this subject.
…
[A]lthough Ukraine is emphatically not run by fascists, far-right extremists seem to be making inroads by other means, as in the country’s police department.

Ukraine’s public is grossly under-informed about this. The question is, why doesn’t anyone want to tell them?

A year after the 2014 coup the CIA secretly started to train Ukrainian paramilitary groups for an insurgency against an eventual Russian invasion:

The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.

The trainees included Azov units:

Despite sometimes open acknowledgement of its Nazism — its former commander once said the “historic mission” of Ukraine is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival” in “a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen” — Azov was incorporated into the country’s National Guard in 2014, owing to its effectiveness in fighting Russian separatists. US arms have flowed to the militia, NATO and US military officials have been pictured meeting with them, and members of the militia have talked about their work with US trainers and the lack of background screening to weed out white supremacists.

Given all this, it would be more of a surprise that the neo-Nazis of Azov haven’t been trained in the CIA’s clandestine make-an-insurgency program. And we’re already seeing the early signs of blowback.

In 2022, three days after the launch of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, I warned that these units would come  to haunt the west:

CIA support for Ukrainian Nazis has a long history.

Op-Ed: The CIA has backed Ukrainian insurgents before. Let’s learn from those mistakes – LA Times

A new Nazi insurgency in eastern Europe is an exceptionally bad idea. Fascist groups from everywhere would join in. A few years from now it may well lead to Nazi terror in many European countries. Have we learned really nothing from the war on Syria and the ISIS campaign?

Meanwhile ‘western’ media who had previously condemned Nazi units in Ukraine started to whitewash them:

Recently the New York Times, like many other ‘western’ outlets, has changed its language when reporting about the fascist Ukrainian Asov Battalion.

What was once “a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization” which even the FBI said is notorious for its “association with neo-Nazi ideology” was first relabeled as merely “far right” before it became a normal “unit in the Ukrainian military”.

While propagandizing Nazi units the media have failed to point out the dangers of their growth:

During the war Azov has grown through active recruiting from “the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization” into the Azov Regiment and, after losing in Mariupol, into a brigade size unit.

It has since, like the Waffen-SS previously, continued to grow and has now reached the size of a corps:

The very first corps formation within the National Guard is now a reality. On April 15, 2025, the Azov Brigade, along with several other National Guard units, officially announced the establishment of the new 1st “Azov” Corps of the Ukrainian National Guard, marking the creation of the Guard’s first operational corps.

The formation of a corps is based on the 12th Special Purpose Brigade “Azov” has been anticipated for many months.

The 12th Brigade, now the 1st Azov Corps, is the main fascist unit in the National Guard. It had the resources and time to celebrate its new status with 3:48 minute propaganda video.

Another Azov unit, the 3rd Brigade is part of the regular Ukrainian military. It is also designated to expand into a corps:

According to Yuriy Butusov, the 3rd Assault Brigade will be restructured into the 3rd Army Corps. The new formation will be led by none other than Andriy Biletsky, the founder of the brigade and the Azov movement.

In NATO formations a corps has between 20,000 and 45,000 soldiers. While the newly formed ones in Ukraine are currently still smaller their designation as corps points to further growth.

Already the two Azov corps are the world’s largest armed neo-Nazi formation. They are growing further through their own recruiting structures and youth organizations as well as by absorbing other ‘nationalist’ units.

These forces will become a serious danger for Europe:

Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope – 9:45 UTC · Apr 16, 2025

A heavily Nazified army right on the EU’s border that will turn against European countries for “stabbing them in the back” as soon as the war comes to an end. Ukraine is the real security threat to Europe, not Russia.

A first taste of the backlash from the western support for Nazis in Ukraine has created came with an assassination attempt against then presidential candidate Donald Trump:

Yesterday one avid U.S. supporter of the fascists in Ukraine tried to assassinate the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump:

Jack Poso @JackPosobiec – 1:39 UTC · Sep 16, 2024

EXCLUSIVE: Attempted Trump assassin Ryan Routh appeared in a propaganda video for the AZOV BATTALLION in May 2022
Embedded video

Routh, himself being too old to fight, had tried to hire foreign mercenaries to fight on the fascist side in Ukraine. He obviously targeted Trump because he had promised to dictate an end to the war in Ukraine.

As I have warned since years back:

Many more such incidents, predominantly in Europe, are likely to follow.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Growth of Ukraine’s Azov Units Follow Path of the Waffen-SS appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Attempt by Harvard University to resist the efforts of the Trump administration to take control of this academic and research institution which has tremendous power in American society, and to set forth a structure whereby the Federal Government (which refers to the private consulting firms and private intelligence firms that actually run the Trump administration and not to the qualified professionals within what is left of the government) could well end up developing into the equivalent the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 by what would become Confederate forces. That was most definitely what Trump’s strategists like Stephen Miller intended. You might notice that the letter was received at Harvard on 164th anniversary of that act.

We know the billionaires want to create a civil war between factions of the little people (especially the little people who think that they are not little like the president of Harvard) so as to avoid the people rising up against the billionaires and demanding that their ill-gotten wealth be seized.

I want to share the letter sent to Harvard by the Trump team (I want to say the Thiel and Adelson team) the response to the Trump administration from Harvard University, and the letter from Harvard’s president to the faculty of Harvard.

I have no interest in defending Harvard. Harvard refused to take a stand against the abuse of the term “anti-semitism” to suppress free speech, and it has refused to allow a discussion about the 9.11 incident, the counterfeiting of money by the Federal Reverve, the COVID 19 reign of terror, or many other state crimes. It has a parasitic relationship with the military industrial complex.

See my letter to President Garber of Harvard from May 7, 2024

Response to Harvard President Garber’s Orders That Protesting Students be Placed on “Involuntary Leave” A call to focus on the real crimes at Harvard

Harvard is a pawn of investment banks. The Harvard endowment is referred to by bankers as “a fund with a little university attached on the side.” Nevertheless, Harvard offers much to the world, even if private equity has distorted its mission.

Trump is not trying to return Harvard to its mission of pursuing scientific truth and scholarly integrity, but rather he is trying to make it conform with his demands for subservience so as to make it easier to make such demands of other institutions and thus establish a complete dictatorship.

We will have to oppose this take over eventually, so we might as well do it now. As Hillel the Elder said, “If not now, when? If not me, who?”

We can denounce the deep corruption at Harvard while defending its academic value. we can demand a change in Harvard’s mission while standing up to dictatorship just as we can walk and chew gum.

Please do take the time to read these critical documents as they give a sense of how the fight may play out. Perhaps it will be a fight between elites seeking benefits (like the fight in the Civil War between the Vanderbilts and the plantation owners) and at the same time be a fight between citizens and the new oligarchs, a fight against slavery—even if that is not what the Trump administration or Harvard had intended. History is not made by them, however.

—

Trump Administration letter to Harvard

Letter Sent to Harvard 2025-04-11

Dr. Alan M. Garber

President

Harvard University Office of the President

Penny Pritzker

Lead Member,

Harvard Corporation

Harvard Corporation Massachusetts Hall Cambridge, MA 02138

Dear Dr. Garber:

The United States has invested in Harvard University’s operations because of the value to the country of scholarly discovery and academic excellence. But an investment is not an entitlement. It depends on Harvard upholding federal civil rights laws, and it only makes sense if Harvard fosters the kind of environment that produces intellectual creativity and scholarly rigor, both of which are antithetical to ideological capture. Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment. But we appreciate your expression of commitment to repairing those failures and welcome your collaboration in restoring the University to its promise.

We therefore present the below provisions as the basis for an agreement in principle that will maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government. If acceptable to Harvard, this document will constitute an agreement in principle, which the parties will work in good faith to translate into a more thorough, binding settlement agreement. As you will see, this letter incorporates and supersedes the terms of the federal government’s prior letter of April 3, 2025.

● Governance and leadership reforms. By August 2025, Harvard must make meaningful governance reform and restructuring to make possible major change consistent with this letter, including: fostering clear lines of authority and accountability; empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, and, from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter; reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty; reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship; and reducing forms of governance bloat, duplication, or decentralization that interfere with the possibility of the reforms indicated in this letter.

● Merit-Based Hiring Reform. By August 2025, the University must adopt and implement merit-based hiring policies, and cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin throughout its hiring, promotion, compensation, and related practices among faculty, staff, and leadership.

Such adoption and implementation must be durable and demonstrated through structural and personnel changes. All existing and prospective faculty shall be reviewed for plagiarism and Harvard’s plagiarism policy consistently enforced.

All hiring and related data shall be shared with the federal government and subjected to a comprehensive audit by the federal government during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028.

● Merit-Based Admissions Reform. By August 2025, the University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.

Such adoption and implementation must be durable and demonstrated through structural and personnel changes. All admissions data shall be shared with the federal government and subjected to a comprehensive audit by the federal government—and non-individualized, statistical information regarding admissions shall be made available to the public, including information about rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests—during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028. During this same period, the dean of admissions for each program or school must sign a public statement after each admissions cycle certifying that these rules have been upheld.

● International Admissions Reform. By August 2025, the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism. Harvard will immediately report to federal authorities, including the Department of Homeland Security and State Department, any foreign student, including those on visas and with green cards, who commits a conduct violation. As above, these reforms must be durable and demonstrated through structural and personnel changes; comprehensive throughout all of Harvard’s programs; and, during the reform period, shared with the federal government for audit, shared on a non-individualized basis with the public, and certified by deans of admissions.

● Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring. By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse. This audit shall begin no later than the summer of 2025 and shall proceed on a department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit basis as appropriate.

The report of the external party shall be submitted to University leadership and the federal government no later than the end of 2025. Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests.

Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.

If the review finds that the existing faculty in the relevant department or field are not capable of hiring for viewpoint diversity, or that the relevant teaching unit is not capable of admitting a critical mass of students with diverse viewpoints, hiring or admissions within that department, field, or teaching unit shall be transferred to the closest cognate department, field, or teaching unit that is capable of achieving viewpoint diversity.

This audit shall be performed and the same steps taken to establish viewpoint diversity every year during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028.

● Reforming Programs with Egregious Records of Antisemitism or Other Bias.

By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.

The programs, schools, and centers of concern include but are not limited to the Divinity School, Graduate School of Education, School of Public Health, Medical School, Religion and Public Life Program, FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.

The report of the external party shall include information as to individual faculty members who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or incited students to violate Harvard’s rules following October 7, and the University and federal government will cooperate to determine appropriate sanctions for those faculty members within the bounds of academic freedom and the First Amendment.

The report of the external party shall be submitted to University leadership and the federal government no later than the end of 2025 and reforms undertaken to repair the problems. This audit shall be performed and the same steps taken to make repairs every year during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028.

● Discontinuation of DEI. The University must immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies, including DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies, under whatever name; demonstrate that it has done so to the satisfaction of the federal government; and demonstrate to the satisfaction of the federal government that these reforms are durable and effective through structural and personnel changes.

By August 2025, the University must submit to the government a report—certified for accuracy—that confirms these reforms.

● Student Discipline Reform and Accountability.

Harvard must immediately reform its student discipline policies and procedures so as to swiftly and transparently enforce its existing disciplinary policies with consistency and impartiality, and without double standards based on identity or ideology.

Where those policies are insufficient to prevent the disruption of scholarship, classroom learning and teaching, or other aspects of normal campus life, Harvard must develop and implement disciplinary policies sufficient to prevent those disruptions. This includes but is not limited to the following:

Discipline at Harvard must include immediate intervention and stoppage of disruptions or deplatforming, including by the Harvard police when necessary to stop a disruption or deplatforming; robust enforcement and reinstatement of existing time, place, and manner rules on campus, including ordering the Harvard police to stop incidents that violate time, place, and manner rules when necessary; a disciplinary process housed in one body that is accountable to Harvard’s president or other capstone official; and removing or reforming institutional bodies and practices that delay and obstruct enforcement, including the relevant Administrative Boards and FAS Faculty Council.

Harvard must adopt a new policy on student groups or clubs that forbids the recognition and funding of, or provision of accommodations to, any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment; invites non-students onto campus who regularly violate campus rules; or acts as a front for a student club that has been banned from campus.

The leaders or organizers of recognized and unrecognized student groups that violate these policies must be held accountable as a matter of student discipline and made ineligible to serve as officers in other recognized student organizations. In the future, funding decisions for student groups or clubs must be made exclusively by a body of University faculty accountable to senior University leadership.

In particular, Harvard must end support and recognition of those student groups or clubs that engaged in anti-Semitic activity since October 7th, 2023, including the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, Harvard Graduates Students 4 Palestine, Law Students 4 Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the National Lawyers Guild, and discipline and render ineligible the officers and active members of those student organizations.

Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.

Harvard must investigate and carry out meaningful discipline for all violations that occurred during the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 academic years, including the Harvard Business School protest of October 2023, the University Hall sit-in of November 2023, and the spring encampment of 2024. This must include permanently expelling the students involved in the October 18 assault of an Israeli Harvard Business School student, and suspending students involved in occupying university buildings, as warranted by the facts of individual cases. o The Harvard president and police chief must publicly clarify that the Harvard University Police Department will enforce University rules and the law. Harvard must also commit to cooperating in good faith with law enforcement.

● Whistleblower Reporting and Protections.

The University must immediately establish procedures by which any Harvard affiliate can report noncompliance with the reforms detailed in this letter to both university leadership and the federal government. Any such reporter shall be fully protected from any adverse actions for so reporting.

● Transparency and Monitoring.

The University shall make organizational changes to ensure full transparency and cooperation with all federal regulators. No later than June 30, 2025, and every quarter thereafter during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028, the University shall submit to the federal government a report—certified for accuracy—that documents its progress on the implementation of the reforms detailed in this letter.

The University must also, to the satisfaction of the federal government, disclose the source and purpose of all foreign funds; cooperate with the federal government in a forensic audit of foreign funding sources and uses, including how that money was used by Harvard, its agents, and, to the extent available, third parties acting on Harvard’s campus; report all requested immigration and related information to the United States Department of Homeland Security; and comply with all requirements relating to the SEVIS system. We expect your immediate cooperation in implementing these critical reforms that will enable Harvard to return to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence.

Josh Gruenbaum

Commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service

General Services Administration

Sean R. Keveney

Acting General Counsel

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services

Thomas E. Wheeler

Acting General Counsel

U.S. Department of Education

—

Harvard’s response

Dear Messrs. Gruenbaum, Keveney, and Wheeler:

We are writing in response to your letter dated April 11, 2025, addressed to Dr. Alan Garber, Harvard’s President, and Penny Pritzker, Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation.

Harvard is committed to fighting antisemitism and other forms of bigotry in its community. Antisemitism and discrimination of any kind not only are abhorrent and antithetical to Harvard’s values but also threaten its academic mission.

To that end, Harvard has made, and will continue to make, lasting and robust structural, policy, and programmatic changes to ensure that the university is a welcoming and supportive learning environment for all students and continues to abide in all respects with federal law across its academic programs and operations, while fostering open inquiry in a pluralistic community free from intimidation and open to challenging orthodoxies, whatever their source.

Over the past 15 months, Harvard has undertaken substantial policy and programmatic measures. It has made changes to its campus use policies; adopted new accountability procedures; imposed meaningful discipline for those who violate university policies; enhanced programs designed to address bias and promote ideological diversity and civil discourse; hired staff to support these programs and support students; changed partnerships; dedicated resources to combat hate and bias; and enhanced safety and security measures.

As a result, Harvard is in a very different place today from where it was a year ago. These efforts, and additional measures the university will be taking against antisemitism, not only are the right thing to do but also are critical to strengthening Harvard’s community as a place in which everyone can thrive.

It is unfortunate, then, that your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms long Messrs. Gruenbaum, Keveney, and Wheeler April 14, 2025 Page 2 recognized by the Supreme Court.

The government’s terms also circumvent Harvard’s statutory rights by requiring unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law. No less objectionable is the condition, first made explicit in the letter of March 31, 2025, that Harvard accede to these terms or risk the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding critical to vital research and innovation that has saved and improved lives and allowed Harvard to play a central role in making our country’s scientific, medical, and other research communities the standard-bearers for the world.

These demands extend not only to Harvard but to separately incorporated and independently operated medical and research hospitals engaging in life-saving work on behalf of their patients. The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.

Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle. Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community. But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.

Letter to Faculty from the President of Harvard

The Promise of American Higher Education

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

For three-quarters of a century, the federal government has awarded grants and contracts to Harvard and other universities to help pay for work that, along with investments by the universities themselves, has led to groundbreaking innovations across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields.

These innovations have made countless people in our country and throughout the world healthier and safer. In recent weeks, the federal government has threatened its partnerships with several universities, including Harvard, over accusations of antisemitism on our campuses.

These partnerships are among the most productive and beneficial in American history. New frontiers beckon us with the prospect of life-changing advances—from treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes, to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, quantum science and engineering, and numerous other areas of possibility. For the government to retreat from these partnerships now risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals but also the economic security and vitality of our nation.

Late Friday night, the administration issued an updated and expanded list of demands, warning that Harvard must comply if we intend to “maintain [our] financial relationship with the federal government.” It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner. Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the “intellectual conditions” at Harvard.

I encourage you to read the letter to gain a fuller understanding of the unprecedented demands being made by the federal government to control the Harvard community. They include requirements to “audit” the viewpoints of our student body, faculty, staff, and to “reduc[e] the power” of certain students, faculty, and administrators targeted because of their ideological views. We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement. The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

Our motto—Veritas, or truth—guides us as we navigate the challenging path ahead. Seeking truth is a journey without end. It requires us to be open to new information and different perspectives, to subject our beliefs to ongoing scrutiny, and to be ready to change our minds. It compels us to take up the difficult work of acknowledging our flaws so that we might realize the full promise of the University, especially when that promise is threatened.

We have made it abundantly clear that we do not take lightly our moral duty to fight antisemitism. Over the past fifteen months, we have taken many steps to address antisemitism on our campus. We plan to do much more. As we defend Harvard, we will continue to:

• nurture a thriving culture of open inquiry on our campus; develop the tools, skills, and practices needed to engage constructively with one another; and broaden the intellectual and viewpoint diversity within our community;
• affirm the rights and responsibilities we share; respect free speech and dissent while also ensuring that protest occurs in a time, place, and manner that does not interfere with teaching, learning, and research; and enhance the consistency and fairness of disciplinary processes; and
• work together to find ways, consistent with law, to foster and support a vibrant community that exemplifies, respects, and embraces difference. As we do, we will also continue to comply with Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act makes it unlawful for universities to make decisions “on the basis of race.”

These ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate. The work of addressing our shortcomings, fulfilling our commitments, and embodying our values is ours to define and undertake as a community. Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere. All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.

Sincerely,
Alan M. Garber

This originally appeared on Emanuel Pastreich – Fear No Evil.

The post Trump Forces Declare War on Harvard appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump’s war on global commerce is just plain nuts, and not just the pure economic part of it either. With each passing day we hear from more wanna be MAGA big thinkers arguing that the Donald’s Trade Rampage is also about geopolitics and four dimensional Trumpian chess designed to restore America’s global leadership and technological dominance for years to come.

Well, no, true economic prosperity and technological advance comes from entrepreneurs, investors, inventors and risk-takers operating on the free market. They don’t need any help at all from loud-mouthed Washington politicians who generally have no idea what they are talking about and, more importantly, no skin in the game. That’s why the latter are both ineffectual and dangerous: To wit, the Washington pols are always happy to burden, block, batter and impair the honest enterprise of companies large and small if they get it in their minds that “national security” or “national greatness” require the heavy hand of bureaucrats, tax collector, regulators and pork dispensers.

That’s the essence of Trump-O-Nomics. It amounts to nothing more than a rightwing/populist appropriation of the normally leftist-led approach to mobilizing the state’s heavy-hand for the purpose of fixing problems that are either non-existent or badly misdiagnosed. In the case of the yawning US trade deficits and the hollowing out of America’s once vibrant industrial economy, the massive Trumpian Tariff maneuvers are about as far afield from the real issues as anything every dreamed up by FDR, LBJ or Barrack Obama; and these Trumpian misfires are already fostering immense collateral damage that’s breaking to the surface everywhere.

For instance, when we saw this missive from Goldman Sachs earlier today we initially presumed that its trading book was heavy with Boeing stock and that, as they are want to do, Goldman was putting out a sheep-shearing call to lighten its book at the expense of its customers. After all, how in the world could a 145% tariff on China not result in some retaliatory damage to the world’s leading commercial jet supplier by the folks in Beijing who control upwards of 25% of the total global commercial jet market?

We think the impact to Boeing is very small because China had already stopped taking Boeing deliveries and stopped ordering Boeing aircraft during the last Trump administration, such that there is no real reduction to implement,” Goldman wrote in a note to clients in the late afternoon hours of the cash session.

Needless to say, it was the bolded part of the sentence after the “because” point that changed our mind. It turns out that single-handedly the Donald has already wiped out the largest market of one of America’s premier exporters and aerospace powerhouses that consistently puts huge “winning” trade surplus scores on the board. Well, at least according to Trump’s way of splainin’ things.

Thus, if you look back at 2014—a time before the Donald volunteered to come to Washington and help—Boeing shipped nearly $1o billion of civilian aircraft to China in a single year. Alas, after Trump launched his first trade war on China in 2018-2019, Boeing sold a total of only $6.5 billion of planes to China during the entirety of the five years over 2019-2024!

Stated differently, during the period 2010-2018, Boeing shipped $79.8 billion of planes to China, which accounted for 62% of the combined duopoly market with Airbus. During the last five years, however, Airbus shipped 630 planes to China versus a mere 89 by Boeing, causing Airbus’ $42 billion of sales to tower over Boeing’s $6.5 billion, That is to say, thanks to the Donald’s misguided trade meddling a company owned by a socialist consortium of European states has had handed to them on a platter a stunning 87% share of the global aircraft market!

You can’t get more destructive than this. And for what?

Well, apparently, to get even with China for scooping up US labor-intensive manufacturing jobs that the Fed had inflated right out of the global market.

Boeing Versus Airbus Sales To China in Units And Dollar Value, 2010 to 2024

To repeat from Part 3, US unit labor costs by 2024 stood 470% higher than they had been in 1965 when the US was still running balanced accounts with the world, and when the Fed understood “sound money” to require o.o% inflation.

Stated differently, under a regime of sound money the urgently required deflationary purge demanded by the rise of the low-cost exporting economies would have caused the red bars in the chart to fall after 1992, not continue to climb skyward as it actually did. Accordingly, the solution to America’s unsustainable trade deficits lies in root and branch reform at the Eccles Building a few blocks from the White House rather than a madcap eruption of global trade wars over tariffs and NTBs, which have virtually nothing to do with the trade deficit problem.

Nonfarm Unit Labor Cost Index, 1965 to 2024

Again, just consider the US/China trade balance in 2023 for the top 50 US imports from China which was hideously lop-sided. Yet it is not remotely possible that this 18:1 ratio between imports and exports was caused by trade barriers to US exports or other kinds of cheating by China’s trade bureaucrats. To the contrary, it was due to a vast gap between labor and other production costs in the two economies, pure and simple.

Trade Balance in 2023 for Top 50 US Imports From China:

• Imports: $397 billion.
• Exports: $22 billion.
• Balance: -$375 billion.
• Import/Export Ratio: 18:1

As it happens, tariffs self-evidently have little if anything to do with this extreme imbalance. Thus, among the top 50 US imports, the actual US weighted average tariff on these goods from China was 23.0% versus China’s 26.2% tariff on the same 50 categories of US exports in 2023.

Obviously, this trivial 320 basis point tariff differential on this common group of 50 four-digit HS categories does not remotely explain a 18X trade imbalance in favor of China. Nor is there any evidence that so-called NTBs (nontariff barriers) to US exports explain it, either.

The fact is, labor intensive manufacture of shoes, shirts, furniture and industrial commodities account for the imbalance. Even iPhones, desk tops and commodity semi-conductors were moved to China by Apple Inc. and other Silicon Valley based US companies in order to capture the labor cost arbitrage, as we elaborate below.

Moreover, the relatively high dueling tariffs imposed by both sides as of 2023 (23% vs. 26%) were entirely due to the trade wars that the Donald started during his first term in the Oval Office. Again, China’s tariff on these 50 categories of goods was just 7.5% on a MFN basis in 2017 before the Trump tariffing rampage started. So what has been gained, unfortunately, is not a reduction in US imports from China, but just higher off-setting duties on US export sales to China.

The lopsided imbalance of imports from China has not changed despite the Trumpian tariffs because, as indicated above, since 1992 the US price level has risen by 131%. Not surprisingly, the American market soon became flooded with labor-intensive Chinese shirts, shoes, sheets, toys and furniture at first; and then electronics, iPads, iPhones and computers in an even greater flood as time went on and Chinese manufacturing moved up the value chain.

As we also indicated previously, the nominal wage gap in USD was already large in 1992, but has steadily expanded ever since. In fact, in nominal USD terms the US/China manufacturing wage gap of $16.50 per hour in 1992 has more than doubled to $34.25. The figures below for both countries were supplied by Grok 3 and include both hourly pay plus full-loaded benefits absorbed by employers.

Hourly Wages: US-China=labor gap:

• 1992: $16.80-$0.33=$16.50.
• 2007: $29.81-$1.36=$28.45.
• 2024: $43.46-9.35=$34.14

In short, the Fed has inflated its way into a flood of imports from China and other low labor cost exporters. For example, the footwear and apparel category generated $41.7 billion of US imports from China in 2023 versus just $0.5 billion of US exports to China. That was due to the $34/hour wage gap, not trade barriers or intellectual property theft or any of the other risible claims made by the Trumpites

Likewise, the imbalance in toys and video games was $34.6 billion of imports from China versus $0.3 billion of US exports to China. And in this case, the duty rate is 0.0% on both ends of the two-way trade. So perforce, unfair trade barriers were not an issue in this market.

In the case of furniture, lighting and plastic products, the imbalance was similar at $29.3 billion of imports from China versus $1.0 billion of US exports to China. But the current Chinese import duties on US exports in these categories tell you all you need to know. Prior to 2018, China’s MFN tariff on these products averaged just 5.3%, which is hardly a roadblock to a competitive foreign producer.

But in his wisdom, the Donald raised the US tariff on furniture, lighting and plastic products to 25% during his first term, causing the Chinese to retaliate by raising their tariff from the MFN average of 5.3% to an average of 30.5% on these products in 2023. Of course, high-cost US exporters of these products were not very competitive in China anyway, but the Donald’s tit-for-tat on tariffs during his first term closed the door entirely. And, now, his latest 125% tariff is transparently a tax grab that can’t possibly help close a 29:1 import/export ratio.

The story is similar in the case of flat-screen TVs. Here the figures were $13.8 billion of imports from China and only $0.1 billion of US exports to China. That’s a 138:1 import/export ratio but its clearly not due to tariffs or other NTBs. In this case, China’s MFN tariff was just 3%, but when the Donald raised the US rate on flat-screen TV imports to 25% during this first term, the Chinese countered with a 28% rate as of 2023.

Again, what’s the point? The 138:1 import/export ratio in this product category was due to China’s superior cost structure and production infrastructure. Trade barriers had nothing to do with it.

In the case of solar panels, electric motors and air conditioners, the US imported $22.5 billion from China versus exports in these categories of just $1.2 billion. Again, the MFN tariff in China was just an average of 7%, but by 2023 stood at an average of 24% owing to the Donald’s raising the US tariff on China-made goods in these categories to 25% the first time around.

Even in the case of so-called high tech products, the fully rational move by Apple Inc and others to source iPhones, laptops, AirPods and semiconductors from China was driven by yawning labor and other cost differentials. Consequently, the three product categories which encompass these Silicon Valley designed and engineered products showed imports of $136 billion versus exports of just $7.3 billion in 2023.

Again, that was a 19:1 import/export ratio. Moreover, the resulting $129 billion deficit in these three notionally “high tech” categories accounted for 46% of the entire US trade deficit with China of $279 billion in 2023.

Then again, this huge imbalance wasn’t owing to tariff or other kinds of trade cheating. In fact, China’s normal MFN duty on the US exports of $7.3 billion in these three high tech categories was just 1.5% on a weighted average basis. And even after the first round of Trump trade wars it was only 9.7% under the retaliation rates China imposed on bilateral trade with the US in 2023.

By contrast, the actual US tariff on imports of these high tech products from China in 2023 was nearly $27 billion or 25%. And until the weekend reprieve, which was subsequently clarified to be not a reprieve but another short-term “pause”, it would have been $154 billion or 145%!

As we indicated previously, these massive imbalances in even high tech products are owing to yawning differences between the inflated US cost structure and that of China’s freshly minted factories and just-out-of-the-rice-paddies industrial labor force.

For want of doubt, we requested Grok 3 to build up a bill of production costs for the Apple iPhone X based on actual production costs incurred by its supplier, Foxconn, in its world-scale plants versus the comparable costs of building the components and assembling the final product in a plant based in Austin, Texas.

The table speaks for itself. US labor and other production costs would be 45% higher ($1,043 versus $720 per unit), and that includes the supply chain costs of getting the product from China to a US distribution warehouse on the west coast.

Accordingly, there is no mystery to the entire trade deficit story. Even in the case of high tech products where US producers have overwhelming technological and intellectual property superiority, US producers have gone off-shore to manufacture their products because over the last five decades the Fed has inflated the bejesus out of the American economy.

iPhone X Cost Build-Up (China vs. USA, 2023, Pre-Tariff)

So, enough already! What the Donald in his “wisdom” is actually saying is that the free people and businesses of America are not permitted under his writ to buy low-cost goods from China because the red capitalists of Beijing have not sufficiently inflated their own cost structure to catch up to the relentless US inflation generated by the Fed.

When all else fails, of course, the Trumpites resort to sputtering about the great China threat to America’s place of world leadership. On the military front, however, China doesn’t have the GDP heft to even think about landing on the California shores, notwithstanding Wall Street’s endless kowtowing to the China Boom.

Indeed, when it comes to the threat of a conventional military invasion the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century. That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles would consign a Chinese naval armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters.

Likewise, neocon knuckleheads have been jabbering about China’s growing Navy, which numbers 400 hulls compared to 305 ships in the US Navy’s fleet. But what they don’t say is that most of these Chinese units are coastal patrol boats, which likely couldn’t even make it to the coast of California, anyway.

In terms of Naval power projection capability, the proper measure of lethality is not the number of hulls; it’s the total displacement tonnage. In this connection, the US Navy has 4.6 million tons of displacement, averaging 15,000 tons per ship. By contrast, China’s Navy has but 2.0 million tons of displacement, averaging only 5,000 tons per boat. That is to say, the Chinese Navy is totally visible, assessable and trackable, and is not remotely of the size and lethality that would make an invasion of America remotely plausible.

At the end of the day, however, what really debunks the China Threat nonsense is its jerry-built, debt-entombed economy.The fact is, China has accumulated in excess of $70 trillion of debt in barely two decades, and is therefore not some kind of sustainable economic giant that will conqueror the global economy. In fact, it is a Ponzi living on borrowed time and borrowed money.

As shown in the chart below, its bank debt alone now totals $63 trillion, which is up by 13X from the $5 trillion outstanding just 20 years ago in 2004. Owing to this madcap debt explosion, much of which built unused infrastructure and empty apartment buildings, the debt of China’s state-run banking system is nearly three times the footings of the US banking system.

Stated differently, China didn’t grow organically in the historic capitalist mode; it printed, borrowed, spent and built like there was no tomorrow. The resulting simulacrum of prosperity would not last a year if its $3.6 trillion global export market—-the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright—were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.

To be sure, China’s totalitarian leaders are immensely misguided and downright evil from the perspective of their oppressed population. But they are not stupid. They stay in power by keeping the people relatively fat and happy and couldn’t possibly wish to risk destabilizing a towering economic house of cards that has not even a vague approximation in human history.

Despite this, we never want for round-house claims that China’s economic house of cards doesn’t matter because it is hell-bent on dominating a battlefield that is “asymmetric, economic and digital” according to one critic we read today.

But to the contrary, Red Capitalism is the greatest economic Ponzi in world history, and is neither stable nor sustainable. It will ultimately tip-over under its own weight of excess debt and sweeping malinvestment—just like the Soviet Union did for different reasons.

Washington simple needs to mind its own business, let free enterprise flourish at home, allow freedom of commerce abroad for American companies and entrepreneurs, slash the defense budget by 50%, balance the Federal budget, eliminate 75% of Federal regulations and get out of the way.

There is nothing “national” or geostrategic about this. It’s just beltway bullshit made up by Washington lobbies, think tanks, NGOs and busy-bodies trying to justify their own illicit claims on budgets and power. And now they have captured the Trumpite trade howlers, as well.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

The post We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Trade War With China appeared first on LewRockwell.

Join us in Auburn, Alabama to hear Ron Unz on “The True History of World War II; USS Liberty Survivor Phil Tourney on “The Attack on the USS Liberty”; retired Airforce Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski on a personal perspective on Pentagon Lies; Wanjiru Njoya on “Reconstruction Reconsidered”; Scott Horton on How DC restarted the Cold War with Russia and the Ukraine disaster; Brion McClanahan on “The Rightous Cause Conquers the World”; Ilana Mercer on “The Real Israel”; Hunt Tooley on how World War I spawned the total state; Yours Truly on the “false virtue” of American imperialism; and other great speakers.

It was banned in Miami, but not in Auburn.  The Oscar-winning documentary, “No Other Land,” will be shown on the afternoon of May 15 just before the evening cocktail reception.  Come and join us.  You’ll never hear any discussions like this on the FOX War Channel.

The post Don’t Miss the Mises Institute’s Historic “Revisionist History of War” Conference May 15-17 appeared first on LewRockwell.

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An influential strategist from a NATO member commiserates.  https://thecradle.co/articles/blue-homeland-architect-warns-nato-has-failed-and-the-eu-wants-turkiye-on-its-knees

The post Everyone Agrees, NATO is So Over appeared first on LewRockwell.

Over the course of the past three millennia, Western Civilization has faced many apocalyptic challenges and existential threats, both internal and external.

I believe we stand today, as a civilization, quivering on an oscillating precipice facing perhaps our greatest danger, one as real and threatening as the series of Medieval invasions from multiple hostile forces, the Magyars (Hungarians) from the east, the Viking expansion from the north and the Arabs from the south, all followed by the Bubonic Plague which ravaged the continent. In the 20th Century the West faced and defeated the onslaught of those twin totalitarian tyrannies, National Socialist Germany and Marxist/Leninist Socialism of the USSR.

Those who hate and seek the destruction of the West wear many ideological guises and raiment.

The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this Dialogue. The Spirit of Western Civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everyone is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education.

Logos is an ancient Greek term. It means reason as expressed in human speech. The Greeks believed reason to be the controlling principle in an orderly, harmonious universe (cosmos).

The faculties of reason (conceptual thought) and language (propositional speech) are what distinguish human beings from other creatures.

Accordingly, man is described as “the rational animal.” As philosopher Mortimer Adler points out in his book, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes:

. . . man is the only talking, the only naming, declaring or questioning, affirming or denying, the only arguing, agreeing or disagreeing, the only discursive animal.

Philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand develops this idea further in her book, For the New Intellectual:

Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food, and the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch – or build a cyclotron – without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.

But to think is an act of choice . . . Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs, or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival – so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think.’

Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think – not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment . . . Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality.

Human beings are capable of abstract thought, the transcendence of their immediate environment, and the emancipation from the perpetual present.

In one of the most important books of the 20th Century, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, historian Carroll Quigley elaborates on this crucial idea of abstraction:  

Both man and universe are dynamic, or changeable in time, and the chief additional complexity is that both are changing in a continuum of abstraction, as well as in the more familiar continuum of space-time. The continuum of abstraction simply means that the reality in which man and the universe function exists in five dimensions; of these the dimension of abstraction covers a range from the most concrete and material end of reality to, at the opposite extreme, the most abstract and spiritual end of reality, with every possible gradation between these two ends along the intervening dimensions that determine reality, including the three dimensions of space, the fourth of time, and this fifth of abstraction. This means that man is concrete and material at one end of his person, is abstract and spiritual at the other end, and covers all the gradations between, with a large central zone concerned with his chaos of emotional experiences and feelings.

In order to think about himself or the universe with the more abstract and rational end of his being, man has to categorize and to conceptualize both his nature and the nature of reality, while, in order to act and to feel on the less abstract end of his being, he must function more directly, outside the limits of categories, without the buffer of concepts. Thus man might look at his own being as divided into three levels of body, emotions, and reason. The body, functioning directly in space-time-abstraction, is much concerned with concrete situations, individual and unique events, at a specific time and place. The middle levels of his being are concerned with himself and his reactions to reality in terms of feelings and emotions as determined by endocrine and neurological reactions. The upper levels of his being are concerned with his neurological analysis and manipulation of conceptualized abstractions. The three corresponding operations of his being are sensual, emotional or intuitive, and rational.

The sequence of intellectual history is concerned with the sequence of styles or fads that have been prevalent, one after another, as to what emphasis or combinations of man’s three levels of operations would be used in his efforts to experience life and to cope with the universe.

Early Christianity, influenced by Greek philosophy, borrowed the term “Logos” as a symbolic representation for Jesus Christ. Logos was the divine wisdom manifest in the creation, government, and redemption of the world. It was identified with the Second Person of the Trinity.

In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God; and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was made nothing that has been made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness grasped it not. There was a man, one sent from God, whose name was John. This man came as a witness concerning the light, that all might believe through him. He was not himself the light, but was to bear witness to the light. It was the true light that enlightens every man who comes into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But to as many as received Him He gave the power of becoming sons of God; to those who believe in His name; who were born not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. And we saw His glory – glory as of the Only-begotten of the Father – full of grace and truth.

The Gospel of John 1, 1-14

With this Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian intellectual inheritance (in addition to the various elements offered by the barbarian Germanic tribes and the Muslim world) Western civilization has developed as “logocentric” or reasoned speech-centered.

From the time of the Protestant Reformation, particular emphasis has been placed upon the written word as a means of transmitting and recording knowledge, away from the earlier “art of memory” or oral tradition of classic Greek and Roman antiquity.

“Printing was to bring about the most radical alteration ever made in Western intellectual history, and its effects were to be felt in every area of human activity,” noted James Burke in his excellent book, The Day The Universe Changed.

“The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest, most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature known as Homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. That record covers nearly twenty-five hundred years in an unbroken stretch of this animated oddity’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, logic, politics, botany, zoölogy, medicine, geography, theology, — everything, I believe, that lies in the range of human knowledge or speculation. Hence the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience. Our studies were properly called formative, because beyond all others their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children; and if one wished to characterize the collective mind of this present period, or indeed of any period,—the use it makes of its powers of observation, reflection, logical inference,—one would best do it by the one word immaturity.” ― Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Anyone remotely aware of the dynamic interplay of ideas and events in the world for the past several decades is well aware that in the media, in the academy, and in the corridors of power, Western Civilization is under a vicious and aggressive assault. This has particularly accelerated in the past few weeks. Here are vital unapologetic defenses of the West and its definitive legacy in shaping the world:

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, by Douglas Murray

Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis, by James Lindsay

The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, by Heather Mac Donald

When Everyone Kneels, Who Will Stand Up for Western History and Culture? article by Giulio Meotti

“In Defense of Western Civilization,” article by Richard Finger

How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity, by Rodney Stark

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.; (EWTN series The Catholic Church: Builder of Civilization; online at YouTube)

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, by Anthony Esolen

Civilization, by Kenneth Clark; (BBC TV series Civilization); online at YouTube (here)

Phoenix: The Triumph of the West, by J. M. Roberts; (BBC TV series The Triumph of the West; select episodes online at YouTube)

The Great Books of the Western World, by Mortimer J. Adler (Author, Editor), Clifton Fadiman (Editor), and Philip W. Goetz (Editor)

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos , by Jordan B. Peterson

The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, by Allan Bloom

The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail

“Must It Be the Rest Against the West?” article by Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy

“The Coming Anarchy,” article by Robert Kaplan

“The Superiority of Western Values in Eight Minutes,” Speech by Ibn Warraq

Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy, by Ibn Warraq

“Sharia’s Incompatibility with Western Values, Explained,” article by Immanuel Al-Manteeqi

The Theory of Education in the United States, by Albert Jay Nock

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man by Albert Jay Nock

The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, by Henry Adams

What If Everyone Had A Classical Education?” TED presentation by Rebekah Hagstrom

“The Trivium of Classical Education: Historical Development Decline in the 20th Century and Resurgence in Recent Decades,” A Dissertation Presented to The Graduate Faculty of Greenleaf University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Randall D. Hart, July 2004.

The post Western Suicide: Cause and Effect appeared first on LewRockwell.

Why Marxist Organizations Like BLM Seek to Dismantle the “Western Nuclear Family”

Épater le bourgeois (shock the middle classes) has been the revolutionary rallying cry of the left in the cultural war against Judeo-Christian morality and the nuclear family for well over a hundred and fifty years.

It lies at the epicenter of Modernism, Marxism, Fascism, National Socialism, Progressivism, Feminism, Environmentalism, and Homosexualism.

For fascinating, in-depth explorations of bourgeois (middle class) culture, see Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914, by Peter Gay;  The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud Volume 1: Education of the Senses, Volume 1, by Peter Gay; The Tender Passion: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 2, by Peter Gay; The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3, by Peter Gay; The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 4, by Peter Gay; Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 5, by Peter Gay; Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideologies in Transition, by Gertrude Himmelfarb;  The De-moralization Of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, by Gertrude Himmelfarb; and One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution, by Gertrude Himmelfarb; The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, by Deirdre McClosky; Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t explain the Modern World, by Deirdre McClosky; and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capitol or Institutions, Enriched the World, by Dierdre McClosky.

The classic and definitive statement of elitist contempt for bourgeois culture is Eminent Victorians, by the scathing, bitchy biographer Lytton Strachey. Strachey, who along with his homosexual lover and fellow Cambridge Apostles initiate, economist John Maynard Keynes, were unabashed advocates of “the higher sodomy,” setting forth the destructive agenda for generations of anti-bourgeois subversion.

Later the Apostles served as the breeding nest for treason by spawning Soviet espionage agents Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Michael Straight. 

Following in the degenerate path blazed earlier by Keynes, the postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault sexually assaulted young boys while living in Tunisia.

See also Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, by Peter Gay; Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, by E. Michael Jones; Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872-1927, by Daniel Albright; France: Fin de Siècle, by Eugen Weber; Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, by Carl E. Schorske; Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, by Peter Gay; Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, by Mel Gordon; Modern Times: The Word from the Twenties to the Nineties, by Paul Johnson; The Shock of the New, (DVD) by Robert Hughes; Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies, by Paul Buhle and David Wagner;  Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture, by Chris Robe’; Enemies of Society, by Paul Johnson; The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, by Robert Nisbet; and Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America.  

The post Épater le bourgeois (shock the middle classes) Has Been the Revolutionary Rallying Cry of the Left in the Cultural War Against Judeo-Christian Morality and the Nuclear Family for Well over a Hundred and Fifty Years appeared first on LewRockwell.

Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato "fuori controllo" negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa è una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa è la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso è accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/i-tagli-alla-spesa-non-indeboliranno)

La proiezione del modello GDPNow della Federal Reserve Bank di Atlanta per la crescita del PIL reale nel primo trimestre del 2025 mostra ora un crollo al -1,5%. Ciò segna una significativa revisione al ribasso rispetto alla precedente stima del 2,3% del 19 febbraio 2025.

Un declino così enorme è strano. Come siamo passati dal +2,3% al -1,5% in meno di un mese? Questo tipo di crollo in un'economia grande come quella degli Stati Uniti è estremamente raro.

La reazione immediata della stampa è stata quella di definirla l'inizio di una “recessione targata Trump” e di attribuirne la colpa alle linee di politica del presidente. È interessante notare che il 1° giugno 2022, GDPNow aveva stimato la crescita del secondo trimestre del 2022 a +1,3%; il 1° luglio 2022 era scesa a -2,1%, uno spostamento di 3,4 punti percentuali in 30 giorni. Come l'ha definita la stampa? “Paura della crescita”. Una cosa simile è accaduta nel terzo trimestre del 2021: la stima è scesa dal 6,1% (30 luglio) al 2,3% (1° ottobre), un calo di 3,8 punti in due mesi.

Nel 2022 il PIL reale è sceso per due trimestri consecutivi sotto l'amministrazione Biden. Secondo il Bureau of Economic Analysis, il primo trimestre aveva visto un calo del -1,6% nel tasso annuo, seguito da un calo dello 0,6% nel secondo trimestre. Centinaia di analisti, commentatori ed economisti, insieme all'NBER, hanno rapidamente dichiarato che non si trattava di una recessione. È esilarante, quindi, leggere le centinaia di commenti che sostengono che l'Atlanta Fed NowCast stia sottintendendo che le linee di politica della nuova amministrazione stiano causando una recessione.

Come ho scritto qualche mese fa, gli Stati Uniti sono in recessione nel settore privato da mesi. Tuttavia un aumento anomalo della spesa pubblica durante un periodo di crescita e una politica di prestiti rischiosa hanno portato a un PIL ipertrofico.

Gli Stati Uniti hanno avuto un aumento del PIL nominale di $7.590 miliardi tra il 2021 e il 2024 rispetto a un aumento di $8.470 miliardi del debito pubblico. Ciò ha segnato la peggiore crescita del PIL aggiustata all'accumulo di debito pubblico sin dagli anni '30.

Molti analisti avvertono che gli sforzi del Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) causeranno una recessione se la spesa pubblica verrà ridotta in modo aggressivo. Sebbene tagliare la spesa possa “ridurre” il PIL, non danneggerà la crescita economica; anzi la rafforzerà.

Dobbiamo ricordare che la spesa pubblica degli Stati Uniti, finanziata dall'aumento del debito federale, ha rappresentato circa il 22-25% della crescita totale del PIL degli Stati Uniti nel periodo 2021-2024. Questo straordinario aumento della spesa pubblica nel mezzo di una ripresa ha portato a un debito pubblico record ed è stata la causa principale della crescita dell'offerta di denaro e, con essa, dell'esplosione dell'inflazione che gli americani stanno subendo oggi.

Uno studio di ricerca del MIT Sloan, pubblicato il 17 luglio 2024 da Mark Kritzman et al., intitolato “I determinanti dell'inflazione”, ha concluso che la spesa federale è stata il motore principale dell'impennata dell'inflazione nel 2022, stimando che sia stata da due a tre volte più significativa di qualsiasi altro fattore.

La spesa pubblica era fuori controllo, provocando un'impennata della crescita della massa monetaria e l'inflazione cumulativa subita dagli americani negli ultimi quattro anni è stata superiore al 20,9%, con prezzi di generi alimentari e benzina in aumento di oltre il 40%.

La spesa pubblica eccessiva non è stata solo la causa dell'aumento della crescita dell'offerta di denaro e dell'impennata dell'inflazione, ma ha anche portato a un aumento del debito di $8.470 miliardi e a un percorso insostenibile verso la rovina finanziaria se le linee di politica fossero rimaste le stesse. Secondo il Congressional Budget Office, senza cambiamenti gli Stati Uniti avrebbero accumulato deficit per $12.600 miliardi tra il 2025 e il 2030. Si prevedeva che le spese per interessi netti sarebbero aumentate da $881 miliardi nel 2024 a $1.200 miliardi entro il 2030, anche ipotizzando l'assenza di recessioni o aumenti della disoccupazione.

Il taglio della spesa pubblica è essenziale per ridurre i prezzi, tenere sotto controllo l'inflazione e fermare l'imminente disastro delle finanze pubbliche. Nel 2024 è diventato evidente che le misure di entrate non avrebbero ridotto il deficit federale degli Stati Uniti. I deficit sono sempre un problema di spesa.

Dobbiamo ricordarci che la crescita del PIL del 2,8% nel 2024 rifletteva quasi $2.000 miliardi in prestiti, un rapporto spesa/crescita di circa uno a uno e un percorso pericoloso verso una crisi del debito.

Il PIL privato dovrebbe misurare l'economia, poiché la spesa pubblica e il debito non guidano una crescita produttiva. Eliminare la spesa pubblica può darci un quadro più accurato della realtà del settore produttivo in America. Le ultime stime della Federal Reserve di Atlanta mostrano un massiccio calo delle esportazioni nette (-3,7%) dovuto a un forte aumento delle importazioni, un piccolo calo del consumo di beni (-0,09%) ma servizi forti (+0,62%) e aumenti della spesa pubblica (+0,34%) e un sano aumento degli investimenti (+0,62%). Il fattore sorprendente è un crollo anomalo delle esportazioni e un aumento delle importazioni che potrebbero essere rivisti, perché il deficit commerciale a dicembre 2024 è salito di $98,4 miliardi e il PIL non ha riflesso un crollo importante delle esportazioni nette. La cosa preoccupante è che la spesa pubblica continua a essere eccessiva e gli Stati Uniti stanno registrando un deficit annuo di $2.500 miliardi.

Gli Stati Uniti non entreranno in recessione a causa del cambio di amministrazione, ma a causa delle spese eccessive degli anni di Biden. Ridurre la spesa federale, il deficit e l'accumulo di debito è essenziale per recuperare la salute dell'economia.

L'aumento del PIL dovuto a spesa pubblica e debito non significa favorire la crescita: è la ricetta per il disastro.

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

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una “mancia” in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

“Getting vaccinated every year is the best way to lower your chances of getting the flu.” That is the declaration of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) at its website’s page dedicated to immunization for flu. The problem is that actual medical investigation instead indicates the shots are a dud when it comes to protecting people from flu.

The latest study showing this comes from the Cleveland Clinic. The results show a 27 percent higher rate of flu in the 2024-25 flu season among the Cleveland Clinic’s almost 44,000 employees who took the flu shots mandated by the Cleveland Clinic compared to among its almost 10,000 employees who escaped the mandated shots via claiming medical or religious exemption. Alex Berenson provided the details in an April 8 article at his Unreported Truths. The study authors’ conclusion that “We were unable to find that the influenza vaccine has been effective in preventing infection” Berenson aptly calls “a masterpiece of understatement.”

One obvious outcome suggested by this study is that the Cleveland Clinic and other businesses should end their mandates that employees take flu shots.

Most people would think that a job of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), so long as it exists, would be to pull colossal failures like the flu shots off the market, or at least to warn people that the shots look like they are all risk and no benefit. However, as it has done with other spurious pharmaceutical products, HHS is acting as a flu shots promoter. It goes so far on its flu immunization page as to recommend that, with quite limited exceptions, people over six months old take the shots yearly.

In February, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. signaled his desire that, instead of promoting that people take vaccines such as flu shots, the focus be on promoting that people exercise informed consent. There is a long way to go on achieving this objective. Where is the mention at the HHS flu immunization web page of indications the flu shots do not work? Where is the sharing of information about the people who have reported being hurt by the flu shots and who have even received compensation for flu shots injuries? Why are the shots still recommended for people down to the age of six months old?

The United States government and HHS do not have Americans’ backs on flu shots. HHS’s shots pushing does, though, help bring in the profits for pharmaceutical companies.

Reprinted with permission from The Ron Paul Institute.

The post The Dud Flu Shots appeared first on LewRockwell.

We assume that Player One in the White House is having fun.  Between moments of boredom with the whole thing he appears to enjoy time playing a video game, one like SimCity in which players build their own communities.  But the game Donald Trump plays allows him to build his very own TrumpWorld.

So far, his world includes global mapmaking.  Nobody serious much cares or thinks that America is elevated and Mexico diminished by renaming the Gulf of Mexico, but for a dedicated gamer it is like calling out other players online.  It thrills Player One in TrumpWorld since it represents unilateral might.  Then there are the options of making Canada a state, taking Greenland and the Panama Canal by force, or displacing millions of people to create the Gaza Riveria Resort, a luxurious playground for the rich and famous.  And this is only the first level!

Trump, who we are told simply doesn’t read much of anything that’s not on a teleprompter, is so completely mesmerized by video that he appoints people to office based on their appearance on TV.  It bestows a reality on them that others lack and in TrumpWorld it is a major qualification for high office:  Pete Hegseth, Dan Bongino, Sean Duffy… you get the idea.  His Kennedy Center board appointees include Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiroma.   Being a Fox News host or contributor is best, but others on TV can get the presidential nod, and even become ambassadors, too.

For a former reality TV star, it is the most fun ever to have your own global reality video game.  You can upend all of world trade, commerce that makes greater prosperity possible, with nothing more than a notion and the push of a button.  On a whim Player One can threaten one tariff rate one day and another the next, changing frantically from day to day.  This makes planning and production virtually impossible for anyone engaged in business.  But it’s okay since it’s only a video game.  It’s his world. Any inconvenience or cost digital beings suffer in the changing gamescape is not really real in a reality video game reality.

Trump World should have been carried a warning for extreme violence. It was packaged as peaceful, but it’s clear now that thundered threats of bombardment are major tools of fun and play.  “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before!”  Wow!  That’s awesome!  “Your country gets blown to smithereens,” Cool!  “Hell will rain down upon you like nothing you have ever seen before!”  Boys playing games online talk like that.  Normal people in the real world, people with healthy human consciousness don’t.  But TrumpWorld is just a hyper-exciting game, one that now features fresh new images of people being incinerated right before our eyes.  “Oops!”  So realistic! So exhilarating!

As you would expect of a serious gamer, even before his first go-around Trump showed himself to be uncommonly interested in wielding deadly power. He repeatedly pressed a foreign policy adviser during the 2016 campaign to explain why the US couldn’t use its nuclear weapons. Like so many other role-playing and real time strategy games – Fallout, and Command and Conquer – TrumpWorld now includes the thrilling prospect of carnage by nuclear weapons.

What if things go amiss?  No worries.  TrumpWorld’s Player One can always take a break and play some golf.  One game is as good as another.  If everything gets broken down or blown up in TrumpWorld, he can pause and reset.

Can’t he?

The post Trumpworld: Ready Player One! appeared first on LewRockwell.

In an amusing display of British pride and solipsism, the venerable Times of London once ran the headline “Fog in Channel – Continent Cut Off.”

Overly arrogant individuals sometimes find it difficult to recognize that they are not the center of the universe, and that instead they might actually be considerably less large and powerful than those they intend to overawe, cut off, or isolate.

This sort of notion was also famously expressed in a Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoon I remember seeing during my childhood. One of the Looney Tunes characters—I forget which one—was perched on the branch of a tree and idiotically decided to destroy his adversary by sawing it off. Since cartoons may easily defy physical laws, his ridiculous plan actually succeeded and that branch remained suspended in mid-air while the rest of the tree suddenly plummeted to the ground. But real life is considerably different than what was portrayed by Warner Brothers cartoonists.

Some may disagree. I’ve sometimes wondered whether the surprising trade policies that President Donald Trump announced over the last couple of weeks might have been inspired by those Bugs Bunny cartoons of the 1950s. Perhaps he assumed that they accurately portrayed real life events and decided to apply that same strategy to America’s international trade problems.

Certainly the sudden, unilateral application of new tariffs against every other country in the world—ranging from a stiff minimum of 10% against the entire human race to a China rate that ultimately reached an absurd 145%—seemed more like something out of a cartoon than normal economic policy planning.

The initial tariff rates shown in the chart that Trump held up at his April 2nd announcement produced a jaw-dropping reaction by nearly all economic observers. I suspect that many of them may have wondered if he’d somehow gotten his dates confused and the whole exercise had actually been intended as an April Fools’ joke.

I was recently interviewed by a right-wing British podcaster named Mark Collett, and he suggested that Trump’s erratic and mercurial political decisions reminded him of the Roman Emperor Caligula, leading me to concur with his historical analogy.

Caligula is probably best known for announcing that he would appoint his horse Incitatus to the consulship, the highest political office of the Roman government, and also for declaring himself to be a living god. But I think that if Trump had given his favorite dog or cat a Cabinet post and even Tweeted out a few fanciful claims regarding his own divinity, the negative impact upon America’s position in the world might have been considerably less damaging than what was caused by his outrageously bizarre tariff proposal.

Tariffs are just a type of tax levied on imports, and America annually imports well over $3 trillion dollars worth of foreign goods, so tariff taxes obviously have a huge economic impact. But Trump suddenly raised those taxes by more than a factor of ten, taking them from around 2.5% to 29%, rates far, far beyond those of the notorious 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and reaching the levels of more than 100 years ago. This certainly amounted to one of the largest tax increases in all of human history.

According to our Constitution, tariffs and other tax changes must be enacted by Congressional legislation. But Trump ignored those requirements, instead claiming that he had the power to unilaterally set tariff tax rates under the emergency provisions of a 1977 law that no one had ever previously believed could be used for that purpose.

Across our 235 year national history, all our past changes in tariff, trade, or tax policy—including Smoot-Hawley, NAFTA, the WTO, and Trump 45’s own USMCA—had always been the result of months or years of political negotiations, and then ultimately approved or rejected by Congress. But now these multi-trillion-dollar decisions were being made at the personal whim of someone who had seemingly proclaimed himself a reigning, empowered American autocrat.

As might be expected, Trump’s huge tax increase on $3 trillion of imports quickly led to a very sharp drop in stock prices, but Trump declared that he was unbending and would never waver. China had prepared for exactly such an economic attack, and when it soon retaliated with similar tariffs on American products, Trump counter-retaliated, with several days of those tit-for-tat exchanges eventually raising tariff rates against China to an astonishing 145%, essentially banning almost all Chinese goods. Many other countries and the EU also threatened similar retaliatory tariffs, but since their tax rates were governed by law rather than autocratic whim, their responses were necessarily much slower.

However, just a week after he announced those gigantic tariffs against the entire world and repeatedly promised to maintain or even further raise them, Trump suddenly changed his mind. Although he kept the Chinese rates at those ridiculous levels, he declared that tariffs on all other countries would suddenly be reduced to a very high but rational 10% rate for the next 90 days while he decided what to do.

Thus, during the course of a single week, Trump had raised American tariffs by more than a factor of ten, then dropped them by a factor of two, representing exactly the sort of tax policy we might expect to see in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Trump’s totally unexpected reversal naturally produced a huge rebound in stock prices, which recovered much of the ground that they had previously lost, and Trump boasted about all the money that his friends had made from that unprecedented market rebound. This led to some dark suspicions that our unfortunate country had just witnessed one of the most outrageously blatant examples of insider trading in all of human history.

Across thousands of years, the world has seen many important countries ruled by absolute monarchs or all-powerful dictators, with some of these leaders even considered deranged. But I can’t recall any past example in which a major nation’s tax, tariff, or tribute policies have undergone such rapid and sudden changes, moving up and down by huge amounts apparently based upon personal whim. Certainly Caligula never did anything so peculiar, nor Louis XIV nor Genghis Khan nor anyone else who comes to mind. Lopping off the heads of a few random government officials was one thing, but drastic changes in national financial policies were generally taken much more seriously. I don’t think that Tamerlane ever suddenly raised the tribute he demanded from his terrified subjects by a factor of ten, then a few days later lowered it back down by a factor of two.

What will our tariff rates on $3 trillion of imports be like in a few months? I doubt that anyone can say, even including the current occupant of the Oval Office. For example, late Friday night the Trump Administration apparently exempted smartphones, computer equipment, and other electronics from his Chinese tariffs, hoping that the timing would help hide that further abject surrender from the American population.

Consider America’s major business corporations or even its small mom-and-pop operations. Nearly all of these have some substantial connection to international trade, even if they merely rely upon ordinary products that they buy at Costco or Walmart. On April 2nd, Trump announced his huge new tariffs that would greatly raise the price of those products or possibly lead to their disappearance, then on April 9th he changed his mind and suspended those tariffs for 90 days, but still proposed to afterward enact them, while essentially banning nearly all Chinese imported goods with a 145% tariff that may or may not continue.

Under those circumstances, how could any rational corporate planner—or even sensible small-businessman—formulate any long-term investment plans? For at least the next 90 days, virtually all business investment will surely remain frozen, except perhaps for a little panic-buying. It’s hardly surprising that consumer sentiment quickly reached the worst levels since record-keeping began.

Read the Whole Article

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I’ve often thought that the UK hasn’t had any good leaders since Lord Salisbury, the last prime minister of Queen Victoria’s reign, who died in 1902.

Lord Salisbury (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil) was a prudent and sensible man who understood that most ambitious schemes undertaken by people in government are likely to be ruinous. Recognizing the folly of getting into alliances with Europe’s Continental powers, he maintained the policy of “splendid isolation.” His pessimistic view of government scheming was encapsulated in the credo:

Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.

I am certain that Lord Salisbury would have been appalled by pretty much every major decision made by the British government since his death, especially its gross mismanagement of affairs on the European continent in the first decade of the 20th century. The British government’s unnecessary alliances with France and Russia and its needlessly unfriendly posture towards Germany were, it seems to me, foolish at best, and more likely bloody-minded, especially when one considers that the British Royal family was from Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II was Victoria’s grandson.

The British government’s treatment of its young men during World War I—herding millions of them into cold, muddy, water-filled, rat infested trenches, where they were subjected to round-the-clock artillery barrages—strikes me as one of the most outrageous abuses of human beings ever perpetrated.

While Churchill is often idolized as Britain’s great 20th century leader because of his rousing speeches during World War II, it’s not clear to me that any of his decisions arose out of any sort of special prescience or judgement. After Neville Chamberlain declared war on Nazi Germany on Sept. 3, 1939, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty—a position he was holding when the Royal Navy attempted to defend Norway from the German navy. This operation ended in disaster on June 8, 1940, when the German battle-cruisers Scharnhost and Gneisenau caught the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her two escorting destroyers Acasta and Ardent in the Norwegian Sea, sinking all three ships, with the loss of 1,519 British sailors. Even though Churchill was head of the Navy, it was Prime Minister Chamberlain who took the flak for the incident and resigned, leaving his office open to Churchill.

Chamberlain declared war on Germany because it invaded Poland, which it intended to use as a staging ground for its invasion of the Soviet Union. The paradox of this decision was that Britain’s ally, the Soviet Union, invaded Poland sixteen days after the German invasion. At the Yalta Conference in Feb. 1945, Churchill agreed to leave Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe under the de facto control of Joseph Stalin.

It seems to me that Britain’s awful leadership reached a new summit with Tony Blair and has become steadily more dreadful ever since. It may have reached its Grotesque Globalist Apotheosis with Rishi Sunak. After working at Goldman Sachs, Sunak co-founded a hedge fund registered in the Cayman Islands (to avoid paying taxes) called Theleme Partners.

He and his French co-founder, Patrick Degorce, apparently named the fund after the Abbey of Thélème—a fictional institution featured in the books of the 16th century monk François Rabelais. The inhabitants of the Abbey follow the motto “Do what thou wilt.” This motto was adopted the 20th century English occultist Aleister Crowley, who called his philosophical system Thelema.

Theleme Partners was one of the earliest investors in the pharmaceutical company Moderna (when it only had ten employees). One wonders if Degorce received the investment tip from his fellow Frenchman, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel.

When Sunak left Theleme Partners in 2013 to go into politics, his interest in the fund was placed in a blind trust, but it’s hard to believe he didn’t know that the fund retained its huge ($500 million) position in Moderna.

While he was serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer, his government signed a deal for 5 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine. Shortly after Sunak became Prime Minister in 2022, his government signed a 10-year-investment partnership with Moderna “to build a state-of-the-art vaccine manufacturing centre with the ability to produce up to 250 million vaccines a year.”

In other words, Sunak is the poster boy for the sort of “young globalist leader” who benefits from “public-private partnerships” between guys who control the public purse strings and their financial-pharmaceutical industry cronies.

Between 2020-2022, mRNA vaccines were all the rage in British government circles. Now it’s sending billions to Ukraine’s unelected oligarchy that has a well-documented history of money-laundering and other gangster racketeering.

A decisive factor in making this kind of chicanery possible is the conspicuous dumbing down of the British public, which may now be even more ignorant and brainwashed than the American public. The results in London are plain to see. Guys like Rishi Sunak and his globalist cronies make millions doing dodgy deals with Moderna, the beneficiaries of Britain’s “Net Zero” policy, and Ukrainian oligarchs. They live in the posh parts of town, dine in the fabulous restaurants, and visit the splendid shops of Mayfair.

Most taxpaying Londoners—people who don’t have hedge funds domiciled in the Cayman Islands— struggle to pay for their housing in neighborhoods that are dreary and dystopian.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Why Is the UK Government So Awful? appeared first on LewRockwell.