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Quello che più fa arrabbiare eurocrati e sodali/sicofanti al seguito, e causa travasi di bile senza senso sulle piattaforme pubbliche di ogni sorta, è il tappeto dei finanziamenti che è stato tolto da sotto i loro piedi. Con Biden era tutto impostato sul pilota automatico: la proliferazione della legislazione europea è stata accelerata spudoratamente in tale arco presidenziale, un “laissez-faire” in ottica predazione del potenziale industriale-tecnologico americano. Dopo Powell, che nel 2022 ha rappresentato uno spartiacque a livello finanziario, Trump lo ha rappresentato a livello fiscale/politico. E come quando lo “zio ricco” chiude i rubinetti dei soldi ai “nipoti nullafacenti”, questi ultimi si agitano sputando veleno nel piatto in cui mangiavano piuttosto che darsi da fare. Peggio, usano ogni mezzo a loro disposizione per tornare a godere di quel flusso di liquidità che faceva fare loro la “bella vita”. In questo contesto si inseriscono tutte le multe imposte alle Big Tech americane, l'uso a tutto campo del DSA/DMA, la retorica guerrafondaia dell'UE e, in ultima battuta, l'uso dello SWIFT come un'arma. Ecco quest'ultima è più subdola come ci ricorda “The Epoch Times”, visto che può rappresentare un terreno di disturbo alla pace che gli USA stanno perseguendo con sommo interesse da quando Trump ha preso la carica. Ma l'UE, nonostante la sua boria accumulata dopo 2+ decenni di vita seguendo la massima “vivere al massimo col minimo sforzo”, è obsoleta e sorpassata. Nel caso particolare lo SWIFT è sorpassato, soprattutto in ottica GUNIUS Act e Big Beaufitul Bill, leggi in sincronia che aprono le porte a innovazioni talmente “disrputive” a livello mondiale da passare (paradossalmente) inosservate. Oro, Tether, Bitcoin e, in minore battuta, Ripple (è un fatto che sia stata “benedetta” dall'attuale amministrazione americana) sono i cavalieri dell'apocalisse per i desideri di sopravvivenza della burocrazia europea. È un lento soffocare le prospettive di galleggiamento di una struttura farraginosa che non può far altro che affondare nel mare magnum della storia. D'altronde, lo “zio ricco” non è diventato tale per caso...

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di John Phelan

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/lue-e-una-zona-di-libero-scambio)

Il 1° gennaio 1993 nacque il Mercato Unico Europeo. L'ottobre dell'anno precedente il Primo Ministro britannico, John Major, aveva auspicato “un mercato unico europeo di 330 milioni di persone [...]. Un mercato per i computer britannici, le automobili britanniche, le televisioni britanniche, i tessuti britannici, i servizi britannici, le competenze britanniche. La più grande area di libero scambio del mondo”.

Eliminando le barriere commerciali all'interno della Comunità Economica Europea, il Mercato Unico avrebbe stimolato il commercio, la crescita economica e, forse, l'integrazione politica. Queste speranze non si sono mai concretizzate.

Un rapporto del Fondo Monetario Internazionale di ottobre dell'anno scorso ha rilevato che, mentre il commercio intra-UE di beni è aumentato dall'11% al 24% del Prodotto interno lordo dell'Unione Europea tra il 1993 e il 2023, rispetto all'8%-15% del commercio extra-UE, il commercio intra-UE di servizi – che rappresenta il 72% del PIL dell'UE – è cresciuto esattamente allo stesso ritmo del commercio extra-UE. Infatti il commercio tra i Paesi dell'UE è meno della metà di quello tra gli Stati Uniti.

Come si spiega tutto questo? Come osserva Luis Garicano, ex-membro del Parlamento europeo nell'articolo Il mito del mercato unico: “L'FMI stima il costo nascosto degli scambi di beni all'interno dell'UE in un dazio del 45%. Per i servizi la cifra sale al 110%, superiore ai dazi imposti da Trump sulle importazioni cinesi nel ‘giorno della Liberazione’”.

“Il mercato unico che tutti pensavamo di avere è in gran parte un mito”, conclude Garicano, il quale fornisce tre ragioni per questo fallimento.

In primo luogo il principio del “riconoscimento reciproco”, il quale “afferma che tutto ciò che può essere venduto legalmente in un Paese dell'UE può essere venduto in tutti gli altri”, però “fallisce nella pratica”. Il principio “non è mai stato assoluto” e prosegue:

I trattati dell'UE [...] consentono ai Paesi di bloccare prodotti per motivi legittimi come la salute pubblica, la sicurezza, o la tutela dell'ambiente. Ma queste eccezioni avrebbero dovuto essere solo questo: eccezioni, non la regola. Il problema è il costo dell'applicazione della regola quando un Paese rivendica un'eccezione.

Tra i vari esempi:

Ogni prodotto venduto ai consumatori francesi deve recare il logo nazionale di riciclaggio “Triman” e istruzioni dettagliate per la raccolta differenziata specifiche per la Francia. Le lattine di vernice di AkzoNobel soddisfano pienamente le normative UE in materia di sostanze chimiche e di contatto con gli alimenti, ma una singola lattina di vernice deve comunque recare il logo di riciclaggio Triman francese, il “Punto Verde” spagnolo e il codice alfanumerico del materiale italiano. Lo spazio su una lattina da 1 litro è così limitato che l'azienda ora detiene scorte separate per Francia, Spagna e Italia.

In secondo luogo “le direttive UE non armonizzano la legislazione UE”.

“Ci sono due problemi”, scrive Garicano:

[...] in primo luogo, anziché sostituire le normative nazionali, le norme dell'UE si sovrappongono a esse. In secondo luogo, gli stati membri spesso adottano il cosiddetto “gold plating”, ovvero aggiungono ulteriori requisiti nazionali nell'attuazione delle direttive UE.

Il risultato è che, anche quando l'UE crea norme comuni (direttive o regolamenti volti ad armonizzare), spesso il risultato non è un vero mercato unico. Le nuove norme dell'UE spesso non sostituiscono quelle nazionali, ma creano invece ulteriori livelli di regolamentazione.

A titolo di esempio, propone il Regolamento generale sulla protezione dei dati:

[...] il che (nonostante si tratti di un regolamento) significa che abbiamo ancora autorità di regolamentazione a livello UE, nazionale e regionale. Nel gennaio 2022 l'autorità austriaca per la protezione dei dati ha stabilito che l'utilizzo di Google Analytics da parte di NetDoktor violava il GDPR e ha ordinato al sito di disattivare lo strumento, pena sanzioni. Poche settimane dopo l'autorità francese per la protezione dei dati (CNIL) ha emesso decisioni parallele contro tre siti web francesi, dichiarando nuovamente Google Analytics illegale e intimando a ciascun operatore di passare a un'alternativa ospitata nell'UE. Nel giugno 2022 l'autorità italiana (Garante della privacy) ha imposto lo stesso divieto a Caffeina Media, minacciando di sospendere i suoi flussi di dati verso gli Stati Uniti a meno che non avesse riprogrammato il suo stack di analisi entro novanta giorni. Un editore che opera nell'UE deve ora mantenere configurazioni di analisi separate per Austria, Francia e Italia, mentre lo stesso strumento rimane legale altrove. Il rapporto Draghi rileva che ci sono circa 90 leggi incentrate sulla tecnologia e più di 270 autorità di regolamentazione attive nelle reti digitali in tutti i Paesi dell'UE. Tanti saluti al mercato unico!

Infine “la Commissione europea non sta facendo il suo lavoro nel far rispettare il mercato unico”. “[Esplicitamente] incaricata di garantire l’applicazione dei trattati”, scrive Garicano, “nei dodici mesi fino a dicembre 2024, la Commissione ha aperto solo 173 nuovi casi, ovvero solo un quarto del volume gestito un decennio fa”.

“C'è un'evoluzione paradossale nel ruolo della Commissione”, osserva, “man mano che ha assunto funzioni aggiuntive in settori come l'edilizia abitativa, la difesa e la geopolitica (la prima Commissione von der Leyen si definiva una “commissione geopolitica”), si è ritirata dal suo compito principale di controllo del mercato unico”.

Un ottimista potrebbe dedurre che il problema qui non sia l'eccesso di UE, ma la sua carenza: il Mercato Unico non ha mantenuto le sue promesse perché non è sufficientemente “unico”. Un pessimista potrebbe osservare che, se ciò non avviene da oltre trent'anni, è improbabile che inizi a breve. È improbabile che un altro rapporto o una revisione corposa possano far muovere la bilancia.

Questa è una cattiva notizia per il successore di John Major, Kier Starmer. Con il suo governo in difficoltà a meno di un anno dall'insediamento, ha cercato un nuovo accordo con l'UE per migliorare le condizioni di accesso della Gran Bretagna al Mercato Unico.

Ma i servizi rappresentano una quota relativamente alta per quanto riguarda il 54% delle esportazioni britanniche rispetto al 33% degli Stati Uniti e ad appena il 31% dell'UE, e questo è esattamente il settore in cui il Mercato Unico è una finzione. Questo probabilmente spiega l'ostinato rifiuto dell'economia britannica di crollare in seguito alla Brexit: qualsiasi piccolo vantaggio possa derivare dall'essere bloccati in un Mercato Unico con un gruppo di economie inerti si riduce ulteriormente quando ci sono elevate barriere alla vendita delle proprie esportazioni principali – barriere che non sembrano destinate a scomparire tanto presto.

Se Starmer spera che le sue nuove condizioni di accesso alla “più grande area di libero scambio del mondo” compenseranno il danno economico causato dalle disastrose politiche fiscali del suo governo, è probabile che si sbagli. È un mito.

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

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When the history of the Donald Trump presidency is written, his ill-advised scheme to tariff the world will be seen as one of the most self-destructive acts by a president in the history of the United States. Following up on my article from yesterday, which dealt with why the tariffs on India backfired, I realized that I had no clue about the exact nature of US trade and that of the BRICS countries. So I turned to GROK and Perplexity AI for answers. Not only will this exercise inform you about US trade, but you will also see that these AI engines come up with different answers. So let’s dive in.

Based on the most recent available data for 2024, the top ten countries exporting to the United States, ranked by import value for trade in goods, are as follows:

1. Mexico: USD 505.85 billion
2. China: USD 427.2 billion
3. Canada: USD 421.1 billion
4. Germany: USD 157.1 billion
5. Japan: USD 142.2 billion
6. Vietnam: USD 117.6 billion
7. South Korea: USD 115.1 billion
8. Taiwan: USD 102.3 billion
9. India: USD 85.7 billion
10. Italy: USD 73.7 billion

According to GROK, the total dollar value of exports to the US from the top ten countries (Mexico, China, Canada, Germany, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Italy) in 2024 is approximately USD 2,147.85 billion, representing 64.1% of the total US goods imports (USD 3.35 trillion). For further details, refer to the US Census Bureau’s trade statistics at https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/country/index.html.

Okay, what does Perplexity say? The top ten countries exporting to the US in 2024, ranked by dollar value, were

1. Mexico: $509.98 billion (15.2%)
2. China: $462.63 billion (13.8%)
3. Canada: $422.17 billion (12.6%)
4. Germany: $163.54 billion (4.9%)
5. Japan: $152.06 billion (4.5%)
6. Vietnam: $142.47 billion (4.2%)
7. South Korea: $135.46 billion (4%)
8. Taiwan: $118.73 billion (3.5%)
9. Ireland: $103.75 billion (3.1%)
10. India: $91.23 billion (2.7%)

Only one area of disagreement with respect to the top ten countries… Perplexity likes Ireland, while Grok prefers Italy. But that is not the only discrepancy. According to Perplexity, the top 10 exporters to the US accounted for 68.5% of total US import value in 2024. Hell, they can’t even agree on the total value, expressed in dollars, for the top ten: GROK pegs it at $2.1 trillion, while Perplexity insists it is $2.3 trillion. What is $200 billion dollars among friends?

Apart from showing that the artificial intelligence machines are not necessarily intelligent, we can see that only ten countries account for more than 64% of total US trade. Did you notice that Brazil, Russia and South Africa did not make the top ten? And that India only accounts for 4% of the export trade from the top ten countries.

When you look at total US exports and imports, according to Perplexity, the United States exports are 11% of GDP, while imports represent 14% of GDP. That, boys and girls, is the trade deficit. Only three countries on the top ten list are BRICS countries: China, Vietnam and India. If you add up the numbers, US trade with those three BRICS countries represents 30% of the total… Not a huge amount.

Now let’s look at the top ten countries receiving US export. For 2024, the dollar amounts of US exports to the top ten countries and their share of total US exports are:

The top ten countries accounted for $1,312 billion (63.7%) of the US total exports of $2,064 billion in 2024. Vietnam and India do not appear. The only two BRICS countries on this list are China and Brazil, which account for 9.4% of all US exports.

Thus, we can see that BRICS does not have substantial trade ties with the US. So let’s look at the top ten trading partners of each of the founding members of BRICS for 2024:

China’s top ten trading partners for exports in 2024 were:
1. United States: $524.9 billion
2. Hong Kong: $291.4 billion
3. Vietnam: $161.8 billion
4. Japan: $152.0 billion
5. South Korea: $146.4 billion
6. India: $120.5 billion
7. Russia: $115.5 billion
8. Germany: $107.0 billion
9. Malaysia: $101.2 billion
10. Netherlands: $91.1 billion

Russia’s top ten trading partners in terms of exports in 2024 were approximately:
1. China – $128 billion (21.1% of total exports)
2. Netherlands – $42.1 billion (8.3%)
3. Germany – $29.6 billion (5.7%)
4. Turkey – $26.4 billion (5.2%)
5. Belarus – $23.1 billion (5.2%)
6. Italy – $25.1 billion (3.6%)
7. South Korea – $13 billion (3.4%)
8. Japan – $12 billion (3.3%)
9. Kazakhstan – $11.6 billion (3.1%)
10. United States – $15.4 billion (2.7%)

Are you as surprised as me to see three European countries and the United States on this list? Despite sanctions, it seems there are products and resources those NATO countries still need.

India’s top ten trading partners in terms of exports for 2024 were:
1. United States – 17.90% of exports
2. United Arab Emirates – 8.23%
3. Netherlands – 5.16%
4. China – 3.85%
5. Singapore – 3.33%
6. United Kingdom – 3.00%
7. Saudi Arabia – 2.67%
8. Bangladesh – 2.55%
9. Germany – 2.27%
10. Italy – 2.02%

Brazil’s top ten trading partners in terms of exports in 2024 and their percentage share of Brazil’s total exports were:
1. China – $94.4 billion (28.0%)
2. United States – $40.6 billion (12.0%)
3. Argentina – $13.8 billion (4.1%)
4. Netherlands – $11.8 billion (3.5%)
5. Spain – $9.9 billion (2.9%)
6. Singapore – $7.9 billion (2.3%)
7. Mexico – $7.8 billion (2.3%)
8. Chile – $6.7 billion (2.0%)
9. Canada – $6.3 billion (1.9%)
10. Germany – $5.9 billion (1.7%)
These ten countries accounted for about 66.7% of Brazil’s total exports in 2024, with Brazil’s total exports valued at approximately $337 billion.

South Africa’s top ten trading partners in terms of exports in 2024 and their percentage share of South Africa’s total exports (valued at about $110.5 billion) were:
1. China – $12.4 billion (12.3%)
2. United States – $8.2 billion (8.3%)
3. Germany – $7.3 billion (7.7%)
4. Mozambique – $6.6 billion (6.1%)
5. United Kingdom – $5.3 billion (5.7%)
6. Japan – $4.9 billion (5.2%)
7. India – $4.7 billion (5.0%)
8. Botswana – $4.33 billion (4.2%)
9. Netherlands – $4.27 billion (4.1%)
10. Namibia – $3.9 billion (3.7%)
These ten countries accounted for roughly 61.3% of South Africa’s total exports in 2024

Take note that Germany and the Netherlands are the only countries in the world that trade with all five BRICS founders. Imposing tariffs on the BRICS nations is likely to cause more economic problems for Germany, whose current economic growth number for 2025 is projected to be approximately 0.3% according to recent data from Trading Economics and economic forecasts by the Ifo Institute and Bundesbank. The Netherlands is not much better — the Netherlands’ economic growth forecast for 2025 is around 1.2% to 1.3% according to multiple sources including the European Commission, Dutch policy analysts, and economic institutes.

Here is the important point: China is the only member of BRICS with significant and substantial trade relations with the US and Donald Trump, despite multiple threats, is pulling back from imposing punishing sanctions on China. There are simply too many critical products that the US needs from China. Hitting China hard carries a significant risk of economic blowback on the US economy.

As I noted in a recent article, we are witnessing the dawn of a new international financial order. The days of the US hegemon dictating what other countries can do is over. This article from the Financial Times highlights a critical new development:

Developing countries are moving out of dollar debts and turning to currencies with rock bottom interest rates such as the Chinese renminbi and Swiss franc. . . .

“The high level of interest rates and a steep US Treasury yield curve . . . has made USD financing more onerous for [developing] countries, even with relatively low spreads on emerging market debt,” said Armando Armenta, vice-president for global economic research at Alliance Bernstein.

“As a result, they are seeking more cost-effective options.”. . .

By borrowing in currencies such as the renminbi and the Swiss franc, countries can access debt at much lower interest rates than those offered by dollar bonds. . . .

Companies in emerging markets are also selling more bonds in euros this year, with the amount of this debt in issue rising to a record $239bn as of July, according to JPMorgan. The overall stock of emerging market corporate bonds in dollars totals about $2.5tn.

The era of the US dollar as the reserve currency is ending… it appears to be moving more rapidly than many financial experts anticipated. We are witnessing the birth of a new economic and political world, one that will bring India, Russia and China into more prominent roles. And there is nothing the US can do to stop this, short of starting a nuclear war and ending civilization.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

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In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis stated, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” Since then, his observation has been echoed by people as disparate as Robert Heinlein and Leon Trotsky.

The key here is that, unlike all other commodities, food is the one essential that cannot be postponed. If there were a shortage of, say, shoes, we could make do for months or even years. A shortage of gasoline would be worse, but we could survive it, through mass transport or even walking, if necessary.

But food is different. If there were an interruption in the supply of food, fear would set in immediately. And, if the resumption of the food supply were uncertain, the fear would become pronounced. After only nine missed meals, it’s not unlikely that we’d panic and be prepared to commit a crime to acquire food. If we were to see our neighbour with a loaf of bread, and we owned a gun, we might well say, “I’m sorry, you’re a good neighbour and we’ve been friends for years, but my children haven’t eaten today – I have to have that bread – even if I have to shoot you.”

But surely, there’s no need to speculate on this concern. There’s nothing on the evening news to suggest that such a problem even might be on the horizon. So, let’s have a closer look at the actual food distribution industry, compare it to the present direction of the economy, and see whether there might be reason for concern.

The food industry typically operates on very small margins – often below 2%. Traditionally, wholesalers and retailers have relied on a two-week turnaround of supply and anywhere up to a 30-day payment plan. But an increasing tightening of the economic system for the last eight years has resulted in a turnaround time of just three days for both supply and payment for many in the industry. This a system that’s still fully operative, but with no further wiggle room, should it take a significant further hit.

If there were a month where significant inflation took place (say, 3%), all profits would be lost for the month for both suppliers and retailers, but goods could still be replaced and sold for a higher price next month. But, if there were three or more consecutive months of inflation, the industry would be unable to bridge the gap, even if better conditions were expected to develop in future months. A failure to pay in full for several months would mean smaller orders by those who could not pay. That would mean fewer goods on the shelves. The longer the inflationary trend continued, the more quickly prices would rise to hopefully offset the inflation. And ever-fewer items on the shelves.

From Germany in 1922, to Argentina in 2000, and to Venezuela in 2016, this has been the pattern whenever inflation has become systemic, rather than sporadic. Each month, some stores close, beginning with those that are the most poorly capitalised.

In good economic times, this would mean more business for those stores that were still solvent, but in an inflationary situation, they would be in no position to take on more unprofitable business. The result is that the volume of food on offer at retailers would decrease at a pace with the severity of the inflation.

However, the demand for food would not decrease by a single loaf of bread. Store closings would be felt most immediately in inner cities, when one closing would send customers to the next neighbourhood seeking food. The real danger would come when that store also closes and both neighbourhoods descended on a third store in yet another neighbourhood. That’s when one loaf of bread for every three potential purchasers would become worth killing over. Virtually no one would long tolerate seeing his children go without food because others had “invaded” his local supermarket.

In addition to retailers, the entire industry would be impacted and, as retailers disappeared, so would suppliers, and so on, up the food chain. This would not occur in an orderly fashion, or in one specific area. The problem would be a national one. Closures would be all over the map, seemingly at random, affecting all areas. Food riots would take place, first in the inner cities then spread to other communities. Buyers, fearful of shortages, would clean out the shelves.

Importantly, it’s the very unpredictability of food delivery that increases fear, creating panic and violence. And, again, none of the above is speculation; it’s a historical pattern – a reaction based upon human nature whenever systemic inflation occurs.

Then … unfortunately … the cavalry arrives

At that point, it would be very likely that the central government would step in and issue controls to the food industry that served political needs rather than business needs, greatly exacerbating the problem. Suppliers would be ordered to deliver to those neighbourhoods where the riots are the worst, even if those retailers are unable to pay. This would increase the number of closings of suppliers.

Along the way, truckers would begin to refuse to enter troubled neighbourhoods, and the military might well be brought in to force deliveries to take place.

But why worry about the above? After all, inflation is contained at present and, although governments fudge the numbers, the present level of inflation is not sufficient to create the above scenario, as it has in so many other countries.

So, what would it take for the above to occur? Well, historically, it has always begun with excessive debt. We know that the debt level is now the highest it has ever been in world history. In addition, the stock and bond markets are in bubbles of historic proportions. They will most certainly pop.

With a crash in the markets, deflation always follows as people try to unload assets to cover for their losses. The Federal Reserve (and other central banks) has stated that it will unquestionably print as much money as it takes to counter deflation. Unfortunately, inflation has a far greater effect on the price of commodities than assets. Therefore, the prices of commodities will rise dramatically, further squeezing the purchasing power of the consumer, thereby decreasing the likelihood that he will buy assets, even if they’re bargain priced. Therefore, asset holders will drop their prices repeatedly as they become more desperate. The Fed then prints more to counter the deeper deflation and we enter a period when deflation and inflation are increasing concurrently.

Historically, when this point has been reached, no government has ever done the right thing. They have, instead, done the very opposite – keep printing. A by-product of this conundrum is reflected in the photo above. Food still exists, but retailers shut down because they cannot pay for goods. Suppliers shut down because they’re not receiving payments from retailers. Producers cut production because sales are plummeting.

In every country that has passed through such a period, the government has eventually gotten out of the way and the free market has prevailed, re-energizing the industry and creating a return to normal. The question is not whether civilization will come to an end. (It will not.) The question is the liveability of a society that is experiencing a food crisis, as even the best of people are likely to panic and become a potential threat to anyone who is known to store a case of soup in his cellar.

Fear of starvation is fundamentally different from other fears of shortages. Even good people panic. In such times, it’s advantageous to be living in a rural setting, as far from the centre of panic as possible. It’s also advantageous to store food in advance that will last for several months, if necessary. However, even these measures are no guarantee, as, today, modern highways and efficient cars make it easy for anyone to travel quickly to where the goods are. The ideal is to be prepared to sit out the crisis in a country that will be less likely to be impacted by dramatic inflation – where the likelihood of a food crisis is low and basic safety is more assured.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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The Battle of the Somme lasted for 141 days  from July 1, 1916 until November 18, 1916.  The battle consisted of a French and English offensive against the German lines.  

The battle began with a week-long artillery barrage that was supposed to destroy the barbed wire and German trenches, but in fact turned the land into craters and a muddy morass across which troops could not advance in order.  The German machine guns cut down the British and French troops sent to certain death by totally incompetent and stupid generals. The first day of the 141 day exercise in total stupidity the British suffered 60,000 casualties. In many respects, these were the flower of England, the leaders who would not be present when England again confronted conflict.

A.J.P. Taylor reports that by the end of the 141 day massacre, the British had nothing to show but 420,000 casualties.  The French had nothing to show but 200,000 casualties.  The Germans had 450,000 casualties and intact lines. That comes to 1,070,000 casualties. According to American Battlefield Trust, the total casualties both sides of four years of Washington’s most bloody war–Lincoln’s invasion of the Confederate States of America– was 620,000.

Taylor states, “Strategically, the battle of the Somme was an unredeemed defeat” for England and France.  . . .  Idealism perished on the Somme.”

The troops saw the stupidity of the war long before the generals and politicians.  A French general, Nivelle, self-promoted himself to miracle worker who could win the war. He was allowed his offensive against the Germans on the Aisne.  To distract the Germans from Nivelle’s preparations, the British opened an offensive known as the battle of Arras. The result was 150,000 British casualties. Nivelle’s offensive exhausted the spirit of the French Army. Fifty-four divisions refused to obey orders.  One hundred thousand French soldiers were court martialed. Many thousands deserted.

In 1917 the dumbshit British generals had still learned nothing. General Haig sold the moronic politicians on another offensive at Yypres. The stupid general’s barrage created a morass of impassible mud. Men sank to their waste in the mud.  The horseback calvary charge could not occur. The British lost 300,000 lives.

These losses of life are nothing compared to the loss of lives toward which the politicians of our time are leading us. One nuclear missile can kill millions of people.

Compared to the Somme’s casualty list of over one million, the so-called American civil war over its four years produced not much more than half of the figure for one World War I battle. Gettysburg produced 51,116 casualties.  The Seven Days produced 34,463 casualties, Chickamauga delivered 34,694 casualties, Chanellorsvile 29,609, and Antietam 22,726, according to the US National Park Service.

When I referred in my columns to A. J. P. Taylors histories of WW I and WW II as masterful, I did not say that he was entirely correct.  He is masterful  in showing the total failure of peace negotiations by all involved. Each participant was constrained by forces that prevented them from making the best decisions. As a result, blunder was piled upon blunder until war was the result.  We face a similar situation today.

In his history of the First World War even such an ascerbic historian as Taylor, who has no illusions, buys into the war propaganda that Germany started the war.  This shows the power of war propaganda over a first class historian.  

American Harry Elmer Barnes, the best historian of World War I, The Genesis of the World War (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), whose conclusions were verified in our times by Christopher Clark of Cambridge University in his book, The Sleepwalkers, showed that World War I was the product of a conspiracy between President Poincare of France and two of the Russian Tsar’s ministers.  Poincare wanted Alsace-Lorraine, lost to Germany in Napoleon the Third’s defeat by Prussia. The two Russian Tsarist ministers wanted Constantinople for Russian controlled access to the Mediterranean.

There is no mention in Taylor’s history of Poincare’s role or that of the Russian ministers.

Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany was the very last of the war participants to mobilize.  The last to mobilize cannot be the originator of the conflict. How Taylor missed this again shows the power of war propaganda. The war-mongering presstitues and two-bit punk court historians do not tell the people that Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of England, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were all related through their shared grandmother, Queen Victoria. They were first cousins.  They were unaware of Poincare’s conspiracy with the Russian ministers.

They did not want war over an Austrian Archduke being assassinated by Serbians. The total destruction of Europe was the result.  

The Tsar was told by his ministers, whose eyes were on Constantinople, that was too late to stop the mobilization.  Poincare pushed the war in France.

When the war ended Germany occupied Belgium, huge areas of France and Russia and was said to be the loser. The Germans confronted with left-wing revolution at home agreed to an armistice  that was turned against them in violation of US President Wilson’s promise of no territorial loss, no reparations. The British embargo on food starved the German victors into submission to the Versailles Treaty. Thus was the stage set for World War II.

What we are faced with today is that there won’t be a second war.  Until WW II armies fought armies.  During WW II war against civilians was initiated by Winston Churchill. At the time it was considered a war crime, and Churchill kept the British bombing attacks on German cities secret from the British people.  The American fire bombing of Tokyo was also a war crime and culminated in the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today wars are fought against civilians.  Israel in Gaza is an example.  In present day war plans, nuclear missiles are aimed at the opponent’s civilian cities, not against armies.  The aim of nuclear war is to destroy the country and the population of the opponent.  It is civilians who are at risk.

Americans need to understand that when generals talk about war today, it is the lives of civilians that are at risk.

The post People Have Unrealistic Trust in Governments appeared first on LewRockwell.

On September 5, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to rename the Department of Defense (DoD) to the Department of War (DoW). As one of the justifications for this change, Trump pointed out that the founders of the United States established the DoW as such to “win wars, inspiring awe and confidence in our Nation’s military, and ensuring freedom and prosperity for all Americans”. He also claimed that the US supposedly “won the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II”. These highly controversial claims can easily be challenged by simple historical facts. The Anglo-American War of 1812 ended in a status quo ante bellum, at best. Namely, the British military took and burned Washington DC, including the White House, Capitol Hill and other government buildings.

As for WWI and WWII, the very idea that the US military “won” the two bloodiest conflicts in human history is beyond ridiculous. If anything, Russia contributed far more, particularly during WWII, when approximately 80% of all Axis forces were destroyed on the Eastern Front. However, this fact is almost entirely sidelined in the American public discourse, to say nothing of Trump’s rather limited understanding of history, military science or essentially anything outside of his scope of interests.

He insists that the name DoW was chosen to “signal our strength and resolve to the world” and that “‘Department of War’, more than the current ‘Department of Defense’, ensures peace through strength, as it demonstrates our ability and willingness to fight and win wars on behalf of our Nation at a moment’s notice, not just to defend”.

Trump also added that “this name sharpens the Department’s focus on our own national interest and our adversaries’ focus on our willingness and availability to wage war to secure what is ours”. The notion of America “waging war to secure what is ours” is precisely what worries all sovereign countries on the planet. Namely, Washington DC almost always arbitrarily determines the “ownership” of whatever it points its finger at.

The plutocrats, kleptocrats, warmongers and war criminals running the American government have a vested interest in instigating instability, wars, death and destruction all across the planet, whether directly or through proxies. The DoD’s role in this never changed, nor can we expect it will now that it has become the DoW. However, this change may be more than mere symbolism.

Namely, despite all the talk about “peace” and even ambitions to get the so-called “Nobel Peace Prize” (politically charged, tainted and discredited long ago), Trump’s actions speak louder than words. The attack on Iran mere months after taking office demonstrates just how meaningful “peace” is to his administration. Not to mention the promise that he would “immediately end” the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict. In fact, Trump hasn’t kept many (if not most) of the promises he made to his electorate, whether it’s the infamous Epstein files, gun control, “no new wars”, etc. This is without even considering Trump’s criticism of the Pentagon prior to his first term, when he pledged to make the US military “far stronger for far less”, clearly referring to its unnecessarily enormous budget.

However, Trump’s stance changed dramatically after he gained power. The Pentagon’s official budget is projected to reach a trillion dollars precisely during his presidency and is expected to continue growing afterwards. The much-needed reforms Trump promised never came. On the contrary, the DoW is effectively a cash cow for the aforementioned plutocrats, kleptocrats, warmongers and war criminals running the US government. If anyone thinks this is an exaggeration, they should check how many audits the Pentagon passed in the last several years and decades (or ever). That’s right, it’s exactly zero. In fact, the US Constitution stipulates that the military budget shouldn’t be paid at all because of this. In a recent article, Ellen Brown, an attorney and founder of the Public Banking Institute, brilliantly analyzed this.

She warned that “the US federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of $1 trillion every five months”, while the interest alone exceeds $1 trillion annually. Still, this doesn’t prevent the US government from allocating nearly half of the discretionary budget to the Pentagon. Worse yet, Brown noted that the Pentagon “failed its seventh financial audit in 2024, with 63% of its $4.1 trillion in assets — approximately $2.58 trillion — untracked” and warned that the DoW failed to account for $21 trillion in spending from 1998 to 2015. With over $4.1 trillion in assets and at least $4.3 trillion in liabilities (e.g., personnel costs, pensions, logistics, etc), the Pentagon oversees nearly 5,000 sites worldwide (which include military bases, logistics hubs, and similar infrastructure and facilities).

As Ellen Brown rightfully points out, all this is done with little to no oversight. Why would anyone want to hide such a mind-boggling amount of money and assets from public scrutiny unless the funds are being embezzled (or used for some other sinister purpose)? Why didn’t Trump address this issue during either of his two terms?

Forming the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in cooperation with controversial billionaire Elon Musk was presented as a way to improve budgetary oversight. However, apart from scrutinizing the infamous USAID, the DOGE turned out to be a red herring. Namely, despite the repugnant nature of its activities, the USAID, which will certainly not be missed by anyone except neoliberal extremists, was primarily dissolved as part of an internal political struggle.

This was one of the major reasons Trump and Musk had a falling out, with the latter leaving the DOGE and effectively turning on the new US administration, criticizing it for failure to keep its numerous promises. However, Washington DC wouldn’t budge, continuing its controversial budgetary practices.

In the next several months, Trump became increasingly aggressive, culminating with the aforementioned attack on Iran. This belligerence hasn’t subsided in the slightest. On the contrary, the US is now seriously contemplating a direct confrontation with Venezuela, based on a false pretext that its President Nicolas Maduro is supposedly “running a narco cartel”. This is a potential “Noriega 2.0” moment for the US, with a strong possibility the Pentagon could launch at least limited long-range strikes on Caracas.

Source infobrics.org

The post America’s Department of War – Mere Symbolism or Bad Omen of Things To Come? appeared first on LewRockwell.

This article was originally published on Birch Gold Group

The news feeds were buzzing last week over the recent meeting between Russia, China and India at the Chinese port city of Tianjin. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi made sure to present a unified front at the event, at least in economic terms, and it’s clear that China and Russia’s military ties are solidifying. The Shanghai Cooperation Gathering is being treated by the media as a warning to the US in the face of accelerating trade tensions.

Western journalists seem rather giddy over the news, suggesting that Donald Trump’s tariff policies are pushing America’s enemies together and forming an anti-US axis. The political left hates Trump so completely that I wouldn’t be surprised to see them cheering for Putin and the BRICS in a year or two.

News flash for those who are unaware: The BRICS have been forming their alliance since the Obama era. It’s nothing new and has nothing to do with Trump.

I’ve been tracking the formation of the BRICS alliance since 2009 and the driving motive behind the economic bloc (on the surface) has always been to break from the dollar as the world reserve currency. BRICS leaders have been calling for the end of the dollar and the introduction of a new global currency system for years. Though, the plan is not as eastern focused as many people assume. That is to say, if you’re hoping the BRICS are going to “end globalism” you are sorely mistaken.

In fact, in 2009 both Russia and China put forward the notion of a global currency managed by the IMF; an organization that many people think is US controlled. The reality is that it is globalist controlled, and globalists have no enduring loyalties to any nation state; they are only loyal to their own agenda.

Some people might argue that the situation has changed dramatically since 2009, but I disagree. China is now inexorably tied to the IMF’s SDR basket and Russia remains an active member of the IMF despite the war in Ukraine. It’s important to understand that there are always two different timelines when it comes to world events – There is the more publicized international theater, and then there are the operations of globalist institutions that exist outside of geopolitics.

In my view, globalists are not necessarily the “engineers” behind every conflict or crisis, but they do position themselves to take advantage whenever possible. And, they do play both sides of every conflagration in order to gain the most benefit. In other words, groups like the IMF, World Bank, the BIS, the WEF, and trillion dollar conglomerates like BlackRock and Vanguard are going to court the BRICS just as much as they court the west when it comes to achieving a centralized one-world economy.

It’s no secret what this “new world order” is intended to look like. The Davos crowd has openly discussed their visions for years and during the pandemic they ripped the mask off and reveled in the “inevitable” implementation of their “Great Reset”. To summarize, this is what the elites want for the future economy:

A global cashless system. A one world digital currency built around a basket of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies). AI tracking of all financial records. A “sharing economy” in which all private property is abolished. The use of “de-banking” to control civil discourse – Meaning you can say what you want but you might lose access to your accounts, and perhaps even the jobs market. Population control and reduction. Carbon feudalism in which nations pay tribute taxes to globalists in the name of “stopping man-made climate change” (which doesn’t exist).

These taxes are then redistributed to various nations as a way to incentivize their cooperation. And ultimately, they want the introduction of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a way to make every individual dependent on centralized government for their livelihood so that they never think of rebelling.

This is what the Davos elite mean when they talk about the “Great Reset”. I have noted in recent articles, however, that the globalists have grown disturbingly quiet in the past year. They are not so bold anymore in their speeches as they were during the pandemic and their plans do seem to be hitting a wall.

I’ve seen the media, a number of central bankers and political leaders refer to this issue as Donald Trump’s “economic reset” and I find this narrative fascinating. What exactly are they talking about? Are there competing resets in play, and if so, does this mean the globalist agenda has been derailed?

Trump’s Reset And The End Of Bretton-Woods

Trump’s reset, if we’re to call it that, seems to be rooted in the reversal of the post-WWII Bretton-Woods agreement in which the US was made the de facto financial engine of the global economy. This was when the dollar’s status as world reserve currency was solidified, when America became the consumption hub for the west, and when NATO was formed.

It sounds like a sweet deal for Americans, but playing the role is costly. It is, slowly but surely, destroying our economy through debt and inflation.

Many presidents have used targeted tariffs since WWII, but none have enforced sweeping tariffs like Trump. Often compared to the Smoot-Hawley tariffs under Herbert Hoover which are wrongly blamed for the Great Depression (it was actually international banks and the Federal Reserve that caused the Depression), Trump’s import taxes throw a monkey wrench into the gears of Bretton-Woods trade and stifle globalism by forcing large corporations to reduce their foreign outsourcing.

As I’ve noted many times, global corporations are NOT free market entities, they are socialist entities chartered by governments and protected through special legal and economic privileges. If a company is “too big to fail” and is thus entitled to taxpayer cash through bailouts and QE, then they are not a mechanism of the free market. Therefore, we should not care if they get taxed through tariffs.

Frankly, I think corporate globalism and economic interdependency should be abolished, by force if necessary.

Legitimate Decentralization Or Controlled Chaos?

Trump’s tariffs along with his cuts to foreign subsidies and other economic policies could, in a few years, completely disrupt globalism as we know it. So, in a way, it is indeed a kind of “economic reset”. But here’s the rub: Could Trump’s efforts end up accelerating the globalist reset rather than defeating it?

As noted earlier, the formation of close ties between the BRICS nations has been ongoing since 2009 and their key goal has been to end the structures put in place by the Bretton-Woods agreement. They have stated in the past that they want a new currency system run by the IMF. Whether the BRICS know it or not, their efforts to develop CBDCs and unseat the US play directly into the globalist game plan.

The IMF and the BIS have been working diligently (and quietly) to build a cross-border CBDC framework and the IMF has been planning its own global digital currency built around the SDR basket. The BIS sometimes refers to this system as a “Unified Ledger”.

Are the banking elites setting up an alternative to the dollar in preparation for an incoming clash between the US and the BRICS? And is Trump’s “reset” a catalyst for that crisis?

I support Trump’s tariffs for a number of reasons. I think globalism needs to end. I think domestic production needs to return to the US and I think corporations need to pay a price for their outsourcing. I don’t think that Americans should act as the primary consumer hub for the entire world and I don’t think it’s our job to subsidize the planet. I also think that nothing is going to change unless drastic measures are taken in the near term.

But I also understand the reality that if the US stops playing the role it has been playing since WWII, the majority of nations around the planet are facing a shocking disruption. The US makes up around 30% of global consumption. We supply the vast majority of global foreign aid (around $70 billion to $100 billion annually), which many countries have come to rely on. We are the primary export market for the world and there is no realistic replacement. The dollar and the SWIFT system are the key drivers of global trade.

Would Trump’s reset actually force a majority of nations into a desperate situation? A situation that compels them to look for an alternative solution they would not otherwise accept? Are the globalists waiting in the wings to offer that solution in the form of their own “Great Reset” and one-world digital currency system?

One way or another the existing economic interdependency needs to die. Global corporations need to face a reckoning after decades of protection and special treatment. Production needs to return to the US. Americans need to stop paying for the rest of the world through foreign aid. But if we’re going to take this path then we must also dismantle all globalist organizations in the process.

I believe these institutions plan on exploiting the instability caused by the US breaking from the Bretton-Woods structure. I think they have positioned themselves, as always, to take advantage of any potential conflict that might result. They cannot be allowed to use our necessary reforms as as springboard to achieve the evils of their Great Reset.

A true “reset” will require us to make the destruction of globalist institutions a priority.  Otherwise, any economic action we take could ultimately benefit their agenda.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Could Trump End Up Triggering the Globalist ‘Great Reset’? appeared first on LewRockwell.

There are new reports suggesting that the Trump Justice Department (DOJ) is trying to keep information about Jeffrey Epstein secret.

On Friday, the DOJ asked a federal judge to deny a media request for the names of two people who received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Epstein in 2018. The DOJ cited privacy concerns as its primary reason for objecting, according to court documents. And the day before that, James O’Keefe’s undercover journalism outfit, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), published a video of a DOJ employee saying that any files the DOJ releases will likely be heavily redacted in favor of Republicans. Meanwhile, the leaders of an effort to push through a vote on a bipartisan bill that would force the government to release all Epstein documents say they will soon have the votes they need.

Recipients of Epstein Money

Individuals 1 and 2 received a total of $350,000 from Epstein in 2018 after the Miami Herald published a series of articles titled “Perversion of Justice: Jeffrey Epstein.” That investigative series included criticism by Epstein’s victims of the non-prosecution deal he received 10 years before that. Moreover, “as part of the plea agreement, Epstein secured a statement from federal prosecutors in Florida that the two individuals would not be prosecuted,” NBC News reported.

One of the individuals NBC is trying to have revealed was mentioned in the Herald reports. Both recipients have been labeled as potential co-conspirators, according to prosecutors.

The DOJ letter asking to keep those names sealed says that both individuals are “uncharged third parties who have not waived their privacy interests” and who have “expressly objected to the unsealing of their names and personal identifying information.” Moreover, they were not named in the case against Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

An Insider’s View

As for O’Keefe’s video, the employee who spoke to the undercover journalist is analyst Joseph Schnitt, acting deputy chief of the DOJ’s Office of Enforcement Operations.

Schnitt said there’s internal turmoil at the DOJ. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino want the files released. Bongino, according to Schnitt, “has been causing problems” because he wants the Epstein files made public. Attorney General Pam Bondi, however, just “wants whatever Trump wants,” according to Schnitt. “She’s just a yes-person.”

Schnitt told OMG’s undercover journalist that there are “thousands and thousands of pages of files” on Epstein. But even if the DOJ releases any of them, they would be incomplete:

They’ll redact every Republican or conservative person in those files, leave all the liberal, Democratic people in those files, and have a very slanted version of it come out.

Schnitt touched on Maxwell’s prison transfer to a minimum-security facility. He claimed the move suggested that “they’re offering her something to keep her mouth shut.” OMG verified Schnitt’s claim that convicted sex offenders are normally ineligible for minimum-security facilities.

O’Keefe started the video by revisiting promises of transparency DOJ heads have made in the past, only to reneg on them. At the end, he issued an invitation for people within the DOJ to come forward and provide inside information about what is truly going on within the agency, to spill the beans about what the Trump administration is hiding and why.

The Administration’s Curated Approach

The idea that the DOJ wants to control the Epstein information that is released to the public makes sense given everything that is happening. It would explain why the Trump administration is calling efforts by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to have all the Epstein documents released a “hostile act.” Last week, the House Oversight Committee released more than 33,000 pages of documents related to the investigation. But, Massie pointed out, the information the agency releases will be heavily redacted or has already been made publicly available.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has justified the curated approach to releasing information as necessary to protect the victims. But the victims are supporting Massie and Khanna’s legislation; Johnson blames that on them being “misled.”

A few days ago, Johnson made the interesting comment that Trump was “an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down” and maintained that the president “has no culpability in this thing at all.” But on Monday, he walked that statement back — sort of. He said:

What I was referring to in that long conversation was what the (Epstein) victims’ attorney said. More than a decade ago, President Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, and he was one of the only people, one of the only prominent people, as everyone has reported … willing to help law enforcement go after this guy who was a disgusting child abuser, sex trafficker, all the allegations. That’s what they heard. So the president was helpful in that.

Johnson’s “clarification” is bolstered by comments Massie made Sunday during an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Massie told Stephanopoulos, “I don’t know if the Speaker misspoke when he said that Donald Trump was an informant. The lawyers for the victims said that Donald Trump had been helpful in 2009 in their case by giving them information.”

Getting the Files Released

Stephanopoulos also asked about the effort to pick up the remaining necessary signatures needed for the discharge petition Massie and Khanna are working on. That would force a vote in the House of Representatives on a bill that would release all the information the government has on Epstein, minus redactions to protect the victims. The two held a press conference last week with several Epstein victims in an effort to squeeze out the last two votes needed to reach 218. Right now, 212 Democrats have signed on, and four Republicans. In addition to Massie, they are Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

Stephanopoulos asked Khanna if they still believed they could get the last needed signatures. Khanna said they already have them:

We have the 218 votes. Two-hundred and sixteen already support it. There are two vacancies that haven’t been reported as much, but two Democrats are going to be joining and they are both committed to signing it. That’s going to happen by the end of September.… We have the votes. Let’s get a vote this month and get the files released.

Stephanopoulos brought up that, even if the bill passes in the House, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has “made it pretty clear” he’s going to block it. Can that be overcome? Massie’s response suggests they are hoping that the pressure that’s building for its release would compel Thune not to block it.

“Why do you think, Congressman Massie, the president is resisting the release?” Stephanopoulos asked. Massie replied:

I think it’s going to be embarrassing to some of the billionaires, some of the donors who are politically connected to his campaign. I also think Democrats are going to be implicated in this — Democrat donors. And when you get to the billionaire level, a lot of these folks give to both parties, anyway. There are probably intelligence ties to our CIA and maybe to other foreign intelligence, and the American people would be shocked, I think, to know that our intelligence agency was working with a pedophile who was running a sex trafficking ring.… We can’t avoid justice just to avoid embarrassment for some very powerful men.

Stephanopoulos asked Khanna if he’s concerned that, even if they succeed, the DOJ would “scrub” (as Schnitt suggested would happen) the files to include only Democrats. Khanna said he is indeed concerned. But he added that the victims’ lawyer, Bradley Edwards, has seen the files, as have “many people who are career officials.” So if they politicize the release, Khanna summarized, there are people who would call them out on it.

Khanna wrapped up the interview by pointing out that this issue is bridging the partisan divide:

The American people are dialed into this, They want to know that as a country we can stand with survivors.… They want to know that we can protect our children, and they want to know that there aren’t two Americas, that rich and powerful are going to be held to account for assaulting underage girls. I hope that this actually brings us together. I mean, the roll call had Marjorie Taylor Greene and me hugging after an emotional moment. Some people criticized me, but other people said the survivors are actually bringing this country together around fundamental values.

This article was originally published on The New American.

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British police arrested nearly 900 people over the weekend for expressing support for the peace activist group Palestine Action. Under UK law it is illegal to express favorable opinions about the group because London has deemed Palestine Action a terrorist organization, in the same category as ISIS or Al Qaeda.

At the same time, the Trump administration is defending its assassination of a boat full of Venezuelans on the allegation that they were “narcoterrorists”, an imaginary category designed to lump garden variety drug traffickers in with suicide bombers and mass shooters.

The word “terrorist” becomes more and more of a joke by the day.

I used to think a terrorist looks like a deranged maniac killing large numbers of civilians. Now I know a terrorist actually looks like a woman in a wheelchair holding a piece of cardboard with forbidden words written on it. https://t.co/ruQUknjNRr

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 6, 2025

In the UK a terrorist is someone with a cardboard sign saying “I support Palestine Action”.

In the US a terrorist is a Venezuelan suspected of drug trafficking.

In Israel a terrorist is someone resisting occupation.

We’re told Yemen is full of terrorists because they’re trying to stop a 21st century holocaust.

We’re told Lebanon is full of terrorists because they oppose a genocidal apartheid state.

We’re told Iran is full of terrorists because its government resists imperial regime change agendas.

We were told Al Qaeda were terrorists because they perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, but when Al Qaeda helped the west get rid of Assad they suddenly weren’t terrorists anymore.

Uyghur militants used to be terrorists, but they came off the list when they were deemed useful operatives against Beijing and Damascus.

Iraq needed to be invaded because Saddam wanted to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, but after the invasion it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and then Iraq was suddenly plagued by an epidemic of suicide bombings.

Afghanistan needed to be invaded because the Taliban was providing a safe haven for terrorists, but after 20 years of military occupation the empire needed its war machinery for other duties so they let the Taliban retake Afghanistan.

In 2010, then-vice president Joe Biden proclaimed Julian Assange a “high-tech terrorist” because his journalism with WikiLeaks exposed US war crimes.

Terrorism was used as an excuse to roll out the Patriot Act in the US and the Terrorism Act in the UK, and countless other authoritarian measures throughout the western world which tyrannical empire managers had been seeking to impose for years.

Such undignified bootlickery how American right wingers suddenly started pretending “narcoterrorists” is a real term and that assassinating drug dealers is actually killing terrorists just because the president commanded them to believe that. Pure 1984 Orwellian doublethink.

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 7, 2025

Really “terrorist” just means someone the empire wants to kill or imprison, or a group whose terrorist designation might be used to justify the advancement of preexisting geostrategic agendas.

Propaganda is used to sear events like 9/11 into western consciousness as examples of terrorism which must be prevented at all cost, and then this label “terrorism” is applied to literally anyone who poses an obstacle to the agendas of the western empire.

Once it is accepted that there should be no rules restricting how the state responds to the threat of terrorism, all the state needs to do is label someone a terrorist to remove all rules which might stop them from doing whatever they want to do. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated right now than the ongoing genocide in Gaza which is being justified by the need to eliminate terrorists.

When power-seeking empire architects are given limitless power to fight terrorism, we suddenly find ourselves in a world full of designated terrorists.

The more despised the western empire becomes, the more “terrorists” there are going to be. Because a terrorist is anyone who takes action which inconveniences the empire.

If this keeps up, soon we will all be “terrorists”.

________________

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“No mountain or ocean can distance people who have shared aspirations,” China’s President Xi Jinping said in July 2024, addressing leaders from fellow Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states and a few other nations in Astana, Kazakhstan.

It is not reaching too far, saying that this year’s 25th SCO Summit (SCO) in Tianjin, China, from 31 August to 1 September 2025, fulfilled – and more – President Xi’s vision of 2024. The summit caused a tectonic shift in the conventional world order.

China’s Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Bin told a news conference in Beijing, shortly before the SCO summit, that the 2025 SCO event be

“One of China’s most important head-of-state and home-court diplomatic events this year”.

As the Economist says, “A New Reality is Taking hold.” The “new reality” is not anti-US or anti-West; it is just separating the western unipolar aspirations from the newly created multi-polar, or perhaps better, multi-block, world, where countries aim at a peaceful cooperation towards a joint future with shared benefits.

The SCO was established in 2001 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Today the SCO consists of ten member-states with headquarters in Beijing. In addition to the founding members, SCO members have increased by India, Iran, Belarus, and Pakistan. SCO members account for 23% of the world’s GDP and for 43% of the world’s population.

Further attendance included high-level government officials from Myanmar, Egypt, Cambodia, Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives, Turkey, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn, and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

This year’s summit made clearly the SCO the guiding light for the Global South which includes the 11 BRICS countries, plus the 10 BRICS partners, added at the 16th BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, in October 2024.

While even the UNSG, Mr. Guterres, was invited – while the UN was or still is (?) considered by the US and the West in general as the World Organization in the western camp – President Trump felt snubbed by China, “left out” from the world shifting SCO event in Tianjin.

So, Trump invented a last-minute opportunity to leave his mark on the meeting by requesting President Xi literally on the eve of the SCO summit for “military talks,” a phone call between the two defense ministers (in the US now called War Minister, as the Ministry of Defense has been re-christened by Trump as War Ministry).

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said that Beijing rejected the proposal, reasoning “a lack of mutual understanding between the two countries”, asking a pertinent question:

“Is there any sincerity in and significance of any communication like this?”

Of course not. Trump just wanted to interfere in the SCO summit, showing his self-styled emperor head. But to no avail. The West was absent – the “naked emperor” as well as his European puppets, the (almost) defunct European Union, and especially the non-elected and every time more rejected European Commission (EC).

Imagine just a few weeks earlier, a delegation of the EC including Kaja Kallas, the Commission’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, the Commission’s top-diplomat so to speak, visited Beijing to discuss tariffs, but on the side they were insinuating that China should distance herself from Russia.

So much aggression, let alone undiplomatic thinking and acting – like at home spending taxpayers’ money destined for social programs, instead for a monster armament to go to war against Russia – aggression and a war philosophy that can only lead to a EU downfall which is accelerating by the day.

To add insult to injury, the symbolic leader of the EU, Germany, her Chancellor Friedrich Merz said recently:

 “Putin is a war criminal. He is perhaps the most serious war criminal of our time that we have seen on a large scale. We must be clear about how to deal with war criminals: There is no room for leniency.”

It is time for the Real World, the Global South, to distance themselves from the western warmongers and war-makers. This is just happening with the 25th SCO Summit – a new awakening for peace, cooperation, and togetherness in the spirit of working towards a future of shared benefits.

A future with shared benefits is not possible by western economic standards and principles, that followed since 1989 the so-called Washington Consensus, an un-stated agreement between the three most powerful western financial institutions, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank – to “subdue” the “emerging and developing world” with debt, so as to get a hold of their natural resources.

This disequilibrium already started with the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference during which the World Bank and IMF were created, two institutions which were and still are veto-dominated by Washington. Real economic equality and development had and up to now has no chance under these circumstances. Instead, it is abusive exploitation and neocolonialism.

The SCO decision at their Summit to create an SCO Development Bank bodes well with a new future of togetherness and cooperation. It fits right in with the Chinese Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB). It is a vivid sign of pulling free from the neoliberal western financial institutions making their living by exploiting “socioeconomic development”, instead of enhancing it.

Together and perhaps with a newly furbished BRICS New Development Bank, they will allow the Global South to evolve and grow according to their sovereign and independent terms, using instead of an isolating “protective” tariff system – Trump-style – their comparative advantages to deal and trade with each other – tariff-free. No conflicts but cooperation.

See also this.

This SCO Summit was not a western-style aggression event of “The Willing”, but a China-initiated reorientation of the world order, in which long-term objectives were envisioned by real leaders who had seen and lived enough of western-dictated aggressions, wars and destruction, but instead opted for Peace and Cooperation – and it very much looks like they may succeed.

In his opening speech, President Xi made this point clear:

“Humanity is again faced with a choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, and win-win outcomes; or zero-sum games.”

This clearly creates a growing chasm between East and West. The former seeking peaceful constructive development, while the latter are still clinging to their destructive economic model, wars and killing for a growing military complex and a tech-world that goes hand in hand with the agenda of transhumanization and destruction of humanity.

The highly successful SCO Summit in Tianjin was deliberately staged just before China’s Grand Military Parade on Tiananmen Square, marking 80 years since the end of World War II. It was the culmination of a new “World Order”, one of Peace – demonstrating the West, silently but visibly, that a new epoch is about to begin.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post The End of the Unipolar World Order – A Tectonic Shift Away from the West appeared first on LewRockwell.

Here is the detailed explanation from a user’s.

Assuming the whole world starts sharing a common currency whilst maintaining all existing border controls and barriers to trade and the movement of goods, capital and labour, there would be some fairly disastrous effects.

(TL;DR: most countries would exist in a state of disequilibrium, with very high unemployment in some and very high inflation in others, due to asymmetric economic shocks. Exporting firms would find it cheaper to obtain finance and international trade would increase significantly. Most nations would end up finding a World Currency very painful, and the only way to conceivably even slightly make it work is with a World Federation, i.e.: abolishing the idea of sovereign nations).

First, defining what a single currency entails: it means that all countries would give-up control of their money supply and interest rates (i.e.: monetary policy) to a hypothetical World Central Bank. This is NOT the same as the World Bank, which gives loans for development projects in countries – the World Central Bank instead would control the global money supply and interest rates for this new currency.

Secondly, some definitions: monetary policy is control the money supply and interest rates, and is managed by the central bank. Fiscal policy is control of government finances, and includes things like tax rates, government spending etc. The exchange rate is the value of the currency against other outside currencies – in a common global monetary union, take that to be the nominal value of the currency.

Now, it’s important to understand the idea of an “Optimum Currency Area (OCA)”, that is, a cluster/region of countries that can form a currency union without significant negative economic effects.

There are various theories for what constitutes an OCA, but the most famous is the one developed by Canadian economist Robert Mundell, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work on OCAs and monetary union in 1999. Mundell theorised that currency unions need to have a high level of labour and capital mobility to work successfully. Say country A and country B share a currency (enter a currency union). Now, an asymmetric shock (which is an economic shock that impacts different countries in different ways) hits A negatively, causing a contraction of aggregate demand (AD) in country A. If it had its own currency, its exchange rate would depreciate against the rest of the world to restore competitiveness, reducing the price of exports and increasing the quantity of exports sold. This will allow AD to start increasing again and equilibrium will be restored. In a currency union, the exchange rate will depreciate slightly, but not all the way, as country B has not had a contraction of demand. This means both countries will now exist in a macroeconomic disequilibrium: A’s exchange rate is overvalued, hurting competitiveness and causing unemployment, and B’s exchange rate is undervalued, increasing exports and causing inflationary pressure. To restore equilibrium, labour and capital needs to be able to move from A into B – hence, an Optimum Currency Area needs a high level of labour and capital mobility across borders.

The incredibly highly integrated Eurozone, which has open borders and a common factor markets, already suffers from insufficient labour mobility across borders for a number of reasons, including differences in pension schemes, language barriers, differences in qualification acceptance etc. So the world does not in any capacity have sufficient mobility of labour and capital across borders: there are way too many barriers to the movement of factors of production. A world-currency implemented under anything close to the status-quo idea of independent nation states and borders would result in most countries being in a permanent state of disequilibrium, with high unemployment in some places and high inflation in others.

The world as a whole is also far too vulnerable to asymmetric shocks for it to be an OCA. Commodity-exporting countries in particular struggle to join OCAs as shocks to commodity markets are often far sharper than shocks that hit other industries.

In addition, countries would lose the ability to use monetary policy to correct economic shocks, that is, raising interest rates in times of high inflation and lowering them in times of high unemployment and low inflation. They would be forced to use fiscal policy to correct shocks, but different countries have different approaches to fiscal policy and without some sort of fiscal-policy rules and fiscal transfers implemented by the World Authority overseeing this, there would likely be many cases of countries’ fiscal responses negatively impacting other nations who are in different stages of their economic cycle; the global interest rate for some countries would end up too high and for others, too low. There is also the issue that many countries would become more vulnerable to sovereign default as they would have foregone control of interest rates and the money supply. This would likely result in a series of Greek-like disasters in countries with severe downturns, particularly in countries with poor fiscal discipline.

The case of the Eurozone shows its almost impossible to make a successful currency union without fiscal union and transfers, which effectively means to make a currency union work it needs to be federal entity with a common government.

Finally, Ronald McKinnon and the McKinnon Criterion tells us that in order to minimise the likelihood of asymmetric shocks, countries that enter a currency union should/must have a high level of trade amongst each other. This is not true for the whole world, and likely will not be for the forseeable future purely down to distances (the Gravity Model of trade tells us the value of trade between two nations is inversely proportional to the distance between them).

Now, common currency areas DO see increases in trade as common currencies reduce the cost of exporting and importing. It also reduces the uncertainty export-industry firms face in what their foreign revenues will be, which without a currency union, would fluctuate depending on the exchange rate. This increases investors’ and banks’ confidence in these firms, reducing their cost of obtaining finance and increasing production, thereby increasing exports. When this occurs in all currency union members, you get a surge in trade. Some economists therefore theorise that the creation of OCA is endogenous to STARTING a currency-union, in that a common currency facilitates more trade which brings the union closer to an OCA.

It also can make firms more efficient. As an example, pre-Eurozone, it was common for unions to negotiate high wages, which firms would accept, expecting the government to devalue the exchange rate to reduce the price of exports and make up for the lost competitiveness. Workers in different countries were effectively competing against each other; the introduction of a common currency, the Euro, removed this mechanism, making wage-setting more economically sensible and firms more competitive, reducing prices.

Overall, in the status-quo, a world currency union would result in the vast majority of countries being in a state of economic disequilibrium. For it to even slightly work, you would need a common world government with fiscal rules at the very least, and a world federation at best – and even then, much of the world would remain in disequilibrium as asymmetric shocks can never be totally removed.

Now, if you propose a global currency union AND the removal of all barriers to the movement of goods, capital and labour (i.e.: an open border world), with a common government, that gets more interesting but is beyond the scope of what I can answer at the moment.

This article was originally published on Preppgroup.

The post How Would it Impact Global Finance a World Currency? appeared first on LewRockwell.

It was a moment somewhat like this, 30 years ago, that turned me into a biblical scholar. In the lead-up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, political and religious leaders quoted scripture to justify shutting down food programs and kicking mothers and their babies off public assistance. Those leaders, many of them self-described Christians, chose to ignore the majority of passages in the Bible that preached “good news” to the poor and promised freedom to those captive to injustice and oppression. Instead, they put forward unethical and ahistorical (mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations of biblical texts to prop up American imperial power and punish the poor in the name of a warped morality.

Three decades later, the Trump administration and its theological apologists are working overtime, using Jesus’s name and the Bible’s contents in even more devastating rounds of immoral biblical (mis)references. In July, there was the viral video from the Department of Homeland Security, using the “Here I am, Lord. Send me” quotation from Isaiah — commonly cited when ordaining faith leaders and including explicit references to marginalized communities impacted by displacement and oppression — to recruit new agents for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, a job that now comes with a $50,000 signing bonus, thanks to Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s former pastor went even further in marrying the Bible to anti-immigrant hatred by saying, “Is the Bible in favor of these ICE raids?… The answer is yes.” He then added: “The Bible does not require wealthy Christian nations to self-immolate for the horrible crime of having a flourishing economy and way of life, all right? The Bible does not permit the civil magistrate to steal money from its citizens to pay for foreign nationals to come destroy our culture.”

A month earlier, during a speech announcing the bombing of Iran, President Trump exhorted God to bless America’s bombs (being dropped on innocent families and children): “And in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

And in May, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Republican congressional representatives formed a prayer circle on the floor of the House as they prepared to codify the president’s Big Beautiful Bill. Of course, that very bill threatens to cut off millions of Americans from life-saving food and healthcare. (Consider it a bizarre counterpoint to Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 and providing free health care to lepers.)

The Antichrist

And if that weren’t enough twisting of the Bible to bless the rich and admonish the poor, enter tech mogul Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the man behind the curtain of so much now going on in Washington. Though many Americans may be increasingly familiar with him, his various companies, and his political impact, many of us have missed the centrality of his version of Christianity and the enigmatic “religious” beliefs that go with it.

In Vanity Fair this spring, journalist Zoe Bernard emphasized the central role Thiel has already played in the Christianization of Silicon Valley: “I guarantee you,” one Christian entrepreneur told her, “there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel.”

Indeed, his theological beliefs grimly complement his political ones. “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief,” he said, “you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.” Remember, this is the same Thiel who, in a 2009 essay, openly questioned the compatibility of democracy and freedom, advocating for a system where power would be concentrated among those with the expertise to drive “progress” — a new version of the survival of the fittest in the information age. Such a worldview couldn’t contrast more strongly with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus demonstrates his preferential option for the poor and his belief in bottom-up strategies rather than top down ones.

More recently, Thiel has positioned himself “right” in the middle of the Republican Party. He served as Trump’s liaison to Silicon Valley in his first term. Since then, he has convened and supported a new cohort of conservatives (many of whom also claim a right-wing Christianity), including Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump’s Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton, AI and crypto czar billionaire David Sacks, and Elon Musk, who spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected the second time around. Thiel is also close to Curtis Yarvin, the fellow who “jokingly” claimed that American society no longer needs poor people and believes they should instead be turned into biofuel. (A worldview that simply couldn’t be more incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.)

Particularly relevant to recent political (and ideological) developments, especially the military occupation of Washington, D.C., Thiel is also close to Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founder of the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank behind a coordinated attack on the homeless now sweeping the nation. That’s right, there’s a throughline from Peter Thiel to President Donald Trump’s demand that “the homeless have to move out immediately… FAR from the Capital.” In July, Trump produced an executive order facilitating the removal of housing encampments in Washington, a year after the Supreme Court upheld a law making it a crime, if you don’t have a home, to sleep or even breathe outside. And Thiel, Lonsdale, and the Cicero Institute aren’t just responsible for those attacks on unhoused people and “blue cities”; they also bear responsibility for faith leaders being arrested and fined for their support of unhoused communities and their opposition, on religious grounds, to the mistreatment of the poor.

On top of this troubling mix of Christianity and billionaires, however, I find myself particularly chagrined that Thiel is offering an oversold four-part lecture series on the “antichrist” through a nonprofit called ACTS 17 collective that is to start in September in San Francisco. News stories about the ACTS 17 collective tend to focus on Christians organizing in Silicon Valley and the desire to put salvation through Jesus above personal success or charity for the poor. That sounds all too ominous, especially for those of us who take seriously the biblical command to stop depriving the poor of rights, to end poverty on earth (as it is in heaven), and defend the very people the Bible prioritizes.

For instance, Trae Stephens (who worked at Palantir and is partners with Thiel in a venture capital fund) is the husband of Michelle Stephens, the founder of the ACTS 17 collective. In an interview with Emma Goldberg of the New York Times, Michelle Stephens describes how “we are always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized… I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”

In an article at the Denison Forum, she’s even more specific about her biblical and theological interpretation of poverty and the need to care for those with more rather than the poor. She writes, “Those who see Christ’s message to the poor and needy as the central pillar of the gospel make a similar mistake. While social justice movements have done a great deal to point out our society’s longstanding sins and call believers to action, it can be tempting for that message to become more prominent than our innate need for Jesus to save us.” Such a statement reminds me of the decades-long theological pushback I lived through even before the passage of welfare reform and the continued juxtaposition of Jesus and justice since.

A Battle for the Bible

Of course, such a battle for the Bible is anything but new in America. It reaches back long before the rise of a new brand of Christianity in Silicon Valley. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul’s epistles to claim that slavery had been ordained by God, while ripping the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached what was called a “prosperity gospel” that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism. Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubber-stamp Jim Crow practices, while the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, Sr., helped mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists in national politics.

Over the past decades, the use of the Bible to justify what passes for “law and order” (and the punishing of the poor) has only intensified. In Donald Trump’s first term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border with a passage from the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans: “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders summed up the same idea soon after in this way: “It is very biblical to enforce the law.” And in his first speech as speaker of the House, Mike Johnson told his colleagues, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” an echo of the New Testament’s Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul writes that “the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”

Over the past several years, Republican politicians and religious leaders have continued to use biblical references to punish the poor, quoting texts to justify cutting people off from healthcare and food assistance. A galling example came when Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX), rebutting a Jewish activist who referenced a commandment in Leviticus to feed the hungry, quoted 2 Thessalonians to justify increasing work requirements for people qualifying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). And that was just one of many Republican attacks on the low-income food assistance program amid myriad attempts to shred the social welfare system in the lead-up to President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history and a crowning achievement of Russell Vought’s Project 2025.  Arrington said: “But there’s also, you know, in the Scripture, tells us in 2 Thessalonians chapter 3:10 he says, uh, ‘For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: if a man will not work, he shall not eat.’ And then he goes on to say ‘We hear that some among you are idle’… I think it’s a reasonable expectation that we have work requirements.”

And Arrington has been anything but alone. The same passage, in fact, had already been used by Representatives Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Stephen Lee Fincher (R-TN) to justify cutting food stamps during a debate over an earlier farm bill. And Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) used similarly religious language, categorizing people as deserving and undeserving, to argue against a healthcare plan that protects those of us with pre-existing conditions. He insisted that only “people who lead good lives” and “have done the things to keep their bodies healthy” should receive reduced costs for health care.

Such “Christian” politicians regularly misuse Biblical passages to blame the impoverished for their poverty. There is never a suggestion, of course, that the rich, who have functionally stolen people’s wages and engorged themselves by denying them healthcare, are in any way to blame.

A Theology of Liberation for a Time Like This

Such interpretations of biblical texts are damaging to everyone’s lives (except, of course, the superrich), but especially the poor. And — though you wouldn’t know it from such Republicans — they are counter to the main themes of the Bible’s texts. The whole of the Christian Bible, starting with Genesis and ending with the Book of Revelation, has an arc of justice to it. The historical equivalents of anti-poverty programs run through it all.

That arc starts in the Book of Exodus with manna (bread) that shows up day after day, so no one has too much or too little. This is a likely response to the Egyptian Pharaoh setting up a system where a few religious and political leaders amassed great wealth at the expense of the people. God’s plan, on the other hand, was for society to be organized around meeting the needs of all people, including describing how political and religious leaders are supposed to release slaves, forgive debts, pay people what they deserve, and distribute funds to the needy. The biblical arc of justice then continues through the prophets who insist that the way to love and honor God is to promote programs that uplift the poor and marginalized, while decrying those with power who cloak oppression in religious terms and heretical versions of Christian theology.

My own political and moral roots are in the welfare rights and homeless union survival movements, efforts led by poor and dispossessed people organizing a “new underground railroad” and challenging Christianity to talk the talk and walk the walk of Christ. Such a conviction was captured by Reverend Yvonne Delk at the 1992 “Up and Out of Poverty Survival Summit,” when she declared that society, including the church, must move to the position that “poor people are not sinners, but poverty is a sin against God that could and should be ended.”

Delk’s words echo others from 20 years earlier. In 1972, Beulah Sanders, a leader of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the largest organization of poor people in the 1960s and 1970s, spoke to the National Council of Churches. “I represent all of those poor people who are on welfare and many who are not,” she said, “people who believe in the Christian way of life… people whose nickels and dimes and quarters have built the Christian churches of America. Because we believe in Christianity, we have continued to support the Christian churches… We call upon you… to join with us in the National Welfare Rights Organization. We ask for your moral, personal, and financial support in this battle for bread, dignity, and justice for all of our people. If we fail in our struggle, Christianity will have failed.”

In a Trumpian world, where Christian extremism is becoming the norm, we must not let the words of Beulah Sanders be forgotten or the worst fears of countless prophets and freedom fighters come true. Rather, we must build the strength to make a theological and spiritual vision of everybody-in-nobody-out a reality and create the capacity, powered by faith, to make it so. Now is the time. May we make it so.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post You Can’t Worship God and Money appeared first on LewRockwell.

Philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas remind us to begin with first principles: to see things as they really are. Even Marcus Aurelius counseled, “Of each particular thing, ask, what is it in itself?” Strikingly, this same wisdom is expressed in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), albeit through the words of a villain.

In the context of assisting a student detective in tracking down a serial killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter—both psychiatrist and serial killer—taunts Clarice Starling: “First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius.” The line is frightening because it exposes a perennial truth: evil begins when we refuse to acknowledge the true nature of things. Gender ideology does just this, denying the most basic truth of our humanity: that we are male and female. And as recent school shootings tragically show, such denial does not remain abstract; it can culminate in violence against the most innocent.

Ironically, the film goes further still. In one exchange, Clarice protests, “Dr. Lecter, there’s no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive.” To which Lecter replies, “Clever girl. You’re so close to the way you’re going to catch him—do you realize that?” Even here, Hollywood conditioned audiences to disconnect transgenderism from violence, even while viewers watched the film’s antagonist, Buffalo Bill, murder women in order to construct a grotesque “woman suit” as a substitute for sex reassignment. The message was clear: gender confusion could be exploited for shock but never acknowledged as having any real-world consequences.

What Hollywood once exploited for shock, society now refuses to confront in reality. And the cost has been devastating. On August 27, 2025, 23-year-old Robert Westman, who’d been wrestling with gender dysphoria, carried out a horrific attack at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. During the back-to-school Mass, Westman, who had his name legally changed to Robin, fired through the church windows with multiple guns, killing two kids and injuring 17 others before ending his own life. The FBI labelled it a hate crime targeting the Catholic community.

Sean Fitzpatrick recently wrote an essay in Crisis Magazine titled “Transmurderer,” highlighting how our culture fosters gender dysphoria and ignores its deadly consequences. Fr. Nick Ward has also reflected on the Annunciation shooting in Crisis Magazine (“Transgenderism and the Ruin of Souls”), offering a primarily pastoral and theological response that emphasizes the demonic roots of transgender ideology. My essay approaches the issue differently: by tracing the recent cultural and psychological dynamics of gender ideology before turning to its theological culmination, showing how in this case the shooter’s own writings explicitly testify to the demonic. The Annunciation atrocity cannot be explained solely by social disintegration; it must be considered an assault on truth itself, rooted in relativism, biological denial, and, ultimately, the demonic.

Cultural Conditioning and Denial

For decades, Hollywood has portrayed sexually ambiguous characters, often linking distorted gender identity to chaos, perversity, horror, or violence. Films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp (1983), Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992), and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (2011) all returned to these discomforting themes. The Skin I Live In presents a bizarre story where a father kidnaps his daughter’s rapist, subjects him to forced sex-reassignment surgery, and later assaults him, illustrating how gender manipulation can be weaponized, even outside the trope of a deranged killer.

Gene Simmons even played a flamboyant, psychotic hermaphroditic villain in Never Too Young to Die (1986), showing how far pop culture was willing to exploit gender confusion for shock value. At times, the transgender element is explicit, as in Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda (1953) or William Castle’s Homicidal (1961). Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) took a different angle: Al Pacino’s character robs a bank to fund his partner’s sex-reassignment surgery, motivated by his desire to marry him.

It is worth noting that both Psycho’s Norman Bates and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill were inspired by real-life murderer Ed Gein, who committed gruesome acts such as unearthing corpses, killing two women, and crafting a human skin suit to embody his deceased mother. These themes have captivated and horrified the public. Gein’s crimes will soon be depicted in Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story (2025).

Across both mainstream and obscure cinema, the message has been clear: distorted gender identity does not represent true liberation but is a source of danger, ambiguity, and mental instability. Contrast this scenario with modern cinema, television, educational systems, government policies, and mainstream media, where now, all too often, transgender identity is depicted as empowering and heroic. This narrative has become so pervasive that it has led to a cultural contagion, with unprecedented numbers of children and adolescents questioning their identities.

Nevertheless, for years, the cultural imagination was shaped by images of violent men attempting to erase or redefine their sexual identity. Yet when real-world cases emerge, society’s leaders insist there is no connection.

Read the Whole Article

The post Gender Ideology and Violence: Cultural Confusion and the Spiritual Battle appeared first on LewRockwell.

Abstract

Relying on live-ink letters discovered in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022, this article provides a fresh look at an old controversy: Murray Rothbard’s bitter parting from the inner orbit of Ayn Rand. The correspondence from Rothbard to National Review senior editor Frank S. Meyer pertaining to the Randians details Rothbard’s rollercoaster of responses toward the Collective. The letters on Rand begin shortly before the release of Atlas Shrugged in October 1957 and end after the publication of an unsigned 1961 Newsweek article belittling the novelist. The newly discovered correspondence undermines the persistent claim that Rothbard fabricated unflattering descriptions of the Objectivists in response to their accusing him of plagiarism. The letters, sent long before Nathaniel Branden leveled those charges, reflect the general description of the group in Rothbard’s “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,” issued in 1972. The article further details the influence of Meyer’s Moulding of Communists on Rothbard in his structuring of “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.

—

On the day of Atlas Shrugged’s release, Murray Rothbard wrote Frank S. Meyer to further justify another about-face on Ayn Rand, a subject the two had previously discussed. “Thanks for trying to save my soul,” he wrote Meyer in the recently unearthed October 10, 1957, letter. “You know, however, that I have always been an extreme libertarian purist, anti-prudence, atheist, natural rightser, Aristotelian, etc. so that whatever shifts I may make in a Randian direction will be a logical development and not any sudden conversion. No matter how much you disagree with her system I think you should hail her as a great genius and system-builder” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Meyer failed to disabuse Rothbard of his enthusiasm. Rand eventually did. Perhaps more accurately, her lieutenant, Nathaniel Branden, especially did.

The story of Murray Rothbard’s close encounters of the Rand kind, first told by Rothbard to a mass audience in 1972, the year of Frank Meyer’s death, has been retold in the Rothbard biography An Enemy of the State (Raimondo 2000, 109–35), in the Rand biographies Goddess of the Market (Burns 2009, 182–84), Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Heller 2009, 295–301), My Years with Ayn Rand (N. Branden 1999, 229–31), and The Ayn Rand Cult (Walker 1999, 28, 33–34), and in countless articles, speeches, and podcasts.

This article offers fresh information on an old story: Rothbard’s contemporaneous observations of his 1950s interactions with Ayn Rand and “the Collective,” the group of admirers who surrounded the novelist. Original, live-ink letters discovered in a Pennsylvania warehouse in 2022, as part of research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, provide Rothbard’s perspective not from more than a decade later or distilled through the intermediary of other authors, but firsthand and conveyed in real time to an older, more experienced friend whom he knew as a skeptic of the burgeoning philosophy of Objectivism. The Rothbard file folder contains, among other items, thirty-five letters between him and Frank and Elsie Meyer, of which six letters from Rothbard pertain directly to novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. This warehouse find came within a larger trove that included scores of folders that hold documents pertinent to other figures of relevance on the postwar American Right. Meyer, an ex-Communist, National Review editor, and exponent of fusionism, met Rothbard in 1954 (as a November 28 letter from Rothbard that year shows) and remained friends with him until Meyer’s death in 1972 (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Atop using his friend as a sounding board in these letters, the younger man relied on him again, in a way that has gone largely unnoticed, when he opted to finally publicize what he had observed and experienced among Rand, Branden, and company.

Many of the charges Rothbard ([1972] 2025) issued against Ayn Rand and her followers in a public way in 1972 he had shared privately with Meyer fifteen years earlier. This included using the word “cult” to describe the group that surrounded Rand, noting their humorlessness, and observing the way emotion frequently overwhelmed reason in their leader in contradiction to her philosophy. In at least one instance, the letters provide an account somewhat different from the one Rothbard gave years later. Two letters present evidence that weighs in Rothbard’s favor in disputes that outlived the various parties involved.

In the passage quoted above, for instance, Rothbard speaks of always subscribing to natural rights and Aristotelian views. For the last sixty-seven years, some Objectivists have claimed that Rothbard swiped his Aristotelianism and beliefs about natural rights from Rand. He did personally acknowledge a “debt” to her in developing his appreciation of Aristotle and natural rights (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 14–15). The idea that this required a hat-tip citation whenever he wrote about such concepts, or that a man with three degrees from an Ivy League institution had been ignorant of Aristotle and natural rights before he entered Rand’s inner orbit, seems like a difficult position to defend. Nevertheless, this conjecture continues to animate discussions many decades after the initial dispute.

“Murray Rothbard never cites Ayn Rand once in any of his works in which he defends Aristotle, in which he defends natural rights, or free will—ideas he clearly got from Ayn Rand without giving her a single citation,” Objectivist writer James Valliant claimed on a 2021 podcast. His interlocutor, Jonathan Hoenig, a Fox News Channel talking head, speculated that Rothbard “largely fictionalized” his accusations against Rand. “It’s a load of bullshit, basically, just designed to denigrate Ayn Rand because he was called out plagiarizing her,” he said to Valliant. “Am I summing it up?” Valliant maintained during the podcast that Rothbard “got Aristotle and natural rights straight from Ayn Rand” (Hoenig and Sotirakopoulos 2021).

But in a postcard to Frank Meyer postmarked October 10, 1957, nine months before Nathaniel Branden originated that charge and shortly before Rothbard became a member of sorts of the Collective, the economist described Aristotelianism and natural rights as long-held, core beliefs (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). The plagiarism charge, heretofore regarded as outlandish by non-Objectivists, would seem even weaker given Rothbard’s words typed months before he faced an accusation he could hardly have prophesied. Furthermore, the imputation that a petty Rothbard libeled Rand and her followers in revenge for their exposure of his “plagiarism” cannot stand based on these letters that sat unnoticed since their receipt in Woodstock, New York, nearly seven decades ago.

Rothbard had detailed privately to Meyer in a December 4, 1957, letter the same notion of a rigid, conformist atmosphere within the Collective which imbued “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Rothbard [1972] 2025). Any genesis story on Rothbard’s claims cannot, therefore, attribute their origins to Rothbard devising them as a tit-for-tat response to Branden’s charges of plagiarism. This does not mean, as letters presented later in this article demonstrate, that a degree of vengeance did not motivate Rothbard to publicize what he saw and experienced. An August 24, 1958, letter clearly shows Rothbard seeking to engineer a small amount of payback against people he regarded as his slanderers, and an undated letter from 1961 exudes schadenfreude in response to bad press received by the Objectivists (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

Rothbard’s ([1972] 2025) published reflections on Rand and the Collective arrived with the perspective of years removed from her orbit and jaundiced by the events that led to the bitter parting of two figures of massive import among libertarians. His recently discovered correspondence with Meyer snapshots his views, complex and changing from one letter to the next, while he was inside the group. A reader gleans both what attracted him to the novelist and what ultimately drove him away. Once upon a time, long before Rothbard’s public criticism of Rand, as friend Ralph Raico would later put it, “Murray was very enthusiastic about Ayn” (Raico [2013] 2016).

Rothbard Shrugged

Murray Rothbard first ventured into Ayn Rand’s orbit as a twentysomething Columbia University PhD candidate short of his doctorate. Rand biographies claim that the brothers Richard and Herb Cornuelle, both affiliated at various times with the William Volker Fund (which generously supported, among others, both Rothbard and Meyer), took the Ludwig von Mises disciple to her salon-apartment in 1952 (Burns 2009, 144; Heller 2009, 251). Rothbard credited Herb Cornuelle with the introduction (Rothbard 1989, 27).

From a distance, the Circle Bastiat meetings at Rothbard’s apartment and those attended by the Collective at Rand’s apartment looked the same. Both featured advocates of liberty discussing philosophical topics at a high level in Manhattan, a place not as hostile to those ideas as Moscow but nonetheless quite unfriendly to them. The similarities evaporated upon closer inspection. Rothbard, for instance, noted that Circle Bastiat meetups included “song composing, joint moviegoing, and fiercely competitive board games.” He described them as a “helluva lot of fun” (Rothbard 1989, 27). Few ever described the agora of Objectivism at 36 East 36th Street as fun.

Whereas his encounters with Ludwig von Mises in the early 1950s fueled his intellectual output until the end of his days, the young Rothbard found Rand’s dogmatism off-putting and draining. Her tremendous intellect and individualism, however, seduced him into coming back. He first returned for two nights in the summer of 1954. This time, he ventured into her domain accompanied by the Circle Bastiat. Internally, he found himself intellectually taking Rand’s side in her browbeating of George Reisman but rooting for his teenage friend (Raimondo 2000, 110). As he explained three years later to Rand, the visits left him exhausted, depressed, and threatened by a perceived potential loss of independence should he continue to see her (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16). So, again, he stayed away.

Three years later, after one of the Circle Bastiat obtained an early copy of Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard, now boasting a PhD in economics from Columbia University, found himself not merely intrigued by but enamored of Rand and her ideas (Heller 2009, 295–96). His vacillation, if nothing else, remained consistent.

He wrote her an especially obsequious fan letter on October 3, 1957, the aim of which seemed, at least in part, to return him to Rand’s good graces. To that end, he emphasized his internal defects to explain what had earlier pushed him away from her. His absence, in other words, stemmed from a problem of his and not of hers. Hyperbole constituted most of this letter that its writer insisted lacked hyperbole. He noted his regret that his mother had been able to read merely Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy but never such a work as Atlas Shrugged, which he called “the greatest novel ever written,” from “a mind that I unhesitatingly say is the most brilliant of the twentieth century” (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16). The overstatement here wasn’t necessarily puffery. Rothbard, writing on the day he had finished reading the novel (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12), probably believed much of what he wrote. Countless others, after all, would experience similar exhilaration upon completion of Atlas Shrugged and also regard it as a profound accomplishment.

Rothbard again returned to Rand’s orbit, but for a much longer period than his previous forays. This time, he became not so much a visitor but a member of sorts of the Collective, the small but growing coterie surrounding the Russian immigrant. His letters to Meyer reflect enthusiasm, hesitation, and seeds of the issues that would eventually sunder him from the group.

“We’ve seen Ayn a few times, a couple of times ourselves and once with the whole group,” he wrote Meyer on December 4, 1957. “When Joey [Rothbard’s wife] and I were up there alone, everything went fine, since I asked her questions and she answered them, which is about the only relationship the Randians enjoy having with others: as lecturers. You know I am a 98% Randian: I like their atheist-rationalist-libertarian-Aristotelianism. However, when the group got to Ayn’s a bit of strain set in: in fact, despite her nice words at the end, I could see that fanatical hatred in her eye” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Rothbard had unwisely submitted to a course of what he described to Meyer as “Brandian psychoanalysis” for his “phobia,” identified elsewhere as a fear of travel (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Heller 2009, 297). Rand lieutenant Nathaniel Branden lacked proper credentials at this point to conduct such treatment (Heller 2009, 297–98), and the information he collected, in providing him potential leverage against jaded or jilted members of the group, made such sessions a conflict of interest. Much of this did not occur to Rothbard at the time, as he described the psychoanalysis to Meyer as “pleasant.” He noted that Circle Bastiat members Ralph Raico and George Reisman also visited Branden to cure their illnesses, and that Reisman’s problem remained unknown to him (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

If Rothbard did not yet grasp the imprudence of turning over personal secrets to a man more interested in collecting and keeping followers for Ayn Rand than in helping his patients overcome various mental health ailments, he at least understood his own place in the Objectivist orbit as tenuous. Part of this involved his wife JoAnn, whose Christianity clashed with Objectivism’s zeal for atheism. “Joey says that she would like to see the day when George, Ralph and I are all cured,” her husband continued in that December 4 letter to Meyer, “and then spit in Nathan’s face and walk out; this would be swell but I’m afraid things will come to a head long before that” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

Rothbard went on to enumerate various points of disagreement between himself and the emerging guru. While Rand had once socialized among peers, to include Isabel Paterson, Ludwig von Mises, and Henry Hazlitt, she increasingly operated in a curated world inhabited by vetted admirers (Burns 2009, 114, 125–32, 141; Heller 2009, 245–51). Despite the subservient tone of his October letter to Rand, Rothbard, though two decades her junior, constitutionally did not fit for long in any such sycophantic environment. The fact that he dared to disagree with and even ridicule her demonstrated this. He wrote to Meyer that while Rand’s belief in natural rights appealed to him, he regarded her extension of them to animals as crazy—and confessed to joking about the natural rights of cockroaches with his clique. Rothbard pointed out his belief, contra Rand, in natural instincts and disbelief, contra Rand, that “everyone on the same intelligence level could do anything in any field on the comparable intelligence plane.” He noted a split on the seemingly uncontroversial idea of making support of children compulsory for parents, which, despite Atlas Shrugged’s reputation as a kid-free zone, Rand endorsed. The group’s harsh rejection of his idea of private courts similarly alienated him, he wrote (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). He claimed in the letter that the Randians joined him in support of private police forces, though Nathaniel Branden later cited that as an idea held by Rothbard that Rand rejected as a recipe for civil war, so it is possible that Rothbard misunderstood (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; N. Branden 1999, 230). He opined to Meyer that “to the Randians no differences are minor, and all are crucial,” and that emotion rather than reason governed many of the leader’s pronouncements (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

To illustrate this controversial point, he juxtaposed Rand’s embrace of her Random House editor, who had rejected her ideas but not her book, with her rejection of a classical liberal whose love of God seemed more powerful than his love for Atlas Shrugged. “Bennett Cerf is ‘really’ and metaphysically a great libertarian because he liked Atlas, even though ‘he doesn’t agree to specific issues,’” Rothbard reported to Meyer as the chief Objectivist’s subjective outlook, “while Leonard Liggio is a son of a bitch because he didn’t like Atlas, and also not really a libertarian” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). This intolerance extended, perhaps especially, to the small but growing group of admirers who imitated Rand: Rothbard further told Meyer in that December 4, 1957, letter that his younger associates, Raico and Bruce Goldberg, drove the Collective “wild with fury” by embracing a “logical positivism” that they integrated with Randian ethics (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). This disagreement set off an explosive conflict.

As Rothbard described it to Meyer, Nathaniel Branden and others at the meeting declared Ayn Rand not only the greatest mind since at least Aristotle, but the greatest person as well. Those who did not share this view, Rothbard noted, they labeled as evil. They further acknowledged that Randians were obligated to collectively spurn any person holding such an evil opinion. Both Raico and Goldberg dissented. They conceded that Rand ranked as one of the greatest minds of the century. They just regarded Ludwig von Mises as her intellectual superior. This set Branden and others off. While this blowup involved Randians and not Rand herself, and Rothbard received the story distilled telephonically from Raico and Goldberg, the tale likely evoked in their older friend a déjà vu of sorts concerning the unease he had felt at Rand’s dressing down of Reisman more than three years earlier (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Rothbard 1989, 28–29).

By the late 1980s, Rothbard recalled the Goldberg excommunication slightly differently from what he had communicated to Meyer in the December 4, 1957, letter. In Rothbard’s 1989 Liberty article, the question did not pertain to the greatest mind in history. Instead, Branden asks, “Who has been the most intellectually important person in my life?” And to this perfunctory question presupposing rote answers of “Ayn Rand,” Goldberg answers not “Ludwig von Mises,” as Rothbard had told Meyer contemporaneously with the excommunication, but “Ralph Raico,” who followed Goldberg out of the Collective just as a grateful Goldberg had earlier followed Raico into libertarianism (Rothbard 1989, 28–29). Possibly time played mischief with memories of the event. Possibly time allowed for the accumulation of more detail that provided greater accuracy. Possibly what Rothbard wrote to Meyer in 1957 and what he wrote in Liberty in 1989 both happened. What is definite is that in certain details, the depiction of this event in 1957 differed from the depiction of it thirty-two years later.

The December 1957 experience so jarred Raico and Goldberg—the latter of whom four years later would pen a brutal review of Rand’s For the New Intellectual (Goldberg 1961)—that they called Rothbard at two in the morning with their concerns. Rothbard confessed to Meyer in that December 4, 1957, letter an impulse to immediately share this information with him through a morning-part-of-the-night call, of the type regularly dialed and received on Meyer’s farmhouse’s line, but that his financially “embarrassed” situation restrained him (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). “Do you know the Randians are a grim lot?” he continued. “Even at their most friendliest, which we had seen till recently, they are at best genial, never wildly dramatic and humorous in the Grand Tradition. Ayn’s doctrine is that a sense of humor is permissible: provided one [laughs] at one’s enemies” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

Circling the Wagons

A few weeks later, Rothbard, writing in longhand atop a carbon copy of a typed December 28 letter sent to William F. Buckley Jr., asked Meyer to disregard his negative depiction of Rand and her followers from his previous letter. It was, he had since discovered, a misrepresentation. He now knew what they had really meant. And what was that? He did not say. He did fixate on attacks on Atlas Shrugged in the letter to Buckley, so possibly a circle-the-wagons effect hastened the reorientation of Rothbard’s epistolary depictions of the Collective and its leader (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

In the October 3, 1957, letter, Rothbard had offered to Rand to write letters to the editor on behalf of Atlas Shrugged, which he noted he had already done in response to a negative article on the book by former Communist Granville Hicks in the New Leader (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 15–16). He had continued this crusade in the late fall by writing a letter objecting to a review in Commonweal (Raimondo 2000, 120–21).

He had lamented in an October 8 letter to Meyer the critique of Atlas Shrugged by Helen Beal Woodward in the Saturday Review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Therein, Woodward (1957, 25) had praised Rand’s talent while describing the book as “the equivalent of a fifteenth-century morality play” with “stylized vice-and-virtue characters” that “serve as dummies on which to drape the author’s ideas.” Atlas Shrugged, Woodward wrote, “sets up one of the finest assortments of straw men ever demolished in print.” Rothbard had noted to Meyer, National Review’s “Books, Arts, and Manners” editor, that the “idiot” who wrote that piece also wrote “stupid” reviews for his magazine. The fact that Woodward conceded Rand’s abilities, and fixated less on her ideology than on the notion that her ideology overpowered aesthetics and story and all else, made for a more damaging review than a politicized review in which the prejudices of the critic, rather than the faults of the author, became apparent. He wrote Meyer, “I think I would have preferred an outright leftist attack than this moronic nonsense that makes the book out to be some sort of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

Now, in late December, Rothbard’s ire turned toward the section of National Review that libertarianish Frank Meyer oversaw. Months earlier, Meyer had taken over the “Books, Arts, and Manners” section from Willi Schlamm, after the tempestuous Austrian clashed with his National Review cofounder, William F. Buckley Jr., and fellow senior editor James Burnham. The departure elevated Meyer to editor of the reviews section and facilitated the arrival of Whittaker Chambers, a fellow senior editor who had likely viewed Schlamm’s involvement in the magazine as one reason to rebuff its editor’s repeated invitations to him to join the staff (Tanenhaus 1998, 491–500; Flynn 2025, 218–19). Early in his short National Review tenure, Chambers wrote an infamous, or famous (depending upon one’s perspective), review of Atlas Shrugged that was published in the December 28, 1957, issue. Technically, Meyer oversaw the section that printed the review. However, his newness in the position and the magazine’s desire to hold on to a figure of Chambers’s stature made any potential question of tempering the review moot. An intervention seemed unlikely for another reason: laissez-faire governed Meyer’s editing as well as his economics.

Chambers had already submitted a review of imprisoned Yugoslavian dissident Communist Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, which he demanded the magazine suppress, which it did, until he delivered part two of the review, which he never did. Based on the false supposition of a forthcoming completed Chambers review, Meyer rebuffed, as correspondence from September 1957 shows, attempts by the better-suited Slobodan Draskovich, a Yugoslavian who had witnessed his father’s murder by the Communists and who had spent several years in a Nazi concentration camp, to review his countryman’s book (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Rothbard had noted to Rand in his October 3 letter to her that John Chamberlain, a figure within National Review’s orbit who was far more amenable to Atlas Shrugged’s outlook, might instead review her book for the magazine if Chambers did not produce a review—information likely gleaned from conversations with Meyer (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16).

The idea of a Chamberlain rather than a Chambers review necessarily unleashes what-might-have-been, counterfactual histories of the American Right. But, in contrast to his handling of the Djilas volume, Chambers did submit a full review of Atlas Shrugged, one that forever alienated Rand from Buckley, Chambers, National Review, and much of the burgeoning conservative movement. The backup Chamberlain review, which ultimately appeared in The Freeman, prophetically described the book as “so deftly plotted, so excitingly paced, and so universal in its hero-villain intensity, that it will carry its message to thousands who would never be caught dead reading a textbook—or even a difficult article—on economics” (Chamberlain 1957, 56). While Chamberlain mentioned the author’s “dogmatic ethical hardness” (55), his article mainly consisted of elongated quotations from the novel—hardly the stuff to inspire visceral hatred of the type engendered by the Chambers piece.

From labeling Atlas Shrugged “a remarkably silly book” in the second paragraph to judging in the penultimate paragraph that it commands, “To a gas chamber—go,” the Chambers (1957, 594, 596) review struck as less criticism than condescension. For Chambers, Rand owed a debt not to Aristotle but to a less fashionable thinker: Friedrich Nietzsche. Chambers objected in a philosophical sense to what he dubbed materialism informing the work and in a literary sense to caricatures instead of characters populating its pages. He judged, “Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world” (595).

The review had the opposite effect on Rothbard of what Chambers had intended—at least initially. Rothbard’s early December letter to Meyer sounded in places like Chambers’s late December review for Meyer’s section in National Review. In that December 4, 1957, letter, Rothbard had described Objectivism to Meyer as “a little cult, whose ‘mass base’ consists of a corporals’ guard of stupid young Jewish girls,” that appeared “perilously close to outright insanity, if not over the brink” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Yet after reading Chambers’s harsh review, Rothbard rallied around the Randians. “I am surprised and chagrined to find that the only right-wing best-seller of the decade—Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged—has received its most unsympathetic and unfair review in the pages of National Review (Dec. 28),” Rothbard wrote Buckley on the same date in a missive that he shared with Meyer. “It is no wonder that our intellectual and cultural life is dominated by the Liberals” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). The three-page letter to Buckley resembled a three-page April 8, 1956, letter published by Commentary in June of that year in which Rothbard objected to Dwight Macdonald’s snobbish piece in the publication’s pages about the birth of a new magazine, National Review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Eventually, however, Rothbard adopted a position that, though substantively different, was tonally the same as the one expressed by Chambers so controversially in the pages of National Review.

The Moulding of “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult”

In his December 28, 1957, letter to Buckley, Rothbard cited Chambers’s comparisons of Rand with Adolf Hitler as the “most outlandish error” of his review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). He came around, judging that “the Rand line was totalitarian,” comparing the movement that coalesced around her to the ones that ultimately surrounded “Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao,” describing Nathaniel Branden as “the Führer,” and labeling Objectivism “a totalitarian Cult” (Rothbard [1972] 2025, 1989, 27–28). This conclusion did not seem a far cry from “To a gas chamber—go.”

Whittaker Chambers did not influence Rothbard here. Another National Review senior editor did. Frank Meyer and Murray Rothbard worked in the 1950s and early 1960s as the Volker Fund’s two analysts who reviewed scholarly journals and books. The magnum opus of each man, In Defense of Freedom by the former and Man, Economy, and State by the latter, came about through grants from Volker. Meyer, in his capacity as “Books, Arts, and Manners” editor at National Review, regularly ran reviews written by his friend during the late 1950s and early 1960s.[1] Even during a time when Rothbard’s attempts at political organizing brought him into an alliance with the New Left, he described Meyer in a 1967 article about him as the most libertarian-oriented National Review editor and in a March 4, 1969, letter to him as the only reliably profreedom voice, with the possible exception of John Chamberlain, within the conservative movement (Rothbard 1967; Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Their friendship stemmed not merely from political similarities. Both men hailed from Jewish backgrounds in the New York area, gained reputations as nocturnal creatures, and transformed their homes into salons by welcoming a long line of pilgrims who visited to discuss and debate over weekends and into the night. Rothbard liked and respected Meyer, and vice versa.

Rothbard first took public the private concerns which he had shared with his older friend and others in 1957 and 1958 in a 1972 publication. His “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult” cites Meyer by name, uses “cadre”—one of the former Communist’s favorite words—to make the point that Rand’s inner circle encountered esoteric teachings at odds with her exoteric ones, and references Meyer’s (1961) Moulding of Communists to demonstrate the similar indoctrination processes of Communists and Objectivists (Rothbard [1972] 2025). A curious style that omits dates and names for all but major events and leading figures imbues both Rothbard’s 1972 publication and Meyer’s 1961 book with a hazy quality. A careful reading of the two works reveals the former’s reliance in a broad, structural sense on the latter.

In The Moulding of Communists, a sort of anthropology of the folkways of the party’s vanguard, Meyer recalled a “great sureness” accompanying his embrace of Marxism. He noted that “no conceivable area of life, of action, even of speculation” existed in which the Marxist believes “his judicious use of theory cannot quickly yield certainties and clarities which fit with precision into the well-ordered pattern of his total outlook.” He cited the notion of instructing a physicist to abandon scientific principles in favor of Marxist guidance or the novelist to disregard the judgments of veterans in his field in favor of those from party leaders as examples of how fealty to the group eclipsed individual reason and wisdom (Meyer 1961, 52–53).

One detects echoes of this and other parts of Meyer’s analysis while reading “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.” Yet Rothbard delivered what he guessed amounted to the first negative review of The Moulding of Communists upon the issuance of a paperback edition in 1967. What Meyer described as special to communism, Rothbard characterized as prosaic. IBM, GM, and other large organizations all imposed conformity, he reasoned (Rothbard 1967, 25–26). Meyer, who had worked closely with Prince Mirsky, who later died in the gulag; Walter Ulbricht, who later erected the Berlin Wall; and Michael Straight, who later engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union, certainly witnessed the Communist Party’s “organization men” engage in activities foreign to IBM, GM, and the Randians (Flynn 2025, 43, 54, 70, 75–77). However, the book dealt mainly in generalities and, when citing specifics, did so vaguely. Rothbard (1967) consequently offered a ho-hum reaction to the rather staid expression of Meyer’s wild experience as a Communist from 1931 through 1945.

In The Moulding of Communists, Meyer detailed how the party broke up marriages when one partner lacked sufficient devotion not to the other but to the cause (Meyer 1961, 128–30). In his review, Rothbard characterized marital interference as normal throughout any large organization, where “even the choice of a wife is thoroughly checked and corrected by the criterion of whether or not she fits into the company executive mould. Yet Mr. Meyer seems to believe that only the Communist Party has presumed to dictate the private lives of its members!” In response to the outlining of a similar party expectation of insular, ideologically based friendships in The Moulding of Communists, Rothbard scoffed: “Now Good Heavens! Has Meyer never heard of friendships being formed on the basis of deeply-shared interests?” (Rothbard 1967, 25–26, 30).

The excuses Rothbard afforded Bolsheviks he did not extend to the Objectivists five years later: “In the manner of many cults, loyalty to the guru had to supersede loyalty to family and friends—typically the first personal crises for the fledgling Randian,” points out his vaguely memoirish 1972 broadside. “If non-Randian family and friends persisted in their heresies even after being hectored at some length by the young neophyte, they were then considered to be irrational and part of the Enemy and had to be abandoned. The same was true of spouses; many marriages were broken up by the cult leadership who sternly informed either the wife or the husband that their spouses were not sufficiently Randworthy” (Rothbard [1972] 2025). Rothbard later insisted that he and JoAnn had experienced this heavy-handed tactic (Rothbard 1989, 27–30). Meyer had experienced it, too, albeit in the attempt of the Communists to keep Elsie Meyer within the party by convincing her to ditch her unsalvageable Browderite husband (J. Meyer, pers. comm., July 11, 2023). Each exposé omitted this autobiographical detail even as they both discussed the general phenomenon.

“As in the case of all cults and sects, a particularly vital method for moulding the members and keeping them in line was maintaining their constant and unrelenting activity within the movement,” Rothbard noted in his 1972 tract. “Frank Meyer relates that Communists preserve their members from the dangerous practice of thinking on their own by keeping them in constant activity together with other Communists. He notes that, of the major Communist defectors in the United States, almost all defected only after a period of enforced isolation” (Rothbard [1972] 2025). This was certainly true of Meyer, who spent about two years away from the party in the army and then recuperating from surgeries necessitated by training injuries (Flynn 2025, 105–18). To illustrate the broad point of isolation breeding independence, Rothbard inserted himself in the story in his 1989 Liberty article, where he recalled that Nathaniel Branden had asked him in 1958 why he attended Objectivist meetings only two days a week (Rothbard 1989, 29).

Why did a man known for allegiance to principle zigzag so dramatically on both Ayn Rand and the obscure book by Frank S. Meyer that provided him a template for writing “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult”? In the case of the former, the twists and tacks primarily involved not principle, which he never sacrificed or renounced to ingratiate himself to the Collective, but personality. He countenanced differences in philosophy and what he called “bizarreries” in behavior because he believed Rand offered something special through Atlas Shrugged. Ultimately, his distaste for overbearing people who preached a hands-off policy drowned his earlier enthusiasm for the novel that brought them all together.

In the case of the latter, his shifting standard was possibly influenced by desired outcomes. In 1967, when he reviewed The Moulding of Communists, the Vietnam War was escalating—and Rothbard’s noticeable outrage over the state again taking human life was, too. Rothbard and Meyer agreed on so much. They disagreed on anti-communism. Meyer contemplated a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, shouted “Tear down the Berlin Wall” more than a quarter century before Ronald Reagan did, and offered “Invade Cuba!” as a Madison Square Garden response to the Cuban Missile Crisis (Ebert 1962; Newberry 1962; Judis 1988, 174). Rothbard, who came up through the Old Right, perhaps found it difficult to understand the passion of his friend, who had seen communism up close. A book that depicted Communists—the very people fighting the US government in Vietnam—as robotic ideologues programmed to abjectly follow orders inconvenienced the foreign policy point Rothbard then sought to stress. Meyer, whom Rothbard regarded as a libertarian in just about every respect save for his strident, bellicose anti-communism, probably irked him at that point more than ever (Rothbard 1981, 352–63). Whatever the reason, what Rothbard dismissed as humdrum in his review of The Moulding of Communists, he highlighted as tremendous injustice in “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.”

“A Calm Contempt”

Rothbard once exhorted Meyer to acknowledge Rand as a genius expositor of freedom. Then he used the template of Meyer’s Moulding of Communists to illustrate the various means that the Randians had employed to exert control over followers. What happened between his initial, glowing 1957 letter to Meyer on Rand and the publication of the Meyer-reliant “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult” in 1972? The available Rothbard writings do much to explain. The heretofore unavailable Rothbard letters to Meyer do as well. They also underscore that emotions, which Rothbard often explained motivated Rand (despite her philosophy’s eschewal of a reliance on them even in terms of musical preferences or romantic partners), also fueled him to some degree (Walker 1999, 105–39; B. Branden 1986, 363–64, 386–87, 395).

By mid-1958, the tolerance from Rothbard toward the Randians and the tolerance for Rothbard from the Randians had expired. Dispositive factors for the split included Rothbard’s refusal to turn over a recording of a skit performed by the Circle Bastiat that mocked the Collective; pressure on Rothbard to coax his wife to drop Christianity; Nathaniel Branden’s attempt to damage Rothbard professionally with plagiarism accusations; and Rothbard’s refusal, despite his stated enthusiasm for private courts, to show up for his Randian trial (Rothbard 1989, 27–32; Raimondo 2000, 123–30).

After Branden contacted academics in Rothbard’s field in 1958 with his bill of particulars, the young economist sought to damage the people who sought to damage him. “I just remembered that the Randians get a great number of their raw material channeled to them through Lyle Munson, who, whenever he hears of an admirer of Atlas, sends the person on to Nathan and his lectures,” Rothbard wrote to Meyer on August 24, 1958. “Behind his back, Ayn and Nathan of course dislike Munson greatly (a Catholic you know) but, despite their Higher Morality, are well willing to use him. It occurs to me that one blow you could strike for the anti-Randian, anti-Brandian cause, is to alert Lyle Munson about the nature of these bastards, and thus cut off much of their supply of potential converts” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). By summer’s dog days of 1958, the 98 percent Randian of less than a year earlier described the group with offensive language and sought ways to undermine their project. He now recruited others to “the anti-Randian, anti-Brandian cause.”

The extant correspondence between Frank and Elsie Meyer and Munson, who with his company, the Bookmailer, effectively operated a clearinghouse for right-wing titles and acted as a middleman between buyers and publishers, does not include a note of the type suggested by Rothbard. Meyer compiled a reading list, for light remuneration, for the Bookmailer in 1958, so the correspondence between the two appears heavier that year than in any other. Possibly, given Meyer’s preference for the telephone over the mail, the pair spoke about it; however, Meyer’s papers do not provide any evidence that such a conversation took place (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

In fact, Meyer’s papers provide little evidence that he gave much thought to Objectivism at all. The gauge of Meyer’s interest comes through the almost complete absence of Ayn Rand mentions within the tens of thousands of his letters extracted from the warehouse. Meyer’s elder son, John, subscribed to the Objectivist Newsletter as a teenager. He said in an interview for this article that he regarded Rand’s ideas more favorably than did his father. “I think he considered Rand significant,” John Meyer recollected, “but that there were errors. I am pretty sure that my father’s view was that, on balance, Rand was actually a positive influence.” That said, Frank Meyer regarded Objectivism as not under the broad umbrella of American conservatism, a sentiment Rand would undoubtedly have seconded (J. Meyer, pers. comm., June 16, 2025). Though she did not operate beyond his notice, she did operate outside his passion.

Almost three years after the petition to Meyer to alert Lyle Munson about his false friends, Rothbard remained scarred by his experience within the Collective. In 1961, he sent Meyer a venomous March 27, 1961, Newsweek article, which he described in an undated note as “precious to me” and emphasized that he meant it by petitioning for the article’s return (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). The article examined Ayn Rand and the courses on her theory that Nathaniel Branden oversaw in Manhattan. If the Whittaker Chambers review dripped with condescension, the Newsweek piece flowed with it. Therein, an unsubtle Leslie Hanscom, whom Rothbard identified as the author of the nonbylined piece, places The Fountainhead among the worst novels ever written and defends Rand from charges of Nazism by pointing out that she hates the majority of mankind impartially (Newsweek 1961, 104–5).[2] “God bless Mr. Hanscom—he did a beautiful job on The Rand—he really caught the spirit of the atmosphere, the cult, etc., extremely well,” he wrote Meyer. Just a few years earlier, Rothbard had spun off critical letters to National Review, the Saturday Review, the New Leader, and Commonweal for their negative articles on Rand not nearly as snarky as the Newsweek piece. By 1961, such negative publicity inspired celebratory notes to his friend in Woodstock including an insulting nickname of “The Rand,” which conjured up hive-brain imagery for a group espousing rationalism and individualism. “Newsweek did such a fine job of doing something that I wanted badly to see done,” he wrote, “that it has freed me from passionate hatred of The Rand, and transmuted it into a calm contempt” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

Passions indeed cooled. Contempt calmed. They did not, as Rothbard’s periodic revisitations of this unhappy period demonstrate, entirely dissipate. As he had concluded to Meyer in the August 24, 1958, letter, “To the ordinarily good slogan ‘no enemies to the Right,’ the Randians offer a striking exception” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

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The crime in Charlotte was breathtakingly horrific. Almost unimaginable.

But to the battalions of right wingers out there with their race-based crime charts, pointing the fingers and hooting about “the Blacks” and “Black fatigue,” etc. here’s a clue: The real villain in this whole thing is the State.

It was the State, starting well before the “Great Society” nonsense, that sought to intervene in the lives of American Blacks to “bring them up” to “our” level.

And “fight racism,” of course.

They only succeeded in destroying the one thing that actually helped bring Black people out of poverty and despair: Black Families.

Just as it was the state that passed the “Jim Crow” laws in the first place, when the State decided to clean up its act and make amends, it only succeeded in making matters worse.

The white “do-gooders” who substituted the State for the Black father through welfare and all manner of state-intervention have blood on their hands.

You like statistics? Have a look at how many Black kids grow up with Uncle Sam as their surrogate father.

And it’s easy to blame white liberals for the mayhem the State has unleashed on Black people for the past 70 or so years. But conservatives did next to nothing to make a coherent argument against the State interfering in our families. In fact they have been all for it.

The thug who killed that beautiful young woman should pay dearly for his crime. But the real hand on the knife was the State.

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America’s Untold Stories
With Eric Hunley and Mark Groubert

Ruth Paine: The Woman Who Took JFK Secrets to the Grave

Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley of America’s Untold Stories sit down with filmmaker Max Good following the death of Ruth Paine on August 31, 2025. As the woman who housed Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina Oswald in the weeks leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy, Ruth Paine has long been viewed as a key figure in the JFK mystery—and one who may have taken explosive secrets to her grave.

Max Good, director of The Assassination & Mrs. Paine, shares rare insights from his years researching and interviewing Ruth Paine for his acclaimed documentary. Was she just a well-meaning Quaker—or a knowing participant in a larger intelligence operation? Why did so many JFK researchers question her story for decades? And what questions remain now that she’s gone?

This episode dives deep into Ruth’s connection to the assassination, her CIA-linked relatives, and the lingering doubts surrounding her involvement.

The JFK case just lost a living witness—don’t miss this.

Find out more about “The Assassination and Mrs Paine” and how to watch it at https://www.jfkpaine.com/

Join us November 21st–23rd, 2025 in Dallas at JFK Lancer Conference (or Virtually)

Tickets now available at https://assassinationconference.com/
Virtual tickets start at $75.99
In-person tickets start at $149.99

Discount Code: Use UNTOLD10 at checkout for 10% off

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Senator Ron Johnson joins us today to discuss the official 9/11 conspiracy theory and the legitimate questions that he and many other Americans have about that story. We discuss Senator Johnson’s problems with the official 9/11 investigation, whether the Senate can and should hold new hearings on the subject, and what he will be discussing at the upcoming Turning the Tide: 9/11 Justice in 2025 conference in Washington, D.C. We also delve into harm caused by the experimental mRNA injections and the subsequent erosion of public trust in government and institutions.

The post Senator Ron Johnson Dares to Question 9/11 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Bill Madden wrote:

Please read what Gary has to say about central bank digital currency (CBDC) as total control of our currency by our rogue government will destroy our financial freedom.  Our dollar and all currencies in the world are fiat – and, they shouldn’t be. 

By reading Aristotle’s Definition of Money, you will learn that money must be a “store of value” and no currency in the world is a store of value.  As J.P. Morgan said: “Only gold is money.  Everything else is credit”.  If a currency is fiat paper or a fiat accounting entry backed by gold, anyone holding the fiat currency must be able to convert the fiat currency to gold at some official rate at any time.  Backing a currency with oil or some B.S. basket of other fiat currencies is government hocus pocus.

Voltaire said that fiat currency always returns to its true value of zero. 

Since there was major opposition to the CBDC, the government will attempt to force their control on us with the stable coin.  Interestingly, they intend to back up the fiat stable coin with fiat dollars.  Please remember what Voltaire said.

The Constitution directs the Congress to coin money with no mention of interest and, yet, we have been finessed into a central bank, the Federal Reserve Bank, creating our dollars from thin air and issuing the dollars into circulation with interest currently about one trillion dollars a year.  Adding insult to injury, we are paying interest on fake money.

 

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