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It’s the craziest thing in the world that we already have the technological ability to provide a decent standard of living for everyone on earth, but it doesn’t happen because it’s not profitable. We attained the greatest scientific achievement of all time and then did nothing with it. Our society is completely uninterested in it because capitalism is completely uninterested in it.

It’s just so insane how this doesn’t sit front and center in our attention all the time. There are people dying of starvation, exposure and preventable illnesses every single day for no good reason. Humanity became more than capable of ensuring that this never happened to anyone ever again, and just rode right past that stunning moment in history without even glancing up from its smartphone.

Can you imagine if we did that with any other major technological development?

“Oh yeah humans can fly now… but let’s not.”

“Hey humans now have the ability to share ideas and information in real time with anyone in the world, but whatever, let’s keep mailing letters instead.”

And I would argue that the ability to eliminate poverty and needless human suffering is a far more significant development than flight or the internet. But because it doesn’t generate value for shareholders, we cruised right past it going “Let’s make a chatbot that can generate an Alvin and the Chipmunks version of any song!”

This happened because caring for everyone was never the goal of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to extract labor from the working class and resources from the global south to sell goods and services at a rate that generates profit for the owners of the means of production. That’s it.

Capitalism has no wisdom. It will start wars to generate profit. It will have impoverished populations toiling in mines and sweatshops for pennies in order to generate profit. It will burn up critical drinking water supplies for AI data centers in order to generate profit. It will cut down the last acre of old-growth rainforest in order to generate profit. It will pollute the air, fill the oceans with plastic and kill all the insects if offloading the cost of industry onto the ecosystem helps generate profit.

The entire world is being consumed by an artificially imposed system which holds as its foundational premise that mass-scale human behavior should be driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake. It’s a mindless, planet-devouring machine of our own making. It is creating unfathomable destruction and suffering for terrestrial organisms of every species.

And it doesn’t have to be this way. There is nothing inscribed upon the fabric of the universe which says that we need to live under a system which causes us to feed our biosphere into the woodchipper so that billionaires can become trillionaires. Nowhere is it written in adamantine that that the many must always toil and suffer for the benefit of the few. Things are the way they are because of systems that were put in place by human beings, and human beings can replace those systems with different ones.

If we are to continue to survive on this planet, we’re going to have to move from systems which drive us to compete against our fellow humans and our fellow terrestrial organisms to systems that are driven by collaboration toward the good of all beings. Such systems would be entirely unprecedented by their nature, because unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. It would be unlike anything that’s ever been done before, but it is now a matter of existential importance that it be done.

We’re going to have to change. We’re going to have to become kinder. Gentler. Emotionally intelligent. Driven by the desire for the greater good instead of by fear and insecurity. We’re going to have to wake up. We’re going to have to become unlike anything we’ve ever been before.

Every species eventually hits an adapt-or-die juncture in its existence. This is ours. We must become a compassionate animal, or we will go the way of the dinosaur.

_________________

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The post The Craziest Thing in the World Is That We Could End Poverty, But We Don’t appeared first on LewRockwell.

I recently watched the latest television network special on the JFK assassination: “Truth and Lies: Who Killed JFK?” from ABC News. While the names and faces were different, it was indistinguishable from all the other disinfo pieces produced by CBS, NBC, the Discovery Channel, etc. in the past. I watched it so you don’t have to.

In 1963, there were only three television networks. On November 22, CBS, NBC, and ABC launched unprecedented coverage of President Kennedy being shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Not the actual shooting, of course. That was never shown. They set the template for all television news to come. They simply passed on official pronouncements from local law enforcement, the FBI, and the White House, which were consistently inconsistent and defied all common sense. NBC signed an agreement, in the wake of the biggest story of the twentieth century, to air only information that supported the government’s official narrative. Six decades ago, a bunch of “journalists” who are almost all long dead, agreed not to do what they were supposedly paid to do; investigate and question. Dan Rather was then a young reporter for the Dallas CBS affiliate. He was front and center, and breathlessly went on the air to relate how he’d seen a copy of the Zapruder film.

That home movie was taken by Dallas dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder. Giant “free press” outlet Life magazine paid Zapruder a huge sum of money for the film. Surely, you might think, this representative of the public’s right to know did so in order to beat the competition to the punch, and air the film is as many creative and profitable ways as possible. Actually, they buried it for twelve years. Suppressed it completely, like the Epstein Files. John D. Rockefeller would have been proud. If that seems like an odd thing to do, how odd was it that we had to rely on this grainy home video, to see exactly what happened in that presidential motorcade? There were a few other home movies of the event, including the never seen “Babushka film” (so called because the camerawoman wears a Russian scarf), which had the best view. Where was all the professional footage? The press was normally in front of every presidential motorcade, with their cameras trained on the smiling, handsome president. Not this time. Instead, they were packed into a bus several cars back in the motorcade.

Now, ABC News knew this in 1963. NBC knew it. CBS knew it. They also presumably knew that their ambitious local reporter Dan Rather was lying when he said that the Zapruder film showed JFK’s head going forward with great velocity. The film shows the exact opposite- the president’s head going back and to the left with tremendous force. Since the government claimed lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald was firing from above and behind, this obviously defied the laws of physics. They knew that there were multiple witnesses the government wasn’t interested in. At least six people who independently saw someone resembling Oswald running and entering a station wagon immediately after shots were fired. The Umbrella Man, pumping an open umbrella up and down on a sunny day. He was never identified, just like the Babushka Lady. The hole in the limo’s windshield. The absolute failure of the Secret Service to react to gunfire. Limo driver Bill Greer turning around instead of speeding away to safety.

The mainstream media knew all this and more. They knew that more people thought shots were fired from the front- the infamous Grassy Knoll- than from the building where Oswald worked. Look at the film- everyone is rushing for the Grassy Knoll. No witnesses are looking at, or interested in the Texas School Book Depository Building, where Oswald was a lowly paid worker. Only two mainstream journalists at the beginning were willing to actually do some digging. Jim Koethe was a Dallas Times Herald reporter, rumored to be working on a book about the case. Less then a year after the assassination, he was killed by a karate chop to the throat as he exited the shower. Really. “Natural causes,” I suppose. And Dorothy Kilgallen, famous panelist for the TV show What’s my Line? but also a real journalist, was deep into researching what would have been a blockbuster book on the case. Instead, she died under very suspicious circumstances in November, 1965. Her voluminous files were never found, and her best friend, who had once dated the young JFK, died a few days later.

Walter Cronkite, the trusty soul who provided the voice of the Giant Owl at the Bohemian Grove occult rituals for decades, and late in life bragged about being proud to be “seated at the right hand of Satan,” narrated a putrid 1967 CBS apologia for the Warren Report. Dan Rather followed suit in another comical “investigation” aired in the mid-1970s. NBC busied itself with discrediting Jim Garrison, and ABC aired a horrific 40th anniversary special in 2003, hosted by the Canadian high school dropout Peter Jennings. How do you go from high school dropout to national anchor? That’s even more impressive than college dropout turned billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. At any rate, the power of the medium was so strong that one of my sisters watched it and then told me that I was “wrong” about there being a conspiracy. How do you compete with that? The same fellow who dominated that 2003 special with his computer “animation,” Dale Myers, also dominates this new ABC special.

I argued with Dale Myers briefly decades ago on one of the biggest JFK assassination forums. With all due modesty, he really did run away with his cyber tail between his legs. But here I was, watching him spew out his nonsense again, with no one there to contradict him. ABC had nothing but shills for the official fairy tale as talking heads on this “investigative report.” Oliver Stone was there, sitting next to his good buddy Jim DiEugenio, whom I know and have interviewed. Stone was given a few sound bytes here or there, and DiEugenio had one short comment. They didn’t even flash his name onscreen. Jefferson Morley, who has been on a couple of shows with me, was there to provide his very truncated view of conspiracy, but even that was too much for ABC. Unless I missed something, he was only allowed one brief comment as well. There were the usual haggard “reporters,” who have absolutely no knowledge of the subject, and are ordered to spout the nonsensical party line. You want that six figure- hell, maybe seven figure Christmas bonus, don’t you?

There was a young Black man, who was so unimpressive that I’ve forgotten his name. He was listed as a “social media influencer.” Probably has millions of fake followers. At any rate, he was a blatant DEI plant, who was born decades after the event and had absolutely nothing pertinent to offer. To be fair, he was no worse than the worn out ABC News veterans who displayed their mind boggling ignorance for maybe 250,000 viewers. That’s the hilarious thing about network television; they don’t seem to understand how few people watch them now. Cronkite’s audience is as dead as he is, although hopefully nowhere near the right hand of Satan. And yet, I’m sure that ABC pays these “journalists” huge salaries. It’s a crony capitalist business model thing, you wouldn’t understand. Any number of alt media figures draw a larger audience than these dinosaur networks do. So they know they’re not reaching millions. And yet they continue to lie. They must lie. Deception seems to give them sustenance.

If they simply had given Stone, DiEugenio, and Morley an equal amount of screen time, as opposed to giving so much of it to the absurd arguments of Myers, then however many people actually watched it might have become at least a bit educated on the subject. But, as always, our state controlled media has to make certain that the playing field isn’t level. The referees are on their side. They make the rules. They rig the game. I’ve been down this JFK assassination rabbit hole for fifty years now. Not many are left who have seniority on me. But the research conferences aren’t interested in me, so you know the television networks aren’t going to call. I know the facts. I’ve studied this thing well enough to understand how big a lie the official story is. I’m not going to entertain notions of a limited plot, from “rogue” elements, or a benign coverup. This was a massive conspiracy, involving very powerful forces. Journalists not yet born in 1963 continue to peddle these lies. That’s how powerful they are.

Read the Whole Article

The post JFK: 62 Years and They’re Still Lying appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I hear people talk about saving Western values, I ask them which ones still exist. 

I asked a feminist that question and all she could come up with was “male toxicity.”  I had just listened to a NPR program on which two feminists talked about Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders being sexually harassed.  So why did the cheerleaders fight so hard to get that job?  If they thought that their scantily-clad bodies weren’t going to attract male attention, they must have been crazy.  And disappointed had no male noticed.

Recently over a beer I listened to a former police officer explain how police departments in Democrat cities were being put in the hands of women and blacks. He said that it was the black police chief and white female in charge of police training in Minneapolis who framed Derek Chauvin.  They wanted to get a white male cop and withheld evidence and possibly perjured themselves in order to achieve their goal.

I read recently and reported that “victimized” women now dominate most professions, law, media, education, health care,  and are closing in on corporate executives.  Today’s reality is toxic femininity.  Consider what it means for a “toxic” white male to have a feminist for a boss.  Or a black boss who was taught in school to hate white “slave lords” and aversive racists.  In the Western world everyone except a white heterosexual male can be a victim.  White males can only be oppressors.  This is why when you hear a male on NPR or the networks, he speaks very effete in order to suggest that he is queer and not a toxic male.

The feminists were set back by the assault on them by the transgender lobby.  But they are now back at work.  Italy has just passed a law against Femicide, which means the murder of women.  Why do feminists need this law when it is already against the law to murder any gender?  

I suppose the reason could be that a misogynist is worse than a murderer and that a man who kills a woman must be a misogynist and deserving of punishment by a special law that includes murder and being a misogynist.  I suppose we will soon see laws to forbid transgendercide, homosexualcide, but not for “toxic” white heterosexual men, who will be the one human safe to kill.  See this.

It seems curious that the law only applies to murder and not to rape.  For many years European governments, such as the British, Swedish, and Norwegian, have steadfastly refused to protect their women from rape by immigrant-invaders by enforcing the law prohibiting rape.  In effect, immigrant-invaders have acquired de facto rights to the bodies of white European women.  Possibly this indicates that people of color have higher status than white women in the Tower of Babel that now comprises Western civilization.  Not long ago I reported on a European court ruling that dismissed rape charges against two immigrant-invaders on the grounds that their rape of a white woman was just an expression of their cultural values and in their value system did not qualify as a crime.  So why isn’t murder just an expression of cultural values?

From the standpoint of  the international movement for the Elimination of Violence against Women, it seems that rape does not count as violence against women. The AP writer reporting the story lays the blame for violence against women on “Italy’s patriarchal culture.”   In other words, it is the white toxic male’s fault that immigrant-invaders rape white women.

 Does the law apply if the murderer of a woman is a woman?

What if an American black woman is raped by immigrant-invaders.  Is this the fault of white toxic males?

The post Feminists Find a New Complaint: Femicide appeared first on LewRockwell.

Modern western culture is an absolute anomaly in the history of human civilization. If one studies the principles and doctrines of nearly every other society and empire around the world, you will not find one that allows mass immigration of foreigners with contrary ideologies. You will not find one that allows foreigners to migrate without strict assimilation and loyalty.

From the Arab states, to China, South Korea, and Japan (until recently), to India and beyond, every culture maintains a strict sense of supremacy. There is an absolute expectation that newcomers will adapt to political policies, belief systems, social norms, etc. Most of the world for thousands of years has operated in this way. Only the modern west deviates and only the west is chastised as “xenophobic” for establishing barriers to foreign influence.

The US in particular has been typecast as a “global melting pot”, even though the vast majority of immigration up until the last half of the 20th century was from other western nations with similar beliefs and traditions. The melting pot theory was largely promoted and glorified by socialist elites in the early 1900s and was not a value of the common American.

Israel Zangwill (a British-Jewish Broadway playwright and devout socialist/supporter of feminism) popularized the term nationally in 1908. Even then, he spoke specifically about various European cultures coming to America.

The “melting pot” was never about inviting millions of people from the third-world with utterly exclusive and hostile ideologies. This notion did not become popular until recently.

What happened? When did it become America’s “duty” to adopt the problem children of the rest of the planet? And why is western civilization the only civilization that is expected to be submissive to the concept of multiculturalism?

This topic is at the very root of nearly every political conflict raging today. The ICE raids, the foreign travel bans, the use of the National Guard to deter organized interference of deportations, the recent terror attack in Washington DC, the increasing calls by Democrats and woke activists for violent “resistance” – All of it goes back to the notion that America is SUPPOSED to welcome anyone and everyone, legal or illegal, from any part of the world regardless of the threat they might pose to our society.

Progressives, for various reasons, furiously insist that America is THE melting pot. That this is our national heritage and that anyone who says otherwise is a “fascist” trying to fundamentally change our cultural foundations.

NGOs and globalist foundations spend billions of dollars to facilitate mass immigration to the US, often in violation of the will of the voting public and the administrations in power. They also fund the majority of activist groups trying to disrupt deportations.

Global governance organizations like the UN spend vast sums of money to enable illegal immigration into the US, providing subsidies, maps, and legal advice to migrants seeking to sneak into America or exploit loopholes for temporary residency.

A number of foreign governments (mainly India and Mexico) lobby the US government to open the floodgates, expanding visa programs and allowing non-citizens to take American jobs, housing and other resources.

The “melting pot” has been poisoned with a rancid cocktail of nefarious agendas. Any positive vestiges of the ideal have been lost. Any value the melting pot might have once had is gone. All that is left is an army of parasites looking for blood; a swarm of mosquitoes rushing in to latch onto a vein. Few if any of these people or institutions care about the “American Dream”, they only see the US as an easy target ripe for conquest.

We have made ourselves an easy target. Our faith in liberalism has led us down a dark path of suicidal empathy. We naively assumed that “tolerance” is a virtue; it is not. Tolerance is a luxury – A luxury for the ultra wealthy and the extraordinarily dimwitted.

No other culture on Earth worships tolerance like westerners do, and there’s a good reason for that. In the case of the US, our ancestors already invested their blood and tears and treasure into this nation to make it the most wealthy and successful in the world. We have been living off their labors for generations.

The people that want to give that civilizational wealth away are people who lack respect for the trials and tribulations required to obtain it.

Another problem is that our tolerance often goes unappreciated because it is not a virtue for any other culture, either. The third world sees tolerance as weakness and opportunity. Many foreign social belief systems, from Judaism, to Hinduism to Islam, carry an ancient code of tribalism, an insider/outsider mentality of supremacy which is admonished in modern western thought but tolerated in immigrants.

For third worlders, a culture which is tolerant is fair game for exploitation and perhaps even invasion. You will consistently see foreign groups in the US argue that they are indeed American, but at the same time they will declare allegiance to their nation of origin. Their love of America is based on their love of the WEALTH they can derive from America. They’re laughing all the way to the closest Western Union.

Most have no interest in our principles and our heritage. They see America as an economic zone, a global commons with resources to be tapped. In other words, foreigners see immigration as a fishing business, a means to gain access to a largely unprotected wealth pool created by a culture with more historic merit and more success. They have been gathering their nets for quite some time.

In 2024 the US government under Joe Biden spent over $72 billion on foreign aid with another $26 billion in supplementals. India and Mexico transfer around $100 billion total in remittance from the US each year (foreign workers sending money back home). A number of officials with ethnic roots in these countries regularly argue in favor of continued visas and mass immigration while claiming it’s “for the good of Americans.”

Again, their loyalty is to their culture of origin first and America last.

For progressives and globalists immigration is also about wealth, primarily the redistribution of it from middle-class and upper-class Americans into foreign coffers. They see the common American people (conservatives) as a thorn in their side that needs to be removed. The draining of our buying power and living standards is a stepping stone to cultural deconstruction.

Mass immigration is a tool for social change. Multiculturalism erases national pride and the concept of protected borders. For if we are overwhelmed by the third world, who is going to care about maintaining the borders of our nation anymore? We might as well let the whole thing collapse, right?

They openly admit to this agenda, it’s not a secret. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

Black-pilled nihilists will say that we’ll “do nothing”, but I’m not really interested in the opinions of conservatives who have given up. They are just as responsible for our troubles as progressives. They are weaklings and cowards.

Donald Trump’s recent declaration of a ban on third world immigration is at least bringing the topic to the average American dinner table. It’s been a long time since we had a real national reexamination of the “melting pot” idea. And, from my observations the use of mass deportations is gathering vast support among the American public.

I really don’t think officials living in the bubble of DC or mainstream journalists suffering from delusions of influence realize just how deep the anger goes when it comes to foreign exploitation and foreign influence over American society. I would suggest that there are tens of millions of patriots on the verge of walking out the door tomorrow to wage war on leftists and illegal immigrants should the obstructions of deportations continue.

The naysayers just don’t get how fed up people are becoming. Third world enclaves in places like Minneapolis and Dearborne don’t get it, either. Our tolerance is rapidly melting away, faster than the melting pot can be filled. The era of liberalism is over. The era of western multiculturalism is about to be stamped out. Mark my words, we are on the precipice of a reckoning.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post America’s Poison Melting Pot and the Luxury of Tolerance appeared first on LewRockwell.

The government shutdown “proved an argument that conservatives have been making for 45 years: The U.S. Department of Education is mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states.” The most significant thing about this statement in a November 16 USA Today editorial is not its substance. As the editorial’s author points out, the argument presented is not new.

The most significant thing about the statement is that its author is Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Unlike many in DC, Secretary McMahon backs up her words with action. She is dismantling the Department of Education, fulfilling one of President Trump’s campaign promises.

Since President Trump and Secretary McMahon cannot close the department absent authorizing legislation — legislation that appears unlikely to pass in the current Congress, Secretary McMahon is gutting the department by transferring responsibility for most of its functions to other parts of the government. Secretary McMahon has moved to the Labor Department the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which administers 27 K-12 grant programs, and the office of Postsecondary Education, which administers 14 programs aimed at helping college students, as well as several other programs. The Interior Department will manage the Indian education program, while the State Department will manage the federal foreign language education program. The Department of Education will, for the time being, ensure schools are complying with federal civil rights laws.

Spreading education programs among several different departments may reduce spending. For example, it could spur Congress to stop wasting millions of dollars a year on public relations for the Education Department. However, it does not necessarily reduce federal involvement in education. Therefore, those of us committed to restoring control over education to local communities must continue to advocate for eliminating all federal education programs. The billions spent by the federal government on “improving” education have had the opposite effect. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 72 percent of American eighth graders are below proficient in math and 70 percent are below proficient in reading.

America’s education system cannot be fixed by another No Child Left Behind style reform imposed on local schools by federal politicians and bureaucrats. Instead, the only way to “fix” American education is to restore control to local communities, school boards, and — most of all — parents.

This is why all who care about quality education should celebrate the continued growth of homeschooling. According to Angela R. Watson of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, homeschooling in the 2024-25 school year “continued to grow across the United States, increasing at an average rate of 5.4 percent.”

Parents looking for a homeschooling curriculum incorporating the ideas of liberty should consider my online curriculum. My curriculum provides students with a solid education in history, literature, mathematics, and the sciences. It also gives students the opportunity to create their own websites and internet-based businesses. This provides students with “real world” entrepreneurial experience that will be useful no matter what career paths they choose.

The curriculum is designed to be self-taught, with students helping, and learning from, each other via online forums. Starting in the fourth grade, students are required to write at least one essay a week. Students also take a course in public speaking.

The curriculum emphasizes the history, philosophy, and economics of liberty, but it never substitutes indoctrination for education. The goal is to produce students with superior critical thinking skills. If you think my curriculum may meet the needs of your child, please visit www.RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information.

The post Progress in the Fight for Educational Freedom appeared first on LewRockwell.

At least 10 children have died because of the COVID shots, according to a recently publicized email from Trump Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials.

“At least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” FDA Chief Medical Officer Vinay Prasad wrote on Friday in an email to staff, obtained by The Daily Caller.

“This is a profound revelation. For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children,” Prasad said in the memo.

The finding corroborates that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recently linked at least 25 pediatric deaths to the COVID shot, via information from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Both counts likely significantly underestimate the real number of pediatric deaths from the shots, considering that studies have found vaccine injuries have been seriously underreported to VAERS.

In his Friday memo, Prasad ripped the Biden administration for pressuring the injection of these experimental mRNA shots into children.

“Healthy young children who faced tremendously low risk of death were coerced, at the behest of the Biden administration, via school and work mandates, to receive a vaccine that could result in death,” wrote Prasad.

“In many cases, such mandates were harmful. It is difficult to read cases where kids aged 7 to 16 may be dead as a result of covid vaccines.”

The disturbing admission by the Trump administration’s health agency highlights the silence of the Biden administration about these deaths and raises further questions about its integrity or lack thereof.

“Why did it take until 2025 to perform this analysis, and take necessary further actions? Deaths were reported between 2021 and 2024, and ignored for years,” wrote Prasad. He acknowledged that the vaccines potentially killed more children on balance, considering that they had virtually no risk of dying from COVID.

“The truth is we do not know if we saved lives on balance,” he wrote. “It is horrifying to consider that the US vaccine regulation, including our actions, may have harmed more children than we saved. This requires humility and introspection.”

The Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) will reportedly strengthen its safety protocols for vaccines, including by requiring more clinical trials as opposed to relying on antibody laboratory studies, modifying the annual flu vaccine release, and examining the effect of administering multiple vaccines in one round.

This year, the CDC removed COVID shots from its recommended “vaccines” for healthy children. A CDC panel had voted in 2022 to add the COVID shots to the childhood immunization schedule despite their experimental nature and the fact that they were produced in a fraction of the time ordinarily required to bring a vaccine to market.

The push for COVID shots for children was spearheaded at least in part by CBER Director Peter Marks, who pushed for full approval of the COVID shots even for the young and healthy and laid the foundation for COVID shot mandates.

A large, growing body of evidence shows that the mRNA shots were dangerous to human health in a wide variety of ways and caused deaths at a rate far exceeding usual safety standards for vaccines. As Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, an ear, nose and throat specialist in Houston, Texas, explained to Tucker Carlson in April:

Normally, the FDA will put a black box warning on a medication if there have been five deaths. They will pull it off the market if there have been 50. Well, according to VAERS, (the) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – and it’s vastly under-reported, which I have seen firsthand – there have been 38,000 deaths from these COVID shots.

That number has since increased, according to VAERS, which now reports 38,773 deaths, 221,257 hospitalizations, 22,362 heart attacks, and 29,012 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis due to the COVID shot as of August 29, among other ailments.

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post Trump FDA Says COVID Shots ‘Killed’ at Least 10 Children, Promises New Vaccine Safeguards appeared first on LewRockwell.

My post on Trump’s war on Venezuela two days ago mentioned a Washington Post report (archived) about a war crime directly ordered by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth:

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

The Intercept had previously reported (archived) the second strike the U.S. military had launched against survivors:

People on board the boat off the coast of Venezuela that the U.S. military destroyed last Tuesday were said to have survived an initial strike, according to two American officials familiar with the matter. They were then killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.
…
Last week, a high-ranking Pentagon official who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity said that the strike in the Caribbean was a criminal attack on civilians and said that the Trump administration paved the way for it by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force earlier this year.

“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the War Department official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”

The high-ranking Pentagon official is correct in that the strikes against boats in international waters are criminal attacks on civilians.

But the killing of survivors of such strikes is more than that. It is undoubtedly a war crime.

Hegseth’s order to kill survivors was clearly illegal. It was the duty of the soldiers in the line of command to reject the order. That they have not done so but followed the order is in itself a war crime.

How do we know this?

Because the Department of Defense’s LAW OF WAR MANUAL (LOWM) (pdf) says so:

18.3 DUTIES OF INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF THE ARMED FORCES

Each member of the armed services has a duty to: (1) comply with the law of war in good faith; and (2) refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit violations of the law of war.

Further down the Manual uses the exact case in question,  an order to kill survivors at sea, as an example of an illegal order:

18.3.2 Refuse to Comply With Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations.
Members of the armed forces must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations. In addition, orders should not be construed to authorize implicitly violations of law of war.

18.3.2.1 Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations.
The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.27

Every soldier down the line of command, from the commanding general receiving Hegseth’s verbal order down to the guys who pushed the button to launch the missile had the duty to reject the order. Those who have not done so are themselves guilty.

The footnote in 18.3.2.1 points to the case of the Canadian hospital ship HMHS Llandovery Castle which on 27 June 1918 had been torpedoed by a German U-Boot:

The sinking was the deadliest Canadian naval disaster of the war. 234 doctors, nurses, members of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, soldiers and seamen died in the sinking and subsequent machine-gunning of lifeboats.

In 1921 a German court sentenced two officers to years in prison because they had followed the illegal order of the submarine’s captain, Helmut Brümmer-Patzig, to kill the survivors.

According to the footnote in the LoWM the court said:

“It is certainly to be urged in favor of the military subordinates, that they are under no obligation to question the order of their superior officer, and they can count upon its legality. But no such confidence can be held to exist, if such an order is universally known to everybody, including also the accused, to be without any doubt whatever against the law. This happens only in rare and exceptional cases. But this case was precisely one of them, for in the present instance, it was perfectly clear to the accused that killing defenceless people in the life-boats could be nothing else but a breach of the law. As naval officers by profession they were well aware, as the naval expert Saalwiachter has strikingly stated, that one is not legally authorized to kill defenceless people. They well knew that this was the case here. They quickly found out the facts by questioning the occupants in the boats when these were stopped. They could only have gathered, from the order given by Patzig, that he wished to make use of his subordinates to carry out a breach of the law. They should, therefore, have refused to obey.”

It can not be more clear. The DoD’s Law of Warfare manual is using the case of killing survivors at sea as an example of an illegal order. Today the court would say:

“They could only have gathered, from the order given by Hedseth, that he wished to make use of his subordinates to carry out a breach of the law. They should, therefore, have refused to obey.”

There are signs that one commanding officer did his duty and refused to execute Hegseth’s illegal order. On October 16 the U.S. military attacked another, the sixth, vessel. Two of the four people on board survived and were rescued:

President Trump said that the two survivors of a U.S. military strike Thursday on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea will be returned to their countries of origin.
…
One survivor is from Ecuador and the other is from Colombia.

Thursday’s strike marks the sixth known boat attack in the area since last month — and the first known attack with survivors. Mr. Trump said the strike was against a submarine carrying mostly fentanyl and other illegal narcotics.
…
A Navy helicopter transported the survivors from the semi-submersible to a Navy ship, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to CBS News on Friday.

“It is the custom of the sea to save people who are at risk in international waters. You don’t sort of sail on. That’s against every principle of naval activity,” Eugene R. Fidell, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, told CBS News on Friday. “You’re supposed to save people, even though the people here are people who are only in danger because the U.S. was attempting to kill them.”

On the very same day those survivors were rescued, October 16, the DoD announced that the head of its Southern Command was ‘stepping down’:

The military commander overseeing the Pentagon’s escalating attacks against boats in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration says are smuggling drugs is stepping down, three U.S. officials said Thursday.

The officer, Adm. Alvin Holsey, is leaving his job as head of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees all operations in Central and South America, even as the Pentagon has rapidly built up some 10,000 forces in the region in what it says is a major counterdrug and counterterrorism mission.

It was unclear why Holsey is leaving now, less than a year into his tenure, and in the midst of the biggest operation in his 37-year career. But one of the U.S. officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said that Holsey had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.

It now seems clear that Admiral Holsey got fired for not following Hegseth’s illegal order and for ordering the rescue of the survivors of the strike.

Hegseth meanwhile reveals himself as veritable psychopath:

Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth – 0:37 UTC · Dec 1, 2025

For your Christmas wish list…

@U.S. Southern Command

There are signs that Congress is waking up to the issue (archived) and that Hegseth’s order may well have real consequences for him:

A top Republican and Democrats in Congress suggested on Sunday that American military officials might have committed a war crime in President Trump’s offensive against boats in the Caribbean after a news report said that during one such attack, a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors.
…
The lawmakers’ comments came after top Republicans and Democrats on the two congressional committees overseeing the Pentagon vowed over the weekend to increase their scrutiny of U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean after the report. Mr. Turner said the [Washington Post] article had only sharpened lawmakers’ already grave questions about the operation.

The senators and member of congress should grow a spine and use their power over the budget to reign in the president. The secretary of defense must be fired from his position. Admiral Holsey must be reinstate as Southern Command.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Soldiers Have ‘Duty To Refuse’ Hegseth’s Order To Commit War Crimes appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Beethoven.” Berthold Genzmer (ca. 1890).

December 16 is a special anniversary, a significant one in the history of our Western Christian civilization, but one that should not be forgotten. On that date, 255 years ago in 1770, the musician and composer Ludwig van Beethoven was born in the city of Cologne (Koln) in the Rhineland in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. Traveling to Vienna as a young man, he spent much of his life there as one of the greatest composers of music of all time. His compositions and his persona continue to resound through the ages—as long as there is a Western and Christian culture to admire and celebrate.

Recently, I came upon a study of his life, a study that attempts to revise some of the commonly-held misconceptions about Beethoven, that somehow he was wrapped up in the secular ideals of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and even its anti-religious, or anti-Catholic ideas.

Written by Nicholas Junkai Chong (Columbia University, 2016), the work is a PhD dissertation which is titled “Beethoven’s Catholicism: A Reconsideration” and it makes a number of significant points, among which that Beethoven was much closer in many of his views to the post-Napoleonic traditionalist Restoration than many other chroniclers have admitted. Indeed, we remember the story of his original dedication of his famous “Eroica” symphony (no. 3) to Napoleon, whom he had thought would “liberate” Europe, but then tore that dedication up, instead dedicating the work to Prince Lobkowicz, his patron, certainly no liberal. But that is just one instance, and there are others, including long passages from his letters, his Tagebuch [“Diary”], and the Heiligenstadt Testament, and books that he read by contemporary (and orthodox) theologians, that indicate that his early enthusiasm for the ideals of “liberté” and “egalité” were tempered by an abiding faith that eventually triumphed over many of his earlier illusions. And to this we must add his solid loyalty to the Habsburg Empire and its Kaiser.

Cultural giants like Beethoven have made precious contributions to our Western Christian heritage, a heritage that is critically threatened in our time by demonic and Gnostic demiurges who seek nothing less than the complete perversion of two millennia of Christian culture which brought together the salvific Gift of the Old Testament Hebrews, the philosophy of ancient Greece, and the classical traditions of Rome.

Beethoven was an integral part of that continuum. And like so many others who have contributed to our inherited corpus of art, music, architecture, and literature, he stands above the ages athwart the disintegration and the frenzied assaults on what the poet William Butler Yeats called (in his poem, “The Second Coming”) the “rocking cradle” of Bethlehem—that “rocking cradle” of the Christ from which our culture proceeds.

Just as the post-Marxist and Progressivist academics and mobs and their allies in our cowardly political and media elites wish to put all reminders of our past—those monuments and symbols—whether Confederate or colonial, in remote museums, safely away from the inquiring eyes of most of our citizens, so, too, those epigones of Evil, those cultural vandals who would destroy our inheritance, wish to lock up our sacred traditions of music, literature, and the arts away from our population for whom that inheritance is a birthright. Or, separate them and make them practically inaccessible. And, far worse, “re-interpret” them using new templates based entirely on “race” and “gender”—thus, “women’s studies” which views literature and music through the lens of “masculine oppression” and “toxic masculinity” throughout the ages.

In December 1940, at the end of a live national Saturday matinee broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Gaetano Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment, as author Paul Jackson (in his volume, Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met) recounts, the famous soprano Lily Pons advanced to the front of the stage, and holding a French flag aloft, sang “La Marseillaise.” The audience erupted in emotional enthusiasm…not just there in New York, but across the entire nation where as many as forty million listeners tuned in and heard her salute to a defeated France. Forty million Americans in every state and territory (out of around 130 million citizens) were united not only in remembering fallen France, but by and in a culture and musical tradition they all shared, and, even if not devotees of opera, which they at least understood to be part of their precious cultural patrimony.

Today that unity no longer exists. It has been rent asunder by the very guardians of that cultural inheritance, those entrusted with its care and transmission, who have succumbed to the Dark Lord and the enticements that emit from the foulest voices and most fetid enemies of our civilization.

It was the Roman poet Juvenal two millennia ago in his Satires who wrote, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?,” which translated means: “Who is guarding us against the guardians?” Today we must ask the same questions: Who is guarding us against the cabal of our Intelligence Agencies which now serve as instruments of the Deep State?—Who is guarding us against a political class bought and paid for by globalists who have no loyalty to country or to faith, but rather only to their secularized vision of a global Godless Utopia?—Who is guarding us against the academic elites who control our educational system and pollute the minds of our children?—Who is guarding us against the feculent pollution of our cultural and artistic heritage?

For decades—since before the Second World War—increasingly powerful Elites have controlled the destiny of the American nation. And this dominance has meant not just the revolutionary overthrowal of the traditional political order, but also the veritable abortion of our cultural heritage.

After an initial enthusiasm for and flirtation with what he thought Napoleon might bring to Europe, Beethoven became a strong supporter of the Habsburg monarchy…and an avowed foe of the Napoleonic destruction of the Old Order. He understood what that meant, just as the Blessed Pius IX after the Revolution of 1848 understood the deleterious effects of liberalism and its fanatical desire to destroy Christian civilization.

In 1813 to celebrate the great victory of the Marquess (later Duke) of Wellington over the French at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain (June 21, 1813), Beethoven composed a wonderful little ceremonial piece—“Wellington’s Victory”—a kind of short audially evocative symphonic poem depicting that momentous battle that freed Spain from Napoleonic tyranny. In it he interpolated both French and British airs and songs, including a rousing version of “Rule, Britannia!” (The Brits were on the “good” side back then.) It stands as a musical symbol of both the cultural response that Christian Europe then offered to “the great thief of Europe” as well as a paean to military triumph over the forces of Revolution.

Today both Europe and the United States appear prostrate before the even more frenzied offspring of those 19th century revolutionaries. Let us, then, in 2026 seize upon the signs of Hope—those signs of contradiction against Modernism and Progressivism—and, like our ancestors, like Wellington and, yes, like a Beethoven with the scales removed from his eyes, raise up the banners of Christ the King.

While advancing once more beneath His Cross, we intone the Laudes Regiae: “Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!” chanted at the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day in the year 800 A.D. And we could do no better than letting “Wellington’s Victory” become our symphonic clarion call of militant crusade against our powerful enemies who seek nothing less than the extinction of our culture, our faith and us.

The post Beethoven, the Duke of Wellington, and the Laudes Regiae appeared first on LewRockwell.

Michael Wolff is being pilloried, and although he’s a friend, he deserves some of it because of his dealings with the arch pimp and blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein. For any of you traveling abroad in North Korea, what Wolff has done is play uncle to the blackmailer-pimp, no longer with us, thank God. Michael Wolff has become rich by writing books—hatchet jobs, actually—on Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump. Media types don’t like Rupert because his newspapers are mostly conservative. Media types are usually physically ugly and politically left-wing. Ergo, they don’t agree with Rupert and wish he had never come over to these shores and rescued papers like the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. He also started Fox News, and Fox dominates not only the news cycle but also late-night shows. If Fox didn’t exist, a certain Queens real estate developer would not be living in D.C. as I write. Hence Michael Wolff does not like Rupert. But I do, and I also like The Donald, another person Michael Wolff really dislikes. But I will forgive Michael Wolff anything because of his beautiful wife, Victoria, and I do accept the fact that I’m a sucker for any person of the feminine sex who happens to be beautiful. I simply can’t help it, despite years of trying to resist it.

“What I find amusing is how desperate the media in general and the Times in particular are to try to connect Trump with Epstein.”

Neither Rupert—my onetime boss at the New York Post and London’s Sunday Times—nor The Donald fell for Epstein’s tricks, despite Michael’s advice to the pimp and blackmailer. Both men are too smart and have been around the quad for too long, as they say, to fall for them. Rupert would not be caught dead in the moral sewer that was Epstein. I wish I could say the same for The Donald and Michael Wolff, but however hard Michael tries, along with Trump haters like the Times and New Yorker types, The Donald did not ever get involved with Epstein except having his picture taken at various crappy lowlife parties, now described by the know-nothing media as glamorous shindigs. The onetime head of Harvard, Summers, yes, onetime world’s richest man Gates, yes, onetime president of the Unites States Clinton, maybe, former head of Apollo Leon Black, definitely, but not The Donald. Michael Wolff wanted to entrap Trump with the scumbag but never managed it. He made a fortune trying, though. Good for you, Michael, but it’s a pity your name comes up with that of Epstein.

What I find amusing is how desperate the media in general and the Times in particular are to try to connect Trump with Epstein. Ms. Giuffre’s book is now considered the Bible by the Brit hacks who managed to bring down Andrew Windsor. The fact that she took 12 million greenbacks from him, and after that committed suicide, has not made her story at all suspect to the Brits. The most ignored passage in her book is the one that absolves Trump, the one stating that he acted like the perfect gentleman as far as she was concerned. It must be very frustrating for all those ugly little people at the Times, being unable to hang a crime on Trump. Some of them might even take out their frustrations on their long-suffering, homely wives. The one I feel most sorry for is Summers, an innocent about women who only asked for advice. Summers should not have resigned any post because he did nothing wrong.

Wolff advised Epstein to let Trump hang himself. The Donald is too smart for that. I have written this before, but here it goes once again: A woman I was seeing on the side long ago was asked by Epstein about me. He wanted to meet me. I told her to get lost. Some time later, while sitting in a port-side café in Saint-Tropez, my wife and I were approached by Ghislaine Maxwell, whom I knew from London in the past. She almost begged us to attend a party she was giving. My wife said we were about to sail away, and we actually did. There was no way we would ever be seen with such lowlifes.

So here is my question: How could someone like Leon Black, a shark if there ever was one, pay millions to the pimp Epstein for market info? It had to do with you-know-what, as Epstein was a con man and the shark knew more about markets than Epstein could ever hope to. I can see Larry Summers being taken in because as an academic he’s an innocent where the fair sex is concerned. Gates, ditto. Never mind. The best thing Epstein ever did was to do himself in, but leave it to the left-wing media to reach for straws. Poor things, they’ve got three more years of Trump. Maybe a Russian connection or some hooker’s claims might save them. They live in hope.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post Crying Wolff appeared first on LewRockwell.

How many who voted for Trump would have voted for him if Trump had told them they’d get more new wars?

We are apparently on the cusp of another one, with Venezuela. It has the ring-echo of Ronald Reagan’s war with Grenada, if anyone remembers that. That war was more like a stomp – of a Caribbean island that was a nation in the same sense that a kid’s lemonaid stand is a business. Anyhow, Reagan didn’t run on ending wars. Trump did. So why is he starting them – and why with Venezuela?

Two reasons come to mind – and there are probably others.

The first is that Trump sees war – as all Maximum Leader types do – as good because it tends to rouse the manufactured patriotism of the populace, which serves to distract them from the problems besetting them and to get them to forget that the Maximum Leader is the cause of their problems. Herman Goring had much to say about this. The Chimp may have actually read about what Goring said, or had Dick Cheney read it to him.

Republican voters – in the main – are very susceptible to War Fever. This ought not to be especially surprising given the origins of the Republican Party, which was founded by the man who waged war against Americans who foolishly took seriously that stuff about self-government and consent of the governed. Lincoln and the Republicans schooled Americans about the truth of that, to the accompaniment of belligerent, crusader anthems – My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

Today’s Republicans favor a mellower soundtrack – I’m proud to be an American! Where at least I know I’m free! – that’s as delusional as it is syrupy. But – then and now – the rank and file rally ’round the flag and what they are told it stands for.

But Reagan’s splendid little wars – there was also the Libyan Business – took place at a time when Americans were able to afford the rah-rah’ing because they could afford groceries as well as new cars and a home in the suburbs. Groceries are becoming a kind of luxury for many and a house something akin to what the idea of someday owning a mansion (and a yacht) was back when having a million bucks’ net worth meant you were rich rather than upper middle class.

Today’s Americans are as sick of war – and paying for them – as they are of the sight of people still wearing “masks.” Yet they discover to their astonishment that they might as well have voted for Biden and put the “masks” back on again – insofar as the wars are concerned. Trump must be either catastrophically unaware of how little the American people – especially his base – want another war, or he is aware and just doesn’t care. The latter – if it is so – suggest that Trump may be on the verge of becoming a Maximum Leader in fact rather than just de facto. Maximum Leaders just do as they please, which is pretty much what Trump has been doing. Maybe he is on the cusp of making it official, as by declaring an insurrection – and then who cares what Americans think?

Project Esther is not a fictional story. Nor is Palantir unreal. Same goes for the new Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. Did Trump voters vote for that?

Does it matter that they didn’t? might be a better way to ask that question.

There’s another reason why Trump might be taking us to war against Venezuela, which by the way would be something akin to what National Socialist Germany did when it went to war against Poland (alongside the Soviet Union, but Americans tend not to be aware of that fact). When National Socialist Germany did it, it was said to be a war crime – punishable by death, for the leaders of National Socialist Germany. It is apparently something else when America’s leaders do it. Just ask The Chimp.

Back to the reason for the apparently imminent attack on Venezuela, which has not attacked nor threatened to attack America. Not militarily. But Maduro – the Maximum Leader of Venezuela – has promised to “ditch” the dollar – and that is a far worse threat to America’s Maximum Leader. Venezuela, which is a huge producer of oil, wants to accept other currencies as payment and that paints a target on his back. Or rectum.

Ask Gaddafi about that.

None of this is going to make America Great Again. But that’s as beside the point as the rest of Trump’s promises.

We bought the ticket – and now it’s time to take the ride.

This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.

The post Another War . . . appeared first on LewRockwell.

If we’ve learned anything about the so-called “leaders” of Europe in recent years, they are consummate virtue signalers, and like all virtue signalers, they do it to cloak their true motives. The entire architecture of the E.U. and its member nations ensures that the governments remain steadfastly unaccountable to the people they are supposed to represent.

Europe’s leaders present themselves as being chiefly concerned with the moral and ideological dimensions of politics. Rarely if ever do they speak about the E.U.’s precarious financial state.

As John Cochrane at the Hoover Institute recently characterized it:

The 2010 sovereign debt crisis was the earthquake. The ECB, feeling it was the only game in town, intervened on a large scale, including making large sovereign-bond purchases and lending to banks to fund their sovereign-bond purchases. Then-ECB president Mario Draghi famously pledged “whatever it takes.”

Eventually, an adjustment-program mechanism emerged, allowing support with conditionality and imposing some losses on some creditors. But this institutional reform later fell from grace, and has been crowded out by other ECB interventions starting in the early 2020s. Self-imposed rules on bond purchases weakened with each new intervention.

Bond buying in the quantitative-easing era further enlarged the ECB’s sovereign bond holdings, and surged during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The ECB introduced “flexibility” in purchases to keep sovereign spreads from rising. Inflation climbed sharply starting in 2021 while the ECB continued bond purchases and kept rates low. That surge undermined confidence that the bank could and would control inflation, making any future crisis more unstable.

So here we are. Europe is in a fragile state. Overregulation and bureaucracy stifle innovation and growth. Member states’ debts have risen dramatically. The ECB holds large portfolios of sovereign bonds, and is widely expected to buy more anytime yields or spreads threaten to rise. Banks remain stuffed with sovereign debt, so any sovereign crisis becomes a bank crisis.

The next crisis will challenge European sovereign debts. That crisis may be bigger than even the ECB can handle without chaotic defaults, financial meltdown, or sharp inflation.

Increasingly I wonder if guys who run the ECB (European Central Bank) are far more nervous than they would ever admit to the European press.

The ECB is located in Frankfurt, Germany. The city’s once famous newspaper—the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—is now staffed by amazingly sophomoric columnists who rarely if ever question official policy about anything.

I suspect that if one examines Europe’s negotiations with Ukraine’s oligarchs in the matter of Ukraine’s planned accession to the E.U. and NATO, the proposed agreements contain provisions that would bolster—at least on paper—Europe’s precarious financial condition. Though most people don’t realize it, financial motives have been a major driver of wars for the last two hundred years.

I suspect that Europe’s passionate desire to maintain the proxy war in Ukraine is primarily driven by financial considerations—not for the citizens of Europe, but for the dreadful people who currently hold power and are determined not to relinquish it.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Does Europe Seek War With Russia for Financial Reasons? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The US-Russian peace plan for Ukraine certainly puts an end to a conflict. But, above all, it paves the way for a reinterpretation of history. No, the Russian military operation was not an “illegal, unprovoked, and unjustified military aggression,” but rather the implementation of Security Council Resolution 2202, in accordance with international law. If the people of Europe recognize that they were mistaken, or that they were misled, they will change their regimes just as Ukraine will change its own.

The Ukrainian-Russian conflict is coming to an end: the Russian and American presidents have agreed on a 28-point plan, modeled on the one adopted by the Security Council for the Jewish-Arab conflict  [ 1 ] .

While the guiding principles were approved at the Anchorage (Alaska) summit on August 15 by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin themselves, the details were negotiated by Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev in Miami from October 24 to 26. This agreement was only officially disclosed to Rustem Umerov, secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, early last week, before his flight to Qatar. The unelected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, learned of it in detail on November 20, when Dan Driscoll (Secretary of the Army), General Randy George (Chief of Staff of the Army), and General Chris Donahue (Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe and Africa) presented it to him.

Over the past three months, Russian forces have bombarded the “integral nationalist” units (“Banderists” or “neo-Nazis,” according to Kremlin terminology) of the “White Führer,” Andriy Biletsky. As a result, he emerged defeated from the successive battles of Mariupol (May 2022), Bakmut/Artyomovsk (December 2023), and Pokrovsk (November 2025).

On November 11, the State Department gave the green light to the release of “Operation Midas,” a vast investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) conducted with the assistance of 80 American investigators. It has already led to the resignation of two ministers—Herman Halushchenko, Minister of Justice, and Svitlana Grynchuk, Minister of Energy—and the flight of Rustem Umerov (already mentioned) to Qatar. The resignation of Andriy Yermak, the head of the presidential administration, is highly likely to follow. At that point, Volodymyr Zelensky will be completely exposed: the key political figures on whom he relied will be destroyed. He will have no choice but to accept Donald Trump’s plan or flee himself.

Contrary to what one might think, the unelected president did not seek to modify the conditions of the peace plan when he met with the US delegation on November 20, but to add an amnesty; not an amnesty for war crimes, but for acts of corruption.

Even now, Ukrainians who have remained in the country (a third of the population has already fled Ukraine, half to Russia, half to the EU) are violently opposed to the self-proclaimed president. He was elected to fight corruption, and he has fueled it to unprecedented levels. In November, several riots turned the population against military recruiters. Even the “hardline nationalists” now believe he can no longer help them achieve their apocalyptic goals against Slavs and are urgently planning to overthrow him.

The member states of the European Union, who envisioned and prepared for a protracted war, cannot accept a capitulation that dare not speak its name. Each is now confronted with the brutal end of its dream. Clearly, the fall of the Ukrainian regime will be followed by that of the European leaders who supported it.

Indeed, the time has come to take stock. The European Union initially provided €1 billion in cash, then its military committee established a clearing house allowing Ukrainians to select weapons from the stocks of EU member states’ armed forces. Finally, the Union made its own resources, such as its satellites, available. Over time, the EU contributed more and more: up to €3 billion in July and August.

Let no one believe that this is solely the initiative of Commission officials. On March 1, 2022, the European Parliament, elected by universal suffrage, held a session with President Zelensky, who spoke via video link. It adopted NATO’s position, which disregards the Minsk agreements and considers the Russian special operation against “core nationalists,” pursuant to Security Council Resolution 2202, as an “illegal, unprovoked, and unjustified military aggression.” It was the Parliament that adopted a resolution (P9_TA(2022)0052) paving the way for the EU’s full support of the Zelensky regime, which many member states readily endorsed.

When President Trump and Vice President Vance confronted Zelensky in the Oval Office on February 28, 2025, some governments consulted with one another. A series of back-and-forths took place between Paris and London, both vying to lead a coalition of the willing. Ultimately, only the British remained. London formed a military alliance with the Baltic states (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, the Netherlands, and Sweden) and added Ukraine on November 5. This constitutes a purely British NATO within NATO.

France, although not a member of this alliance with the United Kingdom, is not lagging behind. But it is now more a matter of posturing than action. On November 17, President Emmanuel Macron signed a letter of intent with his unelected counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, stating that, when domestic industry is able, it will build and sell 100 Rafale fighter jets to Ukraine. Then, on November 18, he sent his Chief of the Defence Staff, General Fabien Mandon, to tell the Congress of Mayors of France that the French should prepare to lose their children in an imminent war against Russia.

Volodymyr Zelensky made a panicked phone call to his allies on November 21. Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, and Keir Starmer stressed once again, according to the Élysée Palace, “that all decisions with implications for the interests of Europe and NATO require the joint support and consensus of European partners and NATO allies respectively.”

They all met on November 22nd in Johannesburg, South Africa, for a meeting of G20 heads of state and government, with the exception of… Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The final declaration contained only one vague sentence on the subject: “Guided by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter in its entirety, we will work for a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Ukraine, as well as to end other conflicts and wars around the world.” Such platitudes hardly justified such a meeting. Consequently, the Europeans consulted behind the scenes to develop a counter-proposal.

The European press simply presents the Russian-American peace plan as “favorable to Moscow,” which is neither the case nor the point. The plan, as far as we know, stipulates that Crimea and the two Donbas republics (Donetsk and Luhansk) are Russian. But this was already the case BEFORE the war. It also stipulates that the rest of Novorossiya will be allocated along the front line. In other words, almost all of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, but not the port of Odessa, which would have allowed Russia to establish territorial contiguity with Transnistria, a candidate for membership in the Russian Federation.

In addition, the plan requires that the Ukrainian army, currently 800,000 strong, be reduced to 600,000 strong, that it renounce long-range missiles capable of striking Moscow (which it does not currently possess. This was the debate over US Tomahawks and German Taurus missiles), and that it renounce NATO membership, but European fighter jets may be stationed in Poland.

From a Russian perspective, the most important thing lies elsewhere: the denazification of the Kyiv regime. This is a fundamental objective of which NATO members have never been aware. Denazification requires an educational program in each country to educate them about the other’s culture, similar to the one implemented in France and Germany at the end of World War II.

Moscow has thus achieved what it fought for, but not what it has long hoped for: NATO’s retreat to its 1991 borders. This will always be a source of conflict. The European Union must be aware of this. It should not be surprised to see this conflict continue.

On the US side, Washington pledges to lift sanctions against Russia and to reintegrate Moscow into the G7/8.

Certainly, President Donald Trump is on the verge of succeeding in extricating his country from this mess. But this is only to force the European Union to face its responsibilities.

The reconstruction of Ukraine, estimated at $200 billion, will be split equally between the EU and Russia. Each country will contribute $100 billion. The Russian funds will be drawn from reserves frozen during the conflict. These funds will be controlled by the United States, which will receive half of the revenue generated by these investments.

Finally, if Ukraine renews its commitment not to build nuclear bombs, half of the electricity produced by the Zaporizhzhia power plant will be allocated to Ukraine and half to Russia.

The hardest part is not mentioned by anyone: the European Union (and consequently NATO) will have to recognize that these events did not constitute an “illegal, unprovoked and unjustified military aggression”, but a legitimate application of Security Council resolution 2202, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and international law.

A period of introspection is necessary for everyone. All have contributed to this war, the number of victims of which remains unknown. High-ranking officials in Brussels acted with hubris, EU member states behaved like herds, and the people of Europe convinced themselves that they embodied peace.

It is this realization that seems most important and that will bring about the fall of the regimes that wished and worked to “bring Russia to its knees”.

—

[ 1 ]  “  Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine  ”, Voltaire Network , November 20, 2025.

The post The Fall of Zelensky’s Regime and That of His Allies appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Writes Bill Madden:

I recently sent an e-mail discussing how the Federal Reserve Bank loans our dollar into circulation at interest contrary to the dictates of the Constitution ordering Congress to coin money and regulate its value – without interest.  Aristotle’s Definition of Money requires that money be a “store of value” which gold and silver are and which paper is not.  If paper dollars and accounting entries are used for convenience, they must be backed up by the something of value for the monetary system to contain money vs. the fiat currency that our dollar has become.  Our domestic dollar was backed by silver coins until the end of 1964 and the international dollar was backed by gold until 8/15/1971. 

The referenced link is an 18 minute video explaining the preceding paragraph.  Other good videos explaining our convoluted monetary system are “Hidden Secrets of Money” under the “Learn” heading at: www.goldsilver.com.  Knowledge in this area is important because our dollar is collapsing in value as the currency in other nations is gradually being backed by gold.  This is bad news for the dollar which is currently a worldwide reserve currency but is slowly being replaced to the detriment of our dollar and our economy.  Until now, Americans have enjoyed prosperity due to the international demand for our dollars.  Things are changing.

The video talks about the large banks owning the Federal Reserve Bank.  Please remember that humans own the large banks and that it is the equity side of any corporation that decides whether the corporation will act for the benefit of all stockholders or just the benefit of the one or two families controlling the corporation.  Some super-rich families control more than one corporation.  So, corporations are not greedy but the humans controlling the corporation can satisfy their greed by their control of the corporation.  The management side of the corporation may or may not own a lot of stock but their job is to do what they are told to do by the equity side.

Many of our country’s problems would be solved by a return to the Constitution but, unfortunately, that is not what the financial benefactors of our politicians and bureaucrats want. 

The post The Fed vs. The Constitution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lew,

“It is better to iive for the freedom that Christ has set us free for than to be enslaved in sin and death.” – George Farmer, husband of Candace Owens and father of their four children 

Farmer recently delivered a speech entitled “The Political Order of Antichrist” at the 2025 Catholic Identity Conference. He discussed the temptation, theology and idolatry of technology and the need for Catholics to get involved in developing AI and to get right with the Lord first thing every morning and in all we do. 

The post 2025 Catholic Identity Conference Speech: The Political Order of Antichrist appeared first on LewRockwell.

______________________________________________________________________________________

di Thomas Kolbe

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/lue-accelera-verso-il-collasso-merz)

Il Cancelliere sembra essersi scontrato con la realtà durante la pausa estiva: Merz vede il sistema sociale tedesco in profonda crisi. Nel frattempo i suoi alleati politici a Bruxelles chiedono un aumento della stessa dose di veleno che sta facendo ammalare l'Europa.

Diciamolo chiaramente: gran parte dell'élite politica ha un rapporto frammentato con la realtà. Questo vale tanto per il declino economico della Germania e dell'UE quanto per la comunicazione pubblica degli obiettivi politici strategici, sistematicamente oscurati. Una critica aperta al corso degli eventi potrebbe far crollare la favola politica più velocemente di quanto la realtà possa percolare nell'opinione pubblica.

Merz e lo Stato sociale

Ancora più significative sono le parole di avvertimento del Cancelliere, Friedrich Merz, durante la sua apparizione al congresso del partito della CDU in Bassa Sassonia: “Non sono soddisfatto di quanto abbiamo realizzato finora: dobbiamo fare di più e meglio”.

Eccolo finalmente! Un leggero fremito di autocritica da parte del Cancelliere. Raro, davvero. Eppure quella dichiarazione ci deve far porre una domanda: cosa intende esattamente Merz con “realizzato”? Si riferisce al cosiddetto stimolo agli investimenti, che presumibilmente fornirà un sollievo marginale all'economia tedesca mentre è sull'orlo del collasso? O si riferisce agli ingenti pacchetti di debito e al crescente divario di finanziamento, che molto probabilmente saranno colmati con aumenti delle tasse?

Nel suo discorso a Osnabrück, Merz ha parlato in modo insolitamente chiaro dello stato in cui versa il sistema di welfare: “Lo Stato sociale, così come lo abbiamo oggi, non è più sostenibile finanziariamente rispetto a ciò che possiamo offrire economicamente”. Una diagnosi schietta, che lascia ben poco a desiderare in termini di chiarezza.

Tuttavia non si è fatto alcun accenno a una svolta orientata al mercato, alla fiducia nelle soluzioni individuali, alla responsabilità personale, o a una rapida riduzione della burocrazia. Il messaggio sembra essere: mantenere la rotta.

Momenti di onestà

Merz ha parlato in modo inequivocabile anche dei sussidi sociali: non si può continuare così. Circa 5,6 milioni di persone ricevono i sussidi e molti potrebbero lavorare ma non lo fanno, ha detto. Una realtà che la politica di solito evita.

Un tentativo timidamente esplicito di denunciare apertamente la precarietà della previdenza sociale tedesca. In tempi in cui l'addolcimento della pillola politica è all'ordine del giorno, è quasi un colpo di fortuna quando un politico di spicco riconosce almeno in parte la realtà economica.

Gli ultimi dati economici hanno forse scosso Merz e i suoi colleghi a Berlino? Il PIL si è nuovamente contratto nel secondo trimestre e le prospettive rimangono fosche. Con lo stato che interviene con ingenti programmi di credito e un nuovo debito che quest'anno ha raggiunto circa il 3,5%, l'economia privata si sta contraendo del 4-5%. Definirla recessione sarebbe eufemistico: siamo in depressione.

Più centralismo nell'UE

Mentre il Cancelliere si confrontava con la dura realtà economica della Germania, i rappresentanti dell'UE lanciavano palloni sonda sui media.

È stato Mario Draghi, il poliedrico politico dell'UE, che si alterna con disinvoltura tra l'ex-primo ministro italiano e il presidente della BCE, a presentare l'ennesimo rapporto.

Ha ribadito la sua consueta richiesta: l'Unione Europea deve agire in modo più coeso, come un unico stato, se vuole mantenere un ruolo geopolitico.

Ancora una volta, la stessa medicina che ha fatto ammalare l'Europa: più centralizzazione, meno sussidiarietà e un governo tecnocratico intensificato. Draghi ripropone ancora una volta il piano di Bruxelles, come durante la crisi del debito sovrano di 15 anni fa: potere concentrato a Bruxelles, decisioni al di fuori del controllo democratico, imposte da un apparato politico che dirige le narrazioni sui media. Censura rigorosa, manipolazione dell'informazione: strumenti sporchi per mettere a tacere l'opposizione alla centralizzazione. La stessa logica autoritaria che funzionò allora sta tornando in auge.

La Lagarde e la migrazione

Anche l'alleata di Draghi, la presidente della BCE Christine Lagarde, ha fatto il suo ingresso nel circuito mediatico. Ha toccato il tema dell'immigrazione, un argomento abilmente evitato o distorto nel mondo della politica e dei media tedeschi.

La Lagarde si è lanciata in affermazioni audaci alla riunione della Federal Reserve a Jackson Hole, testando abilmente l'umore dell'Europa. Secondo lei l'UE non potrebbe più crescere senza una massiccia migrazione (di quale crescita esattamente?); ha poi affermato che il PIL della Germania sarebbe oggi inferiore di circa il 6% rispetto al 2019 senza lavoratori stranieri.

Che il Paese sia in depressione da tempo sembra non essere stato compreso dai vertici della BCE. Poi è arrivata la solita solfa: senza migrazione, la carenza di manodopera non può essere affrontata. Nessun accenno ai progressi tecnologici tramite intelligenza artificiale o robotica, che potrebbero compensare la carenza di manodopera. Nessun accenno alla migrazione come rischio per la sicurezza, ai conflitti culturali, o a un Islam politico incompatibile con i valori europei.

La posizione della Lagarde è stata particolarmente eclatante in un momento in cui gli Stati Uniti hanno iniziato a rimpatriare i migranti illegali, ponendo fine all'europeizzazione della politica americana. Il suo discorso, nella terra del risveglio razionale e della svolta politica, non ha suscitato altro che sconcerto.

Jackson Hole ha evidenziato la traiettoria dell'UE: frontiere aperte, élite che ignorano i rischi, mentre la sinistra espande la propria base elettorale a spese della cultura e dell'economia dell'Europa.

Equilibrio precario

Se si mettono insieme i tre eventi – il discorso di Merz, la Lagarde a Jackson Hole e l'ultimo rapporto di Draghi – la conclusione è allarmante: l'economia sta accelerando verso il collasso a causa di una crisi energetica autoinflitta e di un'eccessiva regolamentazione. I fondi sociali, tesi dall'immigrazione illegale di massa, rischiano l'implosione. La soluzione proposta? Centralizzazione, regolamentazione e migrazione incontrollata.

Anche i soliti dibattiti sull'aumento delle tasse del Ministro delle Finanze, Lars Klingbeil, si inseriscono perfettamente in questo contesto: l'individuo non conta nulla, lo stato controlla tutto, gravando sempre di più sui cittadini. L'audacia di attaccare la proprietà privata e aumentare ulteriormente le tasse è sconcertante, e incontra poca resistenza. La CDU di Merz è diventata un muro protettivo di aria fritta, sottile come la carta.

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

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This is a total mindblower!

The post Mike Benz: MrBeast And the USAID Truman Show appeared first on LewRockwell.

We often hear demands to ban so-called “hate speech.” Negative remarks about various groups, including women, black people, homosexuals, Jews, Muslims, can it is alleged, have a negative effect on members of the group who hear or see the speech. It encourages people to hate them and cements negative stereotypes about them in people’s minds. In addition, hearing or seeing “hate speech” offends the members of the group. Free speech may have some value, but whatever value it has it outweighed by the evil of “hate speech.” Almost any group can claim to be victimized by “hate speech,” except for white heterosexual males and Christians, but “hate speech” applies primarily to members of so-called “protected classes.”

From a libertarian standpoint, the question of banning so-called “hate speech” is a no-brainer. Banning any kind of speech, whether it is good or bad, is incompatible with a free society. As the great Murray Rothbard has taught us, all rights are property rights. Everyone can set the rules for speech on his own property, and no one has the right to control what anyone says on someone else’s property. This includes speech which counts as “offensive.” Of course, we don’t live in a libertarian society, but we should come as close as we can in practice to it. This means following the strictest possible interpretation of the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law. . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” “No law” means “no law” and that includes laws against so-called “hate speech.”

Some states have “hate speech” laws on the books. New York is considering a law, already passed in California that requires social media companies to report “hate speech.” This is the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” and has been passed by the State’s Assembly. Here is an account of the measure from Vince Chang, who favors it:

“Under pressure from the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] and other groups, internet platforms have voluntarily adopted measures to regulate hate speech. The ADL described some of the measures that have been taken: Facebook prohibited Holocaust denial content, hired a vice president of civil rights, changed parts of its advertising platform to prohibit various forms of discrimination; expanded policies against content that undermined the legitimacy of the election; and built a team to study and eliminate bias in artificial intelligence. Due to pressure from ADL and other civil rights organizations, Twitter banned linked content, URL links to content outside the platform that promotes violence and hateful conduct. Reddit added its first global hate policy, providing for the removal of subreddits and users that “promote hate based on identity or vulnerability.”

We can see how such laws have a chilling effect on speech if we look at bans on so-called “hate speech” in foreign countries where they are already in operation. I want to focus especially on the Scottish Hate Speech Act.

Let’s first look at an official summary of the Scottish act, from the Scottish parliament site:

“Hate crime is the phrase used to describe behaviour which is both criminal and based on prejudice.

There are already laws in place to protect certain groups from hate crime.

This Bill aims to do three things. It updates these existing laws and pulls most of these laws into one Bill. It also adds to the groups currently specifically protected by hate crime laws.

Criminal courts can generally take into account any prejudice when sentencing a person. Also, people are protected from hate crime through specific laws that apply.

People are currently protected by specific laws on the basis of:

• disability
• race (and related characteristics)
• religion
• sexual orientation
• transgender identity

This Bill adds age to that list and allows sex to be added at a later date.

The Bill creates a new crime of stirring up hatred against any of the protected groups covered by the Bill.”

The bill was enacted in 2021 and came into force on April 1, 2024,

The supporters of this Act want to create a community that is united in supporting “diversity.” Do you see the contradiction? If you oppose what these people call “diversity,” then you are not part of the united community. In other words, only those who accept what we say are free and have rights. As George Orwell said in 1984, “Freedom is Slavery.” Let’s look at what they say in their own words:

“Scotland’s diversity is its strength; and all communities are valued and their contribution welcomed. Hate crime and prejudice threaten community cohesion and have a corrosive impact on Scotland’s communities as well as broader society. Hate crime and prejudice is never acceptable and the Scottish Government is committed to tackling it. This legislation provides an essential element of the Scottish Government’s ambitious programme of work to tackle hate crime and build community cohesion. Anyone who has experienced or witnessed a hate crime is encouraged to report it to the police or to one of the third-party reporting centres that are in place across Scotland. A cohesive society is one with a common vision and a sense of belonging for all communities; a society in which the diversity of people’s backgrounds, beliefs and circumstances are appreciated and valued, and similar life opportunities are available to all. It is through this lens that the Scottish Government has considered the recommendations from Lord Bracadale’s ‘Independent Review of Hate Crime Legislation in Scotland’ in order to inform the modernisation and reform of hate crime legislation in Scotland.

One of the most aggressive groups in trying to silence others for has speech consists of so-called” trans” people. If you don’t agree with them that you can become a man or woman just by “identifying” yourself as one, you can be prosecuted. This is the “democratic community” in action. The prosecutions are by no means confined to religious and political conservatives. Leftwing “gender critical” feminists, who think that a woman is a woman, have been prosecuted. Jonathan Turley tells us what happened to one of them in 2021:

“There is a free speech fight brewing in Scotland where a prominent feminist, Marion Millar, 50, has been charged with the crime of “malicious communication” due to tweets criticizing gender self-identification.  We have previously discussed how feminists are being accused of hate speech and discrimination in these debates.  Indeed, Millar is accused of being a “terf” (a trans-exclusionary radical feminist) by critics due to her opposition to allowing males to declare themselves to be females.  She could now face two years in jail.

What is particularly concerning in this case is that Millar was not told which of her tweets were deemed “malicious.” Millar has thousands of tweets and was told that the charge is based on tweets between 2019 and 2020.  She was simply ordered to the police station and told that social workers would be sent to care for her young twin boys, who are autistic.  After she emerged from the station, she quoted the novelist Salman Rushdie: “Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read.”

There are believed to be six tweets that were cited in the complaint, including pictures of the green, white and purple suffragette ribbons tied around trees to support Millar’s cause. The accuser reportedly said that the ribbons looked like nooses and were therefore threats. How ridiculous can you get?

Fortunately, this particular story has a happy ending, at least relatively so. As The Guardian reports, “Scottish prosecutors have discontinued the case against a woman charged with posting allegedly homophobic and transphobic content online. On Thursday morning, the Crown Office confirmed it had dropped proceedings against Marion Millar, a vocal opponent of the Scottish government’s plans for transgender law reform, before a scheduled hearing next Monday and subject to a review with the alleged victims. Millar, an accountant from Airdrie, had yet to plead, but her defence team, which included SNP MP Joanna Cherry QC, was planning to challenge the prosecution on human rights grounds.” The next person might not be so “lucky.”

Let’s do everything we can to oppose the bigots who want to censor us and force us to adopt their insane opinions!

The post Why Banning Hate Speech Is Evil appeared first on LewRockwell.

Artificial intelligence is being sold as the technology that will “change everything.” Yet while a handful of firms are profiting enormously from the AI boom, the financial risk may already be shifting to the public.

The louder the promises become, the quieter another possibility seems to be:

What if AI is not accelerating the economy at all — but disguising the fact that it is slowing down?

For months, the headlines have declared that AI is transforming medicine, education, logistics, finance, and culture. Yet when I speak with people in ordinary jobs, a different reality emerges: wages feel sluggish, job openings are tightening, and the loudest optimism often seems to come from sectors most invested in the AI narrative.

This raises an uncomfortable question:
Has AI become a true growth engine — or a financial life-support system?

The Mirage of Growth

Recent economic data suggests that a significant portion of U.S. GDP growth is being driven not by broad productivity, but by AI-related infrastructure spending — especially data centers.

A study from S&P Global found that in Q2 of 2025, data center construction alone added 0.5% to U.S. GDP. That is a historic figure. But what happens if this spending slows?

Are we witnessing genuine economic expansion — or merely a short-term stimulus disguised as innovation?

Historically, this pattern is not new. In Ireland in 2008 — before the housing collapse — construction boomed, GDP rose, and optimism became mandatory. Skepticism was dismissed as pessimism. The United States experienced something similar the same year: real estate appeared to be a pillar of prosperity — until it wasn’t. On paper, economies looked strong. In reality, fragility was already setting in.

Today, I see echoes of that optimism — except this time, the bubble is not bricks and concrete. It may be silicon, data, and expectation.

The Productivity Paradox

AI has been presented as a labor-saving miracle. But many businesses report a different experience: “work slop” — AI-generated content that looks polished but must be painstakingly corrected by humans. Time is not saved — it is quietly relocated.

Studies point to the same paradox:

• According to media coverage, MIT found that 95% of corporate AI pilot programs show no measurable ROI.
• MIT Sloan research indicates that AI adoption can lead to initial productivity losses — and that any potential gains depend on major organizational and human adaptation.
• Even McKinsey — one of AI’s greatest evangelists — warns that AI only produces value after major human and organizational change. “Piloting gen AI is easy, but creating value is hard.”

This suggests that AI has not yet removed human labor.
It has hidden it — behind algorithms, interfaces, and automated output that still requires correction.

We are not replacing work. We may only be concealing it.

AI may appear efficient, but it operates strictly within the limits of its training data: it can replicate mistakes, miss what humans would notice, and reinforce boundaries that present an “approved” or “consensus” version of reality rather than reality itself.

Once AI becomes an administrative layer — managing speech, research, hiring, and access to capital — it can become financially embedded into institutions, whether or not it produces measurable productivity.

At that point, AI does not strengthen human judgment — it administers it. And then we should ask:
Is AI improving society — or merely managing and controlling it?

The Data Center Stampede — But Toward What?

McKinsey estimates that over $6.7 trillion may be spent on AI and computing infrastructure by 2030 — a level of capital allocation usually seen in wartime. But what exactly is being built — and will it ever return value to ordinary people?

Like other critics, analyst Jack Gamble warns of a troubling pattern: cloud and chip-companies investing in AI startups that then buy computing and cloud services from their backers — potentially creating a circular economy of investment and demand. AI was perhaps becoming a circular economy of expectations rather than a new engine of growth or real value.

Now The State Is All-In: The Genesis Mission

Even before the government intervened, parts of the AI economy already appeared self-reinforcing. Now that intervention has arrived.

As noted in a recent LewRockwell commentary, a 2025 U.S. executive order — dubbed the “Genesis Mission” — may institutionalize AI infrastructure, potentially transforming deeply indebted AI firms into de facto state-backed entities.

In November 2025, the U.S. government signed an executive order merging federal supercomputers, national-lab datasets, private-sector AI firms, and taxpayer funding into a unified national AI platform. This does not guarantee bailouts — but it creates the conditions under which major AI firms may become too strategically important to fail. Once AI is embedded into national strategy, failure becomes more than a financial problem — it becomes a political one.

This transforms AI from a speculative investment trend into a publicly underwritten enterprise, embedding AI infrastructure into national science and economic policy. Under these conditions, any failure of AI — technological, economic, or environmental — will not remain the problem of a few venture-backed firms. It will become a problem for the public and future generations.

Federal support may buffer data-center and computing firms from market corrections, but it also increases systemic risk if the promised productivity never materialises. When infrastructure becomes publicly supported before its value is proven, failure becomes harder to admit — and easier to subsidise.

There is a further concern: once certain firms become “state-protected,” competition may shrink, accountability may weaken, and the largest AI companies could become entrenched as essential infrastructure. That would strengthen precisely the pattern this article questions — where labor is concealed, economic value is assumed, and risk is quietly socialised.

Who Carries the Risk?

The deeper concern is not AI itself — but where the financial risk of AI may already be hiding.

Large retirement funds and passive index portfolios are now concentrated in AI-dependent giants such as Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla. On the debt side, data-center financing and private credit tied to AI infrastructure are quietly entering bond portfolios.

This means the AI boom is not simply an investment trend.
It may already be embedded inside the retirement accounts of ordinary citizens — without their knowledge.

With the Genesis Mission, risk is no longer only held by markets—it is being woven into public institutions, budgets, national research plans, and long-term economic policy.

If AI becomes truly transformative, perhaps this risk will be justified.
But if AI merely relocates labor and props up GDP on paper — then the risk will not fall on venture capital.
It may fall on pensioners, savers, civil servants, and state retirement systems.

Questions the Public Deserves Answers To

• Is AI transforming work — or creating new layers of hidden labor?
• Are data centers driving prosperity — or only supporting GDP in the short term?
• Are citizens knowingly investing in AI — or are they being invested through passive portfolios?
• Is AI creating value — or merely absorbing capital and subsidies?

With so much capital and debt tied to AI it is beginning to resemble something that could be labeled “too big to fail” — much like the private banks that were rescued after the 2008 financial crisis. When enough money, debt, and public risk are tied to a technology, questioning it becomes difficult — and supporting it becomes mandatory — whether it is delivering real value or not.

Conclusion

As I have written elsewhere we should not let AI overshadow human thought. AI may still deliver genuine breakthroughs, but at this moment, belief seems to be moving faster than evidence. History reminds us that optimism is most dangerous when it becomes unquestioned.

Because if the promised future arrives late — or not at all — the cost will not fall on the visionaries or the corporations. It will fall on the public.

Now that AI is being treated as national infrastructure, its success or failure is no longer a private gamble—it has become a public risk. And public risks always come with a public bill.

Note to readers who purchased the book The War on Men: a small number of early print copies were released before editing took place. The current edition has been fully revised, professionally edited, and formatted. If you received an early draft, please message me via Substack or through my X account at @TheMarkGerard— I’ll gladly send you the corrected edition at no cost. Messages are received directly and replied to personally.

The post AI, GDP, and the Public Risk Few Are Talking About appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s an argument running through the commentariat that goes something like this: AI (Artificial Intelligence) has already rendered some jobs obsolete and will continue this trend until the human race is unemployed.  Even now it surpasses the ability of most people to write an effective opinion essay because it can create logic-driven, elegant compositions in seconds.  Since government schools turn out illiterates, people will depend on AI commentaries for intellectual expression.  Combined with research functions that are allegedly dependent on flawed databases, leading users to accept falsehoods in areas such as medicine, government, and economic theory, it renders them easy prey for a program of complete statism, such as socialism.

Why socialism?  Because socialists promise to care for the downtrodden, which will be every person left alive when AI achieves full robustness.  AI in the hands of a socialist government will feed and house them, and will of course see that it’s done equitably.  This leaves libertarians and conservatives with the urgent need to stop AI in its tracks now, while they still can.

The idea of AI overtaking humanity has a distinguished pedigree.  The website PauseAI presents quotes from leaders in their fields about the dangers of runaway AI:

Physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking had warned that “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race … It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.”

Elon Musk who is developing his own AI called Grokipedia, said “AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation than be reactive   I think that [digital super intelligence] is the single biggest existential crisis that we face and the most pressing one.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates thinks “Superintelligent AIs are in our future…. There’s the possibility that AIs will run out of control.”

The founder of computer science and artificial intelligence Alan Turning predicted

It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said,

There’s a long tail of things of varying degrees of badness that could happen. I think at the extreme end is the Nick Bostrom style of fear that an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) could destroy humanity. I can’t see any reason in principle why that couldn’t happen.

The foregoing experts have IQs far beyond ordinary.  But they’re also human, subject to error.  Inventions that shake up the world have always been feared.

According to Plato the invention of writing “will implant forgetfulness in [men’s] souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”  As it happened writing by hand can improve memory and learning, especially for children.  And in early America, Thomas Paine showed incredible recall as he hand-wrote detailed critiques while relying solely on his memory.

Calculators have been said to be another tool for the lazy.  But in fact they were found to have “allowed learners to focus on problem-solving rather than mechanical calculations” while fostering confidence in their learning abilities.

While it is in some sense true that the internet has shortened attention spans, there is ample evidence to contradict the claim, such as Substack essays, multi-hour podcasts, and eBooks.  If people are engaged in tasks meaningful to them, while working in a supportive environment that keeps  dopamine distractions to a minimum they are fully capable of multi-hour focus.

People are not, therefore, inert automatons under control of subversive forces.  As Bastiat wrote about in The Law, in which he defined socialism as the improper use of force,

When law and force keep a person within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing but a mere negation. They oblige him only to abstain from harming others. . . . But when the law, by means of its necessary agent, force, imposes upon men a regulation of labor, a method or a subject of education, a religious faith or creed—then the law is no longer negative; it acts positively upon people. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own wills; the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives.

There is nothing in AI or AGI that requires the imposition of force.  But socialism and its variants does.  Socialism as an economic and sociological theory was thoroughly debunked by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and again in 1922.  As Mises argued in his 1920 essay, socialism suffers from the fatal absence of market pricing.  Even the best-selling socialist author Robert Heilbroner admitted in 1990, “It turns out, of course, that Mises was right. The Soviet system has long been dogged by a method of pricing that produced grotesque misallocations of effort.”

The only purpose of an economy is to create goods and services that satisfy human wants, not to create jobs.  If AI eliminates jobs in the sense we now understand it, other opportunities will emerge for value creation as they have before when new technologies upset the status quo.  Human wants are unlimited, and theory and history have shown that a market free from state intervention is the best way to satisfy them.

A recent poll shows more college students favor socialism than capitalism.  This is hardly surprising given the socialist orientation of universities and their misrepresentation of capitalism.  As Mises wrote in Socialism, “The terms ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Capitalistic Production’ are political catchwords. They were invented by socialists, not to extend knowledge, but to carp, to criticize, to condemn.”  The economic system that has sent students “graduating with four-year degrees saddled with mountains of debt and little marketable skills” is the Federal Reserve-income tax-warmongering-interventionist-big government monstrosity that is a gross perversion of capitalism.

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