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Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard’s declassification of communications and reports that implicate Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, senior officials from the Obama administration, and former heads of the Intelligence Community in a conspiracy to frame President Trump with the Russia Collusion Hoax is nothing less than earth-shattering.

America has endured many political scandals.  The country has never had to contend with anything of this magnitude — in which a lame-duck president abused and politicized national intelligence-gathering operations in order to blame an adversarial nuclear power for an embarrassing election loss and set in motion a series of fraudulently predicated criminal investigations intended to force President Trump’s resignation from office or impeachment and removal.

As enormous as this scandal already is, it remains an ongoing criminal conspiracy.  Every time former Obama officials — including former DNI James Clapper and former CIA director John Brennan — publicly lie about material facts regarding the Russia Collusion Hoax, they are acting as co-conspirators in a plot to defraud the American people, overthrow a legitimately elected president, and cover up past criminal activity.

Perhaps the only aspect of this story that could rival in size such treason against the United States is the corporate news media’s continued refusal to report these events accurately without fear or favor.  For many reasons, newsrooms will not do so.  Because indoctrinated and committed leftists control the American press, “journalists” lack the requisite discernment to see beyond partisan political blinders and report facts that are personally troubling.  Even worse, many “journalists” have redefined their professional role away from any responsibility for objective truth-telling and toward a kind of active agency in which they shape “truth” to advance a particular worldview.  “Journalists” love Obama.  They despise Trump.  They are happy to act as assets for former Obama administration officials pushing lies and to hide facts that are politically inconvenient.

“Journalists” were and remain essential co-conspirators in the Russia Collusion Hoax.  By publishing sensational stories that were often contradicted by a mountain of publicly available facts, the nation’s pre-eminent news companies aided and abetted the Clinton-Obama information war against the American people.  As has been their wont in this era in which “journalism” resembles stenography, famous “reporters” simply repeated what corrupt members of Obama’s Intelligence Community told them without ever verifying the accuracy of their reporting.  When pressed to corroborate salacious details of their Russia Collusion Hoax stories, “journalists” habitually relied on “anonymous sources” from “past or present government officials” as tawdry proof that their shoddy “journalism” passed muster.

In exchange for acting as propagandists spreading disinformation and misinformation in a hybrid war being waged by powerful Democrats and Intelligence Community officials against citizens of the United States, “reporters” received promotions, celebrity recognition, book deals, and Pulitzer Prizes.  Even after DNI Gabbard’s declassifications have exposed the corporate news media’s Russia Collusion propaganda for the trashy clickbait that it is, “reporters” refuse to retract past lies, return Russia Collusion–related awards or remuneration, or publicly admit any wrongdoing.

The American press corps is now so inextricably linked to the Democrat party and the corrupt Intelligence Community that it would rather pretend not to see the greatest scandal in American history than admit its own complicity in perpetrating mass fraud against citizens of the United States.  These are, of course, the same “professionals” who refused to acknowledge President Biden’s obvious cognitive decline for four years — going so far as to defame those who did notice as “conspiracy theorists” — only to claim today that the Biden administration simply pulled the wool over their eyes.  Should the growing body of evidence documenting the Clinton-Obama conspiracy to overthrow President Trump become impossible to ignore, these same “professionals” will surely claim that powerful members of the pemocrat Party, Obama administration, and espionage apparatus had them fooled, too.

The damage from the Russia Collusion Hoax cannot be overstated.  The psychological warfare directed against the American people destroyed any residual social unity in a nation that has become only more divided since the turn of the century.  The covert hybrid war engineered by Clinton confidants, Obama allies, and Intelligence Community spymasters constituted nothing less than sedition and treason against the legitimate government of the United States.  Not only was President Trump handicapped during his first term by unlawfully predicated criminal investigations but also the Clinton-Obama-aligned co-conspirators further inflamed tensions with nuclear Russia, exhibiting malicious disregard for the safety of the citizens of the United States.

As a nation, we are lucky that the Clinton-Obama coup d’état was ultimately unsuccessful.  Had the Russia Collusion Hoax precipitated President Trump’s resignation or provided enough political cover for corrupt co-conspirators in Congress to impeach and remove him, the American public would be today even more vulnerable to the machinations of a deeply immoral and dishonest Intelligence Community.  Federal bureaucrats who operate in secret and without oversight remain a constant threat to the freedom of all Americans.  Bureaucrats who would wage an information war against the American people and conspire to provoke kinetic war between Russia and the United States are a threat to all mankind.

After any disaster, the survivors must go on.  It is at this time that sober, well-intentioned people take stock of troubling past events and look for potential lessons that can aid them in the future.  It is fair to say that the Russia Collusion Hoax provides many.  Among those, perhaps this is the most significant: No American should uncritically believe any supposed statement of fact coming from the press, the Intelligence Community, or any government official attempting to define “truth” by appealing to a title of authority.

Blind faith in powerful institutions ensures only that those institutions will become irredeemably corrupt.  Healthy skepticism for official pronouncements and public debate of government-sponsored “truths” are indispensable ingredients for a free society.  If any honest observer still clung to the naïve belief that the Intelligence Community, permanent federal bureaucracy, or American news media were honest, impartial institutions acting on behalf of all Americans with dispassionate professionalism, the Russia Collusion Hoax should have exposed such comforting delusions as idealistic hogwash.

Here is another lesson vital to the survival of these United States: The president, in whom all executive power is vested, must have complete control of and total authority over the Intelligence Community, the executive departments, and the broader administrative state.  There can be no extra-constitutional organ exercising executive power that feels emboldened to disregard lawful presidential orders and entitled to chart its own course.  If every spy chief and agency manager operates as if vested with independent power and unilateral authority, then there are a thousand “presidents” governing the United States.  As the Electoral College has not voted them into office, they are, in actuality, tyrants disguising their misappropriation of power behind titles of authority.

The Clinton-Obama Russia Collusion Hoax was nearly a successful coup d’état precisely because the Executive Branch of the federal government has long been home to a thousand tyrants pretending to be presidents.  For the Republic to endure, this betrayal of the U.S. Constitution must come to an end.

Acknowledging these truths adds significance to DNI Gabbard’s ongoing disclosures.  At no time in American history has the Office of the President taken such direct aim at its own Intelligence Community.  These public disclosures are embarrassing — which is why America’s rogue agencies have worked so hard to keep them classified.  They are incriminating — which is why a reactionary public relations campaign (read: a new bombardment of information warfare) is underway to undermine DNI Gabbard’s authority and protect Russia Collusion Hoax perpetrators from legal accountability.  Finally, these disclosures are an existential threat to the Intelligence Community — which is why former spies, current members of Congress, and the corporate news media continue to cover up the truth.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

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From its very beginnings in the seventeenth century, the classical liberals (also known as “libertarians,” or, historically, “liberals”) have been primarily focused on limiting the powers of the state. It has been state powers—not the powers of church or family or employer—that has been the great occupation of the classical liberals. After all, the movement was born in opposition to mercantilism and absolutism.

In the classical liberal view, it has always been state power that is fundamentally coercive and violent, and is the greatest threat to freedom and property rights. Moreover, because the state is monopolistic by nature, the state can exercise its powers untroubled by any legal opposition within the state’s territory. As such, the state is the organization that is positioned to most frequently and potently violate the property rights of its subjects with impunity. So, it is not surprising that historian Ralph Raico states that classical liberalism has been historically focused of preventing states from regulating the private sector, also known as “society.” In classical liberal thinking, Raico tells us, “the most desirable regime was one in which civil society—that is, the whole of the social order based on private property and voluntary exchange—by and large runs itself.”

This is to be contrasted with the old monarchical absolutists who “insisted that the state was the engine of society and the necessary overseer of the religious, cultural, and, not least, economic life of its subjects[.] … [L]iberalism posited a starkly contrasting view.”

In practice, the classical liberals—especially those of the more radical variety such as Gustave de Molinari, Frederic Bastiat, William Leggett, Richard Cobden, and Vilfredo Pareto—feared the powers of the state far more than the powers of any other organization. After all, the liberals understood that powerful interest groups only wielded coercive power if they could enlist the aid of the state itself. Business interests or religious groups—i.e., non-state elements of the private sector—are largely powerless unless backed by state power. This is all the more true today than it was in the time of the early liberals. By the nineteenth century, the state had so completely consolidated its monopoly on legal violence that the state itself was the only true locus of coercive power. Whatever “coercion” might be proffered by non-state groups has thus tended to be limited, weak, and inconsistent.

Those who favor more state power and more state intervention, on the other hand, tend to downplay the abusive and violent nature of state coercion. These apologists for the state often claim that the private sector is just as much of a threat to freedom as is the state.

This claim has long been popular among Marxists who say that private employers and other property owners exercise “economic power” which is supposedly coercive in nature. For example, we are to believe that it is a violation of “rights” if an employer refuses to hire a worker at the worker’s preferred wage. It is supposedly a rights violation if a Christian baker refuses to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding.

Strangely, though, there are some who claim to be libertarians and who are apparently more worried about supposed private violations of rights than they are concerned about the state’s coercive monopoly power.

For example, in a June article self-described libertarian Matt Zwolinski insists that “Libertarians and other advocates of liberty” must commit to ”liberating individuals from all forms of coercion, public and private alike.” He states that libertarians have been wrong for “ignoring threats to liberty posed by non-state institutions (“local bullies”) like corporations, churches, and schools…Each of these organizations wields an enormous amount of power over people’s lives, including the power to restrict their freedom…”

It’s unclear what “threats to liberty” are being carried out by schools and churches in 2025, and Zwolinski’s isn’t talking about actual theft of fraud here. These aren’t real violations of property rights through any coercive means. Rather, Zwolinski appears to making the old “economic-power” argument used by the Left. In this way of thinking, if a private organization won’t rent you a hotel room or give you a raise, then that organization has somehow illegitimately “restricted” your freedom.

Small Business Owners are the Real Threat to Freedom? 

A more careful analysis quickly reveals that these alleged attacks on freedom by private organization are nothing at all like the state’s bona fide attacks on freedom. The alleged private rights “violations” imaged by Zwolinski are really nothing more than one party declining to enter into an agreement with another party. That’s not coercion.

State coercion, on the other hand, involves the state actually stealing, controlling, or destroying the property of an innocent party. We either pay taxes or we are fined and imprisoned. We either follow every little government regulation, or our property is forfeit. (For a full explanation of the difference between real coercion and ersatz private “coercion”, see Rothbard’s analysis in Man, Economy, and State.)

Indeed, Zwolinski specifically opposes Rothbard’s classical-liberal view which focuses on limiting state power. Zwolinski writes:

Consider, for instance, the Rothbardian-informed libertarian opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited certain private entities from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. For the anti-state libertarians, the Act represents an objectionable increase in government power and a violation of individual property rights. But for those whose primary goal is the expansion of human liberty, the Act seems to be a clear victory—expanding the realm of choice for millions of Americans by limiting the power of private bullies…

Rothbard, as a theorist firmly within the radical anti-state wing of the French liberals naturally opposed the US government’s so-called “Civil Rights Act.” That legislation has always been little more than a scheme to increase federal regulatory and judicial power.

Zwolinski however, praises the Act for fighting supposed private-sector “coercion.” This is nothing more than the “bake the cake” philosophy pushed by the interventionist Left. In this scheme, we are to believe that if a baker refuses to bake a cake for a gay couple then the baker has somehow “coerced” the would-be customer. Therefore, the baker should be subject to government regulation and legal action that will likely bankrupt the baker and destroy his business. By this way of thinking, the way to “increase freedom” is to empower the government with vast regulatory powers to ensure that business owners sell pastries in a government-approved manner.

Now, I suspect that millions of Americans think this is fine, thanks to decades of public school propaganda which teaches children that the federal government should dictate to whom you are permitted to sell a sandwich. But it is very odd to bother calling one’s self a “libertarian,” as Zwolinski does, when one takes the position that what this country needs is more government employees micromanaging more American businesses. In this very odd type of “libertarianism,” it seems, the real problem is  the local wedding photographer or property manager. These small business owners are apparently more a threat to freedom than a national government which taxes its population to the tune of five trillions dollars per year and which wages near constant elective wars.

There’s Too Little State Capacity?

In his “libertarian” crusade to increase state power, Zwolinski also employs a second line of attack. Zwolinski attacks the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for de-funding too many federal projects. He writes:

consider DOGE’s relentless attack on state capacity… [Elon] Musk himself is no libertarian. But a great many libertarians have cheered his “chainsaw” approach to cutting the size of government. The problem with this perspective is that not all cuts to government are good, even from the perspective of human liberty. Cutting back on the size and scope of the regulatory state would almost certainly be a very positive thing. But eliminating Voice of America, indiscriminately cutting USAID, and randomly firing employees at the Nuclear Security Administration doesn’t meaningfully enhance the liberty of American citizens.

How strange it is to read an alleged libertarian complaining about a few small cuts to a federal budget that totals seven trillion dollars. Voice of America and USAID are basically propaganda agencies and are utterly superfluous. No ordinary person who isn’t on the federal dole will be negatively impacted by the total abolition of these agencies. On the other hand, Zwolinski shrewdly lists the cuts to the headcount at the Nuclear Safety Agency because those cuts have been the only cuts that could arguably endanger ordinary people in any way. But even in that case, there has been no fundamental change to the agency after 27 employees were fired. The cuts might slow down the rate at which the US Navy—which is already massively over-funded and bloated—builds nuclear-powered vessels

Although these cuts have done virtually nothing to impact the overall size, scope, and power of the American state, Zwolinski appears to be deeply concerned that the “state capacity” of the federal government has been negatively impacted.

Given the sheer size and breadth of the US federal government, it’s difficult to see how anyone could take seriously the claim that the Federal government’s state capacity is too limited. At no time is the US state ever limited in the projects and endeavors that Washington chooses to prioritize. For example, during the covid lockdowns, the federal budget skyrocketed from 4.5 to 6.7 trillion dollars, nearly overnight. That is not a government that lacks state capacity by any measure at all. Moreover, there is no doubt that the US government will continue to send hundreds of billions of dollars to the military conflicts in which Washington wishes to meddle. The money materializes as needed because Washington enjoys nearly unlimited access to credit thanks to Washington’s historically unparalleled and untrammeled access to the wealth and income of hundreds of millions of Americans.

The idea that we must wring our hands about what Zwolinski calls Trump’s supposed “relentless attack on state capacity” is, frankly, laughable.

The State Is Always and Everywhere the Greatest Threat to Freedom

It is bizarre to see someone claiming to be a libertarian while also trying to convince us that private property and the private sector are the real dangers to freedom. This is hardly a novel argument, of course, it’s just one that belongs far more to the democratic socialists of the Eduard Bernstein variety than with anything we might call libertarianism or classical liberalism.

In contrast, the historical liberals and modern day libertarians have always overwhelmingly focused on the dangers of the state, and for good reason. Following the abuses of the French revolution, the Continental classical liberals soon figured out the true nature of state power, and influential freedom fighters like Benjamin Constant declared government—by which he meant the state—to be “the natural enemy of liberty.” Few of these liberals wasted their time warning against the dangers of the local baker.

Not surprisingly, this same “state hatred” so thoroughly developed by nineteenth-century liberals would be reflected in the work of the great Ludwig von Mises. Writing in 1944, Mises sums up the true nature of the state, and why it must be our primary target:

He who says “state” means coercion and compulsion. He who says: There should be a law concerning this matter, means: The armed men of the government should force people to do what they do not want to do, or not to do what they like. He who says: This law should be better enforced, means: The police should force people to obey this law. He who says: The state is God, deifies arms and prisons. The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

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Tim McGraw wrote:

To Hell With Ozzy Osbourne: Paul Kengor

Hi Lew,

I think it was in January of 1971, I was 18, almost 19, when four of us hippies drove from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Wichita, Kansas, in a VW Beetle to see Black Sabbath in concert. It was about 0°F with blowing snow over the highway.

When we made it to Wichita, we had dinner in a diner, then went to the show. It was a small venue, just a thousand people (maybe). I don’t remember much about the show. All I remember was the freezing cold. 

Mr. Kengor can chastise Ozzy Osbourne as much as he wishes, but it isn’t easy being a rock star on the road all the time. Ozzy grew up poor in London (I think). He came from nothing. The lead guitarist in Black Sabbath was brilliant. Ozzy had a good voice. What they really had was the stamina of the slums. 

Perhaps if Mr. Kengor were in a tour bus going across America in winter from small city to small city playing music every night, he’d have a bit more compassion. 

I’m frankly surprised that Ozzy made it to 76.

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Thanks, David Martin.

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Instead of “Draining the Swamp,” the Trump Administration has stepped on the accelerator to bankruptcy. Government deficit spending continues to skyrocket, with a whopping $291 Billion deficit in July alone. This is up 20% year-over-year! It is impossible for government to fix its spending problem by vastly spending more money (that it doesn’t have). The American standard of living will continue to erode.

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Il GENIUS Act così come la Big Beautiful Bill non sono leggi perfette, ma il loro scopo è quello di fermare il sanguinamento affinché poi si possa davvero intervenire con l'intervento chirurgico vero e proprio. Ecco perché in questo frangente storico ritengo che criticare sia appropriato, ma lo sia di più costruire. L'evoluzione di Tether a tal proposito è quanto di meglio ci si potesse auspicare per ottenere un cambiamento a livello di denaro e sistema bancario centrale: collateralizzazione delle proprie emissioni + decentralizzazione delle operazioni di mercato aperto. L'architettura che sta costruendo Tether è una in cui se si vuole accedere al mercato statunitense (consumo, investimenti, finanziamenti) bisognerà avere un “biglietto d'ingresso” (titoli di stato americani) e solo dopo si otterranno i dollari digitali al pari. Chi invece viene etichettato come “nemico” (a questo serve, sostanzialmente, la politica dei dazi), otterrà lo stesso i dollari di cui HA BISOGNO ma al di sopra della parità: pagherà una commissione (5%?) per avere il privilegio di usare il biglietto verde. Il ruolo della FED, in futuro, sarà di arbitro di chi dovrà pagare questa “commissione”, oltre a badare esclusivamente al commercial paper market americano e non più nel mercato dei titoli sovrani americani. Ruolo interno, non più esterno. Inoltre al primo sintomo di incertezza il decennale americano si dimostra nuovamente scelta privilegiata dagli investitori mondiali. Non quelli europei ovviamente. Il decennale tedesco, rispetto al mese scorso, è salito di 10 punti base, quello americano è sceso di 10 punti base. Questo a sua volta aiuta a spiegare come mai l'asticella del debito americano è stata alzata: oltre a dover tenere ancora in conto la legge di bilancio della precedente amministrazione, gli USA si stanno preparando ad accogliere grandi quantità di capitali. Non è una questione di spesa in deficit, è una questione di domanda estera che si appresta a essere rilasciata sul suolo americano e poi impiegata nell'industria americana. Una scommessa azzardata, vero, ma finora interpretata correttamente in base ai numeri del mercato obbligazionario americano. Quindi, sì, come con la teoria quantitativa della moneta, l'offerta conta, ma conta anche la domanda. Un conto sarebbe se la FED inondasse i mercati americani di liquidità che finirebbe per essere rigettata dai mercati stessi poiché foriera di distorsioni della struttura del capitale e di malinvestment; un altro è un ambiente in cui la FED prosciuga il mondo di dollari offshore man mano che strumenti denominati in dollari a livello internazionale raggiungono la data di scadenza e devono essere saldati. Il lato dell'equazione della domanda dei titoli di stato americani sta cambiando ed è qualcosa che gli USA non avevano mai sperimentato finora in questi termini.

______________________________________________________________________________________

di Thomas Kolbe

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/gli-europei-lamentosi-si-lagnano)

Lo shock si trasforma in indignazione. Gli europei si sentono ingannati da Donald Trump, ma l'accordo commerciale non fa che mettere a nudo la crescente perdita di potere dell'UE.

Chiunque abbia familiarità con la politica tedesca sa da tempo che Ursula von der Leyen, Presidente della Commissione Europea, non è un peso massimo della politica. Il suo curriculum come Ministro della Famiglia e della Difesa tedesco parla da solo: le mancano le capacità intellettuali e strategiche per orientarsi o riformare sistemi complessi.

Sì, è stata surclassata da Trump durante i negoziati commerciali, come previsto, ma questo non coglie il punto. Ciò che gli europei lamentano a gran voce non è solo un cattivo accordo, ma l'espressione della loro debolezza geopolitica. La Von der Leyen è andata in Scozia a mani vuote e non ha avuto altra scelta che andarsene a mani vuote.

L'ora della lamentela in Europa

È tempo di postumi da sbornia nel mondo fantasioso europeo. Accuse di sottomissione, negoziati disastrosi e catastrofe economica dominano i titoli dei giornali. L'ex-cancelliere tedesco Scholz mette in guardia dalle enormi sfide che attendono l'economia tedesca.

Guy Verhofstadt, ex-Primo Ministro belga e beniamino dei media generalisti, lo definisce un negoziato scandaloso e una catastrofe per l'Europa. Il Primo Ministro francese, François Bayrou, lo descrive come un giorno buio, un giorno in cui un'unione di popoli liberi ha scelto la sottomissione.

L'Europa è sbalordita dalle dure tattiche negoziali di Trump e dal modo spietato in cui gli Stati Uniti cercano di risolvere il deficit commerciale e il problema della deindustrializzazione.

Benvenuti nel mondo della realpolitik

In questo mondo non ci sono amici, solo interessi strategici. E nessuno continuerà a sottomettersi ai mandati climatici dell'Europa, ora che gli Stati Uniti, attraverso questo accordo commerciale, hanno di fatto dichiarato una seconda indipendenza da Bruxelles.

Ciò che è accaduto in Scozia è stato esattamente questo: l'emancipazione dell'America dal controllo eurocratico.

La drammatica reazione dell'UE rivela che finalmente la verità è chiara ed è giunto il momento di dissipare alcune illusioni di vecchia data sulle relazioni transatlantiche.

Due idee sbagliate

Primo: l'idea che l'America abbia a lungo dominato l'Europa attraverso politiche imperialiste. Al contrario, le amministrazioni statunitensi Biden e Obama hanno seguito un'agenda globalista in salsa europea.

Insieme ai loro alleati a Bruxelles, Londra e Davos, hanno attuato programmi climatici distruttivi, hanno perseguito una politica monetaria inflazionistica e hanno creato Stati sociali modellati sull'Europa.

Le radici di tutto questo risalgono a 100 anni fa, al New Deal di Roosevelt. L'America non è mai stata completamente libera dall'influenza europea.

Secondo: la convinzione che l'UE sia un progetto di libertà legato ai principi di mercato e alla proprietà privata. L'UE è stata fondata come baluardo contro l'impero sovietico, ma fin dall'inizio ha avuto una natura statalista, soprattutto sotto la guida franco-tedesca.

Le critiche alla sua traiettoria socialista sono ancora bollate come teorie del complotto, ma i fatti parlano chiaro: indici di spesa pubblica superiori al 50%, la guerra di Bruxelles alla libertà di parola, la nazionalizzazione del settore energetico, una regolamentazione soffocante; l'Europa sta correndo verso un nuovo socialismo.

Il motivo per cui questo fenomeno non è ampiamente riconosciuto? I media generalisti hanno fatto un lavoro magistrale nel nasconderlo.

Agiscono come sostenitori dell'agenda socialista-climatica verde, mascherando il collasso dell'Europa con pennellate idealistiche.

L'America prende una strada diversa

Eleggendo Donald Trump, gli Stati Uniti hanno scelto un'altra strada. Ciò è particolarmente evidente nella tanto discussa Big Beautiful Bill, un pacchetto di deregolamentazione e tagli fiscali.

I media europei si sono avventati come un branco di lupi ubriachi sulle critiche di Elon Musk secondo cui non avrebbe effettuato tagli significativi alla spesa.

Ma questo non coglie il punto. Il disegno di legge fa molto di più: dalla sicurezza delle frontiere alla deregolamentazione energetica, rimodella la politica statunitense per gli anni a venire.

I tagli al bilancio saranno visibili a partire da ottobre, con il nuovo anno fiscale. La spesa sociale sta già diminuendo in modo significativo.

Con una crescita economica del 3%, le entrate fiscali si stanno stabilizzando. Con grande costernazione dei funzionari dell'UE, la narrazione del collasso fiscale degli Stati Uniti non reggerà.

Gli Stati Uniti non sono in bancarotta. La domanda di titoli del Tesoro rimane forte. Bruxelles, Berlino e Londra avranno bisogno di una nuova scusa per le loro crisi del debito. Il default degli Stati Uniti non le salverà.

Un mercato dei capitali indipendente

Mentre la Germania sprofonda sempre più nel debito, gli Stati Uniti stanno creando un mercato di capitali sovrani.

Mentre l'Europa si aggrappa al suo euro digitale per arginare la fuga dei capitali, gli Stati Uniti vanno avanti con stablecoin private, un sistema di tassi rigoroso e un mercato interbancario collateralizzato (SOFR).

Il credito in dollari ha ora un prezzo definito dagli Stati Uniti. Il mercato dell'eurodollaro, un tempo utilizzato per abbassare artificialmente i costi del credito, è ormai tramontato.

Questo cambiamento darà i suoi frutti in caso di crisi. La FED detiene tutte le leve: fissa i prezzi delle linee di swap e usa il dollaro come arma geopolitica. Tassi di interesse pari a zero, QE e denaro a basso costo per capricci politici sono storia passata. Così come il Green Deal.

Il Green Deal è morto

Il direttore dell'EPA, Lee Zeldin, ha appena annunciato che la CO2 verrà rimossa dall'elenco degli inquinanti pericolosi, sfatando la narrativa del “cambiamento climatico provocato dall'essere umano” e aprendo spazio al dibattito.

Come prevedibile, i fanatici del clima in Europa hanno avuto un crollo, ma la mossa di Zeldin apre la strada a una massiccia deregolamentazione e a investimenti nel settore energetico, annullando i danni degli anni Obama-Biden.

Gli Stati Uniti, già il maggiore esportatore mondiale di petrolio, diventano una superpotenza energetica, spingendo l'Europa, che ne è dipendente, ancora più in difficoltà. L'uranio africano della Francia, i legami dell'Europa con il Medio Oriente: tutto questo sta svanendo.

Un colpo alla macchina mediatica

Poi è arrivata un'altra bomba: l'amministrazione Trump ha tagliato i finanziamenti pubblici alla USAID, lo sponsor globale dei media di sinistra e delle ONG.

Bruxelles sa cosa è in gioco: perdere il sostegno dei media statunitensi e perdere il controllo della narrazione.

L'America sta tornando al suo tradizionale ruolo di paladina della libertà di parola.

Questa è una buona notizia per i cittadini dell'UE che si oppongono alla macchina della censura di Bruxelles. Con il Digital Services Act e le misure repressive del Regno Unito, la libertà di espressione è sotto assedio. Ogni aiuto è benvenuto.

Crepe nell'edificio europeo

Il firewall multimediale è ancora in piedi, ma si stanno formando delle crepe.

L'Eurozona perde ogni anno €110 miliardi in investimenti diretti che invece volano negli Stati Uniti.

E mentre Francia, Germania e l'Europa meridionale si indebitano sempre di più, centinaia di migliaia di  giovani europei fuggono. La Germania, un tempo fulcro dei mercati dei capitali dell'UE, ora sta annegando nei debiti.

Si tratta di qualcosa di più di un fallimento interno: è una minaccia all'intera struttura di finanziamento del debito dell'UE.

Incolpare gli Stati Uniti per il declino dell'Europa è disonesto. È un diversivo e non dobbiamo lasciargliela passare liscia.

È tempo di una vera riforma.

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

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

[A selection from Man, Economy and State.]

“Other Forms of Coercion”: Economic Power

A very common criticism of the libertarian position runs as follows: Of course we do not like violence, and libertarians perform a useful service in stressing its dangers. But you are very simpliste because you ignore the other significant forms of coercion exercised in society—private coercive power, apart from the violence wielded by the State or the criminal. The government should stand ready to employ its coercion to check or offset this private coercion.

In the first place, this seeming difficulty for libertarian doctrine may quickly be removed by limiting the concept of coercion to the use of violence. This narrowing would have the further merit of strictly confining the legalized violence of the police and the judiciary to the sphere of its competence: combatting violence. But we can go even further, for we can show the inherent contradictions in the broader concept of coercion.

A well-known type of “private coercion” is the vague but ominous-sounding “economic power.” A favorite illustration of the wielding of such “power” is the case of a worker fired from his job, especially by a large corporation. Is this not “as bad as” violent coercion against the property of the worker? Is this not another, subtler form of robbery of the worker, since he is being deprived of money that he would have received if the employer had not wielded his “economic power”?

Let us look at this situation closely. What exactly has the employer done? He has refused to continue to make a certain exchange, which the worker preferred to continue making. Specifically, A, the employer, refuses to sell a certain sum of money in exchange for the purchase of B’s labor services. B would like to make a certain exchange; A would not. The same principle may apply to all the exchanges throughout the length and breadth of the economy. A worker exchanges labor for money with an employer; a retailer exchanges eggs for money with a customer; a patient exchanges money with a doctor for his services; and so forth. Under a regime of freedom, where no violence is permitted, every man has the power either to make or not to make exchanges as and with whom he sees fit. Then, when exchanges are made, both parties benefit. We have seen that if an exchange is coerced, at least one party loses. It is doubtful whether even a robber gains in the long run, for a society in which violence and tyranny are practiced on a large scale will so lower productivity and become so much infected with fear and hate that even the robbers may be unhappy when they compare their lot with what it might be if they engaged in production and exchange in the free market.

“Economic power,” then, is simply the right under freedom to refuse to make an exchange. Every man has this power. Every man has the same right to refuse to make a proffered exchange.

Now, it should become evident that the “middle-of-the-road” statist, who concedes the evil of violence but adds that the violence of government is sometimes necessary to counteract the “private coercion of economic power,” is caught in an impossible contradiction. A refuses to make an exchange with B. What are we to say, or what is the government to do, if B brandishes a gun and orders A to make the exchange? This is the crucial question. There are only two positions we may take on the matter: either that B is committing violence and should be stopped at once, or that B is perfectly justified in taking this step because he is simply “counteracting the subtle coercion” of economic power wielded by A. Either the defense agency must rush to the defense of A, or it deliberately refuses to do so, perhaps aiding B (or doing B’s work for him). There is no middle ground!

B is committing violence; there is no question about that. In the terms of both doctrines, this violence is either invasive and therefore unjust, or defensive and therefore just. If we adopt the “economic-power” argument, we must choose the latter position; if we reject it, we must adopt the former. If we choose the “economic-power” concept, we must employ violence to combat any refusal of exchange; if we reject it, we employ violence to prevent any violent imposition of exchange. There is no way to escape this either-or choice. The “middle-of-the-road” statist cannot logically say that there are “many forms” of unjustified coercion. He must choose one or the other and take his stand accordingly. Either he must say that there is only one form of illegal coercion—overt physical violence—or he must say that there is only one form of illegal coercion—refusal to exchange.

We have already fully described the sort of society built on libertarian foundations—a society marked by peace, harmony, liberty, maximum utility for all, and progressive improvement in living standards. What would be the consequence of adopting the “economic-power” premise? It would be a society of slavery: for what else is prohibiting the refusal to work? It would also be a society where the overt initiators of violence would be treated with kindness, while their victims would be upbraided as being “really” responsible for their own plight. Such a society would be truly a war of all against all, a world in which conquest and exploitation would rage unchecked.

Let us analyze further the contrast between the power of violence and “economic power,” between, in short, the victim of a bandit and the man who loses his job with the Ford Motor Company. Let us symbolize, in each case, the alleged power-wielder as P and the supposed victim as X. In the case of the bandit or robber, P plunders X. P lives, in short, by battening off X and all the other X’s. This is the meaning of power in its original, political sense. But what of “economic power”? Here, by contrast, X, the would-be employee, is asserting a strident claim to P’s property! In this case, X is plundering P instead of the other way around. Those who lament the plight of the automobile worker who cannot obtain a job with Ford do not seem to realize that before Ford and without Ford there would be no such job to be obtained at all. No one, therefore, can have any sort of “natural right” to a Ford job, whereas it is meaningful to assert a natural right to liberty, a right which each person may have without depending on the existence of others (such as Ford). In short, the libertarian doctrine, which proclaims a natural right of defense against political power, is coherent and meaningful, but any proclaimed right of defense against “economic power” makes no sense at all. Here, indeed, are enormous differences between the two concepts of “power.”1

—

1 On the spurious problems of “bargaining power,” see Scoville and Sargent, Fact and Fancy in the T.N.E.C. Monographs, pp. 312–13; and W.H. Hutt, Theory of Collective Bargaining (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954), Part I.

The post The ‘Economic Power’ Canard appeared first on LewRockwell.

The stage is being set for a dramatic showdown on the streets of the largest cities in the United States.  The mainstream media is freaking out about President Trump’s takeover of Washington D.C, and protests have already begun.  Needless to say, Washington D.C. is not friendly territory for Trump.  It has one of the highest concentrations of Democrats of any major city in the nation, and Kamala Harris won 90 percent of the vote in D.C. last November.  So this situation has the potential to get out of control very rapidly.

Let us hope that cooler heads prevail, but some in the mainstream media are already trying to draw parallels between the current crisis and the George Floyd protests of 2020.  For example, the following comes from a Time Magazine article entitled “Trump’s Hostile Takeover of D.C. Is Straight Out of the Summer 2020 Playbook”…

As he announced he was taking over Washington’s police department and deploying FBI agents and 800 National Guardsmen to patrol the streets of the nation’s capital, President Donald Trump on Monday seemed to gunning for a trip back to the unsettled summer of 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic and racial justice protests set America on edge. It was an aspirational time jump for Trump, who is in search of a way out of political troubles of his own making.

Wow.

You can certainly feel the anti-Trump sentiment in that article.

And even though Trump just announced his takeover of D.C., the protests have already started…

As President Donald Trump announced Monday plans to place the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control, the group Free DC and its partners held a rally in northwest D.C.

“DC belongs to DC residents,” said a Free DC representative. “DC is our home and Trump can’t have it.”

We will keep a very close eye on these protests to see if they grow.

To me, the footage that we have gotten so far indicates that the protesters are very well organized.

I was curious about “Free DC”, and so I decided to learn more.

This is what they say about themselves on their official website…

The 700,000 people of the District of Columbia deserve to have the power over our local government. However, for far too long, Congress and federal administrations have interfered in DC communities by overturning our local laws, restricting our local budgets, and imposing their will on the people who live in DC for years and generations.

Free DC is a renewed campaign to protect Home Rule and win lasting dignity for our communities. We are no longer willing to accept anything less for our communities, and we are setting out to build the cultural and political movement it will take to win. We want you to be part of it.

To these people, President Trump is enemy number one.

And they were definitely not thrilled when Trump boldly declared that D.C. was just “LIBERATED”…

Washington, D.C. will be LIBERATED today! Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR. I will, MAKE OUR CAPITAL GREAT AGAIN! The days of ruthlessly killing, or hurting, innocent people, are OVER! I quickly fixed the Border (ZERO ILLEGALS in last 3 months!), D.C. is next!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT

We have never seen a president do this before.

During a press conference on Monday, Trump explained that the D.C. police are now under the control of the federal government, and he also announced that the National Guard is going to be brought in…

President Trump said Monday that he is deploying members of the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and that the federal government has taken control of the D.C. police as part of a push to crack down on crime in the nation’s capital, despite data showing crime has declined in the city in recent years.

“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference at the White House. “This is liberation day in D.C., and we’re going to take our capital back.”

It turns out that Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act does give President Trump the authority to do what he is doing…

Section 740 of the DC Home Rule Act allows the President to take control of the Metropolitan Police Department under “special conditions of an emergency nature.”

The President signed two executive actions on Monday, including invoking powers under section 740 and sending statutorily required letters to the DC Mayor and the necessary congressional committees. Section 740 requires the President to notify committee chairmen and the mayor in order to federalize the Metropolitan police for more than forty-eight hours.

But is it a good idea?

Only time will tell.

The capital city of our nation should be a place where people feel safe, and President Trump wants to make that a reality.

But the mainstream media is going to try to use this to stir up people’s emotions.  Here is more from Time Magazine…

As he appeared in a standing-room-only White House briefing room Monday morning flanked by his national security Cabinet, Trump looked to bait his critics into an uproar, hinting he would escalate to active duty military members if needed. The tableau was one designed to send the national conversation spiraling, a maximalist favorite tactic for Trump to move off a difficult moment.

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people,” the President said. The District’s revamped police force, he said, would be empowered to do “whatever the hell they want.”

If Trump’s effort to transform D.C. is successful, we could see similar efforts in other large cities.

During his press conference, Trump specifically mentioned New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Oakland as urban areas that could be targeted next…

President Donald Trump said he might expand his crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital to other major U.S. cities as he announced plans to send 800 National Guard troops into Washington, D.C.

Trump singled out New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Oakland, California during a Monday, Aug. 11, news conference as potential future targets in what would be a drastic escalation of federal presence on the streets of American cities.

“We’re not going to lose our cities over this. This will go further. We’re starting very strongly with D.C., and we’re going to clean it up real quick,” Trump said.

Does anyone out there think that the Democrats are just going to sit back and allow Trump to conduct crackdowns in all these cities?

To me, this could be the beginning of a scenario that leads to the sort of widespread civil unrest that I have been warning about.

In the days ahead, mainstream news sources will inevitably be filled with images of people being rounded up or dragged away.

Emotions will be running really high, and it won’t take much of a spark to set off a very large fire.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post Street Protests Have Already Begun as the Mainstream Media Stirs Up a Backlash to Trump’s D.C. Takeover appeared first on LewRockwell.

About eight years from now, after the reelection of President Vance, experts will agree that there was something rotten in the state of Clinton, Obama, and Biden. Always the last to know, the experts will finally “notice” that something has changed in this city on a hill.

Steve Sailer has a book on Noticing. And why not? The most important skill for a human is to notice when things have changed and then to figure out what to do next.

Anyone with half a brain noticed that something had changed back in 2016 when neophyte politician Trump ran for the presidency. And the Deep State noticed it too. That’s what Clinton and Obama and Clapper and Brennan and Uncle Tom Cobbley and our world-beating Intelligence Community were conspiring to stop before it was too late. Only they failed.

I notice, according to reports, that President Trump has just brokered his seventh peace agreement between warring states since January 20 and counting.

All of us, excepting our liberal friends, really want to know what this all means.

This is what I noticed in the last few days. There’s a Salena Zito piece on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. I’ll just give you the high points:

Spend any time listening to Bessent talk, and it is clear he is laser-focused on one thing, something he can only accomplish in his current job: lifting America’s economy into a position where both Main Street and Wall Street are performing equally robustly.

And this:

The 79th treasury secretary also loves working with President Donald Trump… The banter, trust, and respect that went both ways between the men were tangible.

For instance, Trump recently told Bessent that he didn’t have enough muscle to work as a steelworker.

Bessent’s family “was very affluent for a couple hundred years, and then we weren’t,” so Bessent started doing part-time work at age 9. Then:

Bessent worked his way through college, holding down three jobs during summer break and at least one, if not two, jobs during the school year.

And so on. Real the whole thing. Remember the other Secretary of the Treasury that worked through his teenage years? Alexander Hamilton.

Then there is an interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who, I assume, had something to do with the seven peace agreements. The interview covered the persecution of Christians all over the world. Rubio stated that the Christian “church has traditionally been at its strongest when it’s the persecuted church… [and weakest when it] gets consumed by the culture.” Trump and Rubio are focused on massacres of Christians in countries like Nigeria, and they think the new Pope could help.

But now let’s get a more general world view from James Banakis writing at John Kass’s website. He notes that there are only two responses to Trump: admiration and revulsion.

There is, it seems no middle ground. Thus, it has always been with consequential figures throughout history…

The Trump enemies will hate to hear this, but he is changing the Presidency and international relations for the better, forever. The entire world is in the midst of a revolution.

And Trump is the “hero” that is making it happen. Heroes, according to Joseph Campbell, tend to die on the border between Order and Chaos. Victor Davis Hanson compares Trump to Gen. Patton, who

led the 3rd army’s full blast attack from Normandy to the Rhine.. [k]eeping the opposition confused, and in complete disarray. The leader in this case Trump is the tip of the spear. His administration follows to implement his agendas. He demonstrates every day, whether you agree with his policies or not that he was born to lead.  The press, because of Trump, is in the process of changing forever.  Newspapers and network news are becoming a thing of the past.

My point in throwing all this out is to help you — and myself — try to begin to understand what is going on here. My faith is that we are at a turning point in history, the end of the age of politics as religion, of heaven on earth, the rule of the educated elite. In other words, a revolution.

But what kind of revolution? I suggest there are three kinds of revolution. Educated class revolutions like the French, Bolshevik, and Maoist Revolutions lead straight to the abattoir. Lower-class revolutions usually fail: peasant uprisings and worker rebellions.

But the American Revolution was the most successful in history. Why was that? I suggest that it was a middle-class revolution, led by men who understood life in the real world: men ranging from landowners like Washington and Jefferson, lawyers like John Adams, and, of course My Man Alexander Hamilton, the “bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,” who practiced business and law, and understood central banking.

Have you “noticed” that populist nationalism, all across the world, is middle-class centered? That gives me hope.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Trying To ‘Notice’ What Is Going On appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israel’s military has been conducting operations in Gaza for 675 consecutive days since responding to Hamas’ brutal October 7 attack. Yet war fatigue is growing within Israel as international condemnation reached a new high after the security cabinet approved a military takeover of Gaza City.

The plan was approved on Friday. Before that, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had vowed to take over the entire Gaza strip. Nevertheless, the backlash to Friday’s announcement was so intense that by Sunday, Netanyahu responded. He said during a press conference:

Our goal is not to occupy Gaza. Our goal is to free Gaza, free it from Hamas terrorists. The war can end tomorrow if Gaza, or rather if Hamas, lays down its arms and releases all the remaining hostages.

On Monday, Israeli news outlets reported that diplomatic sources told them that Israeli leaders may cancel or delay the plan “in the name of a ceasefire and hostage release deal, should Hamas show a willingness to make significant concessions.” As for Hamas, Palestinian sources told Israeli news outlets that the terrorist organization’s “willingness to make progress in the talks rests on whether Israel cancels its Gaza City takeover plan.”

No Permanent Occupation 

In the meantime, Netanyahu claims the plan isn’t for Israel to hold on to Gaza permanently. He told Fox News:

We don’t want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter. We don’t want to govern it, we don’t want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us and giving Gazans a good life. That’s not possible with Hamas.

European Backlash

The announcement triggered intense backlash among many Western powers that have hitherto backed Israel. Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp told Axios that, “Netanyahu’s cabinet is losing Europe — totally. We stand with Israel, but not with the policy of the Israeli government.” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the move “will do nothing to bring an end to this conflict or to help secure the release of the hostages,” a sentiment shared by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which warns that the operation “risks the lives of the remaining hostages in addition to potentially sparking a humanitarian disaster.”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has been hawkish on the Eastern European war front, went beyond words of condemnation. He announced that Germany will halt weapons exports to Israel. He said on Sunday, “We cannot supply weapons to a conflict that is being attempted to be resolved exclusively by military means, which could claim hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.” France’s foreign ministry said the plan “would constitute further serious violations of international law and lead to a complete dead end.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said, “We join many others in viewing that this is wrong, that this action is not going to contribute to an improvement in the humanitarian situation on the ground.” Representatives of Australia, Italy, and New Zealand chimed in with their version of finger wagging as well.

Globalist Objections

The heads of globalist entities also objected. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called the plan a “dangerous escalation” that may worsen “the already catastrophic consequences for millions of Palestinians.” European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said, “The Israeli government’s decision to further extend its military operation in Gaza must be reconsidered.” Von der Leyen urged a ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and “unhindered access” to humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza.

One major power that has not objected is the United States. When asked about the plan last week, Trump said, “I know that we are there now trying to get people fed.… As far as the rest of it, I really can’t say. That’s going to be pretty much up to Israel.” On Monday, Trump told Axios that he didn’t think Hamas would release the remaining hostages, of which there are believed to be about 20 who are still alive, “in the current situation,” the insinuation being that Israel needed to tighten the screws.

The disapproval from Western nations is a recent development, one highly influenced by what more people are beginning to view as an unjust, inhumane assault on civilians in Gaza, which has been turned to rubble and its citizens rendered hungry and homeless.

Israelis Weary

There are signs that, even within Israel, support for the Gaza operation has eroded. A poll aired by Israeli broadcaster Channel 12 in July found that 74 percent of Israelis wanted the war to end. According to the report on the poll:

Seventy-four percent of Israelis, including 60% of people who voted for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, back an agreement with Hamas that would release all the hostages at once in exchange for an end to the Gaza war, according to a poll aired Friday on Channel 12.

Axios reported that Israeli officials said it will take several weeks to plan the takeover and the evacuation of civilians from Gaza City. This allows time for a potential agreement.

This article was originally published on The New American.

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Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination. Unpleasant though it may be, the sense of personal sin is precisely that which keeps our sin from getting out of hand…It is a very great blessing because it is the one and only effective safeguard against our own proclivity for evil.

-M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for the healing of Human Evil (1983).

The bad habit of lying starts in childhood when we discover that lying may enable us to indulge in something forbidden, break a rule, or shirk a responsibility without getting into trouble for it. Growing up is the difficult and often painful process of recognizing that there are no free lunches—that everything has to be earned and nothing can be gained without a corresponding sacrifice.

Throughout history, the ruling class has always lied to the people it governs. What seems to make our current era in the West somewhat peculiar is the avidity with which large swaths of the population embrace the practice of constantly lying in the most obvious way about everything.

The ease with which our political class lies about everything has apparently been made possible by the shallowness and sentimentality of our popular culture and the impoverishment of our education.

Recently I listened to Jordan Peterson give lectures on two fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm—Hansel and Gretel and Show White.

I’d long known that the ancient stories collected by the Brothers Grimm revealed the dark side of human nature, and the struggle that all of us must undertake to overcome it. However, I didn’t appreciate the true depth of the horror that Peterson explicates.

His interpretation of these stories made me wonder if Herman Melville had been influenced by them when he wrote Moby Dick—the story of a comfortable young man from New York who, by joining a whaling expedition into the Pacific, has an encounter with the dark side of human nature that most people never recognize because they flatter themselves that they are entirely civilized.

The shallower and less self-aware we become, they less we are able to recognize that many of the people who now direct our institutions are animated by Satanic pride and greed. Many of the most influential people in the West mask their ruthless ambitions in the language of benevolence and virtue signaling. Some of them, like Bluebeard and Queen Grimhilde, seem archetypal in their villainy.

I’m often asked by readers of this newsletter why we aren’t seeing greater and more persistent resistance to the “People of the Lie” who dominate our institutions. The reason, I believe, is that the majority of our citizens is still unable to spot the obvious perfidy that is perpetrated in the public forum every day.

They can’t quite grasp that many of those who occupy leadership positions are terrible people who do terrible things to actual people while convincing themselves they are pursuing their ambitions for the greater good of “humanity” in the abstract.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post People of the Lie appeared first on LewRockwell.

In every political shift, there’s a shadow economy of influence. In the modern GOP, that shadow is cast by a well-financed, highly coordinated network of billionaires, corporate dynasties, and ideological financiers. These actors do not simply donate; they design policy, groom candidates, and capture entire institutions to serve their vision.

This section identifies the top power brokers behind MAGA authoritarianism and the post-Trump far-right. We trace:

• Where their wealth comes from
• What their real goals are
• How they subvert democratic governance
• Their connections to Trumpism, white nationalism, and anti-democratic populism

1. Leonard Leo – Architect of the Shadow Judiciary

Wealth Origin: Federalist Society, Catholic legal networks, undisclosed dark money trusts
Primary Vehicles: Marble Freedom Trust, The 85 Fund, Concord Fund
Goal: Remake the judiciary with ultra-conservative judges who will outlast public majorities.
Trump Connection: Hand-picked most of Trump’s judicial nominees, including three Supreme Court justices.
Impact: Enabled decades-long rollback of reproductive rights, civil rights, and environmental regulations.
Estimated Network Funds: Over $1.6 billion, mostly dark money.
Threat Assessment: Critical — Covert, influential, and legally insulated from public accountability.

2. Charles Koch – The Long Game Oligarch

Wealth Origin: Koch Industries (fossil fuels, chemicals, paper goods)
Primary Vehicles: Americans for Prosperity, Stand Together, DonorsTrust
Goal: Shrink government, eliminate taxes/regulations, weaken labor, privatize public services.
Trump Connection: Initially distanced, then aligned on judicial picks, tax reform, and deregulation.
Impact: Built the pipeline that funds ALEC-written laws, voter suppression, and anti-democratic legislation in red states.
Estimated Network Funds: Tens of billions in combined family and institutional spending since 2008.
Threat Assessment: Critical — Decades-long influence campaign with unmatched state-level control.

One often-overlooked player in the dark money ecosystem is DonorsTrust, sometimes called the “dark money ATM” of the right. This organization launders large donations through anonymous donor-advised funds, making it nearly impossible to trace the original funders of judicial campaigns, ballot initiatives, and think tank operations.

3. Peter Thiel – The Techno-Authoritarian Investor

Wealth Origin: PayPal, Palantir, Facebook early investor
Primary Vehicles: Thiel Capital, Thiel Fellowship, Founders Fund, personal donations
Goal: Dismantle liberal democracy, replace with technocratic nationalism; fund candidates hostile to pluralism.
Trump Connection: Early Trump backer; funded JD Vance and Blake Masters; anti-immigrant and anti-press stances
Impact: Promotes surveillance capitalism; wants “startup society” with limited government and elite control.
Estimated Network Funds: Several billion in personal and directed funds.
Threat Assessment: Critical — Intellectually coherent, media-savvy, and actively reshaping the GOP’s next wave.

4. Rebekah Mercer – The Billionaire Matchmaker of MAGA Media

Wealth Origin: Mercer family hedge fund fortune (Renaissance Technologies)
Primary Vehicles: Mercer Family Foundation, Parler (formerly), Reclaim New York, Make America Number 1 PAC
Goal: Weaponize media and digital platforms to amplify far-right culture wars and dismantle government institutions.
Trump Connection: Top funder of Trump’s 2016 campaign and Steve Bannon’s rise; backed Cambridge Analytica and alt-right influencers.
Impact: Spread disinformation during the 2016 and 2020 elections; funds organizations attacking climate science, voting access, and civil liberties.
Estimated Network Funds: Hundreds of millions via dark money nonprofits.
Threat Assessment: Critical — Mastermind of far-right media architecture, anti-democracy normalization.

5. Stephen Schwarzman – The Wall Street Power Broker

Wealth Origin: CEO and co-founder of Blackstone Group (private equity, real estate, infrastructure)
Primary Vehicles: Personal donations, super PACs, financial industry lobbying
Goal: Protect capital gains and private equity profits, resist taxation and regulation of high finance.
Trump Connection: Top donor and advisor; helped shape Trump’s corporate tax cuts.
Impact: Pushed for deregulation of Wall Street, tax breaks for the ultra-rich, and weakening Dodd-Frank protections.
Estimated Network Funds: Billions in political leverage via Wall Street industry groups.
Threat Assessment: High — Corporate elite with transactional influence over national policy.

6. Harlan Crow – The Justice Purchaser

Wealth Origin: Real estate, Trammell Crow Company inheritance
Primary Vehicles: Personal wealth, Federalist Society donor circles, private gifts
Goal: Shape judicial rulings by supporting anti-regulatory judges and bankrolling ideological allies.
Trump Connection: Close ties to Trump-aligned legal figures; major underwriter of Leo network.
Impact: Provided luxury travel and gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas; funded anti-DEI and pro-theocracy groups.
Estimated Network Funds: Tens of millions personally and through donor advised funds.
Threat Assessment: High — Quiet influencer whose wealth penetrates the highest court.

7. Ken Griffin – The Market Supremacist

Wealth Origin: Founder/CEO of Citadel (hedge fund and market maker)
Primary Vehicles: Super PACs, educational influence, state-level political engineering
Goal: Maintain low-tax, pro-investor climate; suppress progressive taxation and economic justice.
Trump Connection: Supported Trump’s tax agenda; major funder of DeSantis and other MAGA successors.
Impact: Shaped Illinois and Florida politics; attacked teachers’ unions, progressive ballot initiatives.
Estimated Network Funds: Over $500 million in political giving.
Threat Assessment: High — Economic kingmaker using markets to undermine democratic accountability.

8. Rupert Murdoch – The Propaganda Czar

Wealth Origin: News Corp, Fox News, Wall Street Journal
Primary Vehicles: Fox Corporation, NY Post, broadcast dominance
Goal: Consolidate public opinion behind right-wing nationalism, monetize fear, disinformation, and rage.
Trump Connection: Kingmaker of the Trump presidency; Fox News echoed and amplified MAGA lies.
Impact: Promoted election denial, COVID misinformation, white nationalist talking points.
Estimated Network Funds: Billions in media assets and political leverage.
Threat Assessment: Critical — Mass disinformation agent eroding public trust and truth itself.

9. Barre Seid – The Ghost Donor

Wealth Origin: Electronics manufacturing (Tripp Lite)
Primary Vehicles: Marble Freedom Trust (via $1.6B donation), anonymous charitable entities
Goal: Cement hard-right control of judiciary, education, and public discourse.
Trump Connection: Funded Leonard Leo’s empire; passive enabler of post-Trump legal backlash.
Impact: Largest known political donation in U.S. history used to fund anti-democracy infrastructure.
Estimated Network Funds: Over $1.6 billion (single transfer in 2021).
Threat Assessment: Critical — Operates from the shadows but bankrolls America’s ideological capture.

Targeted Strategies to Cut Their Power

1. Direct Public Exposure & Reputation

• Investigative campaigns highlighting lavish perks and self-dealing (e.g., Leo’s use of BH Fund & CRC Advisors).
• Partner with watchdogs (ProPublica, CREW) and use media to debunk understatement narratives (e.g., “court is nonpartisan”).
• Naming and shaming foster public pressure, which is particularly effective for Crow, Seid, Schwarzman, and Mercer, whose wealth is cloaked behind shell networks.

2. Financial Transparency & Flow Interruption

• Enact the DISCLOSE Act: mandates disclosure of all donations >$10K to 501(c)s and Super PACs.
• Ban dark-money interchanges between nonprofits and for-profits (e.g., Leo’s CRC Advisors).
• Require donor disclosure for amicus briefs in key SCOTUS cases to reveal funding flows from Leo, Koch, and Crow

3. Ethics & Anti-Corruption Legislation

• Pass the American Anti-Corruption Act to:
  • Limit gifts from billionaires (including travel and hospitality)
  • Mandate full disclosure of board memberships and private consulting by justices and lawmakers
• Extend gift bans and recusal requirements to SCOTUS justices, targeting Crow and Alito’s relationships.

4. Legal & Tax Enforcement

• Use IRS and AG investigations to challenge nonprofit fundraising abuses (e.g., Seid‑Leo $1.6 billion Marble Freedom Trust)
• Strengthen FEC enforcement by prohibiting dark-money PAC coordination and reforming membership rules (Koch’s networks).

5. Strategic Disinvestment & Boycott

• Mobilize shareholder resolutions in banks and asset managers tied to Griffin, Schwarzman, and Thiel.
• Launch public boycotts of Murdoch-owned outlets (FOX, NY Post), especially during major stories.

6. Campaign Finance & Electoral Overhaul

• Expand public financing so billionaire-backed candidates don’t outspend grassroots campaigns.
• De-gerrymander Redistricting & Enforce Voting Rights to break hold of Koch- and Griffin-funded hardened districts.

7. Civic Media & Narrative Disruption

• Fund truth-based “dark money tracker” media to expose donors (cross-linked with crisis areas like SCOTUS, Congress).
• Support local fact-checking in swing areas where Mercer or Crow-funded outlets smear opponents.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Elite Funders Reshaping Democracy in Their Image appeared first on LewRockwell.

On August 6, 2025, the world marked the 80th anniversary of the American destruction of Hiroshima. As in decades past, Hiroshima Day served to honor the first victims of atomic warfare and to reaffirm the enduring promise that their suffering would not be in vain, that they and the residents of Nagasaki, devastated three days later in 1945, would be the last places to endure such a fate.

Within that commemorative framework, Hiroshima has been effectively rendered an abstraction and reduced to a cautionary tale. With the involuntary sacrifice of that city and its inhabitants, humanity was offered a profound lesson. In the ruins of Hiroshima, the world confronted a vision of nothing less than its own potential end. And awareness of that apocalyptic possibility emerged almost immediately. The very next day, in fact, the American newspaper PM, based in New York, ran an article speculating on the catastrophic consequences of an atomic bomb detonating in the heart of that very city.

For the first time, thanks to Hiroshima, human beings became an endangered species. People everywhere were presented with an existential choice between the quick and the dead, between one world and none. Humanity could recover its moral bearings and pursue the abolition of nuclear weapons and the renunciation of war, or accept the inevitability that such man-made forces would ultimately abolish most or all of us. (Think “nuclear winter.”) Only through the former could we hope for collective redemption rather than collective suicide.

In our annual ritual of remembrance, Hiroshima is recalled not so much as a site of mass slaughter, but as a symbol of peace, hope, and resilience, a testament to our professed commitment to “never again.” Yet this year, such sanitized appeals of official memory rang increasingly hollow. After all, eight decades later, humanity (or at least its leadership) continues to demonstrate that it learned remarkably little from the horrors of Hiroshima.

What, after all, could it mean to commemorate such a moment in a world where today not one, but nine nuclear-armed states hold humanity hostage to the threat of sudden, total annihilation? Worse yet, today’s arsenals contain thousands of thermonuclear weapons, some of them up to 1,000 times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Worse yet, those arsenals are being “modernized” regularly, the American one to the tune of $1.5 trillion or more as a significant portion of our national resources continues to be siphoned away from meeting human needs and redirected toward preparations for (in)human destruction.

Worse yet, all too many of those weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, poised to extinguish life on Earth in what Daniel Ellsberg, the man who long ago released the top-secret Pentagon Papers, once described as a “single, immense hammer-blow to be executed with the automaticity of a mousetrap at almost any provocation.”

Under this country’s current launch-on-warning posture, President Donald Trump (and any president who follows him) holds sole, unquestioned authority to initiate a retaliatory nuclear strike, with as little as six minutes to decide following an alert about a possible nuclear attack (despite a well-documented history of false alarms). This scenario also presumes that the U.S. would only be acting in “self-defense” in response to a nuclear strike by another nation, although mutually assured destruction renders such concepts obsolete. In reality, that assumption is far from certain. Washington (unlike, for example, Beijing) has never adopted a no-first-use policy and continues to reserve the right to initiate a nuclear strike preemptively.

Moreover, what does it mean to remember Hiroshima in a world where, while no atomic bomb has been dropped on Gaza, the tonnage of “conventional” explosives unleashed there is already equivalent to six Hiroshima bombings? As the nuclear abolitionist organization Nihon Hidankyo, composed of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, warned in the lead-up to being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024, the suffering of Gaza’s children all too eerily mirrors their own experiences in Hiroshima.

That city is therefore not merely a past atrocity but an open wound, not simply a lesson of history but an ongoing nightmare. There is, in short, no true way to meaningfully honor its memory while so many countries (my own included) actively prepare for future nuclear war.

At this moment, the history of the bomb needs to be reconsidered, not as an isolated development in an increasingly distant past but as inextricably linked to broader questions of mass violence now, including in Gaza. Such an approach, in fact, would reflect the way the bomb was originally understood by many of the scientists who built it, sensing that it would prove to be what some of them would soon describe as “a weapon of genocide.”

Destroying Cities and Calling it Peace

After those two atomic bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering up to 210,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians by deliberate design, most Americans responded with relief. Echoing the official narrative, they celebrated the bomb as a triumph of scientific ingenuity and a “winning weapon” associated with bringing a swift and decisive end to World War II, the bloodiest conflict in human history.

Decades of historical scholarship have demonstrated that such a narrative is largely a myth. In the aftermath of those two bombings, a carefully constructed postwar consensus quickly emerged, bolstered by inflated claims that those two bombs were used only as a last resort, that they saved half a million American lives, and, perversely enough, that they constituted a form of “mercy killing” that spared many Japanese civilians. In reality, clear alternatives were then available, rendering the use of nuclear weapons unnecessary and immoral as well as, given the future nuclearization of the planet, strategically self-defeating.

Nonetheless, a war-weary American public overwhelmingly endorsed the bombings. Postwar polls indicated that 85% of them supported a decision made without their knowledge, input, or any form of democratic oversight. Notably, nearly a quarter of respondents expressed a further vengeful, even genocidal disappointment that Japan had surrendered so quickly, denying the United States the opportunity to drop “many more” atomic bombs (although no additional atomic weapons were then available).

It remains unclear whether, had they been ready, Washington would have used them. Despite President Harry Truman’s public posture of steely resolve, his private reflections suggest a deep unease, even horror over their use. As Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace recorded in his diary, Truman had “given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, all those kids.”

Why, then, were most Americans not similarly horrified? As historians John Dower and Ronald Takaki have shown, such exterminationist sentiments were fueled by anti-Asian racism, which framed the Pacific War in the American imagination as a race war. But perhaps more important, the way had been paved for them by the normalization of the practice of devastating area bombing, or more accurately, the terror bombing of both Nazi Germany and Japan.

Over the course of the war, the United States and Great Britain had “perfected” that indiscriminate method of destruction, targeting civilian morale and the collective will and capacity of a nation to sustain its war effort. This came despite the fact that President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly condemned the aerial bombardment of civilian infrastructure before the U.S. entry into the war as “inhuman barbarism.”

As Daniel Ellsberg observed, when it came to the rapid erosion of ethical restraints under the exigencies of an existential war, “liberal democracies… in fighting an evil enemy, picked up the methods of that enemy and made them into a private ethic that was indistinguishable really from Hitler’s ethic.” That moral collapse would be evident in the devastation wrought upon the German cities of Hamburg and Dresden, as well as in the similar destruction inflicted by the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities.

That descent into “barbarism” was not lost on contemporary observers. Reflecting on the 1943 Allied bombing of Hamburg, outspoken pacifist Vera Brittain described the destruction as a scene from “the evil nightmare of a homicidal maniac” and as “irrefutable evidence of the moral and spiritual abyss into which Britain and her rulers have descended.” She warned that such actions stemmed from a selective and hypocritical blindness, observing that, “in the Nazis and the Japanese we recognize cruelty when we see it, yet that same cruelty is being created, unperceived, amongst ourselves.”

And such a recognition wasn’t confined to pacifists but extended to policymakers. In response to the devastation caused by the “conventional” bombing campaign against Japan, including the burning to death of as many as 130,000 people in Tokyo in a single night in March 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson warned that, if such attacks continued, “we might get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” (The New York Times reported that the bombing of Tokyo may have killed as many as one to two million people. While not necessarily accurate, such reporting reflected a broader desensitization to mass death that had come to define the logic of total war, as well as a growing public tolerance among Americans for urbicide, the city-scale slaughter of civilians.)

On Nazi and Nuclear Holocausts

Not everyone in the Allied nations shared in the prevailing atmosphere of apathy or even jubilation over those nuclear bombings. Before the second bomb struck Nagasaki, French philosopher Albert Camus expressed his horror that even in a war defined by unprecedented, industrialized slaughter, Hiroshima stood apart. The destruction of that city, he observed, marked the moment when “mechanistic civilization has come to its final stage of savagery.” Soon after, American cultural critic Dwight Macdonald condemned the bombings in Politics, arguing that they placed Americans “on the same moral plane” as the Nazis, rendering the American people as complicit in the crimes of their government as the German people had been in theirs.

American scholar Lewis Mumford likewise regarded that moment as a profound moral collapse. It marked, he argued in 1959, the point at which the U.S. decided to commit the better part of its national energies to preparation for wholesale human extermination. With the advent of the bomb, Americans accepted their role as “moral monsters,” legitimizing technological slaughter as a permissible instrument of state power. “In principle,” he wrote, “the extermination camps where the Nazis incinerated over six million helpless Jews were no different from the urban crematoriums our air force improvised in its attacks by napalm bombs on Tokyo,” laying the groundwork for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The specter of Nazism has always loomed large over the atomic bomb. It was, after all, the fear of a Nazi bomb that first catalyzed the Manhattan Project that would create the American bombs. While the fall of the Nazi regime preceded the use of atomic weapons on Japan by nearly three months, as soft-spoken astronomer Carl Sagan once observed, the ideological imprint of Nazism was etched into the littered landscape of charred bodies and scorched earth of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It endured in the brutal logic of total war carried forward through the ensuing Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union and culminated in the grotesque accumulation of nuclear arsenals with tens of thousands of world-destroying weapons poised to obliterate humanity.

In a 1986 keynote address before the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem, “The Final Solution to the Human Problem,” Sagan argued that Hitler “haunts our century… [as] he has shattered our confidence that civilized societies can impose limits on human destructiveness.” In their mutually reinforcing preparations to annihilate one another, erase the past, and foreclose the possibility of future generations, he concluded, “the superpowers have dutifully embraced this legacy… Adolf Hitler lives on.”

Lacking Hitler, Sagan suggested, Washington and Moscow imposed his image on each other. This was necessary because “nuclear weapons represent such a surpassing evil that they can be justified only by an equally evil adversary.” Humanity, he warned, was then locked in a downward spiral into a moral abyss reminiscent of a Greek tragedy. “When we engage in a death struggle with a monster, there is a real danger that we ourselves will, by slow and imperceptible changes, become transmogrified into monsters. We may be the last to notice what is happening to us.”

This influence was evident in the fact that fear of a Nazi bomb had served as the initial impetus for the Manhattan Project and that the future nuclear state would share certain characteristics of the Nazi regime. As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described it, such a state would rely on “the genocidal mentality,” a psychological willingness, combined with the technological capacity and institutional planning necessary to, under certain circumstances, deliberately destroy entire human populations.

No More Hiroshimas

In concluding his 1986 address, Carl Sagan warned that World War II had never truly ended. And in a sense, it hasn’t ended even today, given that nine countries now possess such world-destroying weaponry. After all, were a nuclear war to happen in the years to come, a scenario the most powerful states have spent the past 80 years preparing for and making ever more likely, the Allies will have retroactively lost the war. In the radioactive ruins of what was once Washington and New York, Leningrad, Moscow, and Beijing, New Delhi, and Islamabad, no less potentially across much of the rest of this planet, we would witness “the fulfillment of Hitler’s last and maddest vision.”

Such a future is anything but hypothetical. It may, in some sense, already be unfolding around us. It takes no great imagination to envision Hiroshima in the wreckage of Gaza or in the increasingly bombed-out cities of Ukraine. And that’s just a hint of the future, were nuclear weapons ever to be used. If we don’t dedicate ourselves to building a world without war and without nuclear weapons, sooner or later we will undoubtedly witness just such devastation on a global and irreversible scale.

To survive as a species and preserve our humanity, we must, as Dwight Macdonald urged us in August 1945, begin to think “dangerous” thoughts “of sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all [people] everywhere.” Only then could we commemorate Hiroshima Day without the hypocrisy of talking peace while endlessly preparing for a world-ending war. Only then could we begin to fulfill the enduring promise of never again, no more Hiroshimas.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post What Do We Forget When We Remember Hiroshima? appeared first on LewRockwell.

While recently channel surfing on Sirius/XM radio, buzzing through the ’70s and ’80s rock stations, I caught a live New York City tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, who died two weeks ago at age 76. Ozzy lived a wild existence, more than mirrored by his music, not only as a solo “artist” (I don’t like that word) but with the grim “work” of his rock group Black Sabbath. He found himself in quite a pit, which he wrote about expressively in his agonizing songs, some of which seemed satanic.

As a product of those times, I listened to all that junk and knew it word for word. I lived a wild life as well. I most certainly didn’t mess with anything that appeared satanic, but as a young person, well, you often didn’t know what the hell (pun intended) you were listening to. Although with many of Black Sabbath’s lyrics, even a dimwitted teenage idiot growing up in Butler, Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s (that was me) could discern something potentially sinister going on.

Words like “Hell” jumped out at you.

And yet, as Scott Ventureyra wrote about in an insightful tribute here at Crisis, Ozzy, like so many of the perverse rockers of his era, seemed to be “channeling confusion not conviction” with his lyrics. At times, “Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath [seemed to be] channeling a kind of exaggerated darkness that was more dramatic than truly diabolical.”

Perhaps. Unfortunately, it was always exasperatingly hard to tell with these types. Their “art” was often unclear and empty and dark. It was downright depressing. It is no coincidence that Ozzy scribbled songs with titles like “Suicide Solution” and found himself “going off the rails” on a “Crazy Train.”

Getting back to the Ozzy tribute on the Sirius/XM channel, it was hosted by a 1980s MTV VJ. In between cuts, the VJ shared a quip with the audience—or at least what he considered to be funny and expected would get a rise or applause. He quoted some fellow rocker who had shared Ozzy’s degenerate lifestyle and who had quipped to the ailing Ozzy that he would see him in Hell someday, where they would “have a beer” together.

The VJ and audience chuckled.

But in truth, of course, that wasn’t funny, especially if it wasn’t a joke. It was nothing to laugh at.

Let me be clear: Hell is not a place where you and your buddies in the afterlife have a beer together. Should you be so horribly unfortunate to end up there, you’re not going to be hanging out at bars and tossing down brewskis with Lucifer.

If that’s where you end up, the Prince of Darkness will have a decidedly different plan for you. You will not enjoy those plans. It isn’t going to be Coors and cigars and guitars and partying with hot groupie chicks.

I really need not say any of this to readers at Crisis Magazine, but I’ll offer just a few vivid descriptions for any non-Catholics or non-Christians who are reading.

Jesus Christ described Hell as a “fiery furnace” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” It is a place of “unquenchable” “eternal fire” and “eternal punishment” (see Matthew 13:41-42 and 25:41-46, and Mark 9:43).

One of the greatest visionaries in the history of the Church, Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), described Hell as a place where “nothing is to be seen but dismal dungeons, dark caverns, frightful deserts, fetid swamps filled with every imaginable species of poisonous and disgusting reptile.” It is a place of “perpetual scenes of wretched discord,” filled with “every species of sin and corruption, either under the most horrible forms imaginable, or represented by different kinds of dreadful torments.” It is a scene of “horror,” a vast “temple of anguish and despair” in which there is no comfort and not a “consoling idea admitted.” For those who are there for all eternity, the suffering is made worse by the “absorbing tremendous conviction” that the just and all-powerful God has given the damned what they deserve.

St. Faustina Kowalska (1905-38), in October 1936, had a vision in which she said she was led by an angel to what she called the “chasms of Hell.” The Polish nun described it as a place of “great torture” and “fire that will penetrate the soul without destroying it—a terrible suffering.” “I, Sister Faustina Kowalska, by the order of God, have visited the Abysses of Hell so that I might tell souls about it and testify to its existence,” she wrote in her diary.

Faustina observed Dante-like sections reserved for specific agonies earned in this fallen world. “There are caverns and pits of torture where one form of agony differs from another,” she recorded. “There are special tortures destined for particular souls…. Each soul undergoes terrible and indescribable sufferings related to the manner in which it has sinned.”

According to Faustina, this was merely “a pale shadow of the things I saw. But I noticed one thing: That most of the souls there are those who disbelieved that there is a Hell.”

Akin to what the Fatima children experienced in their vision of Hell on July 13, 1917, the Divine Mercy saint added: “I would have died at the very sight of these tortures if the omnipotence of God had not supported me.”

Among the children of Fatima, the oldest, Lucia, described Hell as a “sea of fire” filled with “demons and souls in human form, like transparent embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about…great clouds of smoke.” The children heard “shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us.”

It was after this vision that Our Lady of Fatima—that is, the Blessed Mother—taught a special prayer to the shepherd children, which we now know as the “Fatima Prayer” that ends each decade of the Rosary: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell, especially those in most need of Thy mercy.”

I could go on and on with chilling descriptions of the underworld.

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The post To Hell With Ozzy Osbourne appeared first on LewRockwell.

They do it because these billionaires, who control the firms that sell to the U.S. Government (and not — or very little — to consumers), need to control the U.S. Government, in order to control their market. A billionaire wants to control his/her market; and if one’s market is one’s Government (and its allies), then this is the way to do that — by controlling one’s own Government. And there is, by now, massive — and it’s entirely consistent — evidence that America’s billionaires DO control the U.S. Govenment.

On 16 August 2021, Jon Schwarz, at The Intercept, headlined “$10,000 INVESTED IN DEFENSE STOCKS WHEN AFGHANISTAN WAR BEGAN NOW WORTH ALMOST $100,000: Was the Afghanistan War a failure? Not for the top five defense contractors and their shareholders.” Does that reality place into an entirely different perspective than what the billionaires-controlled ‘news’-media have reported to you, about why the repeated promises during that two-decades-long U.S. invasion and military occupation of Afghanistan — promises to end it — turned out to have been a lie until Joe Biden (who wanted to instead increase the Obama-created war against Russia in Ukraine) carried out the withdrawal of America from Afghanistan, which Trump had promised to deliver but never did deliver? Of course, there is a lot of important history about that matter, which has been hidden from — instead of reported to — the American people. And the American public vote in elections, on the basis of what both contending Parties want the public not to know — such as that in America, the war-business is the most profitable one of them all, and actually controls the Government.

Schwarz opened:

IF YOU PURCHASED $10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defense contractors on September 18, 2001 — the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks — and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295.

This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613.

That is, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the Afghanistan War.

Moreover, given that the top five biggest defense contractors — Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — are of course part of the S&P 500, the remaining firms had lower returns than the overall S&P returns.

These numbers suggest that it is incorrect to conclude that the Taliban’s immediate takeover of Afghanistan upon the U.S.’s departure means that the Afghanistan War was a failure. On the contrary, from the perspective of some of the most powerful people in the U.S., it may have been an extraordinary success. Notably, the boards of directors of all five defense contractors include retired top-level military officers. …

And yet Trump has the nerve now to be campaigning to win a Nobel Peace Prize — like the war-mongering Obama (in Syria, Libya and Ukraine) won during his first year as President — as being a ‘peacemaker’, because Trump says that he has prevented wars from happening that he says would otherwise have happened (if he hadn’t secretly stopped them from happening, he says). (That con is obviously aimed at fools, but he has always had plenty of those.)

In fact, the very first actual achievement of Trump as America’s new President in 2017 was Trump’s making the world’s all-time biggest-ever armaments sale, which was hidden by all U.S.-and-allied (billionaires-controlled) ‘news’-media but I headlined it on 21 May 2017, “U.S. $350 Billion Arms-Sale to Sauds Cements U.S.-Jihadist Alliance” and opened:

On Saturday, May 20th, U.S. President Donald Trump and the Saud family inked an all-time record-high $350 billion ten-year arms-deal that not only will cement-in the Saud family’s position as the world’s largest foreign purchasers of U.S.-produced weaponry, but will make the Saud family, and America’s ruling families, become, in effect, one aristocracy over both nations, because neither side will be able to violate the will of the other. As the years roll on, their mutual dependency will deepen, each and every year.

Sixteen years after the Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud (who was nicknamed “Bandar Bush” for his intimacy with the Bush family) served in Washington as Saudi Arabia’s U.S. Ambassador and he and his wife personally paid tens of thousands of dollars to the Sauds’ minders who paid for the apartments and for the pilot-training of 9/11 jihadists, and the U.S. government hid this fact from the U.S. public for fifteen years until it was made public but suppressed by the U.S. press so that Americans still don’t know about it, the U.S. and Saudi aristocracies are now becoming bound together even more strongly than before, because of this record-shattering deal that Trump’s team negotiated with the Sauds.

The U.S. government officially blames Iran for the 9/11 attacks and has fined Iran $10.5 billion for those attacks. The Sauds hate Iran and claim that Iran poses an “existential threat” to them. These new weapons will, the Sauds claim, “protect” them from Iran. Right after Trump won the 2016 election, he staffed the top level of his incoming Administration with people who consider Iran to be the main source of terrorism. In a 5 February 2017 Super Bowl television interview, Trump was asked what his policies would be regarding Iran, and he answered (video here, transcript here): “They have total disregard for our country. They are the number one terrorist state.” But he provided no specifics. This ‘defense’ deal is a big specific part of the answer, to that question. The U.S. will now be even more tightly allied with the Sauds (the world’s wealthiest family) than was previously the case.

According to a report in the New York Times on May 18th, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner participated importantly in these negotiations, when he spoke by phone with the CEO of the biggest American weapons-maker, Lockheed Martin, to request her to discount a crucial radar-system, so that the deal could be accepted by Saudi Prince Muhammed bin Salman al-Saud, and she said yes, which was necessary in order for the entire $350 billion package to be accepted. Unreported, however, about this matter, was whether any concession was made by the Trump Administration to Lockheed Martin, in order to be able to win from them this crucial discount. Whether any such verbal commitments were made, might never become publicly known, but this is the way that deals are made.

Trump as the U.S. President has been even a bigger boost to the fortunes of the controlling billionaires over the U.S. armaments manufacturers, and over the corporations that contract-out the Government’s mercenaries, than he has been to his other billionaire funders, such as the Israeli and American citizen Miriam Adelson.

However, he is just another in a long string of such White House agents for America’s billionaires. Furthermore, ever since the Soviet Union ended in 1991, America’s armaments manufacturers and mercenary-contractors — the megacorporations that sell to the U.S. Government and to its allied Governments, not to consumers — have been by far the most profitable of all U.S. corporations, and so it’s not ONLY “the top five biggest defense contractors” but ALL defense contractors that have far outperformed the rest of the U.S. stock market ever since 1991. Those firms control the U.S. Government because they need to in order to control their market (U.S.-and-allied Governments — the U.S. empire) after there really was (ever since 1991) no longer any real NEED for what they supplied, because America’s biggest if not ONLY ‘enemy’ (ever since 25 July 1945) “Soviet communism,” no longer even existed. After 1991, virtually all of America’s military contracting was graft-based. And this is the reason why the Pentagon’s budget after 1991 (when it should have at least halved) continued stable until Gerge W. Bush and his 9/11 operation, then soared in order to “deal with terrorism,” then declined slightly under Obama (as the “terrorism” threat no longer was so terrorizing to Americans), then has been again soaring under first Trump, and then Biden, and now yet again Trump — all while that budget ought to have been cut by around 50% in 1992, and then remained stable thereafter, not artificially inflated by creating terrorist incidents and then creating ‘the Russian threat’, and now ‘the Chinese threat’. It is all a mega-criminal racket by U.S.-and-allied billionaires (and the political agents that they have funded).

Analogous to the hypocrisy of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his rhetoric in favor of peace: what about billionaires declaring themselves as being “philanthropists” for forming tax-avoidance organizations called ‘non-profits’ that really aren’t the “non” part, but are instead devious legalistic constructs to INCREASE their profits? For example, as Dr. Vandana Shiva has said recently (but the link in it was supplied by me):

Bill Gates is not a philanthropist. He gives a little bit of money to take over entire sectors. The big seed banks are called the CJR system. He gives a million here, but he takes all the seeds of that system. All of these seed banks of the world, he now controls by giving a tiny bit. But that’s not where he stops. He then develops, promotes, technologies for patenting. So he controls the seeds of the world, he finances the Svalbard seed bank, then he creates patent systems and he destroys the international system that controls the country’s rights to their seed, so that all the seeds of the world are his seeds, and he can be the new Monsanto on a global scale.

The Svalbard seed bank alleges that it excludes GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) seeds and is ONLY about non-patent-protected, natural, seeds, but why then are investors such as Bill Gates funding it, and why is there a “lack of direct representation of farmers, despite the fact that they are the main suppliers of seeds, within the governance of an institution such as the [Svalbard] Crop Trust.”? The old “Trust” system that was based upon patents of “intellectual property,” is expected to become extended to include ALSO things that are natural. This can be done simply by those billionaires bribing, promoting, and hiring into elective public offices, officials who will, as legislators, write the legal loopholes, and, as government regulators, allow these entirely artificial monopolies and oligopolies — “Trusts” — regarding GMOs. This is the really long-term-investor’s view. And, if it fails to pan out, the billionaire still gets the tax-cut and the prestige of being a ‘philanthropist’ — even though betting AGAINST the public’s welfare (and so actually a “malanthropist”). Therefore, OBVIOUSLY, there should be NO tax-deductions for, and no ‘non’-profits that are allowed to accept a donation from, any billionaire (or from any organization that HAS accepted a donation from one). Actually, if a “philanthropic” organization really DOES contribute more to the public’s welfare than it or its founders and owners take from the public (and add to the public’s tax-burden and national-debt burden), then that ‘charity’ ought far more properly to become AN AGENCY OF, AND THUS ANSWERABLE TO, and therefore nationalized BY, the Government — no longer serving the intentions and priorities of billionaires. America is possibly the least-socialized country and ought to become considerably more socialized and less ‘free-market’ (which is mainly freedom for the super-rich).

Here is the type of individual — an individual who shares the value-system that predominates amongst billionaires but not amongst the general public — who rises to the leadership of billionaire-backed ‘charities’. More details about that person are at Wikipedia. Bad as most U.S. Government officials, appointed by elected Government officials, are, none are that bad, because any elected Government official who had voted to approve the appointment of a person with a record like that, would be likely to voted out of office for having done so. Billionaires know this, and therefore don’t choose for public office individuals such as that. In order to be chosen by billionaires to be funded into a public office, only individuals who aren’t so obviously evil are selected to present to the voters as a candidate, or as a Party’s nominee. So, the point here is that charities should be prohibited if backed by a billionaire, if not prohibited altogether and all replaced by taxpayer-funded entities, which are answerable TO the public.

Basically, all ‘democracies’ that are based upon competing political Parties contesting to deceive the most voters to s‘elect’ from amongst the candidates that have the backing of at least one billionaire funding their campaigns — which campaigns are contests between competing groups, or “Parties,” of billionaires contending against each other by using lies and gimmicks (such as gerrymandering) to beat the other billionaire Parties — have nothing to do with representing the public. They represent only the billionaires.

Every existing ‘democracy’ is a billionaires’ racket, and every OTHER government is the less hypocritical type of tyranny. Something totally different from either type is needed: authentic democracy. (I described it at that final link.)

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post How Billionaires Who Sell to the U.S. Government Control the U.S. Government appeared first on LewRockwell.

With his education and healthcare policies, President Trump is highlighting a major divide between conservatives and libertarians on both education and healthcare.

As everyone knows, Trump is doing his best to induce universities to abandon leftist concepts involving what is known as DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. He is doing this by threatening a cut-off of federal funds to such universities until they comply with his wishes, at which point he will restore the funding.

Trump’s strategy is working brilliantly. Most of the universities he has targeted have quickly abandoned their leftist principles in order to maintain themselves on the federal dole. In other words, they place a higher value on the dole than they do on their principles.

Conservatives love it. They have always hated DEI and so Trump continues to be their hero. They especially love his threat to cut off federal aid as a way to induce universities to change their policies.

Libertarians take a different position. We believe that there should be a total separation of education and the state, in the same way that our ancestors separated religion and state. We hold that the federal government (and the state governments) have no more business funding universities or telling universities how to run their affairs than it does funding churches or telling churches how to run their affairs.

Thus, under the libertarian philosophy, there would be no government funding of universities at all. Therefore, Trump could not threaten a cutoff of federal funds as a way to induce a university to change its policies because there would be no federal funds to cut off.

By the same token, universities would be free to run their affairs the way they want, which is how things work in a genuinely free society. If a university wishes to adopt DEI, that is its right. If consumers (i.e., students or faculty) don’t like it, they can go elsewhere.

Thus, the big difference between conservatives and libertarians is that conservatives believe in a system where the federal government is taxing people in order to deliver the money to universities. They also favor a system in which the president can use that dole as a way to have universities run their school the way the president wants. Libertarians, on the other hand, favor a complete separation of education and the state, one in which there is no taxpayer dole paid to universities and in which universities are free to run their school the way they want.

It’s the same with healthcare. Conservatives love that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is running the department in an anti-vaccine direction.

Libertarians, on the other hand, favor a complete separation of healthcare and the state, just like with education and religion. Therefore, under libertarianism, there would be no Department of Health and Human Services or any other federal healthcare agency. The federal government would have no more to do with healthcare than it does with religion.

Thus, the federal government would not be pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine. For that matter, unlike conservatism, which is anti-vaccine, libertarianism is neither pro-vaccine nor anti-vaccine. Libertarianism is pro-freedom, which means that a free society is one in which people are free to be pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine.

The bottom line, of course, is that in favoring government control over education and healthcare, conservatives favor a system that is, at its core, anti-freedom. Moreover, they inevitably lament and cry when leftists gain control over their system and use it to move things in a leftist direction. By separating education and the state and healthcare and the state, libertarians favor freedom and also don’t have to concern themselves about the wrong people gaining the levers of power.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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