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WASHINGTON, D.C.  — The U.S. State Department under the Trump administration has indicated it intends to go through with the destruction of approximately $10 million worth of contraceptives whose distribution to Africa has been canceled by rule changes against taxpayer funding of abortion.

During a July 29 State Department press briefing, a reporter asked for an update about “millions of dollars’ worth of contraceptives stocked in Belgium that are due to be incinerated in France […] I know that the Belgian government is trying to find alternative solutions. Is the U.S. government ready to find alternative solutions or are they destined to be destroyed?”

“Well, I do – I want to have that taken back. This is a situation that changes each day,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce responded. “This is a situation regarding birth control and other mechanisms that could be used – first of all, that would violate our Mexico City policy regarding the use of abortifacients, but also the use of some elements that could be used in a kind of forced sterilization framework that some nations do apply, which also we will not facilitate.”

“I think this was a purchase from the previous administration, and so we’re dealing with that,” she added. Bruce’s comments indicated the planned disposal is still on track but did not conclusively rule out a pause or a different decision.

The Department of State later said that “a preliminary decision” was made to destroy certain “abortifacient” contraceptives, The Hill reports, and that the Kemp-Kasten amendment also bars the federal government from aiding any entity with a program of “coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization,” which affects “non-abortifacient contraceptives provided as assistance to entities that do not make the commitment required under the policy.”

The Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam) notes that the stockpile, which includes birth control pills, implants, shots, and IUDs, is valued at $10 million and that two prominent international abortion facilitators, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and MSI Reproductive Choices (formerly Marie Stopes), had offered to buy the drugs, a deal that would have violated the Mexico City Policy. Population control in Africa has been a particular focus of both organizations and of the United Nations Population Fund.

Seventy-seven percent of the supply had been intended to go to five African countries, according to IPPF: Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mali, and Congo. The abortion giant estimated that the loss will mean a 28 percent reduction in Tanzania’s “needed” contraceptives, a 24 percent reduction in Mali’s, and an almost 14 percent reduction of Kenya’s annual so-called “contraceptive need.”

Many contraceptive methods, including birth control pills and IUDs, acts as abortifacients. Moreover, birth control has been found to cause serious medical harm to women.

Within days of returning to office, President Donald Trump signed executive orders to reinstate the Mexico City Policy governing foreign aid and direct federal agencies to recognize the Hyde Amendment’s limits on dispensing federal money domestically.

The Mexico City Policy forbids non-governmental organizations from using taxpayer dollars for elective abortions abroad. President Ronald Reagan first instituted the policy in 1984, and President George W. Bush reinstated it in 2001. For decades, it has been taken for granted that Democrat presidents rescind the policy shortly after taking office and Republican presidents restore it. Restoring the policy was one of the first acts of Trump’s first term, and he said on the 2024 campaign trail he would “consider” bringing it back.

Likewise, the Hyde Amendment is traditionally included every year in federal budgets with little objection and has been estimated to have saved more than two million lives since its adoption decades ago by forbidding most taxpayer dollars from directly funding abortions except for cases of rape, incest, or alleged threat to a mother’s life. President Joe Biden proposed removing it in the budgets he submitted to Congress and worked throughout his presidency to distribute funds to entities involved in abortion.

Abortion, the destruction of an innocent unborn baby in his or her mother’s womb, is always gravely unjust and never necessary to protect a mother’s health.

Trump has also cut millions in pro-abortion subsidies by freezing U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spending.

In March, the administration froze Title X “family planning” grants to nonprofits it said violated its executive orders on immigration and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, including Planned Parenthood affiliates in nine states.

In July, Trump signed into law his controversial “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (BBB), a wide-ranging policy package that includes a one-year ban on federal tax dollars going through Medicaid to any entity that commits abortions for reasons other than rape, incest, or supposed threats to the mother’s life, although that provision is currently held up by a legal challenge.

Other Republicans have proposed standalone measures to fully cut off Planned Parenthood’s government funding: the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act, which permanently bans federal funds from being used for abortion; and the Defund Planned Parenthood Act, which disqualifies Planned Parenthood and its affiliates specifically. But they would require 60 votes to make it through the Senate.

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

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Hell is truth seen too late.  — Thomas Hobbes

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. – Etienne de La Boétie

In politics, corruption begins with the corrupted.  We see turpitude throughout society’s power structure, but it’s only there because we accepted a devil’s bargain.  It took shape long before the current crop of office holders ran for political office.  It was their goal — political office — that people accepted as necessary and right.  Without politicians in office running a government we would be in anarchy, and everyone understood anarchy meant people would be at each other’s throats, and life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Political office is a position of power over others.  It is not found in nature, but then neither are houses, jet planes, or Starbuck’s.  How did this oddball arrangement — political office — get started?  And why is it considered more important than housing, planes, coffee, or our individual lives?

In a state of nature each of us would be responsible for our survival and well-being.  One way is to cooperate with others and produce and trade for the things we need.  It’s called the free market.  Another way is to steal from the producers.  It’s called the government.  A third way is to put yourself at the mercy of the first two and ask them to support you.

Thievery as a career requires at least three conditions.  First, the power to steal and get away with it.  Second, the lack of scruples about taking by force what someone else has produced.  And third, how to redefine number two so that number one can become acceptable to society at large.

Over time it became clear to the politicians that, quoting Shakespeare’s Juliet, “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.”  No one can institute theft and call it by that name, so someone invented a new word, taxes, and declared that taxes takes the thievery out of theft.  There is no violation of ethics if politicians can tax their brothers.  In fact, taking the property of others by force is not really theft, it’s a price paid for a civilized society.  This price is special because it’s not determined by market (voluntary) forces like other prices but rather by a committee.

Thus, we have special names for these special things: Taxes are what politicians call prices, while the committee bears the distinguished name Congress, a body the vassals elect because they have no choice about not electing them and whose decisions are imposed by an implicit threat of death for resistors.

It should be clear that the politicians and the countless agencies they’ve established constitute the government, and that this government is, so the story goes, imposed in the name of protecting us from life’s countless hazards.  It should also be clear that language attempts to hide the distinction between government’s “business model” and those in the market.

Besides the time-tested method of bombing a country back to the Stone Age, Western politicians today are waging war using a Trojan Horse technique.  Rather than sending hoards of soldiers to cross a country’s border and wreak havoc on their people and property, today’s politicians get elected in an enemy’s government (usually their own) then open the floodgates of immigration.  It’s ingenious because migration is a natural process, and political support accelerates the process and avoids the problems of a direct hostile attack.

National security, freedom’s graveyard

Messing in the affairs of other countries has been policy since President Truman institutionalized the national security state with the National Security Act of 1947, his recognition of the State of Israel in 1948, and policy report NSC-68 of 1950 calling for “a massive build-up of the U.S. military and its weaponry.” The red threat served as the excuse for an egregious departure from the government’s founding principle of nonintervention, and its effects have been and will continue to be totally ruinous.

Pundits continue to expose government for its lies, deceptions, aggressions, and avoidable failures.  (See here, here, here, here, here, and here).  The obscenity of government’s unnecessary wars is struggling to stay hidden.  And few are paying attention to the Doomsday Clock, now closer than ever to midnight.  We are forced to abide in ruining our economy through taxes and destruction of the dollar to pay for murdering people in far-away places, and possibly all of life itself.  But it keeps DoD contractors fat and happy and the politicians alive and in office.

Later in life Harry Truman spoke out about the Frankenstein monster he created.  In a December 22, 1963 op-ed in the Washington Post — one month after JFK’s assassination — he wrote:

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue— and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

Should we be surprised when government is given an inch it takes a mile?  Is that not the history of the Constitution, a document of limited powers that Hamilton and others subverted?

In none of the critiques have I read a proposal for doing away with government as it exists.  Jacob G. Hornberger was written endlessly about the harm and futility of government’s immigration control, for example, yet he and most others don’t extend that analysis to government itself.  Still, he acknowledges the Jeffersonian truth that the people have a right to abolish destructive governments and form new ones.

Since it was his creation, Truman can be credited with showing how destructive the National Security State has been.  I submit a new way of governing society is in order, and it’s hiding in plain sight.  Government can and should be market-based, rather than an institution of our demise.  See this.

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Official report of the cause of Spain’s blackout
Via @FT pic.twitter.com/lJCzhVSbZP

— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) August 12, 2025

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Writes Brian. Dunaway:

This time I like Trump’s taste, but how about the basement incinerator?! And only two? I can think of maybe two that shouldn’t be in the basement incinerator.

Better yet, how about a nice big bonfire on the South Lawn! We’ll make a party of it — I’ll bring the margaritas and salsa.

See here.

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Writes Tim McGraw:

Very cool that Tulsi Gabbard showed up and gave a speech.

The post Reflections on Dr. Ron Paul’s 90th Birthday BBQ Party appeared first on LewRockwell.

Americans’ views on Israel have shifted dramatically over the years. Which voter groups are driving that trend, and why?

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President Trump repeatedly tells the American people that the government is taking in lots of cash from tariffs. But the same government is going further into debt and racking up deficits with a Big Beautiful Bill. Wasn’t the goal of electing Donald Trump to cut the government down in size? Instead, the government grows, and Americans have to pay yet another tax (tariffs) to pay for its growth.

The post Who Pay’s The Tariffs? Foreign Countries, Or Americans? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

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Thanks, John Frahm.

The Washington Post

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Nell'economia mondiale c'è ancora una quantità importante di malinvestment. Per quanto tempo le varie economie del mondo hanno implementato la ZIRP e la NIRP? Di quanto è aumentata la spesa pubblica durante la “pandemia”? Bisogna fare i conti con l'inflazione di quei giorni, ed essa è qui e non andrà via tanto presto; non torneremo mai ai prezzi del 2019, quei risparmi ormai sono stati rubati. Quello che adesso si può fare è minimizzare i danni da qui in poi. Più la FED riuscirà a rimanere a un tasso dei Fed Fund alto, più sarà salutare per la correzione degli errori economici passati. E finora i mercati americani non hanno dato manifestazione di segnali di stress. Segnali di deterioramento? Sì. Segnali di riorganizzazione? Sì. Ma tutti gli altri? Beh sono in una condizione peggiore perché necessitano di dollari per i loro debiti esterni. Ecco perché “stimolano” le loro economie tramite tagli dei tassi per “paura della deflazione”. Lo scopo, in questa fase, della cricca di Davos è quello di diffondere quanta più incertezza possibile sull'economia statunitense in modo che i mercati dei capitali si irrigidiscano e non sappiano cosa fare. Da qui la campagna mediatica contro i dazi e la Big Beautiful Bill. Trump sta cambiando il modo in cui i capitali entrano ed escono dagli Stati Uniti tramite i dazi: i produttori non sono sovrani, i consumatori lo sono, e questo a sua volta significa che sono i consumatori a determinare i prezzi mentre i produttori sperano di aver anticipato correttamente la domanda potenziale. Essendo gli USA il più grande mercato dei consumi al mondo essi stanno chiedendo quello che chiederebbe qualsiasi consumatore a livello individuale: prezzi migliori. Questa narrativa viene contrastata dalla cricca di Davos facendo passare Trump come un “folle”, come chi non sa cosa sta facendo, alimentando di conseguenza l'incertezza sulla politica commerciale e monetaria. Infatti durante una crisi della valuta, essa dapprima sale rispetto a tutte le altre come sta facendo l'euro nei confronti del dollaro. È una questione di percezioni e la cricca di Davos sa come giocare con esse, perché sa altresì che Trump ha potere di contrattazione: il mercato del dollaro offshore è determinato internamente, non più esternamente come fino al 2022, e questo vuol dire a sua volta un accesso non più automatico al biglietto verde. Le esportazioni verso gli USA sono l'unico modo per accedere ai dollari, l'asset più liquido al mondo e il primo che viene venduto in caso di emergenza per mantenere in piedi una parvenza di solvibilità... o almeno finché non finiscono le riserve. Infatti il surplus commerciale dell'Europa nei confronti degli USA si sta assottigliando e la capacità dell'UE di riciclare suddetto surplus nei titoli del Tesoro americani terminerà, impedendo alla cricca di Davos di continuare a manipolare la curva dei rendimenti americana tramite la vendita del front-end per dare l'idea che gli USA finiranno in recessione nel breve-medio periodo. Ecco perché, nel contempo, gli USA stanno costruendo tutta un'altra infrastruttura per monetizzare e tokenizzare i titoli di stato americani tramite le stablecoin ad esempio. È una stretta lenta e inesorabile, ma infine mortale per l'UE.

______________________________________________________________________________________

di Christopher Whalen

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/lo-smoot-hawley-ha-causato-la-grande)

Agli americani viene insegnato a scuola che lo Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act del 1930 aggravò notevolmente la Grande Depressione e spinse il mondo in un decennio di deflazione da debito e contrazione economica. Tutto questo ha senso finché non ricordiamo che la storia degli Stati Uniti nell'ultimo secolo è stata scritta in gran parte dai progressisti. Infatti la Grande Depressione iniziò nel 1920 con un decennio di calo dei prezzi dei prodotti agricoli, un'ondata deflazionistica che alla fine travolse il settore immobiliare e l'intera economia statunitense.

Ciò che sfugge a molte discussioni sullo Smoot-Hawley durante e dopo quel periodo è il fatto che il crollo economico degli anni '30 era già scontato, con o senza la nuova legge sui dazi. L'impulso alla base della decisione politica di aumentarli fu una reazione sbagliata al crollo dei prezzi agricoli, ma la forza di suddetta ondata deflazionistica fu principalmente costituita da fattori “positivi” come le nuove tecnologie e l'innovazione. La deflazione iniziata dopo la Prima Guerra Mondiale decimò le comunità agricole e alla fine portò al crollo dei prezzi immobiliari, in particolare quelli della Florida.

Il sostegno al protezionismo fu il ritornello costante delle lobby aziendali e agricole a Washington nel XIX e all'inizio del XX secolo, e fu sostenuto da esponenti di entrambi i partiti politici. Ma la vera causa della potente spinta politica ad aumentare ulteriormente i dazi doganali esistenti alla fine del 1929 la possiamo ricercare nei sostanziali cambiamenti che stavano avvenendo nell'economia americana.

Molti storici ed economisti attribuiscono al livello dei dazi doganali imposti dopo la Prima Guerra Mondiale, e in particolare durante la Grande Depressione, la responsabilità di aver aggravato la contrazione economica e la disoccupazione seguite al crollo del mercato azionario del 1929. L'approvazione del Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act nel 1922 simboleggiava la particolare inclinazione repubblicana al protezionismo commerciale – e all'inflazione della valuta – che risaliva a decenni prima, fino alla fondazione del partito negli anni '50 dell'Ottocento.

Nel suo libro del 2005, Making Sense of Smoot Hawley, Bernard Beaudreau sostiene che l'imposizione di dazi doganali per l'industria statunitense nel 1930 non fosse altro che la continuazione delle linee di politica attuate dal Partito Repubblicano dopo il suo ritorno al potere nel 1920. Beaudreau cita la crescente produttività delle fabbriche statunitensi, la diffusione dell'elettrificazione in tutta l'America e il continuo afflusso di prodotti alimentari e manufatti esteri a basso costo come cause principali della deflazione durante quel periodo. La produzione del pane, ad esempio, divenne automatizzata negli anni '20, contribuendo al relativo calo dei prezzi.

Le importazioni erano ancora percepite come una minaccia dai produttori americani dell'epoca, nonostante i dazi doganali già elevati. La sottoccupazione fu il risultato della mancanza di domanda e del conseguente calo dei prezzi dei prodotti che si verificò negli anni '30. L'industria americana divenne troppo efficiente troppo rapidamente, con conseguente surplus globale di beni e una altrettanto pericolosa mancanza di domanda. L'aria condizionata e il miglioramento dei trasporti contribuirono a trasformare il valore futuro delle paludi della Florida in una gigantesca bolla speculativa che scoppiò due anni prima del Grande Crash del 1929.

Un secolo prima dell'invenzione di cose come l'“intelligenza artificiale”, i lavoratori americani temevano che la tecnologia potesse privarli dei loro mezzi di sussistenza. Il senatore Reed Smoot (1862-1941), repubblicano dello Utah, disse dello Smoot-Hawley: “Ritenere la linea di politica dei dazi americana, o qualsiasi altra linea di politica del nostro governo, responsabile di questa gigantesca ondata deflazionistica significa solo dimostrare la propria ignoranza riguardo il suo carattere universale. Il mondo sta pagando per la sua spietata distruzione di vite e proprietà durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale e per la sua incapacità di adattare il potere d'acquisto alla capacità produttiva durante la rivoluzione industriale del decennio successivo alla guerra”.

L'inizio della Grande Depressione, a partire dall'estate del 1929, portò il tasso di disoccupazione dal 4,6% nel 1929 all'8,9% nel 1930. Il Congresso cercò di correggere questo squilibrio limitando le importazioni attraverso lo Smoot-Hawley. Sebbene vi siano pochi dubbi sul fatto che l'aumento dei dazi abbia aggravato la Grande Depressione, l'aumento delle imposte sulle importazioni potrebbe non essere stato il fattore principale. Infatti l'introduzione dell'elettricità e di altre innovazioni determinò una forte crescita in molti settori dell'economia, ma non in quello agricolo.

Questa visione alternativa del ruolo dello Smoot-Hawley nel trasformare il crollo del mercato del 1929 nella Grande Depressione degli anni '30 è importante per comprendere la narrazione degli anni '20. Dopo la Grande Depressione e la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, la posizione degli Stati Uniti in merito ai dazi cambiò radicalmente, in parte perché gran parte della capacità industriale di Europa e Asia fu distrutta dal conflitto.

Con l'obiettivo di ricostruire il mondo del dopoguerra, l'America adottò una linea di politica fatta di mercati aperti e libero scambio. Essa creò enorme ricchezza e prosperità nei primi decenni dopo la fine della Seconda Guerra Mondiale. In seguito sacrificò posti di lavoro e capacità industriale americani a favore di altre nazioni. Con l'elezione del presidente Donald Trump nel 2024, gli Stati Uniti hanno intrapreso una politica esplicita di riequilibrio delle relazioni commerciali con il mondo, utilizzando la minaccia dei dazi per forzare i negoziati.

Lungi dall'essere un danno per gli americani, la minaccia di dazi esercitata dal Presidente Trump è un meccanismo per garantire che altre nazioni adottino la reciprocità – il “fair dealing” in termini americani – per garantire che il comportamento predatorio dei moderni Superstati mercantilisti, come la Cina, non danneggi i lavoratori e le industrie americane. In questo senso il Presidente Trump sta ereditando il tradizionale atteggiamento politico pro-lavoro del Partito Democratico dopo la Seconda Guerra Mondiale.

La storiografia tradizionale di quel periodo fa sembrare che i dazi dello Smoot-Hawley fossero il fattore primario del peggioramento dell'economia, ma la svalutazione della moneta da parte di Roosevelt e il suo rifiuto di abbassare i dazi, già in vigore dopo decenni di governo repubblicano, furono più significativi. I ricercatori progressisti sostengono che la svalutazione del dollaro e dei titoli garantiti dall'oro abbiano in qualche modo portato a un aumento del reddito e della domanda, ma queste affermazioni ignorano la massiccia liquidazione di debito e azioni avvenuta negli anni '30. È più corretto affermare che i dazi non aiutarono, ma il sequestro dell'oro e la svalutazione del dollaro furono eventi sistemici orchestrati da Roosevelt e dai suoi sostenitori del New Deal, e che rappresentarono il principale fattore negativo per l'economia.

Nelle sue memorie il presidente Herbert Hoover osservò che la svalutazione del dollaro da parte di Roosevelt rappresentò di fatto un aumento dei dazi dal punto di vista del costo per gli acquirenti americani: “I Democratici hanno fatto un gran parlare dei disastri che avevano previsto sarebbero derivati dai modesti aumenti dei dazi Smoot-Hawley (principalmente prodotti agricoli). Il fatto era che il 65% dei beni importati soggetti a dazio era esente da essi, e che la legislazione li aveva aumentati di circa il 10%. Ma il più grande aumento dei dazi in tutta la nostra storia venne dalla svalutazione di Roosevelt”. Hoover proseguì illustrando che sia le importazioni che le esportazioni pro capite diminuirono negli Stati Uniti tra il 1935 e il 1938 a causa delle linee di politica regressive e anti-business del New Deal.

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

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

Thanks,  Johnny Kramer. 

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Bureau of Labor Statistics head Dr. Erika McEntarfer is one of the latest persons President Trump has told “you’re fired.” President Trump said this month that he fired Dr. McEntarfer because the president believed she manipulated jobs data. Manipulations, he stated, include the updated May and June BLS numbers showing the U.S. economy created 258,000 fewer jobs than originally reported, as well as the weaker than expected July jobs report. All of this, the president suggested, was designed to make President Trump look bad.

Following Dr. McEntarfer’s firing, many commenters worried that President Trump’s actions would create the perception that government unemployment and inflation data is manipulated to produce the numbers desired by the president. A loss of confidence in government statistics could impact demand for US Treasuries. This is because the value of Treasuries is adjusted based on the BLS-issued Consumer Price Index (CPI). If investors don’t trust the CPI figures, they can demand higher returns, increasing government’s interest payments.

President Trump is correct that BLS manipulates statistics related to the economy, but it has been doing so since long before Donald Trump moved to the White House.

For example, starting in 1994, the BLS stopped including “discouraged” workers who have stopped looking for work in the official unemployment figures. The BLS also includes those working part-time as employed even if the only reason they are working part-time is they cannot find full-time work. According to John Williams, publisher of the website Shadow Stats, including discouraged and part-time workers who want full-time work in the unemployment figures increases the unemployment rate by almost 20 percent!

The government also understates the effects of inflation. One way it does this is by using “chained CPI.” Chained CPI means that even if price inflation has made steak unaffordable for most Americans, the government does not consider their standard of living lowered if they can buy a “substitute” such as hamburger.

This ignores the fact that if consumers viewed hamburger and steak as equivalent then they would likely have chosen cheaper hamburger before Federal Reserve-caused price inflation made steak unaffordable, leaving them no choice but to purchase hamburger. According to John Williams’s Shadow Stats, using a more accurate definition of inflation would increase the inflation rate to as much as 12 percent.

Manipulating the unemployment and inflation rates allows the government to gaslight the people into believing that the economy is strong and any signs of weakness — such as rising prices or an increase in unemployment in their town — are anomalies that do not reflect the economy’s real condition. Manipulating the inflation figures to understate the true amount of inflation also lowers the “cost of living” increases the government must provide for veterans, beneficiaries of Social Security, and others. This provides a way for government to cut spending without Congress members having politically difficult votes.

President Trump has done a service by highlighting that government statistics regarding the economy are manipulated. Many of those criticizing President Trump for endangering the “credibility” of government’s inflation and unemployment numbers are either unaware of, or more likely have no problem with, manipulating data to fool the public into thinking the welfare-warfare system and the fiat money system are “working.” They only object to manipulating the data to benefit President Trump. President Trump should ensure the government’s unemployment and inflation figures are as accurate as possible by appointing John Williams of Shadow Stats to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The post Newsflash: Governments Lie appeared first on LewRockwell.

Decades ago during my years in college and grad school, I had a strong side-interest in Soviet history, and read quite a number of weighty books in that subject. Most of these heavily focused upon the Stalin era, describing the almost unprecedented loss of life that occurred during that period from the combination of executions, Gulag deaths, and terrible famines.

But these horrifying stories were sometimes leavened by episodes so strange and ironic that I was never entirely sure whether they were real or merely invented.

For example, during the first half of the 1930s, the Great Famine caused by forced collectivization and dekulakization was widely described as having caused many, many millions of deaths. Stalin pushed ahead with this project despite the considerable misgivings of some of the other Soviet leaders, most of whom would themselves soon be purged and often shot just a few years later.

Given such horrifying famine conditions in the Ukraine and other Soviet regions, social order collapsed to the point that many of these deaths went unreported at the time. Thus, they only became apparent several years later when the Soviet Census of 1937 found that there were considerably fewer Soviet citizens alive than had been expected.

According to my history textbooks, Stalin was greatly dismayed by these Census results. But rather than admitting that his policies may have had such adverse consequences, the Communist dictator decided that the expert statisticians of the Census bureau were responsible for the problem, and had them all purged and shot as dastardly anti-Soviet saboteurs and wreckers.

Naturally, I always snickered a little at those forced to live under such a bizarre and irrational autocrat who reacted to a less than favorable message by shooting the messenger. And at least according to Wikipedia, the basic story of such Stalinist irrationality was apparently true, with the 1937 Soviet Census showing that the population was perhaps 10 million lower than had been expected and the Census bureau was indeed purged as a consequence.

But today, in the wake of the apparent economic and political consequences of President Donald Trump’s bizarre and autocratic tariff policies, I am reminded of the famous opening lines of one of Marx’s books, in which the author claimed that historical events appear twice, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” Thus, during the last week or so, we have seen our own government react in ways quite similar to those of Stalin, though so far at least lacking the sanguinary component.

Earlier this year on April 2nd, Trump had declared “Liberation Day,” unveiling a sweeping new set of tariffs against the trade goods of every other country in the world. His new tariff rates were so extremely high and seemingly arbitrary that I doubt I was the only one who wondered whether his presentation had accidentally been delayed twenty-four hours and he had originally scheduled his announcement for April Fools’ Day.

Certainly nothing like this had ever previously happened in American history. Indeed, I could not recall any foreign dictator let alone a democratically-elected leader who had ever unilaterally done anything so strange with regard to foreign trade. As I wrote soon afterward:

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

Trump’s policies were so strange and destructive that the broader historical analogy that immediately came to my mind was the disastrous Great Leap Forward implemented in China under Chairman Mao. A few days after Trump’s declaration I published a piece making this suggestion.

• President Donald Trump and Chairman Mao
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 7, 2025 • 3,800 Words

As might naturally be expected, our financial markets completely panicked at these huge new import taxes. The terrible blows to stock prices, bond rates, and the value of the dollar all seemed to reflect the belief of investors that our country was facing total economic disaster.

As I soon emphasized, one reason for such widespread financial fear was Trump’s bizarre claim that unlike all previous American presidents, he possessed the power to set tariff tax rates by emergency decree:

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

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

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

Although Trump initially promised to stay the course, the quick collapse in the financial markets soon forced him to back down, drastically reducing his new tariff rates for three months while he negotiated bilateral trade deals with other countries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Donald Trump’s Looney Tunes Trade Policy
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 14, 2025 • 3,800 Words

Trump’s dramatic U-turn a week after his initial tariff announcement did allow the financial markets to stabilize and regain the ground they had lost, though his many critics began to ridicule him with the acronym TACO—“Trump Always Chickens Out”—using it to describe our president’s regular response to strong challenges. Even so, most observers predicted that the higher tariff rates that remained together with the tremendous uncertainty and the sharp decline in consumer sentiment would probably result in serious economic problems whether or not Trump ever made good on his threat to revisit the tariff issue after ninety days.

But contrary to those plausible concerns, the employment numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) over the next several months remained surprisingly strong, puzzling those who had warned that economic uncertainty would sharply reduce the willingness of businesses to expand and create jobs.

Read the Whole Article

The post History as Farce with Donald Trump’s Tariff Policies appeared first on LewRockwell.

For all of its flaws, the United States has one of the best governments that has ever been developed. This is because the system is rife with checks and balances, where one part of the country or government can constrain another part from acting out of line, and the public has a voice that can frequently be mobilized if things become too egregious and bring everything back to balance.

This framework naturally leads to bad actors taking a multi-pronged approach where they attempt to co-opt every single thing that constrains their misdeeds. While challenging, this can eventually be done with concerted effort. For example, during COVID-19, virtually every institution that should have prevented the unconstitutional lockdowns, the top-down suppression of unpatented COVID-19 treatments, and the COVID-19 vaccine mandates (let alone their approvals) failed as every institution worked in concert to advance the COVID cartel—resulting in arguably the worst “public health” crime in history.

Yet, even here, due to the independent media, liberty-minded politicians, and the egregiousness of the COVID policies, a check was eventually able to neutralize the COVID cartel. Furthermore, beyond the COVID vaccine program failing to accomplish its primary goal (an annual mandated vaccine and mainstreaming mRNA technology) the trust they’ve long used to market medical products has been shattered and longterm, COVID is now arguably costing the medical industry far more than was made from the pandemic—all of which illustrates our political system has a robust series of checks once things get too out of line.

Exempting Liability

Since so many institutions within our society have been co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry, it has both become vital to find alternative options (e.g., creating a robust independent media) and to protect the viable options that remain.

One of those has always been the courts, as frequently, if a bad actor steps too far out of line, a legal framework exists to constrain their actions. For this reason, a holy grail of the industries which profit from poisoning us has long been to take away the ability of the courts to check them by passing laws (or securing court rulings) that shield them from liability and hence terminate the lawsuits that can stop their egregious conduct.

For example, the whole-cell DPT vaccine was long recognized to be a particularly dangerous vaccine which frequently caused brain damage and death, yet for decades the medical community and government covered it up, and industry refused to bring a safer (but more expensive) acellular DPT vaccine to market.

As a grassroots awareness of the dangers of the vaccine spread across the country (aided by a 1982 NBC program) more and more lawsuits were filed against vaccine manufacturers, the majority of which were for DPT injuries.

Information provided by the three commercial manufacturers of diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and pertussis (DPT) vaccine indicates a striking increase in the number of lawsuits filed against them alleging damage caused by the vaccine. Only one such case was filed in 1978, whereas 73 were filed in 1984. During the seven-year period from 1978 to 1984, the average amount claimed per suit has risen from $10 million to $46.5 million. If the current trend continues, suits will pose an increasing threat to the availability of DTP vaccines in the United States.

Because of this, DPT manufacturers rapidly left the market (e.g., due to rising liability insurance costs) and by 1984, only one remained. As such, something needed to be done to protect the vaccine supply, and a deal was brokered between advocates for vaccine injured children (along with their supporters within Congress) and the pharmaceutical industry. After some work, a framework was put together which was intended to help the vaccine-injured (as lawsuits for vaccine injuries were a grueling and not always successful process), create safer vaccines, and transfer liability from the vaccine manufacturers to the US government so the manufacturers could remain in business.

On one hand, this act accomplished positive things (e.g., vaccine manufacturers became required to list lots as previously ambiguous lot numbers had been used to escape liability for injuries, a safer DPT vaccine was finally brought to market, and VAERS was created). Conversely however, since many provisions of the act designed to protect the vaccine injured were at the H.H.S. Secretary’s discretion and the government ultimately paid for injury compensation. It created a massive incentive to deny that injuries could occur, and as a result, most of the acts’ intended provisions failed to manifest or were systematically undermined.

As such, there’s still very little reliable data on vaccine injury (e.g., VAERS was systematically undermined as the government did not want a publicly available injury database), the science linking vaccines to specific injuries that was supposed to be done never got done, and most importantly it’s nearly impossible for vaccine injuries “not supported by science” to be compensated in the vaccine court. Worst still, a 2011 Supreme Court ruling further gutted the act, making it impossible for vaccine manufacturers to be directly sued, even in cases of grossly defective vaccines that the 1986 law had specifically intended to allow.
Note: this is somewhat similar to how the highly contentious 2015 California law, which took away religious exemptions to vaccination (effectively mandating them), was signed by the governor under the understanding that medical exemptions would always be honored, shortly after which a new law was passed which banned medical exemptions to vaccination in California.

Conversely, this birthed a massive industry, as removing the primary check against the industry (lawsuits for injuries they caused) incentivized producing a glut of new vaccines to enter the market and removed any incentive to ensure their safety. As such, an apparatus gradually developed to ensure investors could expect a successful return on upcoming vaccines by ensuring they would always be approved and mandated upon our children, eventually culminating in the COVID catastrophe.

Fortunately, as our system has a robust series of checks and balances, even though a primary one failed (injury lawsuits), eventually the unrestrained proliferation of injurious vaccines went so far a new check emerged—public loss of trust in the vaccine apparatus, MAHA’s political ascendency and RFK becoming a H.H.S. Secretary who amongst other things has begun to implement the key safety provisions of the 1986 Act every Secretary before him refused to do.

Note: one of the remarkable results of RFK’s tenure and the H.H.S. at last no longer green-lighting (unproven) vaccines for all of America’s children is that the vaccine industry can no longer obtain investor funding for new vaccines (which their trade group has noted is creating an existential threat to the industry).

I mention all of this to provide some context as to when many are quite concerned by the recent push to exempt pesticides from lawsuits.

Monsanto’s Legacy

Monsanto (founded in 1901 where it first produced the controversial artificial sweetener saccharin) has long been one of my least favorite corporations, as it routinely conducts business practices which are both extremely damaging and cruel. For example:

1. Monsanto was heavily invested in dioxins (and related organochlorines like DDT), which they knew were extremely toxic but claimed were “safe.” The most notorious of these was Agent Orange, a potent defoliating (vegetation destroying) agent that was mass-sprayed on Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam (e.g., 12% of South Vietnam) to starve the local population and eliminate hiding places for the Vietcong (for which Monsanto and Dow Chemical were the primary producers). Unfortunately, while the military claimed Agent Orange was safe, it was highly toxic and has since persisted for decades in the environment.

Because of this, Agent Orange caused at least 400,000 deaths and 500,000, often severe, birth defects in Vietnam (with non-Western estimates showing roughly ten times as much harm), and with most of the victims (and their descendants) left with no recourse and a lifetime of death and disability. Likewise, it also severely harmed many Vietnam veterans (e.g., it frequently caused cancer—and in this manner killed a few friends of mine). This in turn, eventually resulted in a 180 million dollar class action settlement (of which Monsanto had to pay approximately 81 million).

Ultimately, while the two components of Agent Orange had some toxicity, the primary issue with Agent Orange was TCDD, a highly toxic dioxin produced during manufacturing, which contaminated the final product, allowing Monsanto to argue Agent Orange was “safe” since TCDD was not part of it. This is a critical point, as Dow had warned Monsanto of the need to reduce TCDD contamination, but Monsanto’s contained much higher levels due to them using a high temperature manufacturing process (which Monsanto’s internal memos described as “dirty”) to accelerate production. As such, depending on the manufacturer and batch, there was a roughly 1000-fold variation in Agent Orange TCDD content.

In 2004, Monsanto spokesman Jill Montgomery said Monsanto should not be liable at all for injuries or deaths caused by Agent Orange, saying: “We are sympathetic with people who believe they have been injured and understand their concern to find the cause, but reliable scientific evidence indicates that Agent Orange is not the cause of serious long-term health effects.

Note: I recently learned from an excellent vaccine safety book (that I’m currently reviewing for an upcoming article) that the same US agencies and scientists (e.g., the CDC and the IOM) who covered up vaccine injuries also spent decades claiming there was “no evidence” for much of Agent Orange’s toxicity.

Additionally, there were many other issues with Agent Orange being leaked into the environment. For example, at their production site in West Virginia, Monsanto routinely disposed of TCDD contaminated wastes in landfills and waterways, polluting the area, and eventually decades later, in 2012, paid $84 million for a class action lawsuit over this (as the residents had experienced a variety of health problems). Likewise, in the 1970s, Monsanto offloaded TCDD containing waste (an impurity in Agent Orange which was its most toxic dioxin) to a company in Missouri without warning them of its toxicity, after which it was disposed of throughout the soil of a popular Missouri riverside resort town (another friend lived next to)—rendering it permanently uninhabitable (for which Monsanto ultimately payed 33 million).

Note: a classic symptom of dioxin poisoning (often seen in these contaminated areas) is chloracne.

2. Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) are extremely resistant to degradation, and hence have many industrial uses (e.g., for insulating, cooling, lubricating or hydraulic fluids or as additives to many common products). Unfortunately, they also persist for decades if not centuries in the environment and are highly toxic (e.g., they often cause cancer, immune suppression, reproductive and developmental issues, endocrine disruption, neurological impairments, liver damage, skin and eye conditions, and cardiovascular and metabolic disorders).
Note: the most extraordinary PCB story I know of is that Kenya had a longstanding problem with thieves dismantling power transformers to extract the durable PCB oil and use it to fry street foods.

Monsanto began producing PCBs in 1929, and before long produced over 99% of America’s. Despite knowing their toxicity as early as the 1930s (and definitely by the 1960s), Monsanto continually claimed they were safe, and only stopped selling them in 1977 shortly before a 1979 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ban due to their toxicity and environmental persistence.

As Monsanto excels in cutthroat legal tactics, they were able to hold PCB lawsuits back for decades (e.g., initially, the only “successful” ones were a few settlements with PCB workers in the 1990s), but eventually in 2003, the dam broke. Many judgments were awarded against Monsanto (primarily for environmental pollution). These included 600 million in 2003 [of which Monsanto directly paid 390 million], 52 million, and then 92 million in 2020, 25 million, 80 million, 537.5 million, then 698 million in 2022, 80 million, then 67 million in 2023, and 35 million, then 160 million in 2024.

Note: Superfund sites designate places too contaminated by hazardous wastes (e.g., toxic chemicals) for general human habitation. In 1995, of America’s 1,238 Superfund sites, 190 had PCB contamination and 80 had dioxin contamination. Sadly, these are not Monsanto’s only Superfund contributions (e.g., they’ve contaminated numerous areas with heavy metals, arsenic, radium and benzenes1,2,3,4).

3. Monsanto has also produced other problematic persistent chemicals. These include Acetochlor and Propachlor, carcinogenic herbicides which persist in the environment (one of which was taken off the market), and Lasso, another problematic herbicide that was phased out.

4. In 1993, Monsanto released a rBGH, a synthetic growth hormone designed to increase cow milk production that ended up in their milk. Health concerns (e.g., preliminary data suggested a cancer,1,2,3 allergy and obesity risk—all of which was subsequently never studied) and animal welfare concerns (e.g., overstraining their milk production lead to an 18% increase in infertility, a 25% increase in mastitis, a 50% increase in lameness and an overall 20-25% increase risk in the animal needing to be culled) it quickly created public concerns about rBGH milk.

To protect their market, Monsanto began an infamous public relations campaign. For example, in 1997 after investigative journalists revealed dairy farms were continuing to use rBGH despite grocery stores promising not to sell that milk (and showed the human and animal health risks from rBGH), Monsanto legally intimated the station into pulling the story and revising it to echo Monsanto’s (unsubstantiated) “safe and effective” claims, after which the journalists were fired for refusing to. Likewise, once milk producers responded to public demands and began specifying on their labels the milk was “rGBH free” Monsanto launched an aggressive legal and legislative campaign to outlaw those labels (which ultimately backfired and made the public much more cynical about the product eventually killing its market).

5. After realizing genetically modified seeds were a highly lucrative market, Monsanto repurposed many of their tactics to monopolize this sector. These included:

• Creating a division to sue small farmers who replanted Monsanto’s genetically modified (GMO) seeds (with over 23 million being awarded to Monsanto).

• Developing seeds which could not reproduce (so farmers would be forced to buy them perpetually), which was eventually withdrawn due to public backlash.

• Having a revolving door at the FDA to shield them from regulatory scrutiny (e.g., this Monsanto Vice President is a well-known example).

• Locking farmers in poorer nations into a cycle of poverty as the seeds were so much more expensive, most notably resulting in mass suicides of Indian farmers who became trapped by debt from Monsanto’s costly BT corn.

• As shown by court documents, manipulating the entire scientific system to create the impression their GMOs were safe (e.g., paying off academics to write or put their names on favorable studies and successfully targeting academic critics along with getting their papers retracted so others would not be willing to risk publishing critical data).1,2,3

• Since significantly more growing cycles exist in topical areas (3-4 rather than 1 in areas with winters), Hawaii became a popular area for cultivating and producing GMO seed crops, rapidly coming to comprise the majority of Hawaii’s agricultural revenue (with 92% coming from GMO corn). As this process required heavy use of restricted-use herbicides and pesticides, due to both environmental concerns and health effects (e.g., cancers and birth defects observed), community resistance gradually mounted against their cultivation.

Note: Monsanto also later received a $10 million fine for using a banned pesticide on Maui and Molokai and a $12 million fine for improperly using a restricted pesticide.

These practices eventually (in 2013-2014) resulted in Kauai (the primary growing site) banning spraying restricted use agrochemicals within 500 feet of schools, hospitals or parks (and requiring announcements of exactl what was being sprayed), a Maui citizen initiative pausing GMO cultivation there until safety studies had been conducted, and the island of Hawai’i banning GMO cultivation. When reading through the reports about what was happening (I was involved in the GMO field at the time due to serious concerns about their safety), I noted how contentious these laws were and was astonished Monsanto had upset Hawaii so much, the citizen initiative was able to pass despite being outspent over 87-1 by the GMO industry (which as far as I know has never otherwise happened). Sadly however, Monsanto was eventually able to overturn all of the laws with the courts by arguing only the state government (which was dependent on the GMO revenue) had the authority to restrict GMO cultivation.
Note: once Monsanto no longer benefited from using Hawaii’s land (e.g., due to fines and community pushback) they shifted their operations to their other USA-based (and subsidized) option, Puerto Rico, where they have continued poisoning the community, but due to the political climate have received minimal pushback. As the land Monsanto used in Hawaii was leased native land,1,2,3 they were able to escape any liability for poisoning the environment, and again offloaded the costs of their predatory practices onto the community.

In short, many people really detest Monsanto (and in my case, presenting all of this is quite cathartic for me—particularly due to my friends’ experiences with Agent Orange). In my eyes, the most important point to take from this is that it is not a good idea to give Monsanto additional legal leverage, as they have shown their legal team will use any means necessary to ensure they can continuing poisoning the world without accountability—and as they have already been successful in fairly outrageous cases, giving them additional tools will make it quite difficult to have any remaining check against their egregious behavior.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Deadly Campaign to Shield All Pesticides from Legal Liability appeared first on LewRockwell.

Social media sherpa “The Chief Nerd” posted a video clip of “entertainers” Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman discussing their anxiety over President Trump’s return to the White House.  Kimmel says he obtained citizenship in Italy so he can escape America.  Silverman thinks that is “amazing” and describes how she searches online for “Trump regrets or MAGA regrets” in the hopes that Americans’ shared misery “will bring people together.”  They both agree: “As bad as you thought it was gonna be, it’s so much worse.”

Celebrity therapy sessions such as this one resemble nature documentaries featuring exotic beasts.  It is fascinating to see rich, famous people living in their native habitats (read: leftist bubbles).  Whenever I think, “Wealthy woke-tards can’t possibly be this daft,” I inevitably stumble upon one of these nature clips documenting the behaviors of idiotically out-of-touch champagne socialists ruminating in the wilds of a Beverly Hills mansion, Manhattan penthouse, or exclusive island resort.

They always repeat something that is regurgitated on leftist social media accounts, too: Trump-voters regret their 2024 votes.  What kind of self-medicating Bizarro World do these mental cases call home?  Trump voters are thrilled with the way things have been going.  They want only more of it and at a faster pace!

They want members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Barack Obama’s administration, and the Brennan/Comey/Clapper Intelligence Community to be prosecuted for the Russia Collusion Hoax.  They want just-following-orders lawfare agents from the DOJ and FBI to be prosecuted for harassing Christians, pro-lifers, J6 protesters, First and Second Amendment–supporters, and everyone who told the truth about the Wuhan Virus and the unsafe and ineffective “vaccines.”  They want millions of criminal illegal aliens to be rounded up and deported posthaste.  They want schools that push boys into girls’ locker rooms to be punished.  They want universities and companies that discriminate based upon race, religion, and sexual orientation to face consequences for violating Americans’ civil rights.  They want the government to stop making it so easy for corporations to ignore American workers by offshoring plants to third-world countries exploiting slave labor and hiring illegal aliens here at home.  They want an end to endless wars.  They want “Green New Deal” regulations to be trashed for good and the vast administrative bureaucracy to be demolished.  They want cheaper energies, less inflation, and greater prosperity.  They want an exceptional America that once again protects free speech and private property and vigorously opposes the coercive strictures of “political correctness.”

MAGA Americans want all this and more, and President Trump is largely delivering.  They don’t expect to agree with everything the president does, but they do have a great deal of faith that they are all on the same side and working for similar things.  When Jimmy and Sarah say that Trump’s return is “unbelievable” and “way worse” than anything they had imagined, they reveal how insular their lives are and how little they understand of the world outside of their carefully pruned, socially segregated, gated communities.

I think the feelings I experience when I hear Kimmel and Silverman expressing their thoughts out loud must be similar to those of a poor kid from Victorian England seeing drawings of lions, elephants, and giraffes for the first time.  I am struck with a sense of disbelief.  Are these strange creatures real?  Oh, yes, the world is filled with many curious oddities!

Kimmel is so worried about imaginary fascism in America that he plans to flee to the land of Mussolini.  Silverman, displaying traits of a psychologically unstable adult, has built a fantasy world in her mind in which President Trump’s voters desperately wish that Drunk Kamala Harris were in the White House today.  In the real world, we might speak gently to Jimmy and Sarah and explain to them how their delusions are causing self-harm.  But this isn’t the real world. This is La La Land — where the best women have penises, Big Government is great (except when Democrats are out of power), and everything people enjoy causes planet-killing “global warming.”

You listen to caviar communists such as Kimmel and Silverman long enough, and a sensible person begins to wonder whether America would be better off providing loony leftists with complimentary straitjackets and taxpayer-funded housing in blue city–sized rubber rooms.  But that’s already what most Democrat-run cities have become!  They are dirty, cramped, crime-ridden hellholes whose residents can barely afford to live without welfare assistance.  Crazy, psychopathic gangs run the streets.  And crazy, sociopathic elites watch the mice scurrying around the urban maze from the safety of luxury lofts high above the carnage.  The only thing that privileged Democrat nobles share with the Democrat riffraff struggling to survive the effects of official Democrat party policy is that both the princes and the hoi polloi suffer from insanity.

If Jimmy and Sarah lost all their wealth and were forced to navigate the world without the help of servants, chemical stimulants, and a reality distortion field that shields them from alternative points of view, would they survive?  Or would we find them curled up in the fetal position, sucking their thumbs and shaking uncontrollably on the side of the road?

People who believe that free speech can survive only if conservatives are censored and the government funds NPR and PBS don’t tend to be made of hardy stuff.  People who think enforcing immigration law is “fascist” don’t tend to be blessed with much cognitive reason.  People who think the government should force citizens to be injected with the pharmaceutical industry’s latest experimental serums don’t tend to have a functioning moral compass.  People who think the sight of American flags on American lawns is “scary” and that the National Anthem should be replaced with “land acknowledgments” don’t tend to see America as “home.”  People who would rather embrace a “mermaid lifestyle” than befriend a MAGA American don’t tend to function well beyond the fortified perimeters of their insulated “safe spaces.”

Chances are that if Jimmy and Sarah were ever forced to survive in real America, they would perish in a puddle of their own tears.

But Jimmy has that Italian passport!  If he can find a team of human-smugglers (Mexican drug cartels operate many right in L.A.!) to get him through dangerous “MAGA country,” across the ocean, and into a nice villa on the Mediterranean Sea, all will be well.  Except has he ever met native Italians who weren’t also wealthy elites living in isolated retreats?

This may be hard for him to accept when he’s been kept in an endorphin-generating simulated reality equipped with cutting-edge wokeness (and no doubt powered by African child slave labor), but regular Italians are an awful lot like regular Americans.  They don’t share the same globalist worldviews so popular among the aristocrats vacationing in palaces on the shores of Lake Como.  Real Italians are tired of crumbling infrastructure, an economy that works only for privileged elites, and endless waves of criminal illegal aliens moving into their neighborhoods.  They are just as eager to “Make Italy Great Again” as Americans are at home.  Poor Jimmy might one day discover that his dual American-Italian citizenship just gives him a more expansive view of how Trumpian the world has become!

It is getting harder to see how leftism should be classified as anything other than a mental disorder.  It afflicts people who are so cut off from competing points of view that they mistake their fantasies as reality.  In this fantasy world, men have babies.  Illegal aliens are law-abiding citizens.  And sexy women wearing jeans are Nazis.

For leftists such as Jimmy and Sarah, fake is real, and real is fake.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Jimmy Kimmel Lives in Bizarro World appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ahead of a planned Israeli assault on Gaza City which UN officials warn will further exacerbate death and suffering for the Palestinian people, Israel has chosen to assassinate five Al Jazeera journalists who’ve been stationed there. Among those killed was Anas al-Sharif, one of the most high-profile surviving reporters in Gaza.

The IDF is of course claiming that al-Sharif was Hamas, because that’s what they always do. They’ve been murdering a historically unprecedented number of journalists and defending their systematic effort to blind the world to their actions in Gaza by claiming that every journalist they kill is Hamas. The journalists are Hamas, the hospitals are Hamas, the UN is Hamas, the peace activists are Hamas, the demonstrations are Hamas, telling the truth is Hamas, human empathy is Hamas, objective reality is Hamas. It’s all Hamas.

That Israel would feel the need to draw attention to its depravity with this targeted strike at this time shows it has some very ugly intentions for Gaza City that it doesn’t want the world to see.

❖

One of the many plot holes in Israel’s claim that it can’t let foreign journalists into Gaza because it’s not safe is that there are now huge areas which have been completely captured and controlled by the IDF. That’s where the GHF sites are, which is where journalists are most sorely needed right now.

It’s not like it’s 2023/2024 and journalists would need to follow Israeli forces into Gaza City to document gun battles with Hamas or take their crews through areas where the IDF could be carrying out air strikes. They could safely just set up their cameras at aid distribution sites and document what’s happening.

The only reason this hasn’t occurred is because Israel doesn’t want the world to see what it’s doing at those aid distribution sites. There is absolutely no other explanation.

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British police arrested 522 people for holding signs saying “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” in response to their government banning the activist group as a terrorist organization. Nearly half of those arrested were over sixty years old.

When I was young and naive I thought terrorism looks like someone detonating a car bomb or crashing planes into skyscrapers. Now that I’m mature and educated I know that terrorism actually looks like an elderly woman holding a sign saying people should be allowed to oppose genocide.

This is a society that has gone stark raving insane.

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U2 frontman Bono has finally issued a statement calling for peace in Gaza two years into a genocide, and however bad you expected it to be I guarantee it’s worse.

He works his way through pretty much every pro-genocide Israeli talking point while pretending to care about Palestinians. He spends paragraphs on October 7, mentions the word “Hamas” 14 times, falsely claims “Hamas are using starvation as a weapon in the war,” says “Hamas had deliberately positioned themselves under civilian targets, having tunneled their way from school to mosque to hospital,” babbles about the 1988 Hamas charter while ignoring its 2017 revisions, blames the whole thing on Netanyahu, and of course mentions “Israel’s right to exist.”

I seriously think he hit every major hasbara talking point. I don’t think he missed a single one. It’s genocide propaganda disguised as humanitarianism. Bono is a piece of shit.

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I judge the character of Jewish people based on how much they oppose the genocide in Gaza. This is also how I judge the character of anyone who is not Jewish.

❖

As soon as someone says they support Israel for religious reasons, you can dismiss anything they say in defense of Israel’s actions, because you know they’ll tell any lie and promote any kind of propaganda in order to advance their religious mission. They’re not engaging the subject to share facts and communicate, they’re engaging it to obtain promised rewards in the afterlife and please an invisible deity. They’ll say whatever they need to say in order to make this happen.

Think about it. If you sincerely held the religious belief that Israel needs to be supported no matter what in order to fulfill some kind of prophecy, or that if you don’t promote the interests of Israel you’ll be tortured for eternity in Hell, or that Actual Metaphysical Yahweh has commanded that helping Israel is the single most important thing in the world, would you not say whatever you need to say and promote whatever narratives you need to promote in order to help make that happen? Of course you would. It’s not about facts and truth for such people, it’s about getting into Heaven and bringing back Jesus and stuff.

The instant someone admits to supporting Israel for religious reasons, there’s no reason to believe anything else they say. Because you know they’ll say things they don’t really know to be true and pretend to believe things they don’t really believe in order to do what they’ve been told is the most important thing they can possibly do with their lives. It’s impossible to have a truth-based conversation with such a person.

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The post Israel Assassinates More Journalists To Hide Its Planned War Crimes appeared first on LewRockwell.

A couple of days ago Trump said it wasn’t worthwhile meeting with Putin, but suddenly ordered his aides to arrange a meeting with Putin in a week. The explanations we have been given for this is that Putin said Trump’s negotiator Witcoff had made an acceptable proposal. Putin’s negotiator Kirill Dmitriev declared “a historic meeting in which dialogue will prevail.”  One dreamer proclaimed that Putin and Trump “may reconfigure the world order.”

These premature declarations of agreement and success have led to further romantic theorizing. One Russian commentator declared that Alaska was chosen for the historic meeting because it “so clearly embodies the spirit of neighborliness and mutually beneficial cooperation lost during the Cold War.” The Russian Atlanticist-Integrationists whose hearts and interests are in the West are hopeful that their declarations of bliss, even if involves Russian surrender, will prevail  over Russian nationalism.

For example, Putin’s negotiator is Kirill Dmitriev, nominally a Russian, but in fact a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Business School–entrances into the American Establishment–who began his career at Goldman Sachs, an establishment member. He is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. His long list of honors and directorships of Russian companies is provided by the WEF. Currently he is chief of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and Putin’s Special Envoy on International Economic and Investment Cooperation. Could Putin have chosen a more conflicted person to negotiate with Washington?

Among these and other highly hopeful statements, what is the reality of the situation? Does it conform to the expressed expectations?

No.  As far as I can tell, Trump is headed into a “historic meeting” with his Russian counterpart and still has no idea what Putin’s position is. Trump most recently spoke of a peace deal based on a “swapping of territories,” which Zelensky’s European supporters say must be a “reciprocal” swap of territory. Zelensky’s position is that all territory must be returned to Ukraine. Putin’s position is that all territory now incorporated into the Russian Federation must be accepted as Russian by Ukraine and the West. Otherwise, Russia has to repudiate its military victories in a war that was provoked by Washington.

But the main problem with Trump’s approach is that he is thinking of the meeting in a very limited context of ending the military conflict with a land swap, whereas Putin wants a mutual security agreement with Washington and NATO that gets NATO off of Russia’s borders. The war that Putin wants to end is the West’s hostility toward Moscow. The war in Ukraine Russia can take care off.

Putin’s objective is a highly desirable goal, because the worsening provocations of Moscow will eventually result in nuclear war. But how realistic is Putin’s goal?

I would say it is not realistic.

First, the Wolfowitz Doctrine is in the way. The Wolfowitz doctrine declares the principal goal of US foreign policy to be to prevent the rise of any power that can serve as a constraint on American unilateralism. The neoconservatives who originated this doctrine are still very influential in US policy-making circles. No US president or Secretary of State has repudiated this doctrine. Trump himself recently declared the policy when he said “I rule America and the world.” That is a hegemonic statement.

Indeed, the current military conflict in Ukraine is entirely the product of Washington’s hegemonic foreign policy. Washington orchestrated the “Maidan Revolution” in order to overthrow a Russian-friendly democratic government and to install a Russophobic puppet. The puppet government then attacked the people in the Russian territories of Ukraine until they forced a Russian intervention after the West used the Minsk Agreement to deceive Putin and after the West refused the Kremlin’s request for a mutual security agreement during December 2021-February 2022.  At this point Putin was forced to intervene in order to prevent the slaughter of the Russians in the independent Donbas republics by a large Ukrainian army trained and equipped by Washington.  If Putin had had the foresight to accept the Donbas republics’ request in 2014 to be reunited with Russia like Crimea, the war would have been avoided.  But Putin, badly advised, confused a defense of Russian people with a provocation to the West.  In 2014 the Atlanticists-Integrationists, whose interests are in the West, not in Russia, still intended for the Kremlin to crawl on its belly back into Western acceptance by being a good subject of Washington’s hegemonic rule..

The entire point of Washington’s orchestrated conflict in Ukraine was to destabilize Russia. Has Washington abandoned this policy goal?

Second, there is the interest of the US military/security complex. The power and profit of the military/security complex depends on having enemies. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the creation of the “Muslim Threat” used to sustain the military/security’s profits and powers with Washington’s 21st century wars that destroyed, so far, five Muslim countries, while supporting with money, weapons, and diplomatic cover Israel’s genocide of Palestine, and Washington is now being aligned with Israel to destroy Iran. A few days ago President Trump bragged that he had negotiated a deal with the EU to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of US weapons to send to Ukraine. What happens to this deal if peace comes to Ukraine? How does the military/security complex see the loss of its Russian enemy? Has Trump promised them an Iranian war and/or a war with China as replacements?

Third, if Trump favors peace with Russia, why did he just reinstall in Europe the US intermediate-range nuclear missiles that President Reagan had removed, and in addition deploy two submarines with nuclear missiles closer to Russia?

More importantly, why has Washington suddenly struck a massive blow against Russia, China, and Iran in the South Caucasus by obtaining for 99 years the Zangezur Corridor that runs along Iran’s northern borders with Armenia and Azerbaijan? This move by the Trump regime is a strike at the heart of China’s New Silk Road, BRICS, and Russia’s influence in former Soviet provinces, and it completes Washington’s encirclement of Iran. Washington is opening more points of military confrontation with Russia and its allies while Russia backs away, thereby inviting more provocations

This audacious Washington strike against Russia, Iran, and China should shatter the Russian illusion that a mutual security agreement is obtainable with Washington. Washington has made a decisive move against three powers which indicates Washington’s seriousness about its hegemony.

Russian commentators downplay the loss of the corridor as they fight to keep reality out of their hopes that Russia will become part of the West.

Before Putin goes to Alaska, Putin should ask Dmitrive how Washington’s takeover of the Zangezur corridor fits in with the “acceptable American proposal” about Ukraine.

And someone, if there is anyone, should ask Putin, XI, and the Iranians why they were yet again asleep at the switch.

Will Putin also be asleep at the switch in Alaska, lulled into illusionary dreams by the likes of Dmitrive?

In his two masterful histories, The First World War and The Origins of the Second World War, A.J.P. Taylor explains the triumph of delusion over reality when governments are confronted with conflict. We are watching it again in our time.

The post Putin’s Meeting with Trump: The Triumph of Delusion Over Reality appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Great Depression was one of the toughest times in United States history. Following a historic collapse of the stock market wages were low, and jobs were tough to find for just about everyone.

However, the saying goes “tough times make tough people”, and the Great Depression was no different. Families, friends, and communities banded together to support one another, and people got savvy with their savings and spending.

To write this article, I spent some time talking with my grandparents who grew up during the Great Depression. In chatting with them I learned some of the tools and tips that they and their families used to save money during this time of economic distress.

I thought it would be helpful to talk with real people who have experience in finding ways to make ends meet when things are tough.

If we can use and learn from the experiences of those who came before us, then hopefully we are better prepared for the hard times that lay ahead of us.

Here are tips for saving money from real survivors of the Great Depression.

Live As A Family

While today’s world encourages young adults to move out as soon as possible, it isn’t the best way to save money.

During the Great Depression families stuck together, and moved together in search of work. Living under one roof cuts down the cost of rent, utilities, food, travel, and more.

By living as a family you can not only save money but have a trustworthy team around you to work through these hard times.

Insulate The Home

Homes today naturally come with some insulation, but the more you can insulate the better. Especially in the colder months of winter keeping the house heated can be challenging and expensive.

My grandmother talked about using whatever they had spare, whether it be clothes, blankets, pillows, etc. Whatever material they had spare was used to try and provide an extra bit of insulation. By adding extra insulation you can find valuable savings on your heating.

Wet Sheets Over Entryways In The Summer

On the other side of things, during the summers of the Great Depression, they would hang wet or damp sheets over the doors and windows.

The water would evaporate during the day and in doing so it would cool the air inside the home some.

The less strain you can put on your AC unit means less strain on your wallet.

Buy Produce That Is Close To Spoiling

One tip my grandparents learned that they still practice today is buying produce close to it’s date of expiration. During the Depression, stores were closed on Sunday and the produce being sold would spoil in the upcoming following week.

As such, vendors would drop their prices on Saturday evenings in an attempt to offload all the produce before it went bad.

By purchasing produce on Saturday evenings their families were able to eat for much cheaper the following week.

Create Your Own Cleaning Supplies

Another tip for inside the home is to create your own cleaning supplies. With the adults in the family often taking on daily labor, my grandmother and the other children learned to take up the work around the home.

Rather than spending on costly household cleaners from the store, mixing hot water and vinegar can be highly effective for scrubbing away grime.

Consider Cheaper Protein Options

Much of the protein we consume today is either beef or chicken, but during the Great Depression, these types of protein became scarce and expensive. As a result, my grandfather talked about finding cheaper protein options like rabbit, eggs, and even squirrels on occasion.

As kids, one of the my grandfather’s favorite meals was fried bologna because it was cheap and easy to make. Eating meals like these may not be ideal, but it was a way for them to keep an entire family fed on a budget.

Another tip for inside the home is to create your own cleaning supplies. With the adults in the family often taking on daily labor, my grandmother and the other children learned to take up the work around the home.

Rather than spending on costly household cleaners from the store, mixing hot water and vinegar can be highly effective for scrubbing away grime.

Consider Cheaper Protein Options

Much of the protein we consume today is either beef or chicken, but during the Great Depression, these types of protein became scarce and expensive. As a result, my grandfather talked about finding cheaper protein options like rabbit, eggs, and even squirrels on occasion.

As kids, one of the my grandfather’s favorite meals was fried bologna because it was cheap and easy to make. Eating meals like these may not be ideal, but it was a way for them to keep an entire family fed on a budget.

Read the Whole Article

The post Money Saving Tips From the Great Depression appeared first on LewRockwell.

Global Research Note 

The proposed location of these negotiations  remains to be confirmed.

Has Putin accepted to enter peace negotiations on American territory rather than in a Third Country?  (M.Ch)

Putin and Trump last week agreed to meet at a location in Alaska. Indications are the meeting will occur as soon as August 15, 2025 or soon after. In other words, in just days. Or perhaps a week or so at most.

If we’re to believe the US media, the meeting is about Trump and Putin negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine. But does the meeting signify the start of serious negotiations and the beginning of the end of the war in Ukraine? Not necessarily. There are other possible interpretations for the meeting in Alaska:

A meeting with Putin may provide the cover for Trump to finally start an actual US withdrawal from the conflict. After all, during the past nine months the US has continued to send weapons, money and provide extensive military assistance to Ukraine. While calling for Ukraine and Russia to stop fighting, the US has continued to participate directly and deeply in the conflict providing general tactical planning by high level US officers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, communications, missile targeting, manning of technical equipment like Patriot systems, training, and so on. Perhaps Trump wants to withdraw from these activities. To do so he needs to show some kind of agreement with Putin as a justification.

Another interpretation is that the meeting is really about restarting discussions on future US-Russia economic relations. These began in the months before April 2025, showed some initial progress, but then were quietly suspended. Trump would no doubt like to ink some deals on Russian commodities, especially rare earths that China has recently decided not to export to the US. And perhaps deepening US-Russia economic relations sends a message to the Chinese the US is intensifying efforts to split Russia from it.

Yet another interpretation is that the purpose of the meeting is to get Putin to agree to a general ceasefire by conceding a ‘piece of the pie’, i.e. of one or two Ukraine provinces in the east where the fighting is mostly occurring. Russia has already taken all of the Lughansk province. Perhaps Trump will offer to Russia what it already has in Lughansk. More likely is the offer of the second province of Donetsk where Russia has been gaining territory daily but has only captured perhaps 60% of the total territory. By offering him the two provinces in exchange for a general ceasefire everywhere before starting negotiations on other issues, Trump is revising his original ‘Kellogg Plan’ that called for ceasefire everywhere in exchange for nothing—which Russia has consistently rejected since Trump took office.

A fourth interpretation is that the meeting is just another clever ruse by NATO and the west to lull Russia into a general ceasefire, with no intention of Ukraine actually withdrawing forces anywhere. According to this interpretation, Trump will offer a verbal or even written promise that Ukraine will then negotiate in good faith. But if this case, it is a repeat of the 2015 Minsk agreement signed by Ukraine and by Germany and France on behalf of NATO, the purpose of which was to convince Russia to halt its destruction of Ukraine’s forces at Debaltsovo that year which save the Ukraine army from defeat. The Minsk agreement of 2015 provided Ukraine and NATO with a diplomatic victory that halted Russia militarily and bought time for Ukraine to rebuild its military and defensive fortifications in the east the next six years in preparation for war.

A fifth interpretation is the most likely, however. That argues the meeting is just a last minute maneuver by Trump to stage a grand PR event, to be followed by statements of agreements in principle by US and Russia which neither side expects will take effect. Trump thereby gets a media event in which he brags he’s successfully gotten the Russians to move toward a final agreement—after he failed to do so the past six months. Trump thus declares a media ‘win’ for himself, even though nothing changes on the ground in the aftermath and the war continues. A typical Trump ‘smoke and mirrors’ event.

Putin may even agree to such an offer and let Trump have his much needed media victory. Even if it’s just a PR event enabling Trump to exaggerate, misrepresent and brag about, it still puts pressure on the Zelensky government and its European allies to respond. If Zelensky’s response is an adamant ‘no deal’—which is almost certain—then it shows Russia is willing to move off its negotiating position to get a peace deal but Ukraine (and Europe) are not. And that weakens US neocon support to continue the war in turn—undermining their current proposals so far held up in Congress to impose 500% tariffs on Russia, secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil, and to provide Ukraine another $55 billion from the US Treasury. If Ukraine and Europe reject outright whatever comes out of Alaska, Russia need not agree to any general ceasefire since the minimum precondition likely for such ceasefire is for Ukraine to totally withdraw its forces from Donetsk.

It is already evident Zelensky and Europe will reject anything coming out of Alaska.

Just the announcement of the possible meeting in Alaska elicited the immediate response by Zelensky and his government that they will never agree to give Russia even one province (Donetsk) in exchange for a general ceasefire. Similarly, Ukraine’s European allies also rejected the idea of any concession and within 24 hours of the Alaska announcement publicly told Zelensky he must continue the war.

US Mainstream Media Leaks

Events that got the ball rolling toward a meeting in Alaska were set in motion by Trump’s sending his second special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to Moscow last week. (Trump’s other envoy is General Kellogg who had carried the water for the US neocons’ demands for Russia to ceasefire first, then negotiate).

What provoked Trump to send Witkoff? It may have been Putin’s signal that Russia has now only two major demands: No NATO in Ukraine and Ukraine acceptance that the four provinces (+ Crimea) are now part of Russia. This appears as a concession without Russia actually making one.

Putin’s demands since June 2024, when he stated them succinctly, include both these preceding prime demands but also several more: political neutrality by Ukraine, reduction of Ukraine’s military to a force no larger than 80,000, denazification of its government, and restoration of rights for ethnic Russian Ukrainians. These latter points were not referenced by Putin who emphasized just the first two. That may have been interpreted by Witkoff, who then convinced Trump the Russians may be open to direct negotiations and a meeting. It was highly likely it was then that Trump sent Witkoff to Moscow.

That this was the likely scenario that led to the announcement of a meeting was leaked by the Wall St. Journal and Bloomberg News late last week. As the Journal suggested, Witkoff carried Trump’s proposal to Putin for Russia to agree to a general ceasefire, providing Ukraine withdraw all its forces remaining in Donetsk where fighting is the heaviest. In exchange for the withdrawal, Putin would agree to ‘freeze in place’ immediately all Russia forces elsewhere in Ukraine. The Journal and Bloomberg interpreted this to also mean Russia would in turn give up the unoccupied areas of Kherson and Zaparozhie provinces. But there’s no evidence of this and it is impossible Russia would, given that all the provinces have been formally integrated into the Russian Constitution and Putin could never agree to do so short of changing the Constitution.

Of course, Zelensky has also declared the four provinces and Crimea are part of the Ukrainian Constitution and are non-negotiable. What this means is one side or the other has to confront a Constitutional crisis in order to negotiate an end to the war. That will not happen. It is likely there can never be a compromised, negotiated settlement to the war—short of one side or the other (Ukraine or Russia) capitulating completely on the battlefield.

So why did Trump ever think he could single-handedly negotiate a settlement to the war?  Was he so blinded by his ego to think it was no different than negotiating some phony business deal? Was he misled by his neocon advisers the past six months not communicating the actual positions of the parties? Perhaps he wants a meeting to hear for himself? Not what his advisers tell him. Does Trump know so little about the origins and history of this conflict and their respective publics’ support? Why did Trump abandon his initial efforts to withdraw the US from the conflict and around April bend to the demands of the neocons and US Deep State and their EU allies, none of whom actually want an end to the war on any terms. Their Kellogg Plan got nowhere. Now Trump is desperate to try something else. So he grabbed at the possible shift by Putin and sent Witkoff to offer Putin something more substantial.

The Kellogg Plan is DOA, as the saying goes. So what does Trump do now? By pushing the Kellogg Plan the past six months, Trump put himself in the corner, appeared to have failed by August, thereafter threw out some threats and an ultimatum that Putin had 50 days to end the war, then cut it to 12, rattled his saber about sending US nuclear subs closer to Russia,  and sent some old nuclear gravity bombs to Britain. He then flip flopped again just days before the 12 day deadline was up and sent Witkoff off to Moscow.

What’s Next Post Alaska?

It doesn’t matter what’s discussed at the Alaska meeting. Or what is or isn’t agreed to or announced afterward in the official ‘read out’ summary report of the meeting, as it’s called.

Nothing will change on the ground. The war will continue. Why?

Because Zelensky, his European backers Starmer, Merz, Macron, and their US Deep State allies (Graham, Blumenthal, CIA, State Department)—along with mainstream US corporate media outlets like NY Times, Washington Post, MSNBC et. al.—all want the war to continue.

Zelensky and the Europeans will reject whatever comes out of the Alaska meeting. Moreover, they will try to do everything they can to scuttle it before—with the cooperation and assistance of their US neocon friends. Both the Europeans and Zelensky will desperately try to get to Trump before the Alaska meeting. Both know face time is the key to turning Trump around.

It’s worked before. It was how last spring when Trump was in Rome and the Vatican they got to him personally. He flipped and assumed a neocon position and had Kellogg take the lead. Witkoff was ‘back-burnered’. Europeans have learned the formula for dealing with Trump: appeal to his ego, inveigle him with flattery, grovel if necessary. They even call him ‘daddy Trump’—as NATO’s director Rutte recently did—when they meet with him. They’ve reportedly even dangled arranging a Nobel peace prize for him.

Both Zelensky and the Europeans will try desperately to inject themselves into the Alaska meeting. They’ll work out a plan with their US neocon friends to step up the pressure on Trump at home in Congress. Their security services may even try to float a false flag threat that if Putin goes something dangerous will happen to him, hoping the Russians thereby cancel.

One should not discount any of these possible counters or that Trump may be convinced to shift gears once again. One need only remember Trump’s aborted efforts in his first term to meet with North Korea’s president Kim and with China’s Xi, both initiatives were thwarted by his neocon advisers and Deep State policy makers.

For it is increasingly clear the past half century at least that US presidents don’t determine US foreign policy or its wars. They are but one of many political ‘nodes’ in the system that do. And the neocons and Deep State—along with Israel and its deep influence over the US government—are the arbiters and deciders of US foreign policy in the 21st century.

In conclusion therefore, one should not expect much from the upcoming Alaska meeting between Trump and Putin, assuming it even comes off. Much can and will happen in the next five days. At best it will be a media and PR event by Trump. It will have little to no effect on the continuation of the war in Ukraine. And there will be no Minsk III or IV or even Istanbul 2.0.  The war will be decided on the front line, as has always been the case.

The war in Ukraine will continue so long as Zelensky and his crew are in power. They will remain in power so long as the Europeans want to continue the war. European leaders want to continue in order to rescue their two decade old stagnant economy, hoping they can revive it with a $1 trillion new expenditure and weapons industry by 2030. And the US neocons who remain deeply entrenched in the US political system want it.

Their combined grand strategy is to keep Trump in check for the next three years, block and thwart his foreign policy initiatives, wait him out, replace him in 2029 with another more amenable US president again, hope that Putin disappears from the political scene by then—and then escalate the war again.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

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