All the staging is a means to an end, and everyone in America is nothing more than a means to an end: close the sale so the few can continue exploiting the many.

You know how realtors stage a house to increase its marketability: first, they remove all evidence that people actually live there. (Of course a vacant house is ideal for staging because there’s none of the messy real-life stuff to deal with.) All the clutter of everyday life must be moved elsewhere so the house can look like a bloodless furniture showroom. In other words, fake.  Then various tricks /cues are employed to activate the sense of “home”: induce the “smell of fresh bread” in the kitchen, adorn rooms with vases of fresh flowers, and have a few fake “family” photos set on bookshelves.

We all understand homes for sale are staged for marketing, as are showrooms and any other space devoted to selling. The raison d’etre of the space is to close the sale, so exacting care is given to every signal, cue and nuance.
(It doesn’t always work as intended. Apple Stores make me want to run screaming from the sci-fi white prison workshop to blessed freedom.)

The problem is everything in America is now staged with an eye on selling you something. Maybe it’s just selling your attention to an advertiser or data-mining outfit. Maybe it’s selling an ersatz slogan like “we’re all in this together” to placate the herd being led to slaughter.
Maybe it’s phony membership in a movement that masks the few taking advantage of the many with a bogus ideological rallying cry. Maybe it’s a so-called “panel of experts” offering up soothing assurances that this highly addictive opioid is incredibly profitable– oops, did I say that? I meant “safe.” It’s incredibly safe.

And so on. Since everything is staged, nothing is remotely credible. The 70-year old performer’s deep-red hair (with a small splash of gray to make the charade “believable”): fake.
The Stepford automatons lining the stage? Replicas of a carefully coiffed “reality.”

The entire financial system –nothing but an elaborate simulacrum of a real-world financial system.

“Democracy”: –nothing but an elaborate simulacrum of a real-world republic.

“Fake” is now itself fake as the meta-marketers seek to undermine the concept of fake to sell the idea that what we recognize as fake is actually real: we’re told that it’s the real thing that’s been hidden from view that’s fake. The photo on the shelf of the fake family is real, we’re told; what’s fake is the actual real photo of the messy real-world family who actually lives here.

Given that everything is staged, trust has been completely destroyed. To trust anything being presented as a means to an end–i.e. a con, a scam, a sales pitch, a fake scent of fresh bread, etc.–is to be a chump.

The legitimacy of everything that’s being staged has been irrevocably lost. Nobody tells the plain truth any more because telling the truth is straying off-message. Staying on-message is the Prime Directive in America. Stray from the message and the truth might leak out, and then we’re all doomed because we can’t close the sale.

There’s no escape from this dependency on staging and staying on-message . The only hope of a return to the real world is the collapse of the entire fake, staged status quo, the collapse of every institution, every media outlet, every social-media platform, every single manifestation of marketing, cons, scams, pitches, gamed statistics, and all the frantic assurances that fake is real and real is fake because your belief in the fraud is the key to closing the sale.

All the staging is a means to an end, and everyone in America is nothing more than a means to an end: close the sale so the few can continue exploiting the many. If you can’t stay on-message, you’re gone–no wealth or security for you, bucko.

Staging is no substitute for reality. The frauds, cons and scams are failing to keep the simulacrum world glued together because no matter how expert the marketing and how great the desire to close the sale so the few can continue exploiting the many , reality intrudes right when the deal’s about to close and the whole absurd contraption collapses in a heap.

The whole planet has every reason to be terminally puzzled at how all those lofty Enlightenment ideals Thomas Jefferson embedded in the 1776 Declaration of Independence ended up with…Trump vs. Biden.

Jefferson borrowed freely from Locke, Rousseau, Hume to come up with an eminently quotable Greatest Hits, featuring “self-evident” truths such as “all men are created equal”, “unalienable rights”, and that searing “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Well, Baudrillard would have dubbed the exercise a mere simulacrum, because in real life none of this uplifting rhetoric applied to Native Americans and enslaved Africans.

Still, there’s something endlessly fascinating about these “self-evident truths”. They actually radiated like Spinoza axioms, spawning abstract truths that can be extrapolated at will. Jefferson’s “self-evident truths” ended up creating the whole, massive structure of what we define as “Western liberal democracy”.

So it’s no wonder that America – perennially self-described as “leader of the free world” – consider these “self-evident truths” as the basis of an ideal society.

And it’s this messianic river of fervent truth flowing out of a Himalaya of Morality that leads Americans to dismiss as “malign actors” every nation or society that is judged to be “deviating” from such obvious evidence.

Those damned furreners. They’re always up to no good.

Cut to a mini-remix of the last Trump-Biden presidential debate. In foreign policy terms, it went something like this.

The moderator is desperate to move on as she’s very much aware of time constraints and looming, incandescent clashes: “Now I want to move on to Defense. It’s established Russia and China are interfering in our election process…”

Here’s classic “self-evident truth” material, delivered according to strict Council on Foreign Relations guidelines.

Cut to Biden: any country that interferes with the American elections “will pay a price”. Russia’s “been involved, China has been involved to some degree, and Iran’s been involved.” They are interfering with “American sovereignty”. Rudy Giuliani was used “as a Russian pawn”. Trump is “unwilling” to confront Putin. Russia has “destabilized NATO” and is “paying bounties to kill Americans in Afghanistan.” And China “has to play by the rules” – or else.

Cut to Trump: “You mean the laptop from hell is another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?”

For the record: Joe Biden did blame the contents of son Hunter’s laptop from hell on Russia.

And discussing North Korea, when Trump said he got along fine with Kim Jong-Un, Biden stated, “We had a good relationship with Hitler before he invaded Europe.” Incidentally, Germany is and remains in Europe. And it’s quite something to see Biden acknowledging in public proven US industrial and political support to Nazism.

Those damn furreners

So, inevitably, the laptop from hell had to show up.

The FBI had Hunter Biden’s laptop since December 2019 – as it had issued a subpoena for it in the first place. And yet the FBI sat on the laptop for 11 months doing nothing.

That must have given plenty of time for those pesky Russians to steal the laptop and plant incriminating evidence.

Well, not really. The FBI was busy mulling how to conduct an investigation on “money laundering”. And not on child porn – which, according to Giuliani, is the piece de resistance in the laptop. No one knows if these alleged “investigations” are ongoing.

LINKBOOKMARK▲▼Now, the FBI and the Department of Justice have finally “concurred”: Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails were not part of a Russian disinformation campaign – directly contradicting what Joe Biden said in the debate.

But then, right before the debate, a bombshell presser – including the FBI and Homeland Security – had announced those pesky Russians and Iranians were in fact “trying to influence opinion” on the US elections.

“Self-evident truths” were back with a bang.

One can’t make this stuff up. And it gets even murkier when the actual “election interference” may be coming from inside the US, not from those damn furreners.

This past summer, the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) war-gamed possible scenarios post-November 3. All the scenarios lead to a huge constitutional crisis – forced, as part of the premise, by Trump’s refusal to concede his defeat at the polls.

TIP, predictably, is a proverbial Beltway bubble, composed of assorted Democratic Party higher-ups, Clintonistas, Obamistas and neo-con Never Trumpers.

Their message is now widely accepted as another avatar of “self-evident truths” because of this group’s powerful grip over Anglo-American mainstream media. Reverberations may be seen, for instance, here, here and here.

So the preferred doomsday scenario ahead spells out an engineered unresolved election, wide socio-political chaos, “continuity of government” protocols, even martial law.

What’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” got to do with it?

Pepe Escobar, UNZ

The average American college student graduates with $30,000 in debt, and the cost of college has more than doubled since 1985 even after accounting for inflation. Unfortunately, due to a lack of other options, many students feel forced into this expensive system even when they can’t afford it or don’t really need a traditional college degree to pursue their future goals.

But an apprenticeship program recently profiled by the Wall Street Journal could offer an example for future programs to follow. It shows how to offer accessible, affordable, and practical jobs training to the millions of young people our current higher education system is failing.

Known as “FAME,” the Federation for Manufacturing Education, the program was founded in 2010 by manufacturing employers struggling to find suitably skilled employees. It now works with community colleges and almost 400 employers across 13 states.

“Students of FAME—a mix of new high-school grads and older factory workers well into their careers—typically spend two days a week in class and three days on the factory floor, earning a part-time salary,” the Journal reports. “They learn to maintain and repair machinery; traditional subjects such English, math and philosophy; and soft skills such as work ethic and teamwork.”

“After earning an associate degree, most work full time for the factories that sponsored them,” the report continues. “FAME graduates fill what might be called ‘grey-collar’ jobs, which involve both traditional blue-collar manual labor and the kind of critical thinking and communication typically associated with a four-year degree.” [Full Story HERE]

Look Ma — no college! Colleges, as we know them, are unsustainable. They spew out Communist debt-ridden punks and offer a perfectly terrible return on the investment of $50K, $100K and rising. Hypocritical, anti-capitalist professors shriek about profits in other industries, and now demand the federal government pick up 100 percent of the tab for their own NEVER ENDING tuition increases … at a time of lockdowns THEY, the professors, support, meaning that colleges are doing one-quarter of the work for the continuing outrageous costs. Why are colleges still in existence? If making a living is the criteria for success, then we already have alternatives on the horizon.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

One hundred years ago today, on April 16, 1910, Henry Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation, put the finishing touches on the Flexner Report.1 No other document would have such a profound effect on American medicine, starting it on its path to destruction up to and beyond the recently passed (and laughably titled) Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA), a.k.a., “Obamacare.” Flexner can only be accurately understood in the context of what led up to it.

Free market medicine did not begin in the United States in 1776 with the Revolution. From 1830 to about 1850, licensing laws and regulations imposed during the colonial period and early America were generally repealed or ignored. This was brought about by the increasing acceptance of eclecticism (1813) and homeopathy (1825), against the mainstream medicine (allopathy) of the day that included bloodletting and high-dose injections of metal and metalloid compounds containing mercury or antimony.2

Eclectics emphasized plant remedies, bed rest, and steam baths, while homeopaths emphasized a different set of medicines in small doses (letting the body heal itself as much as possible), improved diet and hygiene, and stress reduction. The worst results these treatments produced were allergic reactions to no improvement. Hence it’s not surprising they began to be preferred over the ghastly bleeding and metal injections of allopathy, which killed large numbers of patients.

By 1860, there were more than 55,000 physicians practicing in the United States, one of the highest per capita numbers of doctors in the world (about 175 per 100,000).3 By 1870, approximately 62,000 physicians were in practice in the United States,4 roughly about 5,300 of which were homeopathic and about 2,700 eclectic.5 Schooling was plentiful and inexpensive, and entry to the most acclaimed schools was not exceedingly difficult. Most schools were privately owned. Licenses to practice were not required or enforced, and anyone could establish a practice.6

Like the mythical Hollywood portrayal of the American “Wild West” as a place in which the denizens of every town were killing each other in gunfights every minute of the day, the free market period in American medicine has also been distorted as one in which towns were mobbed by traveling quacks prescribing dangerous treatments that killed the townspeople in droves. Organized mainstream medicine concocted this myth, and as previously noted, it was they and not the homeopaths and eclectics who were killing large numbers of people via bloodletting and metal poisoning.7 This is why it took time and effort for any caregiver to win the widespread trust of a typical community in nineteenth-century America. The public en masse blindly lapping up snake oil dispensed from the dirty travel trunks of carnival-tent quacks is wild legend.

Even though they were only about 13 percent of physicians in practice,8 eclectics and homeopaths did damage to the incomes of the allopaths. The allopaths began organizing at the state level to use the coercive power of government to not only severely restrict (if not outright ban) eclectics and homeopaths, and the schools that trained them, but also restrict the number of allopaths in practice to dramatically increase their incomes and prestige.9

The American Medical Association (AMA) had already been formed in 1847 by Nathan Smith Davis. Davis had been working at the Medical Society of New York with issues of licensing and education. While the pretense was always more rigorous standards toward the supposed end of effective treatments, exclusion was the reality. Hence it was no surprise that in 1870, Davis worked successfully to prohibit female and black physicians from becoming members of the AMA.10

The AMA formed its Council on Medical Education in 1904 as a tool to artificially restrict education.11 However, the AMA’s conflict of interest was too obvious. This is where Abraham Flexner and the Carnegie Foundation entered the picture. Flexner’s older brother Simon was the director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and he recommended his brother Abraham for the Carnegie job. Abraham’s acceptance of the role was the perfect special-interest symbiosis. Carnegie’s desire was to advance secularism through higher education, thus it saw the AMA’s agenda as favorable toward that end. Rockefeller’s benefactors were allied with allopathic drug companies and hated for-profit schools that couldn’t be controlled by the big-business, state-influenced foundations. Last of all, the AMA got an objective-appearing front in Carnegie.12

Not only was Abraham Flexner not even an allopathic physician; he was not a widely known authority on education,13 never mind medical education, as he had never even seen the inside of a medical school before joining Carnegie. His report was already effectively written, since it was essentially the AMA’s unpublished 1906 report on US medical schools. Furthermore, Flexner was accompanied on his inspection by the AMA’s N.P. Colwell to insure the inspection would arrive at the preordained conclusions. Flexner then spent time at the AMA’s Chicago headquarters preparing what portion of the final product was his actual work.14

Regardless of these scandalous circumstances, state medical boards and legislatures used the report as a basis for closing medical schools. Around the time of Flexner, there was a high of 166 medical schools; by the 1940s there were just 77—a 54 percent reduction.15 Most small rural schools were closed, and only two African American schools were allowed to remain open.16 By 1963, despite advances in technology and a huge growth in demand, one effect of the report was to keep the number of doctors per 100,000 people in the United States—146—at the same level it was at in 1910.17 Of the approximately 375,000 physicians in practice in 1977, only about 6,300 or 1.7 percent were African American.18

While physician incomes and prestige dramatically increased, so did the caregiving workload. Wolinsky and Brune (1994) report that doctors were firmly in the lower middle class at the time of the AMA’s founding and made about $600 per year. This rose to about $1,000 around 1900. After Flexner, incomes began to skyrocket such that a 1928 AMA study found average annual incomes had reached a whopping (for the time) $6,354.19 Even during the Great Depression, physicians earned four times what average workers did.20 A 2009 survey put family practice doctors (on the low end of the physician income range) at a median of $197,655 and spine surgeons (at the high end) at a median of $641,728.21 These figures are mind-boggling to ordinary Americans, even in good economic times. In addition, the cyclical unemployment that throws workers out of jobs in almost all other industries with the arrival of recessions or depressions became nonexistent among physicians after Flexner.

However, not even Flexner could repeal the laws of economics: the physician workload in certain areas became backbreaking to impossible, such that some physicians no longer accept new patients. Some primary-care physicians today are booked solid for at least two months, and unless you have some sort of connection to get in before that or pay for concierge care, your alternative for urgent care is the same as everyone else’s on a weekend: the emergency room, where you’ll wait for hours, or a walk-in where you’ll see one or two MD names posted on the building, but wait for hours for a nurse practitioner.

Hospitals

Of course it wouldn’t make sense to restrict physician services without restricting hospitals. For-profits were the first to go, and where they were not outright prohibited, they faced a number of regulatory burdens that nonprofits escaped—such as income and property taxes. Nonprofits received generous government subsidies, tax-deductible contributions, and local planning agencies working in their favor to keep for-profit competitors from expanding. This state-sponsored discrimination against for-profit hospitals took its toll: at the time of Flexner, almost 60 percent of all US hospitals were for-profit institutions. By 1968, only 11 percent were for-profit institutions, with about an 8 percent share of hospital admissions.22

Eliminating most for-profit medical schools and hospitals made sense for the AMA and the rest of organized mainstream medicine, since they were controlled by owners or shareholders who had the incentive to control costs in order to maximize profits. Nonprofits were free to pursue the political goals that organized mainstream medicine favored, especially the goal of a much more lengthy and costly education, which served as another barrier of entry to the profession. (Especially amusing was a 2004 article by two Dartmouth physicians arguing for maintaining restricted entry because of high costs.)23

The Rise of Health “Insurance”

In the early 1900s, prepaid health plans were created for the timber and mining workers of Oregon and Washington to help offset the inherent risks of those industries. Within a free-market, for-profit insurance system, claims were closely monitored by adjusters. Fees, procedures, and exceptionally long hospital stays were monitored and subject to challenge. A physicians’ group in Oregon that resented this type of scrutiny created a plan where procedures were reimbursed and fees paid with few questions asked. Plans with similar structures began dominating the market in other locations because of government-provided advantages.

By 1939 these loose cost containment plans began to be marketed under the Blue Shield name. That same year, Blue Cross was endorsed by the American Hospital Association. Already in existence for ten years, Blue Cross had begun as a hospital insurance plan for Dallas school teachers that allowed them to pay for up to three weeks of hospital care with low monthly payments.

After this, organized mainstream medicine waged an intense war on non-Blue plans. Goodman (1980) contends that some physicians lost hospital privileges and even their licenses for accepting non-Blue plans.24 The Blues also gained government-supplied advantages not available to non-Blue plans. In many states, they paid no or low premium taxes and sometimes no real estate taxes. They also weren’t required to maintain minimum benefit/premium ratios and could have no or low required reserves. With government advantages, the Blues steadily came to dominate the industry. By 1950, Blue Cross held 49 percent of the hospital insurance market, while Blue Shield held 52 percent of the market for standard medical insurance.25 They merged in 1982 and today cover one of every three Americans.26

Blues-created “insurance” was anything but true insurance.

• Hospitals were paid on a cost-plus basis. Insurers paid not a sum of prices charged to patients for services but artificial “costs” that bore no necessary relationship to the prices of services performed.
• Insurance of routine procedures. This converted insurance to prepaid consumption that encouraged overuse of services.
• Insurance premiums based on “community rating.” The word “community” meant that every person in a specific geographic area regardless of age, habits, occupation, race, or sex was charged the same premium. For example, the average 60-year-old incurs four times the medical expense of the average 25-year-old, but under community rating both pay the same premium (i.e., young people are overcharged and the elderly undercharged).
• A “pay-as-you-go” system. Unlike genuine catastrophic hospital insurance that placed premiums in growing reserves to pay claims, the new Blues’ “insurance” collected premiums that only covered expected costs over the following year. If a large group of policyholders became ill over several years, the premiums of all policyholders had to be raised to cover the increase in costs.

These traits spell cost-explosion disaster, so naturally they were incorporated into the federal government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs when they were created in the mid-1960s to address the problem of healthcare being unaffordable for the poor and elderly—a problem the state and federal governments created!

This only leaves the mystery of how health insurance became attached to employment. The answer is found two decades before Medicare and Medicaid. Wage and price controls the federal government enacted during World War II prevented large employers from competing for labor based on wage rates, so they competed based on the quality of benefits. The most effective benefit for luring labor to large employers was generous health insurance policies.

The decision by the federal government to allow large-employer benefits to be obtained tax-free while effectively taxing plans purchased by small businesses and the self-employed created a system where medical insurance became not only perversely tied to the size of a worker’s employer but to employment itself. The price of health insurance for many self-employed workers and small businesses became unaffordable.

Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs)

Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) were prepaid practices that began mainly on the US west coast in the early 1900s. Western Clinic in Tacoma (1910) and Ross-Loos in Los Angeles (1929) were among the earliest. (Ross-Loos eventually became part of Insurance Company of North America [INA], which merged into CIGNA in 1982.) Kaiser Permanente began with a clientele of shipyard workers during World War II. After the war, it had hospitals and physicians, but no more worker clientele, so it started marketing to the wider public and by the 1970s had more than 3 million enrollees in five states.27

Still, HMOs had limited appeal. By 1970, Kaiser was the only major HMO in the United States, with most of its enrollees forced to join through their labor unions.28

Much more about HMOs will be covered in a forthcoming review in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. The purpose here is to emphasize that, despite some assertions to the contrary, HMOs are anything but free market firms. The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 made federal grants and loans available to HMOs, removed certain state restrictions if HMOs became federally certified, and required employers with 25 or more employees who offered standard health insurance benefits to offer federally approved HMO plans.

“Obamacare,” or More Accurately, ConservativeRepublicanCare

When you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas…a lot of the ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, originated from the Heritage Foundation. (Barack Obama, NBC’s Today Show, March 30, 2010)

The latest chapter in US healthcare is one of the most surreal. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was signed into law by Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. Among many provisions, the act includes expanded Medicaid eligibility, prohibiting denials of coverage for preexisting conditions, and a requirement to purchase federally approved health insurance or pay a fine.

While the content of the act is summarized in myriad places, much more interesting are its conservative Republican origins. The Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler, the intellectual behind urban enterprise zones, in Senate testimony in 2003 proposed a plan for universal healthcare coverage.29 Here’s one surprising portion of the testimony that sounds like it was uttered by a European socialist:

In a civilized and rich country like the United States, it is reasonable for society to accept an obligation to ensure that all residents have affordable access to at least basic health care—much as we accept the same obligation to assure a reasonable level of housing, education and nutrition.

Keep in mind that Butler is the conservative Heritage’s current vice president of domestic and economic policy. No wonder Butler seems to have found a new admirer in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Butler again:

The obligations on individuals do not have to be a “hard” mandate, in the sense that failure to obtain coverage would be illegal. It could be a “soft” mandate, meaning that failure to obtain coverage could result in the loss of tax benefits and other government entitlements. In addition, if federal tax benefits or other assistance accompanied the requirement, states and localities could receive the value of the assistance forgone by the person failing to obtain coverage, in order to compensate providers who deliver services to the uninsured family.

Now “Obamacare” is certainly more than just a mandate, but the mandate is certainly what has conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, both of whom have connections to, if not sponsorship from, the Heritage Foundation, screaming bloody murder the most. There’s no doubt that these ideas influenced Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan in Massachusetts.

Romney subjected himself to a recent interview by Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that can only be described as a disaster.30 O’Reilly dwelled on the fact that outside tax dollars funded half of the plan, and Romney agreed, adding that the funding was approved by two conservative Republican Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretaries, Tommy Thompson and Mike Leavitt. In response to a question, Romney admitted that he didn’t know that emergency room costs in Massachusetts had increased 17 percent over the last two years. He repeatedly asserted that the plan solved a problem, but he couldn’t specify what it was since Massachusetts had the highest per capita costs both before the plan and after.

As far as other conservative Republicans go, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has repeatedly stated that he sees “some good things” in Obamacare, especially the expanded use of Medicaid.

Voters naïve enough to think they will get a complete repeal from the Republican Party appear to be in for a major disappointment. “Obamacare,” with its continuance of socialized costs for private gains in American medicine, was the treatment that the conservative Republican doctor had in mind for some time. The problem is that the Democrats were the first to implement it.

Dale Steinreich, Mises Institute

It seems that at every debate in which he has participated, whether in 2016 or 2020, Donald Trump gets peppered with the same, worn-out demand to “denounce white supremacists.”

But based on what?  

Whether it’s Chris Wallace, or Savannah Guthrie, or Jim Acosta, some other loudmouth reporter screaming the “denounce” demand as the President walks by, this demand, premised upon a lie, gets repeated ad nauseam by dishonest journalists. Their purpose is to create a false impression that Trump has done something, or said something in the past, that makes him a “racist.”

But nothing could be further from the truth.

The president’s record shows something quite the opposite of the insinuations shouted by the Trump-hating members of the liberal media.  In fact, the president’s record, over time, pictures a man with a huge heart and great compassion and love for the African-American community in the United States.https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=692

Where to start?

February 2, 1998: Donald Trump sat next to host Jesse Jackson at a Rainbow Coalition/Operation Push “Wall Street Project.” Honoring Trump, Jackson said:

 “When we opened this Wall Street project, and we talked about it, he gave us (Operation Rainbow) space at 40 Wall Street, which was to make a statement about our having a presence there. And beyond that, in terms of reaching out and being inclusive, he’s done that too. And created for many people a comfort zone, when I ran for the presidency, in 84 and 88. When many others thought it was laughable, he came to our business meeting here in New York.”

 What? Jesse Jackson praising Trump?

In 1996, per the Wall Street Journal, “Trump filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Palm Beach, alleging that the town discriminated against Trump’s property at Mar-a-Lago, in part because it is open to Jews and African-Americans.” Trump often complained about other Palm Beach social clubs discriminating, and in one suit alleged that “the town commission sought to protect the discriminatory policies (against Jews and Blacks) of many of the town’s other private social clubs.”

A white supremacist suing to protect blacks and Jews? 

As president, Trump pardoned Alice Williams, an African-American grandmother and first-time offender convicted on a nonviolent drug offense. Ms. Williams had received life in prison, under Biden’s 1994 crime bill, which disproportionately imprisoned black Americans for nonviolent offenses.

With the Congress under Democratic control from 2009-2011, and with the power to pass prison reform with full Democrat control of the Congress, Biden and Obama did nothing. They were happy to let decent, nonviolent black Americans like Ms. Williams simply rot their lives away in prison, with no hope for freedom. By their inaction, Biden and Obama showed that they did not care about Williams or other peaceful blacks in prison who deserved a second chance.

The same was true for Biden’s friends in the Democrat-controlled Congress in 2009-2011. But they weren’t interested in prison reform and could care less about helping blacks. They never have cared, and still don’t care. They only wanted the black vote.

In contrast to Obama-Biden, Trump led the charge for prison reform. Trump worked with Congress to pass the “First Step Act,” releasing many African nonviolent offenders held in the federal system.

Even Democrat Van Jones, the leftist, African-American CNN pundit and prison-reform advocate, effusively praised Trump, calling the First Step Act a “Christmas miracle.”

Jones said,

 ” … [e]very time people made a prediction that Donald Trump was going to sell us out, turn on us, wasn’t going to use political capital, he came harder… Donald Trump has got to get the credit. He stood up.”

Obama-Biden had their chance for prison reform but lifted not a finger. And Trump is the “white supremacist?”

Another Trump accomplishment ignored by Obama-Biden? Aid to black colleges.

Trump provided a substantial financial bailout to the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), again, something that Obama-Biden ignored.

In the Economist on September 19, 2020, Kentucky State University President, M. Christopher Brown said that President Trump “has been beating the drum on HBCUs as a cornerstone of his education platform from month one of his time in office.”

Chrichanni Watson, a minority student at Florida A&M University praised Trump in an op-ed for Breitbart. “That (HBCU support) directly impacts us, as HBCU students, and that’s something that cannot be said for the last administration… you’ve got to give the man some credit.”

Trump gives money and Wall Street real estate to Operation Rainbow, files a lawsuit to protect blacks and Jews in Florida, then as President, passes prison reform and bails out HBCUs, and he’s a racist? A “white supremacist?”

But let’s examine another part of the record:  Trump’s multiple “disavowing” statements, responding to questions about racism, relit without end from the leftist media.

• March 3, 2016, GOP Primary debate: Trump says, “I totally disavow the Ku Klux Klan. I totally disavow David Duke.”
• March 6, 2016, Face the Nation: “I reject David Duke, …. I rejected the Ku Klux Klan; from the time I was five years old.”
• August 15, 2017,  commenting on Charlottesville immediately after saying they were “very fine people on both sides,” referring to the legitimate debate about confederate statues, Trump added  “and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
• October 1, 2020, Fox News: “I condemn all white supremacists, I condemn the Proud Boys. I don’t know much about the Proud Boys, but I condemn that.”

Guthrie knew all this at the NBC Town Hall when she issued her “denounce” demand. But she didn’t care about the real facts, because she wanted to mislead voters. But Guthrie isn’t alone in this shameful practice. Fox’s Chris Wallace, who “moderated” the first presidential debate, also gas-lit the issue, demanding Trump “denounce” white supremacists.

When Trump denounced white supremacy, once again, in response to Guthrie’s gaslighting, here’s her response. “[i]t feels sometimes you’re hesitant to do so.”

“It feels?” That’s all you’ve got, Savannah? Feelings, not facts?

America deserves better than having gaslighting propagandists masquerading as journalists whose only aim is to help the Democrat party.

Meanwhile, even beyond his remarkable economic achievements, which led to the highest income level and lowest unemployment levels for black Americans in history, President Trump’s real record on progress in improving life for the African-American community makes him a giant among modern American presidents.

No one has done more, and no one can compare.

Facts matter.

Don Brown, a former U.S. Navy JAG officer, is the author of the book “Travesty of Justice: The Shocking Prosecution of Lieutenant Clint Lorance” and “CALL SIGN EXTORTION 17: The Shootdown of SEAL Team Six.”  He is one of four former JAG officers serving on the Lorance legal team. Lorance was pardoned by President Trump in November of 2019.  Brown is also a former military prosecutor, and a former Special Assistant United States Attorney.  He can be reached at donbrownbooks@gail.com and on twitter @donbrownbooks.

Image: Alisdare Hickson

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Treason doth never prosper; what is the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”– Sir John Harrington.
As Shakespeare would state in his play Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” like a fish that rots from head to tail, so do corrupt government systems rot from top to bottom.

This is a reference to the ruling system of Denmark and not just the foul murder that King Claudius has committed against his brother, Hamlet’s father. This is showcased in the play by reference to the economy of Denmark being in a state of shambles and that the Danish people are ready to revolt since they are on the verge of starving. King Claudius has only been king for a couple of months, and thus this state of affairs, though he inflames, did not originate with him.

Thus, during our time of great upheaval we should ask ourselves; what constitutes the persisting “ruling system,” of the United States, and where do the injustices in its state of affairs truly originate from?

The tragedy of Hamlet does not just lie in the action (or lack of action) of one man, but rather, it is contained in the choices and actions of all its main characters. Each character fails to see the longer term consequences of their own actions, which leads not only to their ruin but towards the ultimate collapse of Denmark. The characters are so caught up in their antagonism against one another that they fail to foresee that their very own destruction is intertwined with the other.

This is a reflection of a failing system.

A system that, though it believes itself to be fighting tooth and nail for its very survival, is only digging a deeper grave. A system that is incapable of generating any real solutions to the problems it faces.

The only way out of this is to address that very fact. The most important issue that will decide the fate of the country is what sort of changes are going to occur in the political and intelligence apparatus, such that a continuation of this tyrannical treason is finally stopped in its tracks and unable to sow further discord and chaos.

When the Matter of “Truth” Becomes a Threat to “National Security”

When the matter of truth is depicted as a possible threat to those that govern a country, you no longer have a democratic state. True, not everything can be disclosed to the public in real time, but we are sitting on a mountain of classified intelligence material that goes back more than 60 years.

How much time needs to elapse before the American people have the right to know the truth behind what their government agencies have been doing within their own country and abroad in the name of the “free” world?

From this recognition, the whole matter of declassifying material around the Russigate scandal in real time, and not highly redacted 50 years from now, is essential to addressing this festering putrefaction that has been bubbling over since the heinous assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22nd, 1963 and to which we are still waiting for full disclosure of classified papers 57 years later.

If the American people really want to finally see who is standing behind that curtain in Oz, now is the time.

These intelligence bureaus need to be reviewed for what kind of method and standard they are upholding in collecting their “intelligence,” that has supposedly justified the Mueller investigation and the never-ending Flynn investigation which have provided zero conclusive evidence to back up their allegations and which have massively infringed on the elected government’s ability to make the changes that they had committed to the American people.

Just like the Iraq and Libya war that was based off of cooked British intelligence (refer here and here), Russiagate appears to have also had its impetus from our friends over at MI6 as well. It is no surprise that Sir Richard Dearlove, who was then MI6 chief (1999-2004) and who oversaw and stood by the fraudulent intelligence on Iraq stating they bought uranium from Niger to build a nuclear weapon, is the very same Sir Richard Dearlove who promoted the Christopher Steele dossier as something “credible” to American intelligence.

In other words, the same man who is largely responsible for encouraging the illegal invasion of Iraq, which set off the never-ending wars on “terror,” that was justified with cooked British intelligence is also responsible for encouraging the Russian spook witch-hunt that has been occurring within the US for the last four years…over more cooked British intelligence, and the FBI and CIA are knowingly complicit in this.

Neither the American people, nor the world as a whole, can afford to suffer any more of the so-called “mistaken” intelligence bumblings. It is time that these intelligence bureaus are held accountable for at best criminal negligence, at worst, treason against their own country.

When Great Figures of Hope Are Targeted as Threats to “National Security”

The Family Jewels report, which was an investigation conducted by the CIA to investigate itself, was spurred by the Watergate Scandal and the CIA’s unconstitutional role in the whole affair. This investigation by the CIA reviewed its own conduct from the 1950s to mid-1970s.

The Family Jewels report was only partially declassified in June 25, 2007 (30 years later). Along with the release of the redacted report included a six-page summary with the following introduction:

“The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s.” [emphasis added]

Despite this acknowledged violation of its charter for 25 years, which is pretty much since its inception, the details of this information were kept classified for 30 years from not just the public but major governmental bodies and it was left to the agency itself to judge how best to “reform” its ways.

On Dec. 22, 1974, The New York Times published an article by Seymour Hersh exposing illegal operations conducted by the CIA, dubbed the “family jewels”. This included, covert action programs involving assassination attempts on foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments, which were reported for the first time. In addition, the article discussed efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US citizens.

Largely as a reaction to Hersh’s findings, the creation of the Church Committee was approved on January 27, 1975, by a vote of 82 to 4 in the Senate.

The Church Committee’s final report was published in April 1976, including seven volumes of Church Committee hearings in the Senate.

The Church Committee also published an interim report titled “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders”, which investigated alleged attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Zaire, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and Fidel Castro of Cuba. President Ford attempted to withhold the report from the public, but failed and reluctantly issued Executive Order 11905 after pressure from the public and the Church Committee.

Executive Order 11905 is a United States Presidential Executive Order signed on February 18, 1976, by a very reluctant President Ford in an attempt to reform the United States Intelligence Community, improve oversight on foreign intelligence activities, and ban political assassination.

The attempt is now regarded as a failure and was largely undone by President Reagan who issued Executive Order 12333, which extended the powers and responsibilities of US intelligence agencies and directed leaders of the US federal agencies to co-operate fully with the CIA, which was the original arrangement that CIA have full authority over clandestine operations (for more information on this refer to my papers here and here).

In addition, the Church Committee produced seven case studies on covert operations, but only the one on Chile was released, titled “Covert Action in Chile: 1963–1973“. The rest were kept secret at the CIA’s request.

Among the most shocking revelation of the Church Committee was the discovery of Operation SHAMROCK, in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA from 1945 to the early 1970s. The information gathered in this operation fed directly into the NSA Watch List. It was found out during the committee investigations that Senator Frank Church, who was overseeing the committee, was among the prominent names under surveillance on this NSA Watch List.

In 1975, the Church Committee decided to unilaterally declassify the particulars of this operation, against the objections of President Ford’s administration (refer here and here for more information).

The Church Committee’s reports constitute the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but over 50,000 pages were declassified under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22nd, 1963. Two days before his assassination a hate-Kennedy handbill (see picture) was circulated in Dallas accusing the president of treasonous activities including being a communist sympathizer.

On March 1st, 1967 New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested and charged Clay Shaw with conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy, with the help of David Ferrie and others. After a little over a one month long trial, Shaw was found not guilty on March 1st, 1969.

David Ferrie, a controller of Lee Harvey Oswald, was going to be a key witness and would have provided the ”smoking gun” evidence linking himself to Clay Shaw, was likely murdered on Feb. 22nd, 1967, less than a week after news of Garrison’s investigation broke in the media.

According to Garrison’s team findings, there was reason to believe that the CIA was involved in the orchestrations of President Kennedy’s assassination but access to classified material (which was nearly everything concerning the case) was necessary to continue such an investigation.

Though Garrison’s team lacked direct evidence, they were able to collect an immense amount of circumstantial evidence, which should have given the justification for access to classified material for further investigation. Instead the case was thrown out of court prematurely and is now treated as if it were a circus. [Refer to Garrison’s book for further details and Oliver Stone’s excellently researched movie JFK]

To date, it is the only trial to be brought forward concerning the assassination of President Kennedy.

The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was created in 1994 by the Congress enacted President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that all assassination-related material be housed in a single collection within the National Archives and Records Administration. In July 1998, a staff report released by the ARRB emphasized shortcomings in the original autopsy.

The ARRB wrote, “One of the many tragedies of the assassination of President Kennedy has been the incompleteness of the autopsy record and the suspicion caused by the shroud of secrecy that has surrounded the records that do exist.” [emphasis added]

The staff report for the Assassinations Records Review Board contended that brain photographs in the Kennedy records are not of Kennedy’s brain and show much less damage than Kennedy sustained.

The Washington Post reported:

Asked about the lunchroom episode [where he was overheard stating his notes of the autopsy went missing] in a May 1996 deposition, Finck said he did not remember it. He was also vague about how many notes he took during the autopsy but confirmed that ‘after the autopsy I also wrote notes’ and that he turned over whatever notes he had to the chief autopsy physician, James J. Humes.

It has long been known that Humes destroyed some original autopsy papers in a fireplace at his home on Nov. 24, 1963. He told the Warren Commission that what he burned was an original draft of his autopsy report. Under persistent questioning at a February 1996 deposition by the Review Board, Humes said he destroyed the draft and his ‘original notes.’

…Shown official autopsy photographs of Kennedy from the National Archives, [Saundra K.] Spencer [who worked in ‘the White House lab’] said they were not the ones she helped process and were printed on different paper. She said ‘there was no blood or opening cavities’ and the wounds were much smaller in the pictures… [than what she had] worked on…

John T. Stringer, who said he was the only one to take photos during the autopsy itself, said some of those were missing as well. He said that pictures he took of Kennedy’s brain at a ‘supplementary autopsy’ were different from the official set that was shown to him. [emphasis added]

This not only shows that evidence tampering did indeed occur, as even the Warren Commission acknowledges, but this puts into question the reliability of the entire assassination record of John F. Kennedy and to what degree evidence tampering and forgery have occurred in these records.

We would also do well to remember the numerous crimes that the FBI and CIA have been guilty of committing upon the American people such as during the period of McCarthyism. That the FBI’s COINTELPRO has been implicated in covert operations against members of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s. That FBI director J. Edgar Hoover made no secret of his hostility towards Dr. King and his ludicrous belief that King was influenced by communists, despite having no evidence to that effect.

King was assassinated on April 4th, 1968 and the civil rights movement took a major blow.

In November 1975, as the Church Committee was completing its investigation, the Department of Justice formed a Task Force to examine the FBI’s program of harassment directed at Dr. King, including the FBI’s security investigations of him, his assassination and the FBI conducted criminal investigation that followed. One aspect of the Task force study was to determine “whether any action taken in relation to Dr. King by the FBI before the assassination had, or might have had, an effect, direct or indirect, on that event.”

In its report, the Task Force criticized the FBI not for the opening, but for the protracted continuation of, its security investigation of Dr. King:

“We think the security investigation which included both physical and technical surveillance, should have been terminated … in 1963. That it was intensified and augmented by a COINTELPRO type campaign against Dr. King was unwarranted; the COINTELPRO type campaign, moreover, was ultra vires and very probably … felonious.”

In 1999, King Family v. Jowers civil suit in Memphis, Tennessee occurred, the full transcript of the trial can be found here. The jury found that Lloyd Jowers and unnamed others, including those in high ranking positions within government agencies, participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King.

During the four week trial, it was pointed out that the rifle allegedly used to assassinate King did not have a scope that was sighted, which meant you could not have hit the broad side of a barn with that rifle, thus it could not have been the murder weapon.

This was only remarked on over 30 years after King was murdered and showed the level of incompetence, or more likely, evidence tampering that was committed from previous investigations conducted by the FBI.

The case of JFK and MLK are among the highest profile assassination cases in American history, and it has been shown in both cases that evidence tampering has indeed occurred, despite being in the center of the public eye. What are we then to expect as the standard of investigation for all the other cases of malfeasance? What expectation can we have that justice is ever upheld?

With a history of such blatant misconduct, it is clear that the present demand to declassify the Russiagate papers now, and not 50 years later, needs to occur if we are to address the level of criminality that is going on behind the scenes and which will determine the fate of the country.

The American People Deserve to Know

Today we see the continuation of the over seven decades’ long ruse, the targeting of individuals as Russian agents without any basis, in order to remove them from the political arena. The present effort to declassify the Russiagate papers and exonerate Michael Flynn, so that he may freely speak of the intelligence he knows, is not a threat to national security, it is a threat to those who have committed treason against their country.

On Oct. 6th, 2020, President Trump ordered the declassification of the Russia Probe documents along with the classified documents on the findings concerning the Hillary Clinton emails. The release of these documents threatens to expose the entrapment of the Trump campaign by the Clinton campaign with help of the US intelligence agencies.

The Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe released some of these documents recently, including former CIA Director John Brennan’s handwritten notes for a meeting with former President Obama, the notes revealing that Hillary Clinton approved a plan to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

Trey Gowdy, who was Chair of the House Oversight Committee from June 13th, 2017 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has stated in an interview on Oct. 7th, 2020 that he has never seen these documents. Devin Nunes, who was Chair of the House Intelligence Committee from Jan. 3rd, 2015 – Jan. 3rd, 2019, has also said in a recent interview that he has never seen these documents.

And yet, both the FBI and CIA were aware and had access to these documents and sat on them for four years, withholding their release from several government-led investigations that were looking into the Russiagate scandal and who were requesting relevant material that was in the possession of both intelligence bureaus. Do these intelligence bureaus sound like they are working for the “national security” of the American people?

The truth must finally be brought to light, or the country will rot from its head to tail.

Cynthia Chung, Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.

The most remarkable thing about the War in Iraq was not the dollars wasted or hundreds of thousands of innocent people and US servicemen killed, but the fact that all of the journalists who promoted the lie to the American people were never held to account.

During the 2000s, a bipartisan cabal of overwhelmingly Jewish media personalities coordinated with American intelligence services to concoct the lie that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction to use against the United States.

The role of neoconservatives in this endeavor, primarily as Bush administration officials coordinating the war, is well known. What has been forgotten is the integral role “liberal” publications like the New York Times, Washington Postand others played in selling the WMD hoax.

The Times’ Judith Miller is credited with being one of the first to plant unsubstantiated WMD tales in popular consciousness, but other Jews — many of them also seen as unambiguously “liberal” — also played an active role in lying to drum up support for Bush’s war for Israel: Ezra Klein (currently of Vox), Jeffrey Goldberg (now editor of The Atlantic), and Jonathan Chait (star columnist at the New Yorker). That’s just a shortlist.

Amazingly, every one of these individuals has only grown in prestige and influence in the press in the aftermath. Even Iraq war sin chicken Judith Miller remained unapologetic in her 2015 rehabilitation tours. She has since 2016 been hired by conservative outlets like Fox News and City Journal, now dedicating her columns to promoting foreign election meddling claims.

The gravest problem now with our Jewish controlled media is that all of the Iraq war disinformation agents, not just Miller, are now amongst the loudest amplifiers of the US intelligence community’s latest baseless hysterics alleging that every act of low-level trolling, dissenting political opinion, or news report (including initially the Hunter Biden story) that they find inconvenient is an inorganic product of Russian, Chinese or Iranian “election meddling” or “disinformation.”

To what ends? To lower public confidence in liberal institutions? To cause division and polarization? To make people afraid to vote and even more afraid of the outcome? The intelligence community’s Chicken Littles are doing this on a much wider scale than any supposed foreign agent.

Earlier today, the Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe held an “important” national security conference besides American NKVD leader Christopher Wray claiming that crudely written emails sent by someone impersonating the pro-Trump group, Proud Boys, telling registered Democrats in Florida not to vote was in fact an act of “election interference” by Iran. Intelligence operatives at the announcement also mentioned that Russia was conspiring with them by harvesting US political registrations for ill-intended reasons. No evidence was provided for either allegation.

The claim is ridiculous because, first of all, Florida political registrations are publicly available and easily found online. Anyone can obtain them without engaging in cyber crime or hacking.

Secondly, unflinching hostility towards Iran and over the top loyalty to Israel first is an issue Joe Biden and Donald Trump both enthusiastically agree on.

Trump and Biden are equally bad for Iran in distinct ways. Biden supports escalating Washington’s military presence in Syria and placing pressure on Iraq to cut ties with Iran.

Trump on the other hand has for the last few years attempted to starve the Iranian people into submission with “maximum pressure” sanctions, but this has been paired with military retreats in geostrategic zones of the Middle East that Israel believes are important to maintain a foothold in.

The Iranians and Russians don’t have a dog in America’s 2020 election fight between Oreo and Hydrox. Seeing how only 67% of Democrats are excited to vote for Joe Biden, it looks like Biden’s uninspired and mailed-in candidacy is the foremost act of interference in his campaign.

Meanwhile, Iran has responded with fury typical of a falsely accused man. The nation’s diplomats have lodged an official complaint at the United Nations demanding the FBI and DNI stop making frivolous accusations of trying to intimidate voters in America. President Hassan Rouhani’s counter is that both candidates — who are just spokesmen for Washington’s permanent bureaucracy — are enemies of the Iranian nation.

Today’s press conference by Wray and Ratcliffe was more akin to the despots in 1984 switching back and forth between blaming Eurasia (Russia) and Eastasia (China and Iran) during Hate Week. It’s a moronic distraction from their moronic failures, corruption and the artificially induced climate of fear they have created in our homeland.

It’s an attempt to shoehorn into tonight’s debate the non-issues of “election interference” and “disinformation” that most of the American public, which is suffering from problems like hunger and unemployment, has tuned out.

From weapons of mass destruction to weapons of mass distraction, both personify the Jewish post-truth order.

Eric Striker, UNZ

America today confronts an unprecedented crisis. Our economy is collapsing, and the fake coronavirus “epidemic,” with its draconian restrictions, is destroying our liberty. What can we do? We’re fortunate that Dr. Ron Paul, our greatest living American, has provided a masterful diagnosis and offers us hope for a cure—if only we will listen.

The End of Unearned Opulence sums up and extends the message that Ron has given us in his many years of devoted service. In the book, he speaks of the “Faustian bargain” that Nixon imposed on the American people when he abandoned convertibility of the dollar into gold in 1971. He offered us fifty years of fake prosperity, but, inevitably, the bill from the devil came due. In telling us about this, Ron talks about the great German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe and how he modified the Faust legend. As I read this, I thought about Goethe finishing his great play Faust in the wisdom of his later years. Ron has in like fashion offered us his mature wisdom in this book.

The Revolution: A Mani…Ron PaulBest Price: $1.99Buy New $6.99(as of 11:00 EST – Details)What is Ron’s message for us? He says, “The opulence of great wealth has been exposed. The grave danger we now face can no longer be denied. What we are witnessing today is what happens to a society when counterfeit wealth dissipates….A Ponzi scheme mentality which has existed for decades allows for constant pyramiding of debt as part of our fiat monetary system. This policy is a predictable event and is instrumental in the creation of financial bubbles. Fractional reserve banking is a major contributing factor in creating money out of thin air, which inflates the debt bubble. Much of the malinvestment that results appears as wealth, but is in reality an illusion that disappears with the bursting of the bubble.”

The Austrian business cycle theory of Mises and Rothbard shows irrefutably that this policy won’t work. Why, then, has it been imposed on us? Ron gives us the answer. It benefits the crony capitalists—the opposite of genuine free market entrepreneurs—who are in bed with the government. He says, “The humanitarian claim of the welfare/warfare proponents is that their efforts have always been designed to care for the poor. The only problem is that as financial bubbles develop, the already wealthy receive most of the benefits….The huge bailouts in the 2008 recession saw the banks and mortgage companies benefitting while individuals lost their homes. With today’s lockdowns we see the large corporations avoiding the worst regulations and permitted to operate, while the mom and pop businesses go broke.”

Why do people allow that mad and evil policy to continue? Ron answers that the government deludes people with crusades against imaginary enemies, in order to gain more control over us. First and foremost, Ron is a critic of the warfare state. Ron is not a pacifist – an ancient charge against those who oppose constant war. He believes in the right to self-defense, but he does not believe in the initiation of violence, whether by private criminals or the state.

Still, this is the issue strategists would have had him avoid: just talk about the budget, talk about the greatness of America, talk about whatever everyone else was talking about, and you’ll be fine. And, they neglected to add, forgotten.

But had Ron shied away from this issue, there would have been no Ron Paul Revolution. It was his courageous refusal to back down from certain unspeakable truths about the American role in the world that caused Americans, and especially students, to sit up and take notice.End The FedRon PaulBest Price: $2.18Buy New $5.68(as of 09:55 EST – Details)

While still in his thirties, Murray Rothbard wrote privately that he was beginning to view war as “the key to the whole libertarian business.” Here is a key way Ron Paul has been faithful to the Rothbardian tradition. Time after time, in interviews and public appearances, Ron has brought the questions posed to him back to the central issues of war and foreign policy.

Worried about the budget? You can’t run an empire on the cheap. Concerned about TSA groping, or government eavesdropping, or cameras trained on you? These are the inevitable policies of a hegemon. In case after case, Ron pointed to the connection between an imperial policy abroad and abuses and outrages at home.

Inspired by Ron, libertarians began to challenge conservatives by reminding them that war, after all, is the ultimate government program. War has it all: propaganda, censorship, spying, crony contracts, money printing, skyrocketing spending, debt creation, central planning, hubris – everything we associate with the worst interventions into the economy.

But Ron Paul permanently changed the nature of the discussion on war and foreign policy. The word “nonintervention” rarely appeared in foreign policy discussions before 2007. Opposition to war was associated with anticapitalist causes. That is no longer the case.

Ron brilliantly extends his point to our present crises. The fake coronavirus menace has become the means by which the state criminals can distract the public from their disastrous economic policies and put us under their control. As Ron says,

The goal of the hysterical reaction to the coronavirus, from both local and national politicians, has been to distract from the much bigger crisis we face dealing with: the Fed’s responsibility for the economic collapse and its hunger for unlimited power. The fact that responding to the exaggerated coronavirus crisis made the economic downturn much worse was not a disappointment to those individuals who see economic turmoil as an opportunity to promote radical Marxist ideas.

Ron is of course a medical doctor, and he speaks with authority when he tells us that the health crisis is phony:Liberty Defined: 50 Es…Paul, RonBest Price: $1.27Buy New $6.79(as of 07:10 EST – Details)

The coronavirus epidemic is not the bubonic plague….It’s now recognized that much of the data reported on the severity and extent of the disease was seriously flawed and misleading. The reports inevitably made it appear that the epidemic was much worse than it was. To many observers, this was more than just careless mistakes but rather a concerted effort to spread fear and panic. This effort amazingly led to a delusional and extreme reaction by the media, politicians, public health fanatics, drug companies, national and global governments, supporters of socialism, fascism, and Marxism, all promoting the infamous lockdown.

As if this weren’t bad enough, the Marxist BLM and Antifa are rioting and looting while left-wing elements in government aid and abet their revolutionary tactics. “Antifa, BLM, and cultural Marxism’s concerted efforts to topple the remainder of the American Republic means, ‘they smell blood.’”

We thus face a dire situation, but Ron inspires us to change things. I had the rare honor of serving as Ron Paul’s congressional chief of staff and observed him in many proud moments in those days, and in his presidential campaigns. People today sometimes compare Ron Paul with Bernie Sanders. The comparison of Bernie to Ron goes like this: both launched insurgent, antiestablishment presidential campaigns while in their 70s, shook up their respective party establishments, and attracted large youth followings. But Bernie is no Ron.

Just on the surface: Bernie is a grump and difficult to work with; Ron is a kindhearted gentleman who always showed his appreciation for the people in his office.

More importantly, Ron urged his followers to read and learn. Countless high school and college students began reading dense and difficult treatises in economics and political philosophy, because Ron encouraged them to. Ron’s followers were curious enough to dig beneath the surface. Is the state really a benign institution that can costlessly provide us whatever we might demand? Or might there be moral, economic, and political factors standing in the way of these utopian dreams?

It’s not hard to cultivate a raving band of people demanding other people’s things, as Bernie Sanders does. Such appeals arouse the basest aspects of our nature and will always attract a crowd. It’s very hard, on the other hand, to build up an army of young people intellectually curious enough to read serious books and consider ideas that go beyond the conventional wisdom they learned in school about government and the market. It’s hard to build up a movement of people whose moral sense is developed enough to recognize that barking demands and enforcing them with the state’s gun is the behavior of a thug, not a civilized person. And it’s hard to persuade people of the counterintuitive idea that society runs better and individuals are more prosperous when no one is “in charge” at all.The Great Ron Paul: Th…Horton, ScottBest Price: $45.43Buy New $19.99(as of 06:24 EDT – Details)

Yet Ron accomplished all these things. Ron knew that the philosophy of liberty, when explained persuasively and with conviction, had a universal appeal. Every group he spoke to heard a slightly different presentation of that message, as Ron showed how their particular concerns were addressed most effectively by a policy of freedom.

Before leaving Washington and electoral politics, Ron delivered an extraordinary farewell address to Congress. The very fact that Ron could deliver a wise and learned address only goes to show he was no run-of-the-mill congressman, whose intellectual life is fulfilled by talking points and focus-group results. When Ron first spoke to the so-called values voters, for example, he was booed for saying he worshipped the Prince of Peace. The second time, when he again made a moral case for freedom, he brought the house down. But he did not pander to them nor to anyone else, and he never abandoned the philosophy that brought him into public life in the first place. No one had the sense that there was more than one Ron Paul, that he was trying to satisfy irreconcilable groups. There was one Ron Paul.

That a farewell address seemed so appropriate for Ron in the first place, while it would have been risible for virtually any of his colleagues, reflected Ron’s substance and seriousness as a thinker and as a man.

In that address Ron did many things. He surveyed his many years in Congress. He made a reckoning of the advance of the state and the retreat of liberty. He explained the moral ideas at the root of the libertarian message: nonaggression and freedom. He posed a series of questions about the US government and American society that are hardly ever asked, much less answered. And he gave his supporters advice on spreading the message in the coming years.

“Achieving legislative power and political influence,” he said,

should not be our goal. Most of the change, if it is to come, will not come from the politicians, but rather from individuals, family, friends, intellectual leaders, and our religious institutions. The solution can only come from rejecting the use of coercion, compulsion, government commands, and aggressive force, to mold social and economic behavior.

America 2020 the Survi…Stansberry ResearchBest Price: $26.98Buy New $31.86(as of 05:20 EDT – Details)I am convinced that historians, whether or not they agree with him, will continue to marvel at Ron Paul for many, many years to come. Libertarians a century from now will be in disbelief at the very notion that such a man actually served in the US Congress of our time.

One of the most thrilling memories of the 2012 campaign was the sight of those huge crowds that came out to see Ron. His competitors, meanwhile, couldn’t fill half a Starbucks. When I worked as Ron’s chief of staff in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I could only dream of such a day.

Now, what was it that attracted all these people to Ron Paul? He didn’t offer his followers a spot on the federal gravy train. He didn’t pass some phony bill. In fact, he didn’t do any of the things we associate with politicians. What his supporters love about him has nothing to do with politics at all.

Ron is the antipolitician. He tells unfashionable truths, educates rather than flatters the public, and stands up for principle even when the whole world is arrayed against him.

Of course, Ron Paul deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. In a just world, he would also win the Medal of Freedom, and all the honors for which a man in his position is eligible.

Young people are reading major treatises in economics and philosophy, because Ron Paul recommended them. Who else in public life can come close to saying that?

No politician is going to trick the public into embracing liberty, even if liberty were his true goal and not just a word he uses in fundraising letters. For liberty to advance, a critical mass of the public has to understand and support it. That doesn’t have to mean a majority, or even anywhere near it. But some baseline of support has to exist.

That is why Ron Paul’s work is so important and so lasting.

Ron concludes The End of Unearned Opulence with these challenging words: “Ideas whose times have come cannot be stopped by armies or political chicanery. Considering the intelligence and character of our enemies, it should never be said by us not resisting that we capitulated to their evil nonsense. We are indeed in unchartered waters surrounded by blood-thirsty sharks.” With Ron’s wisdom and courage, we can escape those waters.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

You see him night after night, in state after state, giving speeches to crowds in the tens of thousands. As a long-time professional speaker, I personally have been in and around other speakers all of my adult life. I have delivered more than 1060 presentations myself and I have witnessed at least that number live and in-person. Donald Trump, however, stands out like no one else.

When you watch the rallies (peaceful protests), what is most incredible about the president is his ability to stand in front of a crowd – sometimes two and three crowds on the same day – and keep them enthralled.

No Else Like Him

I’ve observed some of the most energetic speakers in the country, and few have the performance energy of Donald Trump. I also am personal friends with people who have been speaking for 20 to 30 years. The speakers have honed their craft, and still they are exhausted at the end of several days, especially if they have to fly to a location to deliver presentations.

When such individuals speak two days in a row, or three days in a row, by the time they return home, they need a day or so to ‘repair.’ It’s only natural. And yet, here is Donald Trump, 74, obviously overweight — and based on the body mass index, perhaps even obese — and his energy for speaking and lighting up a crowd is simply amazing. Whether or not you like him, there is no denying he can electrify a crowd.

It has been reported that Donald Trump rises quite early each morning, perhaps 4 a.m. or 5 a.m., and retires late each evening, at perhaps 10-12 p.m. Despite Trump’s extra girth, his energy for being our president and presiding over the affairs of state is simply extraordinary. Speaking 1,000 miles away the night before, Trump, nonetheless, puts in a full day of work back at the White House. Simply amazing.

Fit Bunch

President Obama was a lean individual, who played basketball, frequently played golf, and worked out in the White House Gym. Although he smoked during the early part of his administration, he always appeared to be at peak fitness. President George W Bush in particular, was quite fit. He jogged, played some golf, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, ate well, and worked out in the White House Gym. Yet, on a daily basis, neither man outworked President Trump.

All of the presidents before Trump, Bill Clinton, and heading backward — George Bush Sr., Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and so on — were vigorous men. All of them exercised in one way or another. Still, there is scant testimony that would dislodge the view that President Trump has outworked his predecessors of the last 50 years.

What is the source of Trump’s energy? I have witnessed the phenomenon of the superstar overachiever in business. Entrepreneurs, generally, who have started their own business and obviously work for themselves, have an abundance of energy that one does not often see among those who work in larger organizations and report to higher-ups.

Like An Entrepreneur

The entrepreneur rises early, starts to work in earnest, often stays late, and then comes in the next day and does it again. Why? When you’re working on your own venture, for whatever reason, you are largely immune to many of the energy depleters that the workaday stiffs experience.

What I can conclude, in observing President Trump’s extraordinary energy for the job, is that Trump has taken on the position as if he were an entrepreneur. America is his ‘company,’ and he’s doing his gut-level best to make it hum. He rises early, gets to work quickly, puts in a full day, stays late, and then gets up the next day and does it again.

There is no telling when we’ll encounter another president with this extraordinary level of energy for the job. So, appreciate it now. Admire what you’re seeing and recognize how unique it is. President Trump is a ‘doer’ for the ages, and time will only prove this to be so even if many people today can’t see it or won’t acknowledge it even when they do.

Jeff Davidson