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Senator Mark Warner: Jan. 6th Protesters Like 9/11 Terrorists!
Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
![]() ![]() Senator Mark Warner: Jan. 6th Protesters Like 9/11 Terrorists! Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
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![]() ![]() ![]() Whatever your feelings about former President Trump, there are reasons to be skeptical when government officials say it was necessary to raid his Florida home to recover classified documents that threatened national security. Like the former president, I was once accused by the government of mishandling classified information connected to my representation of a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. There was nothing in my client’s file that posed any danger to national security. My client was an innocent shopkeeper who was sold to the Americans back in 2003 when the US was paying bounties to corrupt Afghan warlords to turn in Al Qaeda or Taliban fighters, and then shipping those men 8,000 miles to our newly built prison camp in Cuba. The government decided to classify every document in the detainee files as “secret,” not to protect national security, but so it could lie with impunity and tell the American people that the prisoners at Gitmo were the “worst of the worst,” and “terrorists” captured on the battlefield. I never revealed any classified information. I got into trouble after writing an article criticizing the government’s practice of classifying certain evidence above the security clearance level of the detainee’s lawyer, making it impossible to challenge. Following a hearing at the Department of Justice, I was allowed to keep my security clearance long enough to see my client released back to his home and his family after 12 years of unjust imprisonment. I was never in serious legal jeopardy. But the experience opened my eyes to the ways that our government abuses its power to classify information as “secret” to protect its own officials from embarrassment or criminal exposure. Since 9/11, the people most aggressively pursued for mishandling classified materials are whistleblowers, not traitors. Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange revealed official crimes such as the murder of unarmed Iraqi civilians and journalists. Daniel Hale revealed that our drone assassination program regularly slaughters innocent civilians, contrary to public statements about surgical strikes. John Kiriakou revealed inconvenient facts about our torture program. Edward Snowden revealed an illegal mass surveillance program. All these truth-tellers were aggressively pursued under the Espionage Act. Assange may die in prison for telling the truth about the crimes of our leaders. While Trump may not fit the mold of a selfless whistleblower, there is still cause for concern. First, the official justifications for the raid on Mar-a-Lago are highly suspect. Initially we were told that Trump possessed “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons” that he might sell to a foreign government like Saudi Arabia. This shocking accusation has been quietly dropped. Now we are told that the government has “grave concern” that Trump might blow the cover on “clandestine human sources” described in the mainstream media as the “lifeblood” of our intelligence community. “Disclosure could jeopardize the life of the human source,” a former legal adviser to the National Security Council told the New York Times. This second justification — to protect sources — is also dubious. The DOJ has been in negotiation with Trump’s lawyers since he left the oval office with his boxes of documents. If the government was just concerned about protecting its informants, a deal could have easily been struck wherein government lawyers would go to Mar-a-Lago and redact the lines in the documents that identify informants without the need for a full-blown raid. The sudden concern in the mainstream media about protecting informants in order to take down Trump is short-sighted. The US has a long and sordid history of using corrupt, lying informants to launch disastrous policies like the Iraq War. In 2002-03, we were told by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell that the government had “solid intelligence” that the Iraqi regime possessed mobile production facilities for biological and chemical weapons. Had ordinary Americans then had access to the intelligence reports — leaked years later, after the disastrous war was in full flight — we would have learned that the “solid intelligence” about mobile weapons labs came from a single informant named “Curveball,” who had been described by his handlers as “crazy” and “probably a fabricator” and his intelligence as “highly suspect.” Had some brave patriot leaked these reports in real time, millions more Americans would have taken to the streets in 2002 to stop the planned invasion of Iraq. The media should be demanding more information from our government, especially about its use of informants, and not more secrecy. It is a basic rule of journalism that governments lie, and they often bribe (and sometimes torture) informants to support those lies. Many innocent men, including my client, were sent to Guantanamo Bay on the word of informants who were bribed with large cash rewards. If these informants are the lifeblood of our intelligence service, then that service should be defunded. A more plausible explanation for the Mar-a-Lago raid was provided by two high-level US intelligence officials who told Newsweek’s William M. Arkin that the true target of the raid was a personal “stash” of hidden documents that Justice Department officials feared Donald Trump might weaponize. This stash reportedly included material that Trump thought would exonerate him of any claims of Russian collusion in 2016 or any other election-related charges. “Trump was particularly interested in matters related to the Russia hoax and the wrong-doings of the deep state,” one former Trump official told Newsweek. This explanation is corroborated by former senior director for counterterrorism Kash Patel, who prepared a key House report that revealed “significant intelligence tradecraft failings” in connection with the Intelligence Community’s Assessment on Russian interference. But the CIA has blocked the release of Patel’s report by classifying it as “secret.” Read the rest here. Declassify the Documents From Trump’s Basement Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute ![]() ![]() ![]() Most Americans are unaware how close Russia and Ukraine came to ending the current war in April. Last March 27, Ukraine president Zelensky told his people "Our goal is obvious – peace and the restoration of normal life in our native state as soon as possible." He was hinting at what went unsaid: Ukraine and Russia, brokered by NATO member Turkey, reached a tentative fifteen-point peace plan to end the month old war. Key points were Russia withdraw from all Ukraine except for breakaway Donbas and Crimea. Ukraine would pass on future NATO membership, pledging neutrality between Russia and NATO. Donbas and Crimea would undergo political transition based on self-determination to be recognized by both combatants. Ukraine security would be guaranteed by neighboring countries but no foreign troops would enter Ukraine.
What’s not to like? For the US weapons makers, the end to a weapons manufacturing boondoggle. That $60 billion in free weaponry to Ukraine fighters has depleted our ammo dumps. For the US military, the end to a new perpetual war, albeit a proxy one, to relieve the boredom of peace. For the political class, the end to the new Cold War with Russia to weaken, marginalize, and keep them from economic integration with Europe. Meanwhile... So on April 9, Uncle Sam sent Boris Johnson, the latest version of America’s British Prime Minister poodle, to Kiev, to school Zelensky on who’s running the war. The UK, Johnson advised "was in it for the long run,” would not be party to any Ukraine, Russian agreement since the "collective West" saw a chance to "press" Russia and make the most of it. Johnson cannot be accused of subtlety. Two weeks later, the US sent Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Kyiv to reinforce Johnson’s warning and make clear the US and NATO were determined to use the war to "weaken" Russia. NATO ally Turkey has blamed the US and UK for sabotaging a promising chance to end the war early on. When it comes to provoking, preventing and prolonging senseless war, America always fails the test of peace. Getting back to the question posed: Why did the US torpedo the April Ukraine war negotiated settlement? Because we can. Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com (via ZeroHedge). Why Did US Torpedo The April Ukraine War Negotiated Settlement? Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute ![]() ![]() ![]() A Swiss billboard is making the rounds on social media depicting a young woman on the telephone. The caption reads, "Does the neighbor heat the apartment to over 19 degrees (66F)? Please inform us." While the Swiss government has dismissed the poster as a fake, the penalties Swiss citizens face for daring to warm their homes are very real. According to the Swiss newspaper Blick, those who violate the 66 degree heating limit could face as many as three years in prison! Prison time for heating your home? In the “free” world? How is it possible in 2022, when Switzerland and the rest of the political west have achieved the greatest economic success in history, that the European continent faces a winter like something out of the dark ages? Sanctions. While long promoted – often by those opposed to war – as a less destructive alternative to war, sanctions are in reality acts of war. And as we know with interventionism and war, the result is often unintended consequences and even blowback. European sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine earlier this year will likely go down in history as a prime example of how sanctions can result in unintended consequences. While seeking to punish Russia by cutting off gas and oil imports, European Union politicians forgot that Europe is completely dependent on Russian energy supplies and that the only people to suffer if those imports are shut down are the Europeans themselves. The Russians simply pivoted to the south and east and found plenty of new buyers in China, India, and elsewhere. In fact, Russia’s state-run Gazprom energy company has reported that its profits have increased by 100 percent in the first half of this year. Russia is getting rich while Europeans are facing a freezing winter and economic collapse. All because of the false belief that sanctions are a cost-free way to force other countries to do what you want them to do. What happens when the people see dumb government policies making energy bills skyrocket as the economy grounds to a halt? They become desperate and take to the streets in protest. This weekend thousands of Austrians took to the streets in a “Freedom Rally” to demand an end to sanctions and the opening of Nord Stream II, the gas pipeline on the verge of opening earlier this year. Last week an estimated 100,000 Czechs took to the streets of Prague to protest NATO and EU policy. In France, the “Yellow Vests” are back in the streets protesting the destruction of their economy in the name of “defeating” Russia in Ukraine. In Germany, Serbia, and elsewhere, protests are gearing up. Even the Washington Post was forced to admit that sanctions on Russia are not having the intended effect. In an article yesterday, the paper worries that sanctions are inflicting “collateral damage in Russia and beyond, potentially even hurting the very countries that impose them. Some even worried that the sanctions intended to deter and weaken Putin could end up emboldening and strengthening him.” This is all predictable. Sanctions kill. Sometimes they kill innocents in the country targeted for destruction and sometimes they kill innocents in the country imposing them. The solution, as always, is non-intervention. No sanctions, no "color revolutions," no meddling. It's really that simple. Europe Commits Suicide-by-Sanctions Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute ![]() ![]() ![]() What would you do if you were Merrick Garland? Would you prosecute Trump? Or would you walk away, concerned about accusations you and the FBI were playing politics? Step One appears easy, put off any decision until after the midterms. Trump is not a candidate, key issues driving the midterms (inflation, Ukraine, Roe) are not his issues and though Trump is actively stumping for many candidates, initiating any prosecution before the midterms is just too obvious. Nothing else about Mar-a-Lago has had an urgency to it (months passed from the initial voluntary turnover of documents and the forced search) and announcing an indictment now would be a terrible opening move. So if you’re Garland, you have some time. On the other hand waiting until after the midterms can be dangerous if as expected the Republicans do well and take both the House and the Senate. Even with slim majorities Republicans are expected to initiate their own hearings, into Hunter Biden’s laptop and how the FBI played politics with that ahead of the 2020 election. Holding off an indictment until that is underway risks making your case look like retaliation for their case. That’s a bad look for a Department of Justice which claims it is not playing politics. It would look even worse if the Republicans try and cut you off, opening some sort of hearings into the Mar-a-Lago search prior to an indictment. Nope, if you’re Merrick Garland you are caught between a rock and a hard place. But there is a bigger question: if you are Garland and you indict Trump, can you win? Candidate Trump is already earning a lot of partisan points claiming he is the victim of banana republic politics, and his indictment ahead of 2024 (it matters zero if he has formally announced or not, he is running of course) will allow him to claim he was right all along. An indictment will allow Trump to fire both barrels, one aimed at Garland and the other at the FBI and these, coupled with the dirty tricks a Republican investigation into the FBI and Russiagate will expose will make Trump look very right. He was the victim of partisan use of justice, and the FBI did try to influence both the 2016 election (with Russiagate) and the 2020 (by deep-sixing Hunter Biden’s laptop claiming falsely it was Russian misinformation) and now is taking a swing at 2024 with the Mar-a-Lago documents. If public opinion moves further to Trump’s side, Merrick Garland through his indictment just reelected Trump to the White House as a sympathy candidate. The spooks call that blowback, and it is a real threat in this instance. Any action against Trump must preserve what is left of faith in the rule of law applied without fear or favor, or risk civil disenfranchisement if not outright civil unrest. Garland will have to address the most obvious precedent case involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who maintained an unsecured private email server which processed classified material. Her server held e-mail chains classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level which included the names of CIA and NSA employees. The FBI found classified intelligence improperlystored on Clinton’s server “was compromised by unauthorized individuals, to include foreign governments or intelligence services, via cyber intrusion or other means.” Clinton and her team destroyed tens of thousands of emails, potential evidence, as well as physical phones and Blackberries which potentially held evidence. She operated the server out of her home kitchen despite the presence of the Secret Service on property who failed to report it. Her purpose in doing all this appeared to have been avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests during her tenure as SecState, and maintaining control over what records became part of the historical archive post-tenure. Clinton seems to have violated all three statues Trump was searched under. If the FBI is going to take a similar fact sets and ignore one while aggressively pursuing another, it risks being seen as partial and political. Any further action against Trump and certainly any prosecution of him must address why Hillary was not searched and prosecuted herself. Fair is fair, and after all nobody is above the law. The other fear holding Garland back would be that of losing the case outright in court. Classified documents are typically dealt with either via administrative penalties (an officer is sent home for a few days without pay) or as part of some much larger espionage case where the documents were removed illegally as part of the subject spying for a foreign country. Rarely is a case brought all the way to court for simple possession. Most of the laws Trump may have broken require some sort of intent to harm the United States. In other words, Trump would have had to have taken the documents not just for ego or his library or as some uber-souveniers but with the specific intent to commit harm against the United States. Garland certainly does not have that. Other factors which typically play into documents cases are also not in Garland’s favor. Despite not being kept in line with General Services Administration standards, the documents appear to have been locked away securely at Mar-a-Lago, the premises itself guarded by the Secret Service. Trump has already turned over surveillance video of the documents storage location, which presumably does not show foreign agents wandering in and out of frame. It is much harder to prosecute a case when no actual harm was shown done to national security. Another factor in documents cases involves the content of the documents themselves. The uninformed press has made much of the classification markings, but Garland will need to show the actual content of the docs was damaging to the U.S., and that Trump knew that. Overclassification will play a role, as will the age and importance of the information itself; after all, it is that information which is classified, not the piece of paper itself marked Secret. Garland will know Trump will fight him page by page, meaning much of the classified will be exposed in court and/or the trial will move to classified sessions to shield the information but feed the conspiracy machine. One can hear Trump arguing his right to a public trial being taken away. Hyperbole aside, the critical question returns to whether or not prosecutors could prove specific intent on Trump’s part for the more serious charges. Proving a state of guilty mind — mens rea — would be the crux of any actual prosecution based on the Mar-a-Lago documents. What was Trump thinking at the time, in other words, did he have specific intent to injure the United States or to obstruct some investigation he would have had to have known about? Without knowing the exact nature of the documents this is a tough prediction but even with the documents on display in front of us proving to a court’s satisfaction what Trump wanted to do by keeping the documents would require coworkers and colleagues to testify to what Trump himself had said at the time, and that is unlikely to happen. It is thus unlikely based on what we know at present that Trump would go to jail for any of this. Take for example the charges of tax evasion now levied again the Trump Organization (i.e., not Trump personally and not part of the Mar-a-Lago case.) Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, as part of a plea deal, will testify against the Organization but not Trump himself as to why the Organization paid certain compensation in the form of things like school tuitions, cars, and the like, all outside the tax system. It will be a bad day for the Organization but loyal to the end, Weisselberg will not testify as to his boss’ mens rea. It is equally unclear who would be both competent and willing to do so against President of the United States Trump. Blue Check enthusiasm aside, he won’t go to jail over this. The final questions are probably the most important: DOJ knows what the law says. If knowing the chances of a serious conviction are slight, why would the Justice Department take the Mar-a-Lago case to court? Then again, if knowing the chances for a serious conviction are slight, why would the FBI execute a high-profile search warrant in the first place? To gather evidence unlikely ever to be used? No one is above the law, but that includes politics not trumping clean jurisprudence as well. And then what? If Garland successfully navigates the politics, if he proves his case in court, and if he secures some sort of conviction against Trump which withstands the inevitable appeal, then what? Trump’s Mar-a-Lago “crimes” are relatively minor. Could Garland call Trump having to do some sort of community service during the 2024 campaign a win? Pay a fine? It seems petty. It sure seems Trump wins politically big-picture whether he wins or loses at Mar-a-Lago. If you were Merrick Garland, what would you do? Reprinted with permission from WeMeantWell.com. Prosecuting Trump Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute ![]() ![]() ![]() The latest empty cliché that one hears out of the mouth of Christians is “Pray for Ukraine.” But do Christians who utter this pious platitude even know what they mean when they say it? I suppose that it is supposed to mean that we should pray for the people of Ukraine who are suffering because of the unjustified Russian invasion of their country. If only things were that simple. Some observations are in order. This appeal is based on the overly simplistic yet false and evil notion of Ukraine, good; Russia, bad. This trite expression in the form of a prayer request is virtue signaling at its worst. I think we are at the point now where someone saying “Pray for Ukraine” is the verbal equivalent of someone wearing a face mask. If U.S. soldiers are heroes for following their government’s orders, then why aren’t Russian soldiers heroes for doing the same? The Ukrainian nationalists (and the Christians who hang on their every word) who compare Putin to Hitler are gravely insulting Jews. How come I have never heard any Christians say that we should pray for the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine who were shelled for the past eight years by the Ukrainian military? If we should pray for the people of Ukraine, then what about the Uyghurs in northwest China who have been persecuted by the Chinese government for years? And what about the Chinese people? Their government keeps imposing strict lockdowns because of its ridiculous zero-Covid policy. Where were these Christians when the U.S. military was killing Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians by the millions during the Vietnam War? Why are these Christians silent about Cubans suffering because of the U.S. embargo against Cuba? Would Christians be saying “Pray for Yemen” if the United States was not supporting Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen.? And what about the people of Saudi Arabia suffering under the brutal rule of the Mohammed bin Salman regime? Shouldn’t we pray for them? Oh, I forgot, they are Muslims. How many of these Christians expressed any concern about all the widows and orphans that the U.S. military made over a twenty-year period in Afghanistan? How many of these Christians offered up prayers for the people of Iraq—a country that never attacked the United States—when hundreds of thousands of them were injured, maimed, or killed during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and, before this, as a consequence of the brutal sanctions that the United States imposed on the Iraqi people? Why should we take any of these Christians seriously when they say “Pray for Ukraine”? What Ron Paul said back in 2014 about the Russian annexation of Crimea is still just as true today: “Why does the U.S. care which flag will be hoisted on a small piece of land thousands of miles away?” So, yes, pray for Ukraine. But pray for the civilians of the world who are on the receiving end of bombs and bullets from any army. And pray especially for the civilians of the world who are on the receiving end of weapons made in the good ole USA by merchants of death like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. Reprinted with permission from LewRockwell.com. Pray for Ukraine? Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute ![]() ![]() ![]() Delivered to the 2022 Ron Paul Scholars Seminar, Sept. 2nd 2022, Washington, DC. Allow me to say at the outset how pleased and not a little surprised I was to be invited to address this seminar for the second year in a row. Pleased, because I can’t think of a better place than the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar to encounter bright young people who can afford even the most cranky old Boomer like myself grounds for hope. Surprised, because as I recall following last year’s presentation the organizers were constrained to confiscate your predecessors’ belts and shoelaces and place them under 24-hour protective watch. As I asked them last year: “How do I tell you that, in the layman’s terms, your lives will probably suck? At least in the near future. But there is hope. I will return to that.” My talk last year was called “It’s Later than you Think,” and of course now it’s even later still. On the off-chance that none of you has memorized that text, I will give a brief summary of what I said then – which as I noted even then ended with a dim glimmer of sunlight – and then review how the past year has, I believe, confirmed my assessment then and, somewhat paradoxically, made that glimmer shine just a bit brighter. All in all, I think we have grounds to be cautiously pessimistic. In brief, my thesis last year was that the gathering clouds were not just those of a political crisis (presumably one that would be amenable to change through political means – “Vote harder next time! Vote harder, boy!") or just an economic and financial crisis (is two quarters of negative GDP growth by definition really a recession, or not – ah, the rollercoaster of the business cycle!). No, it was something more fundamental. Rather, the America we oldsters had grown up with, and which had been declining for decades, had fundamentally ceased to exist. Indeed, what we’re seeing here is something of world historic proportions that in some essential way breaks with anything seen in the lifetime of anyone now living. Sure, back in my day – ‘– there was corruption, yes there was influence-peddling, yes there was contempt for truth and common decency. But these were debasements within what could still be argued was a structure built on a Constitution and the rule of law. That is, somethingexisted, though as with all human affairs, it was only as good as the people operating within that something. One could still, with a straight face, contend that if the good guys win, if wise policies prevail – audit the Fed, cut taxes, stop our interventionist foreign policy, ban abortion, legalize dope, whatever you want – there was enough integrity to the something to allow for such improvements. We were still living in a normal moral universe, where virtue and vice contended for dominance. We were still living in America.A watershed was passed with Covid and the measures – the lockdowns, the masks, social distancing and monitoring, the clot shot, censorship of dissent – supposedly intended to deal with a virus, accomplishing within a few short months what decades of climate hysteria could not, summed up under the moniker “the Great Reset” and its ubiquitous slogan “Build Back Better.”’ ‘Taken together [what we have been seeing has] all the appearance of a controlled demolition of all established human interactions in anticipation of their replacement by something we are assured by our betters will be an improvement. The contours of the “new normal” in the post-American America hurtling in our direction have already become so familiar as to need little elaboration: infringement on traditional liberties based on “keeping us safe”; “cancel culture”; blurring of the lines between Big Government, Big Finance, Big Pharma, Big Data, etc., amounting to corporate state capture; and, not directly based on supposed anti-virus measures but closely tracking with them, joint government and corporate promulgation of socially destructive, historically counterfeit ideologies (“intersectionality,” LGBTQI+, feminism, multiculturalism, “critical race theory,”) … with principal targeting of children subject to sexualization and predation by those expressing what were once quaintly known as abnormal appetites and identities.Now. there’s where I would have left it last year. We are a year further into a very dark tunnel, and there’s nothing (in my very fallible opinion) anyone can do to stop an accelerating rush into the abyss. But we can talk about probabilities. A year ago, if I had to guess, I’d have said chances of any kind of happy ending for this country or the world would be very slim indeed. Limitless tyranny at home, endless war abroad. George Orwell’s boot stomping on a human face forever, but dragged out in rainbow glitter and a feather boa while carving up your kids’ sexual parts. America: sliding quietly under the Woke waves never to be seen again while imposing the same poison on the rest of the world. There is no Transatlanticism without transgenderism! As Craig Murray memorably observed regarding the United Kingdom and the collapse of Boris “BoJo the Clown” Johnson’s Prime Ministership, we could anticipate that America would draw to a close not with a bang … but with a fart (albeit one generating hurricane force winds). My assessment radically changed on February 24, 2022, when Russia began what it called its Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Without going into all the details of the war itself and the reasons for it, I believe that the reverberations of that war are having and will continue to have serious consequences for the smooth fade into oblivion that had been our most likely doom. In a nutshell, the entire globalist program – Build Back Better, plans for Biden’s renewable Gangrene New Deal energy economy, “you vill eat ze bugz,” more “genders” than Heinz varieties – may come crashing down along with its premier instrumentalities, the evil twins NATO and the European Union. Can it be that there’s a “soft landing” to this second cold war, that the US-led so-called “rules-based international order” might dissolve as (relatively) peacefully as did the Warsaw Pact and the USSR? Do miracles on that scale happen twice in one lifetime? Put another way: what we’re seeing now is in fact World War III between the Global American Empire (the G.A.E., or “the GAE”) and a loose set of countries led by Russia and China: Eurasia. Only a small portion of that war is military, confined for the moment to Ukraine but with the danger of spread. There is also the potential for an outbreak in the western Pacific over Taiwan., not to mention other flashpoints like Iran and North Korea. Most of this global war, though, is financial and economic, and of course in the informational and propaganda sphere. Bottom line: I see no way for the GAE to win, nor any way for its leaders to accept defeat. The risk of an accidental escalation to a nuclear conflagration exists, as does the possibility (albeit a slim one, I hope) of a so-called “Samson Option,” deliberately bringing down the temple crushing all inside. Well, if the worst happens, we won’t have to worry because we’ll all be dead. If it doesn’t, what comes next won’t be pretty though: a combination inflation/deflation in the form of inflation of daily living needs (food, fuel), deflation of stored wealth (stocks, bonds, crypto, real estate, maybe metals, durable goods and discretional purchases that people can't afford because all their money goes for food, gas, and keeping lights on). For the short term, cash will be king but eventually – maybe in a year, two years? – the US dollar will go down the tube as well. At this juncture it’s hard to see what could replace it, but it sure won't be the Euro or the Pound. In our post-industrial debt-based virtual economy we will be painfully educated as to how much our ability to buy underpriced imported stuff at Walmart and on Amazon rests on dollar “seigniorage,” which in turn rests on global perceptions of American military superiority. As the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman put it, “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.” Just as the USSR's international standing was inextricably linked to its internal stability, the visible failure of the empire will feed a crisis of legitimacy at home in the US and in our vassal states. The chickens of the US establishment’s post-Cold War misguided and needless ideological quest for world domination, waged with all the Manichaean messianic zeal of 1920s Bolsheviks, are coming home to roost. It is a house built on sand: “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.” The real question I don't know the answer to is when we cease from a downward sloping glidepath to a sudden plunge. It will certainly hit Europe first. Indeed, that’s already happening, with smelly Germans being told not to shower but wash with a wet rag and to gather firewood for the coming winter. There will be civil disorders and toppling of governments by non-constitutional means, as we already saw some time ago in Sri Lanka. But unlike the AstroTurf color revolutions the US and our satellites have specialized in for decades these will be true grassroots outpourings of desperation. Some countries like France and Italy have a real proclivity for that sort of thing, others like Germany not so much. What about the US? Maybe there’s too much Anglo-Saxon law-abidingness – and for the time being, too much danger of harsh repression à la the January 6 "insurrection," crushing of alt-lite groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, politization of law enforcement, and so forth. Things would only get "kinetic" here when cities dissolve into chaos and people outside rural areas starting pondering who gets to eat today and who doesn’t, but I don't know how soon that might happen. How bad will it get? Two of my former Senate colleagues, now at a major Washington think tank, on a recent podcast urged us to remember (specifically, in the aftermath of the Dobbsruling overturning Roe v. Wade) that “we're fellow Americans, we're fellow citizens. We are not enemies. … [to] quote Lincoln …, he says in the first inaugural address, ‘We are not enemies, but friends. We must never be enemies.’ It’s a nice thought, a pious wish. But is it true? Was it true in Lincoln’s time? Bear in mind that both Northerners and Southerners – ‘In 1861 … worshipped the same God, read the same Bible, honored the same Founding Fathers, claimed fidelity to the same Constitution. In today’s America, like in the rest of the Woke Woke West, we can’t even agree on our pronouns [or on what a “woman” is. We are moral aliens to one another. We are not “fellow” anythings except in the most superficial, formal sense.]. … The term “cold” civil war, a war that might possibly turn “hot,” has become a commonplace in American discourse. That should not come as a surprise when we remember how the Red Gnostic seizure of power in Russia [a century ago], to which many draw parallels to America today, didn’t triumph without bloodily overcoming ferocious popular resistance. The rising tide of Rainbow Gnosticism in America now, whether it succeeds or fails, may turn out to be just as destructive. Let’s remember too that, if you credit the William Strauss and Neil Howe “Fourth Turning” cycle, we are only about halfway through a crisis that will totally transform this country, assuming there’s a country left at all by the end of it.’There’s also the ethnic factor, to which I alluded earlier. In addition to their terminal (and it may be terminal) law-abidingness, Americans have a poor understanding of their identity as an ethnos. If you ask the average American who doesn’t belong to a “hyphenated” identity like African, Asian, Latinx, etc., or specifically Polish, Italian, Jewish, Greek, Cuban, Haitian, Japanese, whatever “What makes you an American, what is an American? Who and what are you?” – he or she would have no idea what you were talking about. “Uhhh…. muh ‘Constitution’ … muh ‘democracy’?” “Uhhh… [looking at his arm] … I guess, uh, I’m ‘white’?” “Uhhh … my grandfather was Dutch I think… or was that Danish?” “Uhhh … I think my mom’s Presbyterian…?” When I was a kid more than half a century ago, from a family of relatively recent immigrant origin, if you told the average non-hyphenated American that Americans weren’t a nation, he’d have punched you in the nose, and deservedly so. Now, after decades of multi-culti propaganda based two great lies – one: that we’re a “civic” nation, not an “ethnic” one, and two: that America is a “nation of immigrants” – we don’t know who or what the hell we are. This is one reason, as the late Samuel Huntington put it, our relationship with the world is so messed up, dominated by foreign and corporate lobbies: if you don’t know who you are, how can you tell what your interests are? Mind you, I’m not saying the Constitution is unimportant, but as I mentioned, it’s an epiphenomenon, not the foundation but an expression of something more fundamental: the people who created it who were, well, Englishmen who’d fought for their rights as Englishmen and separated from the Crown as a consequence. Hint: that’s why we’re speaking English. That’s why we have the Constitution we do. That’s the identity to which those of us not of Anglo-Saxon stock assimilated to, before assimilation became a hate concept. Observed John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court: “Providence has been pleased to give us this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” Writes Huntington: “Subsequent generations of immigrants were assimilated into the culture of the founding settlers and modified it, but did not change it fundamentally. … Would America be the America it is [or was?] today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.” Theethnos makes the constitution, not the other way around. Point of illustration: We’ve only had two constitutions, the first one, the Articles of Confederation, was only in effect for a few years. How many constitutions has France had? Hint: the current setup since 1958 is called the Fifth Republic. Plus lots of monarchy, a couple of Napoleons. Yet France remained France because there are these people, an ethnos, called “Frenchmen,” a unique historical mélange of Germanic Franks (hence the name) and Romanized Celtic Gauls. Sure, since even before the recent influx of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, there are other ethnoi indigenous to France: Basques, Bretons, German-speaking Alsatians (as Bonaparte – himself a Corsican, really a kind of Italian – once said, “Let the Alsatians speak German so long as their swords swing French”). But none of these are the “state-building nation” as it’s known in political theory. We don’t call that country “Alsatia,” “Corsicania,” or “Bretonia.” France exists because of French people specifically, not these others. My point here isn’t really about France, which has its own elite pathologies. (The ridiculous current president, “Li’l Macro” as I like to call him, once said there is no such think as “French culture,” notwithstanding the millions of people around the world who both know it and appreciate it.) The point is that states and their constitutional orders depend on the self-awareness of the people who created that state and their desire for a sovereign, independent political expression – even one along the lines of a limited, minimalist state most of us would prefer. To a greater or lesser extent, that self-awareness, which is usually though not always ethnic, is still to be found in some European countries (especially, and paradoxically, in the former communist countries) and even more so outside of Europe. In America that self-awareness is more questionable. Put another way, many Frenchmen still know they are French, Russians Russian, Poles Polish, Japanese Japanese, Yorubas Yoruba, and so forth. Americans – eh, it’s at best an open question. In my opinion, that doesn’t bode well for our long-term future as we enter a period of existential turmoil. We also, in the short term, need to take into account a looming regime crisis: Uncle Joe Biden is incompetent and everybody sees he needs to go but there's nobody capable who will replace him – certainly not that cackling moron set to take his desk in the Oval Office. Meanwhile, the GOP, with very few exceptions, isn't much better. Also – spoiler alert! – watch for election fraud in November, for which we’re already seeing the media spin, and which could itself be a trigger. In any case, we ain’t gonna vote our way out of this. As someone on Twitter put it, “America today is like a corpse being consumed by maggots. Liberals are rooting for the maggots. Conservatives are rooting for the corpse.” All in all, it’s a real Shinola Storm in which we’ll be faced with a lot of what are called “known unknowns” – information deficits of which we are aware – plus no doubt a bunch of “unknown unknowns”: you don’t know what you don’t know; too many variables, not enough constants. I do take some comfort in the hope that whatever happens, it very well may take down the globalist Davos Great Reset crowd. What comes next, I don’t know. Once the GAE Sauron tanks, will it be replaced by a Eurasian Saruman – or will there be a genuine opportunity for global pluralism and, domestically, revival of some kind of healthy order reflecting our country’s best traditions and values? Maybe I’m a giddy optimist after all…. I do hope that once the ordeal is over, some sort of decent America can arise, perhaps only in part of what used to be the United States. Anticipating something comparable to what the Soviet Union went through in the 1990s, I reckon the whole thing should be over by about 2027, hopefully sooner but by 2030 at the latest. But first we have to get through it. Which brings us back to my parting admonitions to your predecessors last year, which I see no need to change: ‘I think your ability to impact the “big picture” regarding any of this is slim to none. Even our ability to discern the signs of the times in an era of pervasive Gnostic deceit abetted by technologies unimaginable just a few years ago is limited. It’s Even Later than You Thought Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute ![]() ![]() ![]() If the non-stop dancing duo Biden and Blinken is seriously seeking to validate its view that the United States of America is and should be the world’s hegemon, they are going about it the wrong way. They should be taking their lead from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky by turning their press conferences into entertainments with dancing bears and scantily clad chanteuses pirouetting and singing across the stage. They would benefit from recalling how Zelensky rose to power through his performances of comedy routines in which he would be prancing around on high heels with three colleagues who appeared to be mocking what might be construed as gay mannerisms to amuse the audience? Or perhaps the rather more outreperformance where Zelensky would play a piano with his penis? If one can remember all that it would most definitely help to understand the foreign policy that is somehow playing out in Ukraine, where Zelensky has transitioned into a serious, unsmiling guy who is adept at solicitations for money and weapons. His pleading has become a shameless full-time endeavor as he now appears on thousands of screens via video link all over the world, saturating the airwaves and dropping in on both major and minor gatherings. Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone recalls how he has appeared on “the Grammy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, the World Economic Forum and probably the Bilderberg group as well, [while also] having meetings with celebrities like Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, and Bono and the Edge from U2. It’s as busy a PR tour as he could possibly have without having a discussion about the strategic importance of long-range artillery with Elmo on Sesame Street.” Elmo might in fact be coming next as NPR is clearly one of Zelensky’s biggest fans. One also suspects that before the Ukrainian President is finished, he will be addressing a rotary meeting in Sioux Falls South Dakota. And Zelensky has even turned begging into a family affair, with his wife Olena welcomed by the President and First Lady at the White House while also going on to address the US Congress, entreating America’s Solons to provide plenty of cash and things that go bang to thwart the ambitions of one Vladimir Putin. As she put it, she is concerned lest her son and daughter be unable to return to school and university in the fall. She then observed that “We would have answers if we had air defense systems” which would enable a “joint victory in the name of life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.” Indeed, a high point of the recent antics has to be the unique cover photo shoot by Vogue magazine, in which the lovey-dovey couple Volodymyr and Olena grin and hug before the cameras. Zelensky declares his undying affection . Vogue aside, the entire Zelensky performance, choreographed as it is by neocons inside and outside the administration, is perfectly color and image coordinated. Zelensky has an endless supply of olive drab t-shirts and he entertains in Kiev a steady stream of statesmen and even heads of government from Europe and the US, including the US Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has appointed a seasoned Justice Department “Special Investigations”, i.e. “Nazi hunter” investigator, named Eli Rosenbaum to look into possible Russian war crimes. The Garland/Rosenbaum dynamic duo will not be looking into possible Ukrainian war crimes like the recent assassination of Darya Dugina in Moscow as it is not part of the mandate from Biden/Blinken and besides which the Ukes are America’s friends, just like the Israelis who are such great friends that they also get a pass on whatever they inflict on the Palestinians, including shooting or blowing up civilians. Indeed, Zelensky’s White House approved message is always the same: “give us money and guns and we will defeat the Russkies.” So Honest Joe Biden gives them the cash and the things that go bang in the night and in return they get a hearty hand shake when the bundles of Benjamins get transferred into the trunk of someone’s car. All of which leads one to wonder if Mr Z is the best reliable source for anything having to do with himself and the corrupt toadies that adhere to him, given the recurring reports that some donated weapons are already making their way into the black market just as quickly as the money goes into officials’ pockets. Zelensky has reacted to criticism by shutting down opposition parties and media, assassinating dissident politiciansand firing or imprisoning any other official who might be inclined to disagree with him. Apart from that, there is allegedly a war going on, which may not be evident from all the horse trading taking place at the presidential palace. It also would appear to be counter-intuitive that the Russians, blamed without much in the way of evidence for atrocity after atrocity, have apparently proven willing to let Zelensky entertain all his guests undisturbed. If you are truly committing a lot of war crimes, why not add one more to the list by blowing up the Kiev presidential palace and both killing Zelensky and probably ending the war at a stroke? There are, in fact, two wars taking place simultaneously. There is, to be sure, fighting going on around Donbas, but the more important conflict is the phony war being waged by the Biden Administration and a number of European Chancelleries in support of whatever is actually taking place in Ukraine. This latter aspect of the war consists of perhaps the most stifling – and effective – propaganda effort the world has ever seen. It includes Joe Biden and his brigade of clowns, but it also has a supporting cast consisting of NATO, a number of European heads of state and virtually the entire western media. Social media has also joined in the struggle, banning Russian originating news stories and opinion, and using algorithms and other forms of manipulation to make reporting favorable to Moscow go away. The allied effort to defeat and destroy Russia relies on lies, half-truths, and out-and-out deception. But why bother to do it? It is because the war was preventable and avoidable, which is what the White House and other governments cannot admit to the public. It makes absolutely no sense and will benefit no one when it is over, and “over” might mean “really over” as nuclear weapons are on the table. But what about the good old American exceptionalism which Biden-Blinken and that stalwart warrior Merrick Garland are supposed to be defending? Well, that seems to have taken a hit as much of the world, watching the fiasco unfold in Ukraine, apparently doesn’t appreciate the Anglo-Saxon sense of humor. To them, the war in Ukraine would never have started if the US and Europeans had invested in the tiniest effort as mediators to come to a negotiated solution. They have given up on the United States as a “force for good” and have rather concluded that Washington is a global bully and a regular aggressor. Former US Air Force colonel and PhD Karen Kwiatkowski has an interesting tale to tell about how far the mighty have fallen. She writes “…I saw that the Solomon Islands refused (ignored really, which is even better) a US Coast Guard request to come to port, to buy fuel, like with real American dollars, y’all! Why was the US Coast Guard floating around the South Pacific – were they lost? After getting a fuller picture – they were looking for lawbreaking fishermen and that’s where their mission took them…” So what was the US response to this outrage, which was immediately blamed on interference by the Chinese? We need “a new embassy in the Solomon Islands… along with a new five year engagement plan in the Pacific.” During the Cold War before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a commonly heard comment was that the country had become economically and politically an “Upper Volta with rockets,” which implied that the USSR spent so much on weapons that the civilian economy was starved of resources. Well, welcome to the former United States of America. As the nation’s decline and fall will no doubt be facilitated due to the millions of mostly Latino “asylum seekers” flowing over America’s southern border, the US as a “Bolivia with nukes” might be more appropriate. The world is tired of Washington and its pretenses and the walls will inevitably come tumbling down when the Biden unsustainable trillions of dollars of added debt-surge brings on bankruptcy Argentina style. A sharp change in course might be able to fix some of the problems, but there is an election coming up which the White House is keen to win by flooding its cherished constituencies with funny money in exchange for votes, a practice which once upon a time would have been seen as corruption. Come to think of it, the US has become a banana republic run by an essentially criminal gang that alternates every few years to pretend to be a democracy. Can’t get much lower than that, but Biden sure is trying! Reprinted with permission from Unz.com. Dancing with the Politicians Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute ![]() ![]() ![]() This talk was delivered on Saturday, September 3, 2022, at the Ron Paul Institute conference in northern Virginia. I. Introduction Remember the quaint old days of 2019? We were told the US economy was in great shape. Inflation was low, jobs were plentiful, GDP was growing. And frankly, if covid had not come along, there is a pretty good chance Donald Trump would have been reelected. At an event in 2019, my friend and economist Dr. Bob Murphy said something very interesting about the political schism in this country. He said: If you think America is divided now, what would things look like if the economy was terrible, if we had another crash like 2008? Well, we might not have to imagine such a scenario much longer. If you think Americans are divided today, and at each other’s throats—metaphorically, but more and more literally—imagine if they were cold and hungry! Imagine if we had to live through something like Weimer Germany, Argentina in the 1980s, Zimbabwe in the 2000s, or Venezuela and Turkey today? What would our political and social divisions look like then? Ladies and gentlemen, we live under the tyranny of inflationism. It terrorizes us, either softly or loudly. I suspect it will get a lot louder soon. As the late Bill Peterson explained, “Inflationism, in today’s terms, is deficit-spending, deliberate credit expansion on a national scale, a public policy fallacy of monumental proportions, of creating too much money that chases too few goods. It rests on the ‘money illusion,’ a widespread confusion between income as a flow of money and income as a flow of goods and services—a confusion between ‘money’ and wealth.” Inflationism is both a fiscal and monetary regime, but its consequences go far beyond economics. It has profound social, moral, and even civilizational effects. And understanding how it terrorizes us is the task today. II. Understanding Inflationism I’ll ask you to consider three things. First, inflation is a policy. We should make them own it. Inflation is not something beyond our control that comes along periodically like the weather. Our monetary and fiscal regimes actually set out to create it and consider it a good thing. Let’s not forget—both Trump and Biden signed off on covid stimulus bills which combined injected roughly $7 TRILLION dollars directly into the economy—even as actual goods and services were dramatically reduced due to lockdowns. Deflation was the natural order of things in response to a crisis, a bullshit crisis in my view, but still a crisis. So of course Uncle Sam actively attempted to undo the natural desire to spend less and hold more cash during a time of uncertainty. This $7 trillion was created on the fiscal side of things. It was not new Fed bank reserves exchanged for commercial bank assets as a roundabout monetization of Treasury debt, as we saw with quantitative easing. This was direct stimulus from the Treasury via Congress as express fiscal policy. Free money. This money went straight into the accounts of individuals (stimulus checks), state and local governments, millions of small businesses (PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] loans), the airline industry, and untold earmarks. This was actual cash, and it is being spent. So any economist who tells you today’s inflation is somehow a surprise is either charitably misinformed or gaslighting. This is a policy. Inflation is engineered. The difference between supposedly desirable 2 percent CPI [Consumer Price Index] and very bad, awful, no good 9 percent CPI is only one of degree. The same mindset produces both. But the inflationists insist a little bit of virus is good for us, like a vaccine … So an express policy of some inflation is the mechanism to forestall too much inflation. This is a curious position. Second, inflation is nothing less than sanctioned state terror, and we ought to treat it as such. It’s criminal. It makes us live in fear. Inflation is not just an economic issue, but in fact produces deep cultural and social sickness in any society it touches. It makes business planning and entrepreneurship—which rely on profit and loss calculations using money prices—far more difficult and risky, which means we get less of both. How do you measure money profits when the unit of measurement keeps falling in value? It erodes capital accumulation, the driver of greater productivity and material progress. So inflation destroys both existing wealth and future wealth, which never comes into being and thus diminishes the world our children and grandchildren inhabit. And it makes us poor and vulnerable in our senior years. After all, saving is for chumps. Current one-year CD rates are below 3 percent, while inflation is at least 9 percent. So you’re losing 6 points just by standing still! By the way, the last time official CPI approached double digits, in the early ’80s, a one-year CD earned 15 percent. I’d like to hear Jerome Powell explain that. By the way, ever since Alan Greenspan began this great experiment of four decades of lower and lower interest rates, guess who hasn’t benefited? Poor people and subprime borrowers, who still pay well over 20 percent for their car loans and credit cards. But here is an unspoken truth: inflation also makes us worse people. It degrades us morally. It almost forces us to choose current consumption over thrift. Economists call this high time preference, preferring material things today at the expense of saving or investing. It makes us live for the present at the expense of the future, the opposite of what all healthy societies do. Capital accumulation over time, the result of profit, saving, and investing, is how we all got here today—a world with almost unimaginable material wealth all around us. Inflationism reverses this. So this very human impulse, to save for a rainy day and perhaps leave something for your children, is upended. Inflationism is inescapably an antihuman policy. Third, hyperinflation can happen here. It may not happen, and it may not happen soon. But it might well happen. And even steady 10 percent inflation means prices double roughly every seven years. We can pretend the laws of economics don’t apply to the world’s leading superpower, or that the world’s reserve currency is safe from the problems experienced by lesser countries. And it’s certainly true our reserve currency status insulates us and makes the world need dollars. Governments and industry mostly use US dollars to buy oil from OPEC countries, hence the term “petrodollar.” It’s certainly true governments, central banks, large multinational companies, worldwide investment funds, sovereign wealth funds, and pension funds all hold plenty of US dollars—and thus in a perverse way share our interest in maintaining King Dollar. It’s true we don’t have easy historical examples of a world reserve currency, like gold, suffering a rapid devaluation across the world (even the Spanish silver devaluation of the 1500 and 1600s was not necessarily caused by a glut in circulating currency). So we’re in uncharted territory, especially given the fiscal and monetary excesses of the last twenty-five years and especially the last two years. But this only means the potential contagion is greater and more dangerous. The whole world can be sickened at once. III. A Story: When Money Dies But as most of you surely know by now, we don’t turn the ship around or win hearts and minds simply with logic and facts and airtight arguments. We need stories, or narratives, in today’s awful media parlance, to gain influence. We need emotional reactions. So I will suggest a story with plenty of pathos to shake people out of their complacency and sound the warning. That story is When Money Dies, Adam Fergusson’s brilliant cautionary account of hyperinflation in Weimar-era Germany. It is the story Americans desperately need to hear today. Fergusson’s book should be assigned to central bankers stat (we wonder how many of them know of it). It’s not a book about economic policy per se—it’s a story, an historical account of folly and hubris on the part of German politicians and bureaucrats. It’s the story of a disaster created by humans who imagined they could overcome markets by monetary fiat. It’s a reminder that war and inflation are inextricably linked, that war finance leads nations to economic disaster and sets the stage for authoritarian bellicosity. We think Versailles and reparations created the conditions for Hitler’s rise, but without the Reichbank’s earlier suspension of its one-third gold reserve requirement in 1914, it seems unlikely Germany would have become a dominant European military power. Without inflationism, Hitler might have been a footnote. Most of all, When Money Dies is a tale of privation and degradation. Not only for Germans, but also Austrians and Hungarians grappling with their own political upheavals and currency crises in the 1910s and ’20s. In a particularly poignant chapter, Fergusson describes the travails of a Viennese widow named Anna Eisenmenger. A friend of mine, @popeofcapitalism on Twitter, sent me her diary from Amazon. The story starts with her comfortable life as the wife of a doctor and mother to a wonderful daughter and three sons. They are talented and cultured and musical and upper middle class. They even socialize with Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg. But in May 1914 their happy life is shattered. Ferdinand is assassinated at Sarajevo, and war breaks out. Wars cost money, and the gold standard wisely adopted by Austria-Hungary in 1892 is almost immediately seen as an impediment. So the government predictably begins to issue war bonds in huge numbers, and the central bank fires up the printing presses. This results in a sixteenfold increase in prices just during the war years. But the human effects are catastrophic, even apart from the war itself. Frau Eisenmenger is luckier than most Viennese women. She owns small investments which produce modest income—fixed in kronen. Her banker quietly urges her to immediately exchange any funds for Swiss francs. She demurs, as dealing in foreign currency has been made illegal. But soon she realizes he was right. There is probably a lesson here for all of us! As the war unfolds, she is forced into black markets and pawning assets to procure food for her war-damaged children. Her currency and Austrian bonds become almost worthless. She exchanges her husband’s gold watch for potatoes and coal. The downward spiral of her life, marked by hunger and hoarding anything with real value, happens so quickly she barely has time to adjust. But her misery doesn’t stop with the end of the war. On the contrary, the Saint-Germain Treaty in 1919 gives way to a period of hyperinflation: the money supply increases from 12 to 30 billion kronen in 1920, and to about 147 billion kronen at the end of 1921 (does this sound like America 2020, by the way?). By August 1922, consumer prices are fourteen thousand times greater than before the start of the war eight years earlier. In just a few short years she endures countless tragedies, all made worse by privation, cold, and hunger. Her husband dies. Her daughter contracts tuberculosis and dies, leaving Frau Eisenmenger to take care of her infant daughter and young son. One son goes missing in the war, one son is blinded, and her son in law becomes crippled following the loss of both legs. Food and coal are rationed, so her apartment is a miserable hovel—and she is forced to dodge searches by the “Food Police” looking for illegal hoarding. Ultimately, she is shot in the lung by her own Communist son, Karl, in a fit of rage. There is a haunting and historically accurate silent film about conditions in Vienna during this era called The Joyless Street, starring a young Greta Garbo. Her character sees everything deteriorate around her; even her father beats her with his cane for returning home without food. Once friendly neighbors become suspicious of each other’s stores of bread and cheese, while prostitution becomes rampant. Angry people jostle in line, waiting for the butcher to open; when he does, only the most attractive women receive the scraps of meat available that day. Fistfights become common. Starving children beg for food in front of restaurants and cafes like stray dogs. Everything familiar and beautiful in society becomes degraded and cheapened seemingly overnight. Like a Stephen King horror movie, something very familiar changes into a strange and menacing place. Your neighborhood takes on a different light. People you thought you knew became malevolent strangers. Scapegoating, blame, and snitching become commonplace. Is this beginning to sound familiar, especially after Biden’s sick speech the other night? So, next time one of these sociopaths in our political class wants to spend a few trillion more to pay for a green new deal or a war with China or free college, remember Frau Eisenmenger’s story. IV. The Lessons for Today How do we apply this grim historical lesson from the Weimar period to America today? How do we tell this story? First, we explain inflationism in human terms, to personalize it and debamboozle it. Make monetary policy vital and immediate, not boring and dry and technocratic. Again, there are enormous moral and civilization components to monetary policy. Inflation not only harms our economy, it makes us worse people: profligate, shortsighted, lazy, and unconcerned with future generations. Professor Guido Hülsmann literally wrote the book on this. It’s called The Ethics of Money Production. This is maybe the greatest untold story in America today: the story of not only how the Fed fundamentally shifted our economy from one of production to consumption, but what it did to us as people. Don’t let them hide behind complex Fed speak the simple reality: monetary policy is nothing less than criminal theft from future generations, from savers, and from the poorest Americans, who are furthest from the money spigot. The idea that reasonably intelligent laypeople cannot understand monetary policy, that it is too important and complex for anyone but experts, is nonsense. We should expose it. Second, ridicule the absurd idea that “policy” can make us richer, More goods and services, produced more and more efficiently, thanks to capital—and thereby creating price deflation—make us richer. That’s the only way. Not by legislative or monetary fiat. So we should attack any notion of “public policy” and especially “monetary policy.” Inflationism creates a fake economy, a “make-believe” economy, as Axios recently put it. A fake economy depends on enormous levels of ongoing fiscal and monetary intervention. We call this “financialization,” but we all have a sense that our prosperity is borrowed. We all feel it. Capital markets are degraded: a lot of money moves around without creating any value for anyone. Companies don’t necessarily make profits or pay dividends; all that matters to shareholders is selling their stock for capital gains. It always requires a new Ponzi buyer. But we know intuitively this isn’t right: consider a restaurant or dry cleaner which operated without profit for years in the hope of selling for a gain years or decades later. Only the distorted incentives created by inflationism make this mindset possible. So down with “policy”—what we need is sound money! Finally, let us not fear being accused of hyperbole or alarmism. Let me ask you this: what happens if we’re wrong, and what happens if they’re wrong? What they are doing, meaning central bankers and national treasuries, is unprecedented. Fake money is infinite, real resources are not. Hyperinflation may not be around the corner or even years away; no one can predict such a thing. But at some point the US economy must create real organic growth if we hope to maintain living standards and avoid an ugly inflationary reality. No amount of monetary or fiscal engineering can take the place of capital accumulation and higher productivity. More money and credit is no substitute for more, better, and cheaper goods and services. Political money can’t work, and we should never be afraid to attack it root and branch. We need private money, the only money immune from the inescapable political incentive to vote for things now and pay for them later. If this is radical, so be it. History shows us how money dies. Yes, it can happen here. Only a fool thinks otherwise. Reprinted with permission from Mises.org. Inflation: State-Sponsored Terrorism Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute ![]() ![]() ![]() President Biden’s campaign to banish (or maybe outlaw) political paranoia took a wallop last spring. In April, the Department of Homeland Security proudly announced that it had created a new Disinformation Governance Board. The following month, the board’s chairman resigned, and Biden administration officials claimed the board was being “paused.” But it remains in the wings awaiting the White House summons for an encore performance.Thought police by another name From the start, the Disinformation Governance Board looked like a political caricature dreamed up by people who never appreciated either Monty Python or Orwell’s 1984. Given the Biden record, it was unclear whether the new board will be fighting or promulgating “disinformation.” After controversy erupted, an unnamed DHS spokesperson told the Washington Post: “The Board’s purpose has been grossly mischaracterized; it will not police speech…. Its focus is to ensure that freedom of speech is protected.” Geez, why didn’t the Founding Fathers think of adding a clause to the First Amendment creating a nefarious-sounding government agency to ride shotgun on the nation’s media? Team Biden expected applause and deference when they announced the first disinformation czar for the board, Nina Jankowicz, a 33-year-old Bryn Mawr college graduate who was hailed as an “information warfare expert.” Jankowicz had the type of resume that made the Washington Post swoon — a Fulbright scholar, a graduate degree from Georgetown University, and “stints at multiple nonpartisan think tanks” — all of which were coincidentally progovernment — thus proving that Jankowicz herself was trustworthy. Team Biden’s vetting operations didn’t win any kudos on this appointment. They failed to ask a critical question: Does she sing? After Jankowicz’s name hit the headlines, activists were soon whooping up some of her greatest performances discovered online. There was her TikTok version of a “Mary Poppins” song warning “Information laundering is really quite ferocious.” More surprising was her YouTube Christmas parody song performance, “Who do I f–k to be famous and powerful?” More troubling was her long record of cheerleading for political propaganda. Jankowicz previously worked for StopFake, a federally funded media-influence operation that in 2018 “began aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups with a long track record of violence, including war crimes,” even dabbling “with Holocaust distortion, downplaying WWII-era paramilitaries who slaughtered Jews as mere ‘historic figures’ and Ukrainian nationalist leaders,” as The Nation reported. She also worked for the National Democratic Institute, which is heavily funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which has spurred perennial controversy for interfering in foreign elections. A long record of censorship When Jankowicz testified in Britain on the UK’s Online Safety Bill, which entitled the government to ban any content with “the potential to cause harm,” she endorsed banning “misogyny” (bad news for old videos of Benny Hill shows). She also derided free speech as on par with “fairy dust.” As Paul Joseph Watson reported in Summit News, “Jankowicz asserted that social media platforms should utilize algorithms that would ‘allow us to get around some of the free speech concerns’ by demoting content so few people saw it.” Jankowicz assured the legislators: “You can shout in the black void, but you do not get a huge audience to do that.” And people like her should have the prerogative to covertly determine how much audience each idea deserves, right? Jankowicz believes that “trustworthy experts” such as herself (she boasts that she is “verified” by Twitter) should be empowered to “edit” other people’s tweets to “add context.” She denounced Loudoun County, Va., parents who complained about left-wing school curriculum for “disinformation” and “weaponizing people’s emotion.” In October 2020, after the New York Post exposed damning emails and other information in Hunter Biden’s laptop, Jankowicz scoffed at the laptop controversy: “We should view it as a Trump campaign product.” She supported the 50 former intelligence officials and other honchos who vouched that the laptop should not be trusted, thereby helping Biden win the 2020 election (according to former attorney general Bill Barr). Jankowicz never complained when Twitter suppressed all links to New York Postarticles before the 2020 election. But when rumors circulated in April that Elon Musk might buy Twitter, she fretted to National Public Radio: “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms.” That line is the Rosetta stone for understanding the new Disinformation Governance Board. The goal is not “truth” — which could arise from the clash of competing opinions. Instead, political overlords need power to exert pressure and pull to shape Americans’ beliefs by discrediting, if not totally suppressing, disapproved opinions. The swamp circles the wagons When DHS revealed that the disinformation board was being placed on hold, it also announced that former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff was brought in to review and assess the board’s mission. Chertoff was assistant attorney general helping organize the mass roundup of 1,200 Muslims after the 9/11 attacks. On November 28, 2001, Chertoff testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee: “Nobody is held incommunicado. We don’t hold people in secret, you know, cut off from lawyers, cut off from the public, cut off from their family and friends.” That was total disinformation, and the Bush administration’s secrecy was later condemned. In August 2002, Chertoff condemned Bush administration critics: “You should not think you’re dealing with a bunch of barbarians….We need to be sober about what is a threat to civil liberties.” But, as The Nation magazine noted, “Chertoff is notorious for enabling some of the most egregious offenses of the War on Terrorism — from federal surveillance, to unlawful detention, to torture. Indeed, his previous governmental appointments were met with vociferous opposition from groups like Human Rights Watch and the ACLU.” When he was DHS boss, Chertoff championed REAL ID and portrayed it as a total surveillance system — even for babysitters. The Nation magazine declared that placing “a man as deeply tainted as Chertoff into a leadership position smacks of a particularly indolent kind of contempt.” Disinformation a longtime tool of the state “Disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods. In early 2003, anyone who denied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was guilty of disinformation — until after George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion found no WMDs. It was disinformation that Obama’s drone assassination program was killing large number of innocent civilians — until Daniel Hale courageously leaked internal documents proving the killing spree. (Hale will spend years in federal prison as a reward for undermining the credibility of this particular disinformation.) Federal agencies have deluged Americans with malarkey for decades. We don’t need a disinformation czar to hector us to submit to the latest Washington catechism. The core of the media defense of Jankowicz was that only right-wing nuts fear the U.S. government would censor Americans. But it is already happening. The Biden White House threatened antitrust investigations against social media companies that failed to suppress “disinformation” about COVID vaccines. On March 3, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy “demanded that the tech companies turn over information about individuals who spread” COVID “misinformation,” the New Civil Liberties Alliance reported. Last year, it was “disinformation” to claim that vaccines fail to prevent contracting or transmitting COVID. But after the Omicron wave, the phrase “breakthrough infection” became almost redundant. The Disinformation Governance Board debacle could not have occurred unless many policymakers felt entitled to control the information Americans receive. Jankowicz’s arrogance was invisible to the Biden team because that arrogance is shared by them. She is part of a niche that assumes they are so superior that they have the right to censor — or at least the right to control what other people think. In the 1960s, the “best and the brightest” had the right to lie Americans into the Vietnam War — for the good of the world. The same type of people now infest Washington and believe they have the right to censor. The new Cold War — in Ukraine Targeting Russian issues would have been a prime topic for the new board. After she resigned, Jankowicz touted the disinformation fight by other federal agencies: “Take a look at the recent work to prebunk [pre-debunk] Russian narratives about Ukraine. It focused on raising awareness of the falsities coming out of the Kremlin so Americans wouldn’t buy into them. It worked.” It “worked” in the sense that the vast majority of the American media has uncritically recited what they have been told about the conflict by U.S. government and Ukrainian officials. But the U.S. government has withheld almost all information it possesses on the battlefield losses of the Ukrainian army, thus helping perpetuate “Ghost of Kiev” types of fantasies about how the conflict is going. On May 27, the Washington Post reported that Ukrainian military “casualties here are largely kept secret to protect morale among troops and the general public” — and American citizens. U.S. officials have also passed on information to the media regarding the conflict that was unverified or even doubtful. At the same time, many politicians have joined a media chorus to denounce as Russian propaganda any suggestion that the war is something less than a glorious triumph of good over evil. U.S. government agencies poured money into the coffers of Ukrainian government agencies, including the office of Lyudmila Denisova, the commissioner for human rights. Denisova spurred hundreds of lurid western media reports about Russian troops on rape rampages, targeting even young babies. But on May 30, the Ukrainian parliament tossed her out of her job because there was no evidence for many of her allegations. Until the moment that Denisova was fired, denying Russian troops were mass raping Ukrainian females was “disinformation.” Few Americans recognize how surreal the notion of “truth” has become inside the Beltway. On April 28, the White House appealed to Congress to provide another massive aid package to Ukraine, including hefty provisions to “support activists, journalists, and independent media to defend freedom of expression.” And how can we be sure that Ukrainian journalists are independent? Because U.S. government officials retain the sales receipt for their purchase. Unfortunately, the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other agencies have been avidly subsidizing “independent media” in foreign nations for years, assuring that there will be an “amen chorus” for U.S. intervention in their nations if deemed necessary. The absurdity of such grants doesn’t register in D.C., in part because so many policymakers are blinded by the presumed righteousness of U.S. policy. As Secretary of State Madeline Albright said, “We are the indispensable nation…. We see further into the future.” Thus, handouts from the U.S. government are the truest source of independence — or some such hokum. It remains to be seen if Biden’s disinformation campaigns on Ukraine and Russia succeed in dragging our nation into World War Three. The United States funds foreign propaganda operations that echo in American newspapers and cable news, and the White House exploits those stories to drag this nation further into an East European border dispute. The federal government has long been the most dangerous source of disinformation threatening Americans. The trillions of pages of new secrets that the U.S. government creates each year is a disinformation entitlement program. In a city that already had hundreds of full-time political appointees whose task is to lie to the America public, why was another board needed? Admittedly, calling it the Disinformation Governance Board is more palatable than naming it the Keep Damn Federal Lies Sacrosanct Panel. Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation. Lessons from Biden’s Disinformation Board Debacle Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute |
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