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Lies, Damn Lies, and Ukraine News

2026-10-29T11:27:40.430-04:00

By William Dunkerley - October 29, 2026 at 09:15AM

It’s been said that truth is the first casualty of war. What about the Ukraine war? I’ve followed the news closely, and have found ample evidence in headlines and storylines that the old adage holds true today. Too often the Ukraine news stories we see are misleading instead of informative.

For instance, in March 2014 CNN reported that Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution was “standing up on behalf of democracy.” A month earlier, The Week cited many pundits and policymakers also characterizing events as a victory for democracy. It was a clear and compelling news theme.

But what’s misleading about that? It creates an impression that is contrary to reality. The truth is that the immediate result of the revolution was an abrupt end to constitutional democracy, not a victory for democracy.

The uprising totally dismantled the constitutional democracy that Ukraine had operated under since its independence from the USSR in 1991. The sequence of events makes it clear. Out went the democratic constitution; in came rule by force under the unelected revolutionaries. That’s what Ukrainians were stuck with for months. The stories about a boost for democracy were completely misleading.

This is a good example of truth being a casualty of war. The news celebrated an advance of democracy while in reality democracy itself had been lost.

Media distortion like that is not unique to the Ukraine war. Here’s an example dating back to the Cold War.

The issue was Soviet missiles showing up in Cuba in 1962. Upon discovery, President Kennedy railed against their presence.

On national TV he demanded that en route Soviet ships presumed to be carrying still more missiles be turned around. And Khrushchev complied.

Still there was the issue of removing the missiles from Cuba. How did that turn out?

“We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked,” reportedly said Secretary of State Dean Rusk. News reports characterized JFK as staring down the menacing Soviet leader and winning this round with the communists. The imagery seemed to play upon the title of Kennedy’s book, Profiles in Courage. It all was emblematic of the American Way. The story was almost poetic.

Indeed, this story seems so perfect that it is hard to believe it was actually a hoax. True, there were missiles. But here is a factual account of how that crisis really unfolded:

In late 1961 President Kennedy began placing nuclear missiles in Turkey, strategically close to the Soviet border. Full deployment was completed in 1962. It would take less than 15 minutes for the missiles to hit Moscow.

Then in July of that year Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sealed a secret agreement with Cuba to deploy Soviet nuclear missiles there, just 90 miles from Florida. It would take them less than 15 minutes to hit Washington DC.

What ended this standoff was something far less poetic than the Kennedyesque example I cited earlier. Khrushchev proposed a quid pro quo: He would remove his missiles from Cuba if Kennedy would remove his from Turkey. Kennedy privately agreed. But he insisted on a significant proviso: the quid pro quo must be kept secret. Khrushchev conceded and Kennedy’s fanciful story of standing tall in the face of a threatening adversary prevailed.

The Cuban missile story thus joins the Ukraine democracy story as another example of truth being a casualty of war.

Now consider this next example from back in Ukraine.

“Parliament votes 328-0 to impeach Yanukovych” reported the Kyiv Post on February 23, 2014. A day earlier the New York Times claimed, “Ukraine’s Parliament voted to remove President Viktor F. Yanukovych from office hours after he abandoned his office.”

Both reports further demonstrate how truth becomes a casualty of war. Neither accurately portrays what really happened.

Radio Liberty was quick to set things straight. In a report titled “Was Yanukovych’s Ouster Constitutional?” staffer Daisy Sindelar presented an in-depth analysis showing that parliamentarians tried to remove Yanukovych from the presidency but failed to achieve a sufficient vote.

She also pointed out that Yanukovych’s alleged abandonment of the presidency was not even a possible basis for declaring the office vacant. Radio Liberty’s corrections are backed up by Constitutional Coup in Ukraine in 2014, a thorough academic study published under the auspices of the Polish Parliament.

Clearly all the examples cited above represent fabricated stories masquerading as the truth. But the news stories are also examples of something much more insidious: the collective impact that a persistent manufactured narrative can have on a given public.

They paint a picture, a vivid narrative, that shapes the cultural schema through which people understand and interpret future events.

This can be seen in how the media have portrayed the fates of Crimea and Donbas. At issue is the question: Did the revolutionary government automatically inherit all the territorial authority of the constitutional democracy they had overthrown?

Crimea, for example, has been a significant stumbling block in discussions of a peaceful settlement of the war. In March 2014 Secretary of State John Kerry told CNN, “Crimea is part of Ukraine. Crimea is Ukraine.” But how is that true? What made Crimea part of revolutionary Ukraine?

Before the revolution, Crimea’s place within Ukraine was established by the democratic constitution. But the revolutionaries abandoned that constitution and claimed authority through force. Their rule by force never extended into Crimea. What, then, was the basis for their claim to Crimea? There was none that holds up to scrutiny. Even the eventual election of Poroshenko as president did not undo the constitutional destruction caused by the revolutionaries.

Why didn’t CNN challenge Kerry’s story? The assumption behind his statement illustrates how an ongoing series of fabricated stories can predispose us to interpret each new story in a particular way. If one can believe that a takeover by force is an advancement of democracy, why question an unsupported claim regarding Crimea? This shows that a lack of scrutiny can lead to creating or reinforcing a cultural schema that impedes our understanding of what is really happening.

The same principle applies to Donbas, but the words are different. Here Ukraine news stories portrayed the situation as “Russia invading Donbas.” But the facts show that notion to be a sensationalized misdirection from the truth.

The actual story can be understood by asking this question: What made Donbas, meaning the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, a part of revolutionary Ukraine?

The logic that clarified the status of Crimea applies here too. Donetsk and Luhansk were not part of revolutionary Ukraine for the same reason. Additionally, their populations actively rejected revolutionary rule. They fought against it when the revolutionaries attacked them. If there were, as reports claimed, Russian volunteers, mercenaries, or regulars helping the population defend their territories, it does not alter the basic scenario.

Calling the territories breakaway regions is a misnomer, as is calling the people separatists. It is not possible to break away or separate from something to which one was not attached in the first place. The Russia invades Donbas story is just sensationalistic fabrication.

What’s worse is that this obscures what really happened there. February 2022 is often cited as the start of the Ukraine war. The facts tell a different story. The hostilities in Donbas beginning in 2014 marked the actual start of the Ukraine war, years before the massive escalation in 2022. Reports say that this Donbas phase of the conflict claimed over 14,000 lives and displaced roughly 1.5 million people.

“Truth is the first casualty of war?” Once again we see that axiom is borne out. The mainstream story about Donbas leaves out the critical parts of the truth. But who will notice that? The facts are obscured from view by the now well-established, yet fundamentally misleading cultural schema.

The false claim of a democratic revolution. The lie about how Yanukovych was dismissed. The false and misleading narratives about the status of Crimea and Donbas. These and other stories have given the American public and our leaders a politically contorted view of the entire Ukraine war dilemma.

These narratives — and the false cultural schema they help create — can also lead people to draw unwarranted conclusions about the reasons behind political leaders’ decisions. As peace-treaty talks approach, there is a danger that proposals and decisions about ending the war might be built on a house of cards — that is, the series of misleading Ukraine news stories and the dysfunctional cultural schema that they helped to create. Together they distort perceptions of how the war began and what is at stake. If negotiators fail to break free of that schema, any resulting peace could prove unsustainable for Ukrainians and their country. What a waste that would be. Haven’t the Ukrainian people suffered enough?

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The Doomsday Government: Preparing for the End of the World, Not the End of Power

2026-10-28T10:27:33.426-04:00

By John W. And Nisha Whitehead - October 28, 2026 at 08:08AM

This time of year, there is no shortage of monsters to frighten us.

Hollywood has given us vampires, zombies, mad scientists, masked killers and creatures that emerge from the darkness to prey upon the unsuspecting.

But perhaps the most frightening monster of all is the government that has become so accustomed to wielding extraordinary power that it cannot imagine a future in which that power is diminished.

Enter the Doomsday Plan.

In what sounds like a plot lifted straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, the Pentagon has unveiled an initiative designed to keep the war machine running even if a catastrophic war devastates the country’s civilian infrastructure.

Under an initiative called FORTRESS, the military is preparing major installations across the United States to operate independently for at least 90 days in the event of a catastrophic disruption. The plan includes portable nuclear reactors, independent power grids, stockpiles of fuel and ammunition, backup communications systems and arrangements for civilian factories to switch over to wartime production.

The Pentagon calls this preparedness.

The rest of us might reasonably wonder: what good is a government that can survive the end of the world if the people it was created to serve cannot?

Of course, governments have a responsibility to prepare for emergencies. But there is a world of difference between preparing to protect the nation and preparing to preserve the power of those who govern it.

That distinction matters, especially when the same government that prepares for catastrophic war also helps create the conditions in which such wars become not only likely but imminent.

The Pentagon has been anticipating a future in which the military can continue fighting, even when the civilian infrastructure that sustains ordinary Americans may no longer function.

Consider the Pentagon’s chilling training video, Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity, made public in 2016.

The video envisions a world of sprawling urban centers overwhelmed by poverty, disease, unemployment, overcrowding, failing infrastructure, environmental disasters and civil unrest.

It is a bleak portrait of the world as military planners fear it might look by 2030. In this vision of the future, cities become battlegrounds and the citizenry are viewed as the enemy.

As the video warns, there will be a need to “drain the swamps.” Only in this dystopian future, “we the people” risk becoming inhabitants of the swamp that military forces are preparing to clear out.

That is a dangerous way for any government to view the people it is supposed to protect.

It is particularly dangerous for a nation whose founders explicitly rejected martial law and enacted constitutional bulwarks to guard against the rise of a police state.

Yet this is where the country has been heading for years.

We’ve witnessed the steady militarization of domestic law enforcement, the expansion of surveillance networks, the deployment of military equipment into American communities, and repeated efforts to blur the line between policing and warfare.

Under the Trump administration, those boundaries have been tested even further through domestic military deployments, aggressive immigration enforcement and expansive claims of executive authority in the name of national security.

The message is increasingly unmistakable: the military is increasingly being presented as the solution to every domestic crisis.

Yet this is also why the Pentagon’s latest Doomsday preparations cannot be considered in isolation from the government’s longstanding continuity-of-government plans.

For decades, federal officials have maintained arrangements intended to preserve essential government operations during a catastrophic emergency, including secure facilities, alternate command centers, succession procedures and protected communications systems.

These preparations are hardly limited to military installations.

Even Trump’s controversial White House ballroom project includes plans for fortified underground facilities, bomb shelters, secure communications and medical facilities, ostensibly to ensure that the presidency can continue functioning during a national emergency.

The government is making elaborate preparations to preserve its leadership and military capabilities in the event of catastrophe.

Some of these measures are practical: a functioning government is essential to coordinating rescue operations, maintaining order and rebuilding after disaster. But continuity-of-government planning also raises a constitutional question that is too often overlooked: what exactly is being preserved?

The Constitution establishes a government of limited, divided powers, accountable to the people and constrained by law.

Preserving that government means more than ensuring that the president can issue orders, military commanders can communicate and federal agencies can continue operating. It means preserving the checks and balances that prevent power from becoming absolute. It means preserving Congress, the courts, due process, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right of the people to challenge government abuses.

It means ensuring that an emergency does not become an excuse to dispense with the very constitutional restraints that distinguish a republic from a dictatorship.

Otherwise, continuity of government becomes little more than continuity of power.

That is what makes the Pentagon’s doomsday planning so unsettling.

The problem is not that the military wants to keep the lights on during a national catastrophe.

The problem is what happens when keeping the machinery of war functioning becomes the overriding measure of national survival.

So where does that leave us?

President Trump and his self-serving administration of war hawks have squandered so much of our resources, our goodwill on the world stage, and our role as a champion for liberty and justice. Now having pushed us to the apocalyptic brink of devastation, they’re building bunkers to save their own necks while the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves.

Enough is enough.

“We the people” should be demanding a government that works to prevent catastrophe, protects civilian life, respects constitutional limits and remembers that its continued existence is not an end in itself. And if they won’t march in lockstep with our expectations, throw the whole lot of them out.

Because as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the danger comes when the government forgets that it exists to serve the people, not the other way around.

A government that survives by abandoning the people and the Constitution has not saved the country.

It has merely saved itself.

The Constitution was not written to ensure that the government would survive at any cost.

It was written to ensure that freedom would survive a tyrannical government.

Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

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The Iran War and the ‘Terrible Power of the Purse’

2026-10-27T11:27:40.355-04:00

By Alastair Crooke - October 27, 2026 at 09:12AM

The “Grand Design” to “maintain [western civilisation’s] place at the head of the world” (as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it) requires the tools for ensuring compliance are two-fold: The creating of destructive revolutionary fervour from below (now termed “regime change”); and secondly, the use of what Theodore Herzl in a now famous phrase termed “the terrible power of the purse to exert irresistible pressure on international politics” in order to co-opt the ruling strata into a power network that would advance the Grand Design “project.”

This is what we are observing with Trump’s war on Iran. The June 2025 Israeli-American attack was primarily a decapitation attack designed to disable both Iran’s political and military leadership, whilst armed Mossad trained elements, the MEK and Baluchi separatists inter alia would be inserted into Iran to foment revolution from the street below. At that time, the former Shah’s son – implausibly – was being presented to the western media as the incoming leader of Iran.

It did not work. And now Netanyahu is touting that Israel has “fresh evidence” that Iran is moving towards producing a weapon component to its nuclear programme. He is telling Trump that he needs now to finish the job of destroying Iran. And to motivate Trump further, leading Israeli daily Ma’ariv reports that Israel stove-piped Likud polling directly into the White House to the effect that Netanyahu might win the Israeli elections on 27 October. According to the report, this Likud information (that runs counter to most other Israeli polls) prompted Trump’s full-hearted election endorsement of Netanyahu.

At the same time, the pro-Zionist billionaire donors are wielding the “terrible power of the purse” at Trump: “We will not accept anything less than the defeat of Iran. If you continue to seek a deal we will pull our financial support from you.”

Senior current and former security officials in Israel however, refute the need for an imminent attack on Iran and Netanyahu’s claim of new evidence of Iran moving toward a nuclear weapon –

IDF Chief of Staff Zamir told Israel’s Channel 13: “We don’t see a need to attack Iran before the elections”;

Leading Israeli military strategist Udi Evental has cautioned:

A war to thwart the elections and democracy, not to thwart Iran’s nuclear programme. Netanyahu, who is suspected of being up to his neck in extraneous political and personal considerations, is unfit to make such a decision. He must not be allowed to.

Whether or not there is such evidence really does not matter. Likely it doesn’t exist. The claim simply forms the peg on which the US is being told to take action to “finish the job” on Iran.

As ever, Netanyahu said in the last days:

Iran is once again trying to develop its weapons of death … There is only one way to remove this threat once and for all – to topple the regime in Iran, and that is my directive to the IDF, the Mossad and the security agencies.

A senior Iranian official told Drop Site that Tehran’s current internal intelligence assessment indicates a high likelihood that large-scale bombing may begin – even before Tuesday’s Israeli elections.

The point here is that Iran does not care who wins in the midterms, nor who will win the U.S. Presidency in 2028. For the Iranian leadership it is all the same. They well understand the concept of the “Grand Design” (how could they not?).

It is well understood in Iran that they are engaged in a long war confronting the entire Atlanticist bloc – Israel, its intelligence services, its arsenals, its satellites, its military industry, and its media machine. It does not matter whether it is a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. Senior Iranian officials see both parties to have been bought by the Zionist terrible power of the purse.

Understanding the “Design” is to understand that the Zionist donor class will never be satisfied by some “deal or trade-off.” They claim it to be certain that Iran ultimately would renege on any mooted acquiescence to U.S. demands. Israelis and their donor class auxiliaries simply do not believe (and repeat incessantly) that Iran would ever accept compliance to Israel, or to accept US political and cultural dominance.

They may be right. Why?

Simply because Iran has a deep civilisation, stretching back to a specifically Persian-Iranian complex of beliefs and practices of the second millennium BCE – Mazdaism, a cosmology of divine drama, represented by the continuing struggle between Light and Darkness.

The renown scholar, Professor Henri Corbin, has argued that “Iran was situated at a centre … it being not only a nation or an empire, but a spiritual universe.” He understood Iran therefore, as a mediating force, both geographically and metaphysically.

For millenia, Iranians have experienced the world as having a clear metaphysical dimension – and history. It is therefore unlikely that they would be attracted to a western nihilistic material posture. Civilisational states, whether Iran or Russia, that embrace contrarian values would never succumb to the “Grand Design.” Hence, they must be destroyed.

What does this metaphysical history mean? It means that Iran is preparing for war, not for a “deal.” Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and personal representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, stated that,

If the question is whether Iran still has the ability to continue missile and drone operations [in the event of an attack], the answer is ‘yes’ … The United States has valuable assets in the region. In the event of war, cables, data centres and artificial intelligence facilities could also come within range. If the conflict begins again, we will have a broader plan.

Everyone must understand that action against Iran carries a cost.

Senior Iranian officials believe that war is coming. Iran has extensive plans (in the event of an attack) that encompasses Saudi Arabia and its leadership, too, a senior Iranian hinted. Karl Miller (from the field) states that in this respect, already a quarter of Saudi oil production has been destroyed and that the damage as a result of AnsarAllah’s retaliatory attacks runs through the whole Saudi production chain – “from wellhead to the gas station” – and that Saudi Arabia has been covering the gap by draining their tanks.

Miller’s report, quoted by Larry Johnson, warns that,

if Saudi Arabia’s export outlets close, its oil has nowhere to go but to its own refineries, its own power plants and its storage tanks. Once the storage is full, that is roughly the ceiling on what Saudi Arabia could keep producing. Close Ras Tanura and Yanbu at the same time, and the Kingdom would have to shut in most of its oil fields. That is exactly the scenario Ansar Allah’s campaign against the pipeline, the Red Sea and the Gulf terminals, is built to produce.

“Any new American or Israeli campaign against Iran will land on a Saudi energy system that has no slack left to absorb it,” Larry Johnson observes.

Any new attack on Iran, by extension, will mean the end to the Gulf as we know it, an end to the petrodollar, and an end to the Gulf as the primary supplier of hard cash to Wall Street and the Tech world.

Nonetheless, Trump reportedly has said that the U.S. is not currently negotiating with Iran, and something will happen “fairly soon.”

Maybe. (But with Trump everything distils into speculation). But if he is bluffing, it won’t work, and his humiliation will be all the deeper.

One man who knows Trump better than most (having authored four books on him), Michael Wolff, opines that if the Democrats win in the 3 November midterms –

They will be trying to impress upon the world that it is ‘a new day.’ Trump, for his part, will be trying to impress upon the world that he still controls the stage. There will be a series of these kinds of things (such as a putative invasion of Cuba, for example) greater than anything we may have imagined. He will not be humbled. The idea of humility does not exist in Donald Trump’s soul. Therefore he will do – the opposite.

Not retreat but attack.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.

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Who is Making Billions from the Iran War?

2026-10-26T13:27:30.571-04:00

By Ron Paul - October 26, 2026 at 10:30AM

At a campaign rally over the weekend, President Trump dismissed Americans’ concerns over high oil and gas prices, claiming that it’s a small price to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars “we” are making from these higher prices.

“We’re making a fortune,” he said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars. Trillions of dollars.”

People are paying a little bit more for gas, he explained, but it doesn’t matter because “we” are making so much money.

The question is, “Who is ‘we’?” We know it is not the American people. They are seeing wage stagnation, inflation, and more pain at the pump. An Economist/YouGov poll earlier this month found that inflation and prices are the top concern among Americans by a wide margin. And in second place were jobs and the economy.

The same poll asked Americans how they rate the state of the US economy and in first place – again by a long shot – was “poor.”

If “we” as in the American people were making hundreds of billions of dollars from the war, you would think these would not be their top two concerns.

But we understand what the President meant by “we.” He meant that part of the “private” sector directly or indirectly in bed with the government war machine. From oil companies to weapons manufacturers and everything in between, war and conflict drive up profits in well-connected corporations at the expense of the rest of us.

That is why we are in a constant state of war. Twenty years in Afghanistan and a similar length in Iraq. Endless bombing in places like Somalia. A twelve-year (and counting) proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Military bases and covert operations across the globe.

And if we find that the largest military budget in the world does not deliver enough actual weapons to win a war? Well, that’s all good too: just double military spending and accuse anyone who objects of not being patriotic!

“Private” companies with enormous political power – many of them revolving doors between government and business – “make so much money” on war, as Trump would say. Whether these wars produce US wins, loses, or stalemates, these corporations in bed with government always win. The money-printing machine makes sure the money cycles into government-favored companies, while campaign contributions are made to the politicians who support the wars.

And if you don’t support the wars? You get the Thomas Massie treatment.

Endless war produces more corporatism, where the private sector does not exist to provide goods to compete in the free market, but to serve political power and strengthen governmental control over the population. Think of it as welfare for the rich at the expense of the poor. The result is tyranny.

This is the very reason our Founders intended to make it as difficult as possible to wage war. As well-educated students of history, they understood how the concentration of war-making power in the hands of one ruler or an oligarchy would impoverish the masses and lead to a moral and financial bankruptcy. They placed war-making power in the “people’s branch” – Congress – hoping that the people would hold their representatives accountable. We have strayed very far from what they intended and if we are to survive, we must reclaim that authority and responsibility.

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Vote As If the Constitution Depended On It

2026-10-24T12:27:40.329-04:00

By John W. And Nisha Whitehead - October 24, 2026 at 10:37AM

There was a time when thinking for yourself was considered a virtue.

These days, it can make you a political outcast.

Question the Democrats, and you’re accused of being a Republican. Question the Republicans, and you’re branded a Democrat. Criticize Donald Trump, and you’re dismissed as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Criticize his opponents, and you’re accused of enabling authoritarianism.

Somewhere along the way, Americans seem to have forgotten that independent thought is not an act of political betrayal. Neither is holding government officials accountable to the Constitution.

Yet we have become so accustomed to viewing every political controversy through the narrow lens of party loyalty that the most important question is often the last one we ask: is what the government is doing actually constitutional?

It shouldn’t matter whether the president is a Republican or Democrat, whether the policy is popular or unpopular, or whether the people being targeted are citizens or immigrants, conservatives or liberals, political allies or sworn enemies.

The Constitution is not supposed to change depending on who occupies the White House.

Neither should our commitment to defending it.

And yet, with another national election approaching, Americans are once again being asked to choose sides in a political battle in which accusations of treason, threats of prosecution, allegations of voter fraud and competing claims of patriotism threaten to drown out the principles that make constitutional self-government possible in the first place.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this political circus is not merely the conduct of those in power, but the willingness of so many Americans to excuse, rationalize or even celebrate abuses of power when they are committed in the name of a political cause they support.

This is how constitutional government begins to lose its meaning: not necessarily through a single dramatic overthrow, but through the gradual abandonment of principles that were supposed to apply to everyone.

Free speech becomes a right worth defending only when the speaker agrees with us. Due process becomes a technicality when the accused belongs to a group we distrust. Government surveillance becomes acceptable when it targets our political opponents. Executive overreach becomes decisive leadership when exercised by our preferred president.

And the Constitution, rather than serving as a restraint on government power, becomes just another weapon in the partisan arsenal.

The irony is that Americans who would never willingly surrender their own freedoms can become remarkably indifferent when those same freedoms are denied to someone else.

This is the danger of treating politics as a team sport: winning becomes more important than doing what is right, loyalty becomes more important than truth, and the ends are used to justify almost any means.

It also explains why the government keeps getting away with so much.

Every administration inherits the powers its predecessors accumulated. Every president discovers new ways to stretch the boundaries of executive authority. Every political party, once in power, finds reasons to defend practices it condemned when the opposition was in charge.

And every time Americans look the other way because their preferred politicians are calling the shots, they help establish precedents that will eventually be used against them.

The Constitution was intended to prevent precisely this kind of government by political convenience. Its protections were never supposed to depend on who holds power, who is popular, or who happens to be on the receiving end of government force.

Yet this is precisely the kind of government by political allegiance that Americans are being conditioned to accept.

Once Americans accept that certain people are entitled to fewer rights because of who they are, what they believe or whom they support, they have already begun dismantling the constitutional protections on which their own freedoms depend.

The question, then, is not merely whether government officials have overstepped their authority, but whether Americans are willing to hold them accountable when they do.

The Constitution is not a political manifesto, a campaign slogan, or a convenient weapon to be wielded against one’s opponents.

It is the law of the land.

And every public official who takes an oath to support and defend it has an obligation to honor that oath, even when doing so interferes with political ambitions, party loyalties or the demands of those in power.

The oath is not to the president. It is not to Congress. It is not to the Republican Party or the Democratic Party.

It is to the Constitution.

Yet somewhere along the way, Americans have allowed allegiance to political parties and personalities to become more important than allegiance to the constitutional principles that are supposed to govern us all.

Imagine what might happen if Americans stopped asking candidates whether they were sufficiently Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, loyal to Trump or opposed to him, and started asking whether they intended to uphold the Constitution?

What a refreshing—and revolutionary—concept.

The real test of constitutional principle is not whether we defend our rights when they are threatened. It is whether we are willing to defend the rights of others when doing so comes at a political cost.

Because a Constitution that protects only the people we like, the causes we support, and the political leaders we favor is no Constitution at all.

It is merely another instrument of power.

This is how a nation that prides itself on freedom can gradually become accustomed to tyranny: not because the Constitution has been abolished, but because the people charged with defending it have learned to make exceptions whenever it suits them.

Too often, Americans have confused political victory with constitutional government.

It is a dangerous bargain.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the powers we tolerate in the hands of politicians we trust will eventually pass to politicians who cannot be trusted. The constitutional protections we deny to others today may be the very protections we need tomorrow.

This is why independent thought matters.

A free people must be willing to question authority, challenge political orthodoxies, reject convenient falsehoods and hold their own leaders accountable—not merely when doing so is easy or popular, but especially when it is neither.

That does not make us disloyal. It makes us citizens rather than subjects.

And if demanding that government officials obey the Constitution makes us political outcasts, perhaps political independence is not such a bad place to be.

After all, the real betrayal of America is not questioning those in power. It is surrendering our principles to keep them there.

Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

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Trump and Netanyahu Want to ‘Finish the Job’ on Iran

2026-10-22T09:27:27.842-04:00

By Philip Giraldi - October 22, 2026 at 08:09AM

If one were seeking to create something like a modern-day folk tale based on current realities and having the theme of “good versus evil” there are any number of real-life narratives available that could be exploited to invite speculation on actual environments that might have served as models for the fiction. I have found much of the bizarre and blood-soaked evil relationship between the United States and Israel, which serves no US interest at all, to be one such arrangement in which two countries have through their own behavior become the most hated in the world. They have successfully established an odd partnership based largely on a common view of which other nations they hate and would like to destroy.

One must consider the monstrous joined-at-the-hip relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv, which is likely soon to become a true military and policy partnership by act of Congress. It will leverage the already existing ability of tiny Israel to manipulate and dominate the large and powerful United States. And there is also something else that should be reckoned with in the arrangement, and that is melding of the desire of the two countries to dominate not only their neighbors but also far beyond that. One can cite the aberrations in behavior that reveal how neither government wants to get along with other nations except in those rare cases where America and the Jewish state are accepted and even honored in spite of not being bound by any rules, decency or even democratic norms.

A prime example of how the completely murderous pathology that guides both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has come to dominate the relationship surfaced last week when Trump endorsed Netanyahu in the upcoming Israeli election. It was a case of two completely evil men finding common ground to congratulate themselves and advance their respective careers, which nearly all of the rest of the world would like to terminate!

Both men are in trouble with their respective electorates in large part because their obsession with endlessly killing anyone annoying be it in the Caribbean or Gaza, has become suspect, largely because the killing is without any actual objective and no real good comes out of the process. This is particularly true for voters in the US who have suffered the bullying by Israel and its domestic Lobby and also bear the tax burden and shortages that are the only fruit that falls from the trees of the conflicts. In Israel the equation is somewhat different as 90 percent of the Jewish voters want to eradicate even more Muslims and Christians and fully support a new Prime Minister who will kill even more of the vermin.

Observe what a brain dead Trump has to say about his good buddy Netanyahu in a shared phone call in which they first exchanged pledges that they would soon “finish the job,” the “job” in question being the “extermination” of Iran and most particularly its government. Bibi told Trump “Donald, we have a job to finish. You said it, and we’ll finish it together. We’ll finish it, and no one else will do it.” Bibi explained later how “I have spoken about this with President Trump more than once, including the day before yesterday… Finishing the job means bringing down the terrorist regime in Iran. It is the head of this poisonous octopus. You cut it off, and it will fall. We will also have peace with Lebanon. We must complete the elimination of the Iranian regime — that is the primary objective.”

Trump then responded in kind, telling Netanyahu that “You’re a warrior, and you’ve been treated unfairly by your country and from some others … but you’re a great warrior, and we will prove that. We will prove that very soon. I think you’re terrific, Bibi … You’re the man I want by my side, Bibi.” On Truth Social Trump later elaborated how “Bibi Netanyahu has been a Great Warrior Prime Minister and an even greater Partner for Peace in combatting the Islamic Republic of Iran.” He is “Strong, Brave, and Brilliant, the kind of Partner that the United States of America is demanding of Israel, a Country for which it has done so much.”

Clearly Netanyahu wants to get reelected to stay out of jail for corruption, apart from anything else, and he knows that unconditional support from the United States is essential to achieve that end and keep the wars in Lebanon, Syria and Iran going. What the two monsters were pledging was the total destruction of a nation of 90 million people that prior to the war initiated by Israel and the US had not threatened in any way either nation. That means it was per the Geneva Convention a war crime and besides which it is a violation of the War Powers Act and the US Constitution that Trump had sworn to support. Israel was admittedly the driving force behind the war against Iran, which has done huge damage to the world economy, because it saw the country as a political-military competitor in the Middle East region and Netanyahu was able to convince a stupid and willfully ignorant Trump that the war would be over in a week or two, a walk-over.

In a move that is being interpreted as an additional American support for Netanyahu in the upcoming election, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made an unannounced visit to Israel on Monday and met with the Prime Minister. The talks reportedly took place at the Ovda Air Base in southern Israel, where US refueling planes and fighter jets are deployed. Hegseth also met with some US troops. As Netanyahu and President Trump have discussed the possibility of restarting the full-scale bombing campaign against Iran the appearance and timing of the Hegseth visit, as he is the strongest supporter of resuming strikes on Iran within the administration, suggests that the war will soon be resuming.

Beyond the depressing likelihood that the war against Iran will soon start up again, there is the language employed by Trump, which as usual is inane. So Bibi is a “great warrior”? That comes from a draft dodger who avoided US military service in 1968 not for any moral reason but because it was inconvenient for him so his father arranged for a Jewish doctor to fake the records for a medical deferment. Trump had “bone spurs,” a condition largely unheard of in the real world before Trump came up with it on paper. And now the draft dodger is praising a “great warrior” who sends his men and women out to shoot three year olds as part of a regime that has been killing children systematically and without any consequences since the conflict with Gaza began.

And, unfortunately, the bad news is still coming. There is no doubt Trump has been the most servile president in US history when it comes to his constant supporting Israel even when it carries out genocide and kills American citizens. Trump has never failed to obey Netanyahu, but, it must be observed, he has only done slightly more so than Biden and the Democrats did when they preceded him in office. So one should have doubts that a possible change-over in the US Congress and Senate, where Israeli flags can be seen flying in some of the offices, is going to make much difference when it comes to the United States “standing with our best friend and closest ally Israel.”

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

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Some Pinocchios are Criticizing President Trump for Saying ‘Shylock’

2026-10-21T20:27:37.126-04:00

By Adam Dick - October 21, 2026 at 04:51PM

The name of Shylock, a character in William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice has long been embraced in the English language as a means of referring to charging high interest for loans or engaging in business ruthlessly. That second meaning also applies to the name Scrooge from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carrol. “Scrooge” may refer as well to disliking people or their pursuit or attainment of happiness.

These are two examples of names from fiction and religious texts that have entered the English language — in various parts of speech — as shorthand for something related to the named character or individual. Other examples include Babbitt, Chicken Little, Hercules, Judas, Pollyanna, and Solomon. Names even come into use in this nature from history. Consider “Napoleon” as an example. Despite the many things the French leader did in his life, the primary thing his name is associated with in this manner relates to him having been short. Likely you have heard a “Napoleon complex” mentioned.

What was the religion and ethnicity of each of these characters and individuals? Most people may not know the answer for the majority offhand. And that ignorance in no way matters for understanding what the use of the names conveys. If you knew Hercules was a polytheist and Solomon was a Hebrew, that matters naught because the use of their names is in regard to nothing having to do with religion or ethnicity. The use of their names is a reference, respectively, to strength and wisdom.

Some people are displaying their linguistic ignorance or doing a Pinocchio (lying) in asserting that President Donald Trump made an antisemitic comment in a speech on Monday. The comment was part of Trump’s effort to defend United States Sente member Roger Marshall (R-KS) from criticism of Marshall for Marshall’s effort to recover fees he said were owed by his medical patients. Trump said that critics had charged that Marshall “was some kind of a Shylock-type guy.”

That’s it. Of course, this is a standard use of the term Shylock in the English language, having all to do with business practices and nothing to do with religion or ethnicity. Nevertheless, people are jumping up and exclaiming that Trump’s comment constitutes an antisemitic incident given that the character Shylock in Shakespeare’s play is a Jewish person.

As is typical of coverage in much media, USA Today reporter Emily R. Condon wrote in a Tuesday news article regarding the matter that Trump “reinvoked an antisemitic slur.” While it is fine to write a news article about how some people claim Trump did such, it is entirely inappropriate to write a news article purporting to state that it is a fact that he did such.

Condon’s article further notes that Trump had also said “Shylock” in July of 2025 in relation to some bankers. Condon reported that Trump defended using the word by stating, “The meaning of shylock is somebody that’s a money lender at high rates.”

Yup. Even if you don’t like Trump, it is hard to argue that he is wrong about that.

But, there are people and organizations that are on a mission to inflate the incidences of antisemitism by declaring antisemitism present in many places where it is not. Two of those organizations — the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Council of Public Affairs — were quoted by Condon to support the notion that Trump’s mention of “Shylock” this year and last is indisputably antisemitic.

It is groups like this that are turning the charge of antisemitism into a joke by automatically applying it to comments like Trump’s and even any criticisms of the government of Israel.

Notably, the Trump administration itself has been a big proponent in making false antisemitism allegations as well, as demonstrated repeatedly in its crackdown on speech critical of the Israel government at colleges and beyond. Nonetheless, the proper course is to call baloney on the false claims of antisemitism, even those aimed at people who themselves are responsible for the flinging of such false claims.

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Higher Oil Prices Are Likely To Stay

2026-10-21T14:27:43.070-04:00

By Moon of Alabama - October 21, 2026 at 07:27AM

Last months the Trump administration was loudly claiming that Iran had lost control of the Strait of Hormuz. Some ‘experts’ even claimed that the flow of oil was back at a pre-war level.

Both of those claims were not true but short term blimps within volatile data. Attacks on ships passing through the Strait have increased. The flow of crude oil continues to be below the pre-war level. The draw down of nearly empty reserves is ongoing. The price of oil continues to rise:

Brent crude futures for December delivery, the global pricing benchmark, were marked 1.6% higher at $111.30 a barrel on Tuesday, a 13.7% gain on the month and working toward the highest closing price since May 19.

This is no longer a temporary problem as long term prices are rising too:

Oil traders are increasingly pricing the battle over the Strait of Hormuz as the new normal. Futures contracts for brent crude in December 2027 are now close to $90 a barrel, the highest ever and a sharp departure from even a month ago.

Further increasing the price for crude oil are the higher costs of transport by sea. Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCC), used for long distance transport, have become very expensive to rent:

VLCC rates from the Gulf to China initially jumped from around $4/bbl to $17/bbl, before easing to $11–12/bbl through April–July. The expiry of the US-Iran ceasefire in August triggered another steep increase, taking freight to $33/bbl by late September and pushing current landed costs from the Middle Eastern Gulf to around $140/bbl in China. For Japan and South Korean freight, lifted landed costs were even higher, to around $145/bbl.

Alternative loading points have offered uneven relief. Freight from Saudi Arabia’s Yanbu terminal to China trended within the $6–7/bbl bandwidth after the initial wartime spike, but Houthi restrictions on Saudi cargoes through Bab el-Mandeb drove it to $28/bbl by mid-October, bringing landed costs to around$140/bbl. Saudi loadings at Yanbu have since slowed down to 1.6-1.8 million b/d (half the March-July average) following intensified Houthi attacks on energy infrastructure along the Red Sea coast, with the Gulf handling the bulk of exports.

Some 15% of the 1,000 strong global VLCC fleet is sitting in the Gulf of Oman where it is waiting to be filled by ship-to-ship transport with oil that has passed on smaller tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Any delay in the Strait has thereby a direct influence on VLCC availability elsewhere. VLCC oil traffic from Brazil to China or West-Africa to India sees similar high rates.

Even more affected by the situation in the Middle East are hydrocarbon products. Diesel and jet-fuel are scarce.

After war damage to their refineries Middle Eastern countries have stopped to export of these. Russia and China have blocked their exports to be able to feed their local demand. Refineries in the U.S. and Europe are at the limit of their capacities. In total some 5 million bl/d are missing.

The situation for natural gas and fertilizer is even worse:

Qatar, the second largest exporter of liquified natural gas, shipped 18 cargoes of liquefied natural gas in the war’s first six months, against 509 a year earlier, and damage at Ras Laffan has removed around 17 percent of its capacity, a loss that would outlast any ceasefire. The Gulf normally supplies about one-third of the world’s traded urea, and agricultural economists warn that next year’s fertilizer buying season may prove more exposed than this one.

Higher energy prices for a longer time will increase inflation in western countries. Central banks, hampered by their ideology, will raise interest rates. (This even as this is unlikely to influence the effects of a supply shock on prices.) Already over-indebted companies, consumers and states will have to cut back on spending. A global recession sets in.

There will be no relief in any of these markets until the conflict in the Middle East is resolved:

Normalization will not take place until there is a durable diplomatic agreement that allows confidence to return. This point was made recently by the CEO of Saudi Arabia’s state oil firm. New Trump administration initiatives such as easing sanctions on Russian diesel or the shadow fleet provide too little actual volume or capacity to make any meaningful impact on the dynamic.

It is therefore increasingly evident that US fortunes in this war cannot be measured by daily tanker transits. Increased flows through the Strait could reasonably be considered a tactical victory that lessens Iran’s immediate leverage and even reduces the possibility of a major increase in oil prices from their current baseline. It would be a misreading of the situation, however, to see this as a strategic victory that makes serious diplomacy unnecessary or allows the US to dictate terms.

It is unlikely that the U.S. is able, or willing, to sue for peace in the Gulf. I find it more likely that the Trump administration, in cooperation with Israel, will launch another violent attempt to bring Iran (and the Houthi in Yemen?) to their knees.

The chances for achieving that are minuscule.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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Much Ado About Russia

2026-10-20T10:27:30.757-04:00

By Jacob G. Hornberger - October 20, 2026 at 08:58AM

Right-wing and left-wing interventionists and interventionist mainstream-press commentators are up in arms over President Trump’s decision to ease economic sanctions against Russia in connection with the Russian government’s agreement to supply diesel fuel to the United States. The notion is that nothing — not even the midterms — must be permitted to interfere with the Cold War II racket that holds that Russia is an aggressor nation that is hell-bent on conquering the world and, therefore, that it is necessary to target the Russian populace with severe impoverishment and even death by starvation or illness with ever-more economic sanctions.

Central to this racket, of course, is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The notion was that Russia was on the march. As soon as it conquered Ukraine, US officials maintained, it would re-conquer Eastern Europe, and then Western Europe and England, and then make its way to South America, Central America, Mexico, and finally the United States, all of which Russia would reconstitute into a new Soviet Union of the world. In other words, Russia is coming to get us again.

The Cold War I racket was used to justify the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state, a type of governmental structure that came with omnipotent powers, including the power of orchestrating and committing state-sponsored assassinations. The racket enabled the national-security branch of the government to quickly become the most powerful branch of the federal government, one to which the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court decided to defer.

The Cold War I racket was also used to justify an anti-communist crusade, during which the US national-security establishment targeted suspected communists, both here and in foreign countries, with destruction of reputation or even with assassination.

Beginning in 1989, the Cold War racket came to a sudden and unexpected end. The Berlin Wall was torn down, Germany was reunified, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and Russian troops withdrew from Eastern Europe.

Officials in the US national-security branch — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — naturally were extremely concerned. Suddenly, they had lost the justification for their existence and for the racket that they were certain would go on forever. People were talking about a “peace dividend,” which would involve a deep reduction in national-security-state spending and maybe even a restoration of America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.

To replace the old racket with a new racket, new official enemies were developed, such as “the terrorists,” “the Muslims,” “the drug dealers,” and “the illegals.” They were all coming to get us, or so they said. Everyone remained deathly afraid.

But the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA were not about to let go of their old Cold War racket so easily. After providing Soviet officials with assurances during the negotiations over German reunification that NATO would not expand eastward, US officials proceeded to do precisely that. NATO began marching eastward, absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact and moving inexorably toward Russia’s borders, knowing full well what Russia’s reaction would be.

That was what the threat to absorb Ukraine into NATO ultimately accomplished — provoking Russia into invading Ukraine in an effort to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. US officials had been warned for years that NATO expansion, especially into Ukraine, could produce precisely such a confrontation. Yet they proceeded anyway.

Voila! The national-security branch had its old Cold War racket back, albeit in a revised format. The Russians are coming to get us … again (along with the terrorists, the Muslims, the drug dealers, and the illegals). The big fly in the ointment, however, is that Russia has been unable to conquer Ukraine. That’s, of course, a problem. If Russia can’t even conquer Ukraine, how is it going to be able to conquer Eastern Europe, Western Europe, England, South America, Central America, Mexico, and then the United States? Whoops!

Never mind that inconvenient problem. In the eyes of national-security statists, it is imperative that we continue hewing to the official narrative. Russia is coming to get us, just like before. We need ever-increasing budgets for the national-security establishment and its ever-growing army of voracious fat-cat “defense” contractors. Who cares if the United States goes bankrupt in the process? We need to again be kept “safe” from the Reds — I mean, the Russians (and from the terrorists, Muslims, drug dealers, and illegals.)

Oh, and don’t forget the Cuban Reds! They are coming to get us too. No doubt the right-wing and left-wing interventionists and the interventionist mainstream press, all of whom remain steadfast acolytes of the national-security establishment, are scared to death that President Trump might lift the old Cold War embargo and the new Cold War blockade against the Cuban people as well. Of course, fat chance of that happening given Trump’s own interventionist mindset.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Europe’s Diesel Winter Is Coming, and Washington Is About to Make It Worse

2026-10-19T10:27:36.279-04:00

By Larry C. Johnson - October 19, 2026 at 09:18AM

Saudi Arabia went looking for allies against Ansar Allah, and so far it has gotten statements of support. Egypt has declared its readiness to back the Kingdom, but its statement does not commit to any military involvement. Pakistan and Turkey have pledged troops under the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement signed in August, but both governments say their forces will play “a supportive rather than active combat role” against the Houthis. I have watched coalition pledges like these for decades. Cairo has not forgotten its war in Yemen in the 1960s. Islamabad has its own border with Afghanistan and a restless India to think about. Neither is going to send its soldiers into the mountains of Saada, so Riyadh will be fighting this one essentially alone.

That matters because Ansar Allah has shown it can reach the Kingdom’s economic core. In the past two weeks the Houthis have struck at Aramco facilities near Riyadh, the Shedgum gas plant in the Ghawar corridor, and the Tanajib oil facility on the Gulf coast. They hit an administrative building at Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters, the company’s historic nerve center. Now they are reportedly targeting Yanbu.

Riyadh says little about the damage, and Aramco’s chief executive insists the company’s system is intact and can be restored to its full 12 million barrels a day within days. I don’t believe it. Karl Miller, who is on the ground in the region, tells me the Saudis have suffered significant damage. That matches what we can see from the outside: a coalition that keeps announcing interceptions while fires keep burning at the targets. Repairing gas-processing trains, stabilization units and refinery components is not a matter of days. After the 2019 Abqaiq-Khurais strike, Saudi output fell by 5.7 million barrels a day, and it took about two months to recover from a single attack on an undefended site. This time the attacks are sustained and repeated, and the repair crews are working under fire.

Yanbu is the crucial target. With Iran’s navy declaring the Strait of Hormuz closed except to vessels it authorizes, Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea terminal at Yanbu, fed by the East-West Pipeline, is the Kingdom’s escape route to world markets. Flows through Hormuz fell to 11.62 million barrels a day in the week to October 13, against a baseline of 17.15 million. That bypass is already badly damaged. The East-West Pipeline is designed to carry up to 7 million barrels a day across the peninsula, pushed along by 11 pumping stations. According to my sources in the region, four of those 11 stations have been severely damaged and are not functioning. This did not come out of nowhere. In September, an attack damaged pumping facilities and knocked the pipeline largely out of service, and regional officials told the Associated Press repairs would take three to five weeks. Aramco got the line back up, and it has been hit again. A pipeline missing more than a third of its pumping stations cannot move anything close to its rated volume, however much crude is waiting in the Eastern Province.

Meanwhile Ansar Allah has seized Greater and Lesser Hanish islands and Perim inside the Bab al-Mandab, putting it astride the very sea lanes that tankers leaving Yanbu must use. Damaged production, a crippled pipeline and a contested Red Sea together mean the world loses Saudi barrels three times over: some cannot be produced, some cannot reach the coast, and what reaches the coast cannot be shipped safely.

Diesel is where this hits hardest. Diesel moves the trucks, tractors, trains and ships that carry everything else, and Europe is one of the world’s dominant diesel importers. The International Energy Agency’s October report is blunt. Middle Eastern fuel exports are below half of pre-war levels, and diesel markets “will remain tight well into 2027.” The IEA does not expect lost diesel stocks to be replenished before the second half of 2027. Diesel benchmarks topped $200 a barrel in September and remain nearly double the price of crude, which is itself around $108 for Brent, up more than 75 percent from a year ago. Ukrainian drones keep hitting Russian refineries and export terminals, so Europe’s other traditional source of middle distillates is also impaired.

So when people ask me when diesel supply returns to normal, my answer is not soon. The IEA’s timeline, which does not account for sustained damage to Saudi facilities, points to the second half of 2027 at the earliest. A real recovery is at least a year away, and probably longer.

Don’t expect the Trump-Putin diesel deal to change that. As I have argued before, the Russian barrels are a rounding error. Moscow has cleared 500,000 tons for export, roughly 3.7 million barrels, with no shipping timeline. Even if every tranche Trump announced is delivered, about 4.8 million tons in total, that comes to roughly 36 million barrels spread over months. The first 300,000 tons equals less than one day of American transport diesel demand, and the full program equals less than four. Measured against the world’s lost Middle Eastern distillate exports, it is negligible. It also depends on Russian refineries that Ukrainian drones continue to hit, and on sanctioned tankers to carry it. The deal may make for a good headline. It will not move the supply curve, and so it will not bring down the price of diesel.

Europe is already paying the political price. On Saturday, France saw its worst rioting in years. The CGT union estimated more than 500,000 people in the streets protesting the cost of gasoline, energy and food, and more than 270 were arrested. In Milan, a demonstration against wars and rising living costs ended with barricades on fire and shops looted. Protests over the cost of living have spread to Belgium and Portugal. Albania has had five straight days of violent clashes in Tirana. The immediate trigger there is anger at Prime Minister Edi Rama, but it is part of the same continental mood of people who feel their governments have stopped listening.

This is the context in which Washington is considering new strikes on Iran. The ceasefire collapsed in July and has not been rebuilt. Every round of escalation since then has raised the price of oil, and each one has given Tehran a reason to tighten its grip on Hormuz and its allies in Yemen a reason to widen their target list. Another U.S. campaign will not reopen the Strait. It will further close it. It will push diesel prices back toward their September records just as Europe heads into winter, when heating oil demand peaks.

American policymakers seem to believe the costs of this war can be exported. They cannot. Europe’s economies were already weak before the war. Factories that run on diesel-powered logistics, farmers who need diesel for the harvest, and households that heat with fuel oil cannot absorb another price spike. The riots in Paris and Milan are a warning of what a long diesel shortage does to a society. If Washington widens this war, it will be choosing to make that shortage longer and deeper, and Europe will pay the bill on its streets.

Reprinted with permission from Sonar21.

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Tucker Carlson—A Really Courageous Journalist

2026-10-19T10:27:32.666-04:00

By Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. - October 19, 2026 at 08:00AM

Tucker Carlson is the most courageous journalist on the national scene in this Country today.

He has marched to the beat of a different drum on Covid, the January 6th protests, genocide in Gaza, immigration, the wars in Iraq, Iran and Ukraine and lately has taken on the President of the United States, and has been right in every instance.

In the process, the has become a hero to the overwhelming majority of Republicans and conservatives under 50 and even a significant number of older conservative Republicans like me.

He was the first national broadcaster to fight against the mass hysteria over the Covid vaccine. When everyone was rushing and almost begging to get vaccinated, Carlson expressed doubts, raised questions, and interviewed experts who pointed out problems.

Now we know the world was rushed into taking a very ineffective vaccine and misled into believing that you wouldn’t get Covid if you just got the shot. Then, when so many who were vaccinated got sick anyway, the propaganda quickly was changed to say that those who took the shot would not have as severe a case.

Those who opposed the hysteria were called “vaccine deniers” as if they were in the same category as those who denied the Holocaust and thus should be ostracized.

If people had followed Carlson’s lead, millions of children would not have been harmed by the closing of schools and the Federal Reserve would not have found that 200,000 small businesses went under because of Covid restrictions and shutdowns.

We now know, too, that the Covid vaccine was more about money for Big Pharma than it was about concern for public health and that it created at least nine new billionaires among pharmaceutical executives.

Carlson was courageous enough to expose the lies being told and coverup going on by Israeli officials, our Ambassador for rather than to Israel, Mike Huckabee, and the hosts at Fox News about the genocide in Gaza.

He interviewed people who gave firsthand reports about how Israel, with complicity by our government, was limiting and/or denying food to starving Palestinians and even at times killing men who were simply trying to get food for their families.

He hosted Dr. Nick Maynard, a British surgeon, who testified about severe medical shortages, noting children had to undergo amputations without anesthesia, and according to AI, detailed “the systematic destruction of hospitals and the detention of hundreds of Palestinian healthcare workers.”

Carlson himself went to Doha, Qatar to visit Gaza refugees and child amputees and orphans and condemned Israel’s restrictions of proper medical care and supplies.

Carlson was the first and at times the only national reporter to show how exaggerated and distorted the reports were about the January 6th protests at the U.S. Capitol. The videos showed that almost all the protesters were peaceful and simply walked through doors held open for them by Capitol police officers and just toured the building like millions of others do every year.

He also reported that many of the protesters were being denied bail and held longer and under worse conditions then we sometimes hold and treat murderers and rapists.

Carlson was possibly the first or at least one of the very few national journalists who has called for a temporary stop or moratorium on all immigration. He also has been the leader in reporting on the many billions of Medicare, childcare, and food fraud by the Somali immigrants in Minnesota.

He also has pointed out that the Democrats have wanted or at least allowed more immigration because their party seems to lose more American-born voters each year. Mayor Mamdani, for example, won 62 percent of the foreign-born voters in his election.

Carlson at first supported the war in Iraq which began in 2003, but by the very next year said he was “ashamed” that he had done so and said he was misled by neocons and the conservative establishment.

He has been a vocal critic of all the mega billions we have given to Ukraine, and he had the guts to go to Russia to interview Putin in the face of severe criticism from the holier than thou national media.

He has been a leading voice for non-interventionist, America First policies since 2004, and this led him to support President Trump rather than the Far Left socialist, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 presidential election.

But he broke with the President after he said he begged Trump not to go to war in Iran the day before it started on Feb 28. Once again, Carlson was right. He, along with other national podcasters such as Judge Napolitano, Megan Kelly and Joe Rogan have pointed out many times that this is Netanyahu’s war and is putting Israel First.

Now, unless all the polls are wrong, the Congress will be controlled by the Democrats after the midterm elections. The Democratic Party is a socialist party today, when people all over the world are desperately trying to flee socialism. I f the President had listened to Carlson, almost everything would have been like it was before we got into this stupid, very unnecessary war.

Years ago, I was watching Tucker Carlson on Fox when he blasted a Jewish billionaire named Bill Ackman. I remember wondering then how much longer he would be able to stay on the Fox network.

Much of the national media-CBS, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, TicToc News, Fox, and more-is under ownership that will not allow or will downplay criticism of Israel. Those who have national radio shows know they have to play the game as do all the members of Congress who have accepted contributions from AIPAC.

Tucker Carlson steps on very wealthy, very elitist, very powerful toes almost every day. I do not know how long someone as “politically incorrect “ as Tucker Carlson can stay on the air. I hope it is for a very long time.

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Vice President J.D. Vance’s Deceptive ‘Antiwar’ Campaign Speech

2026-10-17T15:27:33.675-04:00

By Adam Dick - October 17, 2026 at 02:59PM

J.D. Vance is approaching the halfway point of his term as vice president in an administration that has committed the United States to wars in locations from Ukraine to Venezuela to Somalia to Iran and beyond. All the while, the administration has threatened sending the military into other places across the world including Mexico, Greenland, and Cuba. In short, this presidential administration is fully committed to a warmongering agenda.

Over his 14 years as a United States House of Representatives member, Mike Rogers similarly established his reputation as a committed advocate for US warmongering across the world. This Michigan Republican and the presidential administration are two peas in a pod when it comes to supporting an aggressive empire.

President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential campaign portrayed himself as the peace candidate in the race, a tactic that may have brought him the votes needed to obtain a close electoral victory. But, once elected, Trump turned on a dime, becoming the war president who delivers turmoil, destruction, and death. Through this, Vance has stood by Trump in support.

Given this context, it seems almost unimaginable that Vance would stump in Michigan for electing Rogers to the US Senate by asserting that Vance and Rogers are supporters of peace. Yet, that is what Vance did in a Monroe, Michigan speech on Thursday. With the “peace candidate” ploy having worked for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, Vance audaciously gave it a try in the Michigan speech despite it being divorced from reality.

Vance, in his speech, framed the race between Rogers and Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed as a battle “between politicians obsessed with foreign causes and leaders who remember that their first duty is to fight for the people right here at home.” Vance’s claim is that he and Rogers are among the good “leaders” instead of the bad “politicians” in this comparison. But, Rogers, who relentlessly supported US intervention abroad as a House member and in his chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee is the quintessential politician obsessed with foreign causes. And it is crystal clear that over the last two years the Trump administration has, in its obsessive pursuit of foreign causes, sacrificed the interests of the American people, including by substantially increasing the national debt and driving the cost of fuel sky-high.

Vance proceeded in his speech to declare that the Democratic opponent Rogers faces in the race is “absolutely obsessed with conflicts occurring thousands of miles away in the Middle East.” “He is obsessed,” continued Vance, “with the state of Israel and with Gaza.” This, of course, is an obsession of the Trump administration that started the Iran War jointly with Israel and has been giving Israel enormous financial, military equipment, and intelligence aid to support Israel’s attacks on not just Gaza but also other places including Iran and Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Rogers, a staunch supporter of the US aiding Israel, has asked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — the most prominent organization in the “Israel Lobby” in America — to not directly fund advertisements for his campaign while he travels the country to attend AIPAC organized fundraisers. Rogers is trying to keep under wraps that he is what Vance says his opponent is. Will voters understand the reality or be tricked by the subterfuge?

Why did Vance go through with making claims regarding US foreign policy in his speech that fly in the face of reality? The answer may be found in a comment by Rogers’s Democratic opponent in a Senate election debate held the week before. In that debate, El-Sayed stated in regard to Rogers: “So, it’s just inconsistent to me to be running for Senate from Michigan when you’re more focused on what’s happening to a foreign government than you are focused on what’s happening to folks right here in Michigan.” The foreign government referenced in El-Sayed’s comment is Israel. Instead of trying to give a nuanced counterargument to this charge from the debate, Vance went in his speech with the old standby of “I’m rubber and you’re glue; whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.” In the process, Vance ended up looking ridiculous to anyone with basic knowledge of the foreign policy records of Rogers and the Trump administration.

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The Politics of Denial: When Americans Stop Seeing the Warning Signs

2026-10-17T12:27:28.680-04:00

By John W. And Nisha Whitehead - October 17, 2026 at 10:25AM

The spectacle of public executions. Deadly military strikes on foreign countries. Innocent civilian lives lost to war. Aggressive ICE raids. Government officials accused of using their powers to intimidate political opponents. Public office increasingly entangled with private financial interests. Government leaders who glorify violence, spew hatred, stir up racial prejudice, provoke civil unrest, and stoke discontent.

This is what it looks like when a nation loses its way.

When cruelty is mistaken for courage, vengeance for justice, and the taking of human life for a demonstration of strength.

When government officials tell you not to believe your own eyes and ears about the state of the world around you, when they insist that the truth is a lie and the lie is truth, you’ve stumbled into a dystopian reality in which, as John Lennon rightly concluded, the government is “being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.”

When so-called Christians and self-professed defenders of morality insist that we must accept the lesser of two evils based on exaggerated fears of what might happen if their political opponents gain power, rather than confront the abuses unfolding before our eyes, remember this: the lesser of two evils is still evil.

This is not simply about Donald Trump.

The machinery of the American police state has been assembled over decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Presidents have expanded executive authority, waged undeclared wars, authorized drone killings, built surveillance networks, militarized domestic policing, and invoked national security to justify extraordinary powers.

What makes the present moment so troubling is the extent to which the public is encouraged to accept increasingly aggressive exercises of government power as necessary demonstrations of strength and resolve.

The Constitution was never intended to protect only the innocent, the popular, the patriotic, or the politically acceptable. Its restraints on government power matter most when the government is dealing with people whom society has already condemned.

Yet what happens when the public becomes so accustomed to government overreach, corruption and brutality that it no longer recognizes them as warning signs? What becomes of a constitutional republic when its leaders and citizens stop asking whether government actions are lawful, justified or necessary, and concern themselves only with whether those actions punish their enemies, advance their political interests or preserve their sense of security?

We are witnessing a political culture in which demanding due process for an accused criminal is treated as defending criminality, questioning a military strike is equated with sympathy for the enemy, and opposing government cruelty is portrayed as weakness.

The government doesn’t have to abolish the Constitution outright when it can persuade the public that certain people should no longer be entitled to its protections.

That is how constitutional rights cease to be rights at all and become privileges granted or withdrawn at the government’s discretion.

And that is how a population becomes conditioned to accept the unacceptable.

We’re living in two worlds.

There’s the world we see—or are made to see—and then there’s the one we sense and occasionally catch a glimpse of, which bears little resemblance to the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by those in power and amplified through an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

All is not as it seems.

Monsters with human faces walk among us.

Some of them wield extraordinary government power.

This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, released in November 1988, which remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.

Best known for his horror film Halloween, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.

Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.

In They Live, two migrant workers discover that the world is being subliminally controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite.

All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by hidden messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.

Sound familiar?

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada, played by the late Roddy Piper, discovers a pair of special sunglasses that he sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through Nada’s lenses, the wealthy and powerful who appear human are revealed as monsters exploiting the citizenry.

Likewise, seemingly mundane advertisements conceal subliminal, authoritarian messages. Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” Money proclaims “THIS IS YOUR GOD.” Other hidden messages reinforce the same demands: CONFORM. SUBMIT. STAY ASLEEP. WATCH TV. DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY. NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT.

This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the workings of an authoritarian state.

A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.

In this way, the message of They Live provides an apt analogy for the distorted vision of life in the American police state.

The danger is not simply that powerful interests might conceal what they’re doing. It’s that they can operate in plain sight, confident that enough people will refuse to see—or refuse to care.

For too long, Americans have been persuaded to barter their freedoms for promises of security, rationalizing government wrongdoing because they are told the alternatives would be worse.

But no matter how you rationalize it, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

The warning signs are unfolding in courtrooms, detention facilities, government offices, financial disclosures and daily news reports. And still, too many people choose to look away.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.

The greatest danger is not that the monsters have become so adept at hiding among us. It is that we have become so conditioned to their presence, so accustomed to their abuses, and so willing to excuse their corruption that we no longer recognize them for what they are.

Wake up, America.

If they live—the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords—it is only because “we the people” sleep.

Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

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A Culture of Death

2026-10-15T10:27:27.213-04:00

By Andrew P. Napolitano - October 15, 2026 at 09:29AM

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
–Voltaire (1694-1778)

A government that claims the authority to kill persons after they have been subdued, disarmed, tried, convicted and confined in prison has made a startling claim about the nature of political power. It claims not merely the authority to protect the innocent from violence, but the authority to inflict violence when no immediate threat exists.

It claims that the taking of human life, which it rightly condemns when committed by private individuals, somehow becomes morally permissible when committed by government agents. This is the fundamental contradiction of the death penalty: Government killing the helpless protects the living.

The Declaration of Independence offers a radically different understanding of government. All human beings possess natural rights, and governments are instituted to protect those rights. Government’s just powers derive solely from the consent of the governed. Government is not the owner of our lives. It is our creature, established to protect rights that precede its existence. Its authority is limited, and it cannot legitimately claim powers that the people whom it governs do not themselves possess.

Individuals possess a natural right to defend themselves against an unlawful attack. They may use necessary and proportionate force to repel an aggressor. Because the people possess that right, they can delegate it to the government, including to a military for defensive purposes. Government’s legitimate authority to wage defensive war is a moral and legal derivation of the people’s preexisting right of self-preservation.

But what right does an individual possess to kill a defeated enemy who has surrendered, is disarmed and locked in a jail cell? What right does a private person possess to execute a prisoner who no longer presents an immediate threat? None. The right of self-defense does not include the right to kill a helpless captive as retribution for a past offense.

And if the people do not possess that right, how can they delegate it to government? The principle is straightforward: Government cannot legitimately acquire, through the consent of the governed, a power that the governed themselves do not possess.

Confinement protects society. Execution reveals the state’s claim to omnipotence.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plans to have a convicted defendant executed publicly and livestream the killing represent a particularly repulsive vision of state power. If implemented, such a spectacle would not demonstrate the strength of American civilization. It would advertise its moral depravity. It would turn the deliberate destruction of a human being into political entertainment, with the machinery of government serving as producer and promoter.

There is something profoundly disturbing about officials who would turn a human death into a public performance. What lesson would such a livestream teach? That the state is entitled to kill, that its violence deserves an audience, and that adults and children should watch with approval as the life of a powerless, wheelchair-bound prisoner is extinguished by military sharpshooters? That the proper response to wrongdoing is not the restraint of power but the celebration of its most lethal expression?

This is a cruel and unusual descent into barbarism, a glorification of government killing and an invitation to cultivate a culture of fear and death. Civilization advances when it restrains violence, even in response to terrible crimes. Barbarism advances when violence becomes an instrument of public spectacle and collective gratification.

The military’s involvement makes the proposal still more grotesque. The Department of Defense exists to defend the country against external threats, not to transform the execution of prisoners into a propaganda production. The armed forces should not be reduced to stagehands for a political morality play in which the government celebrates its power over a captive’s life.

A free society should be especially suspicious when government seeks to dramatize its capacity to kill. The Framers understood that all government power must be confined and limited, not worshiped. Publicly celebrated executions would encourage the opposite attitude: Reverence for the state’s ability to destroy rather than respect for its obligation to protect.

A government that wishes to demonstrate moral seriousness should protect the innocent, prosecute crime fairly, provide due process and confine dangerous offenders securely. Life imprisonment incapacitates a murderer without requiring society to pretend that killing is an act of healing. It also leaves open the possibility of correcting a wrongful conviction.

None of this diminishes the suffering of murder victims or their families. Their losses are profound, and their endless grief deserves compassion rather than political exploitation. But the state does not honor victims by imitating the violence that destroyed them. It honors them by establishing a system of justice that refuses to confuse vengeance with virtue.

The values underlying both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution reject a government with unlimited authority. The Framers established a limited government whose legitimacy depends on what was actually consented to by the governed. Consent is not a blank check, and a democratic majority cannot make every exercise of government power morally legitimate simply by funding it.

The death penalty transforms the government from the protector of life into its deliberate destroyer, then asks the public to call the destruction justice. A publicly streamed execution would take that contradiction to its obscene extreme, turning death into spectacle and state violence into pornographic entertainment.

A free people should reject this culture of death.

The measure of a civilized government is not how efficiently it kills a helpless prisoner, or how many spectators it can gather to watch. It is how faithfully it restrains its own power, even when anger, fear and the demand for vengeance make restraint politically inconvenient.

Government exists to protect our natural rights, not to become the final and unquestionable arbiter of who deserves to live. When the state claims that its right to kill is inherent and righteous, it demands a submission that no free people should grant.

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
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Are the United States and Israel in Decline-and-Fall Mode?

2026-10-15T10:27:26.566-04:00

By Philip Giraldi - October 15, 2026 at 08:00AM

Speculation is growing over the sustainability of the United States’ model of global dominance which emerged as Washington ended the Second World War as plausibly the sole superpower. That role was first tested in the Korean War, which produced something of a stalemate in a confrontation that included China, and led to a Ceasefire Agreement which is still in place to this day. More recently the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, even given the disastrous and pointless war in Vietnam, confirmed the US’s superior military, political and financial status, leading to an affirmation of American dominance as an essential element in global political stability in several initiated and mandated policy documents including in the statement of principles spelled out in 1990’s which was later published in September 2000 as the Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century: a Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The final elaboration of the policy was derived from the so-called “Wolfowitz Doctrine” which was the common referral to national defense guidance developed when Paul Wolfowitz, working for Vice President Dick Cheney, was Associate Secretary of Defense. The term is an informal version of the US Department of Defense’s Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) for the years 1994-9 dated February 18, 1992.

As the first DPG after the Cold War and first Gulf Wars ended and the draft described the United States as the world’s only superpower it made preventing the emergence (or re-emergence) of a global or regional competitor a top priority. This objective included preventing any hostile power’s dominance of strategically or resource rich important regions that could produce alternative sources of global power. It argued that that the US Military must remain sufficiently strong enough to deter possible competitors, retaining the ability to act unilaterally if necessary. The PNAC declaration called for a continuing global leadership role for the United States which implied the resort to preemptive war against adversaries when needed.

In promoting the new policy, the Project’s Statement of Principles document of June 1997 elaborated how “…America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests… We need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”

The statement was signed by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld, Peter Rodman, Elliot Abrams, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Aaron Friedberg, Donald Kagan, I Lewis Libby, and Norman Podhoretz among others. It was considered to be very “Israel friendly” subsequently and it, combined with the awesome and growing political and institutional power of the US Israeli Lobby, was used to justify US interventions in the Middle East during the following decades. Indeed, one might argue that Israel’s form of interaction with its neighbors and even with much of the world today was shaped by the numerous Jews and Israel firsters who participated in the drafting of the critical documents asserting Washington’s need to behave aggressively, to include its participation in conflicts that it would otherwise been able to avoid such as those occurring in the Middle East which were instigated by Israel’s promotion of its own interests just like is currently taking place with Iran.

What is important to note today is how the documents that were intended to guarantee American military supremacy including interventionism to maintain that edge appear to have taken hold of the President Donald J Trump administration, most particularly in the minds of the president himself and his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. So, what went wrong as the United States now appears to be losing on all fronts where it has opted for confrontation instead of negotiation? It is perhaps important to note that the geopolitical missteps are likely the result of a doctrine coming from a different world than 1991 with different means of assessing strength or weakness. Trump and Hegseth might well be perceived as dinosaurs heading for extinction during their own version of the Triassic Period and the country that they have so much abused might be heading for decline and fall. The question becomes “After the US falls, who will be there to pick up the pieces?”

And one might presume that America’s most protected client Israel, which would certainly be joined to the US as the world’s most hated nation, might also be heading in the same direction. The only difference being that Israel has declared that it will use its nuclear arsenal to take much of the world with it if it goes down, the so-called Samson Option. Israel has at least several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions from its submarine delivery capabilities. Most European capitals would certainly be targets for Israeli missiles and warplanes. Former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan served notice of what might come: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” A minority of Israeli leaders might try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible, but those in charge will surely have the capability to take part of the world down with them and that is precisely what will happen as Israel goes under. But before that happens a wave of millions of Jewish “refugees” will roll over the US and Europe primarily. They will insist on creating new nations just like they did to the Palestinians and likely will have their nuclear weapons with them as “insurance.”

Interestingly, Israel is also reported to be developing a biological weapon arsenal which is “ethnically targeting” selective meaning that it will kill only holders of certain DNA or ethnic characteristics, presumably killing those with majority Arab biology while sparing anyone with Jewish traits or characteristics. Interesting. I might be the easy way to “mow the lawn” of objectional foreigners as Israel’s leaders have frequently carried out in places like Gaza and Lebanon.

But it occurs to me that Israel will follow a slightly different pattern, namely disorienting the playing field by the use of false flag incidents that will encourage Americans and Europeans to support pro-Israel policies that are clearly not in their interest, and applying “Palestinian option” alternatives to reduce and then completely eliminate resistance to its own form of “global dominance.” That means stealing other people’s land while also systematically exterminating them, possibly with the biological “bombs. The process of emigrating is already underway among many mostly better educated Israelis who are already rapidly leaving an Israel under threat to recreate their exclusively Jewish ghettos and settlements in places like Crete, Greece and in South America. The local residents frequently complain about the abuse they receive from the newcomers but their governments suffer from the typical Zionist disease, i.e. local governments that are bought or pressured to give way.

America already has discovered the phenomenon in the communities in New York and New Jersey states and elsewhere in the country where often Orthodox Jewish religious ritual restrictions control behavior of all citizens and even visitors who dare to defile the enclaves. If Israel in what was once Palestine goes under will that mean that millions of new immigrants, certainly given free entry with no conditions on their behavior by a US Congress which displays Israeli flags in its office spaces on Capitol Hill. The clowns in Congress and the White House may not be bothered by the Israeli Jewish tendency to despise the other 90% of any country’s inhabitants as subhuman, as they do with the Palestinians currently. Florida (of course!) Congressman Brian Mast, who wears his Israeli army uniform when working in his Congressional office, said : “there is no such thing as innocent Palestinians”! And he is not the only congressman or staffer who embraces that view, which is reiterated by 90 of Israeli Jews who support extermination of all Muslims and Christians!

So what comes next? John Gehan has written about the next moves by Israel emigrants and how they will impact on the rest of the world after their regional genocidal campaign to create Greater (Eretz) Israel is either concluded in failure or otherwise goes down in flames: “Essentially what we’ll have are at least hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of psychotically racist terrorists entering the USA. These are ethnically obsessed monsters who don’t consider anyone outside of their pernicious tribe to be human. They’ll have weapons at their disposal and a cemented nationwide network to commit mass murder. Maybe some of these crazies will seek shelter in Europe or Canada or Argentina, etc. But many will choose the USA as a redoubt. At best, murders and acts of terror will spike dramatically in this country. Israeli Zionists are genocidal psychopaths. As we have all seen.”

For those who need further elucidation of what is going on and what drives it, the head of one of Israel’s most prominent think tanks, Major General Tamir Hayman has described in an article further examined by Trita Parsi the Quincy Institute, the harsh reality of Israel’s current and ongoing new national security doctrine: Hayman describes how “The United States is a ‘declining power’ and, given its ongoing social and political shifts, will soon abandon Israel in any event. This is compelling Israel to move toward greater self-reliance in order to avoid ‘excessive dependence’ on the US since it ‘exposes Israel to the influence of a progressive American value system that is incompatible with Israel’s Jewish character.’ He concludes: ‘Severing ties with the United States is therefore not only inevitable, but essential to Israel’s independence and the resilience of its Jewish national identity.’” Why is that? “Because of the Primacy of Jewish Identity over Democracy: The state’s Jewish identity takes precedence over its democratic system of government.” And it takes precedence over the constitutional rights of any nation that Jews should wind up settling in!

So, we Americans and presumably lots of other people have something to look forward to from an Israel whose leaders including Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon have often bragged about how they control “America,” and now it it boasting how it has taken its pound of flesh and then will discards the US donor after it is bled white! It presumes the end of nations as we know them that try to function decently to be replaced by an ethno-religious state armed with nukes and bio weapons that will begin its process of extermination just as it is already carrying out in the Middle East! Mazel Tov to y’all!

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

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Mohammed bin Salman is more at risk internally than from AnsarAllah attacks

2026-10-14T11:27:21.593-04:00

By Alastair Crooke - October 14, 2026 at 09:26AM

As part of its “blockade-for-blockade,” “airport-for-airport” strategy, Ansarallah carried out a third attack on Riyadh International Airport on Saturday — 12 people (mostly civilians) were killed and more than 300 injured. This, in tandem with Iran’s escalating attacks on tankers, and expanding its maritime operations, immediately increases the pressures on President Trump to respond — at the precise moment when midterm elections loom.

As the military conflict between Yemen and Saudi Arabia continues, the latter has become increasingly dependent on attacks against Yemeni civilian targets — by Sept 2025, reports confirm that “nearly 15,000 civilians have been killed by direct military action, most of them in air strikes by the Saudi-led Coalition.” Yet the Yemeni armed resistance, taking its cue from Iran’s experience, sees that Saudi is infinitely more vulnerable via its energy infrastructure sitting out in the open.

If Yemen continues to strike at key Saudi economic and energy assets with precision, the consequences for Riyadh will multiply — the battlefield will increasingly become that of Saudi infrastructure destruction and pain for the West versus Yemeni civilian casualties.

This scenario could lead to major capital destruction, a sovereign debt crisis, and Riyadh forced to abandon yet more of its Vision 2030 projects on which MbS has staked the kingdom’s future.

Saudi Arabia continues to behave as though the old formulas of sectarianism, anti-Iran propaganda and an anti-Shia narrative can once again be used to maintain their pro-Western positioning. But those tired mantra have lost their effectiveness — even among large parts of the region’s Sunnis.

The situation today is fundamentally different. AnsarAllah does not represent the Twelver Shia framework that Saudi propaganda could easily portray as an “Iranian project.” AnsarAllah-governed Yemen has its own ideological framework, theological traditions, political history, and system of governance. Neither AnsarAllah nor the broader pro-Sana’a camp can simply be reduced to one sect or social class.

The AnsarAllah Yemeni landscape includes Hanafi Sunnis, Zaidis, Jaroodiya, Ismailis, and other Islamic schools, with even elements of Salafi groups existing within the broader Yemeni social structure.

In short, unless MbS capitulates to AnsarAllah demands — which it seems he is incapable of so doing — the consequences could develop into a devastating macro-economic cascade occurring within the key pivot situated at the centre of the Gulf economic model; a cascade, furthermore, which, as its momentum grows, and foreign capital flees the kingdom, will bring a systemic collapse to the entire western colonial enterprise in the Gulf.

The more paradoxical element to this drama is that it is not from AnsarAllah’s attacks that MbS’ is most at risk — or from which his downfall might be precipitated. It will not come from the battlefield either. Regime change inside Saudi Arabia will come about as a result of his own hand — his compulsive quest to centralise control.

Even Edward Luttwak, known for his links to the western security state, observes that —

…the reason for [the impotence] of Saudi Arabia, in the face of the Houthi offensive, is that, for the Kingdom’s ruling family, the most deadly danger has long been a military coup d’état — such as the one which ended Iraq’s monarchy and killed every single member of its Husseini ruling family on 14 July 1958.

Against that danger, the successive heads of the Saudi ruling family have implemented the most effective remedy possible: divide and rule, not against foreign enemies, but within their own armed forces. For that reason, the different combat elements of the armed forces are geographically separated in the country’s vast territory, and commanded by different princes in charge of various parts of the ministry of defence, all of which are subordinate to the minister himself, Prince Khalid (a younger brother of Mohammed bin Salman).

MbS’ fear is that one F15 pilot, outside of the privileged Royal family Stipendiary circle, might choose to attack one of the Kingdom’s princely palaces (instead of striking at an AnsarAllah target) as a prelude to an all-out military revolt. This is no fanciful threat — an old “Saudi hand” recalled recently hearing one young Saudi officer threatening to do exactly that.

By cutting off traditional tribal patronage by which tribal leaders had expected to receive their share of the kingdom’s oil wealth; by seizing tribal lands earmarked for MbS “vanity projects”; and by actively working to reshape Saudi Arabia’s core legitimacy away from traditional tribal-religious alliances towards a nationalist, youth-driven identity centred around Vision 2030, MbS has cut away the political leverage that traditional tribal elders historically held within the Royal Court.

MBS has made many enemies through the transformation of the Kingdom not towards a nation-state, but rather toward being the property of a single family. He has concentrated immense political, economic, and security powers within his immediate branch of the family, acting as an absolute authority.

As one commentator writes —

For traditional tribal groups like the ‘Anizah, this means that policy decisions are made strictly from the top down, leaving little room for the traditional consensus-building or special autonomy that tribes historically enjoyed.

The erosion of the historic social contract has left a deep sense of economic anxiety and loss of prestige among traditional tribal structures — and among the Wahhabi religious establishment.

The result is that —

…a tribal realignment is under way. In the north and central areas, the Shammar and Anizzah desert tribes have reportedly sealed the borders to Jordan and Iraq. In the south, mountain tribes with historical kinship ties to AnsarAllah are more likely to ignore the border with Yemen than defend the crown.

And we’ll know, soon enough, whether there is any foundation to the [multiple] rumours that representatives of more than a dozen Saudi tribes have sat with IRGC representatives and floated a new political compact — a federal state with tribes receiving a share of oil and gas revenues.

It wouldn’t be surprising if there are not other tribes and clans throughout the Region (Syria, Iraq …) who have a similar smouldering resentment to that of the Saudi tribes, festering secretly away, and similarly derived from their own experience of top-down colonial exploitation.

Might the Saudi Kingdom experience a revolt against MbS? Such a possibility is not without precedent: When King Saud’s reckless governance threatened the monarchy’s survival in 1964, the family, senior princes, and the religious leadership stepped in to strip him of power and enforce his abdication.

In the event of the collapse of MbS-led al-Saud family rule, this would not only topple the Gulf colonial project, but would then initiate a scramble for a fundamental geopolitical re-alignment of the region.

The colonial “current shape” imposed upon West Asia for more than a century is at an inflection point. Everything is “up in the air.” How will President Trump react to AnsarAllah’s accelerated attacks on Saudi Arabia? Will he launch a wider war across the region by attacking Iran, Yemen or Iraq? Or will a major attack on north Yemen against Ansarallah, with Pakistani and Israeli participation, be authorised? Or might the Sistan-Baluchistan region of Iran erupt as a result of a Pakistani-CIA insertion of cross-border Balochi insurgents into Iran, potentially leading to Iranian exchanges of fire with Pakistan?

We don’t know. But it is widely understood that the region’s current shape was drawn up for other, earlier purposes — Bahrain was Persian for two centuries before 1783; Kuwait was a district of Basra until Britain drew a line of separation in 1899; the United Arab Emirates were Trucial Oman (coastal sheikhdoms under British protection, until December 1971). Qatar was a Bahraini suzerainty, then Ottoman, then British, before it became a state in 1971. Lebanon and Syria were carved out of the Ottoman ruin by France in 1920. Jordan was proclaimed a “state” by a British High Commissioner in 1921.

Luttwak forewarns that — “Ultimately … the [al-Saud] inheritors must learn to share Saudi Arabia’s vast flow of oil revenues with everybody else, or else risk losing more than just their wealth.”

Iran has just launched large-scale military exercises amid indications of a possible imminent Israeli-American escalation to come very soon.

Change seems inevitable.

Reprinted with permission from Forum Geopolitica.

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War Against Yemen Endangers Saudi Crown Prince’s Position

2026-10-13T10:27:02.536-04:00

By Moon of Alabama - October 13, 2026 at 08:33AM

In the 1930s, during the formation of Saudi Arabia, three provinces were taken from Yemen. The Yemeni have always wanted them back. They are now in a position where they may eventually achieve that aim.

The western parts of Yemen are unlike the deserts of Saudi Arabia. The area is mountainous and gets a decent amount of precipitation. Some 80 percent of the 33 million Yemeni live in there. Agricultural production in the mountains is however difficult and Yemen has long been dependent on trade to acquire enough food to keep its people alive.

In recent decades the Saudis had sent Wahhabi preachers into Yemen. This led to conflicts with the Zaidi Shia natives and in 2014 resulted in a revolution against the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh which had allowed the Saudis to gain an ideological foothold. The Houthi, a family clan or tribe of Zaidi Shia with a long tradition, allied with other clans and managed to overthrow the government in Sanaa.

Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the then 29 year old Minister Defense of Saudi Arabia, started a war against the Houthi and their allies to restore the Yemeni government. The Saudis, with US help, launched an intensive bombing campaign which killed many Yemeni people. They enforced a blockade of the country. Several hundred thousand people died due to the lack of food. The Saudis hired foreign mercenaries, Jihadis and tribal forces in southern Yemen to fight the ruling forces in Sanaa. Enforcing an air blockade they bombed the airport of Sanaa more than 200 times.

It was all to no avail. In 2022 a ceasefire was established along the conflict lines. Under the name Ansar Allah (Ansarullah) the Houthis and their local allies established themselves as the government over some 70 percent of the Yemeni population. But they knew that the conflict was far from over. With the help of Iran they managed to build and store thousands of drones and missiles.

In October 2023, in support of the Palestinians fighting in Gaza, the Houthi began to target Israeli and US shipping in the Red Sea. In March 2025 the Trump administration, with support from Great Britain, launched air and naval strikes against Ansar Allah targets in Yemen. The campaign went no where. After two months the US declared victory and retreated.

On July 14 2026 the Saudis broke the ceasefire with Yemen by again bombing the airport in Sanaa:

The purpose of the strikes on the Sanaa airport was to prevent the landing of a plane from Iran carrying a Yemeni delegation that attended the funeral of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Despite the strikes, the plane was rerouted and landed at the airport in the Yemeni Red Sea port city of Hodeidah.

The strikes came after the Saudi-led coalition threatened to take action in response to an Iranian flight that landed in Sanaa on July 3. At the time, Ansar Allah said that its forces “repelled” Saudi warplanes attempting to interfere with the flight, and two days later, Houthi fighters launched an offensive against Saudi-backed forces, the heaviest fighting between the two sides in years.

While the two sides agreed to a ceasefire in 2022, a long-standing blockade on Yemen that included restrictions on Sanaa airport was only partially lifted, and in recent months, calls have been growing in Yemen for a complete end to the siege.

The Saudi attack, which led to the renewal of the war, was a huge mistake. Saudi Arabia is a glass house. Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, who is now its sole ruler, only manages to keep his position by force. He is buying off some of the tribal Arab leaders and population. His rule is only legit as long as he can guarantee security and prosperity.

In contrast to Saudi Arabia the Yemeni are poor. They have nothing to lose, but have a strong ideology. They are experienced warriors. They responded to the Saudi attacks with long range drones and missiles.

Saudi export pipelines and oil installations were hit by missile strikes. The Saudi air defenses, exhausted after spending their munitions against Iranian missiles targeting Israel, are in disarray. The Yemeni have learned to launch mixed attacks of drones and missile, confusing air defenses, which allow them to hit targets within Saudi Arabia at will.

They have announced an air blockade over Saudi Arabia to mirror the one enforced against them. Over the last week the managed to hit passenger terminals at the international airport in Riyadh. Major airlines have stopped their flights to Saudi Arabia endangering Muhammad bin Salman’s plans to remake the country into a center of international business:

In recent days, the Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Saree, has issued repeated warnings to airlines and travelers against using Saudi airports, declaring them a ‘theater of operations for our forces.’

The attacks on the airport came ahead of several large political and business events in Saudi Arabia, including Prince Mohammed’s flagship annual investment summit, during which world leaders, billionaires, and executives typically descend upon Riyadh. It is unclear whether high-profile guests will feel safe enough to attend now.

‘The problem for the Saudis is that they experience more damage from Houthi strikes on their infrastructure than the other way around,’ Mr. Gause said. ‘A strike on Riyadh Airport could lead someone thinking about investing in the country to reconsider.’

In contrast, much of Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, which the Houthis control, has already been destroyed.

There is no one who expects the Saudis to win in this conflict. Saudi allies are reluctant to join the conflict. Turkey and Pakistan, which have signed defense agreements with bin Salman, are unwilling to fight in Yemen. The US is delivering intelligence reports but is too short of ammunition to join the war. Local Saudi mercenaries in Yemen are in disarray and unwilling to fight the superior forces of Ansar Allah.

Unless Mohammad bin Salman is willing to file for peace with Yemen the war will escalate into a larger and longer conflict. Yemeni ground forces are likely to soon enter the former Yemeni provinces in southern Saudi Arabia. Further strikes of Saudi airports will diminish its international reputation. More attacks on its oil installation will lower its income.

Bin Salman’s role is not as secured as it seems to be. After he had gained the crown prince position he had imprisoned tribal leaders and competing family members. He has liberalized the country against the will of its deeply conservative establishment. His many failed vanity projects have cost a lots of money with little to show for it.

Iran has offered to mediate a peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

It is unlikely that Mohammad bin Salman is willing to engage in it even though it is probably the best and only way for him to stay in his position.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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The Only Way To Fight Government Corruption

2026-10-12T14:27:23.917-04:00

By Ron Paul - October 12, 2026 at 12:37PM

This past week we have seen several serious Administration corruption scandals. Fox News host-turned-Trump Ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, came to attention recently when she informed a Greek official, in what sounded like a threat, that Washington can overthrow any government it wishes.

While hardly breaking news, such an admission is not normally considered part of diplomatic dialogue. But for Guilfoyle, that was only the beginning. She is reported to have strong-armed a donor into paying off her $100,000 American Express bill before she took office. Most recently, she is in even hotter water for reportedly using her ties to the Trump family – she was once engaged to Donald Trump, Jr. – to set up business deals for a wealthy Greek businessman who was coincidentally funding her supposedly lavish lifestyle in Greece.

Similarly, last week the media reported that US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s right hand man David Millstein was abusing his post to further his own political biases. Millstein, who first came under scrutiny for sending a request to Israeli citizens for “monetary wedding gift[s],” has also reportedly been suppressing or even falsifying Embassy reporting that is critical of Israel. In a supposedly “America first” Administration, it is shocking that officials are abusing their power for the benefit of a foreign country over their own.

The corruption taint goes even deeper. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is reported to have doubled his net worth while in office. Likewise, the Trump family itself is said to have earned billions from sketchy business deals – including military deals while a war is on – while Donald Trump has been in office. President Trump himself, who has made a show of refusing his salary as President, is said to have made over two billion dollars in the first year of his second term. That is a far cry above the $400,000 US Presidential salary!

While there is much noise on the Right about the danger of socialism – and it should not be discounted – what is not discussed enough is the “socialism” for the rich and well-connected. One word for this is “corporatism.” It is the merger – even if temporary – of state power with “private” interests.

Rich Greek businessmen are not lavishing gifts on Ambassador Guilfoyle because she is a nice person. They are looking for favors that only those holding the levers of political power can grant.

Ideally, elected and appointed government officials would be more like Rep. Thomas Massie, who was already a successful businessman before winning office and therefore did not view his “public service” as a kind of piggy bank. However, we live in the real world and such standards are probably too high to expect.

So, what is the solution? Corrupt officials abuse their positions because the government is so enormous and invasive that there are endless opportunities for graft and grift. If we are really seeking to end or reduce government corruption, we must return government to the size it was when this country was founded. Rather than waiting for a government of saints to lead the country, we must remove the incentives that tempt mere men and women to view elected and appointed office as an opportunity for personal and financial gain.

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Mike Huckabee Should Resign

2026-10-10T13:27:33.923-04:00

By Jason Jones - October 10, 2026 at 11:34AM

The New York Times reports that U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s senior adviser, David Milstein, suppressed an embassy report and obstructed efforts by our elected representatives in Congress to obtain information. That in itself is a scandal—but it’s the gravity of the information in question that makes this story rise to the level of demanding immediate and formal accountability to American citizens.

In March, U.S. senators wrote to Huckabee demanding answers about American citizens killed in the West Bank since January 2022. Among them were the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and Amer Rabee, who was just 14 years old. The senators said no one had been held accountable.

This cannot stand. These bereaved families cannot be asked to accept an embassy accused of actively working against their interests in order to protect the reputation of a foreign government whose soldiers and settlers killed their loved ones. And as their fellow Americans, none of the rest of us will accept it either.

No, Mike Huckabee must resign. And if he refuses, President Donald Trump must remove him from office.

The Times report cites 15 U.S. officials and dozens of documents, collectively pointing to a sustained effort to sanitize reporting about the government of the corrupt and unpopular Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The conspiracy went on despite officials elsewhere in the Trump administration—including the president himself—expressing opposition to Netanyahu’s increasingly radical actions. Milstein allegedly blocked a warning that settlement expansion could violate Trump’s opposition to West Bank annexation. Reporting on Israeli inaction against settler violence was at one point replaced with a propagandistic cable praising a crackdown.

This is much more than office politics. These are matters of life and death. When Washington receives a false picture of violence, the people enduring it lose another chance of protection in a region where time is now of the essence. Whether whole communities will remain in the land where they have lived for centuries can depend on their interests being accurately relayed to the rest of the world. Some of those communities are the ancient Christian towns of the Holy Land, where they have worshiped since the time of Christ’s ministry there.

But thanks to the corruption and double-dealing of Huckabee’s office, when our elected representatives asked about dead American citizens, we were denied a full accounting. Even more concretely: That means families lost access to justice—and to the rights afforded to us all as American citizens.

Huckabee denies the allegations, of course, expecting far more sympathy than he has any right to expect. While he claims to have no knowledge of the scandal, officials who spoke to the Times described instances when he helped suppress or recast reporting and others when he restrained Milstein—which, far from exonerating the ambassador, only suggests to me that he was that much more familiar with his aide’s mischief.

And “mischief” is hardly the word for some of the downright sinister actions now being revealed to the public. Responsible Statecraft reported last year that an embassy cable warning of looming famine in Gaza never reached Washington; Milstein instead sent favorable reporting about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Consider what that means for a hungry child: His suffering can become invisible to the very officials with the power to intervene.

Milstein, the stepson of neoconservative talk show host Mark Levin, also circulated a wedding invitation seeking cash gifts from a guest list including Israelis. Huckabee’s very mature response to the scrutiny included calling the reporting outlet, POLITICO, “Politicrap.” An ambassador entrusted with American lives should be capable of answering serious questions with the seriousness they deserve.

Fair Use Excerpt. Read the whole article here.

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When Will This White House Madness End?

2026-10-09T14:27:31.678-04:00

By Philip Giraldi - October 9, 2026 at 11:58AM

It was another horrific week in Washington with President Donald Trump actually succeeding in coming out with an apparently improvised comment that equaled or maybe even exceeded his ghastly performance at the United Nations where he speculated over whether he should “annihilate” Iran and drive it back into the Stone Age. It would seem that ninety plus million dead Persians would satisfy Donald’s blood lust when it comes to killing innocent civilians, but the latest musing by our beloved leader had him addressing a campaign rally in Nebraska, where he appeared to be declaring that he might well consider wanting to continue the war against Iran even if the price to pay from the Iranians were to be retaliation consisting of eliminating some of our cities. He said “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, for keeping our country safe, and it’s going to be over with very soon. Let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego.”

Trump clearly saw the whole thing as some kind of quid pro quo expecting that even Californians would consider the price to pay worth it if it kept Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon but he failed to make any reasonable connection between the nonexistent weapon and the good to come out of annihilation of millions of Americans. The irony is, of course, that since Iran has no nukes and nor is it even developing that resource, a point generally made by US intelligence, it could not in any event destroy either or both of the West Coast cities. But then again, Trump is not given much to deep thinking and what he tends to say is what is roiling around among the three brain cells that might actually be functioning in his oversize head at any moment.

Interestingly, the video recording the gathering shows the Nebraska crowd of MAGA supporters cheering the exchange, seemingly unaware that the war never needed to be fought, that Iran was not and is not any military threat to the United States, and that the whole bloody thing could be ended by Trump repeating his frequent declaration of “victory” before ordering all the troops home and putting an end to it. That way no one “loses” and no more innocents have to die but somehow that does not appear to be an option circulating in the White House.

In the wake of the comment, both California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and San Diego Republican Mayor Todd Gloria called out President Trump for his willing to see Americans die in large numbers due to bad policies coming out of Washington. Newsom wrote on social media how “After sending the National Guard to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. He is deranged and dangerous.” Gloria added “San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’ Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

The White House inevitably pushed back in support of Trump’s comments, with communications director Steven Cheung writing on social media how “The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating US cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the President. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.” Interestingly, Trump’s communications director, who interpreted the comment backwards by claiming falsely that the president had “stopped” an Iranian nuke, was incapable of understanding what Trump actually said and instead invented what he might have been wanting to say. All of which explains why the White House is as dysfunctional as it is.

Beyond that, something at least veering towards a bit of constructive policy did take place on September 30^th when the United States completed its troop withdrawal from Iraq, which it has been de facto occupying for the past 23 years. The withdrawal, which took place after multiple requests by the Iraqi government, appears to be due to the desire to move US troops out of the effective range of some of the Iranian short range-missiles and drones which could easily reach Iraq. The soldiers and airmen will be moving to next door Jordan which means they will still be near enough to intervene if the Iraqis become naughty and do anything that is not perceived as being in American “interests.”

Some will recall that back in January 2020, then President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of the Iranian head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qasim Soleimani who had just landed in Baghdad Airport to join in peace talks between his country and the Iraqis. Peace talks are not the sort of thing that Trumpists are good at, particularly if they involve actual or potential enemies of Israel, so Soleimani had to be stopped. The Iraqis are certainly aware that the departure of US soldiers does not mean an end to American intervention, which can indeed be at the point of a gun but which might also be through sanctions and other less kinetic means.

All of which is to suggest that the game is not over yet and Trump is quite capable of doing something very stupid in an attempt to salvage whatever remains from his reputation. What is behind a lot of this nonsense is the evil circle involving Trump himself and his good friends in Israel. Make no mistake that Israel is dedicated to becoming “Greater Israel” while also eliminating its potential enemies in Asia and Africa. And, unlike Iran, it is actually nuclear armed thanks to the material and technology that it stole from the United States before killing President John F Kennedy who tried to stop them. And the witless Donald will do everything in his power to help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be reelected, be it because he is being blackmailed or because he loves the man so much. Be that as it may, Trump will cooperate fully with Netanyahu or whoever succeeds him, no matter what. So too will there be the usual consensus on doing everything to please the Jewish state coming from the usual crowd of Israel firsters in Congress, in the mainstream media and among the Foundations that have come to rely on the money and “respect” that comes from inhabiting the same space as those who are beloved by Zion.

For those who have not yet aware of just how deeply the Zionist activists have inserted themselves in the body politic, I would greatly recommend an article put out by the highly respectable Quincy Institute that just appeared this past week written by Kelley Vlahos, the Editor in Chief of Responsible Statecraft. It provides the sordid details of how the Israel Lobby backed up by Jewish billionaires has been able to create and then subvert a conservative movement that originally appeared to support American interests to make them instead do Israel’s bidding. She describes how “The annual confab, [NatCon 2026] ostensibly launched for American conservatives in 2019, is in Jerusalem this week, largely focused on shoring up US support for the Jewish state.” If Israel is successful, it will bring about a proposed US-Israeli integration at the Pentagon and take its place as a “partner” of the United States in defense matters as well as in foreign policy. Make no mistake, Israel will bleed us dry and then discard our carcass without even a backward glance. It will be the end of our country. President Donald J Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden have done much to move this process along and it is to them and the cowards in Congress and the media that we the owe the deep hole that we as a once-upon-a-time proud and independent people will soon find ourselves in.

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

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The Prosecutor’s Dilemma

2026-10-08T10:27:13.790-04:00

By Andrew P. Napolitano - October 8, 2026 at 08:20AM

That it is better 100 guilty persons should escape, than that one innocent person should suffer.
— Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

The hardest decision a government prosecutor may ever face is also one of the most important tests of the rule of law: What do you do when you believe a crime occurred, and you believe you know who committed it, but you do not believe you can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty?

The temptation is obvious. A prosecutor is a public official. The alleged victim wants justice. The public demands accountability. The alleged offenders appear unsympathetic. The known facts produce moral outrage. Yet none of those considerations changes the prosecutor’s constitutional obligation.

A criminal prosecution is not a referendum on whether something terrible probably happened. It is an attempt to prove, in a courtroom, that a particular defendant committed a particular crime beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty.

The recently renewed investigation into an alleged sexual assault involving seven Cornell University fraternity members illustrates this dilemma. The woman has alleged that she was sexually assaulted by multiple men at a Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. The case initially was not prosecuted, but it has now been reopened and reassigned amid the emergence of additional information and intense public scrutiny.

The publicly reported record demonstrates why prosecutors cannot simply substitute belief for evidence. The woman’s accounts developed over time. According to reporting based on investigative records, she initially described some sexual activity as consensual, later described other conduct as coercive and subsequently became unequivocal in saying that she had been raped. She also continued friendly communications with at least one of the men afterward.

Those facts do not, by themselves, establish that no rape occurred. Trauma, intoxication, confusion, delayed realization, embarrassment, victim guilt and fragmented memory can complicate the way sexual-assault victims describe events. Experts have emphasized precisely that point.

But neither should a prosecutor pretend that inconsistencies do not exist. They are evidence that a jury may consider, and prosecutors have an ethical obligation to assess how those inconsistencies may affect the likelihood of obtaining a conviction.

That is the difference between believing a victim and being able to prove a criminal case.

The prosecutor is not the victim’s lawyer. The prosecutor represents the government and, ultimately, the public interest in justice. That interest includes punishing the provably guilty and refusing to prosecute people whose guilt the government cannot prove.

This distinction is especially important in emotionally charged sexual-assault cases. There is an understandable social demand that prosecutors believe victims. But the criminal justice system cannot operate on the principle that an accusation is proof. Nor can it operate on the opposite principle — that an initially uncertain victim must necessarily be lying. Both propositions are inconsistent with due process.

The prosecutor’s job is to investigate and evaluate.

That means gathering physical evidence. It means interviewing the complainant and the accused, if they consent. It means testing competing accounts rather than simply adopting one. And it means asking the uncomfortable question: If I were defending this case, what reasonable doubt would I be able to present to the jury?

The Cornell matter illustrates why that process must be meticulous. The district attorney has said that the information originally provided to his office differed materially from information subsequently made public, including transcripts containing statements by the woman that she was confident she had been raped.

He also said he had not initially received those full interview transcripts. Whatever one’s ultimate conclusion about the case, those circumstances justify a renewed investigation. A prosecutor should never decide that a case is unprovable while important evidence remains unevaluated.

But reopening an investigation with a new prosecutor does not mean that charges must ultimately follow.

Public pressure cannot lower the burden of proof. Neither can the seriousness of the accusation. Neither can the fact that a university disciplinary proceeding reached a conclusion. A university’s determination under its disciplinary rules is not equivalent to a criminal prosecution. The criminal justice system operates under a substantially different standard because the consequences are radically different: Criminal conviction can mean substantial imprisonment, lifelong registration requirements and the stigma of a criminal record.

The prosecutor therefore faces a genuine moral dilemma. If she declines prosecution and the defendants actually committed the crime, justice will have been denied. But if she prosecutes a case she does not believe she can prove and the defendants are acquitted, justice has also been denied.

There is no painless answer.

The answer provided by Anglo-American law is the presumption of innocence and the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. Those principles deliberately place the risk of error on the government rather than on the victim or the accused. It is better, under our constitutional system, for the government to decline a difficult prosecution than for it to obtain a conviction simply because public opinion believes someone must be punished.

The lesson of the Cornell controversy is that justice is not measured by whether prosecutors satisfy public anger. It is measured by whether they faithfully apply the law.

A prosecutor who brings charges because the public demands them, despite believing that guilt cannot be established, is not demonstrating courage. She is abandoning the very safeguard that separates criminal justice from mob rule.

The prosecutor’s duty is simultaneous compassion toward an alleged victim and fairness toward an accused person. Those obligations are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they are the essence of the rule of law.

Believe the allegation enough to investigate it fully. Believe the evidence enough to follow it wherever it leads. But charge only when the evidence permits the government honestly to conclude it can prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. Anything less risks turning the criminal courts from instruments of public justice into instruments of public vengeance.

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
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Trump’s Fact-free Diatribe on the Price of Oil

2026-10-07T12:27:29.712-04:00

By Kurt Nimmo - October 7, 2026 at 09:27AM

Another day and another fact-free diatribe by the president of the United States. Trump went on his Truth Social (where truth is a rare commodity) and said Democrats have closed down the nation’s refinery capacity, and this is the reason diesel and gas prices are skyrocketing.

Here’s what Trump didn’t tell you: recent closures were corporate decisions by refinery owners, not a mandate by Democrats. LyondellBasell Industries in Houston made a strategic decision to exit refining in March, 2025, eliminating approximately 264,000 barrels a day. Phillips 66 in Los Angeles closed in October, 2025, citing uncertain long-term sustainability amid changing market conditions, while also reporting high operating costs and low earnings. The closure removed 139,000 barrels from the market. Valero, in Benicia, California ended refining in 2026, citing high maintenance costs and other business considerations. The corporation produced 145,000 barrels a day.

Valero also mentioned regulatory hurdles in California, where the are unusually stringent fuel, environmental, emissions, and operating requirements. However, it is not accurate to claim that Democrats or California’s governor ordered these refineries closed, or that regulations in the state are responsible for the fuel crisis in the rest of the country.

The 2025 shutdowns at the LyondellBasell Houston and Phillips 66 Los Angeles refineries cut total US refining capacity by about 400,000 barrels per day. Because the two California closures eliminated roughly 17% of California’s capacity, their impact is concentrated on West Coast fuel supply and prices rather than the broader US market.

It’s correct to say Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries affect global energy markets. During his first term, Trump approved the first US provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine, notably Javelin anti-tank missiles. In 2018 and 2019, the United States notified Congress of sales totaling 360 Javelins, plus launchers, training, and related equipment. In other words, US foreign policy, under both Biden and Trump, is responsible for the current crisis.

Diesel and heating oil account for nearly 30% of global petroleum use, with about one-quarter of this supply moving across borders. When Russian refinery exports drop, the impact extends beyond Europe, resulting in rising costs in transport, farming, construction, freight, and heating, all of which contribute to wider inflation.

The Trump administration is responsible for raising oil prices by continuing the war against Iran. When tankers stopped transiting the Strait of Hormuz because of the risk of attack, Gulf producers in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain were unable to export. Following the start of military action on February 28, Iranian strikes and potential vessel damage led most commercial shipping to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated 7.5 million barrels per day of crude production was shut down during March, rising to an estimated 9.1 million barrels per day in April. The cost of Brent crude oil on the spot market went from $69 per barrel in 2025 to $96 in 2026. On October 5, WTI crude oil traded at $91.82 per barrel, and Brent crude at $106.13 per barrel.

Finally, Trump continues to claim that the Strait of Hormuz remains open. As of October 5, the passage is closed or severely limited for standard commercial shipping. A few ships are moving through, but traffic has dropped to roughly 9 percent of its earlier level, around seven inbound and outbound ships per day, and war-risk insurance plus recent attacks have rendered routine tanker travel mostly impractical.

Before February 28, the strait generally accommodated about 125–135 large commercial vessels each day. Among them, roughly 54 were oil, chemical, or LPG tankers, along with about six LNG carriers. The remainder comprised bulk carriers and container ships.

Trump’s misrepresentation of the facts fails to deceive the vast majority of Americans who bear the weight of his economic and foreign policy choices. MAGA paladins, however, tend to accept his folderol without question, reinforcing Orwell’s notion of doublethink—a form of indoctrination where people are expected to hold two conflicting beliefs as true, often clashing with their own memory or sense of reality.

Reprinted with permission from Another Day in the Empire.

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Trump Talks the Talk and Walks the Path of War on Iran. So Does Netanyahu

2026-10-06T14:27:23.966-04:00

By Alastair Crooke - October 6, 2026 at 09:31AM

We are on a path to more war. Trump could (and should) have declared victory and simply walked away from Iran, but that would have cast him as “a loser” (a prospect that he cannot tolerate). But secondly, he is — for whatever reason — in thrall to Netanyahu and Israel.

Tucker Carlson in August 2024 spoke directly to Trump: “You will not win this war [with Iran]. You will lose it and it will destroy your Presidency. Furthermore, Netanyahu and the Zionist donor class do not like you. They hate you.”

“I know” was Trump’s only response. That was then.

From Trump’s UN General Assembly address where he said that Iran must either capitulate after the US midterm elections after which he threatens to issue his ultimatum, or else he will have to decide whether or not to “quickly annihilate” Iran. All who heard this took it to be a threat to use nuclear weapons. And indeed, since then, Trump has harked back several times to this threat of annihilation, using one synonym or another — always underlining, together with his close associates, the repeated demand that Iran may not have a nuclear weapon, ever.

In parallel, Netanyahu is claiming that Israel has fresh Intelligence precisely pointing to Iran taking concrete steps towards a nuclear weapon (though the security and defence community in Israel say that no such evidence exists). “They’re trying to develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to every city in the US,” Netanyahu again repeated to CBS this week.

The crux here is that Trump wants a victory over Iran and cannot find the kinetic “silver bullet” by which to defeat them. The pre-midterms’ war narrative thus has switched to emphasise that Iran’s hold over Hormuz has been broken (Bloomberg “confirms” we are indeed back to near pre-war levels of Middle East oil flows), and that the US financial siege will have Iran bankrupt within two weeks — so asserts Treasury Secretary Bessent.

Earlier this week, an all-out propaganda campaign broke out to convince people that the Strait of Hormuz is basically open. As Philip Pilkington writes:

‘80% open’ was the talking point peddled by Bloomberg’s Javier Blas … [it] felt like the latest oil glut media operation: Oil is trading at near or over $100 a barrel, yet the flow through the Strait is back to about its pre-war norms. Call it Oil Glut 2.0.

Pilkington outlines how he did a deep-dive search to see from where“the Oil Glut 2.0 narrative had sprung” —

I asked a series of vital questions. What is the source of the data? … How was it interpreted? How does [it] compare with verifiable fact? What does the reaction of both the oil futures market — comprised of some of the best informed oil analysts on the planet — and the US government tell us about the credibility of the report? … The core claim is that shippers have figured out a stealthy way to transport oil through the Strait of Hormuz … The main source was Kpler, the highly regarded … analytics firm … often referred to as ‘The Bloomberg of physical markets’.

The Kpler chart is telling us that since the beginning of September an awful lot of oil is being moved through the Strait of Hormuz … [This] seemed bizarre … When we turn to Kpler’s data sources and methodology, we find strong reasons to be concerned. In normal times, Kpler’s data seems robust … Yet Kpler itself admits that it is impossible to do [its usual verification procedures] for ships … trying to transport oil stealthily. Instead, [Kpler] states that it is using satellite imagery to count the ships crossing the Strait. High resolution satellite imagery of active conflict zones is a hot geopolitical commodity … [However] when I investigated this, I found that Kpler does not state where it got the images … Senior company employees [also said] they use this imagery to detect shadow fleets ‘when allowed’ … suggesting that they do not have full control over the data provided ….

Pilkington believes, however, that this new war propaganda campaign appears to be much less effective — “The Oil Glut 2.0 [narrative] simply did not land as well as the first iteration.” He notes that in July, when leading commentators led the “oil glut narrative,” oil prices fell by $30 per barrel; this time they only fell by $10 per barrel. Crucially, there was a lot more scepticism by people in the know. Given the clear evidence of now near-daily Iranian missile and drone attacks on ships violating Iran’s regulations, both in Hormuz and in the wider Gulf, this is not surprising.

The propaganda war is anyway more an adjunct to the “midterm wars,” rather than to the war on Iran, which Trump has fixed around the nuclear issue. The issue of the opening of Hormuz is intended to impact psychologically on American voters’ concern about diesel prices and inflation in the lead up to the elections.

Trump has said explicitly that he will attack Iran (if it doesn’t capitulate) after the midterms. But with this framing, the midterms’ outcome itself becomes a moot point: If Trump does better than expected, he is likely to view the election outcome as endorsement for his tough stance on the Iran war. But if Trump does worse — i.e. if the GOP loses both the House and Senate — might he not then decide to “double down” anyway?

Double down to do what? It is improbable that a renewed bombing campaign on the lines of the earlier phase of war would bring about an Iranian surrender. But to use nuclear weapons touches on the most sensitive of nerves and on moral issues — Nevertheless, Colby Elbridge, Under-Secretary for Defence Policy, is at work to amend the US’ “use of nuclear weapons” protocols to permit the use of tactical nukes as a “halfway-house” to the “Big One.”

One way around this public sensitivity would be for Israel to be the first combatant to use nuclear weapons against Iranian targets — most likely launched from submarines supplied by Germany. However, even if Israeli nuclear-tipped Tomahawk missiles were launched from submarines, the latter — by needing to surface for launch — perhaps would expose the vessels and missiles to Iranian pre-emptive action. No doubt satellite eyes are watching.

And what of Iran? Why would Iran wait until Israel and the US were fully readied for escalation after the midterms? Would Iran wait in the hope that the midterms would result in a political paradigm change in the US? Or might Iran pre-empt US and Israeli attack plans?

If this next phase of the war should come about — which now seems inevitable — it will spread more widely and more deeply than the last rounds of war, changing both the political geography of West Asia, and likely the stance toward the US of Russia and China, too.

Reprinted with author’s permission from Forum Geopolitica.

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Trump’s Other War

2026-10-05T10:27:36.220-04:00

By Ron Paul - October 5, 2026 at 08:38AM

As the midterm election draws near, a number of Republicans in tough races are distancing themselves from President Trump’s war. The war is unpopular because it has inflicted economic pain on the already-suffering American people.

No, I am not talking about the Iran War. I am talking about President Trump’s tariff war.

The Tax Foundation estimates that, since he returned to the White House, President Trump has imposed tariffs on about 54 percent of imported goods.

Contrary to the claims of power-hungry politicians and corporatists seeking protection from overseas competitors, the financial burden of tariffs falls on American businesses and consumers, not foreign exporters. Tariffs are a tax on Americans.

President Trump’s tariffs have been estimated to impose an over 800 dollars tax on the average American household this year.

Tariff defenders claim tariffs boost domestic industries, thus strengthening the US economy. The truth is, while tariffs may benefit some industries that have major competition from abroad, tariffs harm American businesses, like farms, that rely on exports for a substantial share of revenue. Additionally, countries often respond to increased tariffs on goods exported to the US by raising tariffs on imports from the US.

High tariffs also hurt businesses that rely on importing raw materials and parts necessary to make their products.

According to a survey of 4,150 registered voters conducted by the Cato Institute and Morning Consult, 74 percent of Americans view tariffs as a factor in the price increases that continue to bedevil American families, while 53 percent of Americans understand that tariffs weaken the US economy.

The survey’s most disheartening result — at least for President Trump and Republicans preparing to face the voters in less than a month — is that 49 percent of Americans say President Trump’s tariffs have made their lives worse.

President Trump launched his tariff war without receiving approval from Congress, even though Article One of the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power “to lay and collect” taxes. In order to get around the Constitution, President Trump claimed that federal laws giving the president emergency powers give him the authority to impose tariffs and thus increase taxes on the American people.

President Trump’s claim regarding his authority to impose tariffs without authorization from Congress was struck down by the Supreme Court. Then, instead of taking the opportunity the court gave him to end his tariff war, President Trump simply found new justifications to impose tariffs.

One of President Trump’s latest tariff targets is Canada. The Canadian government responded to President Trump’s tariffs by imposing tariffs on US goods. President Trump then responded by forbidding the importation of a long list of Canadian goods. Once again President Trump acted without getting authorization from Congress.

President Trump’s tariffs have raised prices for American consumers, increased production costs for many American businesses that rely on imported materials and goods, and hurt farmers and other export-reliant business.

Public anger over the economic damage inflicted by the president’s devotion to tariffs, as well as the harm caused by President Trump’s unconstitutional war on Iran, appears to be helping the Democrats regain in the upcoming election control of one or both houses of Congress.

The fact that President Trump claims to be for free markets yet is embracing interventionist policies like tariffs is contributing to the rise of Democrats winning races while publicly embracing socialism. Those of us who know the truth must increase our efforts to support the libertarian alternative to both left- and right-wing authoritarianism.

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First Them, Then Us: America’s Shift from Police State to Prison State

2026-10-02T14:27:15.390-04:00

By John W. And Nisha Whitehead - October 2, 2026 at 12:59PM

America, you got fooled. Again.

For starters, the war on illegal immigration was never just about illegal immigration.

If you fell for that, chances are you’re still falling for the government’s oldest trick: manufacture a crisis, identify an enemy, frighten the public, declare an emergency, and then use the resulting fear to justify another expansion of government power.

Terrorism. Crime. Drugs. National security. Illegal immigration.

Different threats. Same playbook.

Take a legitimate problem—or inflate it into an existential menace—and suddenly constitutional safeguards become inconveniences, extraordinary powers become necessities, and anyone who questions the government’s methods can be accused of siding with the enemy.

Immigration is a perfect example.

A highly charged issue that pushes all of the knee-jerk, polarizing buttons when it comes to deep-seated fears and prejudices, immigration has been the perfect vehicle for the Trump administration’s political fearmongering and authoritarian power grabs.

Trump has repeatedly described illegal immigration in the language of invasion, criminality and national-security emergency.

Yet a closer look suggests a far more complicated reality.

A 2026 Cato Institute analysis of Census data found that both legal and undocumented immigrants are less crime-prone than native-born Americans.

So, what is the government’s end game?

We’ve been so fixated on the overt cruelty, unapologetic authoritarianism, thuggish brutality, and blatantly unconstitutional abuses of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that we missed the larger menace taking shape behind it.

While the country fights over who should be allowed in, who should be kicked out, and who can participate in a pay-to-play scheme that benefits the oligarchy, the government continues building the infrastructure of a prison state.

This is the real power grab.

Immigration is the testing ground.

The precedent being established and the tactics being trotted out and normalized are the real danger. Because once the government establishes that it can suspend the Constitution’s safeguards for one disfavored group, there is nothing magical that keeps those powers confined to that group.

We are all at risk.

Be warned: the machinery being built to find, track, identify, seize, detain and disappear immigrants can just as easily be redirected toward the population at large.

That is how a police state becomes a prison state.

Immigration enforcement is the dress rehearsal in anticipation of the government’s ultimate muscle flex.

We are watching the infrastructure of a prison state being assembled in plain sight.

Surveillance, however, is only the beginning. The real power comes when the government takes everything it knows about you and acts on it.

Find you. Seize you. Detain you. Move you. Cut you off from the people who might intervene on your behalf. Eventually, make it difficult for anyone outside the system to determine where you are at all.

This is where ICE becomes particularly instructive.

As historian Timothy Snyder warns, “If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.”

Once due process ceases to be a non-negotiable right for one disfavored group, it becomes an optional privilege for everyone.

This is the slippery slope that eventually allows the government to make everyone disappear—citizen and immigrant alike—whenever they become inconvenient, or disfavored, or no longer useful to the powers-that-be.

This is precisely why due process matters.

Due process is not a privilege. It is not a legal loophole. And it is not a technicality reserved for people the government considers deserving of special treatment.

Due process is what stands between accusation and punishment, between suspicion and imprisonment, and between government power and individual liberty.

At the heart of that protection is habeas corpus, which translates to “you should have the body.”

Dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215, habeas corpus allows someone imprisoned by the government to challenge that detention in court and demand that the government make the case for why they should be held.

The Founders considered habeas such a fundamental and necessary ingredient in guarding against government tyranny that they included it in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 of the Constitution. As the Brennan Center explains, habeas “was conceived to guarantee protection from the king arbitrarily disappearing subjects to secret dungeons without just cause or due process.”

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, imagining authoritarian government taking root not in some distant dictatorship but in America.

Those four words capture one of the most dangerous assumptions a free people can make.

It can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to citizens. Not to innocent people.

Not to me.

Perhaps not. Perhaps the government will never put you on a rendition flight to a country you’ve never visited. Perhaps you will never disappear into a detention center. Perhaps masked agents will never come to your door.

But there are other ways for a free people to disappear.

Privacy disappears. Anonymity disappears. The freedom to move about without being tracked disappears. The freedom to associate without creating a digital trail disappears. The freedom to protest without being identified, catalogued and entered into a database disappears. The presumption that government should leave you alone unless it has legitimate cause to investigate you disappears.

Bit by bit, the boundaries separating a free citizen from a prisoner begin to disappear, too.

You are watched. Tracked. Catalogued. Scanned. Recorded. Flagged. Followed.

Your movements become data. Your associations become data. Your face becomes data. Your life becomes searchable.

All that remains is for someone in government to decide what the data means.

This is how “We the People” disappear.

We disappear when we cease to live as a people presumed free and begin living instead as inhabitants of a country-sized surveillance state—watched constantly, tracked everywhere, our movements and associations increasingly subject to monitoring, cataloguing and government scrutiny.

That is the larger danger concealed by the immigration debate.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, eventually the prison built for someone else can become the prison imprisoning all of us.

Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

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