Peace and Prosperity

Totalitarian UK Parliament Goes FULL STALIN On Russell Brand!

Daniel McAdams — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 16:46:39 GMT

Forget evidence, trials, or the presumption of innocence: for the UK Parliament It's "sentence first—verdict afterwards." Culture Committee Chair Caroline Dinenage sent letters to every platform commentator Russell Brand has appeared on to demand that he not be allowed to earn money from his work. Even though he has not been charged, much less convicted of a crime! Also today: Jan 6th "insurgents" were crawling with Feds. Finally: NATO dam cracks with Poland saying "hasta la vista" to Ukraine. Today on the Liberty Report:

Ukraine Demotes Nazi Trans Spokesperson

Kurt Nimmo — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 13:17:43 GMT

No sooner did the beggar Zelenskyy trek to New York to lecture the United Nations did the so-called Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces suspend Sarah (Michael) Ashton-Carillo.

You may recall Ashton-Carillo’s video a while back. In the video, the American trans in a bad blonde wig and a military green polo shirt threatened to unleash Nazi assassins against all who criticize USG involvement in the Ukraine war.

From Zerohedge today:

The controversial American transgender spokesperson for Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces Sarah Ashton-Cirillo (born Michael Cirillo) has been suspended indefinitely by the Ukrainian military, also pending an investigation. According to an official Ukrainian military statement, Ashton-Cirillo's recent statements regarding "hunting down" dissidents and "propagandists" were not approved.

This is a public relations skit. Nazis, past and present, have long humiliated, attacked, tortured, and murdered political opponents. The problem with Ashton-Carillo is not his menacing threat. It’s a problem with timing. The Nazis not only want to kill men, women, and children in Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Crimea, and Russia, but also those of us opposed to USG and NATO efforts to collapse Russia and, in the process, start a nuclear war.

Republican Senator J.D. Vance seems to be one of only a few Congress critters concerned about Nazi assassins. From the Newsweek division of the corporate war propaganda media combine. He sent a letter to DC officialdom demanding answers.

Vance's September 15 letter about Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, a spokesperson of the Territorial Defense Forces (TDF) of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, was addressed to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. In his message, Vance raised several questions about Ashton-Cirillo and accused her of threatening "physical violence to anyone who circulates 'Russian propaganda'" during a video message she had made.

Newsweek is an Ashton-Carillo Lite of sorts, although it has not directly called for murdering dissidents. It agrees with the Ukro Nazis that speech critical of Ukraine is “Russian propaganda,” the sort of “disinformation” now being sanitized under laws enacted in the EU and the UK. Instead of double-tapping malcontents, the USG and corporate social media deplatform and demonetize domestic critics.

Vance asked if “intelligence services” are involved in funding the likes of Ashton-Carillo, a question that will of course not be addressed.

The USG has long supported and funded Nazis. There is ample evidence of this, although most Americans are woefully ignorant they support Nazis. They know virtually nothing about Operation Red Sox and CIA-USG support of “exiled nationalists” (Banderite Nazis) between 1949 and 1954. They know little about AERODYNAMIC, a CIA op that lasted until the Nixon administration, or the propaganda front AETENURE and the clandestine radio station Nova Ukraina.

A declassified document from 1950 reveals the CIA worked to clandestinely exploit “these Ukrainian organizations” (the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation and the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council). Both were formed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the latter known as the perpetrator of ethnic cleansing massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, primarily targeting women and children.

Stuart Dowell writes,

In the blood frenzy, the Ukrainians tortured their victims with unimaginable bestiality. Victims were scalped. They had their noses, lips and ears cut off. They had their eyes gouged out and hands cut off and they had their heads squashed in clamps. Woman had their breasts cut off and pregnant woman were stabbed in the belly. Men had their genitals sliced off with sickles.

For the psychopaths past and present running USG foreign policy, the fact they have long supported ethnic cleansing and genocidal Nazis is not something that keeps them up at night.

Brutal and sadistic Nazis are exactly the kind of monsters the CIA created in its 70+ year war against the Soviet Union, now against a non-communist Russian Federation (the Cold War wasn’t about defeating communism, it was about creating enemies, hobbling and destroying the competition, growing the MIC and adding to its enormous profits).

Naturally, for his crime of exposing the truth, the senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance, will be taken to the woodshed over his brazen questioning of officialdom and his demand for answers on USG support for Ukro Nazis.

The mental case Ashton-Carillo responded to Vance by accusing him of “focussing on the tired trope of gender chaos” while avoiding the fact he speaks for the Azov Battalion, Ukro Nazis, and foreign mercenaries dominating the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces.

Reprinted with permission from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.

Harvard’s Jacinda Ardean Calls on the United Nations to Crack Down on Free Speech as a Weapon of War

Jonathan Turley — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 13:01:17 GMT

Jacinda Ardern may no longer be Prime Minister of New Zealand, but she was back at the United Nations continuing her call for international censorship. Ardern is now one of the leading anti-free speech figures in the world and continues to draw support from political and academic establishments. In her latest attack on free speech, Ardean declared free speech as a virtual weapon of war. She is demanding that the world join her in battling free speech as part of its own war against “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Her views, of course, were not only enthusiastically embraced by authoritarian countries, but the government and academic elite.

In her speech, she notes that we cannot allow free speech to get in the way of fighting things like climate change. She notes that they cannot win the war on climate change if people do not believe them about the underlying problem. The solution is to silence those with opposing views. It is that simple.

While some of us have denounced her views as an attack on free expression, Harvard rushed to give her not one but two fellowships. While the free speech community denounced her for unrelenting attacks on this human right, Harvard praised her for “strong and empathetic political leadership” and specifically enlisted her to help “improve content standards and platform accountability for extremist content online.”

I actually have no objection to the inclusion of Ardern as a Harvard fellow. She is a former world leader who is leading the movement against free speech. It is a view that students should consider in looking at these controversies. However, Harvard has heralded her views with no acknowledgment of her extreme antagonism toward free speech principles. There is also little countervailing balance at the school with fellows supporting free speech as a human right. Rather, Harvard (which ranks dead last on the recent free speech survey) has become a virtual clearinghouse for anti-free speech academics and advocates.

Free speech is now commonly treated on campuses as harmful. Rather than the right that defines us, it is treated as an existential threat.

What is so chilling is to hear Ardean express her fealty to free speech as she calls on the nations of the world to severely curtail it to prevent people from undermining their policies and priorities. She remains the “empathetic” face of raw censorship and intolerance. She is now the virtual ambassador-at-large for global speech regulation and criminalization.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

'George Who??' 'Woke' NYC Set To 'Cancel' George Washington Statues!

Daniel McAdams — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 16:39:19 GMT

Santayana is credited with saying "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." New York City is considering sending a good chunk of US history down the "memory hole" by destroying statues of George Washington. Also today: Sen. Rand Paul says "no way" to more Ukraine aid; vows to block any fast-track. Meanwhile Ukraine is holding a US citizen Gonzao Lira in prison for having a different opinion about the war and Ukraine's spokesperson threatens to "hunt down" others like Lira. Today on the Liberty Report:

War Profiteers Are A Sign Of A Profoundly Sick Society

Caitlin Johnstone — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 13:11:38 GMT

“War is good for business.”

So reads a quote from an arms industry executive in a recent Reuters article titled “At London arms fair, global war fears are good for business” about Europe’s biggest arms show, the biennial Defence and Security Equipment International. You will probably be unsurprised to learn that Reuters does not name the war profiteer whose quote inspired their headline.

The article describes the way the war in Ukraine and brinkmanship in Taiwan is leading to surging profits for the military industrial complex, with the UK doubling its arms exports in 2022 and worldwide military spending expected to continue to rise by four percent each year for the next five years. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, European military spending rose 13 percent in 2022 alone, bringing total global spending to an all-time high of $2.24 trillion.

“We are extremely busy,” an exaltant head of sales at an armored steel company tells Reuters.

An executive from the arms industry tells Reuters "war is good for business".

And in Europe, business is booming.

In 2022, European military spending increased by 13%, bringing total global spending to an all-time high of $2.24 trillion.https://t.co/bTMQv0WdwP
— Dimitri Lascaris (@dimitrilascaris) September 18, 2023

War is good for business, and it’s expected to get even better. The world’s largest military contractor Lockheed Martin saw its stock rise by a whopping 37 percent last year — helped along by taxpayer-sponsored stock buybacks — and in a report titled “Lockheed Martin: Huge Growth Ahead”, an investment analyst for AlmaStreet Capital predicted last month that Lockheed’s massive profits will only continue to climb. Calling the escalated geopolitical tensions in the current political atmosphere “the most favorable condition that Lockheed Martin could possibly operate under,” the article’s author writes the following:

“Governments worldwide are increasing their budget for defense and security under this heightened geopolitical tensions worldwide. The US government is not an exception. As the largest contractor to the US government, Lockheed Martin is bound to be the biggest beneficiary of the increased defense budget. Given that the company already reached approximately 8% of YoY net sales growth in 2Q23, I believe escalating geopolitical tensions along with easing macroeconomic conditions would allow Lockheed Martin to soon achieve double-digit growth in net sales by the end of the year.”

So it’s no wonder that Lockheed CEO James Taiclet called the most recent hike in the US military budget “as good an outcome as our industry or our company could ask for.” There are vast fortunes riding on governments equipping themselves to kill large numbers of human beings.

Investment analyst says Lockheed Martin is still poised for "huge growth," with the current escalation in geopolitical tensions being "the most favorable condition that Lockheed Martin could possibly operate under" pic.twitter.com/L4komXMFrj
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 15, 2023

There’s a popular quote, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” commonly attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti but most likely coined by Kurt Vonnegut’s son Mark. Whenever I read reports like this about corporations raking in billions from death, suffering, and extremely dangerous acts of brinkmanship between military powers, I always find that phrase “a profoundly sick society” rattling around in my head.

It’s hard to imagine a society sicker than one in which corporations are not only allowed to profit from war and militarism, but to actually push for more of it using campaign donations, lobbying, and the funding of influential warmongering think tanks. It’s no less evil than if corporations were allowed to slaughter foreigners like livestock and sell their body parts for profit at industrial scale; the only thing that’s different is the payment plan. And yet the people who do this are celebrated as respected job creators instead of thrown into cages like the monsters they are.

This is not the sort of civilization we should strive to be well-adjusted to. It is no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a society in which someone can become a billionaire selling weapons of mass murder after lobbying the government to perpetrate those murders. It is no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a society in which the military industrial complex launders information through the media to promote its deadly products and agendas. It is no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a society in which war profiteering corporations can reap massive quarterly profits in a proxy war that was provoked by the west while pouring fortunes into think tanks which helped manufacture consent for those provocations and which spin the west’s actions in a positive light for the media.

If this society could give rise to something so depraved as the military industrial complex, then it is not the sort of society we should seek to blend in with. This is the sort of society we should want to stick out like a sore thumb in. The sort of society in which we should be swimming against the current when everyone else is swimming with it. The sort of society in which we say a resounding NO to things that everyone else is saying yes to.

This society has failed as spectacularly as anything can possibly fail. We live in a mind-controlled dystopia where war profiteers get to steer public policy, where the entire biosphere is being fed into the wood chipper of global capitalism while we rapidly accelerate toward nuclear armageddon. This is the most insane civilization anyone could possibly design. We should seek dissent and divergence from it to the fullest extent possible.

Reprinted with permission from Caitlin's Newsletter.
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Americans Are Being Led By a Lying Media and Corrupt Political Class

Philip Giraldi — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 04:23:42 GMT

Each morning I do a quick scan of the headlines coming over the wire services, clear my emails and Facebook entries, and then take a closer look at The New York Times online, paying particular attention to the opinion pages. I usually am not disappointed in my belief that the President Joe Biden Administration as well as ex-President Donald Trump, have been and continue to be collectively destroying what was once an admirable nation, something like flushing us repeatedly down the toilets of their ambition and greed.

In that light, last Friday was particularly bad and I had what I have come to call a Gadarene Swine moment. For those unfamiliar with the New Testament tale, which comes from the Gospel of Mark , it tells how Jesus encountered a madman during his Galilean ministry who was infested with demons. The man sought help to be cured of his infestation and Jesus obliged him, commanding “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!”, before confronting the unleashed demon and asking “’What is your name?’ He answered, ‘My name is Legion. For we are many.’ And he begged Him repeatedly not to send them away out of the country. Now there was a great herd of swine feeding near the mountains. All the demons pleaded with Him, asking, ‘Send us to the swine, so that we may enter them.’ At once, Jesus gave them leave. Then the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine. And the herd, numbering about two thousand, ran wildly down a steep hill into the sea and were drowned in the sea.”

My first thought was inevitably deep sympathy over what was done to the poor pigs, but that was quickly replaced by bottomless depression induced by the articles that I had just read in the Times that morning. Yes, we Americans have become the Gadarene Swine and are plummeting to our deaths as a people, driven by demons released by the folks that we have unfortunately come to accept as “our leaders.” The three pieces in question were two “opinions,” one by the inevitable Tom Friedman entitled “A Trip to Ukraine Clarified the Stakes. And They’re Huge” and the other a featured piece written by the newspaper editorial board entitled “How to Support Ukraine Beyond the Next Election.” The third article was a news report entitled “As President, Biden Sees Broader War Powers Than He Did as Senator: The president says he can direct limited military operations without lawmakers’ approval.”

The three pieces together suggest that the United States has become dominated by the airing of specious and often not very credible threats as an excuse to go onto a war footing forever, or at least until the country collapses due to its misplaced priorities. I will not, however, try to recreate in any detail the nonsense spewed by the country’s “paper of record,” if only to reject the basic arguments being made for “going the course” in wars that have no reasonable raison d’etre for having been started at all. None of the pieces even seek to answer the most basic question, which is also avoided by our warmongering governing class, and that is “What was or is the US national interest in getting involved in these wars in the first place?”

And surely the most frightening of the three articles is the one that airs the claim made by a muddle-headed Chief Executive Joe Biden that he can start a new war any time he wants, a bold challenge to the US Constitution’s essentially anti-war balance of government powers and also the existing War Powers Act. The article includes material like “If he is elected to a second term, President Biden pledged that he will go to Congress to start any major war but said he believed he was empowered ‘to direct limited US military operations abroad’ without such approval when such strikes served critical American interests… In 2019, Mr. Biden had already shifted to embracing the view, adopted by the executive branch under administrations of both parties, that presidents have broader constitutional authority to carry out limited attacks on other countries without congressional authorization, so long as it falls short of full-scale war. As president, both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden used force unilaterally, citing their claimed constitutional authority to use military force without congressional permission. In April 2017 and again in April 2018 , Mr. Trump directed airstrikes against Syrian government forces, and Mr. Biden in June 2021 and in August 2022 directed airstrikes on Iranian-backed militia groups in Syria.”

Should I ask how Biden will determine a “critical American interest?” Or exactly how either Syria or Iran has been “imminently threatening” the United States, which is in fact itself illegally occupying Syrian territory? And what about the current proxy war against Russia in Ukraine? Was Ukraine a threat to the US justifying bringing America to the brink of a nuclear war? Friedman is just back from a three-day trip to Ukraine and opines “What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil… This is as obvious a case of right versus wrong, good versus evil, as you find in international relations since World War II.”

Perhaps Tom might make an attempt to look more deeply into the seeds of the Ukraine war and might even consider Googling “Minsk accords,” “Boris Johnson visit to Kiev,” and “NATO Expansion,” but he certainly exhibits the type of judgmentalism that he has displayed for so many years at the Times while covering the Middle East, where he has finally been able to recognize “apartheid” after a journey of nearly fifty years during which time numerous crimes against humanity committed by his Israeli friends have been staring him in the face.

The Times editorial group piece also is unwavering in separating good from evil: “ While this board has questioned some specific decisions by Mr. Biden, such as supplying the Ukrainian Army with cluster munitions, we agree with him that it would be ‘wrong and contrary to well-settled principles’ to pressure another country to negotiate over its sovereign territory. Ukraine deserves full support against Russia’s unprovoked invasion, and it is in America’s national interest to lead its NATO allies in demonstrating that they will not tolerate Mr. Putin’s revanchist ambitions. It is a demonstration of America’s commitment to democracy and leadership that other would-be aggressors are watching.”

It is the well-worn “we have to be firm” assertion to set the example and warn other potential aggressors of consequences. But at the same time, to describe Russia’s attack as “unprovoked” is complete nonsense. And the real irony, not to mention hypocrisy, is the “negotiate over…sovereign territory” line when the US is occupying Syrian national territory and looking the other way and smiling as Israel steals the West Bank and Golan Heights. Some who have been closely following the developing situation in Syria are now reporting that it appears that the US is preparing to mount a new series of attacks to remove the legitimate government of Bashar al-Assad. Three Republican congressmen recently traveled to occupied Syria to meet with groups that the United States government itself has labeled as terrorists. That is referred to as materially supporting terrorism which is a crime and one must ask the dwarflike Attorney General Merrick Garland where was the FBI to interrogate and possibly charge and indict the three when they returned? A major war in Syria would inevitably involve Lebanon and Iran. It would be a disaster for the entire region particularly when Israel takes advantage of the situation and Washington steps in to “have Israel’s back” even if the Jewish state starts the fighting. But the US rarely cares about how heavily its boot comes down on the local population or bothers to count the cost either in dollars or lives.

And, of course, the real danger is that if you buy into this type of nonsense, as both of the major political parties have, there is more to come to us long suffering Gadarene Swine, who will continue to endure an endless series of interventions based on nothing beyond the principal that one can get away with nearly anything when backed by a trillion dollar “defense” budget. And, oh by the way, Ukrainian “leader” Volodymyr Zelensky will be in Washington this week to meet with Biden and all his friends in Congress even as they “debate” giving him another $24 billion. He will want to make sure that the message is delivered to his hosts that he is the man who is in charge. Let’s see how the New York Times covers it!

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

Guerilla Warfare In The GOP: House Erupts Over Budget Bust-Up

Daniel McAdams — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 16:48:32 GMT

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is seeing another open revolt from his conservative and populist flank among House Republicans, with firebrands Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) stomping their feet at the "compromise" 30 day stop-gap. Ron Paul has a solution to the dust-up, so watch the show! Also today: ammo is getting very expensive and NATO promises to Ukraine may suffer. Finally...Ron Paul discusses his new book, The Great Surreptitious Coup and tells you how you can get your own copy! Watch today's Liberty Report:

A Nation of Snitches: DHS Is Grooming Americans to Report on Each Other

John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 13:38:33 GMT

Are you among the 41% of Americans who regularly attend church or some other religious service?

Do you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law?

Do you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car?

Are you among the 44% of Americans who live in a household with a gun? If so, are you concerned that the government may be plotting to confiscate your firearms?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the government and flagged for heightened surveillance and preemptive intervention.

Let that sink in a moment.

If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you have just been promoted to the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

I assure you I’m not making this stuff up.

So what is the government doing about these so-called American “extremists”?

The government is grooming the American people to spy on each other as part of its Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, or CP3 program.

According to journalist Leo Hohmann, the government is handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.”

As Hohmann explains, “Whether it’s COVID and vaccines, the war in Ukraine, immigration, the Second Amendment, LGBTQ ideology and child-gender confusion, the integrity of our elections, or the issue of protecting life in the womb, you are no longer allowed to hold dissenting opinions and voice them publicly in America. If you do, your own government will take note and consider you a potential ‘violent extremist’ and terrorist.”

Cue the dawning of the Snitch State.

This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct, hyper-vigilant, technologically-wired age.

For more than two decades, the Department of Homeland Security has plastered its “See Something, Say Something” campaign on the walls of metro stations, on billboards, on coffee cup sleeves, at the Super Bowl, even on television monitors in the Statue of Liberty. Colleges, universities and even football teams and sporting arenas have lined up for grants to participate in the program.

The government has even designated September 25 as National “If You See Something, Say Something” Awareness Day.

If you see something suspicious, says the DHS, say something about it to the police, call it in to a government hotline, or report it using a convenient app on your smart phone.

This DHS slogan is nothing more than the government’s way of indoctrinating “we the people” into the mindset that we’re an extension of the government and, as such, have a patriotic duty to be suspicious of, spy on, and turn in our fellow citizens.

This is what is commonly referred to as community policing.

Yet while community policing and federal programs such as “See Something, Say Something” are sold to the public as patriotic attempts to be on guard against those who would harm us, they are little more than totalitarian tactics dressed up and repackaged for a more modern audience as well-intentioned appeals to law and order and security.

The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own policing.

This is how you turn a people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.

It’s a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry remains focused on and distrustful of each other and shadowy forces from outside the country, they’re incapable of focusing on more definable threats that fall closer to home—namely, the government and its cabal of Constitution-destroying agencies and corporate partners.

This is how the government keeps us under control and in its crosshairs.

By the time you combine the DHS’ “See Something, Say Something” with CP3 and community policing, which has gone global in the guise of the Strong Cities Network program, you’ve got a formula for enabling the government to not only flag distinct “anti-government” segments of the population but locking down the entire nation.

Under the guise of fighting violent extremism “in all of its forms and manifestations” in cities and communities across the world, the Strong Cities Network program works with the UN and the federal government to train local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal.

What this program is really all about, however, is community policing on a global scale with the objective being to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police will identify, monitor and deter individuals who could be construed as potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats.

The government’s war on extremists has been sold to Americans in much the same way that the USA Patriot Act was sold to Americans: as a means of combatting terrorists who seek to destroy America.

However, as we now know, the USA Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that has turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect.

Similarly, the concern with the government’s ongoing anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

If you can’t read the writing on the wall, you need to pay better attention.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, unless we can put the brakes on this dramatic expansion and globalization of the government’s powers, we’re not going to recognize this country five, ten—even twenty—years from now.

As long as “we the people” continue to allow the government to trample our rights in the so-called name of national security, things will get worse, not better.

It’s already worse.

Reprinted with permission from The Rutherford Institute.

Hold On To Your Wallets! Zelensky's Back In Town!

Daniel McAdams — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 16:43:18 GMT

After shipping some $45 billion in military equipment to Ukraine, the Biden Administration is bringing Ukrainian President Zelensky back to Washington to beg for more money. But with the war going badly for Ukraine and strong US opposition to spending more on the effort, it looks to be an uphill battle. Also today: who was the armed guy impersonating a cop at the RFK rally...and why can't RFK get Secret Service Protection? Finally...Homeland Security has a new target: you! Watch today's Liberty Report:

Don’t Tread on Homeschoolers

Ron Paul — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:49:56 GMT

A 12-year-old Colorado boy became a victim of “woke” education when he was taken out of class and told he could not return unless he removed a Gadsden flag, or “Don’t Tread on Me,” patch from his backpack. The school backed down after a video went viral in which a school official told the boy and his mother that the problem with the patch is that the Gadsden flag’s origin is related to slavery and the slave trade. The school was criticized by individuals from across the political spectrum for seeming ignorance of the role the Gadsden flag played in the American Revolution. Among the critics was Colorado Governor Jared Polis, one of the few remaining Democrats willing to defend free speech from the woke mob.

This incident reminded me of a 2009 Department of Homeland Security “fusion center” report warning that individuals with Gadsden flag bumper stickers, or bumper stickers supporting my presidential campaign or the Libertarian or Constitution parties, were potentially dangerous extremists. After I and many other Americans objected, the offending report was withdrawn. But, the fact that it was issued in the first place, just like the fact the Colorado student was ever removed from class for his Gadsden flag patch, shows how the authoritarians view the “Don’t Tread on Me” symbol.

The reason the woke authoritarians hate the Gadsden flag has nothing to do with racism or extremism. It is because the flag represents a rejection of authoritarianism and an embrace of liberty. Benjamin Franklin originally used the rattlesnake to symbolize the rebellious American colonies. He chose the snake because the rattlesnake “never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders.” In other words, rattlesnakes follow the nonaggression principle that forbids the use of offensive force against another’s person or property, but allows the use of force to defend against any violations of one’s rights — including those committed by government officials.

In contrast, authoritarianism is rooted in the notion that politicians, bureaucrats, and their favored special interests have the right to tread on everyone.

The smearing of the Gadsden flag as racist is just the latest example of how the woke left is using its power in American education and cultural institutions to discredit the symbols and ideals of limited government and free markets. The woke left views schools as a place to indoctrinate children into Cultural Marxism rather than a place where children can gain a good education.

The rise of woke education is leading many parents to consider homeschooling. Parents looking to provide their children a quality home-based education that promotes real learning that does not push a political agenda, but does instruct in the history and philosophy of liberty, should look into my homeschooling curriculum. My curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes rigorous programs in history, mathematics, and the physical and natural sciences. The curriculum also provides instruction in personal finance. Students can develop superior communication skills via intensive writing and public speaking courses. Another feature of my curriculum is that it provides students the opportunity to create and run their own businesses.

The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize free-market economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. I encourage all parents looking at alternatives to government schools — alternatives that provide children with a well-rounded education that introduces them to the history and ideas of liberty without sacrificing education for indoctrination — to go to RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information about my homeschooling program.

‘Biden’s phase’ of Ukraine war is beginning

Melkulangara Bhadrakumar — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 04:56:59 GMT

Long-range cruise missiles supplied by UK and France, hit Russia’s Black Sea fleet at its home port of Sevastopol, Sept 13, 2023

The ground war in Ukraine has run its course, a new phase is beginning. Even diehard supporters of Ukraine in the western media and think tanks are admitting that a military victory over Russia is impossible and a vacation of the territory under Russian control is way beyond Kiev’s capability.

Hence the ingenuity of the Biden Administration to explore Plan B counselling Kiev to be realistic about loss of territory and pragmatically seek dialogue with Moscow. This was the bitter message that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken transmitted to Kiev recently in person.

But President Zelensky’s caustic reaction in a subsequent interview with the Economist magazine is revealing. He hit back that the western leaders still talk the good talk, pledging they will stand with Ukraine “as long as it takes” (Biden mantra), but he, Zelensky, has detected a change of mood among some of his partners: “I have this intuition, reading, hearing and seeing their eyes [when they say] ‘we’ll be always with you.’ But I see that he or she is not here, not with us.” Certainly, Zelensky is reading the body language right, as in the absence of an overwhelming military success shortly, western support for Ukraine is time-limited.

Zelensky knows that sustaining the western support will be difficult. Yet he hopes that if not Americans, European Union will at least keep supplying aid, and but may open negotiations over the accession process for Ukraine possibly even at its summit in December. But he also held out a veiled threat of terrorist threat to Europe — warning that it would not be a “good story” for Europe if it were to “drive these people [of Ukraine] into a corner”. So far such ominous threats were muted, originating from low ranking activists of the fascist Bandera fringe.

But Europe has its limits, too. The western stockpiles of weapons are exhausted and Ukraine is a bottomless pit. Importantly, conviction is lacking whether continued supplies would make any difference to the proxy war that is unwinnable. Besides, European economies are in doldrum,’ the recession in Germany may slide into depression, with profound consequences of “deindustrialisation.”

Suffice to say, Zelensky’s visit to the White House in the coming days becomes a defining moment. The Biden Administration is in a sombre mood that the proxy war is hindering a full-throttle Indo-Pacific strategy against China. Yet, during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, Blinken explicitly stated for the first time that the US would not oppose Ukraine using US-supplied longer-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory, a move that Moscow has previously called a “red line,” which would make Washington a direct party to the conflict.

The well-known American military historian, strategic thinker and combat veteran Colonel (Retd.) Douglas MacGregor (who served as advisor to the Pentagon during the Trump administration), is prescient when he says that a new “Biden’s phase of the war” is about to begin. That is to say, having run out of ground forces, the locus will now shift to long-range strike weapons like the Storm Shadow, Taurus, ATACMS long-range missiles, etc.

The US is considering sending ATACMS long-range missiles that Ukraine has been asking for a long time with the capability to strike deep inside Russian territory. The most provocative part is that NATO reconnaissance platforms, both manned and unmanned, will be used in such operations, making the US a virtual co-belligerent.

Russia has been exercising restraint in attacking the source of such enemy capabilities but how long such restraint will continue is anybody’s guess. In response to a pointed query about how Washington would see the attacks on Russian territory with American weaponry and technology, Blinken argued that the increasing number of attacks on Russian territory by Ukrainian drones are “about how they’re [Ukrainians] going to defend their territory and how they’re working to take back what’s been seized from them. Our [US] role, the role of dozens of other countries around the world that are supporting them, is to help them do that.”

Russia is not going to accept such a brazen escalation, especially as these advanced weapon systems used to attack Russia are actually manned by NATO personnel — contractors, trained ex-military hands or even serving officers. President Putin told the media on Friday that “we have detected foreign mercenaries and instructors both on the battlefield and in the units where training is carried out. I think yesterday or the day before yesterday someone was captured again.”

The US calculus is that at some point, Russia will be compelled to negotiate and a frozen conflict will ensue where the NATO allies would retain the option to continue with Ukraine’s military build-up and the process leading to its membership of the Atlantic alliance, and allow the Biden Administration to focus on the Indo-Pacific.

However, Russia will not settle for a “frozen conflict” that falls far short of the objectives of demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine that are the key objectives of its special military operation.

Faced with this new phase of the proxy war, what form the Russian retaliation will take remains to be seen. There could be multiple ways without Russia directly attacking NATO territories or using nuclear weapons (unless the US stages a nuclear attack — of which the chances are zero as of now.)

Already, it is possible to see the potential resumption of military-technical cooperation between Russia and the DPRK (potentially including ICBM technology) as a natural consequence of the aggressive US policy towards Russia and its support for Ukraine — as much as of the current international situation. The point is, today it is with DPRK; tomorrow it could be with Iran, Cuba or Venezuela — what Col. MacGregor calls “horizontal escalation” by Moscow. The situation in Ukraine has become interconnected with the problems of the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan.

Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said on state television on Wednesday that Russia has “no other options” but to achieve a victory in its special military operation and will continue to make progress with their key mission of mowing down the enemy’s equipment and personnel. This suggests that the attritional war will be further intensified while the overall strategy may shift to achieving total military victory.

The Ukrainian military is desperate for manpower. In the 15-week “counteroffensive” alone, over 71,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. There is talk of Kiev seeking repatriation of its nationals in military age from among the refugees in Europe. On the other hand, in expectation of a prolonged conflict, the mobilisation in Russia is continuing.

Putin disclosed on Friday that 300,000 people have volunteered and signed contracts to join the armed forces and new units are being formed, equipped with advanced types of weapons and equipment, “and some of them are already 85–90 percent equipped.”

The high likelihood is that once the Ukrainian “counteroffensive” peters out in another few weeks as a massive failure, Russian forces may launch a large-scale offensive. Conceivably, Russian forces may even cross Dnieper river and take control of Odessa and the coastline leading to the Romanian border, from where NATO has been mounting attacks on Crimea. Make no mistake, for the Anglo-American axis, encircling Russia in the Black Sea has always remained a top priority.

Watch the excellent interview (below) of Col. Douglas MacGregor by Professor Glenn Diesen at the University of North-Eastern in Norway:

Reprinted with permission from Indian Punchline.

Florida Surgeon General: Most People Should Not Take the New Coronavirus Shot

Adam Dick — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 04:50:05 GMT

If you are under age 65, do not take the new coronavirus shot being rolled out this month. That is the recommendation of Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo in the “Guidance for COVID-19 Boosters” publication he released Wednesday. And, even for older individuals, Ladapo is not giving a blanket OK for the shots. The publication advises that people 65 years old and older should discuss the information in the publication “with their health care provider, including potential concerns outlined in this guidance.”

This stand by Ladapo puts him at odds with top government health officials in other states who are recommending the latest experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shot for everyone from babies to the elderly. This will be coronavirus shot number eight for people who have taken the experimental shots on the recommended schedule as they became available from day one.

This is not the first time Ladapo has stood apart from his counterparts in other states’ governments in regard to coronavirus shots. In October of 2022 he advised that a smaller subset of people — men ages 18 to 39 — should not take the mRNA coronavirus shots; earlier in 2022 the Florida Department of Health that he leads advised that healthy children ages 5 to 17 may not benefit from coronavirus shots and Florida alone among states refused to distribute coronavirus shots to children age four and younger. As with Ladapo’s new advice, the concern earlier was that the dangers of the shots outweigh the benefits, if any.

Ladapo’s advice offered Wednesday is quite similar to the advice offered by America’s Frontline Doctors in December of 2020 — during the rollout of the original campaign pushing coronavirus shots. Many Americans would have saved themselves from regret, and more, if they had followed this advice from the beginning.

Of course, by this point, most Americans are wise to the coronavirus fearmongering and pro-shots hype. Instead of rushing out to take the new shot, their reaction to being urged to take it will be along the lines of “you’ve got to be kidding,” “not a chance,” or just a simple “nope.”

It would be nice if many top health officials of other state governments would join Ladapo in standing up to the coronavirus shots propaganda that threatens individuals’ health through the encouragement that they be injected repeatedly with dangerous and ineffective shots. If these officials have not warned by now about the shots like Ladapo has, then they should be judged as either too ignorant, too meek, too lazy, too fraudulent, or too corrupt to merit continuing in their positions.

You're Not Supporting Ukraine Enough Until the Nuclear Blast Hits Your Face

Max Abrahms — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 04:57:58 GMT

What happened to Elon Musk this past week showcases how completely unhinged and dangerous US policy to Ukraine has become. The condemnation began when the Washington Post published excerpts from a new biography on Musk revealing that he turned down a Ukrainian request to help launch a major sneak attack in September 2022 on the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

There were numerous, legitimate reasons why Musk refused to activate his Starlink internet services for Ukraine to carry out the unprecedented, surprise attack on Russian naval vessels: Musk was providing terminals to Ukraine for free; he was not on a military contract at that time; the late-night request came directly from the Ukrainian—not American—government; and Starlink had never been activated over Crimea because of US sanctions on Russia. Most importantly, Musk was concerned that enabling the attack could result in serious "conflict escalation." He worried that he was being asked to turn on Starlink for a "Pearl Harbor like attack" and had no wish to "proactively take part in a major act of war," possibly provoking a Russian nuclear response.

In response to this nuclear aversion, Musk was called "evil" by a high-level Ukrainian official and "traitor" by American war enthusiasts. Rachel Maddow on the Russia conspiracy network MSNBC said Musk was "intervening to try to stop Ukraine from winning the war." Not to be outdone, CNN's Jake Tapper described Elon as a "capricious billionaire" who "sabotaged a military operation by Ukraine, a US ally," an act that demands "repercussions." For his part, chief Iraq war salesman-turned-Democrat-darling, David Frum, said that Musk must be stripped of his US government contracts for not reflexively acceding to the Ukrainian Starlink request, and former "progressive," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, called for an immediate Congressional investigation "to ensure foreign policy is conducted by the government and not by one billionaire."

‼️ @SenWarren demands an investigation into SpaceX after Musk blocked Ukraine from extending the Starlink network near Crimea.

“The Congress needs to investigate whether we have adequate tools to ensure foreign policy is conducted by the government and not by one billionaire". pic.twitter.com/p3I19Yk851
— Ostap Yarysh (@OstapYarysh) September 12, 2023

But the Musk pile-on was just getting started. In the days that followed, his detractors used a Ukrainian operation as proof that Musk was overreacting. Days after the Starlink story broke, Ukraine successfully launched British Storm Shadow cruise missiles into the Russian naval headquarters in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol. It was the largest attack since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly 19 months ago, and it damaged a Russian submarine and warship.

When the military action was not followed by World War III, Musk was torched again. As the pro-war media noted, "It was precisely such a strike, according to Musk, that should have provoked a nuclear war." A torrent of international relations pundits on Twitter mocked Musk, tweeting things like "I was assured by an internet service provider executive that this would have caused WWIII and the use of nuclear weapons" and "How's it going man, after the splendid attack on Sevastopol? WW3 started already?"

Musk's detractors might think this is all very funny, but attacking Crimea—not to mention the Russian mainland in increasingly frequent drone strikes on Moscow—is no laughing matter. Even the staunchest Western war enthusiasts from the NATO-aligned Atlantic Council to the Estonian defense minister to Biden's own Secretary of State Antony Blinken all previously acknowledged that threatening Crimea is a possible "red line" that could lead to nuclear war.

As the Russian military specialist Nicolo Fasola pointed out in April, "There's a definite risk that Putin would use nuclear weapons to counter a Ukrainian offensive in Crimea. And that's why Ukraine's Western allies are reluctant."

Fair Use Excerpt. Read the whole article here.

Can the Government Cut Off Personal Liberty?

Andrew P. Napolitano — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 04:42:29 GMT

Last week, the Governor of New Mexico confronted what she claimed was a health crisis, and her solution was to deny law-abiding folks the right to bear arms. The health crisis she identified was an uptick in the murder rate in the city of Albuquerque. And her solution was to turn off the personal liberty of all persons there. She purported to do this by issuing an executive decree that prescribed the penalties for doing what was perfectly lawful the day before the decree -- openly carrying a registered handgun.

She did this notwithstanding the expressly guaranteed right in the U.S. Constitution to keep and bear arms, notwithstanding the Supreme Court's most recent interpretations of the constitutional guarantee, notwithstanding the natural right to self-defense and notwithstanding comparable guarantees in the New Mexico Constitution and laws.

Stated differently, the Governor took the law into her own hands and defied and perverted it. Can this possibly be legal? In a word: No.

Here is the backstory.

In 1939, the Supreme Court heard an appeal in U.S. v. Miller, a case in which the defendant had been convicted of carrying a rifle across state lines that was too short, according to federal statutes. The statutes were based on the power of Congress to regulate commerce between the states. Even though Miller was not engaged in commercial activity, and even though no lawyer appeared or presented an argument for him in the Supreme Court, the court upheld his conviction.

From and after that case, the feds and the states began aggressively regulating the possession, sale and movement of weapons. The big-government types in both political parties regularly either enacted laws or gave the power to bureaucrats to promulgate and enforce regulations that severely impaired the right to keep and bear arms. Their view was that their governments would keep them safe, so why does anyone need arms?

This attitude prevailed until 2008, when a retired District of Columbia police officer applied for a permit to own and possess a handgun in his own home, and his application was denied.

The Supreme Court reversed that denial, and an opinion called District of Columbia v. Heller, authored by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, held that the right to keep and bear arms is personal and pre-political; meaning, it is possessed by individual persons and it does not derive from the government. It is the modern mechanical extension of the natural right to self-defense.

Justice Scalia reasoned that the Second Amendment does not grant the right to keep and bear arms; rather, it restrains the government from interfering with it.

As if to defy the Supreme Court, liberal states, begrudgingly recognizing the right to own a gun, made it nearly impossible to carry or use a gun, since Heller only addressed ownership and use in one's home.

Then, last year, the Supreme Court addressed the issue of carrying guns in public places. In an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court overruled Miller and reaffirmed Heller, and ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment means today what it meant to those who wrote and ratified it in 1791.

Thus, the original public understanding of the right to keep and bear arms -- which is the right to use guns to protect life, liberty and property from bad guys and tyrants -- is the governing principle of all gun laws today.

Add to this the basic constitutional principle of the separation of powers, and one can easily see just how wrong and dangerous the behavior of the Governor of New Mexico is. Under the separation of powers, only the legislature can write laws, and only the executive can enforce them, and only the judiciary can say what they mean.

Since governors are in the executive branch, they are not constitutionally competent to write laws; they can only enforce those that the legislature has already written. Thus, when the Supreme Court has defined the right to keep and bear arms as a personal, individual, natural right, no gubernatorial decree can interfere with it.

What about emergencies? The Supreme Court has also ruled consistently that there are no emergency exceptions to the fundamental rights guaranteed from infringement in the Bill of Rights.

Moreover, the Governor of New Mexico has violated federal law by issuing her decree. Federal civil rights laws expressly prohibit all government officials from using government power to infringe upon individual fundamental liberties.

But there is more here about which to be weary.

Many of us who monitor the government's lack of fidelity to constitutional norms firmly believe that its so-called lockdowns and other mandates, issued under the guise of health regulations three years ago, were profoundly unconstitutional. All violated the separation of powers, as these unlawful commands were issued by governors and bureaucrats, not enacted by legislatures. And all infringed upon natural human rights, like worship, speech, assembly and travel, none of which can be impaired without proving fault or guilt at a jury trial.

Surely, the Governor of New Mexico knows this. She has taken an oath to preserve, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution of New Mexico.

Her oaths are to the values underlying government, not just to the pieces of paper on which those values are articulated. The values that she violated -- perhaps as a dry run for future gubernatorial aberrations -- recognize that our rights are natural to our humanity. As such they cannot be interfered with by a decree or even by a popular majority.

Paraphrasing John Stuart Mill, because modern-day self-defense is a natural right, if all America but one were of the view that self-defense by guns is unlawful, the government would no more be justified in seizing the guns of the one than would he, if he had the power, be justified in seizing the guns of the government.

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://judgenap.com/.

COPYRIGHT 2023 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO

America's longest serving deep state mouthpiece calls for Biden (and Harris) to step down

Jordan Schachtel — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 04:21:44 GMT

David Ignatius doesn’t really work for The Washington Post. That’s just his cover gig.

He’s more so the longest serving media asset for the American security state, specifically Langley.

Ignatius has been on the receiving end of many spoon-fed “scoops” during his 50 year career. Most recently, he published a piece on Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s allegedly scandalous communications with the Russians (the story was nonsense and nothing more than a means to sabotage an enemy of the administrative state). Flynn did nothing out of the ordinary, but the Ignatius-launched campaign succeeded in removing the unconventional (by D.C. standards) leader from former President Donald Trump’s inner circle. Read this Politico piece on the many “scoops” he’s received from the national security state.

That’s why his column in The Washington Post today, titled, “President Biden should not run again in 2024,” is worthy of your time and attention.

While devoting the first several graphs to lavishing praise upon President Biden, Ignatius finished buttering him up and delivers what he meant to say.

“I don’t think Biden and Vice President Harris should run for reelection. It’s painful to say that, given my admiration for much of what they have accomplished. But if he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump,” he writes.

The WaPo writer continues, discussing the “two big liabilities” of the campaign: Biden’s age and the fact that nobody likes Kamala Harris.

Ignatius starts digging in, adding:

“Biden has never been good at saying no. He should have resisted the choice of Harris, who was a colleague of his beloved son Beau when they were both state attorneys general. He should have blocked then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which has done considerable damage to the island’s security. He should have stopped his son Hunter from joining the board of a Ukrainian gas company and representing companies in China — and he certainly should have resisted Hunter’s attempts to impress clients by getting Dad on the phone.

If you want the TL;DR version, the article can be summarized by the following key points:

- You did a good job, Joe!

- You’re senile now and it’s time to step down

- Your VP sucks and nobody likes her

- If the Bad Orange Man regains power, it will forever impact your legacy

Having spent many years in The Swamp and being somewhat familiar with the ins and outs of the place, I think it’s very possible that there is an ongoing power struggle within the Uniparty establishment. Biden has been an ideal “caretaker” president for the primary goals of the regime: the further centralization of power and wealth into the hands of the people in charge.

Now, it’s hard to say that Ignatius is advancing the CIA’s position on who the democratic candidate should be. But it’s worth taking note of the column, given the established ties of the man behind it.

Should Biden’s handlers decide to step him down, they have to act soon. South Carolina will hold the first democratic primary race on February 3.

Reprinted with permission from The Dossier.
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Ukraine Hits Crimea (With US Targeting And British Missiles)

Daniel McAdams — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 16:52:25 GMT

Yesterday, Ukraine hit targets in Crimea, damaging or destroying one kilo-class Russian sub and one landing ship. The missiles used were StormShadows from the UK and the targeting was from the US Pentagon. How soon until Russia strikes back at increasingly direct NATO/US involvement in the war? Also today: too little too late - the Pentagon suddenly develops an interest in where the money to Ukraine is going. Finally - Agent Orange 2.0? US to "defoliate" Asian jungles to prepare for war with China. Watch today's Liberty Report:

Five Facts That Compel the Biden Impeachment Inquiry

Jonathan Turley — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 12:46:12 GMT

Below is my column in The Messenger on the reason why an impeachment inquiry is warranted. I do not believe that a case for impeachment has been made, but there is clearly a need for an investigation into a growing array of allegations facing the President in this corruption scandal.

I also reject the notion that, because a conviction is unlikely in the Democratic-controlled Senate, the House should not go down this road. I rejected the same argument made by some Republicans during the Trump impeachment. The House has a separate constitutional duty in the investigation of potential impeachable offenses and to pass articles of impeachment if those allegations are found to be valid. My objection to the Trump impeachments were first and foremost the failure to fully investigate the underlying allegations and to create a full record to support the articles of impeachment. The Senate has its own constitutional function under the Constitution that it can either choose to fulfill or to ignore. A House impeachment holds both constitutional and historical significance separate from any conviction. That does not mean that grounds for impeachment will be found in this inquiry. While the President deserves a presumption of innocence in this process, the public deserves answers to these questions.

Here is the column:

With the commencement of an impeachment inquiry this week, the House of Representatives is moving the Biden corruption scandal into the highest level of constitutional inquiry. After stonewalling by the Bidens and federal agencies investigating various allegations, the move for a House inquiry was expected if not inevitable.

An impeachment inquiry does not mean that an impeachment itself is inevitable. But it dramatically increases the chances of finally forcing answers to troubling questions of influence-peddling and corruption.

As expected, many House Democrats — who impeached Donald Trump after only one hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, based on his phone call to Ukraine’s president — oppose any such inquiry into President Biden. House Republicans could have chosen to forego any hearings and use what I called a “snap impeachment,” as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did with the second Trump impeachment in January 2021.

Instead, they have methodically investigated the corruption scandal for months and only now are moving to a heightened inquiry. The House has established a labyrinth of dozens of shell companies and accounts allegedly used to transfer millions of dollars to Biden family members. There is now undeniable evidence to support influence-peddling by Hunter Biden and some of his associates — with Joe Biden, to quote Hunter’s business partner Devon Archer, being “the brand” they were selling.

The suggestion that this evidence does not meet the standard for an inquiry into impeachable offenses is an example of willful blindness. It also is starkly different from the standard applied by congressional Democrats during the Trump and Nixon impeachment efforts.

The Nixon impeachment began on Oct. 30, 1973, just after President Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into the Watergate allegations. The vote in the judiciary committee was along party lines. The House was correct to start that impeachment inquiry, although House leaders stressed that they were not prejudging the existence of impeachable offenses. The inquiry started roughly eight months before any indictments of defendants linked to the Watergate break-in. It was many months before clear evidence established connections to Nixon, who denied any wrongdoing or involvement.

Every impeachment inquiry is different, of course. In this case, there is a considerable amount of evidence gathered over months of methodical investigations by three different committees.

Consider just five established facts:

First, there appears to be evidence that Joe Biden lied to the public for years in denying knowledge of his son’s business dealings. Hunter Biden’s ex-business associate, Tony Bobulinski, has said repeatedly that he discussed some dealings directly with Joe Biden. Devon Archer, Hunter’s close friend and partner, described the president’s denials of knowledge as “categorically false.”

Moreover, Hunter’s laptop has communications from his father discussing the dealings, including audio messages from the president. The president allegedly spoke with his son on speakerphone during meetings with his associates on at least 20 occasions, according to Archer, attended dinners with some clients, and took photographs with others.

Second, we know that more than $20 million was paid to the Bidens by foreign sources, including figures in China, Ukraine, Russia and Romania. There is no apparent reason for the multilayers of accounts and companies other than to hide these transfers. Some of these foreign figures have allegedly told others they were buying influence with Joe Biden, and Hunter himself repeatedly invoked his father’s name — including a text exchange with a Chinese businessman in which he said his father was sitting next to him as Hunter demanded millions in payment. While some Democrats now admit that Hunter was selling the “illusion” of influence and access to his father, these figures clearly believed they were getting more than an illusion. That includes one Ukrainian businessman who reportedly described Hunter as dumber than his dog.

Third, specific demands were made on Hunter, including dealing with the threat of a Ukrainian prosecutor to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where Hunter was given a lucrative board position. Five days later, Joe Biden forced the Ukrainians to fire the prosecutor, even though State Department and intelligence reports suggested that progress was being made on corruption. Likewise, despite warnings from State Department officials that Hunter was undermining anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine, he continued to receive high-level meetings with then-Secretary of State John Kerry and other State Department officials.

Fourth, Hunter repeatedly stated in emails that he paid his father as much as half of what he earned. There also are references to deals that included free office space and other perks for Joe Biden and his wife; other emails reference how Joe and Hunter Biden would use the same accounts and credit cards. Beyond those alleged direct benefits, Joe Biden clearly benefited from money going to his extended family.

Fifth, there is evidence of alleged criminal conduct by Hunter that could be linked to covering up these payments, from the failure to pay taxes to the failure to register as a foreign lobbyist. What is not established is the assumption by many that Joe Biden was fully aware of both the business dealings and any efforts to conceal them.

The White House is reportedly involved in marshaling the media to swat down any further investigation. In a letter drafted by the White House Counsel’s office, according to a CNN report media executives were told they need to “ramp up their scrutiny” of House Republicans “for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies.” It is a dangerous erosion of separation between the White House and the president’s personal legal team. Yet, many in the media have previously followed such directions from the Biden team — from emphasizing the story that the laptop might be “Russian disinformation” to an unquestioning acceptance of the president’s denial of any knowledge of his son’s dealings.

Notably, despite the vast majority of media echoing different defenses for the Bidens for years, the American public is not buying it. Polls show that most Americans view the Justice Department as compromised and Hunter Biden as getting special treatment for his alleged criminal conduct. According to a recent CNN poll, 61% of Americans believe Joe Biden was involved in his family’s business deals with China and Ukraine; only 1% say he was involved but did nothing wrong.

The American public should not harbor such doubts over corruption at the highest levels of our government. Thus, the House impeachment inquiry will allow Congress to use the very apex of its powers to force disclosures of key evidence and resolve some of these troubling questions. It may not result in an impeachment, but it will result in greater clarity. Indeed, it is that very clarity that many in Washington may fear the most from this inquiry.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

Putin Doesn't Think US Foreign Policy Will Change If Trump Is Re-Elected (And He's Probably Right)

Caitlin Johnstone — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 04:12:17 GMT

Vladimir Putin said at the Eastern Economic Forum on Tuesday that he wouldn’t expect any meaningful changes in US policy toward Russia if former president Donald Trump secures re-election next year.

TASS reports the following on the Russian president’s comments:

“I think there will be no fundamental changes regarding Russia in US foreign policy, no matter who is elected president,” Putin said. “Mr. [Donald] Trump (ex-president and Republican Party candidate — TASS) says he will solve acute problems, including the Ukrainian crisis, in a few days, this can only please. Nevertheless, he too imposed sanctions on Russia during his presidency,” Putin recalled.

The US, according to the Russian president, “views Russia as a permanent adversary, or even an enemy, and has hammered this into the heads of ordinary Americans.” “The current authorities have tuned American society into an anti-Russian vein and spirit — that’s what it’s all about. They have done it, and now it will be very difficult to somehow turn this ship in the other direction,” Putin said.

Putin Says Trump Won’t Change US Foreign Policy
by Kyle Anzalone@KyleAnzalone_ #Putin #Trump #Russia #Ukraine https://t.co/nAERPXnbEa pic.twitter.com/AGVJ333pKf
— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) September 13, 2023

This is not the first time Putin has made such comments. When Oliver Stone asked him in an interview during Trump’s presidency what has changed from administration to administration in the four US presidents he’d gone through during his leadership, Putin replied, “Almost nothing. Your bureaucracy is very strong and it is that bureaucracy that rules the world.”

And he’s right; from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden there has been a consistent pattern of escalation which has now culminated in a terrible proxy war — provoked by western actions — which has the potential to go nuclear at any time. Trump has been campaigning on the claim that he can end the Ukraine war in a day if re-elected, but there is no actual reason to believe that’s true.

Neither mainstream American party likes to admit to this fact because of the implications for their respective political agendas, but in terms of concrete policy decisions Trump actually governed as a virulent Russia hawk who spent his entire term ramping up cold war aggressions against Russia on multiple fronts. He arguably played as much of a role in paving the way toward the war in Ukraine as any other president — it was Trump after all who first began pouring American weapons into Ukraine, an incendiary move that his predecessor Obama had actually resisted for fear of provoking Moscow.

The claim that Trump was a secret agent of the Kremlin has always been a ridiculous conspiracy theory made possible by mass-scale journalistic malpractice and intervention by the US intelligence cartel, and it has been debunked and discredited from pretty much every angle you could think of. But the strongest evidence that it was false was always the fact that Trump spent his entire presidency directly attacking Russian interests with actions like sanctions, shredded treaties, aggressive Nuclear Posture Reviews, efforts to shut down Nord Stream 2, occupying and repeatedly bombing Syria, and arming Ukraine.

Trump defenders will argue that Trump only did these things because he was politically pressured to by the Russiagate narrative, and that may be true, but what is the functional difference between a president who acts aggressively toward Russia because he was pressured to and a president who acts aggressively toward Russia because he wants to? In terms of actual behavior, there is no difference. If Trump is ramping up nuclear brinkmanship against Russia, it doesn’t matter how his feelings secretly feel about it inside — all that matters is that it’s happening. And if empire managers could pressure Trump to act as a Russia hawk before, there’s no reason to believe they can’t do it again.

The most significant thing about all US presidents is not their differences, it’s their similarities. The truth of the matter is that if you were to only watch the movements of troops, war machinery, resources and money from year to year, you wouldn’t be able to tell when one president’s term ended and another began, or what party they belong to or what their campaign platform was. The empire marches on completely uninterrupted, regardless of who Americans elect to be the face at its front desk.

The bureaucracy is very strong, and it is that bureaucracy that rules the world.

Reprinted with permission from Caitlin's Newsletter.
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Is The Biden Impeachment Inquiry Just Political Theater?

Daniel McAdams — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 16:49:59 GMT

Speaker McCarthy finally bowed to pressure and, likely against his preference, launched an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. Already House conservatives like Matt Gaetz are warning that Republican hands will be cuffed. What should we expect from the process? Truth? Also today, Covid tyrants are back and cancelling high school football games again. Finally, Sen. Warren wants Musk probed over failing to facilitate Ukrainian attack on the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Watch today's Liberty Report:

A Personal Journey Through the National Security State

Philip Giraldi — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 12:49:29 GMT

(This presentation was prepared for the Sept. 1st. Ron Paul Institute's Ron Paul Scholars Seminar)

I am accustomed to opening the New York Times and The Washington Post to find laundry list articles relating to what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has reportedly been up to. That many of the evidence free allegations are implausible or even quite contrary to known facts about international political developments does not seem to matter as using the initials CIA appears to be enough to make one’s case that there is something either unseemly or even evil going on. And it serves as a convenient scapegoat for the liberal media – “It wasn’t Joe Biden who dunnit, it was the CIA!”

Over the Labor Day weekend I attended an antiwar conference which included remarks by some speakers who proceeded to run through a whole litany of claimed CIA crimes against humanity. It struck me at the time that they did not always know what they were talking about and I began to think about my own 21 year-long involvement with the National Security Community and, more particularly, to what extent that CIA and to a lesser extent military intelligence were quite the out-of-control demons that they have been made out to be.

Indeed, among my generation’s Agency officers who are by now retired, most I know are antiwar, as am I, though those younger officers whom I encounter on occasion that are actively serving generally are more careful about expressing their views or are outspokenly anti-Russian, which is presumably what how current CIA leadership wants them to deport themselves in public.

I spent 18 years in CIA nearly all overseas where I worked almost exclusively on counter-terrorism against groups that were initially nearly all European, starting with the Italian Red Brigades in 1976 and ending up with the Basque and Catalan separatists in Spain in 1992. I had also served 3 years in army intelligence during Vietnam and in both of those roles, contrary to what the media regularly suggests, I never killed anyone or coerced anyone and never carried a gun, not even in Afghanistan. Nor did I know of any Agency colleagues who had done so. To be sure there were CIA torture prisons in Thailand and Poland in the wake of 9/11, but they were in response to White House mandates and were small scale and moderate compared with what went on in military prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. And when the US government decided to start assassinating US citizens and “profiled” foreigners overseas using drones in 2010 it was done on the authority of President Barack Obama, not as part of operations conducted by the CIA.

I only knew one CIA officer who was behind overthrowing a government, in Chile in 1973, colluding with the Chilean military to remove elected President Salvador Allende and replace him with General Augusto Pinochet. The Santiago Chief of Station’s famous cable to a reluctant Agency HQs to participate in the operation asked “Is headquarters under control of the enemy?” which became a part of CIA lore, repeated and laughed over by entering training classes. Nevertheless, if one revisits what happened with Allende the conclusion that the White House and State Department were equally engaged in the driving of the operation and certainly had given the green light to what followed.

Before that time, one might also recall John F Kennedy’s assessment of what was quite possibly the Agency’s most egregious blunder, the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. Kennedy stated his intention to break the CIA into 1000 pieces after the intelligence disaster, which led to the firing of its first civilian director Allen Dulles. Kennedy never quite completed the demolition job but was assassinated two years later with some investigators inevitably suggesting that CIA was involved in his death.

The congressional commission of Frank Church in 1975-6 exposed Agency engagement in multiple illegal activities, including assassination plots and domestic surveillance of Americans opposed to the Vietnam War. There was the Famous Fidel Castro poisoned cigar plot meant to kill him and the assassination of heads of state in Africa, Asia and Latin America. CIA had also tested large doses of LSD on unwitting subjects. It is hard to recall any other moment in American history when so much horrifying skulduggery was revealed.

A consensus on reforms and oversight after Church documented his findings led Congress to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, which for the first time imposed some limits on the government’s ability to spy on American citizens. It ended the wild days and restricted any operations inside the US. CIA is also regularly accused of leaking or controlling the message coming from the US media, but the reality is that leaks to influence the media and public generally come from the White House or State Department.

My college education was at the University of Chicago, majoring in ancient and medieval history – the university was at that time the intellectual breeding ground of the neocon movement headed by Professor Leo Strauss but students were antiwar and famously occupied the university admin building in 1968 as a protest against Vietnam. I became subject to the army draft immediately upon graduation but I signed up for an extra year for the military occupation specialty (MOS) in intelligence. I went to the training school at Ft Holabird Baltimore, now closed. I was sent to West Berlin due to my one year of Russian study in college, a rare example of the Army actually doing something in personnel assignments that made sense – my classmates mostly went to Vietnam where some were killed while serving in the 521st Military Intelligence Brigade. My army unit from Berlin continues to stay in touch and has held reunions.

I obtained a PhD in European history, was hired by a CIA recruiter at a historians’ conference in New York City in 1975 and served in Rome, Hamburg, as an instructor at the Agency training center in Virginia, Istanbul, Barcelona, and Afghanistan, with language courses in between tours.

But it was during my Army service that I first learned about corruption and lying in government. West Berlin’s detachment of the 66th Military Intelligence Brigade was a 75 officers and enlisted men unit, of which I was the operations sergeant. We were supposed to be able to provide warning of a Soviet attack and were tasked with being able to establish stay-behind reporting if such an attack were to take place, but we were, in fact, unable to do any of that. Instead, we routinely inflated monthly reports using misleading statistics to show how active and “ready” we were. I almost went to my congressman afterwards to tell him what a fraud it all was, but did not want to interfere with my impending grad school using the GI bill, so I kept silent.

After grad school my next stop was at CIA. The Agency was during my time 20,000 strong, divided into operations (spying), analysis, admin and various special staffs focused on issues like drugs, arms control, nuclear proliferation. There is also a paramilitary branch staffed mostly by former military special forces. In my experience, most mid-level employees were honest and hard working. Most lived in Washington, with 2,000 or so overseas. Those at the top became, however, increasingly political and were frequently not trained intelligence officers. Only one director since Bill Casey, former OSS, under Ronald Reagan, has been a career intelligence officer, and that was Gina Haspel in 2018-2021. Instead, they have been selected for political reasons and drawn from the ranks of ex-military like Turner, Woolsey, Petraeus and Pompeo, from retired politicians, or even from a congressional staffer like George Tenet. Currently William Burns, is a former diplomat.

As a little background, CIA was founded in 1947 through the National Security Act to correct failure to connect all the intelligence dots that preceded Pearl Harbor even though the US had broken the Japanese naval communications codes and had all the information needed to anticipate what was about to occur. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that there was still failure to connect some of the dots preceding 9/11 – Coleen Rowley, an FBI agent in Minnesota, among others, was sounding the alarm about some specific Saudis who were learning to fly large commercial airliners and might be planning a hijacking. Richard Clarke, the controversial National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism working for the National Security Council and at the White House, was alarmed, running around with his “hair on fire” as he put it, but could not penetrate the layers of bureaucracy that surrounded George W. Bush to warn about the threat and initiate additional security measures.

The problem with US national security is that there are too many players in the game. My personal experience example of the multiple levels operating within the intelligence community comes from Iran-contra in 1986, secretly and illegally trading arms for money to go to contra-Sandinistas in Nicaragua and to free hostages in Lebanon. Iran Contra was run by the White House’s National Security Council and it was organized by Ollie North. Flights by private jets for Revolutionary Guard commanders were routed through Istanbul, where I was based, and I received a secret message to make the arrangements at the airport, which I did even though it was not a CIA operation. Planes carried cash to Washington, weapons were shipped, and the money generated was routed to the Sandinista rebels to fund the mining of Nicaraguan harbors by the Pentagon, which was also illegal.

In fact, it is often noted that what used to be done by the CIA is now done by other federal agencies, often right out in the open. Recent examples of regime change are the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and State Department in Ukraine, State Department in Iraq, Pentagon in Syria, not CIA, and the war-crime destruction of the Nordstream pipeline was done quite probably by the US Navy after warnings by the president and secretary of state while the assassination of Prigozhin in Russia was probably accomplished by British MI-6. The recent ousting of Pakistani President Imran Khan was clearly a project of the White House and Pentagon and the increasing pressure on Hungary’s Viktor Orban derives from the State Department and president. The fact is that traditional espionage related “covert action” is now implemented by many components of the United States government and its foreign allies, so bleating “CIA, CIA” no longer enlightening.

So where is it all going? Most former intelligence agency employees now believe that the national security system has become so politicized that it is nearly dysfunctional, telling policymakers what they want to hear instead of what they need to know. There have been reports that frustrated CIA and Defense Department analysts have been warning that Ukraine cannot win the war against Russia but the senior managers of those organizations as well as policymakers do not want to hear what hard working analysts have concluded.

The creation of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, currently held by Avril Haines, was intended to serve as a focal point for providing policy makers with the best information from all of the US government’s eighteen intelligence agencies, but it has not really worked well in practice. The various agencies all have established constituencies and agendas that seldom fit snugly together, suggesting that the motive to create CIA in the first place, i.e. to make sure critical intelligence reaches those who “need to know” in a timely fashion, might be unattainable. To be sure, the multiple intelligence failures surrounding Afghanistan, Iraq and now Ukraine are hard to ignore.