US Rep Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) has introduced an authorization for the use of force against Russia bill in the US House, allowing President Biden to take the country to war with the nuclear-armed country in the case of a bio/chemical/nuclear attack on Ukraine. What about the danger of false flags? Also today: US training Ukrainian troops in Germany, Ghost of Kiev unmasked, and Pelosi takes on the bullies… Get your tickets to the RPI June Conference in Houston: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-bide…
Whatever your views of Russia and Russian policy in Europe, ask yourself one question: is all of this worth a nuclear war? Is it that important to average Americans – who themselves are being fed through the metaphorical meat grinder of economic collapse – who governs Russia and where Ukraine’s ever-changing borders might wind up? Does any American really believe that if we fail to fight Putin to the death we’ll be speaking Russian in Peoria next year?
Happy May Day! That may sound a bit odd coming from me, but I do have some fond memories of the “Workers’ Day.”
When I lived in Hungary I would go out to the Városliget (City Park) to where the Munkáspárt – the renamed Hungarian Socialist Workers’ (Communist) Party – would hold a big picnic for its remnant, serving up the traditional sör és virsli (beer and hot dogs). And all of it free or nearly free. The irony of enjoying a free lunch and a few brews from communists was just too tempting. But by and large, they weren’t bad people. Just misguided. The real criminals from the Communist era had already long ago joined the “pro-West” political parties and enjoyed cozy relations with the US Embassy in Budapest!
On to the main topic: a few reflections about the current status of the US/Russia war. Yes, I wrote it: US/Russia war. Let’s call things what they really are. In fact, this is no conspiracy theory at all. The true goal of US policy in the region was revealed this past week by none other than US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, when he clarified that the aim wasn’t really to help plucky upstart Ukraine recover its “democracy,” but rather to weaken – and hopefully disintegrate – Russia itself.
He said: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
Suddenly the narrative of brave Ukraine fighting for its freedom and the sanctity of its borders has dropped, as the real goals are being revealed by those in charge. Just like the 2003 US attack on Iraq was initially sold to us as gifting democracy as a “favor” to a grateful Iraqi people. We all know how that turned out. Odd that people resent having their infrastructure decimated and a million killed. Ingrates.
Likewise Ukrainians are waking up and seeing that all’s not as meets the eye. Wives and mothers in the western Transcarpathia region of Ukraine took their antiwar sentiment to the local Recruitment Office, demanding that their sons and husbands stop being sent to the meat-grinder at the front lines in eastern Ukraine. Turns out the people in the middle aren’t all that crazy about being victims in a proxy war between two great powers. People on the ground know very well that the “Ukraine’s winning” narrative is just propaganda for gullible Western consumption.
Giving Russia it’s own Vietnam? Hmmm…it seems like we’ve seen this movie before. Oh yes…we have!
It all reeks of the grand scheme of the late, not-so-great, global chessboard player Zbigniew Brzezinski, who fondly and famously recalled his master plan for the Soviets in Afghanistan during an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76:Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?Yes, just some “stirred up Moslems.” Including a guy called “Osama bin Laden.” That makes it all the more disturbing that the Pentagon admitted it has “no idea” what happens to the billions of dollars in advanced weaponry it’s pumping into Ukraine. CNN quotes one US intelligence official on the weapons Washington is sending to Ukraine:We have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero… It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time.That’s reassuring. Especially as the Pentagon revealed last week that it “gifted” the Taliban (who Washington had fought for 20 years) with seven billion dollars in weapons when Biden’s horribly-botched evacuation took place last year.
And just as in Afghanistan, Ukraine has its own little extremist problem…Remember: the same people who botched Afghanistan for 20 years and then botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan are in the process of botching our involvement in Ukraine.
Going full Brzezinski on Russia – using Ukraine as a battering ram – may sound good to Brzezinski’s “intellectual” heirs like Victoria Nuland and Tony Blinken, but the big wild card in their grand scheme is that Russia this time sees through it and (correctly) views the Biden Bros scheming as an existential threat to the country (as we would were the shoe on the other foot). So it has openly admitted that it is willing to use its vast nuclear arsenal to fend off any such Beltway efforts.
Whatever your views of Russia and Russian policy in Europe, ask yourself one question: is all of this worth a nuclear war? Is it that important to average Americans – who themselves are being fed through the metaphorical meat grinder of economic collapse – who governs Russia and where Ukraine’s ever-changing borders might wind up? Does any American really believe that if we fail to fight Putin to the death we’ll be speaking Russian in Peoria next year?
Time to fight back against the Beltway war machine!
Join us next month for a great RPI Conference to discuss these very topics! Houston, June 4th. Just a few tickets left! Click here for more info.
Please join us in Houston in June. I guarantee you will learn something and also have a great time with like minds.
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Daniel McAdams Executive Director Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
So, who exactly is Nina Jankowicz? Certainly, not a person with any concerns about preserving freedom of speech or expression. A quick look at her Twitter history is enough to dispel that. When Facebook permanently banned Donald Trump from its service, Nina was in the wings complaining that this punishment was not harsh enough. Through a metaphor, Nina explained that only mass bans on hundreds or thousands of accounts would be enough to “fix” the disinformation “problem.”
In the aftermath of our reporting, Nina joined a veritable army of “disinformation” journalists doing damage control, though Nina was a little too dim to properly understand what was going on. Here is the disinformation expert Nina reassuring her followers that national security professionals would never dare turn their tools inward against the American people—and, still more important, that color revolutions have nothing to do with race!
Just when you thought the Globalist American Empire couldn’t get more Owellian, the Department of Homeland Security is here to make it all worse.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security is creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” to combat misinformation ahead of the 2022 midterms. [Fox News]
The timing of the announcement is symbolically fitting, given recent warnings from journalists, NGOs, and prominent Democrat Senators that the prospect of Elon Musk restoring free-speech to twitter constitutes a “danger our democracy.” It is only right then that one of our nation’s largest national security bureaucracies should set up a special “governance board” to address the threat of so-called disinformation that emerges when speech isn’t entirely controlled by the Regime and its proxies.
The DHS has not said much about what the “Disinformation Governance Board” will actually do, but Politico’s brief write-up on the announcement offers some clues:
DHS is standing up a new Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia. Nina Jankowicz will head the board as executive director. She previously was a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship and oversaw Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute. [Politico]
In case you’re not up-to-date on Government approved euphemisms, “irregular migration” is the new politically correct term for what used to be called “illegal immigration.” We dare the reader to google “irregular migration” and consult what images pop up. Given that the DHS has become a de-facto full service travel agency for illegal aliens pouring over the border, it makes sense that the same agency would want to label any criticism of its policies as dangerous “disinformation.” That “Russia” also falls under the DHS’ new Ministry of Disinformation’s portfolio is arguably even more ridiculous. Didn’t we just learn that the Hunter Biden laptop story, which dozens of media outlets and former intelligence officials demanded to censor as “Russian disinformation,” turned out to be totally true and legitimate?
The specific choice of the Department of Homeland Security to host this new governance board is telling. In 2020, the Trump DHS released a report claiming that “white supremacy” was the single greatest security threat facing America. Mere months ago, the DHS raised the national threat level on the grounds that “misinformation” about Covid-19 or the 2020 election would drive extremist violence.
Key factors contributing to the current heightened threat environment include:
The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions:
For example, there is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19. Grievances associated with these themes inspired violent extremist attacks during 2021.
Malign foreign powers have and continue to amplify these false or misleading narratives in efforts to damage the United States.
In 2002, Congress created the DHS to, among other things, secure America’s border from foreign threats. Now, twenty years on, the DHS has repurposed itself to target as domestic terrorists the Americans who complain about what is crossing America’s border. No development could better illustrate how, over the past two decades, the American security state apparatus has evolved from a shield that guards the American people into a weapon that targets them.
But the establishment of the DHS’s Ministry of Disinformation wouldn’t be a proper intelligence community project unless it was absurd as well as dystopian. For the absurdity, we need to look no further than Nina Jankowicz, the disinformation wizard appointed to protect the American people from dangerous speech about illegal immigration and Russia.
The politically insane plan to divert resources away from the Veterans’ Administration to care for illegal aliens is only the latest example of the unpopular policies that have driven Biden’s approval ratings into the toilet.
But it’s not insane if the endgame is to “fundamentally transform” the country in such a way that it can’t be reversed, and politics will no longer play the same role.
Once geopolitical alliances and relationships have been altered as they’re being since Obama’s first term and now on steroids;
Once four years of an open border with possible 6–10 million illegal aliens flood in and alter demographics and domestic policy, including drugs, crime, welfare, education, housing, and of course voting;
Once you destroy every major institution from academia and the media to the Democrat party and Executive Branch departments like State, DHS, IRS, DOJ, etc., not to mention the military…
You can’t just reverse it.
So perhaps the endgame, after Obama (and his handlers) realized that eight years of slow change was the wrong method, is four years on steroids while gutting every constitutional protection that’s kept us the greatest civilization in the history of the world.
This could be accomplished only with the past several decades of the left’s infiltration, indoctrination, and money directed at all of this.
I’m not generally a conspiracy theorist and hate them, but there’s no logical explanation for what we’re seeing from a political standpoint. It seems far more nefarious.
During the 1990s, Monsanto Corporation’s devastating attack against farmers; their genetically-modified Frankenfoods and their neurotoxic pesticides inspired people to push government into legislating certification standards for foods.
But thanks to Big Pharma, Bill Gates and pop culture media brainwashing, Monsanto still stands strong and is ready to take complete control of your food supply with the help of the same powerful families and foundations who already control the money and the energy.
Their plans to do so are comprehensively laid out in a recent report published at Corey’s Digs.
The indoor vertical farming industry, which is a highly-innovative and efficient method is being funded by Bill Gates and pushed by the World Economic Forum as a replacement to conventional outdoor farming.
Aerofarms is the industry leader in vertical farming and they also co-developed the first CRISPR gene-edited produce product and worked with the NIH to produce proteins for the deadly COVID vaxxines.
Aerofarms makes it clear that they are not conventional gardeners. They’re all about synthetic food products, which is clearly the trend in this growing industry.
Monsanto is creating specially-tailored genetically-cut seeds for these vertical farms and the University of California is developing a plant-based mRNA vaxxine that farms can grow in heads of lettuce, which happens to be the main crop of these new farms.
These GMO farms already provide food at major outlets, including Kroger, Walmart and Whole Foods and are massively expanding.
And it’s not only fresh produce that’s getting genetically-modified. The USDA and FDA have already approved genetic modifications on pigs, salmon and cattle. And they have approved synthetic lab-grown meat.
Bill Gates’ Good Food Institute plans to reimagine meat production with $10 million of support from the USDA. But in order to make their Big Pharma food supply the new American model, they will need a major crisis.
The 2020 lockdowns distressed the supply chain, which was further affected by US sanctions against Russia. This has created a food shortage crisis.
Add to that, over a dozen food processing plants been mysteriously been destroyed in the past several weeks, as well as several fertilizer plants during a major fertilizer crisis.
To make matters worse, Union Pacific Railroad forces a 20% reduction in shipments from the world’s largest fertilizer company.
And when the people demand a solution, as it turns out, Bill Gates is heavily-invested in alternative fertilizers and is also a chief stockholder of the Canadian National railway, who claims to be helping the fertilizer market grow.
Perhaps Bill Gates and Monsanto will volunteer to save everyone with their new gene-edited bacteria fertilizer and maybe it will backfire, like it did in Africa, when after 15 years of trying to help, all Gates and Monsanto accomplished was increasing starvation by 31%.
But that’s OK, because it’s Monsanto-Bayer to the rescue, with their Big Pharma food factories with brand new mRNA vaxxine lettuce.
And as if this wasn’t bad enough, the stated goal of this new Frankenfood industry is to make all food traceable and that means coating it all in nanotech.
Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world. – Henry Kissinger
” If passed, the AUMF will allow President Joe Biden to deploy American troops to defend Ukraine if Russia uses chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.”
But aren’t the US/UK the ones with chem/bio labs in Ukraine?
On Sunday, Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) announced a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). If passed, the AUMF will allow President Joe Biden to deploy American troops to defend Ukraine if Russia uses chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.
The Congressman issued a press release saying the legislation would establish important redlines and echoed Biden’s plea that “Putin must be stopped.”
“I’m introducing this AUMF as a clear redline so the Administration can take appropriate action should Russia use chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons. We must stand up for humanity and we must stand with our allies.
“As the President of the United States has said, Putin must be stopped. Accordingly, the Commander in Chief to the world’s greatest military should have the authority and means to take the necessary actions to do so.”
Similar to the 2002 AUMF, the legislation gives the President nearly a blank check to wage war. The bill does not include oversight on the determination of WMD use or sunset date.
Kinzinger announced the bill on Meet the Press, telling host Margret Brennan, “I don’t think we need to be using force in Ukraine right now. I just introduced an AUMF giving the president basically congressional leverage for permission to use it if WMDs, nuclear, biological or chemical are used in Ukraine.”
In a speech just days before voting for the 2002 AUMF, then-Senator Joe Biden likewise downplayed the risk President George W. Bush would use the authority to go to war in Iraq. “I will vote for this because we should be compelling Iraq to make good on its obligations to the United Nations…Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable.”
One of the political paternalist tricks is to insist that any economic policy failure is more “proof” of the bankruptcy of the market economy. Once again, this worn-out device is employed by Columbia University professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz. Any and all such presumed market “failures” are placed by Stiglitz under the umbrella term, “neoliberalism.”We are facing the consequences of the interventionist and regulatory state. [Click to Tweet]
Neoliberalism has become one of the most elastic terms in the political paternalist lexicon. It amounts to whatever the paternalist dislikes or to any interventionist welfare-state policy that has turned out badly from his own point-of-view, but which cannot be admitted to have been caused by some aspect of his own policy agenda. Never having to say you are sorry for your own social engineering failures is central to this mindset.
In a recent article at Project Syndicate, Stiglitz calls for “Shock Therapy for Neoliberals.”(April 5, 2022). He insists that for the last several decades. America and indeed the world have been caught in the mesmerizing grip of the idea that free markets work. And even worse, the free-market ideology has guided and directed U.S. economic policy from Ronald Reagan to the present.
This may come as a surprise to some who lived through the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations and considered especially Obama’s to be committed to a fairly “progressive” agenda, a capstone of which was the (un)Affordable Care Act and its many false promises. In addition, for many limited-government conservatives and classical liberals, the two Bush administrations, along with Donald Trump’s, seemed far from any noticeable free-market agenda as well.
Stiglitz says recent crises all caused by neoliberalism
Stiglitz points, in particular, to the financial crisis of 2008-2009, the coronavirus crisis of the last two years, and now the war in Ukraine as all examples of the failure of free market-based neoliberalism to be able to steer clear of instability and to restore and maintain economic balance. In Stiglitz’s reading of 21st-century history, you would never know that for the five years before the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve had artificially manipulated key interest rates down to near zero and, when adjusted for inflation, were actually in the negative range for most of that time. This had been made possible with a nearly 50 percent increase in the money supply (M-2) during this half-decade.
Matching this had been a heavily government-created housing boom. Two federal agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had guaranteed and bought up huge portions of the home-mortgage market. The private sector home-mortgage lenders were told by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that they could loan with reckless abandon, with these agencies bearing most or even all the risk if any home loans went delinquent or general bad times were to set in. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ended up “covering” about half of all the outstanding mortgages in the United States.
The financial and housing crisis of 2008-2009 had been made in Washington, D.C. The instability and discovered imbalances in the financial and housing markets had on them the fingerprints of the Federal Reserve System and the federal agencies that created the “moral hazard” of unsustainable home mortgages once the bubble burst. A free market had nothing to do with it because these markets were (and remain) hostages of governmental control and manipulation. (See my article, “Ten Years On: Recession, Recovery and the Regulatory State”.)
Coronavirus crisis was made by restrictive government planning
Turning to the Covid-19 disaster of 2020, Stiglitz refers to the U.S “economies’ lack of resilience. America, the superpower, could not even produce simple products like masks and other protective gear, let alone more sophisticated items like tests and ventilators.” I fear that Stiglitz is starting to suffer from short-term memory loss, at least when it comes to economic policy. It is only two years since the federal and state governments decided to follow the Chinese totalitarian model of extensive lockdowns and shutdowns in the attempt to stop the spread of the virus. This brought production and employment to a grinding halt over many parts of the American economy. It was a perverse system of government central planning designed to bring society to an intentional standstill to assure no one came closer than six feet from any other human being.
Furthermore, it was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that brought about the delays and hindrances to entrepreneurially innovative responses to the medical crisis. These government agencies prohibited private enterprises from marketing improvised, but no less effective, substitutes for more standard ventilator equipment, face masks, hand sanitizers, and testing kits.
No matter how serious the medical and related healthcare and equipment shortages, nothing could be supplied without the slow-motion approvals of the restrictive regulatory gate-keepers. More lives were put at risk or lost, medical needs were left unsatisfied for a longer period of time, and human suffering and anxiety were increased precisely because resilient and robust competitive market responses to the coronavirus crisis faced the impenetrable and shut doors of the American regulatory bureaucracy for many months in 2020. (See my articles, “To Kill Markets is the Worst Possible Plan” and “Leaving People Alone is the Best Way to Beat the Coronavirus“and “The Conquest of America by Communist China“.)
War and government sanctions are causing new disruptions
The upshot is that if people’s values are not consistently pro-liberty, it won’t matter in the long run much what the Constitution “says,” and if they are pro-liberty, then it won’t matter whether there is a written constitution — or a state for that matter.
“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain—that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist” – Lysander Spooner
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, as if we needed another demonstration, that little stands between the government and our liberty. Champions of individual freedom have been properly disturbed by how much power governments at all levels have seized since the pandemic hit in 2020.
To make matters worse, officeholders and public-health officials object when the judicial branch occasionally overturns their power grabs because judges are said to be unqualified to rule on “medical” matters. So, if judges furnish constitutional and other legal grounds against power grabs, we’re supposed to ignore them because they in fact are issuing medical opinions for which they are not qualified. That’s pretty inventive reasoning, but unfortunately it is in the service of tyranny and serfdom.
Some judges have made good, that is, power-limiting, decisions during the pandemic, though they might well have gone the other way. (See John Hasnas’s “The Myth of the Rule of Law.”) It’s only a slight exaggeration to say the judicial process is a coin toss.
When judges get it right, the devout constitutionalists among us cheer: “The system works!” But what about all the times the rulings went the other way? Where does that leave the constitutionalists? They will say that the problem isn’t with the Constitution; it’s with the judges. But considering that the Constitution doesn’t interpret itself, who were they expecting to interpret it? Robots that have been correctly programmed? Who would do the programming? Even people within the competing schools of constitutional interpretation don’t agree on everything.
Since it’s people all the way down and the process is internal, not external to society, don’t the constitutionalists have a wee problem?
James Madison called the Bill of Rights, which he wrote, a “parchment barrier.” But he couldn’t have really meant that because parchment is a poor material for making the heavy-duty, barrier liberty requires due to the predatory nature of politicians. The only real barriers in this regard are the people themselves — people, that is, who refuse to give, carry out, or obey unjust orders. Paraxodically, orders require consent, and that can be withheld. (Think of the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which Brian tells a prison guard that he doesn’t have to follow orders and the guard replies, “I like orders.”)
Strictly speaking, constitutions and statutes cannot compel unjust conduct or compliance. They are merely words. When governors ordered “non-essential” businesses and schools to shut down and people to stay home in 2020, those politicians didn’t point guns at anyone. People obeyed, but I suspect that only a few did so lest they be punished. If someone had disobeyed, armed agents of the state might have been dispatched, but why did they obey orders? No gun was held to their heads. They might have been fired and others put in their place places, but no one would have been subjected to force.
MCViewPoint 