This is the Litmus Test, the reddest red line in the sand.

Every Senator who opposes/fails to support the confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should be considered an untouchable pariah cast into the outer darkness,

*Should be openly denounced, scathingly castigated and condemned as a treasonous war-whore beyond the pale,

*Should be actively picketed against, boycotted, and subjected to massive protest demonstrations every time they make a speech or public appearance or news event,

*Should be openly challenged and denounced in the next election cycle,

*And finally, should receive absolutely no monetary campaign support from the vast tens of millions of Trump Maga loyalists who courageously and decisively voted for President Donald J. Trump.

come to an end today from one desk at The New York Times, as Nobel-prize-winning “economist” Paul Krugman walks away from his keyboard there.  Trump’s re-election is undoubtedly one factor, however, it wasn’t exactly going well for one of the co-architects of 19.7% cumulative, non-transitory Bidenflation for quite a while before last November 5th.  Even the sympathetic Business Insider was shaking its head at Krugman more than a year earlier with its snide and hilarious headline, “Nobel Economist Paul Krugman Gets Trolled for Saying Inflation is Over If You Just Exclude Most of What People Buy.”

By rigging elections and weaponizing the justice system.  He pretends to occupy the moral high road in saying this, as with everything to come out of his mouth.

Today in Politico, finance reporter Victoria Guida takes a look at the prospects for any meaningful reform that might rein in the Fed’s runaway powers that have expanded far beyond its historical remit in recent years.

It seems the prospects are not good.

For starters, the president-elect has no interest at all in having the Fed do less. As president, Trump has only ever called for lower interest rates, which means he always favored a more activist fed interfering more often in markets. Yes, before he was president, Candidate Trump had criticized the Fed for keeping interest rates too low for too long. That line of thinking quickly evaporated after Trump was sworn in.

Trump has seen to be antagonistic toward Powell, but only because Trump sees Powell as too restrictive on monetary policy. Ridiculously, Powell has managed to obtain a reputation in some corners of Washinton—including, apparently, Trump’s corners—that Powell is some kind of hard-money man. That’s not what Trump wants.

In other words, Trump’s occasional expressions of annoyance with the Fed have nothing to do with any significant change to Fed policy. Thus puts Trump at odds with even the timid inflation hawks found within the GOP right now. Or as Guida puts it:

You might think the election of a president who has spent years lambasting the central bank would provide an opening for Republican ideas to reform the Federal Reserve.

But you’d be wrong. … Donald Trump and conservative Fed reformers have very different visions.

So, we have virtually no reason to expect any significant Fed reforms from Trump, but the “conservative Fed reformers,” as Guido calls them, aren’t calling for much other than some changes in window dressing.

These alleged reformers are apparently characterized by a nonspecific fondness for the Taylor Rule, which, as we’ve shown here, is a rather squishy “rule” which one could hardly describe as true “reform.”

Even worse, the conservatives who Guida frames as relatively hard-money people differ from Trump primarily in that the conservative reformers prefer the status quo. For example, Guida writes:

“I like the way it’s set up right now,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said in a scrum with reporters, when I asked him whether Trump should have more of a say in its monetary policy decisions. …

“The 1913 Act has worked really well,” Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, told me in another hallway conversation. “If there are suggestions from the new administration that come in, of course we’re going to look at it on the committee. But a certain degree of independence is necessary.”

“The current Fed’s actions on interest rates are simply a reaction to bad economic policies of the Biden administration,” Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.) said to me. “As we reduce inflation, the Fed’s going to naturally bring rates down. That’s the best approach for us to do that.”

In other words, according to GOP “reformers,” things are fine, and we don’t really need to change anything.

It’s notable, however, that Guida doesn’t even mention actual proposed reforms of the Fed, such as Thomas Massie’s May 2024 legislation to abolish the Fed. One would think that a survey of GOP views on the Fed might warrant a mention in passing. The omission, of course, is what we’ve come to expect from reporters in the legacy corporate media which only mention “respectable” opinions of the governing class. Views outside the window of regime-approved opinion are unlikely to get a mention. Nor can this be explained away by claims that Massie’s legislation has very little chance of passage. Massie’s legislation is about as likely to pass as is a law mandating the Fed use the Taylor Rule, which the Fed would fight with every ounce of its strength.

In practice, if there are going to be any true reforms to the Fed, they will have to be bottom-up with pressure applied by activists and voters from below. No one in the GOP leadership is going to do anything at all about true Fed reform until he fears that his re-election depends on it.

The video discusses the collapse of Macron’s government in France, the political crisis it has created, and potential scenarios for the future. It explores the challenges Macron faces, the opposition from both left and right, and the broader implications for France and the EU.

Two students at George Mason protesting the Israeli genocide occurring in Gaza had the door to their home broken down and their house ransacked by FBI thugs without any search warrant.  There were no charges of any kind, yet the students were kicked out of school.  The holocaust occurring in Gaza is accompanied by an increasing number of Gestapo-style home break-ins by government goons in the U.S.  The same government goons who stood by and did nothing while the Only Black Lives Matter communists set fire to cities, especially in Minneapolis.  Remember all those “mostly peaceful protests”?

On Sunday night, President Biden issues a broad and sweeping pardon for his son Hunter Biden, covering “those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

Hunter Biden was due to be sentenced this month for federal tax and gun crimes. This pardon removes the possibility of any further legal action in those cases. This pardon comes after many months of the President claiming that “no one is above the law,” and after repeated claims by the President that he will not use the power of the presidency to protect his son from the possibility of any punishment for the crimes for which he was convicted. These latter claims were apparently lies, as Biden has now issued a pardon for his son that goes far beyond even the crimes of which he has been convicted.

As Politico reported today,

Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.

“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues. “Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.

Why such a long time-frame and non-specific list of offenses for this pardon? This decade-long get-out-of-jail-free pass for Hunter Biden covers the period during which he has been accused of influence peddling through a variety of “business” dealings in eastern Europe and central Asia. Most notably, it was during this period that Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Hunter Biden was paid $1 million per year for his “work” on the board, in spite of having no professional history that would qualify him for such a role. Overall, the House Oversight Committee accuses the Biden family of accepting over $20 million from foreign entities like Burisma and similar organizations.  The pardon seeks to ensure that Hunter cannot be charged for any of the questionable activities tied to his many “deals” made with foreign governments.

No one should be surprised that the president did this. Of course Biden used his power to protect himself and his family members. At this point in history, it should go without saying that being at the highest levels of state power is extraordinarily helpful in protecting and enriching one’s self, one’s family, and one’s friends. Thus, we should absolutely expect the sorts of people who go into politics—mostly people with few moral scruples—to use the system to benefit themselves and their friends.

Nor should we be surprised when we are presented with yet more evidence that there are two legal systems in America: one for the regime and its friends, and another for everyone else. (By “regime,” we mean the permanent administrative government and its attendant ruling class.)

How the Regime’s Friends Protect Themselves 

The Biden pardon is admittedly crude in how it simply declares the relative of a sitting president immune from prosecution. In practice, however, this is no different from what routinely goes on behind the scenes in the meeting rooms of the regime’s elite elected officials and bureaucrats. The pardon was probably a last resort of a weakened presidency since, normally, the way that the ruling class escapes prosecution for any of its misdeeds is by ensuring that no district attorney—a regime employee, of course—is willing to prosecute. The trick is to hire prosecutors and “law enforcement” personnel who have no interest in ever turning the powers of the state on the regime’s loyal soldiers.

So, it wasn’t at all surprising, for example, when James Comey declared that Hillary Clinton would face no serious legal trouble for her repeated violations of federal laws covering classified material. Comey even claimed that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Clinton. President Biden was also absolved of all guilt by the Department of Justice when Biden, as vice president, was found to have mishandled classified material that he kept in his garage. Biden, like Clinton, faced no punishment for acts that would likely bring significant penalties for ordinary people or for people the permanent government doesn’t like, like Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, regime personnel frequently commit perjury with impunity as federal prosecutors look the other way. It is hard to deny that Anthony Fauci lied, for example, about his actions in covering up evidence of US regime participation in virus research in Wuhan. Similarly, James Clapper lied about the NSA’s spying activities.

We can count on federal prosecutors to turn a blind eye to powerful bureaucrats who simply are not subject to the same kind of legal scrutiny as ordinary taxpayers.

Another tactic employed to cover up crimes by loyal regime personnel is to simply define criminal acts as not criminal. This was employed repeatedly in the days of George W. Bush as key legal personnel offered novel interpretations of the law designed to provide loopholes for elected officials. For example, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo under George W. Bush repeatedly re-defined torture as not torture so as to offer legal cover for Yoo’s bosses. In effect, Yoo declared that the US president is not restrained by any treaty or law when it comes to fighting “terrorism.” What constitutes terrorism, of course, is defined by the regime itself. Bush’s AG apparently agreed.

When Barack Obama targeted and murdered American citizens without any due process, his AG, Eric Holder, simply declared that the law allows such things, and the Bill of Rights doesn’t mean what it says.

We could contrast this sort of impunity with what happens to regular people who commit far more benign infractions of federal law. For example, at about the same time James Comey was declaring that it was perfectly fine for Hillary Clinton to mis-use dozens of classified documents, a low-level Navy sailor, Kristian Saucier, was sentenced to six months house arrest for taking a few photos on board a US submarine.

Similarly, it has become routine for federal whistleblowers to serve time in prison while those who actually commit the crimes exposed by the whistleblowers face no punishment at all. Chelsea Manning is one such case, as is John Kiriakou who exposed the CIA’s illegal torture programs. Kiriakou is the only person connected with the CIA’s criminal conspiracy who has ever faced any legal sanction.

And, of course, there are the cases of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Snowden was forced to flee to Russia to avoid prosecution for telling the truth of the regime’s widespread violations of our basic property rights. Assange, who exposed various federal lies about war crimes in Iraq, finally escaped a federal prison cell only after the American state took its pound of flesh. The American intelligence “community” conspired for years—with the help of Trump, Biden, and Obama—to rob Assange of years of freedom while he holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy or fought extradition from a British prison.

Time and again, we are reminded that obtaining a high-ranking position in the US regime means having access to a special kind of “justice” reserved to allies of the technocracy’s permanent government.

This Is What States Do

In this respect, the US state is like most every other state in human history. States are organizations that are generally characterized by secrecy and institutions that are well-guarded and offer only very limited access to the levers of true power. There is therefore a clear distinction between the productive private sector and the exploiters that run the state itself. This is, as the old classical liberals used to call it, the distinction between the state and “society.”

The two groups have mutually exclusive interests, and the relationship is one of exploitation. The state extracts resources from those who actually produce the wealth and then uses these resources to serve the interests of the state and its favored elites.

Fortunately for the state, the public schools and media have succeeded in convincing the masses that this is fine. Subjected to endless propaganda about how the US government “keeps us safe,” and how democracy means “the government is us,” most Americans have been trained to be complacent about living under the boot of a secretive class of privileged parasites. Many Americans still indulge fantasies about how these beneficiaries of special state justice are engaged in “public service.” In reality, state agents are not at all interested in serving “the public” except to the bare minimum extent necessary to convince the credulous masses that the state actually cares about the public. The real priority of the state, of course, is the state itself and the privileged few who are able to break into the highest echelons of state power.

For those lucky few, provided they don’t do anything to actually endanger the power of the incumbent ruling class, they will be granted all the usual privileges offered to loyal state agents, regardless of political party.  After all, the Bushes, Faucis, and Clintons of the world go to the same parties, their children go to the same schools, and they all show up at memorials and funerals to speak well of each other. They all enjoy the same privileges. They all know that they’ll never face any punishment for their crimes.

The Biden pardon is just the latest reminder of this grim reality.

The joys of a domestic meal at home with friends and family is a product of the great advances of Western industrialization and freedom. It’s no surprise the Leninists tried to get rid of family kitchens.

Mike Benz is a former official with the U.S. Department of State and current Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, is a free speech watchdog organization dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet. This is a vital, must view podcast interview tracing the nefarious background of this draconian, globalist totalitarian regime.

Trump’s secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth is not the most odious of all the neocons he has appointed, not by a long shot.  But the Left is going nuts over him with their hate machine working 24/7, while essentially ignoring other much worse warmongering and dangerous neocon lunatics (presumably Trump’s payback to Mrs. Adelson).  They thought it was their kill shot to reveal that Hegseth, as a typical military veteran, apparently likes to have a drink or two at company parties.  That didn’t cause a national uproar, so they resorted to their tried and true tactic:  Anonymous accusations by anonymous women that he was a hound dog when he was young, or worse yet, that he argued with his former wife.  Still no national outrage but they are still at it.

It could be that he just seems to be the easiest target.  Low-hanging fruit.  Knowing the Lunatic Left as I do, I suspect that what really gets their shorts in a wad over this guy – especially the perpetually angry and unhappy, childless left-wing cat ladies — is that he is a veteran who wants to see military promotions based on merit rather than on whether or not one is a transvestite or a member of one of the other left-wing, Demo-Bolshevik party mascot groups.  Eight years of Obama and four of Brandon have all but replaced merit with cultural Marxism in the military.  They even started teaching this mentally retarded brand of Marxism at West Point.  I suspect they want to destroy this guy to send a message of any other nominee who might take his place that “you’re next” if you intend to challenge our transvestite quotas in the Army or to claim that men and women are not all 100% equal when it comes to the physicality of being a combat soldier.

The article appearing on LRC today, The Unconstitutional Abuses of the FBI, by Ginny Garner, was terrific. Here is another earlier extensive historical critique of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by the noted attorney Robert Barnes.

With Eric Hunley and Mark Groubert

America’s Untold Stories presents Tuesday Newsday, featuring Rich Baris, aka the People’s Pundit, the nation’s top pollster! This week, we dive into Joe Biden’s shocking pardon of Hunter Biden, his claims of “unfair prosecution,” and what this means for the last days of his presidency. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre doubles down on “war politics” as the excuse for Biden’s actions—what’s really going on here? Rich Baris will unpack the critical shifts in voter enrollment, including a steep drop in Democratic numbers in New York, as well as the role of grassroots activists like Scott Presler in flipping states like Pennsylvania red.

Other headlines include: • Chaos in South Korea as martial law grips the nation. • California chaos: Governor Newsom faces backlash, election fraud allegations emerge, and an arcade owner takes justice into his own hands. • Shocking international stories: Delta flight attendants fail a breathalyzer test, and a missing Hawaii woman vanishes into Mexico under mysterious circumstances.

Don’t miss Rich Baris’s expert insights into the 2024 political landscape and what it all means for Trump, Biden, and the nation!

“Did you know that Pokémon Go is more than just a fun game? It’s a CIA-backed tool for data collection, building a hyper-detailed 3D map of the world using your phone! Since its launch in 2016, Niantic—the creators of Pokémon Go—has been collecting real-time data from millions of players worldwide. This data doesn’t just improve gameplay; it feeds into a massive surveillance network funded by a CIA venture firm. From your GPS location to private spaces, every scan builds a geospatial model used for AI, robotics, and even military tech.

“In this video, we reveal the shocking connections between Pokémon Go, Niantic, and the CIA. Learn how your gameplay contributes to a global mapping initiative and why it raises serious ethical questions about privacy. Is augmented reality worth this trade-off? Watch now to uncover the truth!”

How quickly and conveniently they forgot this clown:

This guy was FBI Director for 4 years: pic.twitter.com/z7itrG5gNF

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 1, 2024

By pardoning his perverted, drug addict criminal son Hunter, Brandon covers up his own influence peddling crimes that he conspired with Hunter with in Ukraine and other countries.  A large share of all those tens of millions extorted from foreign oligarchs went to “The Big Guy,” as Hunter called the senile old pervert in the White House.

Will Brandon give nuclear bombs to the creepy little Nazi Zionist dictator of Ukraine as his parting shot?

Tom, the good senator’s plan is just not ambitious enough for me.  Why leave out Washington, Oregon, and that wonderful “prize,” Gavin Newsom’s California?  Ill-inois and J.B. Pritzker could be thrown in for a nice Black-Friday bonus.  Talk about the greatest additions by subtraction in world history!

. . . in Gaza.  Move along, nothing to see here.  It’s just the Israeli/American genocidal Holocaust paid for with your tax dollars.  USA!  USA!  USA!

New York state senator Liz Kreuger, chair of the state senate finance committee who represents the east side of Manhattan (and who looks like a female Jerrold Nadler), thinks there are enough fellow communists in New York, Connecticut, Vermont, and Massachusetts to secede and become a new province of Canada.  She would naturally rather have the rumored son of Fidel Castro as her president.

Where do I donate?

So said President Trump today on Truth Social.

Death threats, bomb threats, “swatting” of Trump cabinet nominees.  (Does anyone know where Alec Baldwin and Robert DiNiro are?  Has Cher left the country yet?  How about Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopie Goldberg?).

“Did you know that Thanksgiving’s history is packed with myths, marketing, and surprising twists? From Virginia’s forgotten feasts to FDR’s chaotic “Franksgiving,” this video uncovers five fascinating truths about the origins of this iconic holiday. Learn how beer influenced the Pilgrims’ landing, the real story of Squanto, and why Thanksgiving became an American tradition centuries later.

“Discover the role of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and even Victorian-era marketing in shaping the holiday we celebrate today. Plus, find out why Plymouth’s story overshadowed Virginia’s earlier celebration. Whether you’re a history buff or just love Thanksgiving, these surprising facts will change how you see the holiday.”

Fred Smith, founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has passed away.  I first met Fred and his wife Fran in the early ’80s.  He was a brilliant warrior for economic freedom and his CEI is by far the most “hard core” free market institution in D.C. (which yes, I know, is not saying much).  CEI scholars have battled the Watermelons (“environmentalist” commies) for decades.  Fred hired the great R.J. Smith, a student of Ludwig von Mises at NYU, as their senior scholar in that area.  This memorial says it all about the kind of person Fred was.  Rest in Peace, Fred.