This classic episode of The Twilight Zone – The Eye of the Beholder, originally aired on Friday, November 11, 1960. I was eight years old, and it scared the Hell outta me.

Perhaps it planted a deep seed within me that ten years later, in November of 1970, I became a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist.

“Suspended in time and space for a moment, your introduction to Miss Janet Tyler, who lives in a very private world of darkness, a universe whose dimensions are the size, thickness, length of a swath of bandages that cover her face. In a moment, we’ll go back into this room, and also in a moment, we’ll look under those bandages, keeping in mind, of course, that we’re not to be surprised by what we see, because this isn’t just a hospital, and this patient 307 is not just a woman. This happens to be The Twilight Zone, and Miss Janet Tyler, with you, is about to enter it.”

Progressives, it seems, have always been obsessed with racial biological collectivism. Whether it was Progressives in the early 20th Century during the so-called Progressive Era (1900-1920) and their mania for eugenics, scientific racism, and race suicide; or today’s Progressives, equally obsessed with identity politics; race, class, gender and queer studies; and intersectionality.

The Progressive Era was a crucial time in American intellectual history. Scholars as divergent as Murray N. Rothbard and G. William Domhoff have documented the impact of thousands of key academics such as Richard T. Ely, Herbert Baxter Adams, and John W. Burgess who received their graduate training in Germany during this period, dominated by the rise of Bismarck’s welfare-warfare state. They returned home imbued with these ideas, which their apt pupils such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson transformed into hard reality. This worship of the newly-discovered wonders of statism, combined with the influx of Darwinian evolutionary naturalism, ”social imperialism,” Fabian socialism imported from Great Britain, the increasing secularization of postmillennial evangelical pietism, all provided the satanic breeding ground for the incubus that emerged as progressivism – complete with its elite notions of centralized political/economic planning, aggressive nationalism, eugenics and the idea of “race suicide. It is a seminal focus of their skewed, maniacal totalitarian world view. Progressives have always insisted upon rule by an elitist professional class of credentialed experts removed from the populist majority of everyday Americans, who they regarded as “deplorables,” “white trash,” or “the unwashed masses.”

Here are some intellectual resources which tell the nefarious backstory:

The Eugenics Crusade

Eugenics in High School History: Failure to Confront the Past  by Thomas F. Cargill

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine

Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, by Charles Benedict Davenport

The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant

The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, by Lothrop. Stoddard

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, by Christine Rosen

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg

Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard

Liberal Fascism: the Secret History of the American left, from Mussolini to the politics of change, by Jonah Goldberg

For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene, by Stefan Kühl

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, by Stefan Kühl

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, by James Q. Whitman

The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, by Dinesh D’Souza

Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, by Robert N. Proctor

Hitler is Winning: How Hitler’s Plan For A Master Race Was Created By The West And Is Being Implemented Today, by Jerry Leonard

Robert Barnes has often spoken of how today’s perilous geopolitical situation is reminiscent of that on the eve of the Great War (World War I). Cloistered and insular political elites are displaying the same willful ignorance and haughty arrogance, the same incompetence and destructive disdain for future unintended consequences, as those earlier pompous leaders of Germany, Great Britain, Austria-Hungry, France, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, Czarist Russia, and the United States of America did then. Below are three famous observers lamenting on the Realpolitik consequences of this deadly folly:

Winston Churchill. statement to William Griffen, editor of the New York Enquirer in August of 1936

“America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’ wouldn’t to-day be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.”

America’s greatest journalist, H L Mencken on World War I

Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 11, 1931, “A Bad Guess,” H. L. Mencken

“Most of England’s appalling troubles today are due to a bad guess: she went into the war on the wrong side in 1914. The theory of her statesmen, in those days, was that, by joining France and Russia, she would give a death-blow to a dangerous rival, Germany, and so be free to run the world. But the scheme failed to work; moreover, it had unexpected and almost fatal results. Not only did Germany come out of the mess a dangerous rival still; France also became a rival, and a very formidable one. Worse, the United States was pumped up to immense proportions, and began to challenge England’s control of the world’s markets. The results are now visible: England has three competitors instead of one, and is steadily going downhill. If she had gone into the war on the German side she’d be in a much better situation today. The Germans would be grateful for the help and willing to pay for it (while the French are not); the French would be down and out, and hence unable to menace the peace of Europe; Germany would have Russia in Europe and there would be no Bolshevik [communist] nuisance; England would have all of Siberia and Central Asia, and there would be no Japanese threat and no Indian revolt; and the United States would still be a docile British colony, as it was in 1914. . . .

“The United States made a similar mistake in 1917. Our real interests at the time were on the side of the Germans, whose general attitude of mind is far more American than that of any other people. If we had gone in on their side, England would be moribund today, and the dreadful job of pulling her down, which will now take us forty or filthy years, would be over. We’d have a free hand in the Pacific, and Germany would be running the whole [European] Continent like a house of correction. In return for our connivance there she’d be glad to give us whatever we wanted elsewhere. There would be no Bolshevism [communism] in Russia and no Fascism in Italy. Our debtors would all be able to pay us. The Japs would be docile, and we’d be reorganizing Canada and probably also Australia. But we succumbed to a college professor [Wilson] who read Matthew Arnold, just as the English succumbed to a gay old dog who couldn’t bear to think of Prussian MP’s shutting down the Paris night-clubs.

“As for the mistake the Russians made, I leave it to history.”

And world-renowned economist and historian Murray N. Rothbard, in Wall Street Banks and American Foreign Policy:

“American entry into World War I in April 1917 prevented negotiated peace between the warring powers and drove the Allies forward into a peace of unconditional surrender and dismemberment, a peace which, as we have seen, set the stage for World War II. American entry thus cost countless lives on both sides, caused chaos and disruption throughout central and eastern Europe at war’s end, and the consequent rise of Bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism to power in Europe. In this way, Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter the war may have been the single most fateful action of the twentieth century, causing untold and unending misery and destruction. But Morgan profits were expanded and assured.”

Books and movies about World War I are not popular because they are depressing. Leaders of world’s great nations destroyed a generation of men in pointless bloody battles. Few Americans realize that World War I was America’s worst foreign policy blunder. Bankers had loaned Great Britain and France more money than they could ever repay. However, if Germany lost, they could demand the Germans pay massive reparations to help pay back these loans. These bankers manipulated American politicians and media to approve American intervention that prolonged the war.

This scene from the great film “Paths of Glory” depicts a typical World War I attack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gyyG…

“The Role of J.P. Morgan in Providing Loans to England and France in World War I”; Peter Palms: https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/25…

“Germany’s Peace-Proposals”, Literary Digest, Dec. 23, 1916: http://www.unz.com/print/LiteraryDige…

Related Tale: “The 1914 American Invasion of Mexico”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZQGt…

“Winston Churchill was responsible for tragic Lusitania sinking”; John Spain: https://www.irishcentral.com/news/iri…

The biggest battle in US Army history was the 1918 Meuse-Argonne offensive. This World War I battle is rarely mentioned in our media and school history books. Once a million American draftees were assembled for combat in France, they were ordered to charge into the strongest German positions, resulting in 26,277 American soldiers slaughtered in just 47 days. My grandfather, Eden C. Burris, Sr., after serving with General John J. Pershing in his campaign in Mexico chasing after the bandit Pancho Villa, later accompanied Pershing to France where he fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive described above. I well remember his regaling me with his World War I exploits when I was a young adolescent.

Related Tale: “The 1914 American Invasion of Mexico”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZQGt…

“Winston Churchill was responsible for tragic Lusitania sinking”; John Spain: https://www.irishcentral.com/news/iri…

“World War I: Wasted Lives on Armistice Day”; History Net; https://www.historynet.com/world-war-…

“Meuse-Argonne Offensive”; video from the National Archives; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hhKk…

World War I: A Revisionist Reading List —  by David Gordon

Royal Cousins at War

Episode 1: A House Divided

Examines what impact the relationships between cousins Nicholas II of Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and George V of the United Kingdom had on the outbreak of the First World War. This episode focuses on the story of the emerging divisions and rivalries between the inter-related royal houses of Europe during the 19th century.

Episode 2: Into the Abyss

The realignment of the European powers and the emergence of the alliance system in the years following the death of Queen Victoria, played a significant role for the three monarchs in the frantic, desperate days of July and August 1914.

Cousins at War  — Article

In May 1910, the monarchies of Europe came together in London, in an opulent show of strength, for the funeral of Edward VII. War and revolution in the ensuing decade heaped assassination, defeat and exile upon them. Author Theo Aronson portrays the European Royal Families at War.

The WWI Conspiracy – Part One: To Start A War — Documentary

The WWI Conspiracy – Part Two: The American Front — Documentary

The WWI Conspiracy – Part Three: A New World Order — Documentary

History Is Written By The Winners — Documentary

People’s Century: 1914 Killing Fields — Documentary

They Shall Not Grow Old — Documentary

I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier — Popular Song Before American Intervention In World War I

World War I: The American Legacy — Documentary

Trench Warfare — Documentary

World War I: Tactics And Strategy — Documentary

World War One Resources

The Christmas Truce of 1914 — Documentaries

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – episode 1: Explosion — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – episode 2: Stalemate — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – Episode 3: Total War — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – episode 4: Slaughter — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – episode 5: Mutiny –– Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – episode 6: Collapse — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – Episode 7: Hunger and Hatred — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – Episode 8: War Without End – Documentary

Who Was Edward M. House?  — Article by Robert Higgs

Phillip Dru, Administrator — Anonymous (Edward Mandel House)

The Intimate Papers of Colonel House — Book by Charles Seymour (editor)

Triumphant Plutocracy; the Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920, Book by Richard Franklin Pettigrew

Your Country At War and What happens To You After A War, Book by Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.

How Diplomats Make War — Book by Francis Neilson

The United States and World War I — Article by John J. Dwyer

World War I and the Suppression of Dissent, Part 1 and II — Articles by Wendy McElroy

The Sinking of the Lusitania — Article by Kurt Hyde

Hidden History of WW1 — A transcript of the Lew Rockwell Show with John V. Denson.

Heritage of the Great War — Comprehensive WWI Website

Woodrow Wilson and World War I  — Murray N. Rothbard (audio lecture)

World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals — Murray N. Rothbard article

War Collectivism in World War I  — Book by Murray N. Rothbard

More than any other single period, World War I was the critical watershed for the American business system. It was a “war collectivism,” a totally planned economy run largely by big-business interests through the instrumentality of the central government, which served as the model, the precedent, and the inspiration for state corporate capitalism for the remainder of the twentieth century.

Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry — Book by H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen

Here is the archetype of all post–World War I revisionism of a particular variety: the hunt for the people who made the big bucks off the killing machine. The Merchants of Death was, in many ways, the manifesto of a generation of people who swore there would not be and could not be another such war.

But here is the kicker: it was co-authored by the founder of Human Events, the conservative weekly. So this is no left-wing screed against profiteering. It is a careful and subtle, but still passionate, attack on those who would use government to profit themselves at the expense of other people’s lives and property.

Here is a sample of the ideological orientation: “The arms industry did not create the war system. On the contrary, the war system created the arms industry.… All constitutions in the world vest the war-making power in the government or in the representatives of the people. The root of the trouble, therefore, goes far deeper than the arms industry. It lies in the prevailing temper of peoples toward nationalism, militarism, and war, in the civilization which forms this temper and prevents any drastic and radical change. Only when this underlying basis of the war system is altered, will war and its concomitant, the arms industry, pass out of existence.”

This book is a wonderful example of what Rothbard called the “Old Right” in its best form. The book not only makes the case against the war machine; it provides a scintillating history of war profiteering, one authoritative enough for citation and academic study. One can see how this book had such a powerful effect.

Why re-release this book now? The war profiteers are making money as never before. They are benefiting from conflict as never before. Everything in this book has not only come to pass but as been made worse by a million times. So this treatise is more necessary than ever.

This is the real heritage of the American Right.

Merchants of Death Revisited: Armaments, Bankers, and the First World War — T. Hunt Tooley article

The year 2004 marked the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Engelbrecht and Hanighen’s Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry, a book that made it into the general consciousness of most thinking Americans by the mid-twentieth century. The stark language of the title no doubt contributed to its fame. Moreover, the theme of arms merchants pushing for war is both easily understood and easily discussed, even by those who have not read it.

The World at War (Ralph Raico) — Video Lecture

The late Ralph Raico was a specialist in European classical liberalism and Austrian Economics. He learned economics under Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Friedrich Hayek, and was professor emeritus of history at Buffalo State College.

In this lecture, Raico teaches a Cato Summer Seminar group the history of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. He offers an in-depth look at the conditions which led to both wars and the ways in which governments throughout the 20th century have used war powers to justify and fuel their expansion.

Aftermath of the Great War — documentaries

Paris 1919, Part 1 — Feature Film

Paris 1919, Part 2 — Feature Film

War Is A Racket, by Smedley Darlington Butler

Trump yes, but don’t forget Harry Truman. On this day in 1950, Truman announced that he was ordering his personal attack force, the U.S. military, to go fight in Korea. Over 36,000 American soldiers died, as usual, in vain and for a lie. What if American troops had all simply said, North Korea is no threat to us, hell no, we won’t go? I don’t know what would have happened in Korea, but I know that the families of over 36,000 American soldiers would not have lost fathers, brothers, sons, and uncles for no good reason.

Trump has suggested changing the title of Secretary of Defense back to Secretary of War.  “We all feel like warriors” after the unprovoked bombing of Iran, he said.  Yes, let’s celebrate the “bravery” of those pilots who dropped 30,000 pound bombs on Iran from ten miles up in the sky while facing no air defense.  And don’t leave out those gallant and brave sailors who pushed buttons to launch missiles at Iran from ships anchored 400 miles away.

The way some Christians idolize President Trump you would think he was the fourth member of the Trinity. I wonder how they feel about their man dropping F-bombs whenever he talks about Iran. I guess it is okay because Iran is a Muslim country.

According to press reports, President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff is back in touch with Iran after the ceasefire with Israel. Will a deal still be possible? Is Iran still interested?

CNN Cold War – Marshall Plan 1947-1952

Excellent history every American should know. CNN was MUCH different during this period when their outstanding Cold War series was made. First aired in 1998, I showed my World History high school students many of the 26 episodes from the series every year until I retired in 2020. This episode was one of my favorites.

When the Parisian woman Marianne Debouzy was shown, I would stop and pause the video tape and refer to her as “that Frog Commie Bitch,” which always both shocked and greatly amused my students.

My students especially loved the segment relating to the Marshall Plan in Greece and the Missouri Mules, how the Greek peasant framers loved their mules and loved the Americans for providing them to help them after WWII. “Long Live America!”

This video focuses upon the highly contested 1948 Italian election between the Communist/Socialist coalition candidate versus the Christian Democrat centrist coalition, and how the US both openly (and covertly) helped defeat the Left.

The role of Pope Pius XII and the Roman Catholic Church is also strongly emphasized, especially when the Pope boldly excommunicated the Communists. After the triumphant results of the election were announced, watch how the Italian Commie bastard Giuseppe Mainardi tells of how he cried crocodile tears because now they were going to be unable to murder anti-communists like they had in the other Stalinist countries of Europe,

The film briefly discusses the CIA role in these matters, the first major covert action undertaken by the Agency.

In the second program below, Mike Benz briefly explains to Tucker Carlson more of the importance of how the CIA then saw its future Cold War role.

Synopsis:

“Cold War is a twenty-four episode television documentary series about the Cold War that aired in 1998. It features interviews and footage of the events that shaped the tense relationships between the Soviet Union and the United States.

“The series was produced by Pat Mitchell and Jeremy Isaacs, who had earlier in 1973 produced the World War II documentary series The World at War in a similar style. Ted Turner funded the series as a joint production between the Turner Broadcasting System and the BBC, and was first broadcast on CNN in the United States and BBC Two in the United Kingdom. Writers included Hella Pick, Jeremy Isaacs, Lawrence Freedman, Neal Ascherson, Hugh O’Shaughnessy and Germaine Greer. Kenneth Branagh was the narrator, and Carl Davis (who also collaborated with Isaacs with The World at War) composed the theme music. Each episode would feature historical footage and interviews from both significant figures and others who had witnessed particular events.

“For both altruistic and self-serving purposes, the United States provides massive grants of aid to the countries of Europe in the form of the Marshall Plan. Stalin, concerned that the intent of the Marshall Plan is to weaken Soviet influence in Europe, prevents countries in its orbit from participating, and establishes the rival Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Communists come to power through a coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Tito, while originally aligned to the Soviet Union, adopts a more independent foreign policy and eventually switches to receiving Marshall Aid Assistance. The CIA and the Catholic Church conspire to help oust the Italian Communist Party and its coalition allies in the 1948 Italian election. The Marshall Plan has the effect of modernising European economies and societies, bringing Western Europe closer together, and closer to the United States. Interviewees include Vladimir Yerofeyev, Gianni Agnelli and Giulio Andreotti. The pre-credits scene portrays the squalor in post-war Italy, and Truman delivering his Truman Doctrine speech of 1947.”

Seemingly before either side agreed, President Trump announced a ceasefire between Iran and Israel. In several social media posts it appears the President is convinced the ceasefire will hold and that the two countries will never shoot at each other again. Is he correct?

Select Background Resources on Israel and the Middle East

The study of the construction of pseudo-secular gnostic religions has been one of the principal obsessions of my life since I first heard Gerhart Niemeyer of Notre Dame lecture on it in 1975 at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Western Summer School at Thomas Aquinas College.

Niemeyer was a keen student of world-renown philosopher Eric Voegelin on these matters, as was Murray Rothbard. I believe understanding this 2000 year battle between orthodox Roman Catholic Christianity and Gnosticism is the ultimate key to unlocking the history of the previous two millennia.

Within the convoluted matrix of this arcane historical wilderness is the search for the ancient origin stories of peoples such as the “Aryans,” “Palestinians” and “the Jews.” Much of this “history” or pseudo-history is very controversial yet intriguing and concerns the ideological roots/origins of Marxism, Fascism, Zionism, National Socialism, Anti-Semitism, Christian Zionism, Palestinian nationalism, Arab Nationalism, and Ba’athism, which continue to impact the geopolitics of the Middle East today.

The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question — Book by Theodor Herzl

The Invention of the Jewish People — Book by Shlomo Sand;

Khazars -Wikipedia

Chazars — The Jewish Encyclopedia

The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage, Book by Arthur Koestler

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East — Book by David Fromkin;

Israel – Birth of a Nation — Documentary

Modern Middle East History in Ten Minutes: Origins of Israel – Palestinian Conflict — Documentary

Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used To Create Israel;

Ralph Schoenman, The Hidden History of Zionism;

Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace?;

Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement — 25th Anniversary Edition: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine;

Saddam and Third Reich –– Documentary (10 parts)

Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators;

Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir;

Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis;

“Ancient History”: U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II and the Folly of Intervention — Sheldon L. Richman article

and John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People.

Just months into his second term, “Peace President” Donald Trump has launched missiles into an Iran that has neither attacked nor threatened to attack the United States. And he has done so with virtually no input from the US Congress. What comes next? Former US diplomat and senior US Senate foreign policy analyst Jim Jatras joins today’s Liberty Report.

I uploaded this video to X just 2 hours before Trump announced they had just bombed the Fordrow nuclear enrichment facility in Iran

btw yes I realized halfway thru recording this that Top Gun used fighter jets to deliver the bomb rather than stealth bombers but it felt kinda silly to re-record everything at that point… according to the plot the whole point of using the planes they did was to bomb the target stealthily, so… kinda still a stealth bomber if ya think about it…

In 1998 Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of an aspirin factory in Susan that he lied about calling it a terrorist training camp. He was in the middle of his grand jury testimony regarding the Monica Lewinsky affair. The whole world now knows that he lied.

Last week Netanyahoo went on trial in his corruption and bribery case that is reported to last for about a year. Wag the Dog 2.0?

Wisdom of the Day: “But America goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy…. America well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” John Quincy Adams.

Founding Fathers Favored Non-Intervention

• Long before Ike’s military industrial complex speech in 1961, Washington warned us with the very first Farewell Address.
• When the wolves of war howled for blood, Washington refused, with the unanimous assent of the brightest lights amongst our founders in the first and foremost declaration of American foreign policy: the Neutrality Proclamation. The American public, after robust public debate, agreed and Congress codified it into law. George Washington’s 1796 farewell address established it as the foundation of American foreign policy from our founding, warning against the “foreign alliances, attachments and intrigues” that inevitably “embitter.”
• Indeed, “the jealousy of a free people out to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” Hence, “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded…The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave.”
• Washington explained how undue foreign allegiances and attachments undermine American liberty: “Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification…As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot.” Thus, Washington warned us to “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
• Thereafter, Washington declared the foreign policy of our Founding Fathers: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
• Washington was right. Unless and until directly attacked, or imminent risk thereof, let’s leave foreign wars to foreign nations.

Boots on the ground? Nah, never! Oh…never mind.

The United States and Israel have launched a brutal and unprovoked war against Iran. The United States tricked Iran by engaging Iran in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear energy program for civilian purposes in order to lower Iran’s guard against an attack. So far, the United States and Israel have murdered Iranian scientists, government officials, military officers, and civilians in the massive bombing campaign that Israel is carrying out with support from the United States.

Since the early 1990s, Israeli Prime Minister and de-facto United States President Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that Iran is on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon. There is no credible evidence to back the allegations that Iran, which is a signatory of the The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), has ever sought nuclear weapons. Instead, Iran has a civilian nuclear program for energy purposes. Furthermore, Iran’s leader, Ali Khamenei, has issued a religious decree against the acquisition, development, and use of nuclear weapons on religious grounds.

On the other hand, the United States dropped two atomic weapons on civilian populations in Japan in 1945 and possesses thousands of nuclear weapons. Israel with the assistance of the United States has about 100 nuclear weapons and refuses to sign the NPT.

Yesterday, Israel’s puppet Donald Trump directly attacked Iranian nuclear sites in violation of domestic and international law. How is waging war on Iran on behalf of Israel putting “America first?” We should remember that the “America first” movement recognized that World War I was a catastrophe of epic proportions that was waged for the benefit of big government and big business.  The “America first” movement wanted to avoid the mistake of involvement in another catastrophic World War.

We are being neo-conned again into another illegal war of aggression based on lies. It is time to demand the immediate removal from office of the treasonous Netanyahu/Trump administration.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez correctly stated, “The President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers. He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations. It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.”

Trump lies, cheats, manipulates at home and abroad, and violates domestic and international law, because he can.  He surrounds himself with lackeys, and he stands for America First as a unipolar power, not for putting America, or Americans first.  He gets to decide all, because he is the glorious commander, the anointed emperor.  How kind and thoughtful of him to spend a good part of his announcement last night to thanking Bibi Netanyahu, and thanking Israel for its role in an unprovoked attack, its “helpful” intelligence, and its unholy level of suffering, less than 1% of what we and Israel have ensured, paid for, and delivered to 2 million Gazans recently.  As Gazans starve, the emperor bows to his tiny alliance, gracious and generous in his otherwise nervous-looking address to the nation.  He may know, or maybe he has no idea, that the battle to preserve and extend the American empire is already lost.

After promising to end forever wars, Trump starts a new one by bombing Iran.

Say it isn’t so. But who can be surprised? Did she ever renounce her endorsement of Biden?

In prison with former senator Bob Menendez.

“I’m so glad I didn’t have a boy,” said Michelle Obama, “Because he would’ve been a Barack Obama.” We are glad with you, Michelle, we are so glad. And thank God that George W. Bush did not have a son either. 

The ghosts of Spring 2003 and onward loom. First, Shock and Awe. Then invasion. Then none of the predicted WMD found. Then wave after wave of IEDs blowing U.S. servicemen to bits. Three things that are certain in life: death, taxes, and Boobus Americanus never learning from the past.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has introduced a bill to more than double the federal minimum wage. Only eight states follow the federal minimum.

If you go the the Middle East and fight for Trump, the neocons, and Netanyahu, then those are the only people that you will be fighting for. You will not be fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. You will not be fighting for the American people. You will not be fighting to defend and protect the Constitution. You will not be fighting for our freedoms. You will not be fighting to defend America. If you die, then you will die in vain and for the lie that Iran was a threat to America, that Iran was a threat to Israel, and that Iran was close to getting a nuke. You will not die a hero, but a sucker and a pawn.