A loaded firearm with any number of magazines is protected by the Second Amendment; you’d think a conservative Republican regime would know and support this. Unsurprisingly, they only care about their own power, not anyone’s rights.

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During the 2024 presidential election there was an alliance of various conservative factions and some libertarian factions to help propel Donald Trump back into the presidency; I, being on the libertarian side, voted for Trump as well, though my sole reason for doing so was to keep the Democrats out of power after they overthrew their own primary election. It’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that Trump would have won that election without libertarian support, but it certainly didn’t hurt anything for his chances. Unfortunately, the same story that has been happening since William F. Buckley did everything he could to expel libertarians from the official, respectable Right at least has happened once again; conservatives are mad at libertarians for expecting conservatives to govern on the policies they campaigned on while conservatives are more interested in wielding state power for their own benefit and smearing libertarians as enemies.

A tale as old as time.

It’s interesting that they keep declaring that libertarians need to be made to have no influence in the “conservative movement,” as if libertarians have ever had any influence. Sure, conservatives retweeted some libertarians like Dave Smith when he was making the case to elect Donald Trump, but what has the Trump regime done that libertarians would support? President Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht early in his second term, and that’s it. If libertarians had influence in the “conservative movement” or the Trump regime, then Trump would be enacting policies favorable to libertarians, but there’s only one example anyone could point to and, while that’s a something many libertarians were in favor of (I never followed the Ulbricht case and have no idea where I stand on his conviction and pardon), it didn’t fundamentally move the United States closer to libertarianism at all.

It’s interesting to note that the claim is that libertarians are the ones betraying the conservative movement and/or the Trump regime by disagreeing with them. These same people who cheered Trump alongside libertarians during the presidential campaign continue to cheer President Trump now while he enacts policies that are the exact opposite of what he campaigned on, not to mention being completely at odds with libertarianism, with no cognitive dissonance, and while he attacks and backs a primary challenger to the most libertarian member of Congress, Rep. Thomas Massie. Conservatives were happy to have libertarians help them elect Donald Trump, but once they were in power the message immediately became for libertarians to shut their mouths and fall in line, or else. If that’s not betrayal then nothing is.

The real lesson from this episode should be that libertarianism and conservatism are largely incompatible, and libertarians should never trust the conservative movement at large. These conservatives will campaign like libertarians and then govern like Democrats because they have the same political goal as Democrats. Like Democrats, their only interest is in attaining and wielding political power without constraint, while libertarians, largely, want to limit and decentralize political power. These goals are obviously entirely opposed to one another. Murray N. Rothbard, “Mr. Libertarian,” was right when he said the only question that really matters when picking allies is, “Do you hate the State?” The conservative movement, like the progressive movement, loves the State, and libertarians should never again help them gain political power.

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It really should not surprise me how many conservatives who were angry when their side was being canceled, suspended, or blocked on social media and television networks are suddenly all too gleeful about the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from his television show on ABC or other progressives being fired around the country for saying outright disgusting things about or even just simple criticisms of Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination. Yes, plenty of these people are hypocrites, a great example is MSNBC’s Democratic propagandist Chris Hayes:

But if you were mad about Tucker Carlson’s cancelation and are now celebrating Jimmy Kimmel’s cancelation, you are equally as hypocritical. You’re either against cancel culture, or you’re not; you either support freedom of speech, or you don’t. Tit-for-tat may be satisfying, but it’s not principled. Saying wrong, even cruel or disgusting things about a person who was just brutally murdered is free speech. False information should be widely called out, and maybe ABC should fire its employees if they use ABC’s network to propagate false information. However, when the Federal Communications Commission, an agency of the national government, tells ABC that they have to do something about Jimmy Kimmel or the FCC will do something about ABC “the hard way,” then that is government censorship.

The counter-argument from conservatives that we hear is that the FCC has a legitimate role in overseeing networks who have a government license to use the “public spectrum,” such as ABC. This argument would make sense to me coming from the progressive left, but I can’t begin to understand how the conservative right can make this argument with a straight face. There is no legitimate role for the national government to regulate the “public spectrum,” there is no such thing as a “public spectrum” if you believe in private property rights, and the United States Constitution does not designate a “public spectrum” anywhere in the document.

As the U.S. Constitution does not designate public airwaves or a public spectrum, and does not give the U.S. government the power to regulate public airwaves or a public spectrum, the U.S. government has no constitutional authority to designate or regulate public airwaves or a public spectrum as the Tenth Amendment makes clear. If the argument then is, “Well, the framers of the Constitution couldn’t foresee airwaves in the 18th-century,” I’ll grant you that, but it doesn’t change anything. Conservatives don’t get to simply ignore the Constitution when it’s convenient for them anymore than progressives do. If conservatives want to designate and regulate public airwaves—though I’m not sure why people who claim to support free markets would want to do that in the first place—then they will need an amendment to the Constitution to make it legal.

All of that said, even if there were constitutional authority for the FCC to regulate the public spectrum, it would not change the fact that ABC only moved to suspend Jimmy Kimmel after the FCC threatened them. Saying that ABC can handle Jimmy Kimmel over what he said “the easy way” or “we can do it the hard way” is still a threat from the national government over speech and has nothing to do with the free market whether you think they have a legitimate role in doing so or not. It’s no different from Congress threatening social media companies like Facebook and Twitter with new regulations if they didn’t change their moderation policies themselves to crackdown on people questioning the official narrative on COVID, or the 2020 election, or January 6th rioters.

You either style yourself a defender of free speech, which includes vile and false speech from your political opponents, or you can support the government threatening networks, colleges, businesses, and individuals over what they or their employees have said. The two positions are mutually exclusive and now that they’re in power, too many conservatives have dropped their “free speech” masks to go after their political opponents.

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Despite botching the operation itself, one of the very few good things that Joe Biden did during his presidency was to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, but now President Donald Trump has announced that he wants to get Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan back from the Taliban and put U.S. troops back into the country.

Credit to journalist Michael Tracey on X for the video.

Trump says that the base is apparently close to where the Chinese government makes nuclear weapons and so is of strategic interest to the United States government. There is no good reason for a single American troop to step foot in Afghanistan, and doing it to provoke the Chinese government is a particularly bad reason. Average Americans can no longer afford to pay for Washington’s imperial ambition and no longer want to lose their lives for it either. After campaigning on “no more stupid wars,” is there a single war or military escalation that the second Trump regime won’t find itself involved in?

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I knew a little of Charlie Kirk the political figure, but I did not know anything of Charlie Kirk the man. As far as politics go, I viewed Kirk as a partisan figure spouting little more than Republican/Trumpian talking points, and I think that was largely correct. However, in the wake of his assassination I can’t stop thinking about the loss of a father and husband, and what his family is going through now. I knew of Charlie Kirk the political figure, but politics is the least of any person. Charlie Kirk was not a political figure; he was a person, a friend to many, a son, a husband, a father, and more besides.

There will be ramifications for the United States because someone chose to assassinate Charlie Kirk, and I doubt that any of them will be positive. Most of us will argue that this simply proves that our already entrenched beliefs were correct all along, and plenty will want retribution against the guilty and the perceived-to-be-guilty. I don’t pretend to know what response Charlie Kirk would support were he alive to comment on this situation, but I know that he professed himself to be a Christian and a follower of Jesus Christ. So perhaps it would be most fitting to remember Charlie Kirk alongside a message of forgiveness from Jesus.

I am afraid of what comes next for our country, but for now I simply mourn the loss of another life to political violence.

Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.

Understanding the United States Constitution is not really a difficult task, but it is made so by scholars and politicians who want to expand upon the very limited set of powers granted to the U.S. government by the Constitution. For example, the plain text of the 2nd Amendment is only difficult to understand or only requires reading between the lines to people who want to ignore what it says so that the U.S. government can limit what weapons American citizens can own or carry without going through the difficult process of amending the Constitution. Likewise the question of whether American citizens have the right to burn the American flag.

President Trump signed an executive order yesterday supposedly making it a crime to burn the flag of the United States, but that’s not exactly what it does. What it actually does is create a new emphasis on crimes that involve burning an American flag, such as inciting a riot or theft. The Supreme Court case Texas v. Johnson (1989) states that burning the American flag in and of itself is an act of protected symbolic speech under the First Amendment to the Constitution, which would make Trump trying to ban it outright a direct violation of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Vice President J.D. Vance has argued, however, that the court got the decision wrong and that Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s dissent was correct where he argued that burning the flag was a uniquely bad form of expression, that can lead to other bad outcomes, and an exception should be made not to have it protected under the Constitution.

I would argue that Vance is wrong, and that Texas v. Johnson is irrelevant. Whether or not burning the American flag constitutes protected symbolic speech under the First Amendment, or whether it is so uniquely bad that it is a form of expression that should not be protected by the Constitution is making the Constitution more convoluted than it really is. There are two amendments to the Constitution which make clear how the Constitution is to be interpreted, and these are the Ninth and Tenth amendments in the Bill of Rights.

The Ninth Amendment here states that simply because, say, the First Amendment explicitly declares certain rights to be protected, such as the freedom of speech, it does not imply that other rights not explicitly declared to be protected are not also protected, but, rather, that any rights not explicitly declared to be outlawed by the Constitution are retained by the people. Therefore, since burning the American flag is not declared to be a crime by the Constitution, it is a right retained by the American people per the Ninth Amendment. Whether burning the American flag is protected speech under the First Amendment is irrelevant because it is protected in its own right by the Ninth Amendment.

The Tenth Amendment explains that there are no assumed powers of the United States government within the U.S. Constitution, but that the powers granted to the U.S. government are limited only to those powers explicitly stated within the Constitution. Anything else is either reserved to the various State governments or to the American people individually. Since the Constitution does not grant the U.S. government the power to ban burning the American flag, the U.S. government, including the president, has no power to ban burning the American flag.

Leaving aside the fact that President Trump’s Executive Order does not actually ban burning the American flag in and of itself, the question of whether burning the American flag ought to be protected or not, as decided in Texas v. Johnson, is irrelevant: Burning the American flag is protected per the Ninth and Tenth amendments to the Constitution and if people believe that burning the American flag ought to be illegal then an amendment to the Constitution would need to be ratified making it so. There is no clause for making exceptions based on any criteria despite the argument made by Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1989 and endorsed by Vice President Vance. As I said, the U.S. Constitution is a relatively simple document to read and understand, and the only reason to pretend otherwise is because someone wants the Constitution to be ignored to enact their favored policies. Ignoring the Constitution is why the federal government established by the Constitution has not existed for a century at least in favor of the imperial government we have today with no limits to its power. There is no going back, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t point out when elected officials are advocating violating their oaths to the Constitution whenever we can.

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I’m inclined to agree that American lawmakers should not have allegiances to foreign countries over the United States, but I don’t believe that Vivek actually believes that.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Republican Senator Ted Cruz openly stated, “I came into Congress 13 years ago, with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States Senate.” This is an American politician and lawmaker explicitly declaring his allegiance to a foreign government. Ramaswamy’s last tweet mentioning Israel came in May 2024, and his last tweet mentioning Ted Cruz came in January 2021. If Ramaswamy actually believed that American politicians should not have allegiance to foreign governments, then Cruz’s statement strikes me as far more offensive than Ramirez’s which could simply be her referring to her cultural ties.

Vivek Ramaswamy doesn’t care if American politicians have allegiances to foreign governments, or, at least, doesn’t care enough to apply the standard equally. He cares about it in so much as it makes him and his political allies look good to voters and makes his political opponents, direct or indirect, look bad to voters, but that doesn’t sound as good for a tweet.

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Representative Mike Johnson has been the Speaker of the House of Representatives since October 2023, and yet his immediate predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, who is no longer even an elected representative of the United States House of Representatives, is still styling himself as “Speaker McCarthy” on X. Kevin McCarthy is the “Speaker” only of his own delusions at this point. Of course, McCarthy is not the only politician to hold onto the title for an office that he no longer holds, Representative Nancy Pelosi is also delusionally styling herself as “Speaker Pelosi,” a position she has not held since January 2023.

Then of course there’s the President of the United States, an office currently occupied by President Donald J. Trump. And yet we often hear about “President Obama” or “President Biden” in the present tense when neither of the people being referred to hold any political office whatsoever. And, on her personal website “About” page, Kamala Harris mysteriously refers to some person called “Vice President Harris” despite the current vice president being J.D. Vance. Not to pick on one party, the Democrats are largely out of power at this time, Donald Trump insisted on being referred to as “President Trump” while Joe Biden previously occupied the office of the presidency for four years, and we still hear about a “President Reagan” despite Ronald Reagan having died over 20 years ago.

In the United States, government titles go with government offices, not with the politicians who inhabit those offices temporarily. That these tax parasites insist that we continue to use these titles for them so that they can feel elevated above the mere rabble is no evidence that we ought to continue doing so. Politicians are not our betters for having been elected to this or that post, and they should be taking pride in re-entering civilian life and getting a real job that actually contributes to civilized life, rather than in the highest government office they were able to swindle the American taxpayer into letting them occupy.

The policy on X is that there are certain official government accounts that stay with the office, I’m thinking of the accounts “POTUS” and “VP”, though there may be more that I don’t know about. If, say, Joe Biden is not permitted to continue to use the “POTUS” X account, then why should Kevin McCarthy or Nancy Pelosi be permitted to refer to themselves as “Speaker” on X? More importantly, why should supposedly free Americans continue to refer to washed-up politicians by their previous titles in any capacity? They are either now holding lesser offices or no offices, and should be referred to accordingly. If it makes Mr. McCarthy angry that we pointedly refuse to defer to his delusions, then so much the better.

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One of the things that struck me about the Tucker Carlson interview of Senator Ted Cruz is how both of them are using the term isolationist incorrectly. They make a distinction between competing camps within the Republican Party of foreign policy interventionists who might be typified by the late John McCain and isolationists such as Ron Paul and, to a lesser degree in my mind, but not to theirs, his son, Senator Rand Paul. Senator Cruz says he sees himself somewhere in between those two camps, or as a third camp entirely, where he judges a foreign policy on the basis of whether it’s in the interest of America or not, and Carlson made the point that he is not an isolationist and, as such, believes that if Iran is genuinely trying to assassinate President Donald Trump, a claim that Cruz makes in the interview without evidence, then the United States should be full-scale invading Iran if not outright nuking them.

Both men are equating isolationism with pacifism, which are two distinct ideologies. It may be true that all pacifists are isolationists, I’ll let the pacifists speak for themselves but it seems like a reasonable assumption, but it is certainly not true that all, or even most, isolationists are pacifists. They use Ron Paul as their chief example of an isolationist; Ron Paul prefers the term “noninterventionist” to isolationist, which I personally find too cumbersome a word for casual use and don’t care to argue with warmongers who will continue to use isolationist just to annoy us anyway; but Ron Paul himself voted in favor of the authorization for military action against Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which I believe was a mistake on his part, and introduced legislation for letters of marque and reprisal against Osama bin-Laden, which I think was a better strategy. Those are not the actions of a pacifist, but can be in line with isolationism, or “noninterventionism” if you prefer. From Ron Paul’s 2008 book The Revolution: A Manifesto, emphasis mine:

Americans have the right to defend themselves against attack; that is not at issue. But that is very different from launching a preemptive war against a country that had not attacked us and could not attack us, that lacked a navy and an air force, and whose military budget was a fraction of a percent of our own. A policy of overthrowing or destabilizing every regime our government dislikes is no strategy at all, unless our goal is international chaos and domestic impoverishment.

These are not the words of a pacifist against any military action whatsoever as Tucker and Cruz want to paint isolationists, but is perfectly in line with an isolationist foreign policy that views war only as an absolutely necessary last resort rather than the answer to every foreign policy desire that can be dreamed up by politicians looking to get kickbacks from arms manufacturers.

Whether you call it isolationism or noninterventionism, again, I use the terms interchangeably without distinction because it’s not worth a pointless argument, the fact is that one can espouse this foreign policy without being against all war all the time. In fact, I would describe an isolationist foreign policy similarly to how Senator Cruz describes his foreign policy views in that our foreign policy must be in the interests of the United States. In the case of war, however, it’s not that war must be reflexively opposed no matter what, but that war must be both an absolute last resort, in that all peaceful diplomatic possibilities have been exhausted, and just in the sense that the United States has been attacked or is definitively going to be attacked. In the case of the attack on Iran that the Trump regime engaged in on behalf of the Israeli government, or the regime change that Senator Cruz advocates against the Iranian government, the Iranian government had not attacked the United States, nor do they have the capability to attack the United States aside from the many American military bases surrounding Iran that the United States has no business having anyway; there is no evidence suggesting that Iran was working to develop nuclear weapons, nor does the United States have the authority to decide what countries are allowed to have nuclear weapons, especially considering that the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Iranian agreement limiting their nuclear capabilities during Trump’s first-term in office; and the United States was in the middle of diplomatic negotiations with Iran at the time they backed the Israeli attacks against Iran and then directly attacked Iran on their own. So the United States was not attacked, was not under threat of an attack, the pretext of the alleged threat was a lie, and diplomacy had barely begun.

For these specific reasons, an isolationist would oppose the attacks on Iran, and not because of some reflexive, unconsidered sentiment against war itself as Tucker and Cruz tried to frame the isolationist position. Again, isolationism is not pacifism, but a foreign policy that does not equate diplomacy with war, as warmongers like Senator Lindsey Graham and even Senator Cruz himself, in calling for regime change in Iran, do, but believes that diplomacy is preferable to war. And, if diplomacy has truly been exhausted and it must be war, then that war must meet the criteria of being both just and in the interests of the United States. War is such a catastrophe for everyone involved that the bar must be almost impossibly high to pass before we engage in it. That’s what an isolationist believes.

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I wrote previously that the Trump regime was clearly trying to provoke Iran into a retaliatory attack against the United States by bombing their nuclear facilities so that the Trump regime would have an excuse to engage in a regime change war against Iran.

Instead of that, President Trump ended up announcing a ceasefire between Israel / America and Iran.

Does this ceasefire prove that I was wrong? At this point I would say no, because we have no reason to trust in Trump’s ceasefire anymore than we had reason to trust in his diplomacy with Iran, which he openly acknowledges was a ruse to open the door for the Israeli / American attacks against Iran. He is saying the right things regarding the ceasefire and even being critical of Israel for violating the ceasefire, but words are worth nothing from Donald Trump. The only way to judge the ceasefire is to see how it plays out over time, and for now it’s far too early to say.

If the ceasefire holds, and Trump is willing to enforce it against Israel (we have no doubt he would be willing to do so against Iran), then my initial response was wrong by a degree. I wrote:

It should also be apparent that the Trump regime wants Iran to escalate after this bombing so that they have an excuse to to enact the regime change war against Iran that Israel and the neoconservatives have been agitating for three decades at a minimum.

Again, assuming the ceasefire holds, then saying that Trump wanted Iran to escalate was obviously not correct. Iran did retaliate by bombing a U.S. base in Qatar, but made sure that the U.S. government knew exactly when that attack was going to happen, per Trump himself, so that there would be no possibility of an American being wounded or killed in the attack.

I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured.

So it’s exactly what Dave Smith said in a recent episode of Part of the Problem: it was Iranian restraint that averted disaster. That said, if the Trump regime absolutely wanted an excuse to start a regime change war against Iran, as I stated previously, they would have used the retaliatory strike, or any other lie, like Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program, as a pretext no matter what. So my claim in the previous post may prove to have been incorrect, and that’s a good thing. I could not be happier to be wrong if that turns out to be the case, but I remain skeptical of Trump’s ceasefire.

I was not entirely wrong, however, because Trump himself stated that regime change in Iran was an option.

Meaning, if Iran had not practiced restraint in retaliating against the illegal American attack against their nuclear energy program, Trump was considering a policy of regime change against them, which would have meant full-scale war with Iran. So, again, it was Iran, not Trump and certainly not Israel, who de-escalated the situation to avoid a catastrophic regime change war, assuming the ceasefire is actually enforced and is not just another ruse to prepare for a regime change war against Iran. The only way to be certain, at this point, is to wait and see.

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After last night’s unconstitutional attack against Iran based on the lie that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon, which, despite her protestations, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified that Iran was not doing, MAGA influencers are trying to convince the world that this is proof that President Trump does not want a regime change war against Iran.

They’re essentially saying that this act of war, and bombing another country is an act of war, is diplomacy to keep us out of war. This is the MAGA version of “War is Peace,” and nobody with a brain should believe this propaganda. The ease with which this bombing can escalate into a bigger war should be apparent to anyone given Iran’s threats to bomb U.S. military installations in the Middle East should the U.S. bomb them, and the fact that they’ve demonstrated their capability to do so by bombing Israel in retaliation of Israel’s strikes against Iran. It should also be apparent that the Trump regime wants Iran to escalate after this bombing so that they have an excuse to to enact the regime change war against Iran that Israel and the neoconservatives have been agitating for three decades at a minimum.

The real purpose of this attack is to goad Iran into directly attacking the United States, which they have the capability to do given there are U.S. military bases all around Iran in the Middle East, so that Imperial America can finally justify their regime change war against Iran and kick up the American electorate into a war fervor. Let’s just pray that the American people can see through the lies of the Trump regime and oppose another disastrous war in the Middle East.

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It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory with stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.

It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came—next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams—visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender!

Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:

God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest,
Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory—

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord and God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside—which the startled minister did—and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

“I come from the Throne—bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import—that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of—except he pause and think. “God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two—one uttered, and the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this—keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon your neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain on your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse on some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

“You have heard your servant’s prayer—the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into words the other part of it—that part which the pastor—and also you in your hearts—fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard the words ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory—must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

“Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle—be Thou near them! With them—in spirit—we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it—

For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(After a pause.)

“Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.”

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

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In the tweet from Vice President J.D. Vance that I quoted in yesterday’s post, he stated, “I have yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use.”

Journalist Aaron Maté responded on X with a valid reason, but Vance seems to have conveniently missed (ignored) it. I thought it was worth documenting and spreading as far as possible.

The argument is that Trump broke the original Iran nuclear deal, which capped Iran's enrichment at the threshold for civilian use. By killing that deal, which Iran was adhering to, Trump sent the message that the US would not accept Iran enriching even for civilian use.

So Iran -- as it was allowed to under the deal, given Trump's violation of it -- increased enrichment in the hopes of convincing the US to return to the deal and abandon its crippling sanctions that strangle Iran's economy. What were they supposed to do, wait for Donald Trump, Joe Biden and then Donald Trump again to change their minds?

If one wants to argue that the original deal that Trump broke was flawed because it was set to expire, well Trump could have tried to renegotiate it. He didn't. He simply killed it, re-imposed crippling sanctions, and then assassinated Iran's top general as he was trying to de-escalate to Saudi Arabia.

One could also argue that Iran made a tactical error in enriching at a higher level. But it not only has the right to do that, it did so while actively negotiating with Trump and repeatedly renouncing nuclear weapons, as it long has. Just a few months ago, the US intelligence community affirmed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program suspended in 2003.”

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Aaron Mate

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By Aaron Maté

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Article 1, Section 1 of the United States Constitution states:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution then goes on to state:

The Congress shall have Power… To declare War…

So the Constitution explicitly states that all powers granted in Article 1 are for the Congress, and then goes on to explicitly state that the Congress shall have the power to declare war. Not the president.

In a lengthy post on X, Vice President Vance states, among other questionable assertions, that President Trump has the authority to “end Iranian enrichment,” which would require an act of war.

Meanwhile, the president has shown remarkable restraint in keeping our military's focus on protecting our troops and protecting our citizens.

He may decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment. That decision ultimately belongs to the president.

That decision does not ultimately belong to the president, it ultimately belongs to the congress per the Constitution. Of course, no presidential regime has ever cared about the Constitution, and the Congress is only too happy to pass on their responsibility to declare war or not. Still, it’s worth pointing out that Vance is outright lying, especially given that he goes on to state:

But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue. And having seen this up close and personal, I can assure you that he is only interested in using the American military to accomplish the American people's goals. Whatever he does, that is his focus.

President Trump has earned absolutely no trust on this issue, nor has Vice President Vance given that we have established that he already lied in his tweet about the constitutional powers of the presidency. I posted on Sunday that Trump was lying in a post on Truth Social that the United States “had nothing to do with the attack on Iran” for a variety of reasons.

Now Trump has a new post on Truth Social all but admitting that he was lying.

Who is we? He tells you right in the post: “the good ol’ USA.”

No politician should ever be trusted. H. L. Mencken put it best:

The burden of proof, as I see it, is always upon the policeman, which is to say, upon the lawmaker, the theologian, the right-thinker. He must prove his case doubly, triply, quadruply, and then he must start all over and prove it again. The eye through which I view him is watery and jaundiced. I do not pretend to be “just” to him — any more than a Christian pretends to be just to the devil.

Donald Trump is a politician. J.D. Vance is a politician. By entering politics at all they have forfeited the right to be trusted by those of us they purport to govern, and by openly lying even more so. If the claim is that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, as it has been the claim from people wanting war with Iran for my entire life, then they have to prove their case, especially since Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence testified a few short months ago that there was no evidence that Iran was trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Simply saying “trust us” while you lie about the constitutional powers of the president, lie about your illegal involvement in the attack against Iran in the first place, and dismiss the intelligence reported by your own administration that would undermine your reason for being involved in the attack against Iran is unacceptable. Especially when it comes to getting the United States involved in another endless, un-winnable war in the Middle East and innocent people die by the hundreds of thousands as a result. These are the same lies that led to the disastrous war in Iraq 20+ years ago with the same amount of evidence provided: None. So no, Mr. Vice President, we will not trust you on this issue.

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Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age and The American Conservative and former coordinator of the 2008 Ron Paul campaign for president, is claiming that some non-interventionists are behaving as “reverse neocons” by claiming that President Trump should have exerted his influence or power to stop Israel from attacking Iran.

“Trump doesn’t control Israel and Israel doesn’t control Trump. If you say the U.S. shouldn’t tell other countries what to do, but you insist the U.S. should have stopped Israel from attacking Iran, you’re not exactly a non-interventionist.”

On today’s episode we’ll explain why McCarthy’s argument doesn’t hold up.

Referenced Posts:

President Trump Lies About U.S. Involvement in Israeli Attack on Iran

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President Trump is claiming that the United States government “had nothing to do” with the Israeli attack on Iran.

This is as bold of a lie as any politician could possibly tell after Trump himself came out and said that the U.S. knew about and supported the attack. From The Wall Street Journal:

President Trump told The Wall Street Journal that he and his team were aware of Israel’s plans to attack Iran.

Asked what kind of heads-up the U.S. got ahead of the attack, Trump said in a brief phone interview on Friday morning, "Heads-up? It wasn’t a heads-up. It was, we know what's going on."

The president said he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday and plans to speak with him again Friday. He called the operation "a very successful attack, to put it mildly."

"I told the other side, I said, you have 60 days to make the deal. On the 61st day, they attacked. Today is 61 actually, and it was a very successful attack," Trump said.

Knowledge of and the support of the Trump regime aside, the United States also supplied the weapons that Israel used in the attack against Iran and financially backs the Israeli government, as Trump himself noted in a post on Truth Social on Friday.

I told [Iran] it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come - And they know how to use it.

So how can it be that the United States “had nothing to do with the attack on Iran” when they knew about it, openly supported it, supplied the weapons that were used in the attack, and then helped defend Israel against a retaliatory attack from Iran? One of the reasons the warmongers and neoconservatives give for the necessity of a war against Iran is that Iran supports terrorist proxies in the Middle East against American and Israeli interests; now they want to claim that their open support of a proxy in a war against Iran does not make the United States a belligerent in that war. Either supporting, funding, and arming a proxy in attacks against others is an act of war and/or terrorism, or it isn’t. The United States doesn’t get to have it both ways anymore than anyone else in the world does.

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Using American weapons and American taxpayer money, the government of Israel bombed Iran yesterday, and seemingly has the full support of the Trump regime. Will this be the start of the war that American neoconservatives and the Israeli Likud Party have been agitating for my entire life, or will this help with the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran over their nuclear energy program? Hopefully not the former, but probably not the latter either.

“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to “just do it,” but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done. I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come - And they know how to use it. Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse! There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end. Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. God Bless You All!” - President Donald Trump

“Two months ago I gave Iran a 60 day ultimatum to “make a deal.” They should have done it! Today is day 61. I told them what to do, but they just couldn’t get there. Now they have, perhaps, a second chance!” - President Donald Trump

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President Trump and Vice President Vance are demanding that the Federal Reserve lower interest rates to create a false boom in the economy that would inevitably go bust and lead to a downturn, but probably not until after they’re safely out of office.

“The president has been saying this for a while, but it's even more clear: the refusal by the Fed to cut rates is monetary malpractice.” - Vice President J.D. Vance

“CPI JUST OUT. GREAT NUMBERS! FED SHOULD LOWER ONE FULL POINT. WOULD PAY MUCH LESS INTEREST ON DEBT COMING DUE. SO IMPORTANT!!!” - President Donald J. Trump

My response to Vance on X did not go what anyone would call viral, but certainly is one of my biggest tweets ever leading to almost 20 new followers in a few hours.

“Artificially manipulating interest rates at all is counterfeit and theft. That’s what you’re advocating.”

The Austrian School of economics teaches us, to put it simply, that keeping interest rates artificially low creates money out of thin air and devalues the currency which is the cause of price inflation throughout the economy, and, worse, leads to malinvestments that create an artificial boom in the economy that inevitably goes bust leading to a recession.

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Elon Musk, head of X, Space X, and Tesla, was tasked by President Trump to create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to find and eliminate wasteful spending by the United States central government, which Musk jumped into with gusto, posting his proposed cuts on X for all to see. Less than half a year later, however, Musk has left the DOGE, and the Trump regime entirely, and is coming out against Trump’s proposed spending bill which Trump is calling the “Big Beautiful Bill” or BBB. I can’t speak to beautiful, but it’s certainly big in that it is a big spending bill that will inevitably lead to big tax increases and big inflation.

President Trump, needless to say, has a different view of the bill:

This idea that spending more money somehow constitutes a spending cut, whether it’s by “saving us money down the road” or some other magic beanstalk, is what politicians wasting our money have been saying for decades. Spending more is not a spending cut, and, to quote Ron Paul, “Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations…” That President Trump is the one saying this nonsense doesn’t make it true, and whether you’re a Trump supporter or not you can still point out when he is lying or wrong. as he is here. Whatever Trump may say about Congressman Thomas Massie or Sentator Rand Paul because of their opposition to his big spending bill, they’re right and telling the truth, and now Elon Musk is telling you as well. If you really want to Make America Great Again then you need to listen to them, not Trump.

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I am not a fan of paying for monthly or annual subscriptions; when it comes to streaming services like Netflix my strategy has been to pay for maybe one or two at a time and only for a month at a time: Pay for a month of the subscription, immediately cancel the subscription so that it does not auto-renew before I remember to cancel it, and watch everything that I want to watch in that month. There are certain exceptions, such as ESPN+ so that I can watch PGA Tour Live, and here on Substack I’m a regular subscriber to Matt Taibbi’s Racket News among a few others, but that has been my general strategy when it comes to recurring subscriptions.

Substack really wants us all to enable paid subscriptions, which they of course get a percentage of, but I am not so popular a writer or podcaster that I can convince people to subscribe to my Substack for free let alone expecting anybody to pay for a subscription. Certainly not a recurring subscription. And given that I don’t personally like recurring subscriptions myself, I wouldn’t be comfortable asking people to pay me monthly or annually even if they were willing to do so. I would also prefer that my content remain open to the public rather than be hidden behind a paywall. Another reason that I don’t want to turn on recurring paid subscriptions is that if I were to get paid subscriptions I’d feel worse about the large periods of time where I produce no content, like how I haven’t had a new post here since the end of February or a new episode of Never Say Nothing since November.

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