First Them, Then Us: America’s Shift from Police State to Prison State

By John W. And Nisha Whitehead - October 2, 2026 at 12:59PM

America, you got fooled. Again.

For starters, the war on illegal immigration was never just about illegal immigration.

If you fell for that, chances are you’re still falling for the government’s oldest trick: manufacture a crisis, identify an enemy, frighten the public, declare an emergency, and then use the resulting fear to justify another expansion of government power.

Terrorism. Crime. Drugs. National security. Illegal immigration.

Different threats. Same playbook.

Take a legitimate problem—or inflate it into an existential menace—and suddenly constitutional safeguards become inconveniences, extraordinary powers become necessities, and anyone who questions the government’s methods can be accused of siding with the enemy.

Immigration is a perfect example.

A highly charged issue that pushes all of the knee-jerk, polarizing buttons when it comes to deep-seated fears and prejudices, immigration has been the perfect vehicle for the Trump administration’s political fearmongering and authoritarian power grabs.

Trump has repeatedly described illegal immigration in the language of invasion, criminality and national-security emergency.

Yet a closer look suggests a far more complicated reality.

A 2026 Cato Institute analysis of Census data found that both legal and undocumented immigrants are less crime-prone than native-born Americans.

So, what is the government’s end game?

We’ve been so fixated on the overt cruelty, unapologetic authoritarianism, thuggish brutality, and blatantly unconstitutional abuses of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that we missed the larger menace taking shape behind it.

While the country fights over who should be allowed in, who should be kicked out, and who can participate in a pay-to-play scheme that benefits the oligarchy, the government continues building the infrastructure of a prison state.

This is the real power grab.

Immigration is the testing ground.

The precedent being established and the tactics being trotted out and normalized are the real danger. Because once the government establishes that it can suspend the Constitution’s safeguards for one disfavored group, there is nothing magical that keeps those powers confined to that group.

We are all at risk.

Be warned: the machinery being built to find, track, identify, seize, detain and disappear immigrants can just as easily be redirected toward the population at large.

That is how a police state becomes a prison state.

Immigration enforcement is the dress rehearsal in anticipation of the government’s ultimate muscle flex.

We are watching the infrastructure of a prison state being assembled in plain sight.

Surveillance, however, is only the beginning. The real power comes when the government takes everything it knows about you and acts on it.

Find you. Seize you. Detain you. Move you. Cut you off from the people who might intervene on your behalf. Eventually, make it difficult for anyone outside the system to determine where you are at all.

This is where ICE becomes particularly instructive.

As historian Timothy Snyder warns, “If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.”

Once due process ceases to be a non-negotiable right for one disfavored group, it becomes an optional privilege for everyone.

This is the slippery slope that eventually allows the government to make everyone disappear—citizen and immigrant alike—whenever they become inconvenient, or disfavored, or no longer useful to the powers-that-be.

This is precisely why due process matters.

Due process is not a privilege. It is not a legal loophole. And it is not a technicality reserved for people the government considers deserving of special treatment.

Due process is what stands between accusation and punishment, between suspicion and imprisonment, and between government power and individual liberty.

At the heart of that protection is habeas corpus, which translates to “you should have the body.”

Dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215, habeas corpus allows someone imprisoned by the government to challenge that detention in court and demand that the government make the case for why they should be held.

The Founders considered habeas such a fundamental and necessary ingredient in guarding against government tyranny that they included it in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 of the Constitution. As the Brennan Center explains, habeas “was conceived to guarantee protection from the king arbitrarily disappearing subjects to secret dungeons without just cause or due process.”

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, imagining authoritarian government taking root not in some distant dictatorship but in America.

Those four words capture one of the most dangerous assumptions a free people can make.

It can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to citizens. Not to innocent people.

Not to me.

Perhaps not. Perhaps the government will never put you on a rendition flight to a country you’ve never visited. Perhaps you will never disappear into a detention center. Perhaps masked agents will never come to your door.

But there are other ways for a free people to disappear.

Privacy disappears. Anonymity disappears. The freedom to move about without being tracked disappears. The freedom to associate without creating a digital trail disappears. The freedom to protest without being identified, catalogued and entered into a database disappears. The presumption that government should leave you alone unless it has legitimate cause to investigate you disappears.

Bit by bit, the boundaries separating a free citizen from a prisoner begin to disappear, too.

You are watched. Tracked. Catalogued. Scanned. Recorded. Flagged. Followed.

Your movements become data. Your associations become data. Your face becomes data. Your life becomes searchable.

All that remains is for someone in government to decide what the data means.

This is how “We the People” disappear.

We disappear when we cease to live as a people presumed free and begin living instead as inhabitants of a country-sized surveillance state—watched constantly, tracked everywhere, our movements and associations increasingly subject to monitoring, cataloguing and government scrutiny.

That is the larger danger concealed by the immigration debate.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, eventually the prison built for someone else can become the prison imprisoning all of us.

Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

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The Tyranny of One Man’s Opinion

By Andrew P. Napolitano - October 1, 2026 at 08:51AM

Thomas Cromwell was the Lord Chancellor of England for much of the reign of King Henry VIII. He engineered the convictions and executions of many whom Henry wanted out of the way, including his two predecessors in office — one of whom was St. Thomas More — and even the king’s second wife, Queen Anne.

When Cromwell’s son Gregory, who became sickened as he watched his father devolving from counselor to monster, learned that an executioner for the queen had been sent for from France a week before her trial, he asked his father what the purpose of her trial was if the king had preordained the queen’s guilt and prepaid the executioner. Cromwell replied that the king needed a jury to give the appearance of legitimacy to her conviction and prevent the public perception of “the tyranny of one man’s opinion.”

In America, we have a Constitution not only to prevent the perception but also the reality of the tyranny of one man’s opinion. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment makes clear that if the government wants life, liberty or property, it cannot take it by executive command, but only by due process — a fair jury trial and all its constitutional protections; and Article I makes it clear that if the government wants war, it cannot commence it by executive command, but only by congressional declaration.

We have a Constitution also to assure the separation of powers in the federal government. Congress writes the laws, appropriates the taxpayers’ money and funds borrowed in their names and declares war when the United States is in danger of imminent foreign threat. The president enforces the laws, spends money as Congress directs and wages the wars Congress has authorized. The judiciary decides what the Constitution and the laws mean and, if properly challenged, determines if the president and Congress or the states have exercised their duties lawfully and constitutionally.

The central constitutional question is not whether a president sincerely believes that his policies are necessary. It is whether the Constitution permits personal liberty and limited government to depend upon the opinion of one man. That is the danger of executive government without effective legislative and judicial checks.

A fair reading of the Constitution begins with a truism: Presidential power is not whatever the president believes it to be. It is only what the Constitution and laws actually confer.

Consider the administration’s attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats. President Donald Trump says he has directed military forces to strike narcotrafficking vessels and describes the operation as part of his campaign against fentanyl and cartels. But the constitutional question is separate from the president’s characterization of the targets. A person suspected of being a drug trafficker — or even a mass murderer — does not thereby become condemned to death. Criminal guilt always requires accusation, evidence and adjudication according to law, before punishment.

These boat killings are unlawful extrajudicial executions. In the language all Americans can understand, they are murders.

The same principle applies to Iran. The Framers deliberately divided the war powers. Article I gives Congress the power to declare war, authorize military force, regulate the armed forces and control appropriations. Article II makes the president commander in chief. The distinction matters. The president commands forces; Congress determines where and under what circumstances the president does so.  

Trump has openly declared an American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and said that the United States controls which ships pass through it. He has also imposed sanctions which deny food, medicine and currency stability to millions of innocent Iranians. He even threatened to murder all Iranians — beyond the thousands he has already killed — if a peace agreement is not soon reached. 

Those statements highlight what the Constitution was designed to prevent one individual from addressing alone: Whether the United States should wage military and economic hostilities against the population of another nation.

Congress has repeatedly resisted treating the Iran conflict as a matter solely for presidential discretion. Just two weeks ago, support for Trump’s war failed to muster majorities in both houses of Congress.

Nor can the president’s personal assessment of Iran’s nuclear intentions settle the matter. In 2018, his State Department’s compliance report said Iran was fulfilling its nuclear-related non-proliferation commitments and U.S. intelligence had assessed with high confidence that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

In 2020, his State Department again said that Iran was not then engaged in key activities associated with designing and developing a nuclear weapon. In 2025, his Director of National Intelligence testified that the entire U.S. intelligence community continued to assess that Iran was not building nuclear weapons.  

Those facts alone establish something constitutionally important: The president’s personal belief — whether informed or uninformed — is not evidence or law or a substitute for congressional authorization.

The same textual principle reaches domestic spending and taxation. Article I provides that only Congress can impose taxes, and money may be drawn from the Treasury only pursuant to appropriations made by law. Even though the Supreme Court has invalidated Trump’s tariffs, he continues to impose them. Even though Congress has not authorized funds for Trump’s vanity projects, he continues to spend tax dollars on them.

The Constitution does not grant any branch of government carte blanche. It has separated powers precisely because legislators, presidents and judges can all succumb to the corruption of power — and can all be wrong.

That is the deeper meaning of the tyranny of one man’s opinion. The danger is not merely that one president might be wrong. It is that a constitutional system becomes meaningless if one man’s conclusions about war, crime, taxation, spending, foreign threats or national security become the sole basis for government actions — particularly actions that kill innocents.

The Founders separated the sword from the purse and divided governmental power because they understood a truism: Personal liberty and limited government cannot long survive when entrusted to one man’s opinion.

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO 
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

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America’s National Security Scam Rolls On

By Philip Giraldi - September 30, 2026 at 09:21AM

Once upon a time the United States of America was confident that it, shielded by broad oceans to the East and West and having friendly countries that it dominated economically and militarily to the North and South, was safe from any threat by any foreign nation or even any combination of nations. Washington was confident that it could defeat any adversary in conventional warfare and, if push came to shove, its nuclear weapon capability gave it a unique and decisive edge that no enemy would dare to challenge given the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That Golden Age, consisting of a few years after World War 2, did not last long however, as policymakers in Washington discerned that the Soviet Union, once an ally against Hitler, posed a great transnational threat due to its government embrace of the political doctrine of “communism.” “Communism” was the political poison that threatened to challenge and bring down the free-market capitalism that ruled unchallenged in the United States and as such it was an emergent and growing national security threat, with communist parties increasingly implanted and growing all across Europe as well as in parts of Asia and Latin America. Underlining the possibly lethal implications that came along with that threat, the Soviets even managed to end America’s nuclear near monopoly through the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage operation that revealed inter alia to Moscow the highly classified secrets of nuclear weaponry.

Americans suddenly did not seem quite so safe. The threat that southeast Asia was about to succumb to the communist juggernaut led to the Korean War, even though neither the political alignment of Korea nor its military capabilities posed any plausible threat to the United States. The fear of communism persisted for many years after the Korean War ended in an armistice, which still is in place, leading eventually to the Vietnam War, where the North Vietnamese supported by Communist China and Russia, appeared to threaten American allies in the region. In spite of that, it needed a fake Gulf of Tonkin incident to pull the United States into the conflict, which killed 53,000 Americans and nearly 2 million Vietnamese.

But both during and after Vietnam, the threat perception shifted geographically with more emphasis on what was going on in Latin America and the Caribbean, admittedly a lot closer to “home.” The CIA was active in subverting leftist regimes as they rose up in the region, most notably including the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973 Chile leading to his replacement by friendly-to-Washington General Augusto Pinochet.

The United States also continued to be active in its defense against the Soviets in Europe, working through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which in theory created a bulwark against communist expansion. The United States was the lynchpin of the alliance, providing many of the soldiers and most of the money. By the time when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, American taxpayers supported a military budget that was larger than those of most of the world’s leading nations, economically and politically speaking, combined. It was regarded as the sole superpower. Then came 9/11 and national security again was featured under George W Bush, who dubbed himself the “new sheriff in town” and divided the world up into those who were “with” the United States and those who were “not.”

The “defense” budget grew in response to that threat perception, in support of an activist interventionist foreign policy. It was repeatedly asserted that America’s national security was threatened by a large part of the world, or at least that is how it was portrayed as the US military opened up hundreds of new bases. This perception prevailed in a most heavy-handed fashion when it came to dealings with countries like Syria, Iraq and more recently Iran, none of which actually threatened the United States in any way. And the “fear” promotion reflected in the national media was reinforced by the vast and growing political influence of America’s powerful Israel Lobby, which successfully borrowed and manipulated fraudulent security concerns promoted by the Jewish State to corrupt Congress and the White House and turn Israeli interests into US national “defense imperatives.

All of which leads to the understanding on the part of the American government that “national security” is the game to play when in doubt and something is needed to make the public feel that it is being protected, particularly when it is not in any danger or under threat at all. In the recent Gubernatorial contest in Virginia, the woman who won, a former CIA officer, felt it expedient to boast that she had “kept us safe.” Exploiting fear is also a tool that can be produced as needed to support policies that involve no international threat whatsoever. We have today, for example, a government that spies on and interferes with ordinary citizens more than ever has been true in our history and it is all described as being done to keep us safe and secure. But even given the understanding that most governments can and will behave badly, the sheer manipulation of fear by President Donald J Trump has gone far beyond the way the game was rigged for “security” by his predecessors, all of whom have been all too often acting on behalf of domestic lobbies like the Israelis and defense contractors.

Note in particular how Trump during his first term in 2018 actually claimed “security from an international threat” when he was doing something that made the United States and the Middle East region less secure. That was when he tore up Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which had committed Iran to regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to make sure that it was not developing a nuclear weapon. Trump characteristically played the national security card in doing what Israel had presumably ordered him to do, claiming that the Iranians were cheating and were developing their own nukes secretly at facilities that would be hidden from the inspectors. Inevitably, he provided no evidence that that was the case and the United States intelligence community subsequently confirmed that reliable information had demonstrated that Iran had given up all nuclear development that might lead to a weapon in 2003. In other words, Trump was lying and was doing Israel’s bidding over an issue where the actual US interests were quite different and he covered his actions by claiming that there was a “threat.”

Since the war initiated by Israel and the United States against an unthreatening Iran began in February 2026 Trump’s public utterances about the relationship with the Persians have invariably cited his stated belief that he had stopped the Iranians from obtaining a nuclear weapon, which would have threatened the United States. That was, of course, a lie. And to compound his infamous abuse of the facts, he has gone so far as threaten to destroy completely Iran on at least seven occasions, calling for the country to be “obliterated” and/or “annihilated,” most recently during his address to the United Nations last week. Conjuring up ninety-million dead Persians as a talking point suggests that Trump is even more bloodthirsty than his good friend and “genocider” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

And Trump seemingly never knows when to stop. Witness how he has threatened NATO members because they have not responded to the “threat” to American security posed by Iran. And then there is the moronic Trumpean characteristic series of vile monologues complaining about long-time allies Canada and Greenland, invariably focused on the threat to US security that he claims they represent. They should consider themselves lucky that they have been treated so gently! When it comes to the threat posed by “communist” Cuba the president only had this to say last week “I think I’ll have the honor of conquering Cuba. That wouldn’t be bad. It would be a great honor. I can liberate it or conquer it, I think I can do what I want with it.”

Trump has also played the “national security” game with two of his major follies in Washington DC as he seeks to turn the city into “Trumpland.” The first is his gilded ballroom for which he destroyed the East Wing of the White House. When the project grew in grandeur and the Trumpster discovered he could not pay for it, he fortified the basement and declared the modifications to be recommended by the military and secret service, necessary for security. Inevitably, the whole thing was a trick to get the Pentagon budget to cover whatever is needed to finish the job and allow Ballroom Trump to see the light of day. Likewise with the disgusting Arch of Triumph, or perhaps one should say Arch of Trump because that is what it really is. As the estimated costs of the folly, which will block views of the Arlington National Cemetery and also of the Lincoln Memorial, escalated a security feature was added. There will now be sniper nests on top of the edifice and presumably also concealed inside with openings under the roof to fire from. There will be as well an ammunition storehouse so no one runs out of ammo as well as a storage place for drones which can be used to take out bigger targets.

Presumably Trump will be able to order “open fire!” on presumed illegal alien tourists gathered near the existing Washington monuments and he will also call for the launching of drones against the not-so-distant White House and/or Capitol and Congressional buildings if the Democrats should take them over after what he will claim to be election fraud. But don’t worry about that! There will surely be a good and prevailing national security reason that can be invoked in 2028 to lock the Democrats up and give us Donald Trump for an additional four years!

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

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Eisenhower and Washington Both Spoke Out Against War

By Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. - September 29, 2026 at 08:53AM

“God help the Nation when it has a President who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do,”
– President Dwight D. Eisenhower speaking to his White House Staff Secretary, Gen. Andrew Goodpaster.

These words are quoted in a book about Eisenhower’s foreign policy called “Ike’s Bluff—President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle To Save The World,” by Evan Thomas.

In the same paragraph as the words above are these: “When Defense Secretary Neil McElroy warned him that further cuts would harm national security, Eisenhower acerbically replied, ‘If you go to any military installation in the world where the American flag is flying and tell the commander that Ike says he will give him an extra star for his shoulder if he cuts his budget, there’ll be such a rush to cut costs that you’ll have to get out of the way.’”

In a speech to the Canadian Club in Ottawa on Jan. 10, 1946, Eisenhower said these words: “I hate war only as a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

In a speech broadcast from London in 1959, Eisenhower said: “I think people want peace so much that one of these days, governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

Because of these and many other things he said and did, I think a very strong case can be made that Eisenhower was our most antiwar President.

Certainly his most famous remarks were given in his farewell address from the White House on Jan. 17, 1961. He talked of the “grave implications” of “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”

Then he added these famous words: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

I think Eisenhower would be shocked at how far we have gone down the road against which he warned, especially since the Pentagon is now wanting a one-year budget of an incomprehensible of more than one trillion, four hundred billion.

Less famous than his farewell address is his first major speech after his inauguration. It was given on April 16,1953 at a meeting in Washington to the American Society of Newspaper Editors and was probably the most antiwar speech ever given by an American President.

He gave several examples of wonderful things that could be done with war money and then said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

He added: “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all…it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

This speech is quoted above Eisenhower’s grave and in a book by Brett Baker entitled “Three Days In January—Dwight Eisenhower’s Final Mission”.

In addition to his inspiring words, Eisenhower ended the Korean War and even went on national television shortly before the 1956 election to refuse Israel’s request (demand) to join a war against Egypt over the Suez Canal.

Mitchell Bard wrote in The Times of Israel in 2014: “Eisenhower went on television to criticize Israel’s failure to withdraw from Egypt and warned he would impose sanctions if it failed to comply. Eisenhower was prepared to cut off all economic aid, to lift the tax-exempt status of the United Jewish Appeal, and to apply sanctions on Israel.”

Israel withdrew, and war was averted .

I think it is very significant that possibly our other most antiwar President was our other most famous General, George Washington. His farewell address has been read in a ceremonial session of the Senate every year since 1862.

In that speech, he warned against “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.”

He added these very important words: “A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest…betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.” (Israel?)

Finally, in Scott Berg’s lengthy biography of Woodrow Wilson is a statement about World War 1 made by Winston Churchill to a New York newspaper editor: “America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the world war.”

Then Churchill added: “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 break-down in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have…enthroned Nazism.”(p583)

I wish we could have more political and military leaders who would mind our own business and not be so eager to go to war.

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The Coming GOP Bloodbath?

By Ron Paul - September 28, 2026 at 10:27AM

Most indicators suggest that the Republicans in the House and Senate are going to face a brutal backlash from the American people in November. Polling with generic ballots suggest a big win for the Democrats and likely the loss of Republican control of both houses of Congress.

There is little reason to cheer a Democratic party victory, however Republicans in charge have for the most part earned what is coming to them. They have refused to uphold their Constitutional obligation to take leading responsibility for war powers.

Earlier this year, President Trump launched what is the most unpopular war in US history when on February 28^th he ordered a full US assault on Iran. Iran had not attacked or even threatened the United States and our own intelligence community continued – and continues – to claim that Iran is not building nuclear weapons.

The February attack followed last June’s US bombing of Iran after which the president claimed that the country’s nuclear program was “completely obliterated.”

Congress over too many years has been used to allowing the President to have his own way on matters of war and peace. Members bask in the false patriotism promoted by the media and special interests as the people “rally around the flag.” Eventually, when the war has gone on for years without “victory” – as in Iraq and Afghanistan – many claim they were never really for the war in the first place.

This time is different. There was no propaganda blitz. There were no attempts to convince the American people that the “smoking gun” could be a “mushroom cloud” as we were told in the run up to the 2003 Iraq war. The majority of Americans were against the war on Iran before it started and only became more opposed over time.

As the war drags on, we have seen the national debt pass $40 trillion, diesel fuel prices at the highest ever, and inflation hitting the middle class and poor even harder. The “cakewalk” again failed to materialize.

Incumbent Republicans seeking re-election are in such a panic over voter anger about the war that they have taken to calling for a quick end to it while on the campaign trail. When they get back inside the Beltway, however, they vote to keep the war going for fear of President Trump’s anger.

This is not leadership.

Late last week the Iranian delegation in New York for the UN General Assembly meeting offered an off-ramp. Essentially it was the same Memorandum of Understanding that President Trump signed last June and promptly disregarded, but on a shorter timeline. By Sunday, the President announced that he would reject the deal – a deal like one he already signed.

There is no strategy for winning this disastrous war, it is clear. From over-confidence on decapitation strikes to certainty of a quick military victory, the Administration is now promising that they will win by crippling Iran’s economy. The problem is that Iran has been operating under “crippling” sanctions for decades and has a high economic pain tolerance.

Unfortunately, both parties in DC are war parties, so again it is hard to cheer the likely Republican losses. But sometimes electoral losses can serve as wake-up calls. Eventually we may see the re-emergence of antiwar Republicans in the spirit of the late Sen. Robert Taft and a restoration of the Constitution.

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Force the CIA to Disclose Its Chile Records

By Jacob G. Hornberger - September 28, 2026 at 08:18AM

For some odd reason, the CIA steadfastly refuses to disclose all of its records relating to the 1973 Chilean coup, which the CIA ardently supported. The CIA says that “national security” will be jeopardized if its records are disclosed to the American people.

That’s ridiculous. What do they think will happen — that the United States will fall into the ocean or be taken over by the communists, the terrorists, the Muslims, or some other scary boogeyman?

The disclosure issue is more relevant than ever, given that September 21 was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronni Moffitt on the streets of Washington, D.C.

Letelier had served in the administration of Salvador Allende, a socialist who was democratically elected president of Chile in 1970. U.S. officials, especially those in the U.S. national-security establishment, concluded that Allende posed a grave threat to U.S. “national security.” Therefore they set into motion the events that would ultimately lead to the violent 1973 coup, which resulted in one of the most brutal military tyrannies in history — one supported by the U.S. government.

Letelier and Moffitt were driving to work that September 21 morning when a car bomb exploded and killed them both. Moffitt’s husband, who was also in the car, survived. It was a knowing, deliberate, intentional act of murder and terrorism here in the United States.

It was ultimately determined that the person in charge of planting the bomb was a man named Michael Townley. He confessed to traveling from Chile to the United States and organizing a team of Cuban exiles that assisted him in planting the car bomb.

It has always been assumed that Pinochet ordered the bombing, in large part because the CIA conducted an investigation that concluded that Pinochet did, in fact, order the bombing. That conclusion has become an important part of the historical case against Pinochet. In fact, some people are demanding the release of the CIA’s long-secret Chile records to help establish that Pinochet did, in fact, order the bombing.

That’s, of course, a distinct possibility. Letelier was living here in the United States and working for a think tank that was actively working in opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship, including trying to convince Congress to cut off aid to the Pinochet regime. Thus, it stands to reason that Pinochet certainly had a motive to kill Letelier.

However, there is something else to consider. Pinochet was not a dumb man. He had to realize that if a major terrorist attack on American soil could be traced to his regime, his good, solid relationship with the U.S. government, including foreign aid to Chile, would be finished. It is very difficult to believe that he would have been willing to take that chance just to silence a prominent critic of his regime.

There is another possibility, one that the U.S. officials and the U.S. mainstream press are loathe to consider. That possibility is that it was the CIA, rather than Pinochet, that ordered the hit on Letelier.

Yes, I know what U.S. supporters of the CIA will respond. They’ll point to that CIA investigation that concluded that it was Pinochet who ordered the hit. But isn’t that sort of like saying that the Gestapo investigated one of its murders and concluded that someone else did it? If the hypothesis being investigated is CIA involvement in the assassination, how can the CIA’s own official conclusions be treated as dispositive, especially given the CIA’s longtime expertise in covering up its assassinations?

Let’s consider some other unusual factors:

1. As part of its effort to prevent Allende from taking office, the CIA supported and encouraged Chilean military conspirators seeking to remove Gen. René Schneider, including through kidnapping. Schneider was subsequently shot during a kidnapping attempt and died three days later.

What does that have to do with Letelier? Well, if they’re willing to violently remove Schneider from office, why would they be reluctant to terminate a critic of the man who they helped install into power, Augusto Pinochet? After all, don’t forget that Letelier was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, one who had actually served in the administration of the socialist president who was considered to be a grave threat to U.S. national security. Therefore, CIA officials would have considered it to be no big deal to terminate the life of such a man through a state-orchestrated assassination. Moreover, the CIA would have known that it would never be punished for assassinating someone it deemed to be a threat to “national security.”

2. Manuel Contreras served as Pinochet’s director of its brutal internal security force — DINA. Townley implicated Contreras as the DINA official responsible for ordering the operation, and Contreras was ultimately convicted in Chile for the Letelier assassination. Contreras maintained that the CIA, rather than Pinochet, was behind the assassination.

3. While serving as director of DINA, Contreras maintained an intelligence relationship with the CIA and even received a cash payment from the agency.

4. It’s worth mentioning that Townley had contacted the CIA before the Letelier assassination. The CIA has maintained that Townley initiated those contacts and that it never recruited him.

5. Townley was given what can only be described as one of the sweetest sweetheart deals in the history of U.S. criminal jurisprudence. After all, don’t forget — he was the person who was in charge of the operation that planted the bomb in Letelier’s car. There was no question but that this was a premeditated act of brutal murder of two totally innocent people. Anyone else would have been given nothing less than a life sentence.

Yet, Townley was permitted to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to murder and given only a 10-year sentence — with parole eligibility after only 3 years 4 months. The government also agreed to protect Townley (an admitted murderer) and his family. Interestingly, he would not be required to testify concerning other crimes committed outside U.S. jurisdiction.

This cold-blooded murderer was released from prison after serving only five years in prison.

It gets better.

Townley was permitted to enter the federal witness protection program. In fact, given that he was in this program during his five years of incarceration, we don’t really know where his “incarceration” took place — or even if it was inside a penitentiary, especially given his plea bargain guaranteed him with parole eligibility after only 3 years 4 months. To this day, Townley is presumably living the good life under a secret identity, being fully protected by the U.S. government.

How do U.S. officials justify this extraordinary treatment of an admitted cold-blooded murderer? They say that he was used to build a case against his DINA superiors, including Contreras. Really? Then why not keep him in prison until such time that Contreras or any other Chilean officials are brought to the United States to stand trial? Why agree to release him before that? Contreras was never extradited to the United States to stand trial and, as I state below, Chilean official Armando Fernández Lario was prosecuted and convicted and was forced to serve only 5 months in jail. In other words, Townley got a free pass.

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that prior to the Letelier assassination, Townley traveled to the United States, where he met with CIA officials. The CIA says that nothing came out of that meeting. Of course, the CIA, as everyone knows, would never lie.

Oh, U.S. officials also justify the sweetheart treatment of cold-blooded murderer Townley by saying that he helped them secure convictions of the Cuban exiles that were part of his bomb team. What? Isn’t the standard procedure to offer sweetheart deals to the little people in a murder in order to get the people at the top? Why not offer the sweetheart deals to the Cuban exiles in order to secure a conviction and life sentence for Townley, the man who recruited and organized them?

While we are on the subject of Cuban exiles, need I mention the CIA’s longtime close relationship with Cuban exiles? Wasn’t it Cuban exiles that the CIA used in its fiasco invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961?

6. Let’s do a quick examination of the sentences that the Cuban exiles on Townley’s team received for having helped to assassinate two innocent people on the streets of Washington, D.C.

José Dionisio Suárez Esquivel. 12-year sentence. Released after serving only 7-8 years.

Virgilio Paz Romero. 12-year sentence. Released after serving only 6-7 years.

Alvin Ross Díaz. Initially received life sentence. Convictions reversed on appeal. On retrial, acquitted of murder-related charges because the jury didn’t believe Townley.

Guillermo Novo Sampol. Initially received life sentence. Convictions reversed on appeal. On retrial, acquitted of murder-related charges because the jury didn’t believe Townley.

7. Chilean official Armando Fernández Larios. Sentenced to 27 months to 7 years. Served only 5 months before being released because of his cooperation.

Whether the CIA’s still-secret records contain evidence bearing on CIA involvement in the Letelier/Moffitt assassinations is impossible to know. Regardless, after 50 years, the American people should not have to take the CIA’s word for what its remaining Chile records do or do not show. And, no, America will not fall into the ocean or be taken over by the Reds, the terrorists, the Muslims, or anyone else if the CIA is forced to divulge all of its 50-year-old records relating to Chile.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Who in Hell are the Houthis?

By Eric Margolis - September 26, 2026 at 09:28AM

The Houthis are a small tribe in Yemen’s mountainous north who love their quirky Zaidi sect of militant Islam, cherish their guns, and love to chew the narcotic shrub qat. I joined Houthis in the wild mountains of Yemen to follow their wars and chew qat.

Houthis like to argue, smoke weed and repel invaders. They live in one of our planet’s wildest, most inhospitable regions, so bleak and arid that even the local camels are cranky and irritable.

The highlands are filled with squabbling tribes who call themselves pure Muslims while accusing their neighbors of being ‘bad’ Muslims. They do not welcome outsiders unless they bring tobacco and ammunition. The Houthis really dislike their Sunni Muslim neighbors. They deeply detest their Saudi Arabian neighbors who, in turn, despise their Yemeni neighbors as unlettered mountain bandits.

Into this hotpot of neighborhood animosities strode the Saudis. Long dismissed as illiterate Bedouin hicks, the increasingly rich Saudis decided they wanted to be the regional power. One of their first targets were the Houthis high up in the Arabian mountains.

Saudi Arabia had a strategic problem. Its rulers do not trust their small, feeble army. They fear it might stage a coup as is common in most Arab nations. So, the Saudis maintain a second Bedouin force called the `White Army’. It’s a glorified camel corps. Saudi used to rent a 15,000-man division of Pakistan’s crack army to protect its oil fields from covetous neighbors. Talks are underway again between Islamabad and the Saudis for a new Pakistani mercenary force.

In 2018, Saudi Arabia began a heavy bombing campaign against whatever Houthi targets could be found. Britain supplied the strike fighters. Pilots were mainly mercenaries from the US and Britain. Like the current US bombing campaign against Iran, results were sparse.

The attacks made a lot of Houthis really angry. Reportedly, 10,000 Houthis were killed. Finally, a bunch of Houthi warriors decided to go attack Saudi Arabia. Yemen’s Houthis fired barrages of medium-range missiles at Saudi military bases and oil fields. At the same time, Houthis begam impeding the sole maritime passage out of the Red Sea, the Bab el-Mandeb. Coupled with the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz, closing the Bab el-Mandeb (Gate of Tears) put world oil markets and shipping routes into a panic.

The Houthi blockade and Iran’s closure of the Hormuz Strait caused a major jump in the price of oil and diesel fuel. Americans were outraged, particularly the truck drivers and farmers who formed Trump’s voter base. The credo of America’s far right remains ‘God, guns and gasoline.’ All three are sacred.

The Saudis are now pleading with the US, Britain, Israel and Pakistan to go after the Houthis. Large cash incentives are being offered to anyone who will bash these insolent tribesmen. Trump, for one, is scared of another small war. He should be.

Interestingly, the obscure Houthis are the only Arab nation willing to retaliate against Israel for its savaging of the Palestinians. The powerful Muslim nations – Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey – are scared of Israel and don’t give a damn for the Palestinians,

So, the honor and pride of the Muslim world lies in the hands of a bunch of rag-tag, pot-smoking mountain bandits. A lot of Muslims would like to see them give the snooty Saudis a good kicking. Meanwhile, the Egyptians are sneaking troops back into Yemen, paid for, of course, by the Saudis.

Reprinted with permission from EricMargolis.com.

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Never Forget Federal Marijuana Frauds

By James Bovard - September 25, 2026 at 09:52AM

For more than 50 years, the federal government shamelessly pretended that marijuana had no recognized medical use. Last December 18, President Trump signed an executive order entitled, “Increasing Medical Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research.” Trump ordered the Attorney General and the Drug Enforcement Administration to speed up rule-making to finally enable far more medical research on the benefits of marijuana.

On April 23, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that henceforth all “FDA-approved marijuana-derived products” and “State-licensed medical marijuana products” are immediately shifted from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3, a far less restrictive federal regulatory regime.

Of course, libertarians want to see all federal restrictions on marijuana abolished. The nearly 100-year federal war on the loco weed has been a disgrace and a failure from the start.

But the long history of federal persecution of marijuana users, researchers, and growers provides a high-potency kick on the perils of federal intervention to purportedly protect Americans’ health.

During the 1920s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers to grow cannabis to boost their sagging incomes (hemp was used for such things as paper and rope). Marijuana also grew in popularity during the 1920s as a result of Prohibition, which inflated the price of alcohol by curtailing its availability.

During the Great Depression, Mexican immigrants surged into the United States searching for work and brought marijuana with them. Hostility toward the immigrants led to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively criminalized the possession of marijuana and, according to Yale professor David Musto, “mostly put a lot of jazz bands in jail.”

Criminalizing marijuana 

Harvard Professor of Psychiatry Lesther Grinspoon notes, “Between 1839 and 1900, more than a hundred articles on the therapeutic uses of marijuana appeared in scientific journals. As late as 1937, extract of cannabis was still a legitimate medicine marketed by drug companies.” The American Medical Association testified at hearings that year urging that marijuana not be effectively banned. Unfortunately, Congress — bowing to the exhortations of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics — proclaimed in 1937 that marijuana had no medical value. Congress effectively prohibited any use of marijuana for ailing Americans. But simply because a majority of congressmen say something doesn’t make it true.

In 1972, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) petitioned the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to reclassify marijuana and recognize its medical uses. The director of the agency refused to consider the petition. NORML took the case to a federal appeals court, which issued a ruling that admonished the agency for rejecting the petition without “a reflective consideration and analysis.”

In 1975, NORML sued the Drug Enforcement Administration (the successor agency to the Bureau) to force the agency to evaluate the evidence on whether Americans should have access to marijuana strictly for medicinal purposes. DEA held a hearing, and a DEA administrative law judge found some merit on some of NORML’s positions. But the chief of the DEA overturned those aspects of the judge’s decision.

In 1977, a federal court of appeals criticized the DEA’s final order and ordered the agency to reconsider the evidence for the medical benefits of marijuana.

In 1982, NORML petitioned the federal appeals court to force the DEA to follow the court’s previous orders. That same year, the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine concluded: “Cannabis and its derivatives have shown promise in the treatment of a variety of disorders, [including] glaucoma, asthma, … and in the nausea and vomiting of cancer chemotherapy.”

In 1986, a DEA administrative law judge launched an extensive evaluation of the evidence for marijuana. DEA judge Francis Young spent two years conducting hearings and listening to scores of expert witnesses. Young ruled in 1988: “The marijuana plant is anything but a new drug…. Uncontroverted evidence in this record indicates that marijuana was being used therapeutically by mankind 2,000 years before the birth of Christ. The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for a DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in the light of the evidence of this record.”

How did the DEA respond to the evidence? DEA administrator John Lawn denounced the judge’s finding as a “cruel and dangerous hoax” and refused to accept the judge’s ruling. Lawn announced that the agency would only allow medical use of marijuana if it had already “currently accepted medical use.” And since DEA forbid any doctors from prescribing marijuana for medical use, that somehow meant that the agency must continue to ban its use in the future.

NORML sued again, appealing to a federal court to force the DEA to accept the recommendations of its own administrative law judge, and the court again compelled the DEA to reexamine the issue.

In March 1992, the DEA “reconsidered” and announced that it was right all along and that it would continue to ban any medical use of marijuana. DEA chief Robert Bonner decreed: “Lay testimonials, impressions of physicians, isolated case studies, random clinical experience, reports so lacking in details they cannot be scientifically evaluated and all other forms of anecdotal proof are entirely irrelevant.” Bonner got warmed up and showed some of the fervor that is the pride of DEA: “Beyond doubt, the claims that marijuana is medicine are false, dangerous and cruel. Sick men, women and children can be fooled by these claims and experiment with the drug. Instead of being helped, they risk serious side effects.” Bonner acknowledged that he based his findings on the same testimony and documents that led DEA Administrative Law Judge Young to an opposite conclusion four years earlier.

As Harvard psychiatry professors Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar noted at that time, “The Government’s real concern is not that marijuana is ineffective as a medicine, but that it is too effective. The Government cannot acknowledge any of this because it has vastly exaggerated the dangers of marijuana for more than 50 years and is still committed to its war against the drug.”

California’s Proposition 215

Clinton’s drug czar General Barry McCaffrey effectively claimed to be a wiser scientist than all the experts who researched marijuana’s effects. On August 15, 1996, while campaigning in California against Proposition 215, which would have legalized the medical use of marijuana, McCaffrey declared: “There is not a shred of scientific evidence that shows that smoked marijuana is useful or needed. This is not science. This is not medicine. This is a cruel hoax.” On December 30, 1996, when asked by a CNN reporter “is there any evidence … that marijuana is useful in a medical situation?” McCaffrey responded: “No, none at all. There are hundreds of studies that indicate that it isn’t.” McCaffrey ridiculed claims of marijuana’s benefit as “Cheech ‘n’ Chong medicine.”

After voters passed the proposition, the drug czar’s office put out a press release warning: “The passage of [Proposition 215] creates a significant threat to the drug control system that protects our children…. The decision to bring appropriate criminal or administrative enforcement action will be, as always, decided on a case-by-case basis.” McCaffrey’s warning sparked a vision of a DEA agent lurking underneath the desk of every doctor.

Federal judge Fern Smith issued a preliminary injunction on April 30, 1997, prohibiting the feds from punishing doctors: “The government’s fear that frank dialogue between physicians and patients about medical marijuana might foster drug use … does not justify infringing the First Amendment…. [T]his case is about the ability of doctors, on an individualized basis, to give advice and recommendations to bona fide patients suffering from serious, debilitating illnesses regarding the possible benefits of personal, medical use of small quantities of marijuana.”

Clinton administration officials sneered at marijuana referendum results. Attorney General Janet Reno declared: “I don’t think that the determination as to whether there is a medical, a scientific medical use of marijuana, should be made at the ballot box. I think it should be made in an informed way after appropriate scientific evaluation.” And if government officials chose to ignore all the scientific evidence, then that was merely political science.

Pressure toward reform

The federal government in 1978 began a program providing marijuana directly to a small number of people with illnesses that undeniably benefited from consuming marijuana, such as glaucoma and epilepsy. But the George H.W. Bush administration closed the program to any new entrants in 1992 after only eight people were certified — even though hundreds of thousands of people suffered from the same illnesses. The Clinton administration refused to reopen the program to new sufferers. The Justice Department, in a 1999 brief, declared: “It became clear that the potential widespread use of marijuana for ‘medical’ purposes under the program … was bad public policy.” According to the Justice Department, the first requisite of good public policy is to pretend that individual citizens do not exist.

In 1997, the CBS situation comedy Murphy Brown featured star Candice Bergen suffering from the aftereffects of chemotherapy. A friend provided her with some marijuana. DEA chief Thomas Constantine denounced CBS for “doing a great disservice” by “trivializing drug abuse” and “pandering to the libertarian supporters of an `open society’ and to the myths of legalization.” Constantine barked: “I am extremely troubled that at a time when teenage drug abuse is doubling … a television show of the caliber of Murphy Brown would portray marijuana as medicine. It is not medicine…. More dangerously, the show sends the message to our children that marijuana must be OK because it’s medicine.” Constantine promised to investigate “if any laws were broken” by broadcasting that show.

Clinton’s drug policy was haunted by the specter of emaciated chemotherapy patients desperately needing something to stop their vomiting and fire their appetites. And nothing works better for this than smoking marijuana. The feds approved pills with THC, the active ingredient in marijuana; however, pills are scant help to someone heaving their guts.

Bluster from Washington political hacks failed to stop the cascade of new scientific evidence on the medicinal benefits of marijuana:

• A 1997 study performed on animals at the University of California at San Francisco found that cannabinoids (the active ingredient in marijuana) can be an effective reliever of pain without the adverse side effects of opiates.
• The American Journal of Psychiatry reported in 1999 that German researchers successfully used the major psychoactive ingredient in marijuana to treat Tourette’s Syndrome (a complex neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by sudden spasms).
• The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported in 1998 that marijuana may protect brain cells during a stroke.
• British researchers revealed in 2000 that a marijuana compound was very effective in helping control the muscle spasms that afflict people with multiple sclerosis.

Clinton administration officials suppressed research results of United Nations affiliates that embarrassed the U.S. drug war. The World Health Organization (WHO) completed a major study of marijuana’s effects in 1997. The draft of the final report included a comparison of the adverse effects of cannabis with alcohol and tobacco. However, the WHO, bowing to pressure from the U.S. government and other drug warriors, suppressed that chapter. New Scientist, a British magazine, acquired a copy of the study and reported that in five out of seven categories of long-term health damage, alcohol was judged more harmful than marijuana. The report also observed that “in developed societies, cannabis appears to play little role in injuries caused by violence, as does alcohol.”

Obama’s prosecutions 

In 2008, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama appeared to pledge an end to the persecution of medical marijuana users and providers: “What I’m not going to be doing is using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue.” Regardless, the Obama administration brought almost twice as many prosecutions against medical marijuana providers and users as did the George W. Bush administration. Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, complained in 2012 that “Obama has become more hostile to medical marijuana patients than any president in U.S. history.” A 2012 Time magazine analysis noted that the DEA “has made it clear that medical marijuana is not medicine, and even called it a ‘mortal danger.’”

Obama’s repression of medical marijuana coincided with an explosion in abuse of prescription painkillers. A 2016 federal report estimated that 38 percent of adults had used prescription painkillers in the previous year, resulting in 19,000 deaths (more than the national homicide total). Medical marijuana is a proven pain killer, but the Obama administration (supported by pharmaceutical companies’ campaign contributions and lobbying) scorned it. The National Institute on Drug Abuse torpedoed a 2011 research project testing whether “marijuana helps combat veterans with their post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“When you mix politics and science, you get politics,” observed historian John Barry. Generations of politicians and bureaucrats were willing to scorn scientific research to score “tough on crime” points. The ruling class was perpetually more interested in controlling Americans than in permitting citizens to find relief for all that ailed them. Anyone with an illness or malady that marijuana could help became merely collateral damage in the war on drugs. But as historian Thomas Macaulay observed in 1839, “It is mere foolish cruelty to provide penalties which torment the criminal without preventing the crime.”

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Trump’s Ukraine Peace Push: Why There’s No Need to Negotiate Crimea and Donbas

By William Dunkerley - September 25, 2026 at 09:39AM

President Trump’s emissaries shuttled from Moscow to Kyiv seeking a way to end the Ukraine war. Afterward, Trump negotiator Jared Kushner explained, “…the hardest issue is still territory.” That dispute centers on Crimea and Donbas.

These areas have been points of territorial intransigence for Ukraine and Russia.

However, there is a way to break that deadlock. But it might not be what either side expects. That’s because the territorial claims of both Russia and Ukraine rest on competing narratives rather than basic facts. Each side seems stuck on its own version. The underling truth is an orphan.

Russia seems to have based its related claims on kinship and historical background. Ukraine’s position presumes that the territorial authority of the pre-2014 Ukrainian constitutional order continued uninterrupted after the revolution.

But that presumption overlooks what happened to Ukraine’s constitutional democracy in 2014. The country’s established order began to unravel in Kyiv. That was before Crimea and Donbas became the hot issues they are today. The precipitant was the Ukrainian Revolution.

The revolutionaries did not simply take over Ukraine’s structure of governance. They threw it out. They disposed of the democratic constitutional order.

The Western media told a different story. The New York Times called it a decisive “victory for democracy.” However, that transition had not been accomplished constitutionally or democratically. That didn’t seem to matter, though. The Economist wrote that “the world applauds the collapse of the regime and offers to help build a democracy.”

What an ultimate irony that was. Mainstream Western media widely celebrated the new rule by revolutionary force as a triumph for freedom and democracy.

Amidst that bravado something important was overlooked. With the discarded constitution, out with it also went the basis of authority for all the officials and offices that had derived their legitimacy from it. What remained was simply the power of force exerted by the revolutionaries.

Territory quickly became a central issue.

It is important to recognize that at the time of this rupture, the revolutionariy’s power of force did not extend to Crimea or parts of Donbas.

Ukraine’s borders had never existed independently of its constitutional order. They were defined and protected by it. Once that order had been thrown out, the territorial borders were no longer what they had been before the revolution.

That rupture turned out to have far-reaching consequences.

You see, before the revolution the power and authority of all government leaders, and indeed of the parliament itself, flowed from that very constitution — including the president. That means the revolutionaries had disenfranchised them all in one single act. They had terminated Ukraine’s constitutional democracy and all that went with it.

The only remaining basis of authority was the power of force exerted by the revolutionaries.

A revolutionary parliament then adopted an earlier version of the Constitution and used it as a guide. But that did not restore the constitutional order that had existed before the revolutionary rupture. By then their constitutional mandate had already been nullified. The revolutionaries had removed their own constitutional mandate. The replacement constitution they favored did not have the democratic standing of the one they had thrown out. In fact, it had previously been ruled unconstitutional by the then-standing constitutional court. In a practical sense, governance was now largely at the will of the revolutionaries.

There has been much controversy over whether President Yanukovych had been removed from office constitutionally. But in light of the foregoing, it didn’t actually matter. The presidency was a constitutional office. When the constitution was discarded there simply was no legal presidency. That same stark reality applied to the parliament itself as well.

Now the only authority left in Ukraine had become the power and force of the revolutionaries.

Back in 1991 Ukraine had declared its independence from the USSR. In establishing its own sovereignty it defined its borders. Its Law on the Succession of Ukraine stipulated that the new state’s borders with neighboring former Soviet republics were the same as those of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. That definition was incorporated into the constitution in effect at the eve of the 2014 revolution. That was the legal basis of Ukraine’s border claims.

Once Ukraine became subject to rule by revolutionary force rather than through a constitutional mechanism, the borders issue took on a different character. Now borders were defined by the physical control of the revolutionaries. Wherever the revolutionary authority could impose its rule, that territory was Ukrainian. Where that rule could successfully be resisted, the revolutionaries had no defensible territorial claim.

The result was that there were no longer constitutionally defined borders.

A thorny problem arose when parts of pre-revolutionary Ukraine failed to submit to the revolutionary authority in Kyiv. The same situation remained after Petro Poroshenko was elected president.

The issue was which territories were inside or outside of Ukraine. Mainstream media, including outlets such as CNN and Reuters, had begun using terms such as “breakaway regions” to describe Crimea and the areas of Donbas that refused to submit to the revolutionary authority in Kyiv.

However, to call a territory “breakaway” presupposes that it had been subject to continuous and legitimate governmental authority from which it subsequently separated.

The constitution thrown out by the revolutionaries had declared that those borders were “inviolable.” But that provision ceased to exist when the revolutionaries threw out the constitution.

The revolutionary transition had severed the constitutional basis that defined borders. The truth was not simply that Crimea and Donbas had “broken away” from Ukraine. In factual terms they never were parts of post-revolutionary Ukraine.

Those who dispute this conclusion have a counterargument. They appeal to the international-law theory of “state continuity.” That doctrine allows the identity of a state to persist despite changes in government, constitutional arrangements, or political upheaval.

That doctrine might be useful for settling debts and responsibilities when a constitution changes. But it leads to absurd conclusions regarding territorial borders. The concept has existed since the 19th century. Try applying it to the pre-WW2 borders of the great empires. The concept becomes a legal fiction.

State continuity does not by itself answer the separate question of how a particular government derives its domestic authority. The continued existence of a state does not automatically establish that a government claiming to rule that state possesses an uninterrupted legal basis for its authority.

This distinction is crucial.

Another argument used to support the revolutionary view is that it has gained wide international recognition. But what does that really establish? Recognition does not by itself create the internal authority it recognizes. Nor does it change the facts that gave rise to any territorial dispute.

The argument is not that post-revolutionary Ukraine had no sovereignty, nor that Ukraine simply ceased to exist as a state. The actuality is that the revolutionary authorities had severed their constitutional basis of legitimacy. In reality their authority depended upon their ability to exercise and enforce their rule by force.

The Ukraine territorial conflict began with a false narrative that became the mainstream story. Even government peace negotiators seemed to buy into it. That left the story’s disingenuity as a negotiating obstacle for Ukraine and United States peace efforts. They disagreed over differences that were neither factual nor real. They were only competing narratives.

In June 2014 Poroshenko took office as president following a democratic election. But the country he inherited was not the pre-revolutionary Ukraine; it was just what was left of it.

Poroshenko had assumed power not from the Yanukovych administration and the borders it had controlled, but from the revolutionary authorities who ruled a country that did not include Crimea or parts of Donbas.

By the time the democratic process resumed, the geographical limits of the state’s authority had already been dictated by the limits of revolutionary force. Yet, based on his rhetoric, Poroshenko did not appear to recognize the actual territorial losses incurred under the revolutionaries. Neither has his successor Volodymir Zelensky.

Finally coming to terms with the factual truth about Donbas and Crimea can straighten out the widespread misunderstandings. It would take Donbas and Crimea off the table. They would not have to be negotiated. They are already settled by the reality of the situation.

If the facts about Crimea and Donbas are recognized by both sides, a major point of contention will be settled. That would allow negotiators to stop wasting time debating false narratives. They would then be free to pursue a course toward a practical peace treaty, one based on reason and reality. The quest for peace in Ukraine would finally have a fair chance.

But what happens next will depend on whether the US negotiators are really willing to discard the prevailing false narratives about Crimea and Donbas — and impose that reality on President Zelensky. That would give peace efforts a leg up in settling other differences and a much better chance of achieving a lasting peace.

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How War Propaganda Justifies Conscription into Unjust Wars

By Wanjiru Njoya - September 24, 2026 at 09:39AM

Conscription is a form of indentured servitude. Murray Rothbard argued that everyone has a natural right to self-defense, but “we have no moral right to use coercion—the bayonet or the revolver—to force someone else to defend us.”

Rothbard argued that if we want men to stand in our defense, “the way to induce people to volunteer for hazardous jobs is to pay them extra as compensation.” And yet, instead of offering a wage that would reward men who sign up willingly, governments rely on force to press conscripts into service. The conscript is,

. . .seized by the authorities and inducted into the armed forces. There his body and will are no longer his own: he is subject to the dictates of the government; and he can be forced to kill and to place his own life in jeopardy if the authorities so decree.

This debate recently returned to public attention when it was reported that the United Kingdom is reconsidering conscription due to what the UK government sees as escalating hostilities with Russia.

Campaigners are protesting over the prospect of conscription returning amid mounting Russian threats against Britain. A coalition of 13 British peace and faith organisations has launched a petition demanding the Government rule out military conscription, or any compulsory form of national service involving the armed forces. . . There is currently no conscription in Britain, although concerns about World War 3 have fuelled renewed discussions on how the armed forces could be expanded.

For conscription to be even remotely tolerable by the public, it is, at the very least, necessary for warmakers to persuade the public that the war is just, and worth fighting. Otherwise, people are likely to revolt, as happened in New York when the Enrollment Act of March 1863 drafted men to fight Lincoln’s war.

On July 11, 1863 the first names for induction into the army were called. The next day, New York erupted into some of the most violent riots in American history. The office of the provost marshal—charged with enforcing the draft—was burned, railroad lines were destroyed, and telegraph lines cut. . . . Over one hundred people died in the rioting, thousands were wounded, and thousands of African Americans fled New York.

This attempt to corral New Yorkers into the war against their will followed soon after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863. The implication, following the Proclamation, was that what had started out as a politically-driven war to save the Union was now a moral crusade to free the slaves of the South—surely a just cause! But very few were convinced. John M. Taylor observes that, under the Enrollment Act of 1863,

Wealthy Northerners could either fight or pay a $300.00 exemption from the draft. The Irish, mostly coming from meager circumstances, typically lacked the funds to buy exemptions. Whereas large numbers of wealthy Southerners fought, few wealthy Northerners did. William Tecumseh Sherman alluded to this, stating, “that without conscription there would have been no way to ‘separate the sheep from the goats and demonstrate what citizens will fight and what will only talk.’”

The Emancipation Proclamation was not seen by the draftees as moral justification to fight. For one, the Proclamation belied its own moral authority by failing to free all slaves and only purporting to free those under Confederate control. Freeing only the slaves of one’s enemies, almost two years into the war, marked the Proclamation as a war measure rather than a humanitarian edict.

Further, the Proclamation did not apply to the five slave states fighting on the Union side—Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—nor did it free slaves in parts of the South that had already been brought under federal control. For example, Tennessee and parts of Louisiana—New Orleans and Union-held parishes—were excluded from the Proclamation.

Far from the Emancipation Proclamation persuading the rioters that Lincoln’s cause was just, they saw emancipation as a threat to their own precarious socioeconomic circumstances. They turned their ire against the authorities and Lincoln’s friend Horace Greeley, but also against the black population who were not to blame for Lincoln’s stratagem.

The long term damage to New York’s black population was significant: In the aftermath of the riots, the city’s black population plummeted by more than 20 percent, to below 10,000 (the lowest number since the 1820s), as blacks fled the city in droves.

It is often observed that warmakers do not personally tend to show up to fight in their own wars. This gives them further incentive to rely on conscription. Many New Yorkers were against the war in the first place, but, in total numbers, far more of them ended up fighting in the war compared to the abolitionists of Massachusetts who had backed the war from the beginning. Professor Clyde Wilson observes that,

Historians have often noted that, generally speaking, the best generals and soldiers in the “Union” armies were not supporters of the Republican Party or the Lincoln administration. Republicans and especially abolitionists tended to avoid military service in the war they had initiated.

For example, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a pacifist, and so were his fighting-age sons. They declared that they were conscientious objectors and would not serve even if drafted. Although Garrison was a vocal supporter of Lincoln’s war, he regarded pacifism as his Christian duty and denied that it was hypocritical to refrain from personally joining the war he publicly supported.

One of Garrison’s sons did acquiesce to serve if drafted. He was eventually offered an officer’s commission, which, coincidentally, worked out as an opportunity for him to burnish his racially-enlightened credentials by leading an all-black unit.

One concern many have is that without conscription a country might come under attack and lack the manpower to mount a defense. However, when the cause is just, and seen by citizens to be necessary in their own defense, a government that rules by consent need not fear that no one would be willing to stand defense. In this context, fighting defense of hearth and home, Ludwig von Mises saw conscription as justified. This justification would not apply to an aggressive war.

In “Did the South Have to Fight,” Thomas Fleming observes that, “Many Southerners resented conscription not because they were unwilling to fight but because they wanted the honor of fighting as volunteers.” They saw the cause for which they fought as one for the defense of the South, not just for the selfish interests of a few warmakers.

The case is entirely different when an unpopular government already knows that many people do not trust its motives and would therefore be unwilling to fight its wars. In the UK, the Daily Express reports:

A YouGov survey of 3,044 people found 38% of under-40s would refuse to serve if a new world war broke out, while 30% said they would refuse even in the event of an imminent invasion of the UK.

Unpopular governments that rule by the bayonet are most likely to resort to conscription. In the case of the New York Draft Riots, many of the conscripts were immigrants who had recently arrived from Germany and Ireland and did not see any reason to get involved in Lincoln’s war.

As Lew Rockwell has observed, often the warmakers wage war for reasons that have little to do with popular opinion. It is no surprise that they deem war propaganda and use of force against their own citizens to be necessary, after the fact, to persuade people to support their war effort. As Rockwell counsels,

The people and the warmakers are two distinct groups. We must never say “we” when discussing the US government’s foreign policy. For one thing, the warmakers do not care about the opinions of the majority of Americans. It is silly and embarrassing for Americans to speak of “we” when discussing their government’s foreign policy, as if their input were necessary to or desired by those who make war.

Reprinted with permission from Mises.org.

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Fulton Sheen and Me

By Andrew P. Napolitano - September 24, 2026 at 09:31AM

History yields people whose influence extends far beyond their earthly lives. They become teachers to generations they never met, spiritual companions to people whose names they never knew, and reminders that faith is not merely a set of propositions to be accepted but a way of life to be embraced. For me, one of those extraordinary figures is Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.

Fulton Sheen possessed a rare gift: He could bring the richness, beauty and intellectual depth of traditional Catholicism into the homes of ordinary Americans. Through his Emmy Award-winning, half-hour weekly television program in the 1950s, “Life Is Worth Living,” he introduced millions of viewers to traditional Roman Catholicism. He did not dilute the faith to make it acceptable to the times. He presented it with clarity, conviction, humor, warmth and a deep love for Jesus Christ.

For those of us who cherish the traditional Catholic faith, Sheen remains a particularly compelling figure. His Catholicism was rooted in the Eucharist, the priesthood, the sacramental life, the spiritual disciplines that had nourished the faithful for centuries, the need to evangelize, and a public recognition of the unique role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in human salvation.

The Catholic faith that Sheen proclaimed fostered the traditional pre-Vatican II practices that shaped centuries of Catholics. The Latin Mass, with its reverence, mystery and transcendent orientation, expressed a vision of worship in which the human person was drawn beyond the distractions of the world and into a unique space, reserved for Christ’s re-sacrifice of himself.

Sheen also understood the importance of the seemingly ordinary disciplines of Catholic life: meatless Fridays, weekly confession, personal prayer, the daily recitation of the Rosary, and personal self-denial. These practices were not empty rules or burdens imposed for their own sake. Properly understood, they were instruments of spiritual formation.

Sheen’s genius was to explain truths and regimens in ways that ordinary people could understand. He could speak about theology without making it lifeless, about sin without making it condemnatory, and about holiness without presenting it as something reserved for monks and nuns. He understood that every person, regardless of education, wealth or social position, was created for communion with God.

Here is how Fulton Sheen touched my life. Shortly after I graduated from law school, a friend gave me a Miraculous Medal as a gift. It was a beautiful, traditional, 24-karat gold image of the Blessed Virgin Mary that Catholics often wear on a chain suspended from our necks. I wrote to Archbishop Sheen and asked him to bless it for me.

He wrote back quickly. In his letter, he asked me to meet him during Holy Week at 12:30 in the afternoon at Marble Collegiate Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, where he was preaching.

I arrived in time to hear his traditional Catholic sermon. Then, I stood in a line of people waiting to meet him. When I reached the head of the line, he floored me.

He looked directly into my eyes and said: “You must be Andrew. Show me the medal!”

I was shaking as I loosened my necktie, unbuttoned the top two buttons of my shirt, removed the medal, and handed it to him. He held the medal in one hand. With the other, he touched my eyes, my ears and my lips. He blessed and kissed the medal, then placed it over my head and around my neck.

Then he embraced my entire head in his hands.

This was a profoundly personal encounter. Here was a holy churchman, a public figure known to millions, yet in those moments his attention was directed entirely toward God and the sacramental significance of the medal and wishes of a supplicant stranger. I asked him why we were in a Protestant church.

He said, in substance: “These folks need to know that in Catholic churches all over the world, Jesus Christ is physically present under the appearance of bread and wine; and He wants to be present in their hearts.”

That answer revealed something essential about Sheen’s ministry. His love for Catholicism did not lead him to withdraw from the world. It impelled him to bring the Catholic message to people who might never enter a Catholic church. He understood that evangelization required meeting people where they were, speaking to their questions, and inviting them toward the fullness of the truth.

What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of suffering? How should we confront sin? What does it mean to love God? Where can we find truth, forgiveness and lasting hope? Why is there war and genocide? No question escaped him.

Sheen’s answers always led back to Christ through Mary.

The traditional Catholic practices he cherished offered a practical response to spiritual poverty. The Latin Mass directed the soul toward the mystery of transubstantiation. Confession restored the relationship between the sinner and God. The Rosary brought the mysteries of Christ and Mary into daily life. Fasting and self-denial weakened the grip of selfishness and cupidity. Personal prayer opened hearts to divine grace.

These practices did not promise an easy life. They called for discipline, humility and perseverance. But Sheen understood that holiness is not produced by convenience. It requires the daily decision to place God above self.

This week, the Church is beatifying Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. Beatification is a formal declaration that a person may be publicly honored as Blessed according to the Church’s norms. It is a significant step toward canonization.

For those who have long admired Sheen, his beatification is an opportunity not merely to celebrate his accomplishments but to reflect upon his holiness. For me, Archbishop Sheen will always be more than a figure in the history of American Catholicism. He is the man who didn’t know me, looked into my eyes and mysteriously said my name, and drew me to his heart.

That encounter remains in my heart as an unmerited gift from a future saint. Blessed Fulton J. Sheen, pray for us.

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
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