Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

For the first time in a millennium, Europe no longer plays a critical role in promoting Western civilization nor in world history at large.

Ostensibly it should. Some 750 million people live on the European subcontinent.

Europe still remains the most popular tourist spot on earth. Its hallowed architecture, art, infrastructure, and natural beauty still remind millions of visitors of the world’s once most dynamic and grandiose civilization.

Even now, European nations, in and out of the Europe Union, still produce a combined gross domestic product of $24 trillion, second only to the United States.

Europe’s exports are among the world’s most coveted cars, sophisticated technology, and valued industrial goods.

Yet since World War II, Europe has played an increasingly reduced role in world affairs, despite its membership in the NATO alliance and the growth of the European Union.

Why?

The twentieth-century traumas of World War I and II—in which some 70 million Europeans were killed—saw Europe commit near collective suicide. The ensuing Cold War hinged on protecting a relatively unarmed Europe from an aggressive nuclear Soviet empire on Europe’s borders.

But as World War II and the Cold War faded into memory, Europe did not snap back and assume its centuries-old role as a world leader and beacon of Western Civilization.

Instead, a weary Europe outsourced its security to the United States. It redefined itself as a postmodern, pacifist, socialist utopian project—most recently predicated on redistributionist entitlements, open borders, and radical green policies that have all inevitably ensured European decline.

Europeans grew louder and whinier the less relevant they became.

Although Europe has large sources of untapped hydroelectrical, nuclear, coal, and natural gas power, its green religion has all but shut down new nuclear and fossil fuel generation and closed existing plants. The result is that the cost of European energy is prohibitive for both the public and industry.

Recent economic growth was essentially zero throughout the Eurozone. The European cradle-to-grave social net, and its hyper government regulations and restrictions on economic activity increasingly are unsustainable.

Few European nations spend even a mere two-percent of their GDP on defense. And the result is that both Europe at large and its NATO members cannot defend their continent without the assistance of the United States.

Nor can Europe project power beyond its shores to preempt dangerous threats on its own horizon or to its allies.

Europe is also shrinking and aging. Its collective fertility rate of 1.5 is far below the rate of replacement. Most young people in Europe—the ancient home of Christendom—express neither belief in God nor any faith in organized religions.

In many European countries, foreign-born emigrants comprise twenty percent of the population. Most of them have arrived poor, without education, in mass, illegally, with little desire to fully integrate, from inimical countries, and holding political and religious views hostile to Europe.

The other half of the West is in little better condition.

The United States is reeling under $33 in national debt.

After embracing various bankrupt academic critical legal “theories,” major American cities are unsafe, unhealthy, and unsightly. The American southern border is wide open. Eight million illegal aliens have poured in just since January 2021, many of them hostile to the United States.

America is increasingly politically, racially, and tribally divided. It has mysteriously determined not to fully utilize its vast natural resources, especially gas, oil, and rare earth metals.

In this vacuum, the enemies of the West see only opportunity.

Russia invaded European Ukraine. Its ongoing aggression still terrifies frontline NATO nations.

China threatens periodically to storm Taiwan, as it bullies it neighbors, buzzes U.S. ships and planes, and manipulates currency, markets, and trade.

Iran has armed to the teeth anti-Western terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.

Iran’s “Shiite Crescent” from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut to Palestine threatens both pro-Western Arab regimes and Israel.

Iran brags that its surrogates can destroy Israel and will soon be nuclear with a global reach to both the United States and Europe.

Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, presumably on the assumption that current generations of Westerners in Israel, the U.S., and Europe would not react too strongly to its precivilization barbarity if it entailed a subsequent messy war.

In sum, the world is safe only when a strong America, along side its European partner, secure their borders, protect the world’s sea- and air spaces, support constitutional and pro-Western nations, and deter thuggish belligerents.

Perhaps as war clouds gather and enemies multiply, Europe will rediscover its heritage and reawaken to its historical role.

Increasingly, a lonely U.S.—and the world at large—need the return of a sane and powerful European co-partner, one that emerges from its self-induced slumber, and resumes its ancient role in preserving civilization from its multiplying enemies.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Critics who rail against the hypocrisy of wealthy global elites jet-setting on carbon-spewing private planes while pontificating about the need for the rest of us to cut our climate footprints just got a boost from a new study.

It turns out that the world’s richest 1 percent emit about the same amount of carbon as the world’s poorest two-thirds, according to an analysis from the nonprofit Oxfam International.

This means that a small sliver of global elites, or 77 million people, have produced as much carbon as the 5 billion people that make up the bottom 66 percent by wealth, per the study.

The study also estimates that it would take roughly 1,500 years for someone in the bottom 99 percent to produce as much carbon as the wealthiest billionaires do in just one year.

The study was based on research compiled by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and examined the emissions of various income groups up to 2019. In summary, it suggested that the private jet-setting class of global leaders and policymakers, who take private planes to lead summits addressing the assumed dangers of climate change, may warrant charges of hypocrisy.

The majority of these jets were attributed to private flights undertaken by participants for the WEF meeting.

Klara Maria Schenk, a transport campaigner for Greenpeace’s European mobility campaign, called the private jet use at Davos a “distasteful masterclass of hypocrisy,” given that the WEF claims to be committed to the Paris Climate Target of keeping climate warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“Davos has a perfectly adequate railway station, still these people can’t even be bothered to take the train for a trip as short as 21 [kilometers]. Do we really believe that these are the people to solve the problems the world faces?” Ms. Schenk said.

It was much the same story for the 2021 COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, where about 400 or so global leaders showed up on private jets, according to the Daily Mail.

Authored by Brandon Smith via off-guardian.org,

Editor’s Note: It’s not often we publish an article written before OffG even existed, but this one – written over a decade ago in September 2013 and brought to our attention by Mark Gresham – is both interesting and prescient.

It discusses the decline of US power, the rise of BRICS, and plans for a global currency seven years before COVID brought all those plans center-stage. It also warns of a false or exaggerated US-Russia binary and Putin’s globalist tendencies.

*  *  *

The high priests of academic and “official” history love a good villain for two reasons:  First, because good official villains make the struggles and accomplishments of good official heroes even more awe-inspiring.  And, second, because nothing teaches (or propagandizes) the masses more thoroughly than the social or political lessons inherent in the documented rise and fall of the world’s most despicable inhabitants.

We get shivers of fear and excitement when we discuss the evils and the follies of ancient monsters like Nero, Attila the Hun, Caligula, etc, or more modern monsters, like Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Goebbels, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and so on.  We take solace in the idea that “we are nothing like them”, and our nation has “moved beyond” such animalistic behavior.

But even more fascinating popcorn-style history is found not in the destruction of tyrants, but the destruction of empires.

When an entire culture steps off the edge of the abyss into the realm of societal psychosis, the world often changes forever and in ways that, at least on the surface, seem to bring humanity a little closer together.  The fall of Rome led to the eventual rise of a dominant Catholic theocracy and the rulership of royal blood lineage that lasted for centuries in Europe.

The flames of World War I and the destabilization of the Kaiser’s Germany led to the formation of the League Of Nations; a first attempt at a global governing authority designed to “maintain world peace”.  World War II and the fall of the Third Reich resulted in considerable horrors, which the establishment of the United Nations was supposedly meant to prevent from ever occurring again.

The decline of the British Empire saw the implosion of cultural colonialism, and the rise of corporate colonialism, which centralized immense power into the hands of the banking class as the new official oligarchs of our modern era.  The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the abandonment of the Soviet Union was lauded by then U.S. President George Bush as the beginnings of a “New World Order” – an ideological concept which heralds the final deterioration of the idea of economic and political sovereignty as a mainstay of human civilization.

When examining the approved version of historical conflict, one gets the overwhelming impression that the villains of our past, through their hubris, their greed, and their insanity, seem to inspire a sudden surge of unification as their ashes are cleared from the air.  One might even come to believe that the “natural progression” of conflict is leading us towards a future in which the only solution is the dissolution of all boundaries and the adoption of a one world narrative.  Wouldn’t it be glorious if the deaths of these malevolent tyrants and societies finally inspired the birth of a single human system in which no conflict is possible because we are all on the same side?

Perhaps it would be glorious, if you have adopted the childish notions of history common to the mainstream.  For those who have not, the story, and the ultimate solutions to the ills of mankind, become a little more complicated…

America’s Villainous Mustache

Mainstream history tends to follow the motions of a play or film, in that archetypes and symbolic figures are consistently created in order to satisfy the natural flow of a particular fiction.  The bad guy wears a mustache (not always, but it is strange and disturbing to see how often this archetype materializes in the mainstream world view.

Just look at Hitler, Stalin, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, etc.  We love mustached villains).  His criminal successes make him imposing and frightening.  He acts without conscience, or, he wrongly believes his terrible actions are justified in the name of the “greater good”.  His inevitable mistakes make his final failure ironic and satisfying in the face of the iconic hero, who defeats the enemy while the citizenry stands back and watches in awe and wonder as helpless spectators.

The villain is indeed evil, and deserves to be dethroned, but the assumption many people make is that the other side is diametrically good.

This is not always the case…

America is used to playing the role of the hero in the epic tale of modern Earth.  Our nation began with an act of defiance and victory so unexpected and so poetic, it cemented our cultural identity as freedom fighters for centuries to come.  Over time, our government, turning progressively corrupt, has exploited this cultural identity in order to lure Americans into committing atrocities in the name of our traditional sense of “heroism”.  We have, in fact, become the very antagonists we thought we were fighting against (there’s the delicious irony needed to round out our fairytale).

Our government’s actions surrounding Syria, for instance, have made America appear not just bloodthirsty, but also ridiculous.  The Obama Administration has taken us to the brink of World War III and left us there to stare out over the chasm.  The slightest breeze could send us plummeting.  All to generate military support for Al-Qaeda, the same organization designated by the establishment as our mortal enemy.

In the meantime, our economic system now survives solely on the whims of the Federal Reserve, a private central bank that answers to NO ONE, and writes fiscal policy without oversight.  The government is not only seeking to trigger world war, it also wants to pay for that war with money we do not have, riding debts we cannot pay, to foreign creditors we will piss off in the process of unleashing our unfunded laser guided hell.

Never has the U.S. been slathered in so much absurdity all at once.  Now, we wear the mustache…

Most of us in the Liberty Movement would agree that our country is being poisoned from within, and that our government for many decades has become an enemy of all free peoples.  But there is a very important question that we seem to have overlooked:

If America has been written as the villain, then who is meant to be the hero?

Putin Is Not Your Buddy

Lets step back from the global stage for a moment and examine the situation from a different perspective.  What if the U.S. is not just a product of corruption for corruption’s sake?  What if our new identity as the next historical evil-doer is part of a greater script, and America’s fall from grace is meant to be used to foment the success of fantastic (but fake) protagonists in an engineered fight for a “better and more centralized world”?

How many of us in the Liberty Movement cheered the diplomatic and strategic prowess of Vladimir Putin, for example, in the days leading to Obama’s “red line” attack on Syria?  We cheered because his position was correct, and his demeanor made our government look homicidal by comparison.

We cheered his letter to TIME Magazine because we are tired of being the only people pointing out the vicious parasite our political body has become, and it was exciting to be vindicated by an outside source.  We cheered his protection of Edward Snowden, a truly courageous whistle blower that exposed the terrifying Orwellian nature of the NSA.  We watch video reports from Russia Today (RT) because they give a far more accurate accounting of the facts in the U.S. than all American media entities combined.

It is easy for us to get caught up in the idea that since the West has become the bad guy, the East must now be the good guy.

The problem is, we are being played yet again.

Putin has long called for the end of the dollar’s world reserve status and the creation of a new “global structure” and a “global currency” revolving around the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights:

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/at-g20-kremlin-to-pitch-new-currency/375364.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/davos/4376315/Russian-prime-minister-Vladimir-Putin-calls-for-end-of-dollar-stranglehold.html

Is it just coincidence that Putin wants the same centralized global economy and global governance that the IMF and multiple banking elites have been calling for for years?

The same elites who created the debt crisis and currency crisis we now face in America?  Is it just coincidence that Eastern economic and political dominance over issues like Syria perfectly benefits the IMF plan for a financial shift to the BRICS nations and away from the U.S. greenback?  The same plan promoted by many American financial moguls?

Russia is a model for despotic socialized society posing as “civilized society”, and yet, our government has made America so ugly that Russia looks noble by comparison.  Putin is placed on the cover of TIME magazine everywhere in the world except the U.S., and the Washington Times responds by stating that such behavior is a sign of “America’s downward spiral in the global community”, as if we are about to be shunned from the world at large:

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/conscience-realist/2013/sep/18/time-puts-vladimir-putin-its-front-cover-everywher/

While RT produces fantastic journalistic pieces that are critical of American government, rarely if ever do they turn a discerning eye to Russia, and this is not just oversight.

Look carefully at the narrative that is being constructed here.  Putin is NOT our buddy.  He represents exactly what our own government now represents; globalism and naked centralized government aggression against the individual.  However, as mainstream history is being written, the story will be told that it was nations like Russia and China, and organizations like the IMF, that tried to hold back the tide of catastrophe while America, the last empire, steamrolled into thick-skulled oblivion surfing on a shockwave of fiat money and brute military vanity.

The Washington Aristocracy Is Scum, But Don’t Let That Fool You…

Most people with an extensive Liberty Movement education are well aware that false paradigms are used in politics by establishment elites in order to control social discussion and to divide the population against each other.  The Left/Right debate has been and always will be a farce, being that the leadership on both sides of the aisle have identical goals when it comes to the most important aspects of the American structure.

The elites of the Democratic and Republican parties, regardless of rhetoric, will BOTH strive for greater government power, less individual liberty, the erasure of economic sovereignty and free markets, and a dependent and enslaved public.  On these pursuits, they completely agree.

In one week, our faux leadership is to decide once AGAIN on the possibility of a debt ceiling increase that will bring us ever closer to a debt and currency avalanche event.  During past debates, much fanfare is given to the supposed conflict between the interests of the Democrats and the GOP, up until the last moment when the GOP caves in completely and allows the debt ceiling to be vaulted.  Will the same happen again in this case?

It depends on how quickly the establishment wants to bring entire roof down on our heads.

A freeze of the debt ceiling would eventually mean default on our Treasury Bonds, since our government must take on exponential debt in order to receive the benefits of the Federal Reserve’s printing press, as well as pay off our foreign creditors.

A government shutdown could slow the growth of some liabilities, but it does not account for the liabilities already in circulation, thus, we can still default.  Not to mention, our debt and currency standing could easily come into question, resulting in a bond dump or loss of reserve status.

The only option that does not result in a fast moving firestorm through our financial system is a debt ceiling increase, and how much longer can we get away with kicking the can down the road?  In any case, America is about to change for the worse, and the decision on when this is to happen was made a long time ago.  The Washington aristocracy is blatantly guilty in the instigation of our current dilemma, and my theory is, they want you to know they are the culprit, as long as you continue believing they are the ONLY culprit.

They want you to forget all about the IMF, the corporate elites, and Vladimir Putin’s involvement in the larger plan.  They want you to cheer when international banks and what’s left of the G20 rescue us after years of fiscal disaster and institute centralized global economic governance.  They want to be the only authors of this story, and what author doesn’t want to see himself placed in the role of the champion?

Just as there are false political paradigms, there are also false international paradigms.  The Liberty Movement is the wild card; an unknown quantity.  We aren’t fighting for one side or the other – we are fighting for particular principles and beliefs. The establishment’s best strategy is to co-opt our momentum by convincing us to focus on alternative opposition, or place our trust in fabricated advocates.

No matter how epically monstrous our government becomes, and no matter how satisfying their ultimate demise will be, our battle does not end with them.  It only begins with them.

Originally published by alt-market.us, you can contact the author via [email protected], or follow him on gettr or parler.

Submitted by Aidan Johnston of Gun Owners of America,

Biden and his cronies in the White House have cooked up a new unconstitutional gun control “rule” for ATF to enforce.

ATF is trying to eliminate the private sale of firearms without background checks and registration paperwork. They’re essentially accusing anyone of selling a gun of being “engaged in the business” of dealing in firearms and requiring a federal gun dealer license.

You might think that you’d actually have to meet some threshold of firearms sold to need a license—hit the benchmark and you’re no longer just a lemonade stand on the side of the road; you’ve got to get a business license and obey local regulations.

Well, in 1979, ATF decided against “establishing a threshold number” on the theory that gun-owning patriots like you could simply stay below the threshold and “avoid obtaining a license….” This is a bit like saying that it would be a bad idea to post a speed limit because drivers might actually go under the speed limit.

Instead, ATF’s new rule says you might not be allowed to sell even one gun to your family member without getting a government license and filling out the proper registration paperwork. Also, ATF thinks you can be engaged in the business without ever acquiring or selling a single firearm!

So, does ATF have any legal footing to stand on? Let’s take a look at the statute.

The statutory definition of “engaged in the business as applied to a dealer in firearms,” is:

a person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business to predominantly earn a profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms, but such term shall not include a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms.

That doesn’t sound like it covers you selling a gun to your cousin at Thanksgiving, does it?

You’re right! Contrary to ATF’s proposed rule that a person can be engaged in the business without ever making a business deal, the statute enacted by Congress contains at least six clear indicators that more is required.

ATF is flat-out wrong when it says that “even a single firearm transaction or offer to engage in a transaction [without any actual transaction], when combined with other evidence, may be sufficient to require a license.” Let’s briefly prove just how wrong ATF is on each of these six counts:

1. The Statute Discusses “Firearms” in the Plural.

When writing the statute, Congress was clearly thinking about a business that sold more than one firearm (and certainly more than zero). The plural “firearms” appears repeatedly throughout the statute, so obviously dealing means more than one “firearm.”

2. A “Regular Course” Is a Series of Events Demonstrating an Activity Is Occurring.

The statute clearly requires a dealer’s conduct to be part of a “regular course of trade or business.” This means a series of events demonstrating an overarching business purpose and mindset.

On the other hand, isolated events—like a mere offer to sell or even a single completed transaction—do not prove regularity or a course of business. 

3.”Repetitive” Obviously Means More than Once.

In order to be “engaged in the business,” one must also engage in the “repetitive purchase and resale of firearms.” Of course, repetition means more than once, that is, “the act or an instance of repeating” something. Purchases and resales must be repetitive.

For example, a gun owner who scrolls through some online ads and happens upon a great deal on a firearm (or perhaps even a group of firearms), even if he purchases and then resells that firearm with the intent to profit, still does not constitute a firearms dealer, because his activity is a one-off far from “repetitive,” and certainly not a “regular course” of activity.

And that is supported by this Senate report that accompanied the passage of this statute. Congress expressly intended its “legislation to limit Federal regulation to those involved in more than isolated activities.” 

4. Actual Dealers Must “Purchase and Resell” Firearms.

Not to beat a dead horse, but the statute also requires the repetitive “purchase and resale of firearms.” Thus, firearms must be purchased “and” resold – a far cry from the ATF claim that “there is no minimum threshold number of firearms purchased or sold that triggers the licensure requirement.” 

For starters, sales alone are not enough, nor are mere purchases of firearms. Both resale and purchase have to happen. And it has to be repetitive, so there must be more than one “purchase” and more than one “resale”—more than two each, in fact!

Now, ATF points to one guy they prosecuted for unlicensed dealing without any evidence of any sales having taken place. But failing to require a “resale” in addition to a “purchase” (never mind requiring each to be “repetitive”) reads the word “resale” right out of the statute. Who cares what ATF did once to some guy in violation of the law while some anti-gun judge looked the other way?

5. A “Resale” Is Something More than a “Sale,” and Is Done Simultaneously.

The statute does not require merely “purchases” and “sales”—something any gun owner might do. Congress actually used the word “resale”—meaning “the act of selling something again” such as “buying used cars for resale to overseas markets.” Thus, embedded within the word “resale” is a requirement that firearm purchases and resales must be linked together within a short enough timeframe of each other to constitute business activity.

ATF tries to eliminate this definition of resale, essentially defining it as a sale, but Congress chose its words carefully, and ATF needs to respect that. No one would say that a collector who buys rare cars, maintains them in his garage for decades, and subsequently offers them at auction has been “buying used cars for resale to overseas markets.” 

Well, that’s just as true for gun stores. No firearm dealer (at least none that wants to stay in business) purchases large quantities of firearms only to hold them in inventory for a long period of time, as does a firearm collector or even investor. A private collector might purchase large numbers of firearms (even of the same make and model) with the intent that they increase in long-term value, a dealer’s profit incentives are much more short-term, out of necessity. 

6. The Statute Exempts Non-Business “Sales, Exchanges, or Purchases” in the Plural.

The statute contains explicit exceptions – a statutory safe harbor – to being “engaged in the business” based on the “occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby.”

Each of these terms used in this part of the statute is plural. This means multiple sales, multiple exchanges, or multiple purchases can be made by gun owners without rising to the level of “dealing.”

No one could amass a “collection” without accumulating multiple firearms, and probably getting rid of some as well. Congress was well aware that “many firearm hobbyists sell or trade firearms from their collections,” and Congress never intended for ATF to start prosecuting gun owners for such private sales.

Who could have guessed it? Biden’s ATF is totally overreaching this latest ATF rule. The plain text of the statute proves at least six ways that ATF’s final rule is a load of crap! 

Under the Administrative Procedures Act, when agencies like ATF make rules, they must first submit the rule for public comment on the Federal Register.

During this period, citizens can give their thoughts on the rule and describe their unique situations as to how it will affect them.

Please submit comments here on the Federal Register. 

*   *   *

We’ll hold the line for you in Washington. We are No Compromise. Join the Fight Now.