MKitch3|Sept. 25,2025

MK3 Blog is reposting an article and documentary  that contain explosive, largely unknown information about Israel’s 1967 attack on a U.S. Navy ship that was intended to sink the ship with all men aboard. 

The information details how Israel was able to induce the U.S. government to cover up the attack.

President Lyndon Johnson had told the media, off the record, that Israel had intentionally attacked the ship.

When Israel and its friends in major Jewish organizations learned that Johnson had done this, declassified Israeli documents now show that they threatened Johnson with ‘blood libel’ and gross anti-Semitism, which would end his political career.

Many of Johnson’s closest advisors were Israel partisans who secretly reported back to Tel Aviv on his every move.

To protect their contacts’ identities, the Israelis used codenames in their communications with them: 

“Hamlet” was Abe Feinberg, one of the most influential fundraisers ever in Democratic Party politics, whose phone calls Johnson couldn’t afford to ignore; “Menashe” was Arthur Goldberg, the U.S ambassador to the United Nations; “Harari” was David Ginsberg, a prominent Washington lawyer who represented the Israeli embassy; and “Ilan” was Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a longtime Johnson confidant who had dined with the President on the eve of the Six-Day War. (LBJ owed his political career to “Ilan”/Fortas)

The Israeli government hired teams of lawyers, including close friends of Johnson, and began an “all-out offensive” to influence media coverage of the attack, leaning on them to kill critical stories and slant others in Israel’s favor…

By Maidhc Ó Cathail, Reposted from Consortium News, November 12, 2014

“The Day Israel Attacked America,” an investigation into Israel’s deadly June 8, 1967, attack on the USS Liberty at the height of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, was aired on Al Jazeera America [after U.S. broadcasters had refused to work on the project – see the director’s statement below].

Directed by British filmmaker Richard Belfield, the documentary confirms not only that the attack on the U.S. Navy spy ship was deliberate, an undisputed fact long accepted by all but the most shameless Israeli apologists, but reveals, perhaps for the first time, how Tel Aviv was able to induce the U.S. government to cover up an attack that killed 34 and injured 171 of its own seamen by a supposed “ally.” 

USS Liberty (AGTR-5) receives assistance from units of the Sixth Fleet after she was attacked and seriously damaged by Israeli forces off the Sinai Peninsula on June 8, 1967. (US Navy photo) 

“It was especially tough for Lyndon Johnson, to date the most pro-Israeli American president in history,” the film’s narrator observed. According to Tom Hughes, the State Department’s director of intelligence and research at the time of the Liberty attack, “Johnson was in a very tough mood.”

As an indication of Johnson’s initial firm stance, Hughes recalled that Johnson briefed Newsweek magazine off the record that the Israelis had attacked the Liberty, suggesting that they may have done so because they believed that the naval intelligence-gathering ship had been intercepting Israeli as well as Egyptian communications.

A post-interview leak revealing that it was the President himself who had briefed the media about the attack on the Liberty alarmed the Israeli embassy in Washington and its friends in the major Jewish organizations, who intimated that Johnson’s Newsweek briefing “practically amounted to blood libel.”

The documentary’s narrator said declassified Israeli documents now show that “they were going to threaten President Johnson with ‘blood libel’, gross anti-Semitism, and that would end his political career.”

“Blackmail!” retired U.S. Navy admiral Bobby Ray Inman frankly summed up Israel’s strategy to deal with Johnson. “[T]hey know if he is thinking about running again, he’s going to need money for his campaign,” said Inman, who from 1977 to 1981 directed the National Security Agency, the U.S. intelligence agency under whose aegis the USS Liberty had been dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean. “So alleging that he’s blood-libeling is going to arouse the Jewish donors.”

The Israeli government hired teams of lawyers, including close friends of Johnson, the narrator added, and began an “all-out offensive” to influence media coverage of the attack, leaning on them to kill critical stories and slant others in Israel’s favor.

“There was a campaign mounted to see what could be done about returning Johnson to his normal, predictable pro-Israeli position,” Hughes said. “Efforts were to be made to remind the President of the delicacy of his own position, that he personally might lose support for his run for reelection in 1968.”

Israelis Bearing Gifts

Noting the cleverness of Israel’s tactics, the documentary revealed that after having identified the Vietnam War as Johnson’s “soft spot,” it quietly provided him with “two extraordinary gifts.”

The first addressed the President’s bitterness toward many American Jewish organizations and community leaders over their opposition to his Vietnam policy. But as the Liberty crisis unfolded, Hughes said, “they were suddenly becoming more silent on Vietnam.” Johnson was made to understand that taking a more “moderate” position toward Israel over the attack would benefit him politically.

The second gift was a vital military one. The U.S. military in Tel Aviv received a surprise visit. “I think I have something you might be interested in,” a senior Israeli intelligence officer told him. The Israelis had just crossed the Red Sea to capture the Egyptian military’s Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missiles, the same ones the North Vietnamese were using to bring down American aircraft on a daily basis.

As a show of gratitude, the U.S. government gave the Israelis two gifts in return. The Johnson administration resupplied them with the weapons they had used in their six-day land grab of territory from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The White House also decided to water down the Defense Department’s inquiry into the attack on the Liberty.

As Hughes explained, “Soon Johnson did respond, and took a much more lenient line and wished that the whole incident could be put behind us as soon as possible.”

Johnson’s “softer approach” to Israel was reflected in the U.S. Navy inquiry then underway on board the Liberty. As one of the survivors recalled, the Liberty’s crew began to realize that “a cover-up was descending” upon them. Among key testimony ignored was the strafing of the Liberty’s deck with napalm and the machine-gunning of the sinking ship’s lifeboats.

Without interviewing any Israelis involved in the attack, the U.S. court of inquiry rushed out a report, hurriedly completed in a mere 20 days, exonerating Israel from blame. Tel Aviv quickly followed up with its own report that concluded that the whole incident was “a series of mistakes, and that no one was to blame.”

Ignoring a secret telegram from its ambassador in Washington advising that Tel Aviv admit its guilt in light of America’s possession of an incriminating audio tape of the attack, Israel instead shifted its focus to repairing the damage to its relationship with the U.S.

“The Israelis have always been very skillful at tracking what the U.S. government is doing, saying, thinking, and efforts to influence it,” Inman pointed out. “And the great advantage they have as compared to other countries is their influence on the Congress.”

A timely Washington Post report noted that “the Jewish lobby could help determine the outcome of 169 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.”

As Johnson considered his re-election prospects, Hughes said the “emotive” language used in earlier Pentagon press releases disappeared and was replaced by “a much more bland and neutral-sounding discourse.”

“But whatever was said to journalists,” the narrator added, “every U.S. intelligence head believed that the attack was intentional.” As one of them colorfully wrote at the time, “a nice whitewash for a group of ignorant, stupid and inept xxxxxxxx.” Though shown but not mentioned in the film, the next sentence of the intelligence chief’s letter stated the obvious: “If the attackers had not been Hebrew, there would have been quite a commotion.”

“The Jewish community has always been more generous than many of their other counterparts in supporting financially elections, political causes,” Inman observed. “In the process, that does translate into influence.”

Israel’s White House Friends

Israel’s influence inside the White House was even more significant. “Many of Johnson’s closest friends and advisors were pro-Israeli, and they reported back to Tel Aviv on his every move,” the film asserted.

If anything, this understated Israeli influence. As Grace Halsell, a staff writer for Johnson, later wrote, “Everyone around me, without exception, was pro-Israel.”

Thanks to its supporters surrounding Johnson, the narrator claimed that the Israeli government was able to constantly shift its story “to counter whatever new intelligence the White House received.”

To protect their contacts’ identities, the Israelis used codenames in their communications with them. “The Day Israel Attacked America,” however, revealed for the first time the identities of four of these pro-Israeli eyes and ears inside the Johnson administration.

“Hamlet” was Abe Feinberg, one of the most influential fundraisers ever in Democratic Party politics, whose phone calls Johnson couldn’t afford to ignore*; “Menashe” was Arthur Goldberg, the U.S ambassador to the United Nations; “Harari” was David Ginsberg, a prominent Washington lawyer who represented the Israeli embassy**; and “Ilan” was Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a longtime Johnson confidant who had dined with the President on the eve of the Six-Day War.

It would hardly be an overstatement to say that the President owed his political career to “Ilan”/Fortas. As biographer Robert A. Caro has written, Johnson “largely through the legal genius of his ally Abe Fortas, managed, by a hairbreadth, to halt a federal court’s investigation into the stealing of the 1948 election,” in a reference to LBJ’s first Senate race.

[Editor’s note: Author James scott reports that Israeli documents also revealed that Eugene Rostow, third in command in the U.S. State Department, repeatedly shared privileged information about U.S. strategy with Israeli diplomats.” (His brother, Walt Rostow, was national security advisor to Johnson at the time.)] 

[Editor’s note: For more on Fortas see “Fortas, Breyer, Brandeis, Frankfurter, Ginsburg: Israel partisans”.]

According to the documentary, it was “Menashe”/Goldberg who supplied Israel with the key intelligence. Goldberg warned the Israelis that the U.S. had an audio tape that confirmed the Israeli pilots knew the Liberty was an American ship before they attacked.

“The strategy worked,” concluded Belfield’s documentary. “The U.S.-Israeli relationship proved to be stronger than the killing and injuring of more than 200 Americans.”

But it wasn’t always a foregone conclusion. As Hughes put it, “The American-Israeli relationship was very much at stake, and it was brought back from the precipice.”

“The Day Israel Attacked America” ends with a scene of surviving veterans of the USS Liberty laying a wreath on their murdered comrades’ memorial headstone and a prescient observation by the U.S. undersecretary of state at the time of the attack.

“It seemed clear to the Israelis that as American leaders did not have the courage to punish them for the blatant murder of American citizens,” George Ball noted, “they would let them get away with anything.” 

Maidhc Ó Cathail was a widely published writer and political analyst. He was also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focused primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

FILMMAKER’S VIEW

By director Richard Belfield

I was first told about the attack on the USS Liberty in 1980 over dinner with a former analyst from the National Security Agency (NSA) in Washington DC.

Back in 1980, I promised my friend that if I ever got the chance I would make a film about it. Over the years, I pitched the idea to numerous broadcasters and always got the same response: eyes rolled upwards, usually followed by the statement, “Are you completely mad?”

Fast forward to 2009 and I was a guest speaker at the NSA’s biennial conference on historical cryptography, talking about an unsolved code on an 18th century monument in an English stately home.

While there, I went to two other sessions – both about attacks on American signal intelligence naval vessels.

The first was the capture of the US spy ship, the Pueblo (boarded by North Korean forces in 1968 – and never returned). The survivors of that incident were treated like heroes and feted on stage.

The next day there was a session about the USS Liberty. James Scott, who has written easily the best book on the Liberty attack [The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship], was on stage and limited to his allotted 20 minutes. Ranged against him were three Israeli apologists, all of whom were allowed to overrun their time. Survivors from the Liberty affair were allowed to sit in the audience, but they were denied any say in proceedings.

As an Englishman, I was brought up with a strong sense of fair play and I thought this was a disgrace. It was gruesome to watch. First, the crew had been attacked in broad daylight by a close ally, then they were betrayed by their government and now they were being humiliated by the same agency many had worked for back in 1967.

Earlier this year, I acquired a copy of the audiotape of the attack as it had unfolded, the real time conversations between Isreali Air Force pilots and their controllers back at base. It had never been broadcast before. I went to talk to Al Jazeera and after careful consideration, the network commissioned the film.

On location, it all started with James Scott (who gets a co-producer credit on this project). When writing his book, he had already interviewed the survivors as well as many of the key people in the Washington political and intelligence machine from that time. The introductions he made would prove invaluable as we began filming interviews.

The veterans were extraordinary. One after another, they were generous with their time, uniformly eloquent and passionate and above all, honest in their recollections.

They all felt betrayed by the American government but were keen to exonerate ordinary Jewish people both in Israel and without, for any responsibility for the incident. Their beef was simply with the senior Israeli officers in the control room and their superiors higher up the command chain who had ordered the attack.

After a few days filming, I rang Elaine Morris, my producer back in London. She asked how things were going. All I could say was that the quality of the interviews was the best I had ever experienced in many decades in this business.

In Texas we interviewed Bobby Ray Inman, an intelligence officer with a glittering track record at the CIA, Naval Intelligence and as a former director of the NSA. My contacts in the UK intelligence world had always told me “he is one of the good guys” and I quickly discovered why. He was frank and clear. The top Israeli commanders, he explained, had known exactly what they were doing when they attacked the Liberty and when it came to holding them to account, the US government rolled over for them.

We filmed an annual memorial ceremony in Washington, D.C. It was emotional, visceral and tense, with survivors, family and friends gathered in the morning sun. Listening to a sole bugler playing the US Navy’s lament, ‘Taps’ is a memory that will never fade.

Years earlier, I had visited the US military graves in Arlington Cemetery but now, following the ceremony, I got to go there again with Dave Lucas, one of the survivors of the attack and a truly wonderful man.

We filmed as he walked up the hill carrying a wreath from the ceremony. Alongside him was a crew member, a Portuguese language specialist, who had left the Liberty in Spain just a few days before it sailed off up the Mediterranean to take up position off the Egyptian coast. He had been temporarily replaced for the mission by an Arab linguist. He wept openly for the comrades he had said goodbye to, never to see again. As we filmed the pair laying the flowers, an interview with one of the other survivors, Jim Kavanagh came suddenly to mind. “I went through hell,” he had said about his shipmates. “But they left this earth.”

Finally, we filmed on a sister ship to the Liberty, now moored in San Francisco. The crew hauled an outsized US flag up a mast for us. The flag – known as the “holiday colours” – was identical to that which was flown from the Liberty on June 8, 1967. It was huge, clearly visible for miles, and I knew immediately that no one could ever have been in any doubt about the nationality of the ship beneath it.

Watching the Stars and Stripes unfurl into the wind, I realised that I had got to keep the promise I first made to my friend in a Washington restaurant 34 years ago. 

*Abe Feinberg: 

Excerpt: “One person key in such Zionist financial connections to Truman was Abraham Feinberg, a wealthy businessman who was later to play a similar role with President Johnson. 
“While many Americans have been aware of Truman‘s come-from-behind win over Dewey, few people know about the critical role of Feinberg and the Zionist lobby in financing Truman‘s victory. After Feinberg financed Truman‘s famous whistle-stop campaign tour, Truman credited him with his presidential win. (When the CIA later discovered that Feinberg also helped to finance illegal gun-running to Zionist groups, the Truman administration looked the other way.)”

**David Ginsberg: 

Ginsberg was an American political advisor, lawyer, and consummate Washington insider. He was a founder of Americans for Democratic Action, executive director of the Kerner Commission, held a position at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with the assistance of Felix Frankfurter (Israel partisan), successfully represented Henry Kissinger in his battle to keep private the transcripts of his telephone conversations while serving as secretary of state and national security adviser under President Richard Nixon, and as counsel to the Jewish Agency’s office in Washington, was part of an inner circle of advisers to the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and helped smooth the way to the Truman administration’s recognition of the new state of Israel, with Mr. Weizmann as its first president, in 1948. 

UNLIKE THE WRITING OF HISTORY chemistry is an exact science. Old fashioned historians have always conducted endless learned debates about meanings and interpretations, and the more indolent among them have developed a subsidiary Black Art of dreading between the lines", as a substitute for wading into the archives of World War II documents which are now available in embarrassing abundance.

Recently, however, the more daring modern historians have begun using the tools of forensic science -- carbon-dating, gas chromatography, and simple ink-aging tests -- to examine, and not infrequently dispel, some of the more tenaciously held myths of the twentieth century.

Sometimes the public is receptive to the results, sometimes not. The negative result of the laboratory analysis of the ancient Shroud of Turin is one example: it is not a deliberate fake, perhaps, but nor was it nearly as old as the priests would have had centuries of gullible tourists believe.

It is unlikely that the world's public will be as receptive, yet, to the results of the professional and dispassionate chemical examination of the remains of the wartime Auschwitz concentration camp which is at the centre of this report.

Nobody likes to be swindled, still less where considerable sums of money are involved. (Since 1949 the State of Israel has received over 90 billion Deutschmarks in voluntary reparations from West Germany, essentially in atonement for the "gas chambers of Auschwitz".) And this myth will not die easily: Too many hundreds of millions of honest, intelligent people have been duped by the well-financed and brilliantly successful postwar publicity campaign which followed on from the original ingenious plan of the British Psychological Warfare Executive (PWE,) in 1942 to spread to the world the propaganda story that the Germans were using "gas chambers" to kill millions of Jews and other "undesirables".

As late as August 1943 the head of the PWE minuted the Cabinet secretly that despite the stories they were putting out, there was not the slightest evidence that such contraptions existed, and he continued with a warning that stories from Jewish sources in this connection were particularly suspect.

As a historian I have, on occasion, had recourse to fraud laboratories to test controversial documents for their authenticity. In the late 1960s I discarded certain diaries of Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, offered to myself and the publishers William Collins Ltd., since Messrs. Hehner & Cox Ltd. of the City of London advised me that the ink used for one signature did not exist during the war years. It was I who exposed the "Hitler Diaries" as fakes, at Der Stern's famous international press conference in Hamburg in April 1983.

And yet I have to admit that it would never have occurred to me to subject the actual fabric of the Auschwitz concentration camp and its "gas chambers"--the holiest shrines of this new Twentieth Century religion--to chemical tests to see if there was any trace of cyanide compounds in the walls.

The truly astounding results are as set out in this report: while significant quantities of cyanide compounds were found in the small de-lousing facilities of the camp where the proprietary (and lethal) Zyklon B compound was used, as all are agreed, to disinfect the plague-ridden clothing of all persons entering these brutal slave-labour camps, no significant trace whatsoever was found in the buildings which international opinion -- for it is not more than that--has always labelled as the camp's infamous gas chambers. Nor, as the report's gruesomely expert author makes plain, could the design and construction of those buildings have made their use as mass gas- chambers feasible under any circumstances.

For myself shown this evidence for the first time when called as an expert witness at the Zündel trial in Toronto in April 1988, the laboratory reports were shattering. There could be no doubt as to their integrity. I myself would, admittedly, have preferred to see more rigorous methods used in identifying and certifying the samples taken for analysis, but I accept without reservation the difficulties that the examining team faced on location in what is now Poland: chiselling out the samples from the hallowed site under the very noses of the new camp guards. The video tapes made simultaneously by the team--which I have studied--provide compelling visual evidence of the scrupulous methods that they used.

Until the end of this tragic century there will always be incorrigible historians, statesmen, and publicists who are content to believe, or have no economically viable alternative but to believe, that the Nazis used "gas chambers" at Auschwitz to kill human beings. But it is now up to them to explain to me as an intelligent and critical student of modern history why there is no significant trace of any cyanide compound in the building which they have always identified as the former gas chambers.

Forensic chemistry is, I repeat, an exact science.

The ball is in their court.

David Irving London, W. 1 May 1989

The Leuchter Report via video.

The Leuchter Report via pdf

The Second Leuchter Report via pdf

David Irving comments

MKitch3|Sept. 25,2025

What the document is (and what it claims to do)

DARPA’s project frames “narrative comprehension” as a network—a complex system in your brain (or culture) that digests facts, stories, metaphors, frames. The proposal’s ambition: identify disruptors (things that break or shift narratives) and inductors (things that build or reinforce narratives).

Key claims:

• Narratives can be decomposed into components, nodes, relations, etc.

• It’s possible to detect the “fault lines” where narratives are vulnerable (to disruption) or fortifiable (to induction).

• Through computational, neuroscientific, semantic, and social network techniques, one could intervene—i.e. tweak public belief, steer discourse, “nudge” large populations’ worldview.

• The project spans multiple levels: individual cognition (EEG, semantics) up through collective social and media systems.

In sum: DARPA is proposing not just persuasion, but structural narrative warfare.

Three things that jumped out (because they’re scary or illuminating)

1. The mechanistic worldview

DARPA treats belief, meaning, narrative like hardware and software. Words, metaphors, frames = modules you can insert, delete, corrupt. That’s chilling. People are messy. Emotions, contradictions, identity—all resist clean modularization. Yet this proposal acts as if stories are legos, waiting to be snapped together or ripped apart.

I don’t think humans can be fully reduced that way. But if you buy the premise even 30%, the possibility of mass influence is terrifying.

2. Scaling from micro to macro

The proposal doesn’t just want to tinker with an individual’s understanding. It wants to scale — push on culture, media, networks, influencers. You aren’t just persuading one person; you’re bending entire discourse ecosystems.

This reminds me of how social media algorithms amplify. DARPA wants to feed in nodes, see ripples, adjust. In effect: “narrative feedback loops” as weapons.

3. The ethically undeclared war

DARPA documents often hide the moral framing in euphemism. This proposal claims benign goals: resilience, narrative countermeasures, protecting societies. But what constitutes “undesirable narrative”? Who decides?

This is weaponization of belief, under the guise of defense. That’s a slippery slope into Orwellian territory.

Structure + logic (how the proposal is laid out)

1. Narrative decomposition: break stories into semantic primitives, causal chains, rhetorical devices.

2. Vulnerability mapping: find weak spots where narratives fracture or shift easily.

3. Induction strategies: methods to amplify or embed narratives—via agents, media, social networks.

4. Intervention experiments: test on small populations, see how narrative spreads, measure via EEG, sentiment, discourse changes.

5. Feedback loops: real-time monitoring, adjusting interventions dynamically.

You see how this is more than theory. It’s a control system + experiment + continuous optimization.

Risks, gaps, and red flags

• Overconfidence in model accuracy
  When you assert you fully map narrative networks, any error or bias—and there will be many—could lead to dramatic misfires. Wrong narrative pushes, backlashes, or worse.

• Ethics and oversight vacuum
  DARPA is under the defense umbrella. The proposal’s checks and balances (if any) are internal and arcane. Civil society may never see when or how this is used.

• Resilience of alternative narratives
  People don’t always behave rationally. Counter-narratives, irrational loyalty, identity, trauma—all resist algorithmic manipulation.

• Scale mismatch
  Testing on a small population is not the same as rolling out at scale. Effects might deviate wildly when spread across cultures, languages, identities.

• Autonomy inversion
  If your beliefs are being nudged by hidden forces, is your autonomy intact? This is a fundamental philosophical risk.

Why this matters now

Narrative warfare isn’t hypothetical. Look around: disinformation, gaslighting, polarization, algorithmic echo chambers — they’re structural, not random. Projects like this accelerate the ability of states (or private actors) to embed narratives that silence, distract, or reshape collective will.

If we don’t understand how stories are being engineered, we’ll never know when we’re being manipulated.

What we should demand

• Transparency about whether any of this is in operation now (spoiler: almost certainly).

• Independent oversight — ethical boards that include philosophers, sociologists, ethicists, not just tech.

• Public literacy in narrative mechanics — so people can spot manipulation.

• Robust freedom of narratives — legal, cultural, technological spaces where counter-stories can persist.

• Limits on deployment in domestic contexts (propaganda, political persuasion).

DARPA’s narrative proposal is a blueprint. It’s a bet: that stories can be engineered. Whether or not it succeeds, it reveals how powerful belief infrastructures are seen by the military-industrial complex.

TL;DR
DARPA’s Toward Narrative Disruptors and Inductors treats narratives as networks to manipulate. It’s a mix of neuroscience, semantic modeling, social engineering. The ambition is huge — and so are the dangers. The proposal errs on mechanistic reductionism, lacks transparent ethics, and presumes controllability.

Questions I leave you with:

1. If you could reverse-engineer a dominant narrative (say on politics or climate), what nodes would you identify as vulnerable?

2. How do you defend your own narrative space — i.e. the stories you believe and the frameworks you use?

3. Can human unpredictability be a defense mechanism against narrative engineering?

4. At what point do “public goods” narratives (e.g. health, security) become Trojan horses for persuasion?

MKitch3|Sept. 26,2025.

War doesn’t start with tanks. It starts with words. Strip a people of their humanity, brand them “radical” or “enemy,” and you’ve done the hard work before the first shot is fired. That trick isn’t new—it’s the oldest weapon in the American arsenal.

This country was baptized in violence. The Revolution? War. Expansion? Endless campaigns against Indigenous nations, often justified by calling them “savages.” Slavery? A war against human dignity itself, maintained by lash, gun, and statute. When peace broke out, it was never more than an intermission before the next excuse to flex military muscle—whether across the seas in the Philippines or in our own streets during Reconstruction.

The formula is simple: dehumanize, delegitimize, destroy. The rhetoric hasn’t aged a day. The language once aimed at tribes, abolitionists, and strikers has been recycled, polished, and pointed at “terrorists” and “extremists” today. Different century, same script.

And here’s where it turns inward. Citizens—the people allegedly protected by the Constitution—now find themselves described in government briefings the same way Indigenous nations once were. “They” are dangerous. “They” must be monitored. “They” are expendable. Replace “they” with “you,” and the mask slips.

I’m not making this personal for drama; I’m making it personal because it is. I’ve seen how quick the state is to label, how easily neighbors begin to parrot the same script, how fast ordinary dissent gets filed under “threat.” This is how democracy curdles into paranoia.

Here’s the bitter truth: the state loves war because war makes power efficient. When a people are dehumanized, you don’t have to debate them, you don’t have to answer their grievances, you don’t have to see them. You just act. You surveil, you isolate, you crush. It is cheaper than governing honestly, and America has chosen cheap violence over costly honesty more times than I can count.

And you, reader—don’t pretend you’re outside this cycle. Every time you nod along to headlines that reduce people to caricatures, you grease the gears. Every time you swallow “security” as a blank check, you help set the stage for the next round of domestic enemies. That stage is already lit.

The question isn’t whether America wages war against its own. The question is how much longer you’ll tolerate the farce that this isn’t war at all. Call it what it is. Recognize the pattern. Because if you don’t, don’t act surprised when you wake up and find out the “enemy” is you.

An American Holocaust

by Christopher Bollyn 

25-Sep-2007

The thousands of lives lost in the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center were innocent victims of a holocaust. The word "Holocaust" derives from the Greek words "holos" (completely) and "kaustos" (burned sacrificial offering) meaning complete destruction by fire. The correct usage and meaning of this word, however, have been distorted by Zionist propagandists, who have sought to trademark the word as a proper noun to signify the loss of Jewish lives in World War II.

"Totality of destruction has been central to the meaning of holocaust since it first appeared in Middle English in the 14th century, used in reference to the biblical sacrifice in which a male animal was wholly burnt on the altar in worship of God," The American Heritage Dictionary says about the word's history.

Holocaust means complete destruction by fire with extensive loss of life as it comes from the Greek holokauston, which means "that which is completely burnt."

"Holocaust has a secure place in the language when it refers to the massive destruction of humans by other humans," according to the American Heritage Dictionary's note on usage.

ACTUAL HOLOCAUSTS

I personally know of several actual holocausts in modern times in which there were "massive destruction of humans" by fire caused by other humans: the fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities, most notably Dresden on February 13-14, 1945; the massacre of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993; and the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

The entire center of Dresden, the beautiful Saxon capital, was completely consumed by fire on Ash Wednesday 1945 after the Anglo-American fire bombing raids of February 13 and 14, 1945. According to August Kuklane, an eyewitness, some 600,000 people, including many thousands of refugees, had been living in the city center that was incinerated as they slept.

The U.S. mass media does not use the term "holocaust" to refer to the destruction of thousands of lives by fire in the World Trade Center because the word has been usurped by Zionist propagandists. The controlled media in the United States also completely avoids discussing the evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of the 9-11 holocaust.

Although it is extremely unpleasant to contemplate, it must be remembered that hundreds of innocent Americans and other people were literally roasted alive in the upper floors of the twin towers before they collapsed. Besides the fires that were caused by the airplane fuel, there is evidence that there were large amounts of Thermite involved in the destruction of the three collapsed towers. Many people chose to jump from the 110-story towers rather than die from the extreme heat they were subjected to.

The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, and Neil Mackay, Scotland's News Journalist of the Year for 2002, could teach American newspapermen something about journalism and what a "free press" really looks like. Mackay wrote an excellent article about the abundance of evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of 9-11. Mackay's piece was published in the Sunday Herald on November 2, 2003:

There was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.

Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis – and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.

Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.

After being detained for two months, the five Israeli intelligence agents were returned to Israel on "visa violations." In Israel, three of the men discussed what they had been through on an Israeli television talk show, where Oded Ellner (center in photo below) made this revealing comment:  "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event.”

Mackay asks the question U.S. journalists are afraid to even think: But how can you document an event unless you know it is going to happen?  "Put together," Mackay concluded, "the facts do appear to indicate that Israel knew that 9-11, or at least a large-scale terror attack, was about to take place on American soil, but did nothing to warn the USA."

The controlled media in the United States avoids the facts of Israeli prior knowledge because it is evidence of Israeli involvement in the terror attacks of 9-11. This is obviously a taboo subject in the Zionist-controlled media. The facts, however, indicate that many Israelis knew that 9-11 would take place. Warnings conveyed on the Israeli-owned Odigo instant messaging system two hours before the attacks were precise to the minute.

Odigo, a company partly-owned and financed by the Israeli criminal Kobi Alexander, had its U.S. headquarters only two blocks from the World Trade Center, yet Odigo failed to pass the warning it had received on to the authorities in New York, a move that would have saved thousands of lives. Two weeks after 9-11, Alex Diamandis, Odigo's vice president, said, "The messages said something big was going to happen in a certain amount of time, and it did – almost to the minute."

The Washington Post briefly reported about the evidence of Israeli prior knowledge on October 4, 2001 on page A-24:

Another possible hint of the plot came two hours before planes crashed into the World Trade Center, when two employees of Odigo Inc. in Herzliya, Israel, received electronic instant messages declaring that some sort of attack was about to take place. The notes ended with an anti-Semitic slur.

"The messages said something big was going to happen in a certain amount of time, and it did -- almost to the minute," said Alex Diamandis, vice president of sales for the high-tech company, which also has offices in Lower Manhattan. He said the employees did not know the person who sent the message, but they traced it to a computer address and have given that information to the FBI.

What is most striking about the media censorship of the Odigo (Comverse) story of prior knowledge of 9-11 is that it was never reported in any of the New York newspapers. The New York Times only published two articles in which it discussed the five dancing Israelis.

The first, "5 Young Israelis, Caught in Net of Suspicion" was published on October 8, 2001 on page F-3. The article suggests that the five Israeli agents were completely innocent:

By some accounts, they seemed to be making light of the tragic situation.

Besides the cash [$4,700 in the socks] and the [multiple] passports, one man had fresh pictures of the smoldering wreckage of the trade center in his camera, images he had captured by standing rather conspicuously on the room of the van.

The Times article names the five Israelis: Oded Ellner, Omer Gavriel Marmari, Yaron Shmuel, and the brothers Paul and Sivan Kurzberg. The article contains an interesting choice of words used by Yigal Tzarfati, an Israeli consul in New York, who referred to the World Trade Center attacks as "bombings": "This is a huge misunderstanding," Tzarfati told the Times. The five Israeli agents "have nothing to do with the bombings."

On November 21, 2001, the New York Times published its second article about the five Israelis in a piece titled "Dozens of Israeli Jews Are Being Kept in Federal Detention." The article by Tamar Lewin and Alison Cowan was published on the day the last two Israeli Mossad agents were returned to Israel and appeared on page B-7:

In New York, immigration officials began deporting five young Israeli moving men who have been in federal custody since Sept. 11. Two of the deportees, Oded Ellner and Omer Gavriel Marmari, landed in Tel Aviv yesterday. The others, Paul Kurzberg and his brother Sivan, and Yaron Shmuel, were expected to fly to Israel today.

The five aroused attention in New Jersey after people noticed them going to unusual lengths to photograph the World Trade Center ruins and making light of the situation. One photograph developed by the F.B.I. showed Sivan Kurzberg holding a lighted lighter in the foreground, with the smoldering wreckage in the background, said Steven Noah Gordon, a lawyer for the five.

As objectionable as their behavior may be, Mr. Gordon said of their long incarceration, ''It's not a crime and they were being treated as if it was.''

The five were asked to take polygraph tests before being allowed to leave. But Paul Kurzberg refused on principle to divulge much about his role in the Israeli army or subsequently working for people who may have had ties to Israeli intelligence, Mr. Gordon said. His client had trouble with one seven-hour polygraph test administered last week, but did better on a second try.

The Forward, New York City's leading Jewish newsapaper, reported on March 15, 2002 that the five Israelis had been on "a Mossad surveillance mission" and their fake moving company was just a "front":

According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.

After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations.

However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.

"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9-11."

However, he added, the bureau was "very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn't know about it."

Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue.

However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.

In the days after the attack, an employee who worked at the Mossad-front company, Urban Moving Systems, told the Record (Bergen, New Jersey) that the Israelis "were joking" about the holocaust that had just occurred within eyesight of their office across the river from the World Trade Center:

An employee of Urban Moving Systems, who would not give his name, said the majority of his co-workers are Israelis and were joking on the day of the attacks.

"I was in tears," the man said. "These guys were joking and that bothered me. These guys were like, 'Now America knows what we go through.'"

Executive Summary

The United States was founded on the premise that liberty is inherent, not state-granted. The Constitution and Bill of Rights were written as barricades against tyranny, but two and a half centuries later, those barricades look more like speed bumps. America has morphed from a nation of fiercely independent citizens into one of surveilled subjects. Each crisis—wars, depressions, terrorism, pandemics—has been exploited to grow government power. This paper traces that trajectory from 1776 to the present, showing how law and government reshaped America into something disturbingly close to the tyranny it once rebelled against.

I. Introduction: Liberty on a Leash

Thomas Jefferson wrote that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Americans haven’t been vigilant. The very institutions created to secure freedom—courts, Congress, executive agencies—have repeatedly undermined it. Tyranny doesn’t show up with a crown and scepter anymore. It shows up as emergency orders, national security directives, and regulatory codes thicker than a dictionary.

Definitions:

• Tyranny: the arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power.
• Police State: a political system where government exerts rigid control through surveillance, force, and intimidation.

At its founding, the United States swore these would never take root. Today, they’re routine.

II. Founding Blueprint vs. Early Deviations

The Revolutionary Spirit

The colonists’ rebellion was against taxes, standing armies, and a government that claimed power over their lives without consent. The Declaration of Independence’s grievances against King George III could almost double as a critique of Washington, D.C. today: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices… and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.”

Constitutional Guardrails

The Bill of Rights was meant as a wall:

• First Amendment: no abridgment of speech, press, or religion.
• Second Amendment: arms in the hands of the people as a check on power.
• Fourth through Eighth: privacy, due process, jury trials, limits on punishment.

Early Overreach

It didn’t take long to break the guardrails.

• Alien & Sedition Acts (1798): criminalized dissent against the government.
• Marbury v. Madison (1803): gave courts supremacy in interpreting the Constitution, shifting the balance of power.
• War of 1812: Madison flirted with suspending habeas corpus.

From the beginning, emergencies justified bending the rules.

III. War, Crisis, and the Expansion of Federal Authority

Civil War Era

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed dissenters, and imposed the first income tax. Government argued it was temporary. It wasn’t.

Reconstruction and Gilded Age

Federal troops enforced laws in Southern states, setting precedent for military intervention in civil affairs. The newly formed Department of Justice centralized prosecutorial power.

Progressive Era (1890s–1920s)

• Federal Reserve (1913): centralized control of money supply.
• Income Tax (16th Amendment): opened endless revenue streams.
• FBI (1908): born to investigate “interstate crime,” quickly expanding into political surveillance.
• Espionage Act (1917): criminalized dissent in wartime; still used today.

New Deal (1930s)

FDR’s alphabet agencies reshaped the federal government into a permanent managerial class. The Supreme Court largely rubber-stamped expansions.

IV. The Birth of the Police State

Prohibition (1920s)

The 18th Amendment turned ordinary Americans into criminals overnight. Federal agents kicked in doors, launched raids, and perfected surveillance tactics.

Civil Rights Era & COINTELPRO

In the 1950s–70s, the FBI spied on civil rights leaders, antiwar activists, and political dissenters. Martin Luther King Jr. was targeted, wiretapped, and harassed.

The War on Drugs (1970s onward)

• SWAT teams proliferated.
• Mandatory minimum sentences filled prisons.
• Civil asset forfeiture let police seize property without trial.

Judicial Shifts

• Terry v. Ohio (1968): legitimized “stop and frisk.”
• Hudson v. Michigan (2006): weakened exclusionary rule, allowing illegally obtained evidence.

Qualified immunity doctrine shielded police from accountability, institutionalizing impunity.

V. Post-9/11 and the Security State

The 9/11 attacks were a jackpot for state power.

USA PATRIOT Act (2001)

• Expanded surveillance: secret FISA courts, roving wiretaps, bulk data collection.
• Gag orders on businesses.
• National Security Letters bypassed judges.

Department of Homeland Security

TSA, ICE, and massive information-sharing bureaucracies emerged overnight. “Temporary” measures became permanent.

NSA Surveillance

Revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, the NSA collected the phone records, emails, and browsing histories of millions of Americans. Government claimed safety; what it built was a turnkey surveillance system.

Militarized Policing

Post-9/11 programs funneled billions in surplus military equipment to local police—armored vehicles, drones, tactical rifles. Ferguson, Missouri (2014) showed the absurd result: small-town cops in desert camo aiming rifles at protestors.

VI. COVID-19 and the New Face of Emergency Powers

The pandemic proved just how fast liberty collapses when fear takes over.

• Lockdowns: businesses shuttered by decree.
• Mandates: vaccination as a condition of work or travel.
• Censorship: social media aligned with government agencies to suppress dissenting views.
• Contact tracing and passports: prototypes for digital compliance systems.

For the first time in U.S. history, Americans were confined in their homes under threat of arrest without individualized suspicion. Courts mostly upheld it.

VII. Cultural Shifts: From Liberty to Permission

Generations raised under constant “threats” (terrorism, drugs, pandemics) now accept surveillance and control as normal. Cameras in every store, checkpoints at every airport, ID requirements for ordinary life—it’s all framed as “for your safety.”

The cultural expectation has flipped:

• Founding America: Government must justify its power.
• Modern America: Citizens must justify their freedom.

VIII. Case Studies and Timeline

Timeline of Tyranny in Law and Practice

IX. Conclusion: The Road Ahead

The founders warned against standing armies, unchecked executive power, and laws so complex no citizen could navigate them. Every generation has ignored the warning a little more, until now Americans live in what looks like a soft police state: heavily surveilled, heavily policed, and heavily regulated.

The danger isn’t just what government does today—it’s the infrastructure it has built. Surveillance databases, biometric systems, and militarized police units don’t vanish when the crisis ends. They wait for the next crisis.

The choice is stark: reclaim natural rights and impose strict limits on government, or continue the slide into a digital cage dressed up as democracy.

X. Appendices

Founding Warnings

• James Madison: “The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”
• Thomas Jefferson: “When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”

Key Court Cases

• Marbury v. Madison (1803) – judicial review.
• Katz v. United States (1967) – expectation of privacy doctrine.
• Terry v. Ohio (1968) – stop-and-frisk.
• Hudson v. Michigan (2006) – weakened exclusionary rule.

Bibliography (selected)

• The Federalist Papers (Nos. 10, 47, 51, 84).
• Congressional Records on the Patriot Act (2001).
• Supreme Court Opinions, Terry v. Ohio (1968).
• Snowden, Edward. Permanent Record.
• Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide.
• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow.

MKitch3|Sept. 23,2325

“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”  
 -Thomas Jefferson

Every generation of Americans swore it would never happen here. Tyranny was something our ancestors fought to throw off, not something we’d ever embrace. But here we are, surveilled and regulated, treated like suspects by our own government. What changed? Everything. And it didn’t happen overnight. This is a post that came out of my white paper on the subject.

The Founders’ Blueprint

America was born in rebellion against a king who taxed, surveilled, and sent soldiers to knock on doors. The Bill of Rights was supposed to keep that nightmare from returning. Free speech, private property, the right to bear arms, the guarantee that no soldier or bureaucrat could barge into your life without cause—those were meant to be permanent guardrails.

It didn’t take long to start breaking them. The Alien & Sedition Acts (1798) literally made criticizing the government illegal. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, locking up Americans without trial. Cracks formed almost immediately.

Government’s Growth Addiction

Crisis became the permanent excuse. The Civil War gave us income tax and centralized federal power. The Progressive Era gave us the IRS, Federal Reserve, and FBI. FDR’s New Deal locked in a federal managerial state that never shrank back. Each step was sold as “temporary.” None of it was.

Birth of the Police State

Prohibition turned ordinary Americans into criminals. Federal agents stormed homes, raided bars, and perfected surveillance tactics.

By the 1960s, the FBI was running COINTELPRO, spying on civil rights leaders and antiwar activists. Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped and harassed by his own government.

Then came the War on Drugs. SWAT teams, civil asset forfeiture, mass incarceration—it all became normal. The courts shrugged and gave police qualified immunity, making them nearly untouchable.

The 9/11 Jackpot

If you were in Washington on September 12, 2001, you had a golden ticket. Politicians rushed the Patriot Act into law, and suddenly secret courts, mass surveillance, and indefinite detention were standard operating procedure.

The Department of Homeland Security was created, the TSA became permanent, and the NSA quietly built a surveillance system that made East Germany’s Stasi look like amateurs. Local police got armored vehicles and battlefield rifles. By the time Ferguson erupted in 2014, America’s cops looked more like an occupying army than public servants.

COVID and the Emergency State

If 9/11 built the hardware, COVID-19 installed the software. Americans were confined to their homes under threat of arrest. Businesses were shuttered by decree. Speech questioning the rules was censored online. Vaccine passports and contact tracing apps were rolled out like beta tests for a digital permission system.

For the first time, it became obvious: government no longer needed war or terrorism to justify emergency powers. Public health worked just fine.

From Liberty to Permission

The cultural shift might be the most dangerous part. The founders assumed government must always justify its power. Today, the expectation has flipped. Citizens are forced to justify their freedom. Want to travel, work, or even speak online? Prove you have permission.

The Timeline of Tyranny

• 1798: Alien & Sedition Acts criminalize dissent.
• 1861: Lincoln suspends habeas corpus.
• 1917: Espionage Act punishes antiwar speech.
• 1933: New Deal locks in permanent bureaucracy.
• 1971: War on Drugs militarizes policing.
• 2001: Patriot Act launches mass surveillance.
• 2020: COVID lockdowns confine Americans in their own homes.

Where We’re Headed

America has become what it once resisted: a heavily surveilled, heavily policed society where the rule of law is too often the rule of fear. The infrastructure for tyranny already exists—databases, cameras, drones, militarized police forces. All it needs is the next “emergency” to tighten the screws.

The choice now is simple. Reclaim the founder’s suspicion of government, or learn to live inside a digital cage disguised as democracy.

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MKitch3|Sept. 23,2025

This was written in 2008/2009. 

Since the late 1990s, federal agents have reported systemic communications security breaches at the Department of Justice, FBI, DEA, the State Department, and the White House. Several of the alleged breaches, these agents say, can be traced to two hi-tech communications companies, Verint Inc. (formerly Comverse Infosys), and Amdocs Ltd., that respectively provide major wiretap and phone billing/record-keeping software contracts for the US government.

Together, Verint and Amdocs form part of the backbone of the government’s domestic intelligence surveillance technology. Both companies are based in Israel – having arisen to prominence from that country’s cornering of the information technology market – and are heavily funded by the Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence (both companies have a long history of board memberships dominated by current and former Israeli military and intelligence officers). Verint is considered the world leader in “electronic interception” and hence an ideal private sector candidate for wiretap outsourcing. Amdocs is the world’s largest billing service for telecommunications, with some $2.8 billion in revenues in 2007, offices worldwide, and clients that include the top 25 phone companies in the United States that together handle 90 percent of all call traffic among US residents. 

The companies’ operations, sources suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies exploiting encrypted trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers (particularly organized crime). “The fact of the vulnerability of our telecom backbone is indisputable,” says a high level US intelligence officer who has monitored the fears among federal agents. “How it came to pass, why nothing has been done, who has done what – these are the incendiary questions.” If the allegations are true, the electronic communications gathered up by the NSA and other US intelligence agencies might be falling into the hands of a foreign government. Reviewing the available evidence, Robert David Steele, a former CIA case officer and today one of the foremost international proponents for “public intelligence in the public interest,” tells me that “Israeli penetration of the entire US telecommunications system means that NSA’s warrantless wiretapping actually means Israeli warrantless wiretapping.”

As early as 1999, the National Security Agency issued a warning that records of US government telephone calls were ending up in foreign hands – Israel’s, in particular. In 2002, assistant US Attorney General Robert F. Diegelman issued an eyes only memo on the matter to the chief information technology (IT) officers at the Department of Justice. IT officers oversee everything from the kind of cell phones agents carry to the wiretap equipment they use in the field; their defining purpose is secure communications. Diegelman’s memo was a reiteration, with overtones of reprimand, of a new IT policy instituted a year earlier, in July 2001, in an internal Justice order titled “2640.2D Information Technology Security.” Order 2640.2D stated that “Foreign Nationals shall not be authorized to access or assist in the development, operation, management or maintenance of Department IT systems.” This might not seem much to blink at in the post-9/11 intel and security overhaul. Yet 2640.2D was issued a full two months before the Sept. 11 attacks. What group or groups of foreign nationals had close access to IT systems at the Department of Justice? Israelis, according to officials in law enforcement. One former Justice Department computer crimes prosecutor tells me, speaking on background, “I’ve heard that the Israelis can listen in to our calls.”

Retired CIA counterterrorism and counterintelligence officer Philip Giraldi says this is par for the course in the history of Israeli penetrations in the US He notes that Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage” – Israel is second only to China in stealing US business secrets. The 2005 FBI report states, for example, “Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States. These collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizable armaments industry.” A key Israeli method, warns the FBI report, is computer intrusion.

In the big picture of US government spying on Americans, the story ties into 1994 legislation called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which effected a sea-change in methods of electronic surveillance. Gone are the days when wiretaps were conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA mandated sweeping new powers of surveillance for the digital age, by linking remote computers into the routers and hubs of telecom firms – a spyware apparatus linked in real-time, all the time, to American telephones and modems. CALEA made spy equipment an inextricable ligature in our telephonic life. Top officials at the FBI pushed for the legislation, claiming it would improve security, but many field agents have spoken up to complain that CALEA has done exactly the opposite. The data-mining techniques employed by NSA in its wiretapping exploits could not have succeeded without the technology mandated by CALEA. It could be argued that CALEA is the hidden heart of the NSA wiretap scandal.

THE VERINT CONNECTION

According to former CIA officer Giraldi and other US intelligence sources, software manufactured and maintained by Verint, Inc. handles most of American law enforcement’s wiretaps. Says Giraldi: “Phone calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to US investigators by Verint, which claims that it has to be ‘hands on’ with its equipment to maintain the system.” Giraldi also notes Verint is reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its R&D costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. According to Giraldi, the extent of the use of Verint technology “is considered classified,” but sources have spoken out and told Giraldi they are worried about the security of Verint wiretap systems. The key concern, says Giraldi, is the issue of a “trojan” embedded in the software.

A Trojan in information security hardware/software is a backdoor that can be accessed remotely by parties who normally would not have access to the secure system. Allegations of massive Trojan spying have rocked the Israeli business community in recent years. An AP article in 2005 noted, “Top Israeli blue chip companies…are suspected of using illicit surveillance software to steal information from their rivals and enemies.” Over 40 companies have come under scrutiny. “It is the largest cybercrime case in Israeli history,” Boaz Guttmann, a veteran cybercrimes investigator with the Israeli national police, tells me. “Trojan horse espionage is part of the way of life of companies in Israel. It’s a culture of spying.”

This is of course the culture on which the US depends for much of its secure software for data encryption and telephonic security. “There’s been a lot discussion of how much we should trust security products by Israeli telecom firms,” says Philip Zimmerman, one of the legendary pioneers of encryption technology (Zimmerman invented the cryptographic and privacy authentication system known as Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, now one of the basic modern standards for communications encryption). “Generally speaking, I wouldn’t trust stuff made overseas for data security,” says Zimmerman. “A guy at NSA InfoSec” – the information security division of the National Security Agency – “once told me, ‘Foreign-made crypto is our nightmare.’ But to be fair, as our domestic electronics industry becomes weaker and weaker, foreign-made becomes inevitable.” Look at where the expertise is, Zimmerman adds: Among the ranks of the International Association for Cryptological Research, which meets annually, there is a higher percentage of Israelis than any other nationality. The Israeli-run Verint is today the provider of telecom interception systems deployed in over 50 countries.

Carl Cameron, chief politics correspondent at Fox News Channel, is one of the few reporters to look into federal agents’ deepening distress over possible trojans embedded in Verint technology. In a wide-ranging four-part investigation into Israeli-linked espionage that aired in December 2001, Cameron made a number of startling discoveries regarding Verint, then known as Comverse Infosys. Sources told Cameron that “while various FBI inquiries into Comverse have been conducted over the years,” the inquiries had “been halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks.” Cameron also noted a 1999 internal FCC document indicating that “several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system.” Much of this access was facilitated through “remote maintenance.”

Immediately following the Cameron report, Comverse Infosys changed its name to Verint, saying the company was “maturing.” (The company issued no response to Cameron’s allegations, nor did it threaten a lawsuit.) Meanwhile, security officers at DEA, an adjunct of the Justice Department, began examining the agency’s own relationship with Comverse/Verint. In 1997, DEA transformed its wiretap infrastructure with the $25 million procurement from Comverse/Verint of a technology called “T2S2” – “translation and transcription support services” – with Comverse/Verint contracted to provide the hardware and software, plus “support services, training, upgrades, enhancements and options throughout the life of the contract,” according to the “contracts and acquisitions” notice posted on the DEA’s website. This was unprecedented. Prior to 1997, DEA staff used equipment that was developed and maintained in-house.

But now Cameron’s report raised some ugly questions of vulnerability in T2S2.

The director of security programs at DEA, Heidi Raffanello, was rattled enough to issue an internal communiqué on the matter, dated Dec. 18, 2001, four days after the final installment in the Cameron series. Referencing the Fox News report, she worried that “Comverse remote maintenance” was “not addressed in the C&A [contracts and acquisitions] process.” She also cited the concerns in Justice Department order 2640.2D, and noted that the “Administrator” – meaning then DEA head Asa Hutchinson – had been briefed. Then there was this stunner: “It remains unclear if Comverse personnel are security cleared, and if so, who are they and what type of clearances are on record….Bottom line we should have caught it.” On its face, the Raffanello memo is a frightening glimpse into a bureaucracy caught with its pants down.

American law enforcement was not alone in suspecting T2S2 equipment purchased from Comverse/Verint. In November 2002, sources in the Dutch counterintelligence community began airing what they claimed was “strong evidence that the Israeli secret service has uncontrolled access to confidential tapping data collected by the Dutch police and intelligence services,” according to the Dutch broadcast radio station Evangelische Omroep (EO). In January 2003, the respected Dutch technology and computing magazine, c’t, ran a follow-up to the EO scoop, headlined “Dutch Tapping Room not Kosher.” The article began: “All tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force…is insecure and is leaking information to Israel.” The writer, Paul Wouters, goes on to discuss the T2S2 tap-ware “delivered to the government in the last few years by the Israeli company Verint,” and quoted several cryptography experts on the viability of remote monitoring of encrypted “blackbox” data. Wouters writes of this “blackbox cryptography”:

“…a very important part of strong cryptography is a good random source. Without a proper random generator, or worse, with an intentionally crippled random generator, the resulting ciphertext becomes trivial to break. If there is one single unknown chip involved with the random generation, such as a hardware accelerator chip, all bets are off….If you can trust the hardware and you have access to the source code, then it should theoretically be possible to verify the system. This, however, can just not be done without the source code.”

Yet, as Wouters was careful to add, “when the equipment was bought from the Israelis, it was agreed that no one except [Verint] personnel was authorized to touch the systems….Source code would never be available to anyone.”

Cryptography pioneer Philip Zimmerman warns that “you should never trust crypto if the source code isn’t published. Open source code means two things: if there are deliberate backdoors in the crypto, peer review will reveal those backdoors. If there are inadvertent bugs in the crypto, they too will be discovered. Whether the weaknesses are by accident or design, they will be found. If the weakness is by design, they will not want to publish the source code. Some of the best products we know have been subject to open source review: Linux; Apache. The most respected crypto products have been tested through open source. The little padlock in the corner when you visit a browser? You’re going through a protocol called Secure Socket Layer. Open source tested and an Internet standard. FireFox, the popular and highly secure browser, is all open source.”

THE CALEA CONNECTION

None of US law enforcement’s problems with Amdocs and Verint could have come to pass without the changes mandated by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which, as noted, sought to lock spyware into telecom networks. CALEA, to cite the literature, requires that terrestrial carriers, cellular phone services and other telecom entities enable the government to intercept “all wire and oral communications carried by the carrier concurrently with their transmission.” T2S2 technology fit the bill perfectly: Tied into the network, T2S2 bifurcates the line without interrupting the data-stream (a T2S2 bifurcation is considered virtually undetectable). One half of the bifurcated line is recorded and stored in a remote tapping room; the other half continues on its way from your mouth or keyboard to your friend’s. (What is “T2S2”? To simplify: The S2 computer collects and encrypts the data; the T2 receives and decrypts.)

CALEA was touted as a law enforcement triumph, the work of decades of lobbying by FBI. Director Louis Freeh went so far as to call it the bureau’s “highest legislative priority.” Indeed, CALEA was the widest expansion of the government’s electronic surveillance powers since the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which mandated carefully limited conditions for wiretaps. Now the government could use coercive powers in ordering telecom providers to “devise solutions” to law enforcement’s “emerging technology-generated problems” (imposing a $10,000 per day penalty on non-compliant carriers). The government’s hand would be permanently inserted into the design of the nation’s telecom infrastructure. Law professor Lillian BeVier, of the University of Virginia, writes extensively of the problems inherent to CALEA. “The rosy scenario imagined by the drafters cannot survive a moment’s reflection,” BeVier observes. “While it is conventionally portrayed as ‘but the latest chapter in the thirty year history of the federal wiretap laws,’ CALEA is not simply the next installment of a technologically impelled statutory evolution. Instead, in terms of the nature and magnitude of the interests it purports to ‘compromise’ and the industry it seeks to regulate, in terms of the extent to which it purports to coerce private sector solutions to public sector problems, and in terms of the foothold it gives government to control the design of telecommunications networks, the Act is a paradigm shift. On close and disinterested inspection, moreover, CALEA appears to embody potentially wrong-headed sacrifices of privacy principles, flawed and incomplete conceptions of law enforcement’s ends and means, and an imperfect appreciation of the incompatible incentives of the players in the game that would inevitably be played in the process of its implementation.” (emphasis mine)

The real novelty – and the danger – of CALEA is that telecom networks are today configured so that they are vulnerable to surveillance. “We’ve deliberately weakened the computer and phone networks, making them much less secure, much more vulnerable both to legal surveillance and illegal hacking,” says former DOJ cybercrimes prosecutor Mark Rasch. “Everybody is much less secure in their communications since the adopting of CALEA. So how are you going to have secure communications? You have to secure the communications themselves, because you cannot have a secure network. To do this, you need encryption. What CALEA forced businesses and individuals to do is go to third parties to purchase encryption technology. What is the major country that the US purchases IT encryption from overseas? I would say it’s a small Middle Eastern democracy. What we’ve done is the worst of all worlds. We’ve made sure that most communications are subject to hacking and interception by bad guys. At the same time, the bad guys – organized crime, terrorist operations – can very easily encrypt their communications.” It is notable that the first CALEA-compliant telecom systems installed in the US were courtesy of Verint Inc.

THE AMDOCS CONNECTION

If a phone is dialed in the US, Amdocs Ltd. likely has a record of it, which includes who you dialed and how long you spoke. This is known as transactional call data. Amdocs’ biggest customers in the US are AT&T and Verizon, which have collaborated widely with the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping programs. Transactional call data has been identified as a key element in NSA data mining to look for “suspicious” patterns in communications.

Over the last decade, Amdocs has been the target of several investigations looking into whether individuals within the company shared sensitive US government data with organized crime elements and Israeli intelligence services. Beginning in 1997, the FBI conducted a far-flung inquiry into alleged spying by an Israeli employee of Amdocs, who worked on a telephone billing program purchased by the CIA. According to Paul Rodriguez and J. Michael Waller, of Insight Magazine, which broke the story in May of 2000, the targeted Israeli had apparently also facilitated the tapping of telephone lines at the Clinton White House (recall Monica Lewinsky’s testimony before Ken Starr: the president, she claimed, had warned her that “a foreign embassy” was listening to their phone sex, though Clinton under oath later denied saying this). More than two dozen intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other officials told Insight that a “daring operation,” run by Israeli intelligence, had “intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of the most sensitive lines of the US government on an ongoing basis.” Insight’s chief investigative reporter, Paul Rodriguez, told me in an e-mail that the May 2000 spy probe story “was (and is) one of the strangest I’ve ever worked on, considering the state of alert, concern and puzzlement” among federal agents. According to the Insight report, FBI investigators were particularly unnerved over discovering the targeted Israeli subcontractor had somehow gotten his hands on the FBI’s “most sensitive telephone numbers, including the Bureau’s ‘black’ lines used for wiretapping.” “Some of the listed numbers,” the Insight article added, “were lines that FBI counterintelligence used to keep track of the suspected Israeli spy operation. The hunted were tracking the hunters.” Rodriguez confirmed the panic this caused in American Intel”It’s a huge security nightmare,” one senior US official told him. “The implications are severe,” said a second official. “All I can tell you is that we think we know how it was done,” a third intelligence executive told Rodriguez. “That alone is serious enough, but it’s the unknown that has such deep consequences.” No charges, however, were made public in the case. (What happened behind the scenes depends on who you talk to in law enforcement: When FBI counterintelligence sought a warrant for the Israeli subcontractor, the Justice Department strangely refused to cooperate, and in the end no warrant was issued. FBI investigators were baffled.)

London Sunday Times reporter Uzi Mahnaimi quotes sources in Tel Aviv saying that during this period e-mails from President Clinton had also been intercepted by Israeli intelligence. Mahnaimi’s May 2000 article reveals that the operation involved “hacking into White House computer systems during intense speculation about the direction of the peace process.” Israeli intelligence had allegedly infiltrated a company called Telrad, subcontracted by Nortel, to develop a communications system for the White House. According to the Sunday Times, “Company managers were said to have been unaware that virtually undetectable chips installed during manufacture made it possible for outside agents to tap into the flow of data from the White House.”

In 1997, detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department, working in tandem with the Secret Service, FBI, and DEA, found themselves suffering a similar inexplicable collapse in communications security. LAPD was investigating Israeli organized crime: drug runners and credit card thieves based in Israel and L.A., with tentacles in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, and Egypt. The name of the crime group and its members remains classified in “threat assessment” papers this reporter obtained from LAPD, but the documents list in some detail the colorful scope of the group’s operations: $1.4 million stolen from Fidelity Investments in Boston through sophisticated computer fraud; extortion and kidnapping of Israelis in LA and New York; cocaine distribution in connection with Italian, Russian, Armenian and Mexican organized crime; money laundering; and murder. The group also had access to extremely sophisticated counter-surveillance technology and data, which was a disaster for LAPD. According to LAPD internal documents, the Israeli crime group obtained the unlisted home phone, cell phone, and pager numbers of some 500 of LAPD’s narcotics investigators, as well as the contact information for scores of federal agents – black info, numbers unknown even to the investigators’ kin. The Israelis even set up wiretaps of LAPD investigators, grabbing from cell-phones and landlines conversations with other agents – FBI and DEA, mostly – whose names and phone numbers were also traced and grabbed.

LAPD was horrified, and as the word got out of the seeming total breakdown in security, the shock spread to agents at DEA, FBI and even CIA, who together spearheaded an investigation. It turned out that the source of much of this black Intel could be traced to a company called J&J Beepers, which was getting its phone numbers from a billing service that happened to be a subsidiary of Amdocs.

A source familiar with the inquiries into Amdocs put to me several theories regarding the allegations of espionage against the company. “Back in the early 1970s, when it became clear that AT&T was going to be broken up and that there was an imminent information and technology revolution, Israel understood that it had a highly-educated and highly-worldly population and it made a few calculated economic and diplomatic discoveries,” the source says. “One was that telecommunications was something they could do: because it doesn’t require natural resources, but just intellect, training and cash. They became highly involved in telecommunications. Per capita, Israel is probably the strongest telecommunications nation in the world. AT&T break-up occurs in 1984; Internet technology explodes; and Israel has all of these companies aggressively buying up contracts in the form of companies like Amdocs. Amdocs started out as a tiny company and now it’s the biggest billing service for telecommunications in the world. They get this massive telecommunications network underway. Like just about everything in Israel, it’s a government sponsored undertaking.

“So it’s been argued that Amdocs was using its billing records as an intelligence-gathering exercise because its executive board over the years has been heavily peopled by retired and current members of the Israeli government and military. They used this as an opportunity to collect information about worldwide telephone calls. As an intelligence-gathering phenomenon, an analyst with an MIT degree in algorithms would rather have 50 pages of who called who than 50 hours of actual conversation. Think about conversations with friends, husbands, wives. That raw information doesn’t mean anything. But if there’s a pattern of 30 phone calls over the course of a day, that can mean a lot. It’s a much simpler algorithm.”

Another anonymous source – a former CIA operative – tells me that US intelligence agents who have aired their concerns about Verint and Amdocs have found themselves attacked from all sides. “Once it’s learned that an individual is doing footwork on this [the Verint/Amdocs question], he or she is typically identified somehow as a troublemaker, an instigator, and is hammered mercilessly,” says the former CIA operative. “Typically, what happens is the individual finds him or herself in a scenario where their retirement is jeopardized – and worse. The fact that if you simply take a look at this question, all of a sudden you’re an Arabist or anti-Semitic – it’s pure baloney, because I will tell you first-hand that people whose heritage lies back in that country have heavily worked this matter. You can’t buy that kind of dedication.”

The former CIA operative adds, “There is no defined policy, at this time, for how to deal with this [security issues involving Israel] – other than wall it off, contain it. It’s not cutting it. Not after 9/11. The funeral pyre that burned on for months at the bottom of the rubble told a lot of people they did not need to be ‘politically correct.’ The communications nexuses [i.e. Amdocs/Verint] didn’t occur yesterday; they started many years ago. And that’s a major embarrassment to organizations that would like to say they’re on top of things and not co-opted or compromised. As you start to work this, you soon learn that many people have either looked the other way or have been co-opted along the way. Some people, when they figure out what has occurred, are highly embarrassed to realize that they’ve been duped. Because many of them are bureaucrats, they don’t want to be made to look as stupid as they are. So they just go along with it. Sometimes, it’s just that simple.”

Source: http://www.antiwar.com/orig/ketcham.php?articleid=13506

by Christopher Ketcham 

MKitch3|Sept. 22,2025

Every country has its favorite myths. Ours are red, white, blue, and stamped with two words that people swear mean the same thing: freedom and liberty. They don’t. They never did. And the fact we keep pretending otherwise is one of the reasons American law, politics, and daily life have been one long tug-of-war between what we think we’re promised and what we’re actually allowed.

The Bare Bones: Legal and Philosophical Roots

Freedom is the raw condition of being unconstrained. It’s the natural state—what philosophers call a negative right, an absence of interference.

Liberty is freedom that has been recognized, structured, and (inevitably) limited by law. It’s not the absence of restraint but the protection against arbitrary restraint.

Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), defined liberty as “the absence of external impediments.” John Locke upped the ante, calling liberty a natural right, but one that had to exist under law for civil society to function.

Black’s Law Dictionary draws the line clean:

• Freedom: “The absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint.”

• Liberty: “Freedom from arbitrary restraint, especially by government.”

So freedom is the wild field. Liberty is the fenced pasture the state swears you can run around in.

Founding Era: The Word Choices That Still Haunt Us

• Declaration of Independence (1776): Jefferson wrote “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He didn’t say “freedom.” Liberty here was a philosophical ideal, imported straight from Locke.

• Constitution (1787): The preamble promised to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” The Bill of Rights mixed the two: freedom of speech, freedom of the press—but framed them as liberties that government couldn’t touch.

• Federalist Papers (1787-88): Madison and Hamilton tossed the words around strategically. Madison warned that liberty without structure dissolves into anarchy. Hamilton argued too much freedom would shred the Union.

The Founders, in short, used both words with purpose. Freedom was a condition; liberty was a principle.

The Timeline: Law, Politics, and the Shrinking (or Expanding) Circle

1798 – The Alien and Sedition Acts

• Congress criminalized criticism of the government. Freedom of speech existed in theory; liberty was mutilated in practice. Jefferson and Madison pushed back in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, claiming liberty was being crushed by federal overreach.

1860s – The Civil War and the 13th Amendment

• Lincoln’s rhetoric danced between liberty and freedom. He said at Gettysburg the war would bring a “new birth of freedom.” The legal system codified liberty for the formerly enslaved—but reality lagged a century behind.

1866 – Civil Rights Act

• Congress declared all persons born in the U.S. citizens with “full and equal benefit of all laws.” Freedom on paper. Liberty in practice? Still throttled by Black Codes and Jim Crow.

1917–1918 – The Espionage and Sedition Acts

• World War I saw dissent criminalized again. Eugene Debs went to prison for anti-war speech. The Supreme Court (in Schenck v. United States, 1919) blessed it, birthing the “shouting fire in a crowded theater” doctrine. Freedom got an asterisk.

1941 – FDR’s Four Freedoms Speech

• Roosevelt reframed freedom globally: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. Two were classic liberties; two were positive rights requiring massive government action.

1960s – Civil Rights Movement

• Martin Luther King Jr. talked about freedom ringing from every mountainside, but the fight was about liberty—forcing the state to honor rights it had already promised. Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) tried to close the gap.

2001 – The Patriot Act

• Freedom shrank in the name of security. Liberty was recast as something you have only if you’re not suspected of terrorism. The state’s leash tightened.

2020 – Pandemic Restrictions

• “Freedom” became the battle cry of those resisting mandates. “Liberty” became the lawyered-up justification for state power: public health outweighed personal autonomy.

Quotes That Show the Creep

• Patrick Henry (1775): “Give me liberty, or give me death!” — fiery, but limited to a select class.

• Abraham Lincoln (1864): “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty.” — still true.

• Benjamin Franklin (1759): “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” — a warning ignored every generation.

• Justice Brandeis (1928, Olmstead v. U.S. dissent): “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

Freedom vs. Liberty in the Real World

• Speech: Freedom means you can say what you want. Liberty means the courts decide if what you said qualifies as “protected.”

• Travel: Freedom suggests you can move wherever. Liberty is why you still need ID at TSA and a passport at borders.

• Property: Freedom says you own your land. Liberty is the zoning board telling you what you can’t build on it.

Why It Still Matters

Freedom is the banner. Liberty is the contract. One fires the imagination, the other locks horns with reality. Every major American conflict—political, social, or cultural—sits in that gap.

• Too much freedom without structure = chaos (see: mob rule).

• Too much liberty without freedom = authoritarianism dressed in legalese.

The Founders knew it, Lincoln knew it, Roosevelt twisted it, and we’re still choking on the difference.

The Punchline

Freedom is what you claim.

Liberty is what survives the lawyers, the judges, and the politicians.

The American project, at its best, is keeping those two words close enough that citizens don’t feel conned. At its worst, it’s watching the distance grow until freedom becomes rhetoric, and liberty becomes permission slips.

MKitch3|Sept. 21, 2025

This is my white paper of the public research on CBDC system design across central banks, BIS/IMF handbooks and large technical pilots. This research is a year in the making and still has a long way to go. 

Executive summary

Public research converges on a few core CBDC design choices that determine performance, privacy, resilience and policy control. Across dozens of proofs-of-concept and pilots, three patterns recur: two-tier distribution with public–private roles; modular architectures that mix centralized and distributed components; and granular policy controls implemented via wallets and APIs rather than “programmable money” embedded in the ledger itself. Offline payments remain achievable but complex; privacy can be enhanced with selective disclosure or Chaum-style eCash techniques; and cross-border efficiency gains are real in wholesale settings, where PvP/DvP workflows and atomic settlement reduce settlement risk. 

1) Design goals and constraints

Policy objectives

Typical goals: maintain monetary sovereignty and singleness of money, improve payments resilience/competition, enhance financial inclusion and cross-border efficiency, and safeguard privacy proportional to AML/CFT obligations. Recent official surveys find 94% of central banks exploring CBDCs, with retail work most advanced and a sharp uptick in wholesale pilots. 

Non-functional requirements

CBDC systems target very high throughput and low latency, fault tolerance, cyber resilience, and robust governance. BIS emphasizes modular system design and the feasibility of combining centralized and decentralized components. 

2) Core architectural choices

2.1 Distribution model

• Single-tier: central bank provides wallets and services directly. Simple but burdens private sector innovation and scale.
• Two-tier (prevailing model): central bank runs the core infrastructure/ledger; intermediaries handle customer-facing services, onboarding, compliance and innovation. BIS Project Rosalind prototypes an API layer that exposes central bank ledger functions to private providers in a two-tier model.  

2.2 Ledger and processing

• Centralized, sharded processors: Project Hamilton (MIT/Boston Fed) shows that a centrally managed, in-memory transaction processor can reach very high throughput while keeping the ledger technology agnostic; the codebase (OpenCBDC) demonstrates alternative data structures.  
• DLT or hybrid: Many wholesale pilots (Helvetia, Cedar, Jura, mBridge, Dunbar) use permissioned DLT to enable atomic PvP/DvP across institutions and currencies, often with each currency on its own ledger bridged by orchestration.  

2.3 Token vs account abstractions

Designs vary between account-based models, UTXO-style tokens, or hybrids. BIS projects explore UTXO semantics for retail tokens (Rosalind glossary), while other work abstracts accounts at the API layer and treats “balance changes” as events. 

2.4 API-first architecture

Rosalind frames an extensible API layer to standardize integration, enable innovation, and enforce policy via access-controlled endpoints rather than custom ledger logic. 

3) Privacy, data minimization, and compliance

3.1 Spectrum of privacy

Central bank papers stress that CBDC privacy is not binary. Designers can hide data from some actors while revealing to others under due process, using architectural, cryptographic and governance controls. 

3.2 Techniques

• Selective disclosure & PETs: Bank of Canada surveys PETs (ZK proofs, MPC, TEEs, differential privacy) for CBDC contexts, noting maturing but still limited production readiness.  
• Chaumian eCash prototypes: BIS Project Tourbillon explores quantum-resistant eCash variants that offer payer anonymity while maintaining anti-counterfeiting controls and scalability.  
• Policy direction in major jurisdictions: ECB’s preparation-phase reports emphasize “high privacy” for online and offline transactions, with holding limits and offline design under development. UK work considers privacy-enhancing approaches for a potential digital pound.  

3.3 AML/CFT and supervision

Policy levers tend to sit in wallet layers and onboarding processes; APIs can enforce tiered limits, KYC regimes, and transaction monitoring, preserving central bank separation from personal data where politically required. Rosalind explicitly targets compliance while retaining a two-tier model. 

4) Offline payments

Offline is defined as value transfer between devices without network connectivity. BIS Project Polaris provides the de facto handbook and a higher-level design guide, concluding there is no one-size-fits-all solution; solutions require secure hardware, tamper resistance, risk caps, lifecycles, and procedures for re-sync and double-spend handling. Most offerings are not yet live at scale. 

5) Resilience and security lessons from live deployments

• DCash outage (ECCU): a region-wide interruption was traced to an expired certificate in the Hyperledger Fabric deployment, underlining certificate management and operational discipline as critical to CBDC availability.  
• Sand Dollar (Bahamas): ongoing modernization aims to interoperate with a national fast payments platform; early research focused on inclusion outcomes and payment efficiency.  
• eNaira (Nigeria): initial adoption and awareness challenges documented by IMF and CBN; architecture follows a two-tier DLT model with phased rollout.  
• JAM-DEX (Jamaica): launch supported by onboarding incentives; adoption strategy research highlights the role of targeted bonuses.  

6) Cross-border and interoperability designs

6.1 Wholesale corridors

• mBridge: multi-central-bank platform for instant cross-border settlement reached MVP in 2024; BIS subsequently stepped back, leaving central bank partners to continue development.  
• Jura & Helvetia: SNB/Banque de France/BIS experiments proved PvP/DvP settlement with wCBDC integrated into banks’ core systems and legal frameworks.  
• Cedar (NY Fed) & Cedar x Ubin+: FX spot settlement on DLT reduced settlement time to seconds in simulated environments, exploring multi-ledger atomicity.  
• Dunbar: common multi-CBDC platform design and governance insights for cross-border payments across several central banks.  

6.2 Retail corridors

• Icebreaker: hub-and-spoke model connecting domestic retail CBDCs for cross-currency payments with FX competition at the hub.  

7) Retail platform and API design

• Rosalind (BIS/BoE): demonstrates how an API layer can mediate wallet functions, consent, and policy rules while keeping the core ledger minimal; glossary covers UTXO, RTP/ARTP, verifiable credentials.  
• Sela (HKMA/Bank of Israel/BIS): introduces an “access enabler” intermediary to widen competition while maintaining cybersecurity and cash-like properties; non-banks can connect directly to the central bank ledger under this model.  
• Aurum (HKMA/BIS): two-tier system issuing both intermediated CBDC and a CBDC-backed stablecoin, informing Hong Kong’s e-HKD research.  

8) The digital euro, digital pound and US policy research

• Digital euro: ECB is in a preparation phase focusing on high privacy, offline capability, and holding limits while EU legislation progresses. Recent communications press lawmakers to accelerate the legal framework.  
• Digital pound: BoE/HM Treasury 2023 consultation and 2024 response outline a two-tier model and emphasize privacy by design; separate work with MIT DCI explores privacy-enhancing techniques.  
• United States: Federal Reserve’s 2022 discussion paper and public comment summary frame benefits, risks and design considerations without endorsing issuance. Technical research at the New York Fed and Boston Fed continues via Cedar and Hamilton.  

9) Technology building blocks

• Identity & credentials: tiered KYC with verifiable credentials; policy knobs (limits, age-restricted features) applied at wallet layer.  
• Cryptography: ZK proofs, VOPRFs and blind signatures are under active evaluation; eCash variants show strong privacy for payer anonymity with anti-counterfeiting controls.  
• Offline secure elements: secure enclaves/SE chips and tamper-resistant counters mitigate double-spend; reconciliation protocols cap offline risk exposure.  
• Message and data standards: ISO 20022 alignment and standardized APIs are recurring themes in BIS/IMF materials; resilience requires disciplined key, cert and secrets management, per DCash lessons.  

10) Governance, risk and operational readiness

• Cyber and operational resilience: IMF’s CBDC handbook chapters and notes focus on securing the ecosystem across central bank, intermediaries and vendors, including incident response, change control and supply-chain risks.  
• Legal positioning: EU is actively legislating a digital euro; UK and US remain in consultation/research phases. Wholesale pilots often operate under existing legal frameworks with central bank oversight.  

11) Open design debates (2025)

1. How much privacy is enough? Europe signals strong privacy commitments; technical PETs are improving but are not yet “turnkey” at national scale.  
2. Retail vs wholesale first: Many jurisdictions prioritize wholesale CBDC to resolve settlement risk and cross-border frictions; retail remains politically sensitive.  
3. Offline at scale: Feasible, but device security, risk caps, user UX and merchant hardware remain open challenges.  
4. Interoperability: Competing architectures exist for cross-border flows (hub-and-spoke vs shared platforms vs interlinked ledgers); governance is as hard as the tech.  
5. Role of central banks vs private sector: Sela and Rosalind show viable models for widening competition while preserving the central bank core.  

12) Comparative snapshot of flagship projects (non-exhaustive)

13) Practical design checklist (what consistently works)

1. Start two-tier with an API gateway between the core ledger and intermediaries; build policy in wallets and APIs.  
2. Target ledger minimalism, keep programmability at the edges; use event-driven integration to existing RTGS and fast-payments systems.  
3. Engineer privacy by design with selective disclosure and PETs; adopt jurisdiction-specific defaults and due-process access controls.  
4. Treat offline as a separate subsystem with its own risk, device, and lifecycle model; cap value and frequency while offline.  
5. Plan for cross-border early: decide whether to interlink domestic systems (Icebreaker), join shared platforms (mBridge/Dunbar), or pursue bilateral corridors (Jura/Helvetia).  
6. Don’t neglect ops: certificates, keys, and change control can take you down faster than code bugs, as DCash showed.  

14) Annotated bibliography (selected, by theme)

System architecture and APIs

• BIS: CBDCs – System design (2024). Modular, mix-and-match components; privacy as a key design axis. 

• BIS/BoE: Project Rosalind report (2023). API prototypes and wallet functionality. 

• MIT/Boston Fed: Project Hamilton / OpenCBDC (2022). High-performance retail core. 

Offline payments

• BIS Polaris: Handbook (May 2023) and High-level design guide (Oct 2023). Canonical offline design references. 

Privacy

• Bank of Canada: Privacy in CBDC technology (2020) and Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for CBDC (2025). 

• BIS: Project Tourbillon (2023). eCash with privacy/security/scalability. 

Wholesale cross-border

• NY Fed: Project Cedar (2022–23). FX PvP on DLT, multi-ledger atomicity. 

• BIS/partners: Project Dunbar (2022), mBridge (2022–24), Jura (2021), Helvetia (2022). 

Retail cross-border

• BIS: Project Icebreaker (2023). Hub-and-spoke rCBDC corridor with competitive FX. 

Regional deployments

• Bahamas: Sand Dollar modernization (2025) and inclusion studies. 

• Nigeria: eNaira design paper (2021) and IMF one-year review (2023). 

• Jamaica: adoption and incentive design. 

• ECCU: DCash outage post-mortems. 

Jurisdictional programs and law

• ECB digital euro prep-phase updates and legal track. 

• BoE/HMT digital pound consultation and responses. 

• Federal Reserve: Money and Payments (2022) + public comments summary (2023). 

15) Minimum viable blueprint for a retail CBDC (synthesized)

1. Core: centralized, scalable transaction processor with append-only log and deterministic state machine; HSM-backed keying and continuous audit. Hamilton-style throughput targets.  
2. Interfaces: Rosalind-style API gateway enforcing rate limits, consent, limits, tiered KYC and programmability via rules engines.  
3. Distribution: two-tier intermediaries (banks and non-banks; Sela access-enabler option) for onboarding, AML, customer support.  
4. Wallets: reference mobile wallet and SDK with PETs for selective disclosure and offline risk caps per Polaris.  
5. Resilience: multi-region active-active, cert automation, staged rollouts, chaos testing; explicit incident runbooks learned from DCash.  
6. Cross-border: interlinking strategy evaluated early (Icebreaker hub vs mBridge/shared corridors vs bilateral PvP/DvP like Jura).  

16) Appendix: quick pointers to primary sources

• BIS “CBDCs – System design” PDF (2024).  
• BIS Project Rosalind report (2023).  
• BIS Project Polaris handbook + design guide (2023).  
• MIT/Boston Fed Project Hamilton + OpenCBDC.  
• NY Fed Project Cedar Phase I and technical appendix.  
• BIS Projects mBridge, Dunbar, Jura, Helvetia; updates and PDFs.  
• ECB digital euro preparation-phase updates (2024).  
• BoE/HMT digital pound consultation (2023) and site (2025).  
• IMF CBDC Virtual Handbook: cybersecurity and design notes (2023–24).  
• Live deployments: Sand Dollar (Bahamas), eNaira (Nigeria), JAM-DEX (Jamaica), DCash (ECCU).  

Bottom line

If you distill the public research, the safest, most future-proof pattern is a two-tier, API-first system with a minimal core, PET-hardened wallets, explicit offline subsystem, and an early cross-border strategy. The rest is governance, ops and politics, which, as DCash and EU legislative delays remind everyone, can make or break the tech. 

MKitch3|Sept. 21,2025

You can’t open a financial journal or scroll a central banker’s LinkedIn feed without stumbling on four letters: CBDC. Central Bank Digital Currency.

Depending on who you ask, it’s either the evolution of money, or the most polite dystopia since QR codes on restaurant menus. But strip away the hype, and what you find is a mountain of research papers, pilots, and stress-tested prototypes. Taken together, they form a rough blueprint of what a CBDC system will actually look like if and when the switch gets flipped.

This piece digs into that blueprint—the tradeoffs, the pilots, and the recurring design patterns that matter.

Why are central banks obsessed with this?

At a high level, the goals are surprisingly sober:

• Keep control of monetary sovereignty as cash usage declines.

• Boost payment resilience in case commercial systems collapse.

• Nudge competition in retail payments where a handful of private players dominate.

• Explore inclusion and cheap cross-border rails that don’t take three days and a kidney to settle.

As of 2025, 94% of central banks are officially “exploring” a CBDC. Translation: everyone’s tinkering, but only a handful are in live production.

Core design choices

The research converges on a few forks in the road:

1. Distribution model: The overwhelming favorite is “two-tier.” The central bank runs the core ledger, while private banks and fintechs handle onboarding, compliance, and wallet innovation. BIS’s Project Rosalind is the poster child here, sketching out an API layer that lets intermediaries plug in without the central bank becoming a retail help desk.

2. Ledger structure: Some experiments lean into distributed ledgers (think wholesale corridors like Project Jura or mBridge), while retail pilots often look suspiciously like a high-performance centralized database (see Project Hamilton’s blazing throughput demo).

3. Token vs. account: Do you want each digital “note” to exist like a token (UTXO style), or do you just update account balances? Answer: both, depending on who’s running the pilot.

4. Programmability: Everyone likes to whisper about “programmable money.” In reality, most designs punt policy enforcement to the wallet and API layer—transaction limits, KYC rules, consent frameworks—not hard-coded into the core ledger.

The privacy dilemma

This is where the politics crash into the math. CBDCs force societies to pick a point on the spectrum between cash-like anonymity and panopticon-level traceability.

Options on the table:

• Selective disclosure: Share data only with regulators when due process demands it.

• Privacy-enhancing tech: Zero-knowledge proofs, blind signatures, multiparty computation—the usual cryptography suspects, though still not plug-and-play at national scale.

• Chaumian eCash 2.0: BIS’s Tourbillon prototype tested anonymous, quantum-resistant tokens that can still be audited for counterfeits.

Europe is pushing hardest on “high privacy.” The US prefers to mumble vaguely about “balancing innovation and compliance.”

Offline payments: the holy grail nobody has solved

Everyone wants cash-like resilience—value that changes hands without network coverage. The BIS Polaris handbook lays out the requirements: tamper-resistant hardware, risk caps, reconciliation protocols, and a tolerance for lost devices. But no one has rolled out a national-scale solution yet. Offline CBDC remains the most technically gnarly corner of the map.

Field lessons: what went wrong and right

• DCash (Eastern Caribbean): The network went dark because someone forgot to renew a security certificate. Let that sink in: a digital currency taken down by the IT equivalent of an overdue library book.

• Sand Dollar (Bahamas): First-mover advantage, but still struggling with adoption. The tech works, the people are ambivalent.

• eNaira (Nigeria): Same story—big launch, lukewarm uptake. Reminds us that you can build the rails, but you can’t force the train to run.

• JAM-DEX (Jamaica): Got attention by literally paying people to sign up. Adoption through incentives—go figure.

The cross-border obsession

Domestic CBDCs are one thing. The real prize is cross-border payments: instant, cheap settlement without correspondent banks clipping the ticket.

• mBridge (China, UAE, Thailand, Hong Kong): Live MVP for wholesale settlement across currencies.

• Project Cedar (NY Fed): Demonstrated atomic FX settlement in seconds.

• Project Jura & Helvetia (Europe/Switzerland): Proved delivery-versus-payment on tokenized assets with wholesale CBDC.

• Icebreaker (Nordics + Israel): Hub-and-spoke model for retail CBDCs exchanging across borders.

The tech works. The sticking point is governance—who runs the hub, who enforces rules, and who eats the cost of failure.

So what’s the “safe” design?

If you distill hundreds of pages of public research, you get a recipe:

• Two-tier distribution with a central bank core and intermediaries at the edge.

• API-first architecture so wallets and fintechs can innovate without destabilizing the base.

• Minimal core ledger, leaving programmability and policy knobs to the wallet/API layer.

• Privacy-enhancing features baked in early, with selective disclosure as the default.

• Dedicated offline subsystem with risk caps and secure hardware.

• Interoperability plan from day one, whether through shared platforms (mBridge), interlinked ledgers (Jura), or hub-and-spoke models (Icebreaker).

And above all: operational discipline. The DCash outage taught everyone that grand designs crumble if you forget to renew a certificate.

The open debates

• How much privacy is enough?

• Should retail or wholesale CBDC come first?

• Can offline ever really be secure?

• Do central banks risk crowding out private innovation?

• Who actually governs cross-border corridors?

None of these questions have neat answers, which is why CBDC papers read like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels.

Final thought

CBDCs aren’t just a monetary experiment. They’re a stress test of how much trust people are willing to hand back to central banks in a digital age. The architecture is emerging—two-tier, API-driven, privacy-tempered—but the politics will decide if anyone actually uses the thing.

Money is already mostly digital. The real question is whether the next upgrade to the operating system comes from the public sector, the private sector, or some uneasy hybrid.

Allies spy on allies. Everyone in intelligence knows it, but the public hates to admit it. When it comes to Israel and the United States, the espionage trail isn’t rumor—it’s court records, DOJ press releases, and declassified intelligence assessments. For decades, Israel has run some of the most aggressive collection efforts inside America, and Washington has responded with a mix of prosecutions, cover-ups, and shrugs.

Here’s some of the documented history, stripped of spin.

The Pollard Affair

The name Jonathan Jay Pollard still echoes in counterintelligence circles. Pollard was a Navy intelligence analyst who, between 1984 and 1985, passed highly classified documents to Israel’s LAKAM unit. In 1986 he pled guilty to conspiracy to deliver national defense information to a foreign government.

In 1987 he was sentenced to life in prison, one of the stiffest sentences ever handed to an American spying for an ally (D.C. Circuit opinion). His Israeli handler Aviem Sella was indicted but never extradited. The mastermind, Rafi Eitan, headed LAKAM, which was disbanded in the scandal’s aftermath.

Pollard spent three decades in prison, paroled in 2015, and had his restrictions lifted in 2020. Israel later embraced him as a hero, granting him citizenship.

Ben-Ami Kadish: The Quiet Sequel

In 2008, the FBI arrested Ben-Ami Kadish, a retired mechanical engineer who worked at a U.S. Army research center in New Jersey. Between 1980 and 1985, Kadish had passed classified documents on missile systems and nuclear weapons to—astonishingly—the same Israeli official tied to Pollard: Yossi Yagur.

Kadish pled guilty to conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of Israel. He was fined $50,000 and received no prison time, largely because of his age. It was a quiet echo of Pollard, but it confirmed a pattern: this wasn’t a one-off operation.

Franklin and the AIPAC Collapse

The 2000s brought the Lawrence Franklin case, where a Pentagon analyst leaked classified information on Iran to two senior AIPAC officials—Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman—and to an Israeli diplomat.

Franklin pled guilty in 2005 under the Espionage Act and was sentenced to over 12 years (later reduced). Rosen and Weissman, however, became the center of a sensational trial. The DOJ tried to prosecute them under the Espionage Act—an extraordinary move against lobbyists—but in 2009, prosecutors dropped all charges.

The collapse of the AIPAC case stands as one of the most glaring examples of politics derailing espionage prosecutions.

The Nozette Sting

In 2009, the FBI launched an undercover sting against Stewart Nozette, a scientist with deep ties to U.S. nuclear and space programs. Agents posed as Mossad operatives. Nozette quickly agreed to sell classified secrets for cash.

In 2011 he pled guilty to attempted espionage and was sentenced to 13 years in prison (DOJ press release).

Israel wasn’t actually involved—the “handlers” were FBI agents—but the fact the FBI used Mossad as bait says a lot about credibility.

Procurement and Nuclear Secrets

Espionage isn’t always cloak-and-dagger. Sometimes it’s paperwork and exports.

• Richard Kelly Smyth, head of a California company, illegally exported krytrons—nuclear triggers—to Israel in the 1980s. He fled, was arrested in 2001, and pled guilty to export violations (Los Angeles Times coverage).
• Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan later admitted he had been part of Israel’s clandestine procurement network, helping funnel sensitive U.S. technology into Israeli weapons programs.

And before that, in the 1960s, there was NUMEC—a Pennsylvania plant where highly enriched uranium went missing. CIA and Atomic Energy Commission officials long suspected it ended up in Israel. The case was never prosecuted, but declassified memos show the suspicions.

What U.S. Intelligence Really Thinks

For anyone tempted to dismiss these as relics of the Cold War, the U.S. intelligence community has said otherwise.

• A 2008 NSA memo, revealed by Edward Snowden and published by The Guardian, described Israel as a “good SIGINT partner” but admitted: “they target us to learn our positions” on Middle East issues.
• A National Intelligence Estimate ranked Israel as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the United States, behind only China and Russia.

This is not internet rumor—it’s the official assessment of American intelligence agencies.

Spyware: The 21st Century Front

Today’s espionage is digital, and Israel’s role continues.

• In 2021, the U.S. Commerce Department blacklisted NSO Group and Candiru, citing their role in surveillance of U.S. persons (Federal Register notice).
• In 2024, the Treasury Department sanctioned Intellexa, another Israeli-linked spyware consortium, for targeting Americans, including U.S. officials.

The message was clear: Israeli-linked surveillance firms aren’t just shady—they’re national security threats.

Allegations That Didn’t Stick

Some claims remain “officially” unproven.

• The “Israeli art students” of 2001: DEA documented suspicious door-to-door visits near federal offices. DOJ said there was no substantiated espionage (DEA memo coverage).
• Alleged Israeli telecom backdoors (Amdocs, Comverse): heavily reported post-9/11, but no charges or official findings ever confirmed them (Fox News archive).

The Pattern

Put all this together, and the picture is plain:

• Classic espionage: Pollard, Kadish, Franklin, Nozette.
• Illegal procurement: Smyth, Milchan, possibly NUMEC.
• Intelligence assessments: Israel ranked as one of the top collectors against the U.S.
• Modern cyber: NSO, Candiru, Intellexa sanctioned for targeting Americans.

The U.S. has prosecuted when it could, quietly dropped cases when it couldn’t, and buried scandals when politics demanded it.

Conclusion

Allies spy on allies. That’s the way of the world. But the United States has spent decades pretending Israel doesn’t spy on it. That’s the lie.

From stolen nuclear secrets to aggressive lobbying pipelines, from FBI stings to modern spyware hacks, the history is public and undeniable. Court dockets, declassified documents, and sanctions lists tell the story.

The real scandal isn’t that Israel spies—it’s that the American public is told it doesn’t happen.

Read more »

MKitch3|Sept 20,2025

This post continues the thread I began in an earlier article, Principles of Tyranny. Part of the inspiration for this addition comes from the Tenth Amendment Center. I’m going to keep hammering on the theme of tyranny, because it’s not a subject that can be brushed off in a single essay. Future posts will dig even deeper, each one adding more detail and context.

It’s an essential topic—one that every American should be well-versed in and ready to call out wherever it rears its head.

The Partisan Road to Tyranny: George Washington’s Fatal Prediction

George Washington’s Fatal Warning and Prediction

“A frightful despotism.”

George Washington knew what was coming. His Farewell Address, published on September 19, 1796 in the American Daily Advertiser, wasn’t just a retirement notice. It was a dire warning against things like skyrocketing debt and entangling foreign alliances.

But his sharpest, most prophetic warnings were about political parties and the constant fight for power they would unleash, a fight that could only end in total tyranny

A WARNING FOR THE AGES

Washington saw political parties as such a great threat because they were the most dangerous expression of a deeper poison: the mindset of putting party loyalty above all else.

“Let me now take a more comprehensive view, & warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party, generally.”

He argued this partisan instinct, while a universal human trait, gets supercharged in a republic where it grows to its most extreme and destructive form.

“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseperable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human Mind. It exists under different shapes in all Governments, more or less stifled, controuled, or repressed; but in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.”

This mentality inevitably turns politics into an endless cycle of weaponized power and revenge that creates a “frightful despotism.”

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention, which in different ages & countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”

This chaotic warfare between factions is just a temporary phase, a prelude to something far worse: a stable and permanent tyranny.

“But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.”

Washington saw the endgame clearly: a population suffering from constant strife will see a dictator not as a threat, but as a welcome relief.

“The disorders & miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”

THE DAILY DAMAGE

Washington saw two threats: immediate and long-term. Permanent despotism lay far ahead in the future. But the daily rot of partisanship was the immediate disease paving the road to get there.

“Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common & continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.”

He laid out the specific consequences: a government that can’t function (don’t threaten us with a good time!), a public poisoned by paranoia, and mobs in the streets.

“It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot & insurrection.”

Worse, he warned that these internal divisions act as an open invitation for foreign enemies to corrupt the entire system.

“It opens the door to foreign influence & corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country, are subjected to the policy and will of another.”

FUEL FOR THE FIRE

Washington conceded a critical point: under a king, political factions can act as a useful check on absolute power.

“There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government and serve to keep alive the spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true—and in Governments of a Monarchical cast Patriotism may look with endulgence, if not with favour, upon the spirit of party.”

But in a republic, he argued, that same spirit is not a check on power; it’s gasoline poured on a fire.

“But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate & assuage it. A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming it should consume.”

He then connected the dots. The partisan firefight inevitably tempts the winners to ignore the Constitution and consolidate power.

“It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free Country should inspire caution, in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective Constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the Powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism.”

WEAPON AGAINST FREEDOM

Washington built his case for the Constitution’s design on a brutally honest assessment of human nature: people are addicted to power and gladly abuse it.

“A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.”

Because of this, he argued that guarding these boundaries is just as important as drawing them.

“The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power; by dividing and distributing it into different depositories, & constituting each the Guardian of the Public Weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient & modern; some of them in our country & under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them.”

Washington pointed to the amendment process as the legal way to change things. Don’t like how power is divided? Use the process. It’s also a reminder that the people are in charge, not the government.

“If in the opinion of the People, the distribution or modification of the Constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates.”

But he warned that ignoring the rules to achieve a short-term goal – no matter how noble it seems – is the classic tool of tyrants: a weapon to destroy freedom.

“But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.”

THE BRUTAL TRUTH

The largest government in the history of the world loves it when the people fight among themselves.

This creates a vicious feedback loop. The bigger the power in government, the more vicious the fight to control it. And the more vicious the fight, the more power people demand the government take to restore order.

It’s the exact cycle Washington warned would produce a “frightful” and “permanent despotism.”

The end result? “The ruins of public liberty.”

These are George Washington’s farewell warnings that almost everyone ignores today – and if we don’t heed them, the worst is yet to come.

MKitch3|Sept 19, 2025

Executive Summary

The Constitution of the United States explicitly declares itself—and laws made in pursuance thereof—as the supreme law of the land (Article VI, Clause 2). Nowhere does it elevate the Supreme Court to that status. Yet over time, through practice and precedent, the Court has come to be treated as the final arbiter of constitutional meaning. This paper examines the historical roots of this transformation, the warnings issued by presidents and founders against judicial supremacy, the legal and political events that entrenched it, and the implications for American constitutional government today.

I. Constitutional Text: What the Founders Wrote

Article VI, Clause 2 (Supremacy Clause):

“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

Key features:

• The Constitution itself is supreme.
• Laws made pursuant to it are supreme.
• Judges (state and federal) are bound by it.
• Nowhere does it say “the Supreme Court’s interpretations are the supreme law.”

The judiciary is established in Article III, with jurisdiction defined, but there is no explicit claim of “judicial supremacy.” The very idea of the Court being the “final word” was created later, politically and culturally.

II. The Birth of Judicial Review

Marbury v. Madison (1803):

Chief Justice John Marshall declared it the duty of the judiciary “to say what the law is.” This was the first assertion of judicial review: the idea that courts could strike down laws inconsistent with the Constitution.

Marshall: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

The Constitution never states this directly. Judicial review was widely accepted as reasonable, but the claim that the Court’s interpretations are binding on everyone—forever—was a leap.

III. Early Resistance to Judicial Supremacy

Jefferson’s Warnings

Thomas Jefferson fiercely opposed judicial supremacy:

• 1820 Letter to William Jarvis:
  “You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”
• He argued that each branch had the equal right to interpret the Constitution:
  “The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

Jefferson’s philosophy: every branch has the duty to uphold the Constitution, not defer to judges.

Jackson’s Defiance

President Andrew Jackson rejected judicial supremacy during the Worcester v. Georgia controversy (1832). While the quote “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it” is apocryphal, Jackson did ignore the Court’s decision, demonstrating his belief that the judiciary did not rule over the executive branch.

IV. Lincoln and the Civil War Context

Abraham Lincoln, confronting the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, argued that while Court decisions bind the parties to a case, they do not dictate national policy:

• First Inaugural Address (1861):
  “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court… the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

Lincoln respected Court rulings in limited scope but denied the notion that Dred Scott defined the Constitution forever.

V. The 20th Century Rise of Judicial Supremacy

Post–Civil War Developments

• The Court began asserting broader constitutional interpretations in commerce and civil rights cases.
• Precedent hardened around the idea that the Court’s rulings were binding on all levels of government.

Civil Rights Era

• Brown v. Board of Education (1954) held racial segregation unconstitutional. Its moral force and federal enforcement cemented the Court as the “final word.”
• President Eisenhower used troops to enforce Brown in Little Rock (1957), showing executive backing.

This set a new standard: Court rulings would be treated as binding constitutional commands, not mere interpretations.

VI. Modern Expansion of Judicial Supremacy

Key examples of the Court reshaping law and policy:

• Roe v. Wade (1973): Created a national right to abortion.
• Obergefell v. Hodges (2015): Legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
• Citizens United v. FEC (2010): Redefined campaign finance as protected speech.
• Dobbs v. Jackson (2022): Overturned Roe.

Each of these cases demonstrates the Court effectively setting national policy—without legislation. Critics argue this elevates nine unelected justices above Congress, the President, and the people.

VII. Departmentalism vs. Judicial Supremacy

• Judicial Supremacy: The Court is the final interpreter; its rulings bind all.
• Departmentalism (Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln): Each branch has equal right and duty to interpret the Constitution.

Departmentalism maintains balance but risks chaos if branches openly defy one another. Judicial supremacy provides stability but risks oligarchy.

VIII. Modern Critiques

• Left-leaning critiques: Court is captured by conservative ideology and unresponsive to democratic will.
• Right-leaning critiques: Court has usurped lawmaking powers and imposed liberal social policies.
• Populist critique (both sides): Nine unelected justices should not decide issues that Congress avoids.

Public trust in the Court has fallen sharply in the 21st century, with polling showing historically low approval after Dobbs (2022).

IX. Rebalancing Options

1. Constitutional Amendment: Clarify limits on judicial review.
2. Jurisdiction Stripping: Congress can limit the Court’s jurisdiction under Article III.
3. Term Limits for Justices: Reduce lifetime judicial entrenchment.
4. Revive Departmentalism: Presidents and Congress openly interpret the Constitution independently.

X. Conclusion

The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land. The idea that Supreme Court opinions hold that title is a political invention, not a constitutional command. From Jefferson’s denunciations to Lincoln’s resistance, history is filled with leaders who saw the danger of judicial supremacy.

Today, with polarization and declining trust in institutions, America faces the same question Jefferson posed two centuries ago: Do we live under a Constitution, or under the rulings of nine judges? The answer determines whether sovereignty lies with the people and their representatives, or with an unelected judicial elite.

Appendix: Key Quotes

• Jefferson (1820): “The Constitution… is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary.”
• Jackson (1832): “The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges.”
• Lincoln (1861): “The people will have ceased to be their own rulers… resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

Appendix: Timeline of Major Cases and Events Shaping Judicial Supremacy

Early Republic and Foundations

1787 – U.S. Constitution Ratified

• Article VI establishes the Constitution (and laws made in pursuance thereof) as the supreme law of the land.
• No explicit mention of judicial supremacy.

1791 – First Bank of the United States

• Early dispute over implied powers. Hamilton (pro) vs. Jefferson (anti). Congress charters the Bank anyway.

1803 – Marbury v. Madison

• Chief Justice John Marshall establishes judicial review.
• Quote: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
• This creates the precedent that courts may strike down unconstitutional laws.

Expansion of Federal Power

1819 – McCulloch v. Maryland

• Court upholds Congress’s power to create the Second Bank.
• Marshall: the Necessary and Proper Clause allows implied powers.
• Significance: Strengthened national supremacy, widened scope of implied powers, and bolstered judicial authority.

1824 – Gibbons v. Ogden

• Court broadly interprets the Commerce Clause, expanding federal power.

1832 – Worcester v. Georgia

• Court rules that Georgia laws had no authority in Cherokee territory.
• President Jackson refuses to enforce it, exposing limits of judicial authority when the executive resists.

Antebellum Crisis

1857 – Dred Scott v. Sandford

• Court rules that African Americans cannot be citizens and Congress cannot ban slavery in the territories.
• Seen as judicial overreach; inflames sectional tensions.
• Lincoln later rejects the decision’s authority beyond the specific case.

1861 – Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address

• Rejects judicial supremacy:
  “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government… is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court… the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

Reconstruction and Early 20th Century

1869 – Texas v. White

• Court rules secession unconstitutional, bolstering the authority of federal institutions after the Civil War.

1896 – Plessy v. Ferguson

• Court upholds racial segregation under “separate but equal.”
• Judicial supremacy entrenches systemic racism for decades.

1913 – Federal Reserve Act

• Congress creates the Federal Reserve under implied constitutional powers. Judicial precedent (McCulloch) provides cover.

1935 – Gold Clause Cases (Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Perry v. United States)

• Court upholds Congress’s sweeping power to regulate monetary policy, even voiding private contracts.
• Judicial blessing of federal financial authority.

Civil Rights and the High Tide of Judicial Supremacy

1954 – Brown v. Board of Education

• Overturns Plessy, declaring school segregation unconstitutional.
• Becomes a defining moment for judicial supremacy as national policy-setter.

1957 – Little Rock Crisis

• President Eisenhower sends troops to enforce Brown.
• Shows judicial decisions backed by executive force become national law in practice.

1973 – Roe v. Wade

• Court creates nationwide abortion rights framework.

• Seen by critics as judicial lawmaking beyond constitutional text.

Late 20th Century – Judicial Policymaking

2000 – Bush v. Gore

• Court halts Florida recount, effectively deciding the presidential election.
• Cemented public view of the Court as political actor.

2010 – Citizens United v. FEC

• Court rules that corporate spending on elections is protected speech.
• Expands First Amendment interpretations, reshaping campaign finance.

21st Century Polarization

2015 – Obergefell v. Hodges

• Court legalizes same-sex marriage nationwide.
• Hailed as a landmark for equality, criticized as judicial overreach bypassing legislatures.

2022 – Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

• Court overturns Roe v. Wade.
• Returns abortion regulation to states, sparking fierce debates over judicial power and legitimacy.

Modern Critiques and Challenges

• Audit the Fed Movement (2000s–present): Efforts to rein in Federal Reserve independence highlight blurred lines between constitutional authority and judicial-accepted precedent.
• Public Trust Decline (2020s): Polling shows trust in the Supreme Court at record lows, suggesting the doctrine of judicial supremacy is being questioned by both left and right.

Concluding Note on the Timeline

From Marbury to Dobbs, the Court has shaped policy more than any other branch by claiming the power to decide constitutional meaning. But moments like Jackson’s defiance, Lincoln’s resistance, and modern political backlash remind us: the Constitution is supreme law. The Court’s supremacy exists only because other branches and the people consent to it.

Introduction

When people say, “the Supreme Court is the law of the land,” they’re echoing a slogan, It’s not a constitutional fact. 

Article VI of the U.S. Constitution is clear: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof… shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” Nowhere does it say, “the opinions of nine unelected justices are binding scripture.”

Yet in practice, the Court has become just that: the final word, the oracle, the referee in all constitutional disputes. This tension between constitutional supremacy and judicial supremacy has shaped American history from Jefferson to Lincoln to today.

1. The Supremacy Clause as Written

• Article VI, Clause 2 (1787): Declares the Constitution itself, and laws made pursuant to it, as the highest law.
• No mention of the judiciary. No elevation of judicial opinions above the other branches.
• The founders designed a system of co-equal branches, each sworn to uphold the Constitution, not subordinate to one another.

2. Enter Judicial Review (Marbury v. Madison, 1803)

• Chief Justice John Marshall invented judicial review by declaring a law void if it conflicted with the Constitution.
• This was clever politics: the Court claimed a power not explicitly written down, but hard to deny in principle.
• From that point, the Court began carving out a role as the ultimate interpreter, even though nothing in the Constitution gave them “final say.”

3. Jefferson’s Rejection of Judicial Supremacy

• Jefferson feared judicial supremacy would turn into an “oligarchy.” He argued each branch—executive, legislative, and judicial—had the right to interpret the Constitution for itself.
• In an 1820 letter, Jefferson warned: “The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”
• Jefferson’s strict constructionist view clashed with Marshall’s expansive reading of implied powers, especially in cases like McCulloch v. Maryland (1819).

4. Jackson and Lincoln Against Judicial Absolutism

• Andrew Jackson ignored the Court in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), allegedly saying, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” The quote is apocryphal, but the point stands: Jackson didn’t treat the Court’s ruling as the last word.
• Abraham Lincoln, in his First Inaugural (1861), said Court rulings should bind the parties in a case but not “irrevocably fix” national policy. He cited Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), where the Court ruled African Americans could not be citizens. Lincoln rejected the decision’s broader authority, treating it as a judicial mistake, not the supreme law of the land.

5. The Rise of Judicial Supremacy in the 20th Century

• By the mid-20th century, especially post–World War II, judicial supremacy hardened into convention.
• Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was enforced as binding constitutional law, reshaping civil rights. Whatever one’s view of the outcome, it cemented the Court as final arbiter.
• Presidents and Congresses generally deferred, even when grumbling. The Court’s authority expanded by habit, not constitutional amendment.

6. The Problem of Unelected Power

• The Court today wields immense influence: abortion (Roe v. Wade, Dobbs v. Jackson), same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), gun rights (Heller and Bruen), campaign finance (Citizens United), and countless other policy-defining rulings.
• None of these outcomes came from legislation directly. They came from judicial interpretation, binding on the whole nation.
• This makes nine unelected judges—appointed for life—the effective authors of constitutional meaning. Critics see this as aristocracy in robes.

7. Modern Pushback and the “Departmentalism” Argument

• Departmentalism: The idea that each branch interprets the Constitution for itself. Rooted in Jefferson, carried by Lincoln.
• Example: States challenging federal power under “nullification” theories (though historically messy).
• Today, some scholars and politicians argue Congress and the President are not bound to treat Court rulings as universal precedent, only as binding in specific cases.

8. Current Context: Polarization and Court Legitimacy

• Trust in the Court is near historic lows. Decisions like Dobbs (2022) polarized the nation.
• On the right, people complain the Court has been too activist in social policy.
• On the left, critics say the Court is captured by special interests and out of step with popular will.
• Both sides are rediscovering Jefferson’s warning: an unchecked judiciary risks becoming the most dangerous branch.

9. What the Constitution Actually Demands

• The Constitution is supreme. The Court is not the Constitution.
• The Court’s opinions carry weight because the other branches allow them to. The judiciary has no army, no purse—only institutional habit and the compliance of others.
• If Congress or the President took Jefferson’s or Lincoln’s view, they could resist judicial supremacy while still respecting specific rulings in their limited scope.

10. Conclusion

The belief that the Supreme Court is the “supreme law of the land” is a historical and political invention, not a constitutional fact. The Constitution is supreme. The Court is an interpreter, not a sovereign. For most of American history, leaders from Jefferson to Lincoln resisted the idea that nine judges should dictate constitutional meaning for 330 million citizens.

Today, with polarization eroding faith in institutions, the time may be ripe to revisit that debate. Do we want constitutional supremacy, or judicial supremacy? If the Constitution is indeed the supreme law of the land, then Congress, the President, and the people cannot outsource their duty to nine unelected officials.

1. The Real “Supreme Law of the Land”

• Article VI, Clause 2 (the Supremacy Clause): “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof… shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”
• Notice what’s missing? It doesn’t say “Supreme Court opinions are the supreme law.” It’s the Constitution itself, plus laws passed consistent with it.

2. Where the Court Comes In

• Article III establishes the judiciary. It gives them jurisdiction, but nowhere does it say their interpretations are final and binding on everyone forever.
• Marbury v. Madison (1803) is where Chief Justice John Marshall grabbed judicial review out of thin air. He basically said, “We, the Court, decide what the Constitution means, and our word is final.” That was political sleight-of-hand, not a line in the Constitution.

3. Jefferson’s Warning

Jefferson hated the idea of judicial supremacy. He wrote that allowing judges to be the final arbiters of the Constitution would make them “a despotic oligarchy.” He argued each branch had the right and duty to interpret the Constitution for itself.

Lincoln echoed that in his First Inaugural: the people don’t live under the Court, we live under the Constitution. He respected the Court’s rulings in specific cases, but rejected the idea that a single Court decision should “irrevocably fix” policy for the whole nation.

4. Political vs. Legal Reality

• In theory: The Constitution is supreme. Court rulings are just opinions binding the parties in a specific case.
• In practice: Judicial review and stare decisis (precedent) give Supreme Court rulings enormous gravitational pull. Presidents and Congresses, for the most part, go along because otherwise the system cracks.

5. The Gap Between “Is” and “Ought”

• Is: The Court has made itself the referee. Through precedent, most of America treats its rulings as binding constitutional law.
• Ought: If you’re strict about the text, the Court is not supreme law. Its opinions should be respected but not worshiped. Each branch has equal duty to uphold the Constitution as written, not just as interpreted.

So the fight I’m sniffing at is the same one Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln all raised: do we live under a Constitution, or under nine lawyers in robes?

Every time someone loses a job over something they said online, the internet fills up with tears and hashtags. Boo-hoo, the mob didn’t like your tweet. But here’s the cold truth: that’s nothing compared to the people who’ve lost their lives for speaking their minds.

What the First Amendment Actually Says

The First Amendment is not complicated. It says:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Key phrase: shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

Abridging means reducing, cutting back, trimming down.

Freedom means just that—freedom. Not a privilege. Not a “civil liberty” that can be bartered away.

This isn’t up for debate. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Not Congress. Not the President. Not even the Supreme Court with its robed referees.

Hate Speech? That’s a Scam

There is no such thing as “hate speech” in U.S. law. That’s just speech someone happens to hate. And the Constitution doesn’t give a damn about your feelings. It protects your right to open your mouth whether you’re spouting poetry, profanity, or something deeply unpopular.

The Game of Implied Consent

Here’s where the real danger lives. Every time people cheer when someone is deplatformed, canceled, or punished for “bad” speech, they hand lawmakers the excuse to go further. That’s implied consent. You’ve told the government, “Go ahead, limit speech when it makes me uncomfortable.”

But ask yourself: who gave you the authority to bargain away my rights? Who told you that your fragile ego outranks the supreme law of the land? Because it sure as hell wasn’t me.

The Slippery Slope Isn’t Imaginary

Losing your job for saying something unpopular is already bad enough. But once governments normalize punishing speech, history shows us what comes next. It’s not jobs that disappear. It’s lives.

Final Word

You don’t have to like what people say. You don’t even have to listen. But the second you start deciding which words deserve freedom and which don’t, you’re not defending democracy—you’re digging its grave.

For context the following was my original rant:

“First Amendment to the US Constitution—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

{Abridging refers to the act of reducing or limiting certain rights or privileges, often in a legal context, such as abridging the right to free speech or other civil liberties. It involves making a restriction that diminishes the scope or extent of those rights.}

A few things that need clearing up, although the damage is already done thanks to you dimwits.

Congress, the Supreme Court nor the President have the Constitutional Authority to abridge the freedom of speech. Take care to notice it says freedom, meaning it isn’t a civil liberty, it isn’t and never has been up for debate and just because the Supreme Court says it’s so doesn’t make it so. The US Constitution is the Supreme Law of this land, not the Supreme Court. 

There’s no such thing as “hate” speech only speech that you “hate”. It would not make a bit of difference if such a thing were in existence, the US Constitution states, in plan English, Congress shall make NO law ABRIDGING the FREEDOM OF SPEECH. 

You people that participate in this type of nonsense and openly brag about it are giving law makers and every other “but my feelings bro” reject the “implied consent” to take away from every American citizen’s Constitutional protected freedoms/rights. Now on that note, who the fuck gave you the authority or permission to speak on my behalf and give the government such “implied” consent? I didn’t and I never will.”

The following is ChatGPT5 remarks:

That image is basically a blunt reminder that whining about job loss for saying dumb stuff online pales in comparison to people who’ve literally died for exercising speech. The First Amendment isn’t a “customer service policy” for private companies; it’s a restriction on government power. Congress can’t pass laws limiting speech. That’s the deal. But your boss firing you for mouthing off? That’s not Uncle Sam gagging you—that’s capitalism serving you a pink slip with a side of irony.

Here’s where people get tangled:

• “Congress shall make no law…” means the government can’t criminalize you for speech, no matter how offensive, unless it crosses very narrow lines (incitement, true threats, etc.).
• Abridging = shrinking. The government doesn’t get to slice away chunks of that freedom just because it’s inconvenient.
• No such thing as “hate speech” in U.S. law. It’s just speech someone hates. The term is political, not constitutional.

Where the rant has teeth is in the “implied consent” bit. When people cheer on deplatforming, canceling, or laws that flirt with speech restrictions, they’re basically handing lawmakers moral permission to encroach. The Constitution says no abridging, but if the culture keeps demanding the government “do something” every time someone is offended, you eventually get legislators who try. And the Supreme Court—contrary to popular belief—isn’t the supreme law; the Constitution is. The Court interprets, but it doesn’t get to rewrite plain English.

So yeah, it’s not that you have a “right” to keep your job after saying something dumb on Twitter. You don’t. But the bigger picture—the one that should keep people awake at night—is that once you normalize punishing speech socially and economically, it’s a short hop to government punishment. And when governments punish speech, history shows it isn’t jobs that get lost. It’s lives.

Recent findings reveal that the FBI's claim that only 3.7 percent of active shooters are stopped by law-abiding gun owners is entirely false.

The FBI failed to properly record instances where law-abiding citizens stopped violent shooters, leading to false reports that "good guys with guns" have no effect on stopping violent criminals, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center.

The FBI's data, which claimed that only 14 of 374 active shooters were stopped by armed citizens between 2014 and 2024, undercounted shootings by a staggering 561 incidents. When those excluded cases are applied to the dataset, it reveals more than 202 instances where law-abiding gun owners stopped an active shooter.

This updated dataset takes the FBI's original statistic—which claims only 3.7 percent of active shooters were stopped by armed citizens—and raises the real number to 36 percent. If "gun-free zones," a misguided policy that assumes criminals will obey a metal sign, are excluded from the data, over 52 percent of active shooters are stopped by law-abiding gun owners.

Cooking the Books or Just Plain Old Incompetence?

The large disparity between the Crime Prevention Research Center's data and the FBI's statistics raises major concerns, as accurate information is essential for shaping policy and providing a true picture of gun ownership in America.

After all, gun control remains a central issue in many political races, and the policies implemented directly affect the Second Amendment rights of everyday Americans.

"The cascading effect is incredibly deleterious," said former U.S. Justice Department official Theo Wold. "When the Bureau gets it so systematically wrong, it shapes the entire national debate."

So why is there such a large disparity?

Alongside the 561 omitted incidents and the inclusion of "gun free" zones, the report found the FBI mislabeled numerous events, and in many cases, simply listed civilians as "security guards." 

For example, the FBI had classified the 2019 church shooting in White Settlement, Texas—where a parishioner shot and killed the gunman—as an incident where the shooter was apprehended by a security guard.

The Crime Prevention Research Center further noted that the FBI excluded some cases it labels "domestic disputes" or "retaliation murders" from its data about civilians stopping active shooters. The group also found that armed bystanders who thwarted attacks were not counted if the suspect fled the scene.

Shaping the Narrative with Bad Data

A simple Google search about active shooters being stopped by law-abiding gun owners brings up numerous studies claiming to “debunk” the idea that honest citizens can play a role in protecting society—but the real data shows they are completely wrong.

These studies, funded by "progressive" donorsand promoted by gun control groups, also ignore evidence showing that gun control has little to no effect on criminals. Instead, it creates an environment that restricts responsible citizens while giving violent criminals an easier playing field.

In recent years, the Left has weaponized fear about firearms to mobilize concerned voters. Regardless of the real data, it is imperative that they control the narrative while they push towards total disarmament—or as they tell everyone "gun violence' prevention.

Alongside "progressive" studies, mainstream media outlets continue to label the "good guy" as an uncommon occurrence.

Headlines show this framing: 

• "Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander" (Associated Press); 
• "Rampage in Indiana a rare instance of armed civilian ending mass shooting" (Washington Post); 
• and "After Indiana mall shooting, one hero but no lasting solution to gun violence" (New York Times).

Only You Can Prevent Active Shooters

Policies such as "gun-free zones" assign blame to the firearm itself rather than the individual responsible for pulling the trigger. These policies create defenseless environments, allowing large groups of citizens to gather without any means of protection—and voters know this.

According to a 2022 Trafalgar Group poll, 42 percent of voters said that armed citizens were the best defense against mass shootings, while only 25 percent said it was local police. 

The Crime Prevention Research Center study confirms that such areas are prime targets for active shooters. Recall that excluding "gun-free zones" from the data raises successful defensive action by gun owners from 36 percent to 52 percent.

Other forms of gun control—such as purchasing restrictions, background checks, and magazine capacity limits—also place a heavier burden on law-abiding gun owners, as the FBI’s own data confirms that criminals do not obtain firearms legally.

A 2019 FBI study showed that only seven percent of crimes committed with a firearm involved legally purchased guns. Half of all offenders had stolen the firearm, while 43 percent had purchased it from underground or black-market vendors.

The results of gun control leave law-abiding citizens open to senseless violence, but they also turn our schools into major targets. Allowing teachers to carry firearms adds a layer of rapid protection that children deserve. 

The FBI reports that most active threat events—including mass shootings—are over within five minutes. Yet it takes law enforcement betweenfive and 10 minutes (at best) to respond to a shooting. 

The situation is even more dire for rural schoolsthat could be left stranded for over 20 minutes waiting for police response. 

Honorable, well-trained, law-abiding teachers can effectively fill that gap and save countless lives—but it's important that Americans know the true statistics if protective policies are going to be implemented.

Holding the FBI Accountable

The FBI should be a trusted source of information, but time and time again the data it presents to the public fails to reflect the reality of what is truly happening in the United States.

In 2024, Restoration News conducted a deep dive into crime across the country and found that the FBI had severely underreported the surging crime wave—even making it appear as though crime was trending downward. States like California, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Virginiasaw major increases in murder, violent assault, and human trafficking between 2019 and 2023—but the FBI said all was well.

This is from an older piece that I am currently working on updating. It is and will be a work in progress.

--MK3

WHY DOES AMERICA SUCK ZIONIST DICK?

Confronting Israel Is Important –  The Jewish State Is No Friend

The problem with America’s so-called “special relationship” with Israel is the terrible national security and foreign policy choices that are sustained by pervasive political and media corruption, so any honest attempt to examine one inevitably leads to the other.

Related: The Occupation of the American Mind

Most talking heads in the media avoid that dilemma by choosing to completely ignore the dark side of Israel.

Israel – not Russia – is the one foreign country that can interfere with impunity with the political processes in the United States yet it is immune from criticism.

It is also the single most significant threat to genuine national security as it and its powerful domestic lobby have been major advocates for the continuation of America’s interventionist warfare state.

The decision to go to war on false pretenses against Iraq, largely promoted by a cabal of prominent American Jews in the Pentagon and in the media, killed 4,424 Americans as well as hundreds of thousands Iraqis and will wind up costing the American taxpayer $7 trillion dollars when all the bills are paid.

And I can go on from there. According to the FBI, Israel runs the most aggressive spying operations against the U.S. among ostensibly “friendly” nations, frequently stealing our military technology for resale by its own arms merchants.

 Its notable successes in espionage have included the most devastating spy in U.S. history Jonathan Pollard, while it has also penetrated American communications systems and illegally obtained both the fuel and the triggers for its own secret nuclear weapons arsenal.

Israel cares little for American sovereignty. It’s prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have both boasted how they control the United States. In 2001, Israel was running a massive secret spying operation directed against Arabs in the U.S.

 Many in the intelligence and law enforcement communities suspect that it had considerable prior intelligence regarding the 9/11 plot but did not share it with Washington.

There was the spectacle of the “dancing Shlomos,” Israeli “movers” from a company in New Jersey who apparently had advanced knowledge of the terrorist attack and danced and celebrated as they watched the Twin Towers go down.

 Jewish power, both in terms of money and of access to people and mechanisms that really matter, is what allows Israel to act with impunity, making the United States both poorer and more insecure.

A well-funded massive lobbying effort involving hundreds of groups and thousands of individuals in the U.S. has worked to the detriment of actual American interests, in part by creating a permanent annual gift of billions of dollars to Israel for no other reason but that it is Israel and can get anything it wants from a servile Congress and White House without any objection from a controlled media.

 Israel has also obtained carte blanche political protection from the U.S. in fora like the United Nations, which is damaging to America’s reputation and its actual interests.

 This protection now extends to the basing of U.S. troops in Israel to serve as a tripwire, guaranteeing that Washington will become involved if Israel is ever attacked or even if Israel itself starts a war.

 And here on the home front Israel is doing damage that might be viewed as even more grave in Senator Ben Cardin’s attempt to destroy First Amendment rights by making any criticism of Israel illegal.

The non-violent Israel Boycott movement (BDS) has already been sanctioned in many states, the result of intensive and successful lobbying by the Israeli government and its powerful friends.

So if there is a real enemy of the United States in terms of the actual damage being inflicted by a foreign power, it is Israel.

In the recent Russiagate investigations it was revealed that it was Israel, not Russia, that sought favors from Michael Flynn and the incoming Trump Administration yet Special Counsel Robert Mueller has evidently not chosen to go down that road with his investigations, which should surprise no one.

At age 89, he has finally figured out that it is actually all about what a parasitic Israel wants without any regard for its American host, observing on “Democracy Now” that:

“Take, say, the huge issue of interference in our pristine elections. Did the Russians interfere in our elections? An issue of overwhelming concern in the media. I mean, in most of the world, that’s almost a joke.

First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support.

Israeli intervention in U.S. elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done…

I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies – what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015.”

Politicians are terrified of crossing the Jewish lobby by saying anything negative about Israel, which means that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu always gets a pass from the American government, even when he starves civilians and bombs hospitals and schools.

 Netanyahu uses snipers to shoot dead scores of unarmed demonstrators and the snipers themselves joke about their kills without a peep from Washington, which styles itself the “leader of the free world.”

Just recently, Israel has declared itself a Jewish State with all that implies.

To be sure, Israeli Christians and Muslims were already subject to a battery of laws and regulations that empowered Jews at their expense but now it is the guiding principle that Israel will be run for the benefit of Jews and Jews alone. And it still likes to call itself a “democracy.”

A recent television program illustrates just how far the subjugation of America’s elected leaders by Israel has gone. British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is featured on a new show called “Who is America?” in which he uses disguises and aliases to engage politicians and other luminaries in unscripted interviews that reveal just how ignorant or mendacious they actually are.

 Several recent episodes remind one of a February 2013 Saturday Night Live skit on the impending confirmation of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. A Senator asks Hagel. “It is vital to Israel’s security for you to go on national television and perform oral sex on a donkey… Would you do THAT for Israel?”

A “yes” answer was, of course, expected from Hagel. The skit was never aired after objections from the usual suspects.

Baron Cohen, who confronted several GOP notables in the guise of Colonel Erran Morad, an Israeli security specialist, provided a number of clues that his interview was a sham but none of the victims were smart enough to pick up on them.

Cohen, wearing an Israeli military uniform and calling himself a colonel, clearly displayed sergeant’s stripes. Hinting that he might actually be a Mossad agent, Cohen also sported a T-shirt on which the Hebrew text was printed backwards and he claimed that the Israeli spy agency’s motto was “if you want to win, show some skin.”

Cohen set up Dick Cheney by complimenting him on being the “the king of terrorist killers” before commenting that “my neighbor in Tel Aviv is in jail for murder, or, as we call it, enhanced tickling.”

Morad went on to tell Cheney that he once waterboarded his wife to check for infidelity and then convinced the former Vice President to sign a “waterboarding kit” that “already had” the signatures of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon and Demi Lovato.

Another more spectacular sketch included a Georgia state senator Jason Spencer who was convinced to shout out the n-word as part of an alleged video being made to fight terrorism.

After Cohen told Spencer that it was necessary to incite fear in homophobic jihadists, Spencer dropped his pants and underwear, before backing up with his exposed rear end while shouting “USA!” and “America!”

Spencer also spoke with a phony Asian accent while simulating using a selfie-stick to secretly insert a camera phone inside a Muslim woman’s burqa.

In another series of encounters, Cohen as Morad managed to convince current and ex-Republican members of Congress – to include former Senate majority leader Trent Lott – to endorse a fictional Israeli program to arm grade school children for self-defense.

Cohen’s footage included a former Illinois congressman and talk radio host named Joe Walsh saying: “The intensive three-week ‘Kinderguardian’ course introduces specially selected children from 12 to 4 years old to pistols, rifles, semiautomatics and a rudimentary knowledge of mortars. In less than a month – less than a month – a first-grader can become a first grenade-er.”

Both controversial Alabama judge Roy Moore and Walsh were fooled into meeting Cohen to attend a non-existent pro-Israel conference to accept an award for “significant contributions to the state of Israel.”

Representative Dana Rohrabacher, meanwhile, also was interviewed and he commented that, “Maybe having young people trained and understand how to defend themselves and their school might actually make us safer here.”

And Congressman Joe Wilson observed that “A 3-year-old cannot defend itself from an assault rifle by throwing a ‘Hello Kitty’ pencil case at it.”

Cohen’s performance is instructive. A man shows up in Israeli uniform, claims to be a terrorism expert or even a Mossad agent, and he gains access to powerful Americans who are willing to do anything he says.

How Cohen did it says a lot about the reflexive and completely uncritical support for Israel that many American politicians – particularly Republicans – now embrace.

This, in a nutshell, is the damage that Israel and its Lobby have done to the United States.

 Israel is always right for many policymakers and even palpably phony Jews like Colonel Morad are instantly perceived as smarter than the rest of us so we’d better do what they say.

That kind of thinking has brought us Iraq, Libya, Syria and the possibility of something far worse with Iran.

 Israel routinely interferes in American politics and corrupts our institutions without any cost to itself and that is why I write and speak frequently regarding the danger to our Republic that it poses.

 It is past time to change the essentially phony narrative. Israel is nothing but trouble. It has the right to defend itself and protect its interests but that should not involve the United States.

One can only hope that eventually a majority of my fellow American citizens will also figure things out.

It might take a while, but the ruthless way Israel openly operates with no concern for anyone but itself provides a measure of optimism that that day is surely coming.

MK3|Sept 14,2025

Every few months, it happens.

Your feed floods with hashtags, slogans, and profile-picture filters. Corporations suddenly have something to say. Politicians scramble to issue statements. Your friends quietly judge you if you don’t join in.

And like clockwork, we’re all asked the same question: Are you for it, or against it?

That’s The Current Thing.

Every few months, the world demands you care about something. A hashtag. A war. A protest. A slogan. Silence isn’t neutral — it’s suspicious.

What Exactly Is The Current Thing?

The Current Thing isn’t just the latest headline. It’s a loyalty test.

It’s the issue that hijacks the conversation, forces people into binary camps, and turns politics into a game of allegiance.

Here’s the recipe:

• A trigger event — a war, a pandemic, a viral video, a protest.

• Media framing — simplified into “good guys vs. bad guys.”

• Symbols and slogans — hashtags, flags, emojis, profile filters.

• Social pressure — silence suddenly equals complicity.

• Institutional bandwagon — corporations, governments, and NGOs line up.

• Peak saturation — it’s everywhere, all the time.

• The drop-off — it fades, replaced by the next thing.

By the time people stop arguing, you’re already onto the next Current Thing.

Why Do Current Things Matter?

They aren’t random — they’re how modern politics works.

• They give people identity badges. Display the right emoji, wear the right pin, and everyone knows which tribe you belong to.

• They offer moral clarity. Forget nuance — this is good vs. evil, right vs. wrong.

• They act as elite coordination tools. Governments, media, and corporations all get to signal they’re “on the right side.”

• And yes, they can be distractions.

While everyone fights over flags in their bios, bigger, slower issues — like rights being restricted or mass surveillance — slide under the radar.

The Ugly Side of the Current Thing

The problem isn’t that people care. It’s that the care is shallow, manic, and disposable.

• Hashtags don’t fix broken systems.

• Binary framing crushes complexity.

• Yesterday’s “moral emergency” is today’s forgotten headline.

Yesterday’s “moral emergency” is today’s forgotten headline. The victims remain. The policies stay. The crowd moves on.

Meanwhile, as Noam Chomsky pointed out decades ago, the media doesn’t just tell us what to think — it tells us what it’s acceptable to think about.

And corporations have learned to exploit this. They swap their logos during Pride Month, pledge solidarity during protests, or change colors for the flag of the moment. Then, once the spotlight fades, so does their commitment.

Corporations swap their logos during Pride Month, pledge solidarity during protests — then go silent once the spotlight moves on. Marketing masquerading as morality.

Some Examples You’ll Remember

• COVID-19: Masks and vaccines weren’t just health issues; they became political purity tests.

• George Floyd / BLM: Corporate logos went black, fists went up, and protest slogans were suddenly everywhere.

• Ukraine (2022): The blue-and-yellow flag emoji became unavoidable, as Western governments and companies pledged loyalty.

• Israel–Gaza (2023–2025): Competing Current Things (#StandWithIsrael vs. #FreePalestine) split publics down the middle.

• Meanwhile… Yemen, Congo, Sudan? Crickets. Some crises just never qualify as The Current Thing.

And it’s not only foreign policy. Think of the Flint water crisis or the opioid epidemic. Both were once national scandals. Both were described as urgent emergencies. And yet, both faded from public attention long before solutions were reached. That’s how the memory hole works.

Why You Should Care About The Current Thing (Even If You’re Sick of It)

You might think: so what? People always follow trends.

But here’s the kicker: Current Things aren’t just trends — they’re tools.

They show us:

• Who has the power to set the agenda. Why Ukraine, but not Yemen? Why Gaza now, but Congo never?

• How shallow engagement warps democracy. Politics gets reduced to virtue-signaling instead of real policy.

• How attention itself has become currency. If we’re always reacting to the Current Thing, who’s doing the long-term thinking?

If we’re always reacting to the Current Thing, who’s doing the long-term thinking?

A Historical Reminder

The Current Thing has always existed — what’s new is the speed.

• During World War II, Pearl Harbor transformed American opinion overnight.

• In the 1950s, McCarthyism forced Americans to prove their loyalty or risk ruin.

• In the 1960s and ’70s, Vietnam War protests dominated public life, splitting the country into hawks and doves.

Back then, it took weeks or months for public opinion to coalesce. Today, it happens in hours — because social media compresses outrage into viral bursts.

Final Thought

The phenomenon of The Current Thing is not trivial. It reflects how collective attention is orchestrated, how political identities are formed, and how moral clarity is manufactured in a media-saturated society.

While Current Things can mobilize the masses and bring urgent issues into focus, they also risk superficiality, polarization, and distraction from structural change. In the networked age, where attention is currency, politics is increasingly governed by spectacles of the moment.

The challenge for democratic societies is to find ways to engage beyond the Current Thing — to cultivate deeper deliberation, longer-term commitment, and more nuanced debate. Otherwise, we risk a politics permanently trapped in cycles of outrage and amnesia.

The Bezmenov Angle

If you want a deeper understanding of how these cycles work, a good place to start is with Yuri Bezmenov’s warnings about “ideological subversion.”

His four stages — demoralization, destabilization, crisis, normalization — describe exactly how societies can be manipulated. In many ways, Current Things are the perfect vehicles for this process:

• They demoralize by overwhelming people with outrage.

• They destabilize by polarizing groups.

• They create a sense of crisis that demands instant response.

• They normalize the new status quo once attention moves on.

Demoralization. Destabilization. Crisis. Normalization. Current Things are the perfect vehicles for ideological subversion.

Reader Challenge

When the next Current Thing hits, don’t just ask what it is. Ask:

• Who benefits?

• Who is ignored?

• What’s being buried while the spotlight shines here?

Because the spectacle will pass. The only question is: what will you remember when it does?

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

— Voltarine de Cleyre

Definition of tyranny

Tyranny is usually thought of as cruel and oppressive, and it often is, but the original definition of the term was rule by persons who lack legitimacy, whether they be malign or benevolent. Historically, benign tyrannies have tended to be insecure, and to try to maintain their power by becoming increasingly oppressive. Therefore, rule that initially seems benign is inherently dangerous, and the only security is to maintain legitimacy — an unbroken accountability to the people through the framework of a written constitution that provides for election of key officials and the division of powers among branches and officials in a way that avoids concentration of powers in the hands of a few persons who might then abuse those powers.

Tyranny is an important phenomenon that operates by principles by which it can be recognized in its early emerging stages, and, if the people are vigilant, prepared, and committed to liberty, countered before it becomes entrenched.

The psychology of tyranny

Perhaps one of the things that most distinguishes those with a fascist mentality from most other persons is how they react in situations that engender feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. Both kinds of people will tend to seek to increase their power, that is, their control over the outcome of events, but those with a fascist mindset tend to overestimate the amount of influence over outcomes that it is possible to attain. This leads to behavior that often brings them to positions of leadership or authority, especially if most other persons in their society tend to underestimate the influence over outcomes they can attain, and are inclined to yield to those who project confidence in what they can do and promise more than anyone can deliver.

This process is aided by a common susceptibility which might be called the rooster syndrome, from the old saying, "They give credit to the rooster crowing for the rising of the sun." It arises from the tendency of people guided more by hope or fear than intelligence to overestimate the power of their leaders and attribute to them outcomes, either good or bad, to which the leaders contributed little if anything, and perhaps even acted to prevent or reduce. This comes from the inability of most persons to understand complex dynamic systems and their long-term behavior, which leads people to attribute effects to proximate preceding events instead of actual long-term causes.

The emergence of tyranny therefore begins with challenges to a group, develops into general feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, and falls into a pattern in which some individuals assume the role of "father" to the others, who willingly submit to becoming dependent "children" of such persons if only they are reassured that a more favorable outcome will be realized. This pattern of co-dependency is pathological, and generally results in decision-making of poor quality that makes the situation even worse, but, because the pattern is pathological, instead of abandoning it, the co-dependents repeat their inappropriate behavior to produce a vicious spiral that, if not interrupted, can lead to total breakdown of the group and the worst of the available outcomes.

In psychiatry, this syndrome is often discussed as an "authoritarian personality disorder". In common parlance, as being a "control freak".

The logic of tyranny

In Orwell's classic fable, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist Winston Smith makes a key statement:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Following the trial of the surviving Branch Davidians in San Antonio, Texas, in March, 1994, in which a misinstructed jury acquitted all the defendants of the main crimes with which they were charged, but convicted them of the enhancements of using firearms in the commission of a crime, the federal judge, Walter F. Smith, first dismissed the charges, correctly, on the grounds that it is logically impossible to be guilty of an enhancement if one is innocent of the crime. However, under apparent political pressure, he subsequently reversed his own ruling and sentenced the defendants to maximum terms as though they had been convicted of the main crimes, offering the comment, "The law doesn't have to be logical."

No. The law does have to be logical. Otherwise it is not law. It is arbitrary rule by force.

Now by "logical" what is meant is two-valued logic, which is sometimes also called Boolean, Aristotelian or Euclidean logic. In other words, a system of propositions within which a statement and its negation cannot both be true or valid. One of the two must be false or invalid. The two possible values are true and false, and every meaningful proposition can be assigned one or the other value.

A system of law is a body of prescriptive, as opposed to descriptive, propositions, that support the making of decisions, and therefore its logic must be two-valued. It is a fundamental principle of law that like cases must be decided alike, and this means according to propositions that exclude their contradictions.

It is also a fundamental principle of logic that any system of propositions that accepts both a statement and its negation as valid, that is, which accepts a contradiction, accepts all contradictions, and provides no basis for deciding among them. If decisions are made, they are not made on the basis of the propositions, but are arbitrary, and that is the definition of the rule of men, as opposed to the rule of law.

So what Winston Smith is saying is that freedom means being able to distinguish between a true proposition and a false one, and what his nemesis O'Brien therefore does to crush him is make him accept that "2 + 2 = 5", which cannot be true if the logic is Aristotelian. O'Brien represents the logic of arbitrary power, a "logic" we might call Orwellian, although Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, was strongly opposed to it.

The methodology of tyranny

The methods used to overthrow a constitutional order and establish a tyranny are well-known. However, despite this awareness, it is surprising how those who have no intention of perpetrating a tyranny can slip into these methods and bring about a tyranny despite their best intentions. Tyranny does not have to be deliberate. Tyrants can fool themselves as thoroughly as they fool everyone else.

Control of public information and opinion

It begins with withholding information, and leads to putting out false or misleading information. A government can develop ministries of propaganda under many guises. They typically call it "public information" or "marketing".

Vote fraud used to prevent the election of reformers

It doesn't matter which of the two major party candidates are elected if no real reformer can get nominated, and when news services start knowing the outcomes of elections before it is possible for them to know, then the votes are not being honestly counted.

Undue official influence on trials and juries

Nonrandom selection of jury panels, exclusion of those opposed to the law, exclusion of the jury from hearing argument on the law, exclusion of private prosecutors from access to the grand jury, and prevention of parties and their counsels from making effective arguments or challenging the government.

Usurpation of undelegated powers

This is usually done with popular support for solving some problem, or to redistribute wealth to the advantage of the supporters of the dominant faction, but it soon leads to the deprivation of rights of minorities and individuals.

Seeking a government monopoly on the capability and use of armed force

The first signs are efforts to register or restrict the possession and use of firearms, initially under the guise of "protecting" the public, which, when it actually results in increased crime, provides a basis for further disarmament efforts affecting more people and more weapons.

Militarization of law enforcement

Declaring a "war on crime" that becomes a war on civil liberties. Preparation of military forces for internal policing duties.

Infiltration and subversion of citizen groups that could be forces for reform

Internal spying and surveillance is the beginning. A sign is false prosecutions of their leaders.

Suppression of investigators and whistleblowers

When people who try to uncover high level wrongdoing are threatened, that is a sign the system is not only riddled with corruption, but that the corruption has passed the threshold into active tyranny.

Use of the law for competition suppression

It begins with the dominant faction winning support by paying off their supporters and suppressing their supporters' competitors, but leads to public officials themselves engaging in illegal activities and using the law to suppress independent competitors. A good example of this is narcotics trafficking.

Subversion of internal checks and balances

This involves the appointment to key positions of persons who can be controlled by their sponsors, and who are then induced to do illegal things. The worst way in which this occurs is in the appointment of judges that will go along with unconstitutional acts by the other branches.

Creation of a class of officials who are above the law

This is indicated by dismissal of charges for     wrongdoing against persons who are "following orders".

Increasing dependency of the people on government

The classic approach to domination of the people is to first take everything they have away from them, then make them compliant with the demands of the rulers to get anything back again.

Increasing public ignorance of their civic duties and reluctance to perform them

When the people avoid doing things like voting and serving in militias and juries, tyranny is not far behind.

Use of staged events to produce popular support

Acts of terrorism, blamed on political opponents, followed immediately with well-prepared proposals for increased powers and budgets for suppressive agencies. Sometimes called a Reichstag plot.

Conversion of rights into privileges

Requiring licenses and permits for doing things that the government does not have the delegated power to restrict, except by due process in which the burden of proof is on the petitioner.

Political correctness

Many if not most people are susceptible to being recruited to engage in repressive actions against disfavored views or behaviors, and led to pave the way for the dominance of tyrannical government.

Avoiding tyranny

The key is always to detect tendencies toward tyranny and suppress them before they go too far or become too firmly established. The people must never acquiesce in any violation of the Constitution. Failure to take corrective action early will only mean that more severe measures will have to be taken later, perhaps with the loss of life and the disruption of the society in ways from which recovery may take centuries.

The only honorable course for a citizen is to conduct his life as though the Constitution, as originally understood, is in full force and effect, and if and when that brings him into conflict with public agents, to take a firm stance in opposition to their usurpations, regardless of consequences to himself, to them, or to others. Maintaining the Constitution, in every particular, is more important than human lives, even millions of them, if it should come to a choice. Individuals die. The Constitution needs to live for as long as one human remains alive, and perhaps even beyond that. 

— Jon Roland, 2003

--Context for blog post--

What are the odds the patsy taking the fall for the Charlie Kirk incident just so happens to have a transgender partner?

What are the odds the very last question Kirk was asked before being "unalived" was on tranny mass shooters in America?

Last month it was Minneapolis, this month Salt Lake City, both incidents involving tranny's in the narrative.

Do you see the pattern here?

What came from the Minneapolis PsyOp?

AI predictive policing and more reason for "personalized medicine."

Aside from the other telling signs and the obvious division this is causing (by design) this event will also justify both AI predictive policing (Palantir) and AI personalized medicine (Project Stargate) into the minds of the feeble masses – and yes even those who claim to be "awake."

I could be wrong (I want to be) but I haven't been so far...

While the public is distracted with headlines and culture wars, a series of quiet but decisive moves are reshaping the United States. The Epstein files remain sealed. Boycotting Israel is on the edge of becoming a federal offense. The economy is staggering under the weight of debt, inflation, and upward wealth transfer. And perhaps most dangerously, the meaning of words — particularly Nazi — is being bent and retooled to serve a new political purpose.

 This isn’t paranoia. It’s a pattern. And unless more people recognize it, America is being maneuvered into a future where surveillance, censorship, and control are normalized — all under the guise of “protecting democracy.”

 Epstein and the Politics of Secrecy

 The Epstein scandal should have been a moment of reckoning. Instead, it became another lesson in how effectively power protects itself. Despite endless speculation, only fragments of his network have ever been revealed. Now, by congressional maneuvering and judicial stonewalling, the remaining files are effectively locked away.

 The official line is that disclosure would harm “national security” or unfairly implicate the innocent. In reality, it keeps the machinery intact. Transparency here would topple too many pillars — political, financial, and cultural. And so, secrecy wins.

 Criminalizing Boycotts

 At the same time, legislation across multiple states and at the federal level has taken direct aim at boycotts of Israel. These “anti-BDS” measures do more than target one political movement; they carve a hole in the First Amendment.

 If political and economic boycotts — historically one of the most powerful nonviolent tools of American citizens — can be criminalized because they run counter to foreign policy, then the very concept of protected speech is hollow. It would mean Washington has the power to dictate not only what you can say, but what you can buy, sell, or refuse to purchase.

 That isn’t democracy. It’s policy enforcement by coercion.

 The Economy: Bleeding Out in Real Time

 Meanwhile, the economic reality for most Americans is grim. Inflation continues to devour wages. Debt has ballooned to historic levels. Servicing the interest alone now threatens to overwhelm the federal budget.

 On the ground, the middle and working classes are being hollowed out. Housing, food, fuel, and taxes consume nearly all disposable income. Whether the unraveling is intentional — a controlled demolition — or simply the consequence of decades of negligence doesn’t matter. The effect is the same: Americans are being stripped bare before the next phase of restructuring.

 Language as a Weapon: Redefining “Nazi”

 But perhaps the most insidious shift is linguistic.

 The word Nazi once referred specifically to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Over time, it became shorthand for authoritarianism, fascism, and absolute evil. Today, however, the term is increasingly untethered from history.

 There is a growing effort to flip the definition, recasting “Nazi” as a form of left-wing extremism. This linguistic sleight of hand serves a strategic purpose. Once established, it allows lawmakers and media alike to:

•  Label dissenters, populists, and gun owners as “Nazis.”

•  Justify mass surveillance, censorship, and unconstitutional laws under the banner of “fighting Nazism.”

•  Package authoritarianism itself as a moral crusade.

 It’s the same move that followed 9/11 with the word terrorist: stretch the label until it covers anyone the state wishes to target.

 Surveillance by Consent

 The groundwork for this has already been laid. Over the last decade, cancel culture and online witch hunts normalized the idea of punishing people for speech. Every time someone lost a job over a tweet, the precedent grew stronger: free expression is conditional, subject to the whims of outrage.By cheering on these purges, society gave implicit consent for mass surveillance. Neighbors snitched on neighbors. Employers policed thoughts as much as behavior. 

And the state — always watching — realized it could do the same on a national scale.

 What Comes Next

 So where does this leave us?

•  Litigation: Fighting through the courts is slow, costly, and rarely victorious. The system is designed to exhaust challengers.

•  Preparation: Building parallel networks, decentralized communication, and legal defense strategies is more practical than waiting for the system to correct itself.

•  Recognition: Most Americans won’t understand the magnitude of what’s happening until it’s irreversible. Those who do see it now have to prepare outside the herd.

 The Hard Truth

 The most bitter pill is this: those who eagerly participated in silencing others, enforcing conformity, and cheering on surveillance will never fully grasp the damage they enabled. They were useful to the machine, and once their role is complete, they’ll be discarded like everyone else.

 The few who recognize the game have a choice: adapt now, or be consumed in the reset.