6 Ways Big Pharma and Big Food Are Trying to Control the Natural Healthcare Industry in the U.S.

fundamentally, advertisng budgets are deployed to precondition markets ahead of actual product selling.  A lot of this is unethical and disingenioius at best.  recall that established products often have a long history of biological safety supporting them.  all this involves faux science at bbest6 and any form of convenient disinformation.  After all, who will challenge this?

Late fifties the butter industry wsas assaulted to open a path for margerine sales.  now science has completely debunked it whole, but we still used margertine unnecessarily for fifty years.  That is a clear example and you cannot unsee the activity once you are on to it.

It can be stopped, but it also needs massive successful class acton law suits which engage the damaged population.  And participating advertising bagenciesw need to be charged with crimes against humanity in order to educate the rest

6 Ways Big Pharma and Big Food Are Trying to Control the Natural Healthcare Industry in the U.S.

Big Pharma and Big Food’s tentacles reach deep into almost every area that controls which products, services and health information the majority of the population have access to. They have a disproportionate influence on political systems, regulation, markets, medical standards, information control, legal pressure and cultural conditioning.

The Free Thought Project14 hours ago

(Alliance for Natural Health International) America is the research and development capital of natural health. The range of dietary supplements and other natural health products available on the U.S. market dwarfs that in many other global markets, especially the European Union, which has long used regulation as a tool to remove products that compete with drugs.

But anyone with keen eyes on the U.S. market will recognize that the diversity of products on the U.S. market has flatlined in recent years, especially when compared with the boom that followed the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994.

6 Ways Big Pharma and Big Food Are Trying to Control the Natural Healthcare Industry in the U.S.6 Ways Big Pharma and Big Food Are Trying to Control the Natural Healthcare Industry in the U.S.

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Why has innovation declined? Why has natural health not assumed its rightful place as the mainstay of healthcare, as distinct from disease management?

In this article, we investigate the intricate, multi-factorial manner by which special interests work to keep natural health at the margins of healthcare.

America’s health crisis

The U.S. spends more on healthcare than any country in the world by a wide margin. In 2024 alone, spending reached an estimated $5.3 trillion, about 18% of the gross domestic product, averaging over $15,000 per person.

Yet despite this extraordinary investment, the U.S. consistently ranks near the bottom of high-income nations for life expectancy, chronic disease burden and preventable deaths. Put simply, the industrialized country that spends the most on healthcare is also the least healthy.

The scale of ill health makes this contradiction difficult to ignore. Research in 2023 found that 76.4% of American adults live with at least one chronic condition, while 51.4% were managing multiple chronic illnesses.

For many Americans, long-term disease has become normalized rather than exceptional. This raises a fundamental question: what role is the U.S. healthcare system actually playing?

Prescription drugs remain the most important intervention used for people with chronic diseases. While many drugs are lifesaving and essential, prescription medications are now recognized as the third leading cause of death in industrialized countries, behind only heart disease and cancer.

Public criticism has therefore focused heavily on Big Pharma, and much of that concern is justified. However, pharmaceutical dominance alone does not explain why Americans are so sick. Health outcomes are shaped long before a prescription is written.

Research consistently shows that up to 80% of chronic conditions, including cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes and certain cancers, could be prevented or significantly reduced through natural health approaches such as nutrition, lifestyle change, supplements and other preventive interventions.

If this is the case, why are these approaches not more central to chronic disease prevention and care?

The answer lies not in ignorance, but in an orchestrated plan that has been decades in the making. Health outcomes, it turns out, are shaped by who writes the rules, who controls the market and by whom health information is controlled.

In this era of shadow-banning and aggressive policing of “misinformation,” who decides what qualifies as misinformation? And how can people make informed health choices when information is filtered, language is controlled, and foods or nutrients with preventative or therapeutic value cannot be legally claimed to prevent or treat diseases?

To understand the factors at work, we undertook an exercise in which we pointed four different artificial intelligence (AI) engines (ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity and Google Gemini) at the problem, including reviewing the decades’ worth of articles and other data on our international and U.S. websites.

From all of this, we were able to deduce 123 factors, many being interconnected, and most suggesting a conspiracy between some of the most powerful commercial forces (Big Pharma, Big Food and Big Tech) and some of the most powerful agencies — the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Commmission and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

To help simplify what is an incredibly sophisticated and intricate system of control is, we’ve distilled all of it down to six interconnected macro-drivers that work to constrain natural health in what is widely regarded as the most liberal economy in the world, that of the U.S.

The ‘big 6’ macro-drivers constraining natural health

1. Who writes the rules?

Beyond genetics, health is largely shaped by how and where we live, how we move, what we ingest and inhale, how we work and recreate and other aspects of our behavior and choices. But choices, especially as they relate to health, are greatly affected by the information we receive from the various channels to which we are exposed.

Whoever writes the rules decides what counts as “food,” a “food ingredient,” or what gets labeled a “drug.” The health information attributed to those foods or ingredients is subject to extreme control by those who write the rules, whether these are statutory and written into law, or non-statutory, such as government guidance or algorithms used by social media platforms.

A blueberry can be packed with antioxidants that can reduce your risk of heart disease, phytosterols may support heart or hormonal health, chia seeds may support metabolic health and compounds like curcumin or berberine show incredible therapeutic promise.

Yet any claim that suggests these and the thousands of other natural products out there can be used to treat or prevent disease is illegal.

Such claims are the sole domain of drugs — a regulatory architecture that has been crafted over decades by Big Pharma. Consumers may indeed be urged by public health authorities to choose what they eat or consume wisely, yet they are denied a complete picture of what is known scientifically about natural products, especially where these are natural alternatives to drugs.

As we saw during the COVID-19 era, this regulatory power intensifies during public health emergencies. Under emergency authorities, governments can rapidly rewrite rules, suspend existing safeguards and centralize decision-making.

This often leads to the strict policing of information via labels like “misinformation” or “unsafe.” We now know, through recent congressional hearings and updated studies (here and here), that some of the information originally dismissed as “disinformation,” such as the strength of natural immunity, the limited effectiveness of masking and the weak scientific basis for the six-foot distancing, was in fact scientifically sound.

The same pattern is reinforced globally. International standards set by bodies like the Codex Alimentarius Commission and the WHO privilege pharmaceutical-style evidence.

Drugs are presumed “safe and effective” on receipt of their drug license, at least until either is disproven during post-marketing surveillance (e.g., thalidomide, Vioxx).

Foods and natural products, by contrast, must continuously justify any health claims made and disease treatment, mitigation or prevention claims are prohibited. When rules, language, and evidence thresholds are written this way, natural health is constrained, not by science, but by those who write the rules and set the narrative around human healthcare.

2. Who controls the money and markets?

Natural health is constrained at the level of evidence, where money determines what qualifies as “science.” In 1991, about 80% of industry-funded clinical trials were conducted in academic medical centers; by 2004, that figure had fallen to 26%, replaced by for-profit research organisations contracted by drug companies.

This shift has untold impact: study designs, publications, regulations and medical education reflect pharmaceutical interests, leaving natural therapies — without comparable capital — unable to produce the forms of evidence regulators, insurers and clinicians are structurally conditioned to demand.

Markets then reinforce this imbalance. Just four retailers control around 65% of grocery sales, while seeds, meat and grain trading are 60-90% concentrated. Online, gatekeepers such as Amazon and Walmart determine visibility, pricing pressure and data access.

Natural brands must pay for shelf space, surrender customer data and risk rapid imitation, while pharmaceutical and ultraprocessed products benefit from scale, marketing budgets and preferential placement across supply chains and pharmacies.

Finally, the squeeze extends into innovation and medical culture. Following the Myriad case, naturally occurring substances are largely excluded from patent protection, leaving high research costs with little legal protection. Without intellectual property protection, investors see little upside, research dries up and innovation slows.

Combined with regulatory capture and heavy pharmaceutical lobbying, control of money and markets systematically prioritises pharmaceutical over natural health and substances long before consumers are offered a real choice.

3. Who decides ‘standard care’?

Natural health is further squeezed by who defines “standard care.” Evidence-based medicine has elevated randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to a near-exclusive gold standard, despite clear limits.

One analysis found 36% of highly cited RCTs were later contradicted or shown to have weaker effects, while RCTs routinely exclude older, multi-morbid and real-world patients.

Because industry funds most large trials, the hierarchy is skewed: 69% of industry studies focus on drugs, while a mere 1.5% examine behavioral changes. When RCTs are treated as the only valid evidence, therapies without patent-driven funding struggle to generate the evidence required to be recognised as “standard care.”

Funding and publication bias reinforce this hierarchy. Industry-sponsored studies are about 27% more likely to favour the sponsor’s product, and roughly 69% of industry-funded comparative effectiveness studies focus on drugs, while negative results are routinely suppressed.

For instance, in antidepressant research, roughly 92% of trials with negative or questionable outcomes were never published or were misrepresented, while positive trials were almost always published.

Nutrition research remains sidelined, stagnating at about 5% of total National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for over two decades, while U.S. cancer nutrition funding fell 44% between 2012 and 2018. What is underfunded is under-studied, and what is under-studied rarely becomes “standard.”

Professional policing then locks these standards in place. In 2024 alone, the pharmaceutical industry spent $294 million on lobbying, while industry funding now covers about 70% of doctor training. Guidelines built on this evidence base are enforced through reimbursement rules and medical boards that determine acceptable practice.

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During the pandemic, clinicians prioritising nutrition, prevention or off-guideline approaches were suspended or barred from practice, signalling that deviation carries real risk.

By controlling the evidence, the education and the licenses, the system ensures that “standard care” remains drug-centred while systematically marginalizing natural health.

4. Who controls what you’re allowed to hear?

Natural health is constrained not only by evidence rules, but by visibility itself. As the saying goes, “he who pays the piper dictates the tune.”

Legacy media is structurally dependent on pharmaceutical advertising: between January and October 2024, pharma brands spent $7.9 billion on ads, with over $5.3 billion going to national and local TV, accounting for roughly 10%-12% of all TV ad revenue.

Prescription drug ads alone drove 11.6% of national linear TV spend. This dependence creates incentives to avoid narratives that challenge drug-centred models while marginalizing alternatives that do not buy airtime.

Beyond commercials, the flow of information is constrained through biased “fact-checking” and algorithmic suppression. Platforms including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter use downranking, demonetization, shadow banning and deplatforming to suppress health content that diverges from “authoritative sources.”

In 2022, Facebook censored a peer-reviewed investigation by The British Medical Journal (BMJ) into Pfizer’s vaccine trials, labeling it “missing context” despite the fact-checker identifying no factual errors.

Natural health brands also face advertising suspensions for “health claims” or using words like “treat” or “prevent,” even when discussing evidence-based substances.

Pharma also shapes discourse via Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). For example, a 2024 study investigating the 200% increase in opioid-related deaths (2000-2014) found that companies like Purdue Pharma and Janssen drove widespread opioid prescribing through KOL networks.

Today, this manufactured consensus extends to digital platforms where “patient influencers” are paid to promote medications. By framing natural health as “unproven” and using coordinated reporting campaigns to stigmatize non-drug interventions, the system ensures that what the public hears is not the full scientific truth, but a carefully curated pharmaceutical narrative.

5. How risk and law are weaponized

Legal and liability pressures have become another mechanism through which natural health is squeezed. Regulators increasingly rely on a “risk-based” enforcement framework that magnifies isolated incidents to justify broader restrictions on entire categories of natural products.

A clear example in the U.S. relates to the FDA’s 2019 withdrawal of Compliance Policy Guide (CPG) 400.400, which, for more than three decades, allowed homeopathic products to be marketed under enforcement discretion without necessitating a full drug license if they met labeling and manufacturing standards set by the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States (HPUS).

Removing that policy effectively exposed traditional remedies to the same “new drug” approval standards applied to pharmaceuticals — an impossible threshold for non-patentable substances that cannot recover the roughly $2.6 billion cost of modern drug development.

The disparity is striking: conventional pharmaceuticals account for more than 99% of adverse drug events reported to the FDA, while homeopathic products represent only a minute fraction of one percent. That’s why we’re engaged in a lawsuit to correct this wrong that is, otherwise, likely to eliminate an entire modality of alternative medicine.

Regulatory scrutiny is further reinforced through a steady stream of investigations into products marketed as natural. State attorney general actions frequently target categories such as foods and dietary supplements, weight-loss and wellness products sold online and CBD or cannabis-derived supplements.

Of course, oversight of adulterated or misbranded products is a legitimate consumer-protection function. However, enforcement often concentrates disproportionately on natural health categories, with highly publicized investigations and warning campaigns that shape public perception even when issues stem from isolated violations.

Alberta Just Declared WAR ON THE MAID DEATH CULT!

Unsurprisingly, this legistlation has attracted bad practise which must also be countered.  Inasmuch as original practise was awful  and very much off the books ,the first attempt to legistlate had to come up short.  now we have current practise to draw upon and correct,  May we all get it right.

for most cases, it is a preferred call. and even welcome. What is egregious is pushing the solution like a  sales pitch

Other wise tis is evolution on a touchy subject.

Alberta Just Declared WAR ON THE MAID DEATH CULT! 

No More Track 2 & No More DOCTOR MURDER PITCHES!!

Alberta Just Declared WAR ON THE MAID DEATH CULT! No More Track 2 & No More DOCTOR MURDER PITCHES!!

Posted on March 19, 2026In Breaking, Featured, Top Stories, Video Reports

Alberta’s groundbreaking Bill 18: The Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act, tabled March 18, 2026, is Premier Danielle Smith’s bold move to slam the brakes on Canada’s expanding MAID regime.

In this video Dan Dicks of Press For Truth covers the new bill that is restricting MAID strictly to terminal patients with 12 months or less to live, banning it for mental illness as the sole condition, ending Track 2 access for non-terminal cases, prohibiting mature minors and advance requests, and forbidding doctors from even mentioning MAID unless the patient initiates.

Alberta’s move is a massive middle finger to Ottawa’s death cult. We’re talking real safeguards and real protections!

The Political Left, Multiculturalism And The Dark Alliance With Islam

Islam, Nazism and Marxist all share one common ideology aimed at subverting society from within to gain political power and that always excludes all other opinions under might makes right.

of course the obvious counter to this is to use state might to crush the perps.  So far for over a century we have used social exhaustion.  this failed against hitler who got elected and too often against proto autocrats who often get elected first.  Trump is only a recent example of this.

I do think that the Rule of Twelve will resolve this social pathology but so far here we are.

The Political Left, Multiculturalism And The Dark Alliance With Islam

March 20, 2026 5 Comments

https://alt-market.us/the-political-left-multiculturalism-and-the-dark-alliance-with-islam/

By Brandon Smith

For 15 years the FBI was engaged in a landmark investigation into the largest Islamic-based charity in the United States, called The Holy Land Foundation. The organization was operating as a front for Muslim terror groups, funneling cash from western countries to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, until they were finally put on trial in 2008.

Convicted leaders were known as the “Holy Land Five,” and included Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh, and Mohammad El-Mezain. Among the documents seized from these individuals during the investigation was a strategic paper drafted by senior Muslim Brotherhood operative Mohamed Akram in 1991.

The paper was titled: “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America”. It outlined an agenda called the “Civilization-Jihadist Process”, also known as “Stealth Jihad”.

The memorandum gave detailed methods for establishing Islam as a “civilization alternative” in the West and a “grand Jihad” for eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within. It called for the ‘sabotaging’ of the west and its “miserable house” by domestic hands AND the hands of the believers so that the west is eliminated and “God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

The plan explicitly referred to using western society’s own people, institutions, laws, and unwitting allies (progressive groups and NGOs, media, politicians, academics, or civil-rights organizations) to advance the Islamic agenda.

Tactics included infiltration of education, media, government, finance, and alliances with non-Islamic actors “when tactically beneficial” while maintaining ideological separation. This is also called “long-term settlement” (tamkeen); a form of demographic or cultural subversion rather than direct conquest. It is often mentioned in the paper as “the settlement mission”.

A related 1982 Muslim Brotherhood document (called “The Project”) outlines a 100-year global plan with similar elements: building parallel societies, exploiting Western freedoms, and forming pragmatic coalitions.

One problem the Muslims wrestled with was the need for foreign alliances and western “advocates” to make immigration and the integration of Islam into target countries more “official”. Twenty-five years ago, this was considered all but impossible in the US and in Europe. However, since around 2014, the Sharia fundamentalists found a willing and ready ally in the new “woke” left.

Today, the notion of even discussing the agenda of “Stealth Jihad” in a public venue in 2026 is labeled “racist” by progressive activists and left wing politicians (even though Islam is not a race). If you were to go back in time around 15 years ago and explain to people what is happening today in terms of third-world immigration, they would probably laugh in your face and call you a conspiracy theorist.

In 2026 in Europe the plan is nearly complete and in the US the plan is well underway. The change in how our society views Islam as an untouchable subject is largely due to a dark and convenient political alliance between the woke left and the Stealth Jihad.

Only recently has the problem of Muslim immigration risen to the forefront of media coverage, but only because of the work of citizen journalists like Nick Shirley who are exposing widespread fraud among migrants. The majority of this fraud, whether it is in Minnesota or California, is connected to Somali Muslim immigrants and is perpetrated with the help of leftist NGOs and politicians.

Coming from a country with an average IQ of 67, these people are not capable of instituting such a plan on their own. They had help and it is clear that Democrats are deeply involved in these operations, perhaps in exchange for financial kick-backs, but certainly in exchange for votes (Somali migrants in Minnesota voted 80% in favor of Democrats in 2024).

It’s not surprising, but there are a lot of similarities between progressives in the west and third world Islamic migrants from the east.

The political left has long held an agenda similar to Stealth Jihad. In Marxism it is referred to as “cultural hegemony” or “the long march through the institutions”. It is associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party. Interestingly, his ideas of cultural hegemony are often studied as a means of better understanding the agenda of Stealth Jihad.

Gramsci’s approach (developed in his Prison Notebooks in the 1920s–1930s) argued that in advanced capitalist societies the “ruling class” maintains power through cultural hegemony. To overthrow this, he asserted that revolutionaries must wage a “war of position” rather than a frontal assault.

This meant infiltrating and capturing key institutions (schools, universities, media, churches, judiciary, government bureaucracies) to erode cultural norms, reshape public consciousness, and create counter-hegemony until socialism/communism becomes the new ideological norm. We have witnessed this nightmare in vivid color with the woke movement of the past decade. For the longest time the agenda was dismissed as “conspiracy.”

I would also point out that the general attitudes of third world migrants and leftists are essentially the same when it comes to production and survival: Both groups view producers as targets for piracy. Why would they integrate into western society, work hard and build for the future when they can feed off the production of others? Why create their own wealth when it is so much easier to pillage the wealth of people who innovate, construct and save?

But this partnership goes far beyond easy cash and socialized living into the realm of ideological and religious warfare. As noted, Stealth Jihad is about the exploitation of western freedoms and open systems as a means to invade and drive out the native religions (Christianity).

The Christian belief system is essential to western civilization. Whether or not a person living in the west believes in it doesn’t matter; they still benefit from the inherent Christian drive to build, structure and maintain a moral and ordered society based on rules for EVERYONE.

You would think that a partnership between Islam and the woke cult would be completely antithetical. After all, Muslim societies are defined by the rule of dominance, tribalism and brutal theocracy. There is zero tolerance in Islamic society for feminism, homosexuality, transgender theory or atheism. The Marxist world is rooted in atheism and moral relativism – The deconstruction of societal norms and the idea that unchecked hedonism is the ultimate form of freedom.

However, each group is beneficial to the other; they serve each other’s purposes. They also have the same primary enemy (Christianity). This intersection of benefits and shared hatred is where we find “Multiculturalism” – The agenda to wipe out the west using third-world immigration as a bulldozer.

Multiculturalism is simply an updated version of Gramsci’s Marxist cultural hegemony strategy, combined with third world notions of ethnic supremacy or religious supremacy. If you want to understand what is happening in places like the EU or the UK; if you want to know why these governments are completely ignoring the will of the public and blatantly aiding an Islamic invasion, this is why.

These are leftist governments with a clear objective to eliminate competing western and Christian ideals in order to establish a new cultural hegemony, and they are doing it subversively by using liberal values as a cudgel. Modern Europeans, fearful of ever being accused of “bigotry”, refuse to admit that they are committing high-minded suicide. Blind acceptance of immigration and the inability to discriminate logically is setting Europe on the path of total collapse.

This is what the Marxists want, and this is what the Muslims want. It’s much easier to pirate and enslave a population in the midst of social and economic crisis.

In the US we see a similar plan, though, leftists are working much harder to present Muslim migrants as ideologically aligned with liberalism. When conservatives see groups like “Queers for Palestine”, or we see New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani hiring transgenders for his administration while holding Muslim dinners on the floor of his office, what we are witnessing is the theatrical facade of “inclusivity.”

At bottom, these people do not share viewpoints that can truly “intersect”, but their short term goals are the same. Leftists hate conservatives and Christians because we represent a rules based order that stands in the way of their vision of pure hedonism. Muslims see conservatives and Christians as an obstacle to global Islam.

If the conservative west was theoretically defeated and we disappeared, the left and the Muslims would certainly turn on each other. Each group probably thinks they can control the other group when the time comes.

As the war in Iran moves forward, I have little doubt that we will see an exploding insurgency from leftists and Muslims in the US which will force us to question our foundational concepts of a “free and open society”. We will be forced to acknowledge that these exalted ideas cannot be applied to everyone. Specifically, they cannot be applied to people who want to destroy us. At bottom, the “rights” of people waging war upon us do not matter.

The question is, can we survive such a war and come out the other side with a constitutional republic intact? I think we can, but such a system would have to parse out and separate from ideological groups that see the west as a target (the Founding Fathers would NEVER have tolerated an anti-west invasion). We must accept, finally, that we cannot coexist in freedom with such people.

Man Successfully Designs mRNA Vaccine To Treat His Dog's Cancer

Hey, this is a profoundly repeatable therapy totally specific to the patient. butt out everyone.

This protocol needs to be repeated a million times andvalso with humans a billion times. The trest is nonsense.

This is no cure for cancer but it is a viable therapy specific to you alone. go for it. v  folks can do this.  Ad we need thousands out there trying,  And certasinly not an act of congress.

 

Man Successfully Designs mRNA Vaccine To Treat His Dog's Cancer

"If we can do this for a dog, why aren't we rolling this out to all humans with cancer?"

Ronald Bailey | 3.19.2026 3:40 PM

https://reason.com/2026/03/19/man-successfully-designs-mrna-vaccine-to-treat-his-dogs-cancer/

The happy saga of Australian tech entrepreneur Paul Conyngham and his dog Rosie is all over the internet. Conyngham's 8-year-old rescue dog, Rosie, was diagnosed with a fatal skin cancer. Instead of accepting Rosie's allegedly inevitable demise, Conyngham turned to artificial intelligence (both ChatGPT and Grok) to see if he could figure out how to create a personalized anti-cancer vaccine.

Conyngham reached out to Martin Smith, the director of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, to genetically sequence the DNA from both Rosie and her tumor. They agreed, and Conyngham paid $3,000 for the sequences. (It's worth noting that San Diego–based Element Biosciences soon plans to offer whole genome sequencing for $100.) Then he used Google's DeepMind AlphaFold and ChatGPT to analyze the genetic information and to identify mutated proteins produced by the tumors.

Next Conyngham used Grok to design an mRNA vaccine that boosts the production of tumor-associated antigens enabling Rosie's immune system to identify and destroy tumor cells. Once he had the vaccine recipe, he contacted Pall Thordarson, head of UNSW's RNA Institute, to see if the institute would synthesize the vaccine for him. They agreed. Amazing, right?!

Now for the maddening part: "The red tape was actually harder than the vaccine creation, and I was trying to get an Australian ethics approval to run a drug trial on Rosie," Conyngham told The Australian. "It took me three months, putting two hours aside every single night just typing up this 100-page document."

And even then he couldn't get permission for the researchers at UNSW to inject the bespoke vaccine. But why have bioethical bureaucrats involved at all? It's a personalized vaccine that would have absolutely no effects on any person or animal other than Rosie. Additionally, the patient is a dog. Surely Conyngham was sufficiently competent to provide whatever "informed consent" was needed for Rosie.

Rachel Allavena, a canine immunotherapy professor at the University of Queensland, had experience obtaining bioethical approval for experimental immunotherapies, so she was able to cut through the paperwork, reported the New York Post. Conyngham and Rosie traveled to Brisbane, where the vaccine was injected in December.

The good news is that the vaccine has shrunk Rosie's tumors, and she has become more of her old energetic self.

"It raises the question, if we can do this for a dog, why aren't we rolling this out to all humans with cancer?" Smith told the New York Post.

That's a really good question.

Hormuz Showdown Begins: US Warplanes, Apaches Launch Sea Lane Offensive As Trump Eyes Kharg Takeover, Marines En Route

The iranian regime has no choice but to fire off all their missle inventory because survival of the regime is not an option on tye table.

This war remaiins ad hoc.  However the marines are on the way to do two things.  First, seize kharg Island.  Then seize the oil fields  and defend them while making them operational.  My key point is that those ields are close by the coast and can be potentially defended against  Iranian forces who  must also defend the regime far far away.

This cuts off all potential cash flow for the regime.  Then you wait for collapse.

Hormuz Showdown Begins: US Warplanes, Apaches Launch Sea Lane Offensive As Trump Eyes Kharg Takeover, Marines En Route

RGC contradicts Bibi: says missile production is ongoing, is of “no concern” – even as IRGC spokesman Ali Mohammad Naeini is reported killed.

Energy war ongoing: Major sites damaged across the region – Haifa refinery hit, Qatar LNG output cut 17%, Kuwait facilities ablaze.

Kharg Island escalation looms: Trump admin weighing seizure of Kharg Island to reopen Hormuz; Thousands of Marines in route, reports of low US jet strafing runs over strait.

Signal of zero restraint from Ayatollah & FM: Iran sends warning if energy sites are hit again, leadership structure grows opaque; supreme leader says enemies will be denied security.

* * *

IRGC Says Missile Production Intact, Contradicting Netanyahu

On day 21, the Iran war shows no signs of abating. Iran’s IRGC spokesperson Ali Mohammad Naeini was reportedly killed in an Israeli overnight strike, another high-level hit as the decapitation campaign grinds on.

However, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Friday that the Islamic republic has continued to produce missiles despite the war with Israel and the United States. This directly contradicts Israeli PM Netanyahu’s assertions from the day prior, where he said both missile production capacity and uranium enrichment capability have been destroyed. Netanyahu had claimed, “Iran no longer has the capacity to enrich uranium and manufacture ballistic missiles.”

“Our missile industry deserves a perfect score…and there is no concern in this regard, because even under wartime conditions we continue missile production,” IRGC spokesman Ali Mohammad Naini said according to Fars.

Energy Complexes From Gulf to Israel Burning; Casualties Mount

The energy war continues to be front and center. Israel confirmed major Thursday Iranian strikes hit its Haifa refining complex, damaging critical infrastructure, and leaving many in the area without power. Also, the attack on Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility is expected to slash LNG export capacity by roughly 17%. Kuwait hasn’t been spared either, with its massive Mina al-Ahmadi refinery hit for a second straight day, with fires ripping through processing units.

Elsewhere, Bahrain says it has faced over 140 missiles and 240 drones since the war began, underscoring the scale of Iran’s regional barrage.

Across the region, escalation is bleeding into civilian life even in countries not directly part of the conflict. The biggest Muslim holiday of the year, Eid, is being celebrated, and in Iran the Persian New Year “Nowruz” – are unfolding under air raid sirens, also with fresh Israeli strikes in Lebanon and Syria. Currently Palestinians are being barred from Al-Aqsa during Eid. Casualties continue to mount with over 1,400 reported dead in Iran, including 204 children per the Red Crescent – and more than 1,000 killed in Lebanon.

Signs of US Plans to Take Kharg Island

But the real escalation risk surrounds what Washington’s next move may be, as the Trump administration is actively weighing seizing Kharg Island, Iran’s key export hub, in a desperate effort to force Hormuz back open. One source put it bluntly to Axios: “We need about a month to weaken the Iranians more with strikes, take the island, and then get them by the balls and use it for negotiations.” For all the bravado and rhetoric, some analysts see the situation as a classic escalation trap.

But the report says no final decision has been made, but the direction of travel is clear. “He wants Hormuz open… If he has to take Kharg Island… that’s going to happen,” one senior official said, while acknowledging a coastal invasion remains on the table.

The Wall Street Journal in fresh reporting sees signs that an operation is already underway: “The U.S. and its allies have intensified the battle to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, sending low-flying attack jets over the sea lanes to blast Iranian naval vessels and Apache helicopters to shoot down Iran’s deadly drones, American military officials said.” it writes.

via Telegram sputnik_africa

Iran Vows ‘Zero Restraint’ If Its Energy Sites Attacked Again

Here’s what Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted to X on Thursday: “Our response to Israel’s attack on our infrastructure employed FRACTION of our power. The ONLY reason for restraint was respect for requested de-escalation. ZERO restraint if our infrastructures are struck again. Any end to this war must address damage to our civilian sites.”

And CNN reports Friday: “Mojtaba Khamenei, who has made no public appearance since being chosen to succeed his father, said in a written statement security must be denied to all Iran’s enemies.”

Things are meanwhile getting more opaque in terms of leadership structure inside Iran: “Iran has not named replacements for the vast majority of senior officials killed by Israeli strikes since the conflict began on February 28,” CNN reports.

Iran’s strategy appears to be to survive while imposing severe high costs:

Intense Attacks on Israel Continue

There has remained heavy censorship in Israel amid the war, but various overnight reports suggested another past 12 hours of heavy Iranian missile bombardment of Israel. Times of Israel confirmed, though without much in the way of details that sirens have been constant around central and northern Israel.

There were at least half a dozen missile salvos on Israel since late last night. “A home in the central city of Rehovot is burning following an apparent cluster munition impact, rescue services say,” TOI writes. “There are no immediate reports of injuries after Iran launched a ballistic missile carrying a cluster bomb warhead at central Israel.”

Flash90/TOI: The site of an Iranian missile impact in Rehovot, central Israel.

One war observer who has regional contacts wrote on X the following account: “Israel has been pummeled all night. Based on my counts of alerts and reports of landings from open sources the number increased tonight, though there are no reports of casualties.”

The journalist continues, “My Whatsapp groups are filled with people having breakdowns after not sleeping for two weeks. In Jerusalem 4 alerts were heard in a 90 minute span. Iran has been able to increase the number of launches daily. Everyone seems angry at the IDF and Netanyahu for lying about the destruction of Iranian capabilities.”

Doug Casey on The Real Causes of The American War of Secession

Makes sense because the only source of revenue for the federal gvernment was tariffs.  It was onlymuch later that internal taxation became universally possible.  So yes, the planters saw no reason to stay in the Union.  Recall those same planters joined the revolution to protect their long established slave economy a century earlier.

What was making slavery unviable was the steady monetization of the economy using fiat currency.  The writer is correct in pointing out that the slave seconomy was disapearing and this war only sped it on its way.

The South had a real problem of a failing economic model along with facing extractive tariffs on goods naturally acquired as counter trade for cotton.  This might of been fixed with a southern exclusion zone for tariffs but that was likely impractical.

Secession was an attempt to postpone the inevitable which was in sight even then.

Doug Casey on The Real Causes of The American War of Secession

by Doug Casey

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-the-real-causes-of-the-american-war-of-secession/

Editor’s Note: Doug is a longtime member of a dinner club in Buenos Aires called The Round Table. The over 100 years old group is composed of eight Argentines, eight Englishmen, and eight Americans. Every month, one of them gives a paper on a subject they’re knowledgeable about and, after discussion, everyone sits down to a catered dinner. It’s one of the niceties of living in Buenos Aires.

This paper presents an underappreciated view of the American war between the states.

—

I wish to disabuse you of something you’ve probably believed since you were ten years old. Only a third of you have been subjected to the American public school version of history, but that version has permeated throughout the world. After all, the winners get to write the history books. What Americans are taught about their so-called “Civil War” is, in good measure, a fairy tale.

Let’s start by getting the terminology right. It wasn’t a “civil war.” A civil war is a conflict in which two or more factions fight for control of the same government. That’s not what happened. The South wasn’t trying to take over the North. Their sole objective was to leave the Union. That made it a war of secession. Calling it a civil war is propaganda—framing Southerners as rebels and insurgents rather than people who simply wanted to go their own way. Some call it the War of Northern Aggression, a name which might have stuck if the Confederacy had won. I prefer to be neutral, so I will call it the War Between the States.

The standard narrative holds that the noble North, led by the saintly Abraham Lincoln, fought the evil South to free the slaves. Full stop. Now, more than any time in the past, that’s the whole story as far as most Americans are concerned. It’s on a par with believing that Spain blew up the battleship Maine to start the Spanish-American War, or that World War I was fought to “make the world safe for democracy.” I’ll reserve comment on more recent wars. But good propaganda always contains a kernel of truth, even while truth is always the first casualty in a war.

So, what were the causes of the War Between the States, which started April 12, 1861, with the bombardment of Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor, and ended April 9, 1865, with the surrender of Lee at Appomattox?

Slavery was certainly a major element of the conflict. But reducing the bloodiest war in American history—700,000 dead, which in per-capita terms would be about seven million today—to a single cause is not just intellectually lazy and dishonest. It’s dangerous.

So let me walk you through what happened. I think you’ll find it’s far more interesting than the storybook version—because it involves economics, power politics, exploitation of one part of a country by another part, and international intrigue.

In the country’s earlier days, Americans saw themselves as citizens of a state, not the US. Even so, by 1860, the United States was no longer one country in any meaningful economic sense. It was two countries with diametrically opposed economic interests that happened to share a flag and a constitution.

The North had industrialized, with about ten times as many factories as the South, and a growing urban working class fed by massive immigration from Ireland and Germany—people who would work for next to nothing. Northern industrialists were accumulating enormous wealth and, more importantly, enormous political power. They wanted protection from foreign competition. They wanted high tariffs to keep cheap British-manufactured goods out of the American market.

The South was the opposite. It was an agricultural export economy. Cotton was the big commodity—by the 1860s, cotton alone accounted for almost 60% of all US exports. The fiber mainly went to Britain’s mills in Manchester. The South was plugged into the global economy in a way that the North was not, and Southern planters wanted what any export economy wants: free trade. Low tariffs, open ports, and the ability to buy manufactured goods from whoever offered the best price, which was usually Britain.

Half of the country wanted protectionism, and the other half wanted free trade. This wasn’t a minor policy disagreement, but a fundamental conflict of interest that had been building for decades. Alexander Hamilton versus Thomas Jefferson. Industrial mercantilism and protectionism versus agrarian free markets. Like philosophical arguments here in Argentina.

Tariffs: How the North Looted the South

In 1828, Congress passed what Southerners called the Tariff of Abominations, with duties as high as 50 percent on imported manufactured goods. Southerners could no longer buy British tools or cloth at the world market price. You’re forced to buy inferior Northern-made versions at an inflated price. Meanwhile, your cotton exports are damaged, since Britain now has less income with which to buy them. Worse, Britain considers counter-tariffs on cotton imports. Worse yet, Britain sees it should diversify the sources of its imported cotton, destroying your market, which is exactly what happened during the war. You’re being taxed to subsidize your economic competitor. It’s a transfer of wealth from South to North, administered by the federal government.

South Carolina nearly seceded over this in 1832—thirty years before Fort Sumter. Vice President John C. Calhoun developed the doctrine of nullification, arguing that a state could refuse to enforce a federal law that it considered unconstitutional. President Andrew Jackson—who was a Southerner himself—threatened military force. They worked out a compromise, but the fundamental issue was never resolved. And the principle Calhoun articulated—that the federal government could become an instrument of sectional plunder—became the intellectual foundation for secession.

Now here’s the detail that most historians conveniently skip over.

December 20, 1860, and June 8, 1861, following Abraham Lincoln’s election, South Carolina was the first to secede, followed by six other Deep South states by February 1861. After the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, four more states joined, totaling 11 states in the Confederacy. In March 1861—before the war started, before anybody fired a shot—Congress passed the Morrill Tariff. This raised duties back to their highest levels since the Tariff of Abominations. It passed because Southern representatives of seven states had already left Congress following their secession. Think about the timing. The South walks out, and the very first thing the North does is jack up tariffs to benefit Northern industry. If you’re a Southerner, that tells you that the moment you lose your political voice, the Northern majority will use the federal government to loot you. Which is, of course, exactly what Calhoun had warned about thirty years earlier.

The Morrill Tariff also shaped how the rest of the world saw the conflict. Many British observers—and remember, the British were passionate free-traders at this point—looked at the American war and saw not a moral crusade against slavery but a trade war. The protectionist North was trying to force the free-trading South back into an economic arrangement that served Northern interests. We’ll come back to the British angle, because it’s crucial.

It Wasn’t Only Tariffs

Tariffs were the most visible grievance, but they were far from the only one. The federal government had become, in effect, a machine for transferring wealth and power from the South to the North. And I use the word “transferring” deliberately, because this was not an accident. It was policy.

Since there were 23 million citizens of 23 Northern states, and only 9 million (including 3.5 million slaves) in the South, there was no question about which region future legislation would favor.

Federal spending on internal improvements—roads, canals, harbors, railroads—went overwhelmingly to the North. Southern tax revenue, collected largely through those tariffs on imported goods that Southerners consumed, was building infrastructure in Northern states. When the transcontinental railroad was authorized, it followed a northern route. Federal land grants went to Northern settlers and Northern railroad corporations. The Homestead Act, which Republicans championed, was designed to populate the western territories with small free-soil farmers aligned with Northern political interests—not with large-scale agricultural operations that might complement the Southern system of plantations.

The banking system was controlled by Northern financial interests. Southern planters were perpetually at the mercy of New York bankers and cotton factors who set the terms of trade. If you were a Southern cotton grower, you shipped your product through Northern ports, insured it with Northern companies, financed it through Northern banks, and bought your manufactured goods from Northern factories at tariff-inflated prices. The wealth extraction was systematic.

Consider this from the perspective of someone sitting in Charleston or Richmond in 1860. You’re looking at a federal government that spends your tax money on somebody else’s infrastructure, gives away the western lands to people aligned against your interests, and runs a banking system designed to extract your wealth. Many Southern writers explicitly compared their situation to the American colonies under British rule. The structural dynamics were remarkably similar. The South was being treated as an economic colony of the North.

I know some of us here tonight have done business in countries where the central government exists primarily to serve the interests of one region or one class at the expense of everyone else. You know what that looks like. You know how it feels. And you know that people don’t tolerate it forever.

The Lincoln Myth: What He Actually Said and Believed

Now we come to Abraham Lincoln, who may be the most successfully mythologized political figure in American history. And I say that as someone who considers most political figures to have feet of clay.

The popular version of Lincoln is the Great Emancipator—a man who went to war to free the slaves because it was the right thing to do. The actual historical record tells a very different story. I’m not going to give you my interpretation here. I’m going to give you Lincoln’s own words, because they’re rather devastating to the myth.

Look at his First Inaugural Address, March 1861, with seven states already out of the Union: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” That’s not exactly “free at last” rhetoric.

During the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln said explicitly that he was not in favor of social and political equality between white and black people. He opposed blacks serving as voters, jurors, or officeholders. He supported colonization—shipping freed blacks to Africa or Central America. He continued to explore colonization schemes well into his presidency. By modern standards, Lincoln’s racial views were appalling. But they were mainstream for a Northern politician of his era, or the typical man in the street, which tells you something about how “anti-slavery” the North actually was in practical terms. Slavery was a subject of moral debate in both the North and the South. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published in 1851 and was a runaway Best Seller, with 300,000 copies sold in the US and a million in Britain just during its first year. It became the largest-selling novel of the 19th C. The fanatical abolitionist John Brown, then featured in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, also served to give a psychological boost to the importance of slavery.

Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He was a moderate Republican whose income came from railroads and banks, whose philosophy was that of Hamilton, and whose primary commitment was preventing the expansion of slavery into new territories—not ending it where it existed. His reasons were as much economic as moral. Free-Soil Republicans didn’t want slavery in the territories primarily because they didn’t want to compete with slave labor. They wanted the West reserved for white free laborers. It was an economic program wrapped in moral language.

The South could see that slavery was uneconomic and on its way out. Fighting a bloody civil war to maintain slavery never made sense, and no other country fought a war to abolish slavery. It would have died of its own dead weight. Brazil was the last major country to abolish it, peacefully, in 1888.

Note the date of the Emancipation Proclamation. January 1, 1863. With only 87 words, it’s well-crafted and seen as a great moral thunderbolt. But it should be read carefully. It freed enslaved people only in states that were in rebellion. It did not apply to slaves in Washington, D.C., border states that stayed loyal to the Union, or parts of Confederate states already under Union control. The Proclamation was a military measure, not a moral one. Lincoln said so himself. His letter to Horace Greeley in August 1862 is the Rosetta Stone of Lincoln’s priorities: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”

Lincoln acted as a veritable dictator during the war. He suspended Habeas Corpus, he imposed an income tax, instituted a draft, and suppressed free speech, arresting many thousands and shutting down 300 papers for things like criticizing the war effort. His priority was preserving the Union and the federal government’s power—not liberating enslaved people, nor preserving citizens’ liberties. Which brings us to what I think is the most fascinating part of the whole story.

Britain—An Underrated Element

This is the part they definitely don’t teach in American schools, and it may be the most important part of the whole story. Perhaps for the same reason that the importance of the French Army and Navy aren’t recognized in winning the Revolutionary War.

Great Britain in 1861 was the world’s superpower. The Royal Navy controlled the seas. The British Empire spanned the globe. And the British textile industry—the engine of the world’s largest economy—ran on Southern cotton. About 80 percent of the cotton feeding British mills came from the American South. When the Union Navy blockaded Southern ports, it was like cutting off Britain’s oxygen supply. Hundreds of thousands of British textile workers faced unemployment. The economic pressure on the British government to do something was enormous.

But it wasn’t just about cotton. The British had excellent strategic reasons to want the United States broken in two. Think about it from London’s perspective. The Americans had been getting increasingly uppity—the Monroe Doctrine, expansionism, challenging British influence in Latin America and the Caribbean. The United States was becoming a serious rival. Better to have two weaker nations, one of which—the Confederacy—would be dependent on British trade and goodwill. From a pure realpolitik standpoint, British interests pointed strongly toward supporting Southern independence.

And they came very close. In November 1861, a Union warship stopped the British mail steamer Trent and seized two Confederate diplomats. Britain was furious. Troops were dispatched to Canada. The Royal Navy mobilized. Britain and the United States came within inches of war. Lincoln backed down and released the diplomats, but the episode showed just how eager elements of the British establishment were to intervene.

Now here’s the problem the British government faced. Britain had abolished slavery in 1833, and the British public—especially the middle and working classes—took enormous pride in that fact. Anti-slavery sentiment was a powerful political force in Britain. So while the government had every economic and strategic reason to support the Confederacy, doing so openly would mean allying with a slave power. That was politically toxic.

But—and this is the key—as long as Lincoln said the war was about preserving the Union and not about slavery, the British could frame potential intervention as supporting Southern self-determination. The Times of London took exactly this line throughout 1861 and into 1862. The South was fighting for independence, just as the Americans had fought against Britain in 1776. It was about self-government, not slavery. Unless Lincoln made the narrative about slavery, the British had political cover to intervene.

The Emancipation Proclamation destroyed that possibility. The moment Lincoln made abolition an explicit war aim, any British government that supported the Confederacy would be supporting slavery against freedom. And no British politician could survive that. The British working class, despite the devastating unemployment caused by the cotton shortage, rallied to the Union cause. There was a famous meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester—textile workers who were literally starving because of the cotton blockade voted to support Lincoln and emancipation. It was one of the most remarkable moments in British labor history.

Think about what actually happened here. Lincoln played the slavery card not primarily because of moral conviction, though he had serious moral objections to slavery. He played it because it was his single most effective weapon to prevent British intervention. Without the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s possible that Britain would have recognized the Confederacy, broken the blockade, and changed the outcome of the war. Britain’s interests pointed directly toward supporting the South. The breakup of America would have served British strategic interests beautifully. Cotton supply secured. A rival power permanently divided. The only thing that prevented it was the moral weight of the slavery question, which Lincoln exploited with extraordinary political skill. The Proclamation was a geopolitical masterstroke disguised as a moral declaration.

States Rights: Now Just a Euphemism

In polite American society today, the phrase “states’ rights” is treated as code for racism. It was certainly used that way during the civil rights era. But the constitutional questions at the heart of secession were real, and dismissing them as mere cover for slavery is intellectually dishonest.

The United States was founded as a federation of sovereign states. The Constitution was ratified by state conventions, not by a national vote. The Tenth Amendment (now effectively a dead letter) reserved all undelegated powers to the states. For most of American history, the dominant constitutional theory—not just in the South, but across the country—was that the Union was a voluntary compact. States had joined voluntarily, and they could leave voluntarily.

New England Federalists discussed secession during the Hartford Convention of 1814. William Lloyd Garrison, the most famous abolitionist in America, advocated for the North to secede from the South, calling the Constitution a “covenant with death.” The idea that secession was constitutionally permissible was a mainstream position with adherents in every region of the country. The Constitution says nothing about secession one way or the other. It was an open question.

The war settled that question—by force, not by argument. The Union won, and the victors wrote the legal and historical narrative. But secessionists were not wrong as a matter of law. It’s not unlikely the war might have never broken out, ending as a Mexican standoff, if the Confederates hadn’t foolishly fired the first shot at Ft. Sumter. At that point, Lincoln raised 75,000 men for a three-month enlistment and felt it necessary to use them, which he did at First Bull Run on July 21.

The question of whether a political subunit has the right to withdraw from a larger entity is never simple. Most countries are artificial constructs, with artificial borders, mashing together different tribes, religions, and cultures. That’s true of every country in Africa, highlighted by secession movements in Nigeria, Congo, and Sudan. Every country in the Middle East and Western Asia is an unstable multicultural domestic empire; most will break apart. It’s true that many places in this continent, such as Brazil and Bolivia, have this problem. It wasn’t simple in the America of 1861, and it isn’t simple now. Ask the Scots, the Catalans, the Quebecois, and most recently the Albertans. It’s an open question whether the United States will have secession movements or a civil war in the years to come. What are the chances that young Chicanos in Los Angeles will want to pay 20% of their income in Social Security to support old white women in Massachusetts? These are legitimate political and economic questions. Quashing them with shouts of “racism” doesn’t make them go away.

Putting It All Together

So what actually caused the War Between the States? Everything I’ve described is operating simultaneously and reinforcing each other. That’s the honest answer, and it’s a lot more interesting than the fairy tale that it was a crusade to end slavery.

The economic divergence between North and South created fundamentally incompatible interests on tariffs, trade, banking, infrastructure, and western expansion. The war would likely have happened even in a world where slavery didn’t exist.

The tariff question convinced Southerners that the federal government had become a tool of Northern economic exploitation. The passage of the Morrill Tariff in 1861, the instant Southern representatives left Congress, was the confirmation of everything they’d feared.

Lincoln’s actual position on slavery was pragmatic and politically calculated. He was willing to tolerate slavery where it existed to preserve the Union, and he adopted emancipation as a war aim primarily for strategic reasons—above all, to prevent British intervention.

Britain’s role was far more significant than the standard narrative acknowledges. The threat of British recognition of the Confederacy was one of the most powerful forces shaping the war’s moral framing. The Emancipation Proclamation was a diplomatic weapon as much as a moral declaration.

Slavery sat at the center of all of this—but in far more complex ways than the simple story suggests. Slavery was the foundation of the Southern economy that generated the tariff disputes. Slavery was the most prominent states’ rights issue, though not the only one. Slavery was the lever Lincoln used to reshape the war’s international dimensions. And slavery was the moral question that prevented Britain from tipping the balance.

Why Any of This Matters

Let me wrap up by telling you why I think this matters—and not just as a historical curiosity. Simplistic narratives produce simplistic thinking. And simplistic thinking about why nations go to war yields more wars. Oddly, the War Between the States has become more controversial than ever in recent years. The atmosphere in the U.S. has become increasingly racially charged, and the war is now seen as a “good guys versus bad guys” situation. Monuments to Southern soldiers have been taken down, and displaying the Stars and Bars is considered “hate speech”.

Fault lines are developing in the US. Economic divergence between regions and classes is different from that of the 1850s but is arguably much more severe. The federal government was a relatively trivial influence when it controlled only a few percent of the GDP, but now it controls about 40%, in addition to creating currency and credit at will, complex laws, and massive regulations. It’s become a self-perpetuating machine for transferring wealth to the politically connected. Constitutional questions about the limits of federal power are more urgent than they were in the 1850’s.

I’m not predicting another war of secession with conventional armies; the country is way too integrated, and battle lines aren’t drawn on state lines so much as by who controls individual cities. But the US increasingly seems on the cusp of a genuine civil war—different factions fighting for control of the same government, violence over who gets to wield power. That’s far uglier than secession, and the underlying forces are not relics of the past. They’re permanent features of political life, and they’re very much in play right now. Red people and Blue people can’t even have a civil conversation about more than the weather and the state of the roads. And not even about the weather…

That’s one reason for international diversification. It’s an insurance policy against political instability, including in the American government. The men who founded the United States understood that governments are dangerous. They tried to craft a Constitution with enough checks and balances to constrain that danger. Things broke down in 1861. Since governments always grow, accumulate power, and always serve the interests of those who control them at the expense of everyone else, it’s not unlikely the US will experience another period of severe unpleasantness.

The War Between the States is actually just Exhibit B; it wasn’t America’s first experience with overt war between citizens. Exhibit A is the Revolutionary War of 1775-83. It was both a War of Secession (Americans from Britain) and a civil war, because everyone was legally British. But about 1/3rd of them wanted to take over the government and change it, and a different 1/3rd saw that third as treasonous rebels and wanted to maintain the status quo. That war was neighbor against neighbor, much more brutal and far-reaching than just some battles between Red Coats and Continentals.

The 700,000 men who died in the unpleasantness of 1861-65 fought for many different reasons, but very few did it to preserve slavery; 50% of Southern whites owned no slaves. Some fought for abstract principles of union or self-government. But most were simply caught up in forces beyond their control, which is what happens to ordinary people when governments go to war. Understanding the full truth about why they died is the least we owe them. And it’s the best protection we have against repeating similar catastrophic mistakes.

Editor’s Note: Many of the same fault lines are reappearing in the US and around the world today. Economic divergence is getting worse. Government is bigger than ever. Taxes keep rising, debt is exploding, and the system is increasingly designed to benefit the politically connected at everyone else’s expense.

If that sounds familiar, it should.

In the article above, Doug lays out how these kinds of pressures helped drive America toward catastrophe before. In his new video, The US and the World are Heading for a Serious Crisis, he explains why the next major reckoning may be even more dangerous and what steps you can take now to protect yourself and come out ahead.