“Governments lie for a living. That’s not conspiracy theory: that is how governments operate because they deal in power. They don’t deal in truth.” Those words come from economist Jeffrey Sachs in a recent New York Magazine (March, 2023) interview. Sachs is no conservative pundit. He is one of the global elite: an adviser to the World Economic Forum, the Vatican, and an avowed population control enthusiast. He is not being cynical, rather he is speaking from the insider’s point of view; opening the curtain just a bit to give us a glimpse of what really happens in the control room. We may disagree with his political stance but I think it fair to assume that he knows what he is talking about.

Watching our own government in action over the past three years only verifies what Mr. Sachs is saying. We have witnessed in plain view a dual system of justice in this country, one standard for the elite and privileged insiders and another standard, harsher and more punitive, for everyone else. Case in point: contrast the treatment meted out by the FBI to pro-lifer Mark Houck versus the president’s wayward son, Hunter Biden. Houck’s home was raided by an FBI SWAT team last September who terrorized his entire family (including 7 children) over a minor shoving incident at a Pennsylvania abortuary. Thankfully a jury subsequently acquitted Houck of the felonies he was charged with by the DOJ. Meanwhile the same agency spent nearly four years slow-walking their investigation of the Biden laptop containing tons of potentially incriminating evidence of foreign influence peddling, illegal drug use, unreported income, etc. Hunter has been treated with kid gloves throughout, finally pleading guilty to two insignificant misdemeanors. Compare that to numerous grandmas convicted of felony obstruction charges to the clamorous applause of legacy media simply for being escorted by police into the Capitol on January 6.

According to Jack Maxey who recovered much of the deleted material on the Biden laptop, there has been this quiet but cozy relationship between news reporters and intelligence agencies for a long time now. The watchdogs of democracy have apparently become the paid lapdogs of the very folks in power whom they are supposedly watching. Maxey says, “Much of the media is beholden to U.S. intelligence; I think they always have.” As a result he continues, “now they are reluctant to report on their paymasters.” Assuming him to be correct this means that our mainstream “free press” has been captured to become more of a propaganda arm for government than playing its proper role as an independent investigative institution which holds government accountable.

Of course that is not how a real democracy (actually a republic) is supposed to operate. One can see how our Constitutional chain of command has become inverted simply by watching the smug contempt that agency and cabinet officials routinely exhibit toward elected representatives, resorting to outright obfuscation and evasive answers regarding legitimate questions from members of the Senate and Congress. A permanent, and untouchable, administrative bureaucracy seems to have replaced representative government. But this trend of decline from a true functioning republic really began a century or so ago around the time of the First World War. President Woodrow Wilson epitomized the “Ivy League” ruling class mentality, even becoming president of Princeton, his alma mater. Elected president of the nation in 1912 with fewer than 40% of the vote in a three way race, his racism and contempt toward poor immigrants betrayed his patrician outlook. Of the latter he said they “poured the poison of disloyalty into the very veins of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.”

Acting on such sentiments, Wilson revamped the immigration laws to limit quotas on immigrants from poorer, mostly Catholic countries like Italy and Poland. He also signed the Espionage Act which opened up a witch hunt for the deportation of resident aliens. He brought the Federal Reserve System into existence which effectively turned control of the nation’s entire money supply over to the big Wall Street bankers, Morgan, Rockefeller, Warburg, and Schiff. He talked like a populist but in secret he faithfully served the financial oligarchs.

Wilson’s most important deception however was related to the Great War in Europe that began in August, 1914. From the beginning Wilson was keen to help the British and French against the Germans, despite the fact that over 8 million German-Americans lived in the United States, our largest immigrant group. He was aided in this endeavor by a secret British propaganda machine that was flooding American newspapers with defamatory stories about German aggressions and atrocities, either greatly exaggerated or patently untrue (the early version of “fake news”). The Brits were able to get away with the lies because the powerful Royal Navy had cut all the undersea cables into Germany while leaving the trans-Atlantic ones to the U.S. intact. The only incoming reports were thus monopolized by the British government’s propaganda bureau. The same navy then blockaded German ports to even foodstuffs so that by the War’s end the German people were starving to death. Even after the armistice on Nov. 11, 1918 it took Britain another 6 months to lift their blockades, thus needlessly extending the desperate famine of the German people.

Still, Wilson, while publicly proclaiming neutrality to appease public sentiment, behind the scenes was shipping tons of armaments to the allies, a highly profitable venture to American munitions suppliers. The German embassy was well aware of this duplicity which is why Berlin continually warned Americans not to travel on foreign flagged, i.e. British, ships which were being used to transport weapons. Germany’s only defense against overwhelming British seapower was thus her submarine warfare which led to the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania and loss of American lives in May, 1915. Again, Wilson and the British lied claiming there were no armaments in the Lusitania’s hold when in fact there were.

While Wilson was lying to the American people, the French and British were lying to Wilson about the toll the war was taking on their finances and manpower. Without American intervention they could not hold on indefinitely and they needed badly to draw America in to the fight. Wilson was more than willing to oblige but he did not have the American people behind him so he publicly played the dove even as his Wall Street cronies were making fortunes on financing and arming the conflict. Even so his popularity was thin and it was crucial for him to win the 1916 election. He campaigned on the one theme that could get him over the top, namely that he had kept America out of the war. Perceived as a pacifier he was barely re-elected. A mere five months later he managed to engineer the country into the bloody conflict on April 6, 1917. The belligerents by this point were exhausted and would very soon have had to negotiate a truce. Instead, America’s entry into the war essentially extended it for another year at the cost of another million or so lives, 116,516 of them Americans. Wilson got his way and the nations involved bled ever more.

Someone once said that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, referring not to those honest citizens who truly love their country, but to those political and financial schemers who cry out “Patriotism” in order to cudgel others into submission. Americans in 1917 were strongly pacifist, many being recent immigrants who had fled Europe precisely to escape the endless European wars. But once Wilson declared war patriotism was paraded out to shame, coerce, or denounce anyone who harbored pacifist leanings. One of the more shameful episodes in our nation’s history ensued in which loyal citizens were roundly demonized for having the wrong (German) ethnicity.

When Wilson’s call for half a million volunteers went unheeded by a leery public, a conscription law was passed. Consider that for millions of Irish immigrants who had fled centuries of the British depredations in their own homeland, their sons were now to be drafted to fight on behalf of the very same despised nation which had persecuted them. In fact, America was totally unprepared for this war, psychologically and militarily, not to mention considerable push back from all segments of society. Wilson dealt with such resistance harshly.

Weeks before war was officially declared a group of civilians called the American Protective League was formed to “root out” disloyalty, meaning any opposition to the war. The APL became basically an adjutant volunteer arm of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (later called the FBI), empowered to “enforce patriotism and stifle dissent.” By the fall of 1917 it had enlisted 250,000 members to spy on fellow citizens in enforcing the new Espionage Act (yes, the very same act now being abused to indict a former president). The APL became a kind of secret police deputized to “take action against disloyal socialists and pacifists by engaging in domestic surveillance and raiding businesses.” If that sounds more to you like a totalitarian regime than a democratic republic you are not alone.

The APL made warrantless visits into private homes to examine rationed foodstuffs, check up on suspected “Slackers” (draft dodgers), and spy upon neighbors. They took special aim against labor unions, particularly the IWW. In September, 1917 APL members accosted and questioned 75,000 suspected draft dodgers in New York, “arresting” many of them on the spot without any legal right or authority to do so. Employing the full hysterical apparatus of every fascist or communist police state, The APL ran rampant on American soil for nearly two years trampling civil rights underfoot.

Do you recall the self-appointed mask and vaccine cops of more recent memory? It seems the Karens never really go away, they just hybernate waiting for the next big crisis to empower them. The rise of Ku Klux Klan power in the 1920s was a natural outgrowth of the punitive 1918 Immigration Act and general hysteria leading to deportations of “suspect” persons, all official actions which aligned with and supported the paranoid mentality and activities of the APL.

Of course you can’t have an effective police state without a functioning “Ministry of Truth” and President Wilson provided amply for that as well. Under journalist George Creel, he formed the U.S. Committee on Public Information or CPI. The CPI under Creel coordinated the greatest public relations campaign in history up to that time. Creel, an organizational genius, created a department of pictorial publicity employing illustrators and artists to pump out visual propaganda. He trained thousands of speakers called Four Minute Men to pitch war bonds and make patriotic appeals at movie houses in between the four minute reel changes. These talks would eventually reach over 300 million listeners. Then there was a News Division, basically pro-war propaganda and its counterpart the Censorship Division working to repress “dangerous and unfavorable ideas.”

In retrospect the CPI would have a more long lasting influence on American society that the APL which had disbanded by 1920, although many of its members joined the Klan where they continued to harass “reds,” wobblies, and other “un-American” suspects (i.e. Jews and Catholics) throughout the 1920s. The CPI managed to train many persons who would later become very successful public relations and advertising executives. Those techniques of sales and indoctrination which would employ the new airwave communications technologies were greatly developed and enhanced by Creel. Wilson hated and mistrusted reporters but Creel worked to bring government and journalism into a closer, less adversarial, and perhaps more incestuous relationship than they had ever been before. And it was the intelligence agencies even more than the politicians who realized such an advantage and worked to enhance this symbiotic connection. Private media outlets thus became unofficial but effective mouthpieces to propagate government views and policies under the guise of news reporting.

Many of the governmental abuses we are witnessing today can be traced back to the Wilson administration and its involvement of the United States in a war which provided no direct benefit to the country. War did benefit the bankers and industrialists who made fortunes feeding a vast war machine. And the profits of war only whetted their greed induced appetite for more. Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, had tried to warn Wilson that, if left unopposed, Wall Street would drag this country into war. It came to pass just as he predicted in 1917, after Bryan had resigned as Secretary of State, protesting Wilson’s hidden pro-war agenda.

The “War to end all Wars” ironically became the first installment in a series of horrific conflicts infecting not just Europe but every corner of the globe. Until the appearance of this new industrial and finance capitalism which supplied the war machine, war had never been prosecuted on such a vast and destructive scale. Battlefields became scenes of mechanized mass murder. The bloody horrors, added to the severe privations imposed on the civilian population, helped provoke a revolution in Russia that gave communism its initial international foothold. And how does one explain the meteoric success of communism after 1917 except that the West had already long since betrayed its own Christian ideals, a betrayal fully manifested in this senseless, brutal war. This betrayal became even more apparent in the patently unjust and humiliating postwar treaty settlement forcibly imposed on Germany.

Although the military industrial complex wound down after the war it would roar back with a vengeance thanks to simmering resentments and a worldwide economic depression. Eager to stimulate economic expansion, many nations turned to increased military expenditures which only set off a new arms race. Despite initial resistance America was inevitably drawn into World War II, subject to much of the same baiting tactics the British had used before.

Obscene levels of defense spending and endless foreign wars and military adventures have since become the norm over the past 80 years, supposedly in “defense of democracy” however one chooses to define that ambiguous term. Ukraine is only the latest manifestation of Washington’s insatiable war-hawk fever which is uncritically supported by the media, particularly when it is other nation’s peoples whose blood is being spilled. We have been systematically lied to by our government, legacy media, and intelligence agencies for over a century. The politicians involved blithely cover up their own corruption and crimes by waving the flag and screaming “democracy!” Patriotism is indeed the last, and perhaps most effective, refuge of scoundrels.

In one sense 1917 might be pointed to as the year in which the United States ceased to be a functional republic and became a de facto banker’s oligarchy. Mussolini once defined fascism as the merger of government and corporate power. The Wall Street / Washington revolving door looks a lot like what he described, as do the despotic responses to the recent pandemic which only enhanced bureaucratic power and enriched multi-billion dollar corporations even as it drove countless small businesses into the ground.

The push for globalism has never been stronger or more confident of success than it is today. We are unfortunately seeing the fruition of Wilson’s dream of a global world order. It is the fruit of decades of official deceptions, lies, and distortions, meaning that it is a fruit rotten to the core. “Governments lie for a living. That is not conspiracy theory: that is how governments operate because they deal in power. They don’t deal in truth.“

Francis J. Pierson   + a.m.d.g.