Lux Lucet

.The big story this past week? Pretty obviously it was Donald Trump’s decision to reprise his role on the Apprentice, issuing a “Comey, you’re fired” to the now former FBI Director.

As with any decision of this sort, the was a sharp divide along party lines. Some Republicans cheered the news. Democrats, on the other hand, railed against the decision.

Writing in The New Yorker, John Cassidy opined, “At a time like this, it is important to express things plainly. On Tuesday evening, Donald Trump acted like a despot.”

Oh, spare me. The republic will survive.

Generally speaking, the hiring and firing of federal bureaucrats is not a terribly interesting topic. But in Comey’s case, a few words are in order.

For my part, I lost all respect for the man last summer when he failed to recommend charges against a clearly guilty Hillary Clinton in the Servergate scandal.

Then, just a week before the November vote, Comey claimed he was reopening the investigation, only to shut it down just a few days later. This made Comey appear indecisive.

A third failure of judgment on Comey’s part was his decision to launch an investigation into Trump’s dealings with Russia, based, as it was, in part on the debunked “Golden Shower” dossier.

So we have an FBI Director who wouldn’t recommend charges against Hillary Clinton, against whom there was a mountain of evidence suggesting serious wrongdoing during her term as Secretary of State, but who continued to doggedly pursue the case against Donald Trump, a case notable for its complete lack of actual evidence.

So, should Comey have been fired? Yes.He failed the biggest test of his career when he refused to recommend charges against a clearly guilty Hillary Clinton. Thankfully, the American people showed better judgment than he did by refusing to put her in office.

A Brexit, A Frexit, a 16th Century Prexit

In last week’s TWIR, I mentioned that the French presidential election held last Sunday had big implications for France and for the future of the EU.

If you can believe the vote totals, globalist Emmanuel Macron won a resounding victory over nationalist Marine Le Pen.

In response to this, a friend Jeff Schneiter emailed me with his thoughts on the election result. Contrasting the victories of Brexit and Donald Trump with the failure of Le Pen in France, he chalked up the difference to the fact that Great Britain and the US are historically Protestant nations, compared to France which ended the influence of the Prexit (Protestant Exit from the Roman Church-State, AKA the Reformation) in 1690 with the revocation of the Edit of Nantes.

I think Jeff’s onto something here.

The conflict presented in the news as a contest between globalism and nationalism, is really a conflict between political Romanism and political Protestantism.

The Roman Church-State and its Antichirst papal head have always been about globalism. In pre-Reformation Europe, regardless of what country you lived in, you couldn’t so much as breath without permission from the pope.

A hundred years after the Reformation, political Protestantism ended Rome’s domination of all of Europe with its victory in the Thirty Years’ War, settled by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

The treaty of Westphalia established the principle of Westphalian sovereignty, an international political system in which each nation was free to pursue its own ends within the borders of its own territory, free from the control of supranational governing bodies such as the Holy Roman Empire.

Political Protestantism leads to national sovereignty. Political Romanism is globalism.

With this in mind, it is unsurprising that national sovereignty movements succeeded in Britain and the US, while failing in historically Roman Catholic France.

Ideas do indeed have consequences.

Trump to Meet With Pope Francis

During his trip to the Middle East and Europe, Donald Trump will stop off in Rome to meet with Pope Francis on May 24, the Vatican’s Zenit News Service confirmed.

Presidential meetings with the pope have, it seems, become a requirement of the office over the past several decades. Stretching back to Eisenhower who met with Pope John XXIII in Rome in 1959, the past 11 US presidents have met with the Bishop of Rome, most of them more than once.

You can read a history of these meetings here and here.

It is a violation of the First Amendment for the US government to diplomatically recognize the pope as head of state. This victory, achieved by the Romanists during Reagan’s term of office, has added even more weight to the presidential visits with the pope since that time.

Got Gold and Silver?

Whether you’re a long time sacker or have yet to make your first precious metals purchase, now is probably a good time to make a buy.

In the run up to the French election, the powers that be managed to orchestrate a price drop for silver every day for over two weeks straight. They succeeded in doing nearly the same thing with gold.

As a result, both metals are attractively priced for those who are interested.

And if you’re not interested, you should be.

Gold and silver have been money since Old Testament times. And though the criminals who run the world’s financial system try their best to deny it, gold and silver still represent real money today.

For most of us, they are also the best way of securing protection against the predations of the world’s central bankers, who have spent more than a century stealing the wealth of the people via the subtle method of inflation.

The Evil IMF

There are few institutions I can think of more evil than central banks, which by means of their debt-based fiat currencies strip mine the wealth of nations for the benefit of the 0.001%.

And among central banking institutions, there is none more evil than the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

As Martin Armstrong reported this week, the IMF has proposed a capital levy of 10% on European citizens.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term capital levy, what this means is that the IMF wants the EU to steal 10% from the bank accounts of its citizens “In order to reduce the [European sovereign] debt to the level of 2007.”

This is not the first time the IMF has called for such measures. Calls by the IMF of this sort go back to at least 2013, when it issued a report titled Taxing Times. In it, the IMF called for a “one-off tax on private wealth- as an exceptional measure to restore debt sustainability.”

Thus it always is with these people. For them, the problem is never the debt-based, central bank issued bogus fiat currencies poisoning the world’s financial system. It’s never that government spend too much.

No. It’s always that people don’t pay enough taxes.

And notice, the IMF doesn’t say the “one-off” capital levy will solve the debt problem. It will just make it sustainable.

And that’s really the name of the game. Make sure the current system of crony capitalist plunder stays afloat by robbing people and attempting to convince them that it’s for their own good.

And by the way, if the IMF does ever get its way, do you really thing the capital levy will be a “one-off” thing?