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Corruption: The Founders Warned Us About Ourselves

“This can only end in despotism.”

Benjamin Franklin didn’t offer that as a theory. It was a sentence – and prophetic. He knew exactly what happens when a people trade virtue for vice: liberty dies, and tyranny takes its place. Not by accident. Not by force. 

But by choice.

And he wasn’t alone. The founders – and the political thinkers they studied – understood this brutal truth: no system of government can survive the corruption of its own people. Not a monarchy. Not a republic. Not even one bound by the most carefully written constitution in human history.

Once the rot sets in, the outcome is inevitable. The laws become meaningless. The safeguards fail. The tyrants rise. And the people, soft and submissive, cheer them on.

That’s the path we’re on now. Not because we’ve been conquered. Because we’ve decayed.

This isn’t a warning about what politicians are doing to us. It’s a reckoning for what we’ve allowed to happen in ourselves. The one form of corruption no constitution can ever fix is the corruption of the people.

VIRTUE OR TYRANNY

Franklin made that plain just before the Philadelphia Convention began. He wasn’t focused on structures or amendments. He focused on character – because he knew freedom isn’t granted, it’s earned. And not everyone earns it.

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

James Madison didn’t pretend otherwise. In the debates over ratification, he dismissed the fantasy that liberty could be preserved by parchment alone. If the people are corrupt, they won’t just tolerate corruption in office – they’ll literally vote for it. And that makes every branch of government just as rotten as the people who put them there.

“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.”

Thomas Jefferson explained what comes next. The collapse of liberty doesn’t begin with gunfire or invasions – it begins with rot. A quiet, invisible corrosion that spreads through the people until the entire system breaks.

“It is the manners and spirit of the people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.”

These weren’t new insights. The American founders didn’t invent this doctrine – they inherited it. Algernon Sidney paid for it with his life.

He warned that liberty and virtue are inseparable. Once one falls, so does the other.

“Liberty cannot be preserved, if the manners of the people are corrupted, nor absolute monarchy introduced where they are sincere.”

John Adams reached the same conclusion. He didn’t talk about elections or institutions. He made something else clear: the Constitution was made for a people of strong moral character – and it’s useless without them.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Samuel Adams didn’t just warn about corruption – he exposed the strategy behind it. Tyrants don’t need chains or armies to enslave a people. They just need to make the people ignorant and vicious. That’s how they hold power.

“It is in the Interest of Tyrants to reduce the People to Ignorance and Vice. For they cannot live in any Country where Virtue and Knowledge prevail.”

And the tyrants don’t even need chains. A broken people will do the job for them – gladly.

“The Religion and public Liberty of a People are intimately connected; their Interests are interwoven, they cannot subsist separately; and therefore they rise and fall together. For this Reason, it is always observable, that those who are combin’d to destroy the People’s Liberties, practice every Art to poison their Morals.”

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NATO’s Procurement Corruption Scandal Might Delay Its Rapid Militarization Plans

Member states might eschew the NATO Support and Procurement Agency’s services, thus delaying their military purchases, which could delay the bloc’s rapid militarization plans if enough of them do this so as to avoid having to pay more if they’re unlucky enough to be serviced by corrupt employees.

NATO’s next summit will be held from 24-25 June at The Hague and almost certainly see the bloc expand upon its preexisting rapid militarization plans.

Trump is demanding that all members spend 5% of GDP on defense as soon as possible, which Politico recently reminded everyone in their article about this is divided between 3.5% on “hard military spending” and 1.5% on defense-related issues like cybersecurity.

Here are three background briefings on NATO’s rapid militarization plans to bring readers up to speed:

* 19 July 2024: “The EU’s Planned Transformation Into A Military Union Is A Federalist Power Play”

* 24 October 2024: “NATO’s Military Schengen”

* 7 March 2025: “The ‘ReArm Europe Plan’ Will Probably Fall Far Short Of The Bloc’s Lofty Expectations”

In short, the EU wants to exploit false fears of a future Russian invasion to further centralize the bloc under that pretext, with the “military Schengen” (for facilitating the free flow of troops and equipment between member states) and the €800 billion “ReArm Europe Plan” being its tangible manifestations.

The first will create the desired military union while the second will then result in there being an urgent need for some mechanism to organize the division of defense investments between all members.

It’s here where the NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) is expected to play a major role owing to the lack of any alternatives and the difficulty in getting members to agree on creating a new EU-wide one due to some states’ sovereignty concerns. Per the NSPA’s website, “[its] objective is to obtain the best service or equipment at the best price for the customer by consolidating requirements from multiple nations in a cost-efficient way through its turnkey multinational acquisition framework.”

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Palantir Denies Claims It Is Building Master Database

Palantir Technologies is roundly denying claims it’s building a massive, unified database containing Americans’ personal information, following media coverage implying its work for various federal agencies could enable unprecedented surveillance.

On May 30, the New York Times published an article highlighting the potential impact of the more than $900 million worth of federal contracts awarded to the Denver-based technology company since the beginning of the Trump administration.

“We are not building, we have not been asked to build, and we’re not in contract to build any kind of federal master list or master database across different agencies,” Courtney Bowman, the company’s global director of privacy and civil liberties, told The Epoch Times, “Each of those contracts are separate and fulfill specific mandates that are scoped and bound by congressional authorities and other laws.”

In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to limit wasteful spending by “eliminating information silos” among federal agencies. The order mandates that federal agencies must share data with each other. Furthermore, it requires the federal government to have unrestricted access to data from state programs receiving federal funding.

In the days following the report, various media outlets published reports that interpreted Palantir’s work as tantamount to developing a “’master database‘ or ’central intelligence layer’ drawing on Interal Revenue Service, Social Security, immigration and other records,” the Digital Trade & Data Governance Hub at George Washington University said in June.

“Collecting and linking such a vast array of sensitive records could create an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure. … There is a heightened risk of sensitive data being repurposed for uses beyond its original intent, or being used for political purposes,” a team led by Michael Moreno, a research associate at the Hub said.

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U.S. Ramps Up Surveillance Amid Fears Of Iran-Backed Sleeper Cells 

President Trump stated Thursday that a potential U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear targets could occur within a two-week window. This announcement aligns with an uptick in U.S. military activity across the USNORTHCOM, USEUCOM, and USCENTCOM theaters, including airlift missions, the deployment of aerial refueling tankers, and the repositioning of naval assets—indicators consistent with pre-strike staging. While officially framed around countering Iran’s nuclear program, the operation so far suggests regime change. 

Simultaneously, in the Homeland, concerns are flourishing over the possible activation of Iran-backed operatives. According to CBS News, intelligence and law enforcement officials remain focused on Hezbollah-linked sleeper cells and IRGC proxy networks, which could be directed to carry out retaliatory actions if the U.S. initiates kinetic attacks against Iran to support Israel. 

Here’s more from CBS News, citing multiple sources… 

As President Trump is contemplating potential U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, law enforcement officials have stepped up surveillance of Iran-backed operatives in the United States, multiple sources told CBS News.

FBI Director Kash Patel has increased efforts to monitor possible domestic sleeper cells linked to Hezbollah — a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization backed by Iran — since Israel’s Operation Rising Lion offensive began earlier this month, U.S. officials said.

. . . 

The threat from Iranian operatives has worried current and former administration officials since Iranian General Qasem Soleimani was assassinated on Mr. Trump’s orders in January 2020.

CBS noted:

Late last year, federal prosecutors charged an operative of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and two U.S.-based people with plotting to surveil and assassinate critics of the Iranian regime. The IRGC operative allegedly told investigators he was pushed by unnamed IRGC officials to plan an attack against Mr. Trump.

The threat on the Homeland has never been graver given the Biden-Harris regime of globalists facilitated the greatest invasion this nation has ever seen on the southern border, with millions of unvetted migrants, criminals, cartel gangsters, and terrorists. 

In late 2024, former CIA targeting officer Sarah Adams spoke on the Shawn Ryan Show about Al-Qaeda terrorists on American soil. 

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FDA halts Biden-era program of sending Americans’ DNA to China for genetic engineering

The Trump administration is halting companies from conducting clinical trials in China using Americans’ DNA samples in a program authorized by the Biden administration, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA said an immediate review has begun on new clinical trials that involve sending living cells of U.S. citizens to China and other hostile states for “genetic engineering and subsequent infusion back into U.S. patients — sometimes without their knowledge or consent.”

The agency moved to halt the program based on what it said is mounting evidence that some of the trials were conducted without informing people involved that their biological material was being transferred and manipulated.

The activity “may have exposed Americans’ sensitive genetic data to misuse by foreign governments including adversaries,” the FDA said in a statement Wednesday.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said the unacknowledged transfer of DNA samples has raised questions about the integrity of U.S. biomedical research.

“We are taking action to protect patients, restore public trust and safeguard U.S. biomedical leadership,” Dr. Makary said. “The previous administration turned a blind eye and allowed American DNA to be sent abroad — often without the knowledge or understanding of trial participants,” he said.

The FDA said the suspect transfer of Americans’ biomedical samples was the result of a December 2024 policy by the Biden administration that was put in place by the Justice Department in April.

The Biden rule imposed export controls that limited the transfer of sensitive data to countries of concern. But the Biden administration specifically approved a “sweeping exemption” that allowed U.S. companies to send trial participants’ biological samples, including DNA, for processing overseas in FDA-regulated clinical trials.

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Government finally recognizes the Second Amendment

How far has America fallen when the DOJ’s Civil Rights division files an amicus brief with the Supreme Court supporting the Second Amendment against Illinois, and that filing is unusual? How can it be that the DOJ defending a fundamental, unalienable, express constitutional right should be rare, so rare as to be surprising, even astonishing?

If Democrats and their media propaganda arm are to be believed, Donald Trump is a dictator bent on destroying “our democracy.” Ironically, they’re right. He is determined to destroy “our—their—democracy,” which is a tyranny of the majority. That’s why Dems are so desperate to keep every illegal in the country. They want that 50.0000001%, which in a democracy rules. In “our democracy” the majority can deprive the minority of property, rights, liberty, even life. Thus did Biden’s Handler’s Forestry Service try to imprison South Dakota ranchers Charles and Heather Maude over a fence built before they were born. Under “our democracy” they would have gone to jail for ten years leaving their children without their parents. Under our constitutional, representative republic, the charges were dropped.

Such is the tyranny of Donald Trump who ordered his Administration to protect the Second Amendment rights of Americans. “Our Democracy,” like all would-be tyrants, wants to disarm all Americans. Trump, the dictator, wants American’s Second Amendment rights protected.

The issue in this case is Illinois’ violation of the Second Amendment and the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision by banning “assault weapons,” primarily AR-15s, the most popular rifle in America, and “high capacity” magazines—actually, standard capacity magazines.  Thus are Illinois’ Democrat rulers part of “our democracy” rather than America’s representative republic.

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Bloomberg-Backed Green Group Places Officials in State Agencies Tasked With Regulating Utilities, Permitting Pipelines

A Michael Bloomberg-backed fellowship program known for placing attorneys in state attorney general offices to spearhead climate litigation has quietly broadened its scope, sending staffers to work in state agencies that regulate the energy sector, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

The New York University State Energy & Environmental Impact Center’s fellowship—which Bloomberg’s eponymous philanthropic nonprofit provided two seed grants worth $5.6 million in 2017—has long placed and paid the salaries of officials in at least 10 state attorney general offices nationwide. Over the past two years, internal emails obtained by the Free Beacon show, the program has expanded to state-level public service commissions, often-overlooked agencies that regulate utility companies and permit energy infrastructure like pipelines and power plants. The commissions also implement state renewable energy standards that force power providers to generate electricity through pricier green sources.

The center’s work in attorney general offices, where Bloomberg-funded fellows have participated in litigation accusing the fossil fuel industry of causing global warming, has prompted conflict-of-interest concerns over the use of private funding to drive public lawsuits. Its work in state regulatory agencies, on the other hand, is a new development—one that suggests the center and its funders seek to play a more active role pushing green energy development at the local level.

One other key function of the commissions that has emerged in recent years is their oversight and implementation of state renewable energy standards, which are mandates that force power companies to ensure green energy sources produce a set share of local electric generation. Climate activists have lobbied for such mandates, but in places like Delaware those policies have caused dramatic consumer price hikes.

The NYU impact center’s work in attorney general offices has been reported on and has faced criticism for blurring ethical lines—experts have warned the arrangement presents a conflict of interest since it involves the use of private funding to support government positions. Its work in state regulatory agencies, on the other hand, is a new development and suggests the center and its funders seek to play a more active role pushing green energy development at the local level.

“That presents fundamental conflicts of interest,” American Tort Reform Association president Sherman Joyce told the Free Beacon in an interview. “The notion of looking to outside entities to fund the structure and activities of the government is just wrong. These types of arrangements, I think, offend basic notions of the independence of government.”

The NYU impact center and Advanced Energy United, a green energy industry coalition cofounded by left-wing billionaire Tom Steyer, began recruiting state commissions to participate in the initiative in mid-2023, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon. The groups gauged the interest of New York’s Department of Public Service in July 2023, the Michigan Public Service Commission in August 2023, and Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities in September 2023.

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The Censorship-Industrial Complex Has Now Become Self-Perpetuating

I’ve covered a lot of speech crime indictments here at the plague chronicle.

Before Covid, these things hardly ever happened.

Occasionally you’d find the odd article about a dumb tourist who was cited for throwing a Nazi salute in public or something, but that was it. The whole area just didn’t matter.

The German state acquired a kind of political Long Covid from the pandemic.

Its agents learned from their virus repressions that they could get away with a lot more than they ever thought, and they also learned to view ordinary people as their adversaries.

A third thing happened too, in that lockdowns moved a lot of discourse to the internet, and the German elite discovered for the first time that they and their policies suffer a popularity deficit there. To explain this, our baffled and offended if powerful social media naifs borrowed the malevolent concept of “disinformation” from the Anglosphere. They began whining and crying and beating their breasts and clutching their pearls about disinformation. None of them did this so hard and so insistently as the Greens, because the Greens represent the views of the German political elite, and as an elite they feel entitled to scold, control discourse, and tell other people what to do.

That’s my potted history of how we got to this world, with pensioners being sent to jail for typing the wrong three-word phrase on the internet and YouTubers being fined thousands of Euros because some computer programme hallucinated into their banal complaints about poor internet reception a contextually incoherent Nazism. If you’re unlucky enough, you can get nailed for literally anything, and we only hear about a tiny minority of these cases. For a lot of people, the summary judgements they receive from the court are embarrassing, baffling and not worth the trouble. Those who can will just quietly eat the fine and try to get on with their lives.

In past pieces, I’ve drawn comparisons to the DDR, and I’ve also tried to characterise political repression as something that all states get up to when their ruling classes become threatened. I stand by all of that, but I’ve neglected to explain why our present situation is unique.

Europe and particularly Germany have entered a totally new era when it comes to government interference with personal expression. We’ve never seen anything like this before, it is going to get a lot worse, and nobody anywhere has the slightest interest in dialling this back. The prosecutions are escalating and they will only become more pervasive and ridiculous.

What is happening resembles classic “totalitarian” political tactics only superficially. The DDR employed literal bureaucrats and secret policemen whose job it was to censor speech according to defined standards and to punish or intimidate those who said inconvenient things. An analogy would be the farmer who decides there are too many rabbits eating his cabbages, and so he goes out and shoots them.

Modern Germany just can’t go out and shoot rabbits, and the reason has nothing to do with liberal democratic freedoms. We can’t even build bridges. Over a century ago, the Kingdom of Saxony required only two or three years to build the first Carola Bridge over the Elbe in Dresden. The SS destroyed that monument in 1945 to slow the Soviet advance, but the DDR needed only four years to build a replacement – the one that finally collapsed in September of last year. Today, in the best Germany of all time, we will require at least ten years and almost certainly more to build our third Carola Bridge. That is a very rough scale of how much ability the state has lost in the space of just a few generations.

The sclerotic, hyper-managerialised state that cannot build an uncomplicated 500-metre bridge across a river also finds censorship really, really hard. And so it has signed over this project to a whole world of NGOs, many of which now devote incredible resources to policing the internet all day.

We once had a farmer shooting rabbits, and that was bad enough if you happened to be a rabbit. Now we have an obese, bed-ridden, day-drinking farmer who can no longer fit through his front door. To solve his rabbit problem he has deputised a lot of autonomous agents, like the myxoma virus, to get rid of the hated rabbits instead.

This means he’s no longer in control of the process at all. The censorship happens all on its own, and for reasons of its own too.

It’s just something that a growing number of state-adjacent organisations do now, because there are institutional interests (jobs, funding) behind it.

How this happened is insidious.

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Primary School Children Being “Sexualised” by Lessons on the “300 Flags of Pride”

Leaflets handed out at primary schools by the charity Swindon and Wiltshire Pride claim there are more flags representing sexuality and gender identity than there are for countries.

The material, signposted by the local council on social media, goes into detail about a “small selection” of 29 varieties.

It says: “While some might think [300] is too many, it’s all part of a drive to be more inclusive of the expansive breadth of identity within the community.”

Along with the rainbow LGBT Pride flag are a variety of offshoots, from the “intersex-inclusive Pride flag” to the “polyamory Pride flag” and even a black and white “heterosexual flag” for straight people, which it says can include transgender people.

The materials make up part of a free annual support guide produced by the charity, which also points to websites providing advice on controversial practices such as wearing a “binder to reduce apparent size of breasts”, the use of cross-sex hormones in under-18s, and information on “fetish spectrums”.

Parents of children at the primary schools told the Telegraph their concerns had been ignored by the local Labour council. …

One mother, a former teacher, said the guide being given out in primary schools was “really concerning”.

“Obviously the polyamory one, encouraging children to have multiple sex partners, they shouldn’t be sexualising children,” she said. “In the guide itself, under education, it states it is ‘for schools, teachers, and students’.

“A couple of sentences down, for example, it says ‘raise awareness of the lesser known identities across the fetish spectrum’,” she added, saying that was “inappropriate”.

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Britain has fallen to the technocratic death cult

Politicians twist words and abuse language to ‘make lies sound truthful and murder respectable’, said George Orwell. That has never rang more true than it does today. In the House of Commons this afternoon, MPs spoke in deceitful tongues to make suicide sound attractive and death sound liberal. They voted to legalise what they call ‘assisted dying’, but which I think we should call state-sanctioned suicide. For strip away all the linguistic trickery about a ‘right to die’ and what we are left with is a new regime of state-appointed death merchants who will have the power not only to propose self-destruction to the ill, but to facilitate it, too.

Make no mistake, this is a dark day for Britain. MPs voted by 314 to 291 to pass the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. This is the private members’ bill, spearheaded by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, that will empower the state to aid and abet the destruction of lives judged to be less good or less happy than others. It applies to England and Wales. It will permit sick people who are expected to die within six months to get ‘medical assistance’ to end their lives. To be eligible for this state-sanctioned suicide, you must be over 18, have mental capacity and get the agreement of two doctors, seven days apart. Then the state will give you poison to bring about your death.

Ms Leadbeater and her supporters big up the bill’s ‘safeguards’. They insist the law will not be a slippery slope to a culture of death, to self-obliteration as a consumer choice for the merely sad or dejected. It’s about ‘assisting’ the terminally ill only, they say. Yet even on this front, its flaws are glaring. Doctors are often wrong when they estimate how long the sick have left. You might be given six months but get two years. What’s more, people often feel suicidal upon receiving a terminal diagnosis, but then reflect and change and come to cherish the time they have left. This law, unquestionably, would lead to the state-faciliated deaths of people who had so much more living to do.

All the technical blather about ‘safeguards’ distracts us from the profound moral questions thrown up by the bill. Let’s be clear: this law would represent one of the most dramatic and destructive overhauls of the relationship between the state and the individual that we have ever seen. Overnight we would transform from a society that seeks to prevent suicide into one that facilitates it. The health service, once proudly devoted to saving life, would now be charged with ending life in certain circumstances. The Hippocratic cry of ‘First do no harm’ would lie in tatters, replaced by a new deathly creed: ‘Do no harm, unless they’re very sick, in which case maybe kill them?’

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