The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
The pace of FBI arrests and the opening of new Jan. 6, 2021, criminal cases increased so much in late 2023 and early 2024 that District of Columbia federal courts could bend under the weight.
In the past two months, 93 people have been arrested and charged, according to Department of Justice (DOJ) reports. At the current rate, some 445 new cases could hit the docket in 2024—more than in 2022 and 2023, according to one estimate.
In total, up to March 6, at least 1,358 people had been arrested by the FBI and criminally charged by the DOJ for crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach.
If the current trend is to hold, total arrests could be 2,150 by the time the statute of limitations on Jan. 6 crimes expires in early 2026, according to Jacob Rugh, associate professor of sociology at Brigham Young University. Mr. Rugh and researcher Isabella Felin have been publishing Jan. 6 statistics and data visualization on social media platforms X and Instagram since August 2022.
William Shipley, a former federal prosecutor who has represented more than 50 Jan. 6 defendants, said he noticed an upswing in cases starting in September 2023.
Free market capitalism has a long track record of fueling innovation, increasing choice, and providing the best prices for consumers. The reason the vast majority of the world is not still riding on the backs of animals has everything to do with the free market.
But a funny thing happens when politics meets the free market: A desire arises within the politician to exert control over that free market. Politicians see the freedom of the market as a threat to their identity and their hold on power and therefore develop excuses to exert control over it. Within the American context, this political control comes most obviously in the form of bureaucratically formed regulations.
These Washington elites see Americans not as their equals, not as fellow citizens for whom they have been elected to represent so as to ensure that Americans’ freedoms and rights are upheld and protected. Instead, they see them as inferiors who need to be “cared” for and directed as if they were little children.
How else does one explain Washington’s insistent “need” to overregulate? This reality becomes further evident when Washington embraces a certain ideological agenda that much of the country rejects — an agenda such as the climate change cult.
The climate change cult is why Joe Biden has pushed an economically unsustainable green agenda, and it explains why he has targeted the fossil fuel industry for eventual elimination. He proudly promised to “end fossil fuel” back in 2019, and his administration has done much to make headway toward that end.
This explains the Biden administration’s push for electric vehicles, which is costing the auto industry and consumers a lot of money.
Indeed, the rate of EV sales has increased, but it doesn’t remotely meet the levels needed to hit the Biden administration’s stated target of 50% of auto sales by 2030. With just 9% of all auto sales last year being EVs, automakers are now cutting back their EV production and future sales outlooks.
As a recent article from CNBC put it: “EV euphoria is dead. Automakers are scaling back or delaying their electric vehicle plans.” Tellingly, the article notes that automakers have shied away from ESG investing and “companies are again cheering consumer choice.” As the old motto states, the customer is always right.
It’s too bad the Biden administration hasn’t embraced a similar motto of the American consumer always being right. Instead, the administration is seeking to dictate what consumers will and will not be allowed to buy. As we have noted, it’s not just with EVs; it’s also with household appliances.
The International Code Council (ICC) issues building codes for new construction. While the ICC is not a government agency, it does effectively establish building codes for much of the country. Now the American Gas Association is accusing the ICC of “serious lapses in due process” with its soon-to-be-released International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) for 2024. While the energy codes are typically noncontroversial, this year the AGA, which supplies natural gas to 180 million customers across the nation, notes that it was left completely out of the consulting process.
Apparently, the AGA was left out because the new IECC eliminated natural gas in its energy efficiency codes. As AGA CEO and president Karen Harbert contends: “They’re incentivizing electrification and discriminating against the natural gas industry by excluding it from being part of the code. That really is anticompetitive behavior.”
The irony is that eliminating natural gas from building codes will actually negatively affect energy efficiency and increase construction costs, which will in turn raise the price of homes.
According to Harbert, this move by the ICC has everything to do with pushing an activist climate agenda that is anti-fossil fuel. “The activists that are supporting an all-electrification agenda tried to come in through the policy front door, which was to ban natural gas in cities, and that got overturned in the Ninth Circuit. They tried to ban gas at the state level, and that’s now being challenged. And they have tried to do it through regulation and have been unsuccessful.”
The Biden administration is dancing to the same climate activist tune. This is not about what is best for Americans or even what is best for the environment. Rather, it’s about forcing an activist ideology onto the country irrespective of its negative impact on the economy and Americans’ freedom to choose what they want to buy and what works best for them.
When inflation predictably soared following the Biden administration’s decision to spend like drunken sailors in part because of the Democrats’ “green dream” agenda, the president’s response was dismissive. “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way, no serious economist,” Biden claimed back in July 2021.
Indeed, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen infamously insisted that the sky-high inflation was “transitory” at the time. Of course, she now says: “I regret saying it was transitory. It has come down. But I think transitory means a few weeks or months to most people.” Yeah, not years. But this is what happens when an activist agenda guides an administration’s policies.
It’s promoting an agenda of globalism over and against nationalism.
Democracy” is not the defining feature of a free country.
The defining feature of a free country is: individual rights.
Either you have rights, or you don’t. The most basic right is the right to life. A resulting right is the right to be left alone. A government should not exist at all, other than to help protect your rights to be left alone — including, from the government itself.
In a free society, the only thing that’s illegal is the initiation of force. If someone tries to kill you, and you shoot them first, that’s not the initiation of force. That’s self-defense. If you physically impose yourself on another, that’s the initiation of force. It’s at this point — and only at this point — that we need police: to protect the rights of the individual. That’s it.
Fraud should also be against the law. However, fraud has to be objectively proven under a Bill of Rights and the rule of law. The law doesn’t get suspended for people who are IN with the government, and activated against people who are not IN with the government. That’s not a free country, and that’s not a government. That’s a gang of unaccountable mobsters, which we absolutely have today, unequivocally at the federal level and often at the state or local level.
“Democracy” does not refer to a free country where the rights of the individual are paramount. Democracy is a form of mob rule. The majority ruling over the rights of the individual refers to the precise opposite of a free country.
All we hear about today are people who are “threats to democracy.” All this means — both in principle, and in practice — are threats to the ruling Party. The ruling party are the paid-off and/or blackmailed politicians who comprise literally all of the Democratic Party and much of the Republican Party (the RINOs). We might call them the Uniparty.
We’re told that the majority supports the Uniparty. That’s almost certainly not true, and we have no way of knowing since elections are increasingly rigged and most of the media lies about virtually everything, in service of the Uniparty.
But even if the majority supports the slaughter of our Constitution and Bill of Rights that’s done openly, on an hourly basis by the Biden regime and an almost entirely complicit Congress and federal court system, it does not matter. If 99.9999 percent support all of it, it’s still wrong. And in a free country, it would be illegal.
Treason is about the gentlest term to apply to the people who have become our rulers in this “democracy.” If we’re ever to be free again, they all have to be removed from power, appropriately punished and never permitted to ruin any of our lives again.
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“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” Sigmund Freud
This isn’t the way it has to be, and it’s not reflective of the best within most people. But sadly, this is most often the way it turns out. In some grander and greater human future, it may be different. First, most of us will have to shed the ethical, psychological and political barbarism, especially of our era.
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Virtually everyone I talk to thinks mainstream news is just propaganda. COVID drove a spike through the very heart and soul of the First Amendment. Even five years before, people generally respected the news. COVID appears to have been the death knell to mainstream news. This chart shows the results of Gallup Polls, and the trust in American media is down well below 40%. Our models warn that when confidence in government falls below 40%, governments begin to collapse. That magic number applies to the media as well.
Last October, the Pew Research Center reported that Americans follow the news less closely than they used to. I remember growing up, and my father and mother would first watch the nightly news, and then the shows would come on. Never did I ever hear my father call the news fake or propaganda. Indeed, back in 2016, 51% of American adults surveyed indicated that they do so “all or most of the time.” That number dropped to 38% in 2022.
According to Pew, we are witnessing the complete collapse of trust in media across gender, age, education, ethnicity, and party affiliation. The collapse is greater among Republicans and independents, dropping from 57% to 37%. Among Democrats, trust has declined from 49% to 42%.
Those who know my research are quite familiar with the process of a decline in the CONFIDENCE of government, and this is a Private Wave that peaks in 2032. During a Private Wave, we see people distrusting the government and moving to the private sector, so things like the stock market and real estate have risen because capital is moving from government bonds to private assets. The collapse in the media is part of this cycle. The media aligned with the government during the communist era – PRAVDA. While the name meant “truth” in Russian, the people knew it was all just propaganda. We now find ourselves heading in the same direction. The media will fall with the government as it did under communism.
Goodbye, and good riddance to MSNBC, ABC, FOX, CBS, NBC, and the leader of the pack in disinformation – CNN. PS: Newspapers will also follow. Better find a real career.
In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including webs, apps, search tools, and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks. We had a great time poking fun at them.
I recall the days of thinking government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism.
Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control. What is shared and how many people see it is a matter of algorithms agreed upon by a combination of government agencies, university centers, various nonprofits, and the companies themselves. The whole thing has become an oppressive blob.
Here is Google’s new headquarters in Reston, Virginia.
Every major company that once stayed far away from Washington now owns a similar giant palace in or around D.C., and they collect tens of billions in government revenue. Government has now become a major customer, if not the main customer, of the services provided by the large social media and tech companies. They are advertisers but also massive purchasers of the main product too.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. We do not know how much Google has received from the US government, but it is surely a substantial share of the $694 billion the federal government hands out in contracts.
Microsoft also has a large share of government contracts. In 2023, the US Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. It’s just the beginning. The Pentagon is looking for a successor plan that will be bigger.
Actually, we don’t even know the full extent of this but it is gargantuan. Yes, these companies provide the regular consumer services but a main and even decisive customer is government itself. As a result, the old laughing stock line about backwards tech at government agencies is no more. Today government is a main purchaser of tech services and is a top driver of the AI boom too.
It’s one of the best-kept secrets in American public life, hardly talked about at all by mainstream media. Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true.
The same situation of course exists for pharmaceutical companies. This relationship dates even further back in time and is even tighter to the point that there is no real distinction between the interests of the FDA/CDC and large pharmaceutical companies. They are one and the same.
In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called “high fructose corn syrup,” why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of government agencies and budgets.
In free enterprise, the old rule is that the customer is always right. That’s a wonderful system sometimes called consumer sovereignty. Its advent in history, dating perhaps from the 16th century, represented a tremendous advance over the old guild system of feudalism and certainly a major step over ancient despotisms. It’s been the rallying cry of market-based economics ever since.
What happens, however, when government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public.
This used to go by the name “crony capitalism” which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelized industry that primarily serves the state.
The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system –have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream. We hardly know anymore for whom to cheer or boo in the great struggles of our time.
That’s how mixed up everything has become. We’ve clearly traveled a long way from the 1990s!
Some might observe that this has been a problem far back in time. Starting with the Spanish-American War, we’ve seen a merger of public and private as involving the munitions industry.
This is true. Many Gilded Age fortunes were wholly legitimate and market-based enterprises but others were gathered from the nascent military-industrial complex that began to mature in the Great War and involved a vast range of industries from industry to transportation to communications.
Of course in 1913, we saw the advent of a particularly egregious public-private partnership with the Federal Reserve, in which private banks merged into a unified front and agreed to service US government debt obligations in exchange for bailout guarantees. This monetary corporatism continues to vex us to this day, as does the military industrial complex.
How is it different from the past? It’s different in degree and reach. The corporatist machine now manages the main products and services in our civilian life including the entire way we get information, how we work, how we bank, how we contact friends, and how we buy. It is the manager of the whole of our lives in every respect, and has become the driving force of product innovation and design. It has become a tool for surveillance in the most intimate aspects of our lives, including financial information and inclusive of listening devices we’ve willingly installed in our own homes.
In other words, this is no longer just about private companies providing the bullets and bombs for both sides in a foreign war and obtaining the rebuilding contracts after. The military-industrial complex has come home, expanded to everything, and invaded every aspect of our lives.
It has become a main curator and censor of our news and social media presence and postings. It is in a position to say which companies and products succeed and which ones fail. It can kill apps in a flash if the well-placed person does not like what it is doing. It can order other apps to add or subtract to a blacklist based on political opinions. It can tell even the smallest company to comply or face death by lawfare. It can seize on any individual and make him a public enemy based entirely on an opinion or action that runs contrary to regime priorities.
In short, this corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism.
It obtained its first full trial run with the lockdowns of 2020, when tech companies and media joined in the ear-splitting propaganda campaigns to shelter in place, cancel holidays, and not visit grandma in the hospital and nursing home. It cheered as millions of small businesses were destroyed and big-box stores thrived as distributors of approved products, while vast swaths of the workforce were called nonessential and put on welfare.
This was the corporatist state at work, with a large corporate sector wholly acquiescent to regime priority and a government fully dedicated to rewarding its industrial partners in every sector that went along with the political priority at the moment. The trigger for the construction of the vast machinery that rules our lives was far back in time and always begins the same way: with a seemingly inauspicious government contract.
How well I recall those days in the 1990s when public schools first started to buy computers from Microsoft. Did alarm bells go off? Not for me. I had a typical attitude of any pro-business libertarian: whatever business wants to do, it should do. Surely it is up to the enterprise to sell to all willing buyers, even if that includes governments. In any case, how in the world would one prevent this? Government contracting with private business has been the norm from time immemorial. No harm done.
And yet it turns out that vast harm was done. This was just the beginning of what became one of the world’s largest industries, far more powerful and decisive over industrial organization than old-fashioned producer-to-consumer markets. Adam Smith’s “butcher, baker, and brewery” have been crowded out by the very business conspiracies against which he gravely warned. These gigantic for-profit and public trading corporations became the operational foundation of the surveillance-driven corporatist complex.
We are nowhere near coming to terms with the implications of this. It goes way beyond and fully transcends the old debates between capitalism and socialism. Indeed that is not what this is about. The focus on that might be theoretically interesting but it has little or no relevance to the current reality in which public and private have fully merged and intruded into every aspect of our lives, and with fully predictable results: economic decline for the many and riches for the few.
This is also why neither the left nor the right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. The dominating force on both the national and global scene today is techno-corporatism that intrudes itself into our food, our medicine, our media, our information flows, our homes, and all the way down to the hundreds of surveillance tools that we carry around in our pockets.
I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear.
Coming to terms with this intellectually is the major challenge of our times. Dealing with it juridically and politically seems like a much more daunting task, to say the least. The problem is complicated by the drive to purge serious dissent at all levels of society. How did American capitalism become American corporatism? A little at a time and then all at once.
For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author (Jeffery Tucker).
So much for a pro-Trump judge saving the day. Trump has no friends in the government. Neither, by extension, do you nor I, not if we value rule of law and the Bill of Rights. It’s fine if you dislike Trump, but that dislike does not justify making up legal cases to punish political opposition. That’s the stuff of banana republics. The cancer that is leftist fascism has metastasized; it’s too late to save our irretrievably corrupt government. Our fight should be for individual rights, not for this government who has become the biggest threat to rights.
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“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”
Some self-described scholars question whether this quote was from Thomas Jefferson, or someone else; others say it’s accurate. The quote sounds consistent with other things Jefferson wrote. Regardless, the quote (regardless of who said it) speaks the truth and is even more applicable today than at the time of the American Revolution.
Why? Because today’s federal government — the monstrosity propped up by a runaway bureaucracy, a mobster-like “Deep State,” a thoroughly dishonest and compliant media and a pretty openly weaponized and politicized “judicial” system at the federal level, along with hopelessly bought-and-sold politicians with interminable careers spanning 50, 60, 70 years in Congress — is actually WORSE than what the colonists faced in 1776, or (during a later crisis) in 1861; and arguably worse than anything Franklin, Jefferson and Madison predicted could happen if the U.S. ever went astray.
If my prediction holds true, our present government is set on a course that will perhaps even surpass the horrors of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan and Soviet Russia and its satellites. Yes, when you consider the whole cabal (Obama, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Fauci, Soros and son, etc.), they are that evil but — perhaps more importantly — they are legally, intellectually and philosophically almost totally unopposed. Trump is their only opposition and — from where I sit — he’s getting mowed over in a way that no leftist in media, the corporate world or government ever has, or ever will.
Today’s ruling regime (with Biden as the puppet of the moment) does not fear ANYONE — with the possible exception of Trump and his most ardent supporters. Which is why they are doing everything possible to bankrupt and/or imprison MAGA people; and if you think they won’t go further (roundups, camps and all the rest), you are, frankly, a fool.
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THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 