It took just three days.

After drag performer RuPaul announced the creation of a “no censorship” Allstora bookstore, censorship was back with a vengeance after many on the left learned that free speech meant that opposing views might be sold at the site.  While the sentiment was appealing, it became intolerable when activists noted that a “no censorship” store would mean that they could not censor others.

In the rollout, RuPaul stood in a blue suit before a flag to defy the censors and embrace access to works of different authors and viewpoints. For many of us, it was an exciting moment. The anti-free speech movement on the left has grown exponentially. Now, this iconic figure from the left was taking a bold stand for free speech.

With ten million titles, readers could buy most any book, including writers like Riley Gaines who have challenged transgender theories.

Various sites like National Review have covered the rise and rapid fall of the free speech initiative.

The rollout was promising. Like many of us, the founders objected to book bans across the country. Such bans have been implemented by both the left and the right.

Allstora was founded on the pledge that “We’re a marketplace for all books and all stories, with a focus on elevating marginalized voices.” Co-founder Eric Cervini and drag performer Adam Powell, welcomed visitors to the website with a pop-up message that warned “you may find books you disagree with.”

The site declared “censorship of any book, perspective, or story is incompatible with the survival of democracy.” After all, “banning books is never the answer.”

The pledge was heralded in the media. Many viewed it as a jab at conservatives to show that there is nothing to fear in access to opposing views.

Then someone thought about what free speech means.

Liberal critics raised the alarm that the bookstore would be selling “homophobic,” “transphobic,” and “anti-woke” works. Drag performer “Lady Bunny” noted that the store would be selling works by figures like Mike Huckabee, Chaya Raichik, and Matt Walsh.

Lady Bunny asked “Why not just stop selling what many on the left consider to be hate speech?”

That is all that it took. Allstora first implemented a flagging system for offensive books and then just got rid of the no censorship pledge. While some sites state that Allstora only moved to add disclaimers, it appears that the no censorship pledge is gone and various authors are missing. I searched for books by writers like Gaines and Matt Walsh and found nothing.

The obvious response to Lady Bunny is that she is the answer to her question. In the name of combatting hate speech, she is embracing the very tool used by the most hateful movements in history from book burning to black listing of opposing views. Censorship becomes insatiable as the list of offensive topics or views grows from transgender politics to climate change to abortion. Every advocacy group finds opposing its own views to be dangerous and harmful.

It is analogous to what Gandhi said about vengeance:  “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” The same is true about censorship. Eventually it leaves the whole world ignorant.

Jonathan Turley

“Success will bring unity to our country,” a victorious Trump told supporters on Super Tuesday. This presupposes that his opposition wants success. Success means liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights, honest democratic elections, freedom of speech and association, meritocracy, real capitalism, a rising standard of living for all, rational immigration with borders, and self-responsibility. Trump’s opposition, in both parties, want NONE of these things. So if by success Trump means freedom and prosperity, he’s not going to unite good people with bad people. The bad guys, and the fools who support DemComs and RINOs, don’t want success. They have the media, the schools and much of the corporate world behind them. This is why Trump’s battle continues to be so ferocious.

The only way to drain the swamp is cut off their money supply (massively reducing the size and scope of the government), arrest and try for treason the top offenders: Starting with Biden, his Cabinet and Obama. If that’s what we’re talking about, I am all in.

Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, Michael Hurd Ph.D. on LinkedIn, @DrHurd on TruthSocial

Here’s something to consider about a potential Trump victory in November.

Thus far, the Democrats have done nearly all the things they threatened that Trump would do — but never did. They have suppressed free speech through compliant social media companies. They have locked down the country multiple times, because of the flu. They have forced medical experimentation on people, something they opposed when Trump was in office, but gleefully did themselves until stopped by some courts. They have arrested political enemies, including Trump himself, and made every possible effort to get his name removed from the ballot. These are ALL things they SAID Trump would do, but never did; and they did all of them, without any glimmer of shame or defensiveness.

It stands to reason that if Democrats have done ALL these things they insisted Trump would do while in office — and never did — then they will respond to his election in 2024 (if it happens) the same way they claim he responded to Biden. They talk endlessly about “January 6.” They say that Trump started an insurrection to hold onto power. Some insurrection! Trump peacefully and willingly walked away from office, knowing full well there was serious, objective evidence of questionable election practices, especially in Georgia and Arizona. The Biden regime couldn’t find the peaceful protesters at the Capitol guilty of anything other than a few misdemeanors (often with manufactured evidence). They almost treated these misdemeanor offenses as capital crimes of treason, but that’s all they could come up with. They tortured many of their detainees — American citizens — with long, unconstitutional prison stays bereft of due process for the first time in all of American history!

It stands to reason that should Trump actually win in November (against all odds of election cancellation, fraud, and the rest), then the Democrats will do precisely what they claimed Trump did back in January 2021, but never did.

The REAL January 6 for the honest history books may be January 6, 2025. That’s when the Biden puppet regime might unleash its full forces on the good, honest citizens who want not just to make America great again, but free again.

Michael J. Hurd

“Success will bring unity to our country,” a victorious Trump told supporters on Super Tuesday. This presupposes that his opposition wants success. Success means liberty, freedom, the Bill of Rights, honest democratic elections, freedom of speech and association, meritocracy, real capitalism, a rising standard of living for all, rational immigration with borders, and self-responsibility. Trump’s opposition, in both parties, want NONE of these things. So if by success Trump means freedom and prosperity, he’s not going to unite good people with bad people. The bad guys, and the fools who support DemComs and RINOs, don’t want success. They have the media, the schools and much of the corporate world behind them. This is why Trump’s battle continues to be so ferocious.

The only way to drain the swamp is cut off their money supply (massively reducing the size and scope of the government), arrest and try for treason the top offenders: Starting with Biden, his Cabinet and Obama. If that’s what we’re talking about, I am all in.

Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, Michael Hurd Ph.D. on LinkedIn, @DrHurd on TruthSocial

Ever since my time in the White House it has bothered me.

I know politics is a filthy business. As my late father always used to say: “Politics: disgusting but oh so fascinating.” True enough. But politics in the age of Trump is something else.

I was ready for personal attacks against me as Deputy Assistant to the President. Especially since I was early on given the mandate to publicly justify and explain the President’s national-security travel ban. My dismantling of the legacy media narrative that our policy was somehow “racist,” as opposed to predicated on an Obama-era threat assessment concerning which nations were incapable of guaranteeing to us that terrorists weren’t traveling to the US from their territories, was clearly the “trigger” for a smear campaign that shocked even me.

Coming after a high-ranking White House official was, of course, expected. I was clearly a proxy for the man the establishment really hated. Just look at what they did to my Boss and his family and are still doing today. But when “journalists” started to calumny my wife and my high school aged son – calling him a “traitor” in one headline smear piece – even I was shocked. Who are these people, and why do they think a man’s family can be targeted over a difference in politics??

I know I have a certain reputation in the public sphere as a rather serious person. The British press labelled me President Trump’s pit-bull, and when the hosts of The Five were asked what tattoo they would get if they ever did, my former FOX News colleague Jesse Watters picked a portrait of me, since I am “the scariest man on television.” That’s a maybe. However, I am not made of stone, and I still cannot fully internalize the levels of hatred demonstrated by the Democrat Party, the media, and the Washington Establishment. But I have a theory.

I have said for some years now that the dividing line in America is no longer a party political one. In fact, the labels of Republicans and Democrat, or even the broader taxonomy of Conservative versus Liberal, are utterly defunct. There is only one meaningful dividing line that separates one American from another, and it is predicated on love and hate.

Today our nation is split along the answer to one question: “Do you love America, or hate America?” Do you believe this is the greatest and freest nation ever created by man, a “shining city on a hill,” founded on unalienable rights derived from our being made “in the image of our Creator?” Or do you believe, as does the radicalized Democrat Party, that we are an intrinsically bigoted country riven through with neocolonial attitudes and run as a patriarchy where women and minorities are “oppressed?”

For the truth is, we are living in the most perverse of times, with an “elite” that truly hates the nation and the people over which they have power. Why else would our government open our borders, be fine with the more than 100,000 lives annually taken by fentanyl and other drugs trafficked across the border? Or the murder of innocent 22-year old nursing students by illegals released by Democrat prosecutors? How else can you justify giving billions to our sworn enemies and deliberately infecting our armed forces with the sexually perverse and abnormal? In fact: what else would an administration do differently over the last three years if its avowed goal were to destroy America? Think about it.

And then it hit me, thanks in large part to the fascinating interview I just did with the courageous California pastor Jack Hibbs. Why do they so hate President Trump, and why will they use any accusation and any tools against him, his family, and anyone who works for him? The elite hate President Trump so very much because he loves America. Is there anyone alive today who has sacrificed as much as this one man? Simply because he wants America to be “Great Again,” he is facing 700+ years in prison, has been fined half a billion dollars, and banned from doing business in the city he has brought billions of dollars to.

The good news? Hatred only gets you so far. Sooner or later the bile eats you up inside.

We will – eventually – win because our fuel is love. Love of nation, love of family, love of country, but in order to start clawing back our Republic, we need President Trump back in the White House.

Because he actually loves America.

Dr. Sébastian Gorka

A version of this article was first published in 2005. Capitalism Magazine is republishing it again because its message still remains relevant today.

Born over 100 years ago in Holy Mother Russia and educated under the Soviets, Ayn Rand became the quintessential American writer and philosopher, upholding the supreme value of the individual’s life on earth. She herself led a “rags to riches” life, wrote best-selling novels that championed individualism, and developed a philosophy of reason that validates the American spirit of achievement and independence.

The story of Ayn Rand’s life is, in the words of the Oscar-nominated documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life: “a life more compelling than fiction.” Born February 2, 1905, she wrote her first fiction at age 8, when she also showed signs of being an intellectual crusader, vowing to refute a newspaper article claiming that school was the sole source of a child’s ideals. A year later she decided to become a writer: inspired by the hero of a children’s story, who embodied “intelligence directed to a practical purpose,” she had a “blinding picture” of people–not as they are but as they could be.

In high school and college, she discovered two figures whom she never ceased to admire: Victor Hugo, for “the grandeur, the heroic scale, the plot inventiveness” of his stories, and Aristotle, as “the arch-realist and the advocate of the validity of man’s mind.”

Escaping the tyranny and poverty of the U.S.S.R., she came to America in 1926, officially for a brief visit with relatives. A chance meeting with her favorite American director, Cecil B. DeMille, resulted in jobs as a movie extra and then a junior screenwriter. After periods of near-starvation, she sold her first play to Broadway and her first novel, We the Living, set in the Soviet tyranny she had escaped. With her first best-seller, The Fountainhead in 1943, she presented her ideal man, individualist architect Howard Roark. But it was, she said, “only an overture” to her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged in 1957, a mystery story about the role of the mind in man’s existence. With Atlas Shrugged her career as a fiction writer ended, but her career as a philosopher had just begun.

Her philosophy–Objectivism–upholds objective reality (as opposed to supernaturalism), reason as man’s only means of knowledge (as opposed to faith or skepticism), free will (as opposed to determinism–by biology or environment), and an ethics of rational self-interest (as opposed to the sacrifice of oneself to others or others to self). The only moral political system, she maintained, is laissez-faire capitalism (as opposed to the collectivism of socialism, fascism, or the welfare state), because it recognizes the inalienable right of an individual to act on the judgment of his own mind. Your life, she held, belongs to you and not to your country, God or your neighbors.

Ayn Rand understood that to defend the individual she must penetrate to the root: his need to use reason to survive. “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism,” she wrote in 1971, “but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.” This radical view put her at odds with conservatives, whom she vilified for their attempts to base capitalism on faith and altruism. Advocating a government to protect the individual’s right to his property, she was not a liberal (or an anarchist). Advocating the indispensability of philosophy, she was not a libertarian.

Despite being outside the cultural mainstream, her novels became best-sellers and her books sell more today than ever before–half a million copies per year. There is a reason that Atlas Shrugged placed second in a Library of Congress survey about most influential books. There is a reason that her works are considered life-altering by so many readers. She had an exalted view of man and created inspiring fictional heroes.

A sui generis philosopher, who looked at the world anew, Ayn Rand has long puzzled the intellectual establishment. Academia has usually met her views with antagonism or avoidance, unable to fathom that she was an individualist but not a subjectivist, an absolutist but not a dogmatist. And they have thus ignored her original solutions to such seemingly intractable problems as how to ground values in facts. But even in academia, her ideas are finding more acceptance, e.g., university fellowships and a subgroup within the American Philosophical Association to study Objectivism.

Ayn Rand left a legacy in defense of reason and freedom that serves as a guidepost for the American spirit–especially pertinent today when America and what it stands for are under assault.

The summer of 2003 was said to be Europe’s hottest in 500 years. Those who saw this as largely due to human-caused climate change could reasonably have blamed the US, the global leader in carbon emissions. Less so in 2023. The International Energy Agency’s estimates of 2023 carbon dioxide emissions, published last week, show all climate change roads (still) lead to Beijing, even if that’s inconvenient.

In 2003, the annual carbon emissions rankings saw: 1) the US at 5.7 gigatons, 2) the PRC at 4.6 gigatons, 3) the EU at 3.6 gigatons, and no one else really matters. By 2013, Chinese emissions had jumped 125 percent and American emissions dropped 10 percent, leaving Chinese emissions more than double that of American. European emissions had fallen fast and India emerged as a clear fourth.

Fast-forward 10 more years and American emissions dropped again, actually a bit more quickly than the prior decade. There are people who still think the PRC and the US are about equal in emissions. In 2023, China was at 12.6 gigatons versus America’s 4.5 gigatons. The EU’s emissions also fell from 2013-2023, and it’s now fourth globally, with India grabbing third.

In 2023, the US, India, EU and heck, let’s just toss in Japan too, combined to 1.8 gigatons less in terms of emissions than China, alone. The PRC’s emissions growth has slowed sharply in the past 10 years, but the volume increment was still 175 percent larger than the increment to Indian emissions (with the others declining).  

Advocates of tight restrictions on emissions cite their views as supported by science and skeptics’ views as selfish and/or completely wrong. And some climate change skeptics say odd things. But the climate movement’s devotion to science and the overriding imperative to cut emissions often vanish when emissions are attributed to sovereign sources. Then science is unceremoniously dumped in favor of fairness.

It’s not fair to hold China accountable because of history or population size or income level or a vague merger thereof. The atmosphere doesn’t care about your excuses, wasteful Americans, but is forgiving of China’s roughly 64 percent share of global coal emissions. The per capita claim may be the worst. China has the same population as India and 4.5 times the emissions.

The important per capita failing concerns solutions. Per climate change warnings, there’s not nearly enough time for solutions via personal decisions. Solutions must be imposed top-down, as broadly as possible. It’s one government, and to a notable extent, one man who can change the trajectory of 1.4 billion people.

The climate change return to influencing Xi Jinping, history notwithstanding, is many times higher than any other form of climate change advocacy. And if he can’t be moved, advocacy is largely performative. If the US, EU, and Japan had all cut emissions by half 2003-2023, and India’s hadn’t grown at all, China would have still caused a global increase.

Some climate change advocates previously went beyond fairness to fantasy. There was an expressed belief that, if the US led on emissions, China would follow. This is dead now, right, my green friends? Numbers over 20 years show otherwise. The slightest bit of sense shows otherwise. Science doesn’t mix well with faith that Xi, of all people, waits for American leadership.

The best defense of PRC emissions levels is the world’s factory defense. Many Chinese numbers are inflated by global demand for cheaper goods—emissions were relocated along with jobs. If so, serious climate change action calls for painful US policies to block cheap, carbon-intensive imports from China. Actually prohibitive tariffs or low quotas.

Those are costly, but there’d be a logic to them. There’s no climate logic at all in leaving tariffs and quotas on China untouched while pausing American exports of liquefied gas, as the Biden administration did in late January. The pause is not even performative—it will likely increase global coal use or shift gas markets toward bad actors, plus harm American producers and workers.

The climate change movement often expresses frustration at not being taken seriously. Export halts for the US, protests for the EU, and fairness for China, whose emissions are 80 percent higher than the US and UE combined. This is why.

Derek Scissors

Former President Donald Trump celebrated the unanimous Supreme Court ruling keeping him on the presidential ballot in Colorado and other states that ruled him ineligible.

Minutes after the court released its decision, the 45th president took to Truth Social to call the ruling a “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!

9-0 shocker on Supreme Court.

Does this mean election fraud is now illegal too?

I like these comments from my Facebook thread:

Justin Scott Allen: “I think the leftists were warned how close the nation is to CWII, and they simply went along as they have other cheats planned. They pretty much refused to reveal their thinking. It’s beyond crystal clear ‘the rule of law’ is a phrase to which leftists at best pay lipservice, which they feel free to ignore the moment they believe there will be no repercussions for their multi-tier application of justice.”

Leeda Dundale: “Yes, the Dems have other plans and believe me they won’t be good for the Election!”

Why would members of the Supreme Court who vote against the Constitution and the Bill of Rights every single time (in the case of the Obama appointees), much of the time (in the case of bought-and-sold and/or blackmailed Chief Justice Roberts), or a lot of the time (the squishy Trump appointees) — why would they suddenly find reason, principle and justice? Why have they suddenly discovered the U.S. Constitution?

Do they have their limits? Why no other limits — why only this one? What about election fraud? And what about the immunity for Trump as president for actions that Biden already gets immunity for, as president (e.g. having documents in his possession outside of government offices)? Do you seriously think the majority will rule in Trump’s favor on those cases?

They’re planning on getting him in jail. So no worries about the ballot case. That could come back to haunt them with one of their own candidates, someday.

I smell a rat. Come November (if not sooner), we’ll know if I’m right.

Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on Twitter at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, Michael Hurd Ph.D. on LinkedIn, @DrHurd on TruthSocial