Category Archives: Politics

White Privilege and White Racism are Hoaxes

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As part of the false reality that The Matrix has created for us, white people are privileged because of their skin. Allegedly, this privilege creates in white people the impression that they are superior to all others, and this makes them racists.

This dogma has become immune to all evidence. For example, when Americans elected Obama, who regards himself as black, President of the United States and then re-elected him, it passed unnoticed that these events disproved that the white majority is racist.

I have often wondered why Obama, who is half white and half black, chose to be regarded as a black person. This decision cost him “white privilege.” Obviously, Obama, a politician accustomed to considering what most improved his chances, decided that the advantage was in being black, not in being white.

Obama is not the only mixed race person of note who decided being black was advantageous to being white. Lewis Hamilton is also half white, half black, and he also has chosen to be black rather than white. His annual salary as a Formula One race champion is $50 million. His current net worth is $285 million.

His racing team mate Valtteri Bottas, a white man, makes $12 million annually, and has a net worth of $20 million. Bottas often has to forgo winning in order to block challengers to Hamilton.

There is no doubt that Hamilton has been for the past seven years the best. He has been aided by having the best car. Hamilton is a 7 times world champion, matching the record of the legendary German Michael Schumacher. Hamilton is a gifted race driver. I have watched many races in which he starts last as a result of mechanical difficulties during qualifying or penalties and wins the race. Formula One racing is highly competitive. Hamilton is up against Vettel, a four time world champion, and Alonzo, a two time champion, and a number of one time champions. The cars make much of the difference, and in recent years the Mercedes and Red Bull teams have had the best cars.

Until the last two races, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen was leading Hamilton in championship points. But Hamilton and then Bottas succeeded in knocking him off the track into the wall, thus putting him out of the last two races. This sets Hamilton up to own the record of 8 world championships. Mercedes, a German company with a black driver, is in line to again win the manufacturers championship.

Why does Hamilton, who is 50% white and 50% black, identify as a black if there is white privilege?

If white people were racists, why do the white British Formula One fans cheer Hamilton so sincerely and delight in his wins?

I watched recently the British Grand Prix, and the English stands full of tens of thousands of white people were enthralled with their black champion.

In other words, all this white racism stuff is poppycock. Go watch a deep South football or basketball game. 85-90% of the players are black, and the white fans cheer them wildly. How does this reconcile with white racism?

You are not allowed to say so, but the same holds for National Socialist Germany according to documented facts presented in his histories by David Irving. The national socialists went through extensive debates as to how much of a Jew one had to be to be a Jew. Whatever the decision, Irving reports that there were 150,000 half or quarter Jews serving as officers in the Wehrmacht.

How do we reconcile this fact with the holocaust? We can’t, because no one is allowed to investigate or offer an opinion. The holocaust is unchallengeable. Europeans and Canadians who challenge it go to prison.

The situation in which the Western world lives is one in which reality is based on suppositions and ideological assertions, not on facts. Facts have become irrelevant in the Western world. Having rejected facts, Western civilization, which is based on facts, has repudiated itself.

It is this self-repudiation that signals the dissolution of Western civilization.

As Jean Raspail made clear in 1973 in The Camp of the Saints, European Civilization only exists in its monuments. In the United States, allegedly a Christian country, no Christian symbols are permitted on public display at Easter and Christmas.

There is no such thing as a living civilization whose roots are dug up and cast away.

Joe Biden: The Grotesque & Demented Fool

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Joe Biden has flushed the world down the toilet in less than nine months, including his withdrawal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, which led to a swift Taliban takeover and a destabilization of the Middle East, Eric Trump said Wednesday during an appearance on Newsmax TV’s “Schmitt Tonight.”

“Twenty years, 6,300 Americans who lost their lives over there, $2 trillion that was spent over there, and this administration loses a country in seven days and, by the way, embarrasses us around the world. The Sun, the biggest newspaper in the UK, is calling Biden a clown. It’s horribly depressing, especially for a family like us who fought every single day to get this country back on track. … It’s hard to believe how much devastation has been done in a seven-day period.” [from Newsmax 8/19/21]

Exactly right.

The United States, as a free country, does not need a “leader”. A nation of individualists (if we still were one) would not require someone to set an example. People would follow their own reasoning minds, and choose their own heroes, for such a purpose. A free country with a severely limited government exists to protect rights — and that’s all. The most basic right is a property right. Along with that most basic right are the First and Second Amendments — the right to speak your mind, and to physically protect yourself. State and local governments are best equipped to secure rights. The primary purpose of a federal government is to protect our interests abroad, and to secure our borders. How well is Joe Biden doing with that, by any standard?

When the head of government in a free country falters, it’s not a catastrophe. You get a new one. Our Constitution provides for that with impeachment and elections. But the problem here is that this executive head is not accountable to the people. The problem is that in our present state, elections no longer matter. Biden rose to office in the context of a faulty, fraudulent election. The fraud was pulled off with mail-in voting, a fraud that in turn was pulled off by the grossly exaggerated dangers of an overwhelmingly survivable flu virus. It’s as simple as that. The toxic precedents set by that fraud are still with us.

Joe Biden is a grotesque, demented buffoon. Yet he’s also a living reminder of the continuing fraud against the principles of our Constitution, and the very principle of freedom itself. He sneers and snaps at any remote hint of accountability on his part — for anything. He understands, on some level, why he’s there, and how he got there.

The only parties to whom Biden is accountable are the parties responsible for the fraud that put him there. His presence in the world’s highest political office has nothing to do with the people, i.e. the voters; nor will his removal, whenever and however it occurs.

It’s wise to keep that in mind. Biden is a symptom — not a cause. His grotesque incompetence is plain for all to see. But does it occur to anyone that perhaps he’s in office because of his incompetence — and not in spite of it? Rational people who care about their freedom and the continuation of our government would not make such a choice as Biden (nor his anticipated successor, based on what we’ve seen of her). There’s evidence to suggest most people didn’t select Biden in the first place.

The events of 2020 and the first half of 2021 remain completely unresolved: Election fraud; unprecedented, unwarranted and unconstitutional lockdowns; and the clamping down on freedom of speech by gigantic companies taking orders from the White House on what may and may not be posted online. THESE problems are the real crisis, more than Afghanistan and more than Biden. We can’t lose sight of that. It’s not business as usual, and we’re in much more danger than even the most patriotic of us seem to appreciate. Perhaps the catastrophe with Kabul will wake more people up.

Bottom line: America is not a republic; not right now. It’s an occupied country. Whenever you look at Biden, remember that.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The Soviet Union Is Gone, but the Young Yearn for Socialism

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This August marks the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the end to the Soviet Union. During August 19-21, 1991, hardline members of the Soviet Communist Party and the KGB attempted a coup d’état in Moscow to prevent the political and economic reforms introduced over the prior five years from going any further. The coup failed, and on Christmas Eve, 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved and disappeared from the political map of the world.It is as if the last hundred years of the socialist chamber of horrors, not only in the Soviet Union but in all other places around the world in which governments have widely nationalized the means of production and imposed forms of centralized planning, has practically never happened.
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The events of those days are especially imprinted on my mind because I was in Moscow at the time, watching and, indeed, even participating in those August 1991 events. Frequently traveling to the Soviet Union on privatization and market reform consulting work, especially in the, now, former Soviet republic of Lithuania and in Moscow, I witnessed the failed coup attempt and its immediate aftermath.

The Soviet regime had ruled Russia and the other 14 component republics of the U.S.S.R. for nearly 75 years, since the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 led by Vladimir Lenin and his communist cadre of Marxist followers. During that almost three-quarters of a century, first under Lenin and especially Joseph Stalin and then their successors, historians have estimated that upwards of 64 million people – innocent, unarmed men, women and children – died at the hands of the Soviet regime in the name of building the “bright, beautiful future” of socialism.

Mass Murder and Slave Labor Under Soviet Socialism

The forced collectivization of the land under Stalin in the early 1930s, alone, is calculated to have cost the lives of nine to twelve million Russian and Ukrainian peasants and their families who resisted the loss of their private farms and being forced into state collective farms that replaced them. Some were simply shot; others were tortured to death or sent to die as slave laborers in the concentration and labor camps in Siberia or Soviet Central Asia known as the GULAG. Millions were slowly starved to death by a government-created famine designed to force submission to the central planning dictates of Stalin and his henchmen.

Millions of others were rounded up and sent off to those prison and labor camps as part of the central plan for forced industrial and mineral mining development of the far reaches of the Soviet Union. In the 1930s and 1940s, Stalin’s central plans would include quotas for how many of the “enemies of the people” were to be arrested and executed in every city, town and district in the Soviet Union. In addition, there were quotas for how many were to be rounded up as replacements for those who had already died in the GULAG working in the vast wastelands of Siberia, northern European Russia and Central Asia. (See my article, “The Human Cost of Socialism in Power.”)

By the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s the Soviet system had become increasingly corrupt, stagnant, and decrepit under a succession of aging Communist Party leaders whose only purpose was to hold on to power and their special privileges. In 1986 a much younger man, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had worked his way up in the Party hierarchy, was appointed to the leading position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R.

Gorbachev’s Attempt to Save Socialism

Gorbachev believed that the Soviet Union had taken several serious wrong turns in the past. But he was not an opponent of socialism or its Marxist-Leninist foundations. He wanted a new “socialism-with-a-human-face.” His goal was a “kinder and gentler” communist ideology, so to speak. He truly believed that the Soviet Union could be saved, and with it a more humane collectivist alternative to Western capitalism.

To achieve this end, Gorbachev had introduced two reform agendas: First, perestroika, a series of economic changes meant to admit the mistakes of heavy-handed central planning. State enterprise managers were to be more accountable, small private businesses would be permitted and fostered, and Soviet companies would be allowed to form joint ventures with selected Western corporations. Flexibility and adaptability would create a new and better socialist economy.

Second, glasnost, political “openness,” under which the political follies of the past would be admitted and the formerly “blank pages” of Soviet history – especially about the “crimes of Stalin” – would be filled in. Greater historical and political honesty, it was said, would revive the moribund Soviet ideology and renew the Soviet people’s enthusiastic support for the reformed and redesigned bright socialist future.

However, over time the more hardline and “conservative” members of the Soviet leadership considered all such reforms as opening a Pandora’s Box of uncontrollable forces that would undermine the Soviet system. They had already seen this happen in the outer ring of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe.

The Beginning of the End in Eastern Europe

In 1989 Gorbachev had stood by as the Berlin Wall, the symbol of Soviet imperial power in the heart of Europe, had come tumbling down, and the Soviet “captive nations” of Eastern Europe – East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria – that Stalin had claimed as conquered booty at the end of the Second World War, began to free themselves from communist control and Soviet domination. (See my article, “The History and Meaning of the Berlin Wall”.)

The Soviet hardliners were now convinced that a new political treaty that Gorbachev was planning to sign with Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Federative Republic and Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, would mean the end of the Soviet Union itself.

Already, the small Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were reasserting the national independence they had lost in 1939-1940, as a result of Stalin and Hitler’s division of Eastern Europe. Violent, and murderous Soviet military crackdowns in Lithuania and in Latvia in January 1991 had failed to crush the budding democratic movements in those countries. Military methods had also been employed, to no avail, to keep in line the Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. (See my article, “Witnessing Lithuania’s 1991 Fight for Freedom from Soviet Power”.)

Communist Conspirators for Soviet Power

On August 18, 1991, the hardline conspirators tried to persuade Gorbachev to reverse his planned political arrangements with the Russian Federation and Soviet Kazakhstan. When he refused he was held by force in a summer home he was vacationing at in the Crimea on the Black Sea.

Early on the morning of August 19, the conspirators issued a declaration announcing their takeover of the Soviet government. A plan to capture and possibly kill Boris Yeltsin failed. Yeltsin eluded the kidnappers and made his way to the Russian parliament building from his home outside Moscow. Military units loyal to the conspirators ringed the city with tanks on every bridge leading into the city and along every main thoroughfare in the center of Moscow. Tank units had surrounded the Russian parliament, as well.

But Yeltsin soon was rallying the people of Moscow and the Russian population in general to defend Russia’s own emerging democracy. People all around the world saw Yeltsin stand atop an army tank outside the parliament building asking Muscovites to resist this attempt to return to the dark days of communist rule.

The Western media made much at the time of the apparent poor planning during the seventy-two-hour coup attempt during August 19th to the 21st. The world press focused on and mocked the nervousness and confusion shown by some of the coup leaders during a press conference. The conspirators were ridiculed for their Keystone Cop-like behavior in missing their chance to kidnap Yeltsin or delaying their seizure of the Russian parliament building; or leaving international telephone lines open and not even jamming foreign news broadcasts that were reporting the events as they happened to the entire Soviet Union.

The Dangers If the Hardliners had Won

Regardless of the poor planning on the part of the coup leaders, however, the fact remains that if they had succeeded the consequences might have been catastrophic. I have a photocopy of the arrest warrant form that had been prepared for the Moscow region and signed by the Moscow military commander, Marshal Kalinin.

It gave the military and the KGB, the Soviet secret police, the authority to arrest anyone. It had a “fill-in-the-blank,” where the victim’s name would be written in. Almost 500,000 of these arrest warrant forms had been prepared. In other words, upwards of a half-million people might have been imprisoned in Moscow, alone. The day before the coup began, the KGB had received a consignment of 250,000 pairs of handcuffs. And the Russian press later reported that some of the prison camps in Siberia had been clandestinely reopened. If the coup had succeeded possibly as many as three to four million people in the Soviet Union would have been sent to the GULAG, the notorious Soviet labor camp system.

Another document published in the Russian press after the coup failed had the instructions for the military authorities in various regions around the country. They were to begin tighter surveillance of the people in the areas under their jurisdiction. They were to keep watch on the words and actions of everyone. Foreigners were to be even more carefully followed and surveilled. And their reports to the coup leaders in Moscow were to be filed every four hours. Indeed, when the coup was in progress, the KGB began to close down commercial joint ventures with Western companies in Moscow, accusing them of being “nests of spies,” and arrested some of the Russian participants in these enterprises.

Fear Underneath the Surrealism of Calm

During the coup attempt Moscow had a surrealistic quality, as I walked through various parts of the center of the city. On the streets around the city it seemed as if nothing were happening – except for the clusters of Soviet tank units strategically positioned at central intersections and at the bridges crossing the Moscow River. Taxi cabs patrolled the avenues looking for passengers; the population seemed to go about its business walking to and from work, or waiting in long lines for the meager supplies of everyday essentials at the government retail stores; and motorists were as usual also lined up at the government-owned gasoline stations. Even with the clearly marked foreign license plates on my rented car, I was never stopped as I drove around the center of Moscow.

The only signs that these were extraordinary days were the grimmer than usual looks on the faces of many; and that in the food stores many people would silently huddle around radios after completing their purchases. However, the appearance of near normality could not hide the fact that the future of the country was hanging in the balance. (See my article about everyday life under Soviet socialism, “Socialism-in-Practice was a Nightmare, Not Utopia”.)

Russians Run the Risk for Freedom

During the three days of that fateful week, Russians of various walks of life had to ask themselves what price they put on freedom. And thousands concluded that risking their lives to prevent a return to communist despotism was a price they were willing to pay. Those thousands appeared at the Russian parliament in response to Boris Yeltsin’s appeal to the people. They built makeshift barricades, and prepared to offer themselves as unarmed human shields against Soviet tanks and troops, if they had attacked. My future wife, Anna, and I were among those friends of freedom who stood vigil during most of those three days facing the barrels of Soviet tanks.

Among those thousands, three groups were most noticeable in having chosen to fight for freedom: First, young people in their teens and twenties who had been living in a freer environment during the previous six years since Gorbachev had come to power, and who did not want to live under the terror and tyranny their parents had known in the past. Second, new Russian businessmen, who realized that without a free political order the emerging economic liberties would be crushed that were enabling them to establish private enterprises. And, third, veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, who had been conscripted into the service of Soviet imperialism and were now determined to prevent its return.

The bankruptcy of the Soviet system was demonstrated not only by the courage of those thousands defending the Russian parliament, but also by the unwillingness of the Soviet military to obey the orders of the coup leaders. It is true that only a handful of military units actually went over immediately to Yeltsin’s side in Moscow. But hundreds of Russian babushkas – grandmothers – went up to the young soldiers and officers manning the Soviet tanks, and asked them, “Are you going to shoot your mother, your father, your grandmother? We are your own people.” The final act of the coup came when these military units refused to obey orders and seize the Russian parliament building, at the possible cost of hundreds or thousands of lives.

Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!

On the clear, warm Thursday of August 22, the day after the coup attempt collapsed, thousands of Muscovites assembled in a large plaza behind the Russian parliament stood and listened as Boris Yeltsin told them that that area would now be known as the Square of Russian Freedom. The multitude replied in unison: Svaboda! Svaboda! Svaboda! – “Freedom! Freedom, Freedom!”

A huge flag of pre-communist Russia, with its colors of white, blue and red, draped the entire length of the parliament building. The crowd looked up and watched as the Soviet red flag, with its yellow hammer and sickle in the upper left corner, was lowered from the flagpole atop the parliament, and the Russian colors were raised for the first time in its place. And, again, the people chanted: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

Not too far away from the parliament building in Moscow, that same day, a large crowd had formed at Lubyanka Square at the headquarters of the KGB. With the help of a crane, these Muscovites pulled down a large statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police that stood near the entrance to the KGB building. In a small park across from the KGB headquarters, in a corner of which rests a small monument to the victims of the Soviet prison and labor camps, an anti-communist rally was held. A young man in an old Czarist Russian military uniform burned a Soviet flag and played pre-revolutionary patriotic songs on an accordion while the crowd cheered him on.

The seventy-five-year nightmare of communist tyranny and terror was coming to an end. The people of Russia were hoping for freedom, and they were basking in the imagined joy of it. Russia’s history since then has not met any of those euphoric hopes of August 1991, yet, it nonetheless stands as an important moment marking a symbolic end to the collectivist nightmare of the 20th century.

American and British Young Know No History and Want Socialism

Fast forward to today, thirty years later. It is as if the last hundred years of the socialist chamber of horrors, not only in the Soviet Union but in all other places around the world in which governments have widely nationalized the means of production and imposed forms of centralized planning, has practically never happened. The brutality and barbarity of the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Hitler’s Germany has been rightly highlighted in many movies and documentaries in the decades since the end of the Second World War. But compare these with the paucity of similar films and documentaries about the Soviet Union and similar socialist regimes and their disastrous central planning systems, with all their tyranny, cruelty, mass murder, corruption and gradations of privileges and perks for the huge network of Party members and elite bureaucrats who ran all facets of the command and control economy.

Recent opinion surveys by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in the United States on, “U.S. Attitudes Toward Socialism, Communism, and Collectivism,” (October 2020) and by the Institute of Economic Affairs in the United Kingdom in a report, Left Turn Ahead? Surveying Attitudes of Young People Towards Capitalism and Socialism (July 2021) about people’s views about the socialist and capitalist systems, especially among the younger segments of the population, make it clear that knowledge and understanding about what socialist reality has been like has gone down an Orwellian memory hole.

In the United States, a quarter of those surveyed, 26 percent, said that they would like to see the end of the capitalist system and its replacement with a socialist economy. Among those under 40 years of age, the number preferring a socialist society rose to between 31 and 35 percent. Ten percent in this age group consider the ideas in Marx’s Communist Manifesto to be a better guarantor of a free and equitable society than the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. About 30 percent of those below 40 said that Marxism is a “positive” movement against injustice and for management of the economy for the good of all.

When asked, “What is a socialist system?” 31 percent said it involves government ownership of the means of production, while another 32 percent said private enterprise plus government regulation and the welfare state. Six percent said that socialism is a “new system” that has never been tried.

In the United Kingdom, 67 percent of those in the younger categories of the British population said they would like to live under a socialist economic system, and identified socialism with the words, “workers,” “public,” “equal,” and “fair.” Capitalism was identified by 75 percent in the survey with global warming, destruction of the planet, and racism, and 73 percent said that capitalism fosters “greed,” “selfishness,” and “materialism,” compared to socialism, which cultivates “compassion, cooperation, and solidarity.” A large majority said that socialism had never really been tried and that places like Venezuela have been instances in which the socialist idea was simply poorly implemented and therefore not a real test of a socialist system.

These attitudes and beliefs among the younger generations on both sides of the Atlantic do not bode well for the future of freedom. The ideas of one generation often become the implemented policies of the next one. If neither knowledge of, nor appropriate lessons from the reality of socialism-in-practice over the last one hundred years are learned, we may very well be condemned to repeat the past with all of its social, economic, and politically damaging consequences. (See my article, “Socialism: Marking a Century of Death and Destruction”.)

Richard M. Ebeling

Snowflakes: Afghanistan is Your Future

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The plight of Americans left behind in Afghanistan is described as “dire”. U.S. Senator Tom Cotton has set up a hotline for crisis counseling; Biden, still hiding at Camp David, said through his vacationing press secretary that he hopes the Taliban will be nice and let Americans go peacefully.

THIS is what the military and federal government of the United States of America have come to. The military founded by George Washington that defeated the British, later liberated the world from Nazism and Communism, and crushed ISIS only a couple of years ago is now THIS. Why? Because the fish rots from the head down, and Joe Biden, along with all who actively support him, are rotten, through and through.

It’s truly a metaphor for what’s to come. The 30-year-old snowflakes who draw government checks and live in their childhood bedrooms claiming fear of COVID; or the more sophisticated snowflakes who trade on government perks and favors in pursuit of the unearned … They will yawn or sneer at the collapse of American credibility in Kabul and around the world. But the moral credibility that once made “America” mean something, and the fiscal credibility that those government payments or perks made possible, should matter to these snowflakes.

Reality will hit them at some point. The Joe Biden regime is just like any other regime that will follow it in our rigged, utterly corrupt system that once made up a republic. The very Joe Biden who literally hides at Camp David and refuses to talk to anyone is the same one who will abandon the millions who count on ever-expanding benefits — benefits that will do them no good when inflation grows into the double digits, or beyond, and all the freebies in the world will do them no good in a collapsing economy. Yet they will vote for their own destruction again and again — screaming, as they go down, that nothing was ever their fault.

Take a look at those poor, physically mangled, abandoned souls clinging to US military planes fleeing Afghanistan, you snowflakes. Before long, that will be YOU.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Don’t Trust the Brain Trust

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The ghost of FDR is everywhere, haunting both Washington and New York. The terrible trouble is that the minds in power have confused an economic wrecker with an angel of mercy. They are following his confusions and prescriptions day to day in an attempted repeat of the longest economic calamity in modern American history.

They have looked at the history of the New Deal and completely misunderstood it, believing the civics-book claptrap about how FDR saved us from the Depression, whereas the fact is that FDR’s theories and policies lengthened and deepened it to the point that the only way out that the Roosevelt administration saw was war.

The great theoretical error of the New Dealers was to confuse the symptom of low prices with the causes of the economic downturn. The real problem was that prices were massively inflated before the stock-market crash of 1929. The correction had to occur and would have occurred peacefully, if not wholly painlessly, had the government not intervened.

No government in all of human history that has waged war on prices has won.

The Great Depression is exhibit A.

First there was Hoover with his attack on the “bitter-end liquidationists,” whose advice he summarily rejected. Instead he increased taxes, regulated against short selling, attempted to expand liquidity and the money supply, attempted to maintain existing wage rates, extended loans via government, and bailed out debtors with bankruptcy laws. For more on Hoover’s antimarket program, see Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression.

Roosevelt took office and extended this program, while rhetorically claiming that it was the free-market policy of the Hoover administration that failed. Today we see Bush’s attack on speculators and the mediawide attempt to claim that the meltdown is caused by unregulated markets run amok. No doubt the next president, whoever he may be, will continue this crusade against markets, pretending as if the Fed and the Bush administration haven’t been trying antimarket means of rescue for fully two years, with each attempt backfiring.

But now let’s look forward to the next step in the war on falling prices in the 1930s. FDR took office under the promise that he would curb the big spending of the Hoover administration. The tune changed once he took office. Like Hoover before him, he denounced the rich and powerful speculators, bankers, and corporations he blamed for bad economic times. Even as he was saying these things, he called together the people he regarded as the most powerful and important corporate, banking, and labor interests — together with a gaggle of professors from Columbia — and essentially asked them what they wanted to get the economy going again.

This was the Brain Trust that set the pattern for all of Washington’s activities from then to the present day. John T. Flynn, in his masterful book The Roosevelt Myth, described the first round of the New Deal as

that vast hippodrome, that hectic, whirling, dizzy three-ring circus with the NRA in one ring, the AAA in another, the Relief Act in another, with General Johnson, Henry Wallace and Harry Hopkins popping the whips, while all around under the vast tent a whole drove of clowns and dervishes — the Henry Morgenthaus and Huey Longs and Dr. Townsends and Upton Sinclairs and a host of crackpots of every variety — leaped and danced and tumbled about and shouted in a great harlequinade of government, until the tent came tumbling down upon the heads of the cheering audience and the prancing buffoons.

What did the elites gathered around FDR demand? Higher prices (of course), uniform industrial codes on labor and prices, production controls, an end to competition from below, security for labor unions, guaranteed credits, import tariffs — and also the police power they needed to enforce all this. The model here was Mussolini’s Italy, which was regarded at the time as an ideal system of industrial management. Of course, antitrust laws were shelved as the government itself set out to create as many trusts as possible.

What came out of these meetings was the all-around industrial planning fiasco called the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created the National Recovery Administration. The head was former draft administrator General Hugh Johnson, who brought to the effort every propaganda trick he had learned from his kidnapping years. He began with a central plan of wages, working hours, prices, and production quotas. He went on the air, to the papers, to billboards, movies, and everything else to whip up a frenzy.

There was a symbol of compliance: The Blue Eagle. FDR said on the radio that “soldiers wear a bright badge to be sure that comrades do not fire on comrades. Those who cooperate in this program must know each other at a glance. That bright badge is the Blue Eagle.” And, added Johnson, may “God have mercy on anyone who attempts to trifle with that bird.”

And you know what? It is a complete disgrace that business supported it all — for a while.

Flynn tells of police raids of factories, as workers were lined up and interrogated to make sure that they weren’t working overtime and weren’t accepting less than the government-approved minimum. Consumers were arrested for paying less than the approved minimum prices. A tailor named Jack Magid in New Jersey was arrested and jailed for charging 35 cents instead of 40 cents to press a pair of pants. In time, the NRA became unenforceable, as black markets sprung up in every industry. The crackdown became worse, with nighttime raids on factories, and bureaucrats chopping down doors with axes to make sure that no one was sewing clothes. The NRA staff ballooned from 60 employees to 6,000 at the national level.

The entire thing became a war on production to benefit a handful of elites, all in the name of keeping prices up, all on the profound misunderstanding that boosting prices would boost production, whereas the opposite was true. Finally the Supreme Court came to the rescue and declared the whole Soviet-like scheme unconstitutional, but, by that time, it was clear that it was unworkable and doomed to failure.

At the very same time, other sectors such as banking and agriculture were being administered by other destructive schemes, all based on economic error. The result was fantastic waste, disastrous attacks on freedom and productivity, a regimentation of the entire country under a dictator, and a prolongation of the Depression, which went on and on.

No matter how many disasters FDR created — and it was nonstop — and no matter how much his ridiculous “rabbits from the hat” were exposed as economically harebrained, with every new bureau, every new law, every new initiative, the economy continued to sink.

The New Deal is a paradigmatic case of how to turn a downturn into a depression. That US leaders regard this as a model to follow does not speak very well of their economic literacy, and it doesn’t bode well for our future.

On the other hand, if you want to see how to handle a crisis, consider the Panic of 1819. Never heard of it? That’s because it came and went, and that’s because the government did nothing about it.

[Originally published October 7, 2008.]

Llewellyn Rockwell

Is Life Worth Chains and Slavery ?

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“It is vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, peace! But there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

– Patrick Henry, Speech at the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia (23 March 1775)

Frank Chodorov, Part II

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Chodorov’s rejection of war was motivated largely by the growth of the state that accompanied it and that savaged individual freedom. Chapter 11 of his autobiography, entitled “Isolationism,” summarized his position:

When the enemy is at the city gates, or the illusion that he is coming… the tendency is to turn over to the captain all the powers he deems necessary to keep the enemy away. Liberty is downgraded in favor of protection. But, when the enemy is driven away, the state finds reason enough to hold onto its acquired powers.… It is inherent in the character of the state.

Chodorov stressed war’s devastation of economic liberty as well:

Taxes imposed ostensibly “for the duration” have become permanent, the bureaucracy built up during the war has not been dismantled, and interventions in the economy necessary for the prosecution of war are now held to be necessary for the welfare of the people. Whichever side [of the war] won, the American people were the losers.

The American people were burdened with permanent bureaucracy, more restrictive laws, higher taxation, militarism, and inflation because interventionism’s main goal was to expand the state’s sphere of control. Why did people accept such violations of freedom during peacetime? In large part because the state instilled constant fear of an “enemy” into them.

The Cold War and McCarthyism

Chodorov saw the Cold War for what it was: a continuation of interventionism in a different guise. The Cold War is generally dated from the 1947 Truman Doctrine through to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Truman Doctrine was a foreign policy measure that sought to contain the Soviet Union and communism, which were viewed as quintessential threats to America. Direct military involvement was not its primary strategy. Instead, it provided financial and other assistance to regimes that appeared vulnerable to communism; this led America to support oppressive regimes that were perceived to be anti-communist.

The analysis (Chodorov’s journal) immediately began to attack the Truman Doctrine as “dangerously imperialist” and futile because “communism is already the religion of Europe.” Why? The April 1947 issue explained. American involvement in Europe had nourished communism through war and post-war policies that caused hopelessness and poverty. People were prevented “from producing by destroying the tools of production, by condoning wholesale robbery and the rooting up of populations.” The solution: embrace a laissez-faire attitude toward Europe; that is, leave Europeans alone to reconstruct their markets and their lives.

Chodorov’s main reason for a laissez-faire approach was not benevolence toward Europe, although he certainly felt genuine compassion. His purpose was to spare Americans the domestic impact of interventionism.

There is … an even more vital argument in favor of minding our home affairs. If we go along with this poking into the business of Europe, what will happen to the liberty we have left in America? Already there is a “Red” witchhunt afoot, and experience tells us that … the definition of Red will include every person who raises his voice against the going order. Mass hysteria will conveniently support such a definition.

The “Red Scare” — also known as “McCarthyism,” named after Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin — was a tool of interventionism; it stirred up politically useful fear of “the enemy” and rage toward him. The fear became hysteria in 1949 when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic device, eliminating America’s nuclear monopoly.

McCarthy’s ostensible goal in his Senate investigations in the early 1950s was to expose communist infiltration of the American government and society by which radicals sought to overthrow the system. Suspected communists were generally subpoenaed and asked to turn over the names of other so-called subversives.

A favored tactic of persuasion was to blacklist an uncooperative person, which often led to this person being fired and rendered unemployable. Since most hearings were based on unsubstantiated charges and flaunted due process, the term “McCarthyism” has become a synonym for character assassination and unjust proceedings that damage or destroy its target. The hearings were akin to the show trials for which the Soviet Union was rightfully condemned.

Chodorov viewed the hearings as heresy trials and hypocritical. They were heresy trials because people were being persecuted for their beliefs, not for any harm they had inflicted on the person or property of another. Moreover, the act of punishing beliefs was extraordinarily dangerous on a domestic level. “If men are punished for espousing communism,” he warned, “shall we stop there? Once we deny the right to be wrong we put a vise on the human mind” and turn to “ruthlessness.” On a foreign level, using force against an idea was futile because ideas cannot be killed no matter how many people die or accept bribes.

The trials were hypocritical because the “judge” believed in an all-powerful state; they simply wanted the power to be in the right hands — theirs. The men who sat in judgment never asked those in the hot seat if they advocated state power, Chodorov observed. This was because they too “worship power.” He interpreted the question, “Are you or were you a member of the Communist Party?” to mean “Have you aligned yourself with the Moscow branch of the church?” To the extent federal agencies had a communist problem, Chodorov offered an easy solution. “The only thing to do, if you want to rid the bureaucracy of Communists, is to abolish the bureaucracy.”

After a few years, McCarthyism abruptly halted. A turning point came in 1954 with a nationally televised 36-day hearing on accusations against U.S. Army officers and civilian officials. The American public watched McCarthy’s savage tactics with disgust. When Joseph Nye Welch, special counsel for the army, proclaimed to McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency,
sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy lost public support. Unfortunately, at this point, interventionism and bureaucracy were so embedded into the American fabric that McCarthy’s fall from grace did not diminish them.

The Old Right was fading. Under the leadership of William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review, the New Right was ascending; it embraced a strong foreign policy of intervention. In The Freeman of August 1954, Buckley summed up the schism in conservative ranks through one question, “What are we going to do about the Soviet Union?” On one side were “containment conservatives” and isolationists who detested communism but believed the domestic consequences of a militant foreign policy were prohibitive. Chodorov fit into the later category, although he would have demanded to be labeled “an individualist”; in a 1956 letter to National Review, Chodorov wrote, “I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the nose.”

On the other side were “interventionist conservatives” who wanted to launch aggressive action to destroy Soviet power. Buckley correctly predicted the fissure would “ultimately … separate us.” The interventionist conservatives soon dominated and became the New Right.

The later Chodorov

Chodorov sharply differed from conservatives on several issues. He did not share their embrace of big business, for example, because it rushed to compromise with the state in return for privileges that harmed Americans. This not only betrayed true capitalism, it also opened the door to Marxism. Communism would arrive in the United States not on Main Street, he believed, but through Wall Street.

Nevertheless, Chodorov was held in high esteem by the conservative movement. One reason: In 1953, Chodorov founded the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), with Buckley serving as president. ISI was the first national organization designed for conservative students and campus outreach. ISI listed its core beliefs as limited
government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and Judeo-Christian values. It became very influential and had 50,000 members by the end of the twentieth century. Now it is known as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Another reason Chodorov garnered the respect of conservatives was because he wrote and edited prolifically, often debating prominent members of the New Right. In 1951, Chodorov became the associate editor of the then-isolationist periodical Human Events with which analysis merged. He held this post until June 1954, after which he resumed the editorship of The Freeman for a brief time. Books became his primary focus, however. They included One is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist (1952), The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1954), The Rise and Fall of Society: An Essay on the Economic Forces that Underlie Social Institutions (1959), and Out of Step (1962).

Chodorov died on December 28, 1966, after having a major stroke in 1961 while teaching at Robert LeFevre’s Freedom School. He had lived through America’s watershed period on foreign policy: World War I and II, the Truman Doctrine, and the Red Scare. After this, America abandoned the isolationism that had such deep roots in its history and soul. As Chodorov foresaw, the state swelled in size, and Big Business became its partner in interventionism through the military-industrial complex.

Chodorov’s legacy is best remembered for its many positive effects. Just as he looked to Albert Jay Nock as a role model and for inspiration, generations of libertarians have held Chodorov up as a paragon of intellectual integrity and indefatigable commitment to freedom. In an excerpt from One is a Crowd — entitled Time for Another Revolution — he wrote:

Were the disposition of the current crop of Americans comparable to that of their forbears, a new revolution, to regain the profit of the first one, would be in order. There is far more justification for it now than there was in 1776. But, people do not do what reason dictates; they do what their disposition impels them to do. And the American disposition of the 1950s is flaccidly placid, obsequious and completely without a sense of freedom; it has been molded into that condition by the proceeds of the Sixteenth Amendment [which imposed a Federal income tax]. We are Americans geographically, not in the tradition. In the circumstances, a return to the Constitutional immunities must wait for a miracle.

In a real sense, Chodorov created the miraculous revolution for which he longed. He was the man behind the man who sculpted modern libertarianism in the 1960s. And, true to Chodorov’s gentle nature, his revolution is both peaceful and persistent in its demand for individual liberty.

This article was originally published in the July 2021 edition of Future of Freedom.

Biden’s Afghanistan Disaster Proves: There Are No Accidents

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Biden badly bungled Afghanistan. He took the military out of the country without even first securing our weapons and technology. The Taliban, one of the primary groups responsible for 9/11, is back in power, free to strike again. It’s incomprehensible that the nation who won a Revolution, prevailed in the Civil War, World War I, World War II and over ISIS could reach this point. But here we are.

People are quick to label Biden incompetent. And demented. It’s true; he is both of these things. But Biden didn’t achieve high office through his own skill. He was put there by people and entities — tech giants, fascist billionaires like Soros and Steve Jobs’ widow, the Chinese Communists, and others — with both the will and the skill to do so.

Biden’s incompetence is no accident. His regime, like his party, is out to destroy the United States as we’ve known it. Whatever remnants or fragments of individual rights, private property, and fearless defense of liberty still exist must be eradicated. Biden’s party, Biden’s Congress, Biden’s Supreme Court (including paid off, blackmailed or otherwise terrified conservatives) and, most of all, Biden’s media are all on the same page: They want the United States to lose because they want freedom to end. They want capitalism to lose. But they only detest capitalism because it means economic freedom. They have no problem with “crony capitalism”, which is actually economic fascism, i.e., a way to control others through money; it’s FREEDOM they are after.

They will not stop until there is no freedom left. They’re doing everything conceivably possible at home: outlawing fossil fuels; devastating the currency through inflationary spending; massively raising taxes; imposing crippling regulation; shuttering small business with mask mandates and by making people “show their papers” with vaccine passports; and driving up the cost of fuel to paralyzing levels. None of these policies are accidents; they are all deliberate. These are the actions of a regime and a movement HELLBENT on the utter obliteration of freedom.

So don’t call Biden’s disgraceful exit from Afghanistan an example of “incompetence”. In today’s world, there are no accidents. There are no conspiracy theories, either. It’s not a conspiracy to point out that every single action of this regime is the exact kind of action you would expect if a Nazi or Communist party had taken over the government, and was (1) setting the government at war with the people and (2) destroying all cultural and political remains of the previous government. The facts overwhelmingly, and with 100 percent predictability, support this assertion.

So why is the collapse of American military force, not just in Afghanistan, but everywhere, even a tiny bit of a surprise.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The Evidence is in: The COVID Vaccine is a Failure

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In my efforts to provide good information in place of Big Pharma-serving propaganda about Covid and the vaccine, I have reported to you from the official databases the large number of deaths and health issues associated with the vaccine. For some age groups the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus.

I have also reported to you from official reports that the largest percentage of new cases are associated with those who are fully vaccinated. The question is: are these actually new cases or are they vaccine-associated illnesses?

Following the conclusions of a Nobel prize-winner in medicine and other top level experts, I have attributed what the medical establishment calls new cases, breakthroughs, delta variant, to adverse responses to the vaccine itself, thus questioning the existence of the delta variant. But after listening to Dr. Robert Malone, it appears that there are variants also, and will be more variants. Thus the new breakout of what are reported as Covid cases consists of both adverse reactions to the vaccine and illnesses from the new variants.

Dr. Malone is the inventor of the mRNA technology that was used to develop the mRNA vaccine. He is a member of the establishment. He is not a kook, conspiracy theorist, or anti-vaxxer. He is so solid a member of the establishment that the Department of Defense has relied on him for years. Where Dr. Malone differs from the establishment is in his unwillingness to keep quiet when he sees that the ruling Covid narrative does not fit the facts.

Dr. Malone explains (at the 50 minute mark) that what the vaccine is doing, in addition to killing and injuring people’s health, which he does not emphasize, is evolving the virus, in a manner of speaking, training it to escape vaccines. In other words, the vaccine itself amplifies variants that cannot be prevented by vaccines.

You can listen to his explanations in the first 57 minutes of this video address to a professional group of educated people in Silicon Valley. Even if you are not well educated, Malone speaks with a clarity that will allow you to understand the gist of the explanation. https://rumble.com/vl0zpf-dr.-robert-malone-the-liberty-forum-8-10-2021.html

The first 25 minutes are taken up with Malone’s explanation of who he is, his background and experience. He explains the origin and reason for the official public health policy that experts, no matter how distinguished, are censored when they depart from the official (and ever-changing) CDC, NIH, WHO, FDA narrative. In other words, the official public health bureaucracies have a monopoly on the explanation. He explains that the mainstream media is interlocked with the public health bureaucracies and acts as censoring agent. He speaks with humor. He describes being “fact checked” and deplatformed by a high school dropout employed to shutdown “misinformation,” which is everything that diverges from the official narrative of the day. We have reached the point in our absurdity where distinguished scientists are censored by total dumbshits.

Beginning at the 35 minute mark, Malone gets into the heart of the dilemma we face. He makes it crystal clear that the authorities were wrong and that there is no hope that vaccines are the answer. He makes it clear that the delta variant is going to run through the population and no amount of vaccination, masks, and lockdowns can do anything about it. The focus must be switched to treatment. There are known effective treatments, and more are under development and testing. Malone himself was cured by Ivermectin.

Fortunately, he reports, the delta variant is less serious than Covid-19, but future variants might not be if we continue to use a vaccine that trains new variants to escape immune systems.

For the first time in history, the world’s population has been used for mass clinical testing of an experimental vaccine. The evidence is piling up. Official reporting databases show extraordinary numbers of deaths and injuries associated with the Covid vaccine. The vast majority of new cases are associated with the fully vaccinated. The fully vaccinated spread the virus as easily as unvaccinated Covid patients according to the CDC and Dr. Fauci himself. The vaccine is associated with spontaneous abortions. These are all facts now quietly acknowledged by the bungling public health bureaucracies, but still mainly kept from the people.

The public health bureaucracies do not know how to respond to the vaccine failure as they bet the entire ball game on the mRNA vaccine. All the hopes and claims associated with the vaccine were mistaken. It is a long limb to climb back, especially when they have no other policy to suggest.

Not knowing what to do, the CDC recommends more jabs with the toxic vaccine. https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/cdc-panel-recommends-third-covid-19-vaccine-dose-for-immunocompromised_3948012.html?utm_source=News&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-08-13-3&mktids=092db3c2207e302e76724bb7ec9567e0&est=%2F8lqto%2B7%2BWPg%2BZW0EFu7j%2BNb4wY4dqytO%2FhsQbKFOqNMqq9OCLh7%2Fg%3D%3D

All the “fact check” mechanisms put in place to silence those who understand what is happening are still in place and still censoring the experts who have real solutions.

Clearly, the suppression of experts must now stop. The health dilemma that the ignorance and arrogance of public health officials, dumbshit politicians, and dumbshit media have trapped us in can only be resolved by open debate among the world’s experts. No more controlled explanations, or we may all die if not from the vaccine then from a variant created by the vaccine.

Ivermectin Has Stopped Covid in India and the Media Covers Up the Good News

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/indias-ivermectin-blackout

Covid Financed by NIH Has Brought Totalitarianism to the World

Pressure on Unvaccinated Intensifies

https://www.globalresearch.ca/pressure-unvaccinated-intensifies/5752891

Those Who Protest against the “Official” Covid-19 Narrative are Categorized as “Psychopaths”

https://www.globalresearch.ca/collective-narcissism-and-the-dark-triad-those-who-protest-against-the-official-covid-19-narrative-are-categorized-as-psychopaths-is-it-a-witch-hunt/5722151

CDC Is Murder Incorporated

CDC’s Own Statistics Show 1,270 Fetal Deaths Following COVID Shots but CDC Continues to Recommend Pregnant Women Get COVID Injections

https://www.globalresearch.ca/cdc-own-stats-show-1270-premature-fetal-deaths-following-covid-shots-recommend-pregnant-women-get-covid-injections/5752897

If you take the vaccine, this could be your fate

https://www.bitchute.com/video/8I4NlpjAsaL3/

Paul Craig Roberts