On the face of things, the July 2016 murder of Seth Rich had intrigue enough for a full season of House of Cards.

Unknown assailants gun down the young DNC data analyst at 4 A.M. on a Washington, D.C., street and take nothing.  Two weeks later, international man of mystery Julian Assange strongly suggests on Dutch TV that Rich was his source for the purloined DNC emails then roiling the Democratic Party and offers a $20,000 reward to find the killer.

Three days before the November election, Assange reportedly tells liberal media analyst Ellen Ratner that Rich was indeed his source.  Days after Trump’s inauguration, legendary investigative journalist Sy Hersh cites an FBI report confirming Assange’s claim.  Later that year, DNC honcho Donna Brazile dedicates her book Hacks to Rich and wonders out loud whether the Russians had “played some part in his unsolved murder.”

Despite the stakes — the Trump presidency hinged on the investigation’s outcome — there was to be no TV series about Rich’s life and death, no movie, no serious books, not even a single episode of Unsolved Mysteries or 48 Hours.  Incredibly, no major publication or network save for Fox News has even attempted to resolve the still unsolved murder, and Fox execs rather wish they hadn’t.

To understand how a story this potentially explosive could be suppressed for so long, it is necessary to understand one basic fact of Washington life: Donald Trump received just 4.1 percent of the District’s vote in the 2016 election.  Trump’s election disrupted short-term strategies and long-term expectations in every one of the capital’s major institutions, local and federal, public and private, the legal community among them.https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=692

According to Hersh, Trump was a “circuit breaker,” one who made a whole lot of enemies.  Those enemies, as we have seen, would go to great lengths to discredit Trump and anyone associated with him.  The pressure they can bring to bear on even those who want to tell the truth remains formidable.

Instead of a serious investigation by either police or reporters, the Seth Rich case generated a dumpster-full of frivolous lawsuits.  These suits have had the result, likely intended, of silencing those who would dare to investigate Rich’s demise.  All too predictably, the media have heaped abuse on the investigators and cheered on the litigators.

Prominent among the private citizens who asked questions is Ed Butowsky, a Republican wealth manager from Texas.  “It is horrible,” he told me.  “I had no idea how big the other side is, and they are completely after me.”  Once he started inquiring into Rich’s death, said Butowsky, “everything just turned to crap.”  

Butowsky stumbled into his role as sleuth.  Through his occasional TV appearances, Butowsky met Ellen Ratner, a friend of Assange.  Her late brother Michael Ratner had been one of the American lawyers for the fugitive WikiLeaks founder.  On the day after the election, Ratner lobbed a grenade into an otherwise banal panel discussion at Florida’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

“I spent three hours with Julian Assange on Saturday at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,” Ratner volunteered midway through the event.  “One thing he did say was the leaks were not from, they were not from the Russians.  They were an internal source from the Hillary campaign or from somebody that knew Hillary, an enemy.”

If the grenade had detonated, Ratner would have blown a hole in a collusion plot that centered on the presumed Russian hack of the DNC.  Fortunately for the plotters, Ratner’s self-involved fellow panelists skipped over her comments, and the video of the event passed into the ether all but unseen.

According to a complex, multi-party defamation suit Butowsky filed in 2019, Butowsky learned of the Assange revelation from Ratner herself.  She contacted him after the meeting and added the critical detail that Seth Rich was Assange’s source.

On December 17, Butowsky contacted Rich’s parents, Joel and Mary Rich.  He felt sorry for the Riches, sensing they would get no help from the D.C. Police or the FBI.  In addition, as Ratner reportedly told him, Assange had requested that the parents be made aware of Seth’s role, a material fact in the search for their son’s killers.

According to Butowsky, Joel Rich told him he knew that Seth and his older brother Aaron were involved with the DNC email leak.  Joel chose not to go public lest people think his sons were “responsible for getting Trump elected.”  Although the Riches would later deny many of Butowsky’s claims, no one disputes his offer to hire a private investigator for the Riches or their acceptance of that offer.

In the ensuing days, Ratner’s public silence frustrated Butowsky.  On December 29, 2016, he sent an email to Ratner saying, “If the person you met with truly said what he did, is their [sic] a reason you we aren’t reporting it ?”  That same day, Ratner responded, “because— it was a family meeting—- I would have to get his permission–will ask his new lawyer, my sister-in-law.”

Butowsky had one other lively source of information.  In January 2017, he recorded a phone conversation with the profane and refreshingly candid Pulitzer Prize–winner Sy Hersh.  As Hersh related, the D.C. Police called in the FBI when its cyber unit failed to open Rich’s computer.  The FBI’s “hot s—” cyber team succeeded and filed a report.  According to that report, Rich “submitted a series of juicy emails from the DNC” to the WikiLeaks drop box and asked Assange for money in exchange for more emails

Eager for confirmation, Butowsky asked Hersh if he had seen the FBI report himself.  Hersh admitted he had not.  He explained that he had someone on the inside who had seen it, and that person, over the years, had proved “unbelievably accurate” in providing Hersh information.

Although not an ardent Trump fan — he donated to Obama in 2007 and initially supported Carly Fiorina in 2016 — Butowsky thought the media were screwing the new president over.  The apolitical Hersh agreed.  “Trump’s not wrong to think they all lied about him,” he said.  “I have a narrative of how that whole f—— [Russia collusion] thing began.  It’s a [CIA director John] Brennan operation.  American disinformation.”

For the next several months, Butowsky worked behind the scenes helping Fox News try to shed light on Rich’s death.  On May 16, 2017, a report by Malia Zimmerman was published on the Fox News website headlined “Slain DNC staffer had contact with WikiLeaks, investigator says.”

A book could be written about the unraveling of the Fox story, but, in brief, Butowsky went wrong by hiring the investigator in question, former D.C. homicide detective Rod Wheeler.  Wheeler’s quickly proven deceptions forced Fox to retract the story.

New York attorney Douglas Wigdor was the one person to sense Wheeler’s real potential.  “Wigdor is the central point of all this,” Butowsky told me.  Although his name seems to have been lifted from a Harry Potter novel, Wigdor was all business.

On August 1, 2017, his law firm filed a suit on behalf of Wheeler against Butowsky, Fox News, and Zimmerman.  In the suit Wheeler claimed that Zimmerman had misquoted him to “establish that Seth Rich provided WikiLeaks with the DNC emails to shift blame away from Russia.”

The news of the lawsuit cheered the hearts of reporters everywhere except Fox.  Most in the media failed to notice that a week after suing on behalf of Wheeler, Wigdor sent a letter to British regulatory agency Ofcom, citing the Wheeler suit as a reason to block the purchase of Britain’s Sky Television by Fox News’s parent company, 21st Century Fox.

If no one else in the media noticed, the smear artists at Media Matters certainly did.  Its president, Angela Carusone, sent a lengthy letter to Ofcom confirming that Fox “exhibited tacit support for politically motivated misinformation.”  Butowsky argues that the Wheeler suit was a setup for Wigdor “to extort money from Fox.”

As I document in my book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, the media routinely defamed citizens — from Joe the Plumber to James O’Keefe —  who attempted to thwart their narrative.  NPR’s lengthy hit piece on Butowsky is a classic in the genre.

In the report produced on August 17, 2017, NPR’s David Folkenflik does not so much as mention Wigdor, let alone his maneuvering against Fox News.  Instead, he does a dumpster dive into Butowsky’s past.  His not so subtle point in this disgraceful bit of pseudo-journalism is that a man who would fudge his academic credentials, however trivially, could not be trusted to tell the truth about Seth Rich.

Folkenflik adds not a whit of new information about the death of Seth Rich.  He assures his audience a year after the murder that the D.C. Police “believed [Rich’s] shooting was the result of a botched armed robbery.”  Believed?  That’s it?  Folkenflik also fails to mention Ellen Ratner.  At the expense of his own credibility, Butowsky kept his promise not to reveal her role.

Ratner repaid him.  In March 2018, two weeks after Joel and Mary Rich sued Butowsky, et al. for “emotional distress,” Ratner wrote an article for WorldNetDaily titled “I love my conservative friends!”  She specifically cites Butowsky, “the man involved in the Seth Rich controversy.”  Ratner adds coyly, “Some say he had the secrets of the Democratic National Committee, and some think he was just murdered.”

On August 2, 2018, a federal judge in Manhattan dismissed the suits brought both by the Riches and by Wheeler.  Judge George Daniels was particularly cool to Wheeler, ruling that he failed to prove he had been misquoted and “had also given his tacit consent to the article’s publication.”  Aaron Rich has sued Butowsky as well.  Fed up with the harassment, Butowsky fired back with his own suit in March 2019.

In July 2019, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News released a six-part podcast called “Conspiracyland,” in which the former claimed that “Russian intelligence agents” planted the story that Rich was the source of the leaked emails.  This laughably lopsided podcast deserves a deconstruction of its own.  Isikoff, it should be remembered, was the reporter first designated to spread the Christopher Steele nonsense.  Yet three years after that embarrassment, Isikoff was still treating Intelligence Community reports about Russian mischief as though they were gospel.

The critical revelation in the Isikoff story is that Ratner denies  telling Butowsky about Seth Rich.  In what sounds like a staged phone call, Ms. Ratner did protest too much.  “I had never heard of this character,” she tells Isikoff about Rich.  This was an extraordinary claim for any journalist to have made, let alone a friend of Assange.  Ratner spoke to Butowsky four months after Rich’s well publicized murder.  

Once he learned of Ratner’s denial, Butowsky amended his suit to include her involvement in the affair.  He also shared publicly the post–Election Day video of Ratner’s panel discussion as well as audio evidence confirming Ratner as his source.  The major media wanted to know none of this.  A Google search of “Ratner Butowsky” leads to no publication higher on the media food chain than Rolling Stone.

Andy Kroll’s August 2020 article, “Killing the Truth,” takes up where Isikoff left off.  In this exhaustive waste of time and energy, Kroll cherry-picks his way through the available evidence and essentially accuses Butowsky of concocting everything he ever said about Ratner or Joel Rich, an accusation that shocked anew the long since jaded Texan.  

As to Seth Rich himself, all that Kroll can tell his readers is that his murder was “just an attempted robbery gone wrong,” the lone fatality among “the rash of armed muggings” in his neighborhood that summer.

A botched robbery it may have been, but four years after Rich’s death, the skeptic has to ask: couldn’t Kroll or Isikoff or any major media reporter interview at least one of the other mugging victims?  Couldn’t they at least look for fresh forensic evidence?  Couldn’t they put aside their Fox-phobia for a moment and at least fake an interest in finding the killers of the unfortunate Seth Rich?

Or, better still, couldn’t someone in the Intelligence Community — anyone — ask Julian Assange what he really knows?

Jack Cashill’s new book, Unmasking Obama, is now widely available.  To learn more see http://www.Cashill.com.

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Americans are coming into the home stretch of the 2020 election campaigns. The constant media drumbeat of why we must vote has begun, but without any noticeable mention that voting without being informed cannot advance what our Constitution called the “General Welfare.” And the campaigns themselves have largely been filled with promises of using government power to deliver targeted voters something for nothing, rather than central, logically prior issues, such as what the legitimate powers of government are.

In dealing with the avalanche of politicking we are about to suffer from, where even phone blocking can’t keep politicos at bay, returning to that central issue is important, because most of the campaigns consist largely of violating the answer that our founders proposed. Consequently, that makes the almost 300-year-old Cato’s Letters—perhaps the greatest influence on their views on this question (or as Ronald Hamowy, put it, the most “immense authority” about issues such as “the natural restraints on government”)—worth returning to today. In particular, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s sixtieth letter, “All Government Proved to be instituted by men, and only to intend the General Good of Mankind,” can bring us back to the fact that, as John Adams put it, to “nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.”

Consider just a brief part of Cato’s Letters’ efforts to “maintain and expose the glorious principles of liberty, and to expose the arts of those who would darken or destroy them,” particularly the centrality of limiting the power of government to the powers men can legitimately delegate to it.

• “Government…can have no power, but such as men can give, and such as they actually did give, or permit for their own sakes: Nor can any government be in fact framed but by consent…no man can give to another what is none of his own.”
• “Nor has any man in the state of nature power…to take away the life of another, unless to defend his own, or what is as much his own, namely, his property. This power therefore, which no man has, no man can transfer to another.”
• “Nor could any man…have a right to violate the property of another…as long as he himself was not injured by that industry and those enjoyments. No man therefore could transfer to the magistrate that right which he had not himself.”
• “No man in his senses…[would] give an unlimited power to another to take away his life, or the means of living…But if any man…parted with any portion of his acquisitions, he did it with the honest purpose of enjoying the rest with greater security, and always in subservience to his own happiness, which no man will or can willingly and intentionally give away to any other whatsoever.”
• “The nature of government does not alter the natural right of men to liberty, which is in all political societies their due.”
• “All history affords but few instances of men trusted with great power without abusing it, when with security they could…For these reasons, and convinced by woeful and eternal experience, societies found it necessary to lay restraints upon their magistrates or public servants, and to put checks upon those who would otherwise put chains upon them…the power and sovereignty of magistrates in free countries was so qualified, and so divided into different channels, and committed to the direction of so many different men, with different interests and views, that the majority of them could seldom or never find their account in betraying their trust in fundamental instances.”
• “The only secret therefore in forming a free government is to make the interests of the governors and of the governed the same, as far as human policy can contrive. Liberty cannot be preserved any other way.”
• “When the deputies thus act for their own interest, by acting for the interest of their principals; when they can make no law but what they themselves, and their posterity, must be subject to; when they can give no money, but what they must pay their share of; when they can do no mischief, but what must fall upon their own heads in common with their countrymen, their principals may then expect good laws, little mischief, and much frugality. Here therefore lies the great point…in forming the constitution, that the persons entrusted and representing, shall either never have any interest detached from the persons entrusting or represented, or never the means to pursue it…Here every man concerned saw the necessity of securing part of their property, by putting the persons entrusted under proper regulations.”

One of America’s most famous founders, Patrick Henry, said that “No free government, or the blessings of liberty can be preserved…but…by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”

Cato’s Letters provide just such fundamental principles. And letter 60’s reminder that government can’t be given powers by people who do not have those powers to give might be one of the best ways to inoculate yourself against the political siren songs we are about to be immersed in.Author:

Gary Galles

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. He is the author of The Apostle of Peace: The Radical Mind of Leonard Read.

Encountering a certain segment of our society’s acceptance of burning, looting, and execution of the police, not to mention the outrage prevalent when criminals or simple bad actors get their just desserts when police exercise their duty, I have been challenged to find any rhyme or reason to excuse such actions, not only in the permissiveness our leaders attach to such activity, but the actual encouragement they offer.  Indeed, you can find many who are so completely invested in this mindset to the point they cannot cope emotionally with any pushback or appeal to traditional law, justice, or morality.  Simply put, the traditional moral parameters of good behavior no longer apply.

What’s up with that?  The answer may lie in a consideration of the contemporary trends in intellectual thought.

Starting sometime in the 1960s, a concept known as “situational ethics” sought to detach propriety from our traditional Christian mores.  For example, when a man, severely abused as a child, finds himself abusing others in later life; how can we judge him by the same values as those righteously raised?  Indeed, he labors under a burden, not of his own making, that clouds the difference between right and wrong, that renders him handicapped in ways parallel to those with physical deformities.  There is an intellectual price to be paid for such seeming compassion.  We have lost what anchors propriety in discarding responsibility.

Upon the intellectual propensities of moral relativism were built an intellectual relativism that could not but embrace what has become known as postmodern thinking, which cast aspersions on the very concept of truth.  The idea of Truth, with a capital T, was discarded wholesale along with God and Law.  The trend of this form of analysis neatly adopted the tools of Hegel’s dialectic, with a healthy dose of Marxist materialistic leanings, to engender this movement’s current incarnation as “critical justice theory” or “critical race theory,” where a single concept dominated the thesis of the day, to the exclusion of any mitigating thought or evidence.  To this school of thought, in its hubris, debate became an anachronism, shunned at all cost. And those with the temerity to seek honest consideration of competing ideas were rudely cast aside if not eliminated entirely.

So goes the narrative: If there is no truth apart from whatever you may be feeling at the moment; there is no moral, legal, nor ethical underpinning to behavior.  Your feelings trump propriety.  Thus, should you be down and out, for whatever reason, it makes perfect sense that you are being oppressed.  If you lack a good work ethic and cannot hold down a job, obviously the very idea of the worth of such a work ethic is an imposition, a shackle laid upon you. Now you are a victim, reduced to this sorry state by a faceless oppressor.  Such concepts are nothing but a form of imperialism, laid upon the weak and vulnerable, simply to enslave them.  All fault lies with the oppressor, with those of wealth and privilege, those who control the ways and means, those who seek to dominate the oppressed.  No longer does any responsibility fall upon the individual but accrues solely to the oppressor who victimizes all in his patriarchal path.https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=692

And indeed, he does have a face: a face in a blue uniform.  Hence, the uniform — and the human underneath — becomes a ready and convenient target.

A corollary to this way of thinking is the equivalence of all cultures. If truth, the previous foundation of ethical behavior, is merely a construct to control a segment of the population; it follows that there are no superior mores underlying any particular culture, religion or tradition.  Empirical evidence belying this theory, relying on the fact that certain cultures are more open, successful, or humane, is discarded as being, again, based upon a so called truth which is merely an illegitimate tool of the oppressor to cloud clear thinking. Thus, the concept that the drug culture, the ghetto culture, the gangsta culture, and the worst elements of the rap culture are in any way inferior to or must answer to society at large is without basis, is worthy of ridicule, must be obliterated.  Such are the ideas floated by the woke.

It follows that our laws and the police who enforce them are illegitimate.  Hence, the drive to defund, disperse, and destroy law enforcement.  They have no moral superiority to, no ethical prevalence over, no right at all to condemn any competing cultural phenomenon.  If one chooses to be a drug dealer within his culture, it is his right to do so and to live by the customs and mores of that culture.  The victims of this turn of affairs are no longer the providence of society at large but belong to their own, capable of being judged solely by their own.

However, this is a descent into tribalism at best, nihilism at worst.  Local power is absolute power.  Exercised locally it is anarchy. We can understand this as entropy, and all nature trends this way.  But once upon a time, it was society’s leaders’ duty to stem such chaos.  Apparently, it is no longer.  The contemporary shootings and deaths in cities like Chicago and New York are merely collateral damage endured and condoned for the higher good of combating this perceived oppression.  This is simply the cost of doing business in a “woke” society.

Inevitably the chaos will submit to someone’s organization, for good or ill.  Possibly, it will lead to even greater oppression and tyranny from a more pervasive, more powerful entity. And where power alone regulates activity, perdition is the inevitable outcome.  This is the fate of a society that embraces such thinking in the first place.  

Yet a light may yet penetrate the darkness enveloping our hopes, our neighbors, our religions, and our institutions; a light powered by a purer thought that holds life as sacred, as worthy, and that echoes a shared truth able to unite us to counter the forces that would tear us asunder.  May we pray it overcomes the current vector pointing to a dystopian denouement.

Ziggy Bellino is the nom de guerre of a writer living off the east coast who dares not allow his mostly woke neighbors to know too much of his opinions.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/the_way_to_perdition.html#ixzz6ZXUlGGiM
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We have been deceived by public health authorities about Covid, partly from public authorities’ ignorance of the virus, its spread and treatment, but mainly on purpose.

One reason we were intentionally deceived by public health authorities, and continue to be deceived by them, is to create a market for a Covid vaccination. There are billions of dollars of profits in this, and Big Pharma wants them. The financial connections between public health authorities and Big Pharma means that WHO, NIH, and CDC also desire mass vaccinations. If there are not enough people scared out of their wits to voluntarily seek vaccination, the chances are vaccinations will be made mandatory or your ability to travel, and so forth, will be made dependent on being vaccinated.

Another intentional reason for our deception is the Covid threat justifies voting by mail from the safety of one’s home. Voting by mail means that no winner can be declared on election night. The mail-in votes will have to be counted as they come in. The delay in declaring an election winner allows time for more propaganda that Trump has (1) fraudently rigged his reelection or (2) has lost and won’t step down. As the presstitutes speak with one orchestrated voice, whether Trump wins or not will be buried in reports that he lost and refuses to step down or that he won by fraud.

Even if Trump survives the color revolution planned for him, he will be under attack as an illegitimate president just as he was during his first term when he was allegedly elected by “Russian interference.” This will suffice to prevent a renewal of his attack on the Globalist Establishment—listen to his first inaugural address—and again sideline his desire to serve peace by reducing the dangerous tensions with Russia, a policy that deprives the military/security complex of its valuable enemy.

As presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan learned, reducing tensions with Russia threatens the budget and power of the military/security complex that President Eisenhower warned Americans against. This complex has more power than the president of the United States. As no one would any longer believe another “lone assassin” explanation, Trump is being assassinated with false accusations and a color revolution. For awhile Trump used Twitter to refute the false accusations, but now the President of the United States is censored by Twitter.

When the color revolution strikes, Trump will not be able to communicate with the American people through print, TV, NPR, or social media. There will only be charges against Trump, and no answers from him.

The Democrats are claiming that as the Postmaster General is appointed by Trump, he will rig the mail-in votes by not delivering votes from blue states. Yet polls show that the vast majority of Democrats are voting by mail and that hardly any Republicans are. This is because the postal union is a public-sector union and belongs to the Democrats. The postal workers already have their instructions: deliver no votes from red areas. Obviously, no Democrats would vote by mail if they thought the Postmaster General had any control over mail delivery. The Republicans know that the postal union will not deliver their votes and are voting in person. ( Thousands of undelivered, unopened votes from 2018 have been found in a trash dump– https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/exclusive-california-man-finds-thousands-unopened-ballots-garbage-dumpster-workers-quickly-try-cover-photos/ ).

This should mean that on election night Trump will have a tremendous victory, but the delay to count the mail-in votes gives the Democrats the time needed to figure out how large the mail-in vote has to be to win or contest the election.

It is not only mail-in voting but also absentee ballots that don’t get delivered: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/wisconsin-authorities-investigate-absentee-ballots-found-ditch-fbi-probes-discarded-pro

A third reason for the intentional misrepresentation of the Covid threat is to build the growing police state on more intrusions into private life. The public health threat is used to mandate unconstitutional intrusions that close private businesses or force them to operate at 50 percent capacity, thus driving them into bankruptcy and destroying the lifework of people in the name of public health. The threat is also used to accustom the public to obey mandates to wear masks that provide zero protection. Although opposition to this harmful policy is rising in the US and is strong in Germany and the UK, the fear of Covid that has been indoctrinated has caused most populations to behave as lemmings. People are being trained to obey edicts that harm them.

Now, let’s look at the misrepresentation of the Covid Threat itself.

Many medical professionals have shown, with evidence, that the Covid threat has been greatly overstated. According to the CDC’s own data, of the alleged 200,000 Americans killed by Covid, only 9,000 actually were. The remainder had 2.6 co-morbidities that in fact killed them. The CDC reports that in only 6% of the reported Covid deaths was Covid the only cause. For 94% of the Covid deaths, there were on average 2.6 comorbidities or additional causes of death–https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fbclid=IwAR0LhME5kaVDj5hGFZ-G5ypGdMDaGlkPi0DF8aDKL_bUDi0hJsN_Fq5zPUQ#Comorbidities

Examples of comorbidities:

If you’d like to know how the US has reach 200,000 reported #sarscov2 deaths, the Milwaukee coroner’s office is a good place to start. It reports the (anonymized) death certificates of #Covid cases. Just a few of the most recent (sorry about the glare): pic.twitter.com/iUe4wQkO0B

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) September 21, 2020

The CDC concludes that the initial fatality rates were overestimated. If you have the virus, the CDC reports the survival rate by age group. As I read the report, the percentages are all Covid deaths including those with an average of 2.6 comorbidities.

Age Group Probability of Survival

0-19: 99.997%
20-49: 99.98%
50-69: 99.5%
70+: 94.6%

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html

In addition to existing morbidities, many who died from Covid died from the ventilators or from being denied HCQ treatment. HCQ, a safe and certain cure, was demonized by public health officials in alliance with Big Pharma and the presstitutes, because it is inexpensive and in the way of vaccine profits. If there is a cure, there is no need for a vaccine that some experts believe will be more dangerous than Covid itself. (Doctors in Florida claim to have found a second cure– https://bgr.com/2020/09/26/coronavirus-cure-icam-protocol-florida/ )

The Covid threat is being kept alive by the presstitutes and public health officials until a vaccine can be developed. The latest claim is that the return of the young to colleges has reignited the contagation and spreading it to the adult population in a second wave. This “threat” is an orchestrated hoax. According to the data, the 48,299 Covid-19 cases reported at 37 US universities are associated with only two hospitalizations and zero deaths– https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/scam-48299-covid-19-cases-37-us-universities-2-hospitalizations-zero-deaths-likely-killed-dog/

There is talk of returning to lockdowns and more stringent mask requirements. All of this is to keep people, especially the elderly, frightened and supportive of vaccination. Proper testing of the vaccine is suspended in an effort to rush it to market before Covid disappears ( https://www.rt.com/news/501523-western-pharma-vaccines-rush-hypocrisy/ ).

Dr. Mike Yeadon, former Chief Science Officer for Big Pharma giant Pfizer says that the pandemic is over and that the Covid test produces “false positives” and does not indicate infection with Covid. Dr. Yeadon said that we are basing a government policy, an economic policy, and a civil liberties policy on “what may well be completely fake data on this coronavirus.” According to Dr.Yeadon, a “second wave” and “any government case for lockdowns, given the well-known principles of epidemiology, will be entirely manufactured” ( https://hubpages.com/politics/Pfizer-Chief-Science-Officer-Second-Wave-Based-on-Fake-Data-of-False-Positives-for-New-Cases-Pandemic-is-Over ).

It is clear that the Covid threat was overestimated at great cost– https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/09/23/covid-19-threat-was-greatly-overestimated-at-huge-cost/ . The Belgian medical profession has demanded a halt to the Covid propaganda– https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/09/18/belgian-medical-profession-demands-a-halt-to-covid-pandemic-propaganda/

Of course Big Pharma and its shills such as Fauci, Redfield, and the presstitutes, will continue to keep the “Covid Crisis” alive as it is essential to Big Pharma’s vaccine profits, the Democrats’ color revolution against President Trump, and the training of populations to accept more government control over their lives.

In the wake of President Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, pundits of all ideological stripes lament that the fight over the seat vacated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg is too political, that if only our leaders were statesmen, we’d go back to a halcyon age of norm‐​respecting good feelings.

Yet politics has always been part of the process. From the beginning of the republic, presidents have picked justices for reasons that include balancing regional interests, supporting policy priorities and providing representation to key constituencies.

Whether looking to candidates’ partisan labels or “real” politics, they’ve tried to find people in line with their own political thinking, and that of their party and supporters. Even in the earliest days, it was rare for someone to be on the Supreme Court short list of presidents from different parties.

Even in the earliest days, it was rare for someone to be on the Supreme Court short list of presidents from different parties.

Look at the judicial battles of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, with the Midnight Judges Act — the original court‐​packing — as well as Jefferson’s failed attempts to appoint justices to counter the great Federalist John Marshall (whom Adams had appointed in the lame‐​duck session after losing his bid for reelection).

In the years that followed, when U.S. politics was defined by rivalries within the Democratic‐​Republican Party and its successors, ambitious lawyers knew that their careers depended on navigating the intra‐​party split. There has never been a golden age when “merit” as an objective measure of brainpower and legal acumen was the sole consideration.

When nominees have gotten to the Senate, they’ve faced another gauntlet, particularly when the president’s party didn’t have a majority. Historically, the Senate has confirmed fewer than 60% of Supreme Court nominees under divided government, as compared to just under 90% when the president’s party controlled the Senate. Timing matters too: Over 80% of nominees in the first three years of a presidential term have been confirmed, but barely more than half in the fourth (election) year. The difference there is again political: 17 of 19 pre‐​election nominees to vacancies arising during that election year have been confirmed under united government, versus just one of 10 when power was split.

Nearly half the presidents have had at least one unsuccessful nomination, starting with George Washington and running all the way through George W. Bush and Barack Obama. James Madison had a nominee rejected, while John Quincy Adams had one “postponed indefinitely.” Andrew Jackson was able to appoint Roger Taney only after a change in Senate composition, while poor John Tyler, a political orphan after the Whigs kicked him out of their party, had only one successful nomination in nine attempts.

Most 19th‐​century presidents had trouble filling seats before a run from 1894 until 1968 where only one nominee was rejected, John Parker under Herbert Hoover in 1930. Since Lyndon Johnson, all presidents who have gotten more than one nomination had one fail, except George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

In all, of 163 nominations formally sent to the Senate, only 126 were confirmed, which represents a success rate of 77%. Of those 126, one died before taking office and seven declined to serve, the last one in 1882 — an occurrence unlikely ever to happen again. Of the rest, 12 were rejected, 12 were withdrawn, 10 expired without the Senate’s taking any action (most recently Merrick Garland), and six were postponed or tabled. In other words, for various reasons, fewer than three‐​quarters of high court nominees have ended up serving.

Based on relative rates of successful nominations, the argument could be made that the nomination and confirmation process was more political during the nation’s first century than since. Both the presidency and the court were relatively weak then and the process was more of an insider’s game. As the judiciary took on a greater role, nominations attracted more public attention, and also more transparency. Interest groups began to matter — unions and the NAACP contributed to Parker’s 1930 rejection — as public relations became just as important as Senate relations. Politics came back into the process, but in a different way. The battle became one over ideology and public perception rather than satisfying intra‐​party or regional factions.

More recently, we’ve seen divergent theories of constitutional interpretation map onto partisan preferences at a time when the parties are more ideologically sorted than any time since at least the Civil War and the Supreme Court is more powerful than it’s ever been. So of course the battles over these precious judicial seats will be fraught.

It’s too bad, but voters are the ultimate judges, as it were, of the kinds of people they want to see in black robes and the kinds of judicial philosophies they want to empower.

ILYA SHAPIRO

Ilya Shapiro is director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute and author of the new book “Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of Americas Highest Court,” from which this essay is adapted.

“The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation – that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning and exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class – that is, for criminal purpose. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose.” ~ Albert Jay Nock

“The State, rather, is a parasitic institution that lives off the wealth of its subjects, concealing its anti-social, predatory nature beneath a public-interest veneer.” ~ Llewellyn Rockwell

“The act of taxation constitutes aggressive interference with others as a means to compel them to relinquish their property to the State. This is institutionalized robbery. The State must acquire funds before it can provide services. Thus, the State’s act of providing “public services” on social contract grounds cannot be supported as it begins in naked robbery. Because all of the State’s services and functions are only made possible by first committing mass theft against its own “citizenry”, we can readily judge “social contract” justifications for the State to be invalid. No contract which involves robbery and the transfer of stolen property is just or legitimately enforceable, yet the “social contract” appears to be exactly that: a contract involving the transfer of expropriated goods.” –Christopher Rachel

“And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract – the Constitution – made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole numbers that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see.”[22] –Lysander Spooner

The economic policy dominant in the Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries, and christened “mercantilism” by later writers, at bottom assumed that detailed intervention in economic affairs was a proper function of government. Government was to control, regulate, subsidize, and penalize commerce and production. What the content of these regulations should be depended on what groups managed to control the state apparatus. Such control is particularly rewarding when much is at stake, and a great deal is at stake when government is “strong” and interventionist. In contrast, when government powers are minimal, the question of who runs the state becomes relatively trivial. But when government is strong and the power struggle keen, groups in control of the state can and do constantly shift, coalesce, or fall out over the spoils. While the ouster of one tyrannical ruling group might mean the virtual end of tyranny, it often means simply its replacement by another ruling group employing other forms of despotism.

In the 17th century the regulating groups were, broadly, feudal landlords and privileged merchants, with a royal bureaucracy pursuing as a superfeudal overlord the interest of the Crown. An established church meant royal appointment and control of the churches as well. The peasantry and the urban laborers and artisans were never able to control the state apparatus, and were therefore at the bottom of the state-organized pyramid and exploited by the ruling groups. Other religious groups were, of course, separated from or opposed to the ruling state. And religious groups in control of the state, or sharing in that control, might well pursue not only strictly economic “interest” but also ideological or spiritual ones, as in the case of the Puritans’ imposing a compulsory code of behavior on all of society.

One of the most misleading practices of historians has been to lump together “merchants” (or “capitalists”) as if they constituted a homogeneous class having a homogeneous relation to state power. The merchants either were suffered to control or did not control the government at a particular time. In fact, there is no such common interest of merchants as a class. The state is in a position to grant special privileges, monopolies, and subsidies. It can only do so to particular merchants or groups of merchants, and therefore only at the expense of other merchants who are discriminated against. If X receives a special privilege, Y suffers from being excluded. And also suffering are those who would have been merchants were it not for the state’s network of privilege.

In fact, because of (a) the harmony of interests of different groups on the free market (for example, merchants and farmers) and (b) the lack of homogeneity among the interests of members of any one social class, it is fallacious to employ such terms as “class interests” or “class conflict” in discussing the market economy. It is only in relation to state action that the interests of different men become welded into “classes,” for state action must always privilege one or more groups and discriminate against others. The homogeneity emerges from the intervention of the government in society. Thus, under feudalism or other forms of “land monopoly” and arbitrary land allocation by the government, the feudal landlords, privileged by the state, become a “class’ (or “caste” or “estate”). And the peasants, homogeneously exploited by state privilege, also become a class. For the former thus constitute a “ruling class” and the latter the “ruled.”1 Even in the case of land privilege, of course, the extent of privilege will vary from one landed group to another. But merchants were not privileged as a class and therefore it is particularly misleading to apply a class analysis to them.

A particularly misleading form of class theory has often been adopted by American historians: inherent conflicts between the interests of homogeneous classes of “merchants” as against “farmers,” and of “merchant-creditors” versus “farmer-debtors.” And yet it should be evident that these disjunctions are extremely shaky. Anyone can go into debt and there is no reason to assume that farmers will be debtors more than merchants. Indeed, merchants with a generally larger scale of operations and a more rapid turnover are often heavy debtors. Moreover, the same merchant can shift rapidly from one point of time to another, from being a heavy net debtor to net creditor, and vice versa. It is impermissible to think in terms of fixed persisting debtor classes and creditor classes tied inextricably to certain economic occupations.

The merchants, or capitalists, being the peculiarly mobile and dynamic groups in society that can either flourish on the free market or try to obtain state privileges, are, then, particularly ill-suited to a homogeneous class analysis. Furthermore, on the free market no one is fixed in his occupation, and this particularly applies to entrepreneurs or merchants whose ranks can be increased or decreased very rapidly. These men are the very opposite of the sort of fixed status imposed on land by the system of feudalism.

Murray Rothbard

Did you know that the consumption of the poorest 20 percent of Americans is roughly equal to that of the average Dutch or French person, and higher than that of the average Brit, Swede, Dane, or Japanese person? Our poor people are richer than the middle class of most nations! But how do we keep it that way? 

Capitalism has allowed our nation to prosper. But it is always being pulled in different directions, usually to the left, as the government intervenes by increasing taxes, spending and regulations. America is being taken over by cronyism, which is based on connections rather than merit and thus is antithetical to capitalism. Socialism is cronyism on steroids. 

Ralph Benko, one of the last living Kemp Supply-Siders and a Reagan White House deputy general counsel, is alarmed by how the Republicans have fallen into merely paying lip service to capitalism. So last year he co-authored, to great critical acclaim, The Capitalist Manifesto. It pulled together the 10 most popular policies that have been proven to work. He goes into greater detail in The Ten Commandments of Capitalism, explaining why they are crucial and how they work.

Benko begins the book by explaining that the fundamental doctrine of communism is class warfare, which we are seeing take place in our country today, as the left pits the working class against the middle class and wealthy. Benko calls this “an imaginary hobgoblin.” 

The truth is, “cooperation is the source of mutual prosperity.” We saw it work in practice after the supply-side revolution of the 1980s. Benko emphasizes that it wasn’t a right-wing phenomenon, Democrats came together with Republicans. One end of the capitalist spectrum is ordoliberalism, “socially conscious free markets” supported by Democrats. The income tax rate was reduced by 30 percent for everyone, followed by reducing the top rate to 28 percent. These moves supercharged America’s growth. Capping the top rate at 28 percent is Benko’s First Commandment (today it’s at  37 percent).  

Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, asks politicians to pledge not to raise taxes. During an appearance on 60 Minutes, host Steve Kroft badgered Norquist into admitting that he tries to get rid of anyone who breaks the pledge. Norquist responded in the affirmative, “To encourage them to go into another line of work, like shoplifting or bank robbing, where they have to do their own stealing.” 

Benko’s Second Commandment addresses an aspect of this, “There shall be no reduction or elimination of income tax deductions and credits unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.” Getting rid of deductions and credits is nothing more than a sneaky way to raise taxes. 

Benko explains how it’s unfair that the government taxes the sale of investments because this doesn’t take into account inflation. The $1,000 you invested 20 years ago would have to increase to $1,500 now in order to break even selling it. Confiscating capital is right out of The Communist Manifesto. So his Third Commandment would index assets to inflation for the purpose of taxing capital gains. 

Benko puts forth a strong argument for returning to the gold standard in Commandment Six. Did you know that President Donald Trump, Steve Forbes, Alan Greenspan, Lewis E. Lehrman and Ron Paul all support it? There was an effort to return to the gold standard awhile back but it fizzled because of foolishness. “A cult-like dystopian subculture preached that the paper dollar standard would collapse, imminently.” 

The Bank of England published a white paper a few years ago which revealed that if we’d remained on the gold standard, “The average person’s real income would be nearly 50% higher, the increase in prices would be nearly 50% lower” and other economic benefits.

Reagan once said about Congress, “I made a speech a while ago comparing their spending habits to those of drunken sailors. And then a number of my staff members told me that that was unfair to drunken sailors because they at least were doing it with their own money.” Commandment Seven would limit spending by adopting a balanced budget amendment that requires a supermajority to suspend. 

The Eighth Commandment prohibits civil asset forfeiture. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution clearly states that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Seizing people’s property before they’ve had a trial clearly violates this; it is perplexing that these laws have been allowed to remain on the books. Fortunately, there is a growing movement to eliminate them.  

The left pretends to sound patriotic by frequently declaring that America is a democracy (that characterization isn’t even accurate, we are a hybrid democratic republic). But the reality is, “It sneakily prefers to use the government institutions least responsive to the will of the people to advance its socialist agenda.” The left uses bureaucrats and judges to “cram its socialist policies down our throats.” The Ninth Commandment would require regulations affecting more than $100 million to be passed by Congress and signed by the president (the REINS Act). 

The final Commandment eliminates government controls over wages and prices, including telecommunication services, rent and setting a minimum wage. Benko provides several examples of how repealing these laws has resulted in lower prices and higher wages. Reagan decontrolled oil and gas prices, and there was no spike in gas prices. 

In recent years there has been a push for a “net neutrality” law, which would prohibit telecommunications companies from charging companies like Netflix, which use a significant bandwidth of data, more than a company merely delivering email. “The seductively framed ‘net neutrality’ would have taken us back toward dial-up rather than letting us vault ahead to the power to download a movie in less than 10 seconds rather than 7 minutes.”

In 1950, nearly half the world’s population lived under Marxist governments. Reagan changed all that, by starting the overthrow of those governments. But are we turning back? Benko warns against the current love fest with “democratic socialism” sweeping the youth, observing that the 2016 Democratic national platform leaned toward or adopted all six of the still-relevant 10 planks of The Communist Manifesto.

Fortunately, we have a resurgence of interest in capitalism as well with Make America Great Again. The Capitalist League, founded by Benko and William Collier, has already drawn 137,000 Facebook followers worldwide in just a few months. Capitalism is “the secret recipe for equitable prosperity.” Let’s hope Congress believes in these Ten Commandments.

Rachel Alexander

Democratic political leaders have given token statements denouncing violence and rioting in cities across America, but have failed to take meaningful action, former NFL running back Herschel Walker told Fox News Friday night.

“It’s not [a] peaceful [protest] when they say you have got to disperse,” Walker told host Jon Scott in response to reports of a third night of unrest in Louisville following a grand jury decision in the Breonna Taylor case. “It means you have got to go home, [but] they didn’t go home. They moved to another place.” [Source: Fox News online 9-26-20]

Of course. Leftism, fascism, Communism…they all rely on the use of FORCE. Communism is not voluntary. None of Joe Biden’s proposals to nationalize the economy, hand over your guns and submit to government lockdowns are voluntary. It makes total sense that his supporters practice force and coercion. They seek to make such full-scale coercion the law of the land. You think 2020 is bad for liberty, peace and prosperity? You haven’t seen ANYTHING yet. Not if they keep getting their way.

Michael J. Hurd

In granting official diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in November 1933 Franklin Roosevelt was “unintentionally,” of course, returning to the traditions of American foreign policy.

From the early days of the Republic, throughout the 19th century and into the 20th — in the days, that is, of the doctrine of neutrality and nonintervention — the US government did not concern itself with the morality, or, often, rank immorality, of foreign states. That a regime was in effective control of a country was sufficient grounds for acknowledging it to be, in fact, the government of that country.

Woodrow Wilson broke with this tradition in 1913, when he refused to recognize the Mexican government of Victoriano Huerta, and again a few years later, in the case of Costa Rica. Now “moral standards,” as understood in Washington, DC — the new, self-anointed Vatican of international morality — would determine which foreign governments the United States deigned to have dealings with and which not.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Wilson applied his self-concocted criterion, and refused recognition. Henry L. Stimson, Hoover’s secretary of state, applied the same doctrine when the Japanese occupied Manchuria, in northern China, and established a subservient regime in what they called Manchukuo. It was a method of signaling disapproval of Japanese expansionism, though there was no doubt that the Japanese soon came into effective control of the area, which had been more or less under the sway of competing warlords before.

In later years, Roosevelt would adopt the Stimson doctrine of nonrecognition and even make Stimson his secretary of war. But in 1933 all moral criteria were thrown overboard. The United States, the last holdout among the major powers, gave in, and Roosevelt began negotiations to welcome the model killer state of the century into the community of nations.

Recognizing Soviet Russia

To the Soviet negotiator, Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, FDR presented his two chief concerns. One had to do with the activities of the Comintern. This worldwide organization is often ignored or slighted in accounts of the interwar years, but the fact is that the history of the period from 1918 to the Second World War cannot be understood without a knowledge of its purpose and methods.

With his seizure of power in Russia, Lenin turned immediately to his real goal, world revolution. He invited members of all the old socialist parties to join a new grouping, the Communist International, or Comintern. Many did, and new parties were formed — the Communist Party of France (CPF), the Communist Party of China (CPC), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and so on, all under the control of the mother party in Moscow (CPSU).

The openly proclaimed aim of the Comintern was the overthrow of all “capitalist” governments and the establishment of a universal state under Red auspices. Hypocrisy was not one of Lenin’s many vices: the founding documents of the Comintern explicitly declared that the member parties and movements were to use whatever means — legal or illegal, peaceful or violent — that might be appropriate to their situations at any given time.

This was the stark specter facing the non-Communist nations in the decades before World War II: a power covering one-sixth of the earth’s surface had at its command a global movement that was fighting to wrest control of organized labor everywhere, fomenting revolutions in the colonial regions, vying for the allegiance of the western intelligentsia, and planting spies wherever it could — all with the goal of bringing the blessings of Bolshevism to the all of the world’s peoples.

The first commitment FDR asked of Litvinov was that the Comintern should cease subversion and agitation within the United States. This the Soviet minister readily agreed to. When, less than two years later, Washington complained that Russia was not living up to its agreement, Litvinov, in true Leninist fashion, denied that any such pledge had been given.

The second major point brought up in the negotiations involved freedom of religion in Soviet Russia. Ever the politician, Roosevelt was worried about Catholic hostility to the Red regime, a hostility based on the murder of thousands of priests, the wholesale destruction of churches, and the ongoing crusade to stamp out all religious faith.

In discussing the issue with Litvinov, FDR caused the foreign minister acute embarrassment. He brought up Litnivov’s parents, who, Franklin supposed, had been pious, observant Jews. They must have taught little Maxim to say his Hebrew prayers, the president averred, and deep down Litvinov could not be the atheist he, as a good Communist, claimed to be. Religion was very important to the American people, and many would oppose recognition unless the regime ceased its persecutions. “That’s all I ask, Max — to have Russia recognize freedom of religion.” It was Franklin at his most fatuous.

In the end, Roosevelt got Litvinov to concede that Americans in the Soviet Union would have religious freedom, which was never in doubt anyway, and palmed this off as a major Communist concession. FDR had won the public-relations contest once again. When Ukrainian-Americans tried to hold protest rallies in New York and Chicago, they were broken up by Communist goons.

Roosevelt’s strange bias toward the Stalinist regime continued to the end of his life. The massive documentation accumulating in the hands of the State Department on the real events in Russia was never made public, although it could have affected the great debate going on, in the United States and throughout the world, on the relative merits of communism and capitalism.

Nor did FDR’s State Department ever issue any complaints on Soviet crimes, not on the terror famine, not on the Gulag, not on the purge trials, not on the never-ending executions, including the Katyn massacre of Polish POWs. Yet before the United States entered the war, Secretary of State Cordell Hull frequently called the German envoy on the carpet for the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

The grotesque double standard in judging Communist and Nazi atrocities, which Joseph Sobran keeps pointing out and which continues to this day, originated with the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.

The Collectivist Wave

There was a peculiar affinity between Roosevelt’s New Deal and the European dictatorships that on occasion extended even to fascism and national socialism (the correct term, incidentally, for which “Nazism” is a nickname). Early on, FDR referred to Benito Mussolini as “the admirable Italian gentleman,” stating to his ambassador in Rome, “I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished” (though Franklin’s praise of the founder of fascism stopped far short of Winston Churchill’s gushing admiration of Il Duce at this time).

Mussolini, in turn, was flattered by what he saw as the New Deal’s aping of his own corporate state, in the NRA and other early measures. When Roosevelt “torpedoed” the London Economic Conference of June 1933, Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht smugly told the official Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter that the American leader had adopted the economic philosophy of Hitler and Mussolini. Even Hitler had kind words at first for Roosevelt’s “dynamic” leadership, stating that “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt because he marches straight to his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.”

What linked the New Deal to the regimes in Italy and Germany, as well as in Soviet Russia, was their fellowship in the wave of collectivism that was sweeping the world. In an essay published in 1933, John Maynard Keynes observed this trend and expressed his sympathy with the “variety of politico-economic experiments” under way in the continental dictatorships as well as in the United States. All of them, he gloated, were turning their backs on the old, discredited laissez-faire and embracing national planning in one form or another.

It goes without saying that the New Deal was a much milder form of the collectivist plague. (Italian fascism, too, never remotely matched the brutality and oppression of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia.) It is a matter of family resemblances. All of these systems tilted the balance sharply towards the state and away from society. In all of them, government gained power at the expense of the people, with the leaders seeking to impose a philosophy of life that subordinated the individual to the needs of the community — as defined by the state.

The inner affinities of the New Deal with the continental dictatorships is well illustrated by a program that was one of FDR’s favorites.

The Civilian Conservation Corps

One of the first measures passed during FDR’s first hundred days was the act establishing the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Young men were enrolled as amateur forest rangers, marsh drainers, and the like, on projects designed to improve the countryside. The recruits were given room and board, clothing, and a dollar a day. More than two and half million of them passed through the camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps, until the program was abolished in 1942, when the men were needed for the draft.

In 1973, John A. Garraty published an important article on the CCC in the American Historical Review. Garraty was Gouverneur Morris Professor of American history at Columbia and later general editor of the American National Biography, a distinguished historian, and a pillar of the historical establishment. By no stretch of the imagination could he be considered one of the wretched band of Roosevelt haters.

Yet, while a warm admirer of FDR, Garraty was compelled to note the striking similarities between the CCC and parallel programs set up by the Nazis for German youth. Both were

essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth “off the city street corners,” Hitler as a way of keeping them from “rotting helplessly in the streets.” In both countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of young people from different walks of life in the camps. … Furthermore, both were organized on semimilitary lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to national service in an emergency.

Garraty listed many other similarities between the New Deal and National Socialism. Like Roosevelt, Hitler prided himself on being a “pragmatist” in economic affairs, trying out one panacea after another. Through a multitude of new agencies and mountains of new regulations, both in Germany and America, owners and managers of enterprises found their freedom to make decisions sharply curtailed.”Both FDR and Hitler ‘tended to romanticize rural life and the virtues of an agricultural existence’ and harbored dreams of the rural resettlement of urban populations.”

The Nazis encouraged working-class mobility through vocational training, the democratizing youth camps, and a myriad of youth organizations. They usually favored workers as against employers in industrial disputes and, in another parallel to the New Deal, supported higher agricultural prices. Both FDR and Hitler “tended to romanticize rural life and the virtues of an agricultural existence” and harbored dreams of the rural resettlement of urban populations, which proved disappointing. Characteristically for the collectivist movements of the time, “enormous propaganda campaigns” were mounted in the United States, Germany, and Italy (as well, of course, as in Russia) to fire up enthusiasm for the government’s programs.

It is no wonder, then, as Professor Garraty writes, that “during the first years of the New Deal the German press praised him [Roosevelt] and the New Deal to the skies. … Early New Deal policies seemed to the Nazis essentially like their own and the role of Roosevelt not very different from the Führer’s.”

America under FDR did not, of course, follow Germany and Russia on that fateful road to the bitter end. The main reason for this lies, as scholars such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Aaron L. Friedberg have recently written, in our deeply rooted individualist and antistatist tradition, dating back to colonial and Revolutionary times and never extinguished. Try as he might, Franklin Roosevelt could bend the American system only so far.

This article is excerpted from “FDR — The Man, the Leader, the Legacy,” The Future of Freedom Foundation, 1998–2001.Author:

Ralph Raico

Ralph Raico (1936–2016) was professor emeritus in European history at Buffalo State College and a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He was a specialist on the history of liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relationship between war and the rise of the state. He is the author of The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton.