While it is true that inequality makes the poor better off and that restricting inequality interferes with liberty, these are not the best arguments that defenders of the free market should use. They accept that inequality is bad, but we should reject this assumption. There is nothing bad about inequality.

People are unequal in every dimension of their being, including weight, height, muscle build, intelligence, and so on. This just the way the world is. Why should we try to change it? People who attempt this have a grudge against the world. They are not satisfied with the way God created it.

And of course they can’t succeed. As the great Murray Rothbard points out, absolute equality is impossible. No two places on earth, for example, offer precisely the same view.

If we shouldn’t defend the free market by arguing that it decreases equality, what should we do? Fortunately, there are many better arguments available. I’m going to list a number of them, but if you want more details, you should read Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market and Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action.

One of the best of these arguments is that the free market makes possible mutually beneficial gains from trade. If I have something that you want and you have something I want, we can make an exchange, so we are both better off. But what if our exchange makes someone else worse off? This question is a version of the “externalities” or “market failure” argument. The claim is that some of our activities, including trade, impose costs on others. If so, this indicates a failure to define property rights. Once we do so, the so-called “problem” dissolves.

This obviously raises another question. How do people acquire property rights? The best answer is given by Rothbard, further developed and extended by the great Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Everybody owns himself and, given that the earth starts out unowned, he can “mix his labor” with the land and thus acquire it.

Before leaving externalities aside, we should note another important argument. People who talk about externalities want the government to correct them, but what reason is there to think that the government will change things so that the supposedly “correct” amount is produced? There is every reason to think that the government will make matters worse.

There is an assumption that we have been making so far that should now be dropped. This assumption is that in deciding what sort of economic system to adopt, we have a choice. We can pick the free market, socialism, or some intermediate system that is a mixture of the free market and socialism. For any developed economy, this is not so, as Mises proved in his famous article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920), expanded into his great book Socialism. Mises proved that without free market prices, economic calculation is impossible. Entrepreneurs cannot tell whether their investments are profitable. So, they are unable to use their resources efficiently. If they cannot do this, the economy will collapse into chaos.

Further, there is no third system intermediate between the free market and socialism. Interference with the market fails to achieve the ostensible goals of its supporters. Minimum wage laws create unemployment. Price controls lead to shortages. Faced with failure, the interventionists must either return to the free market or intervene again, in an effort to remedy the defects of the previous intervention. If this is continued, there will be no free market left. The result will be full-scale socialism, which has already been shown to be impossible.

How did the socialists and interventionists respond to Mises’s conclusive demonstration that their schemes cannot work? They denied the existence of economic laws that restricted what they could do. As Mises says in Human Action, “It is a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the debates concerning the essence, scope, and logical character of economics to dismiss them as the scholastic quibbling of pedantic professors. It is a widespread misconception that while pedants squandered useless talk about the most appropriate method of procedure, economics itself, indifferent to these idle disputes, went quietly on its way.

In the Methodenstreit between the Austrian economists and the Prussian Historical School, the self-styled ‘intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern,’ and in the discussions between the school of John Bates Clark and American Institutionalism much more was at stake than the question of what kind of procedure was the most fruitful one.

The real issue was the epistemological foundations of the science of human action and its logical legitimacy. Starting from an epistemological system to which praxeological thinking was strange and from a logic which acknowledged as scientific–besides logic and mathematics–only the empirical natural sciences and history, many authors tried to deny the value and usefulness of economic theory. Historicism aimed at replacing it by economic history; positivism recommended the substitution of an illusory social science which should adopt the logical structure and pattern of Newtonian mechanics. Both these schools agreed in a radical rejection of all the achievements of economic thought. It was impossible for the economists to keep silent in the face of all these attacks.”

Thus, it’s the free market or nothing. We are fortunate that the only economic system is on that benefits everybody through the chance of making mutually advantageous exchanges.

This point leads to another argument we can use to defend the free market. In the free market, it’s to my advantage that others do well, because they can offer more goods and services to exchange. This will promote peace between nations. Why go to war with people who are making you better off?

Given the abundance of excellent arguments in favor of the free market, there is no need to use argument that accept the enemy’s premise that equality is a good thing. Let’s do everything that we can to support the genuine arguments in favor of the free market, as best expounded by Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises.

The woke position rests on a fundamental fallacy. This is that there is a fixed amount resources, so that if the rich have more, the poor have less. But this is wrong. Resources in the free market are not a fixed sum. So long as the economy is growing, everybody can benefit. The ‘protected’ can do better without taking away what the rich have earned. The economist Paul Rubin, who died last month, gives a good account of the fallacy: “Karl Marx called his system ‘scientific socialism’ Modern leftists advocate a similar ideology and call themselves ‘woke’ to indicate that they understand the world better than the rest of us. Yet the worldview of Marxists and woke leftists alike is fundamentally primitive.

Folk economics is the economics of people untrained in economics. It is the economic view of the world that evolved in our brains before the development of the modern economy. During this period of evolution, the economy was simple, with little specialization except by age and sex, no economic growth, no technological change, limited trade, little capital, and warfare between neighboring tribes.

Zero-sum thinking was well-adapted to this world. Since there was no economic growth, incomes and wealth didn’t grow. If one person had access to more food or other goods, or greater access to females, it was likely because of expropriation from others. Since there was little capital, a ‘labor theory of value’—the idea that all value is created by labor alone—would have been appropriate, and there was little need to protect capital through property rights. Frequent warfare encouraged xenophobia.

Adam Smith and other economists challenged this worldview in the 18th century. They taught that specialization of labor was valuable, that capital was productive, and that labor and capital could work together to increase income. They also showed that property rights needed protection, that members of other tribes or groups could cooperate through trade, that wealth could be created with the proper incentives, and that the creation of wealth would benefit everyone in a society, not only the wealthy. Most important, they showed that a complex economy could work with little or no central direction.

Marx’s economic system was based on the primitive worldview of our ancestors. For him, conflict rather than cooperation between labor and capital defined the economy. He thought that the wealthy became rich only by exploiting the poor, that all income came from labor, and that the economy needed central direction because he didn’t believe markets were good at self-correction. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the largest and most expensive social-science experiment ever conducted, proved Smith right and Marx wrong.

Members of the woke left want to return to policies based on this primitive economic thinking. One of their major errors is thinking that the world is zero-sum. That assumption drives identity politics, which sees, among other things, an intrinsic conflict between blacks and whites. The Black Lives Matter movement and Critical Race Theory foment racial antagonism and resurrect xenophobia. Leftists vilify ‘millionaires and billionaires’ like Bill Gates and Elon Musk as evil and exploitative. They should recognize them as productive entrepreneurs whose innovations benefit us all.

Dislike of the rich makes sense in a world where one can become rich only by exploiting others, but not in a society full of creativity and useful inventions. Changing tax laws to soak the rich makes sense with a labor theory of value, but not with a sophisticated understanding of continual investment and technological change.

Adopting counterproductive woke policies such as racial job quotas, high taxes, excessive regulation of business, and price controls on some goods may not send us all the way back to the subsistence economy of our ancestors. But if policies that penalize saving and investing and that involve excessive government control are adopted, social capital, wealth, and real income will decline. If we bow to this primitive ideology, there will be increased racial animosity and conflict, slow economic growth, and fewer inventions.”

You might raise an objection to this. Even if the economy is growing, and the minorities can gain without taking resources from the rich, why should they be satisfied with what they get? Can’t they demand more of the growing economic pie? The answer is that doing this will hurt them, not help them. The way in which the economy grows is by capital accumulation, and the great bulk of this takes place through the investments of the well off. Confiscation of the income and wealth of the wealthy will slow down or stop the rate of economic growth. This will make the “protected” worse off. The great Ludwig von Mises proposes a thought experiment that brings out this point vividly: “A law that prohibits any individual from accumulating more than ten million or from making more than one million a year restricts the activities of precisely those entrepreneurs who are most successful in filling the wants of consumers. If such a law had been enacted in the United States fifty years ago, many who are multimillionaires today would live in more modest circumstances. But all those new branches of industry which supply the masses with articles unheard of before would operate, if at all, on a much smaller scale, and their products would be beyond the reach of the common man. It is manifestly contrary to the interest of the consumers to prevent the most efficient entrepreneurs from expanding the sphere of their activities up to the limit to which the public approves of their conduct of business by buying their products.”

There is another way in which the woke movement undermines our economy, and this may be the most serious one of all. The conjuring up of grievances encourages blacks to hate whites. Being white is regarded by many left-wing revolutionaries as evil, and murderous violence will result from this.  As the great black economist Thomas Sowell points out: “Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.

That includes a pattern of violent attacks on whites in public places in Chicago, Denver, New York, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Kansas City, as well as blacks in schools beating up Asian classmates – for years – in New York and Philadelphia.

These attacks have been accompanied by explicitly racist statements by the attackers, so it is not a question of having to figure out what the motivation is. There has also been rioting and looting by these young hoodlums.”

Let’s do everything we can to counter the woke plot to destroy our economy and to encourage the free market economic policies of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. That is the way to a prosperous economy in which all groups can live in harmony.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

The answer is quite clear. “Open borders” would be a disastrous mistake. The policy would subject the United States to hordes of people with alien ideologies and cultures. As the great Ludwig von Mises pointed out, it would have made no sense to allow immigration from Germany and Japan during World War II. “Neither does it mean that there can be any question of appeasing aggressors by removing migration barriers. As conditions are today, the Americas and Australia in admitting German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants merely open their doors to the vanguards of hostile armies.” We face exactly the same situation today. We have a hard enough problem coping with the alien ideologies and cultures that are already here. Why compound our problem?

The situation is even worse than we have so far portrayed. Because of the “woke” control that now prevails, members of “protected” groups such as racial minorities are immediately eligible for reparations, “set-asides,” affirmative action, and other schemes to mulct the American people. Why should our hard-earned tax money go to support people who have no ties to our country? As I said in 2015, “In other words, it’s bad enough we have to be looted, spied on, and kicked around by the state. Should we also have to pay for the privilege of cultural destructionism, an outcome the vast majority of the state’s taxpaying subjects do not want and would actively prevent if they lived in a free society and were allowed to do so?”

Aside from the “woke” problem, there is something else. Those who come here because of “open borders” can immediately benefit from the welfare state. A massive number of people could come here just to live from welfare payments. Why bankrupt our economy? The well-known free market economist Milton Friedman, hardly an extremist, said, “You cannot simultaneously have a free market and a welfare state.”

You might counter this by pointing out that welfare benefits aren’t very lavish. But this is true only if you are thinking of the standards of living of the American upper and middle classes. (Actually, though, these benefits are quite substantial and give the lie to claims that America has been marked by rising “inequality” in recent decades.) Because America is much more prosperous than the places the immigrants are coming from, living from American welfare payments would be a good deal for millions of potential immigrants.

Some fanatical libertarian supporters of “open borders” have come up with a response to this point that has to be characterized as one of the worst arguments in the past few decades. Robert Rector mentions this argument here: “The grant of citizenship is a transfer of political power. Access to the U.S. ballot box also provides access to the American taxpayer’s bank account. This is particularly problematic with regard to low-skill immigrants. Within an active redistributionist state, as Friedman understood, unlimited immigration can threaten limited government.

“Many libertarians respond to this dilemma by asserting that the real problem is not open borders but the welfare state itself. The answer: dismantle the welfare state. The libertarian Cato Institute pursues a variant of this policy under the slogan, ‘build a wall around the welfare state, not around the nation.’. . . Borders should be open, but immigrants should be barred from accessing welfare and other benefits. , , . In a recent debate with Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute, I pointed out this paradox. Griswold replied that the key was to grant amnesty and open borders now and work on ‘building a wall around welfare’ at some point in the future.” See this.

It has to be said that this is utterly stupid. It would be like saying that you need to take two medications. If you take only one, you’ll die. Therefore, you should take one of them and worry about getting the other one later.

There is yet another problem with “open borders,” that gets to the root of why we support the free market. As Mises again and again pointed out, the free market replaces the Darwinian struggle of the natural world, in which some animals survive at the expense of others. In the free market, people can benefit without harming others. There is a harmony of long term interests among people.

But with open borders this is no longer true. Immigrants will take jobs by undercutting American workers, because even very low paying American jobs are better than what they are getting in their home countries. This process will take place until wages reach a common level, and given the vast number of potential immigrants compared with American workers, the wage that results will be close to the immigrants’ standard. American workers could rightly say, “What about us? Your “free market” makes our condition worse.” But of course it isn’t the “free market” that does this. It’s “open borders,” which is an anti-market principle, that does this. Insisting that “open borders” makes everybody better off makes libertarianism seem ridiculous, because a great many people are hurt by the policy.

Some “left libertarians” will object that the free market does indeed mandate “open borders”. But it doesn’t. The libertarian non-aggression principle leaves it up to us to determine what to do in a society with so-called “public” property.

We need to confront another objection. Wouldn’t an attempt to close the border require that we lock up illegal immigrants in concentration camps? Wouldn’t this be a drastic infringement on their liberty? But a closed border doesn’t require this. All that we need to do is to build a wall and prevent immigrants from entering. We don’t have to jail them. All we need to do is to turn them away.

Also, building a wall would be easier if states can build walls around their own territory. This greatly reduces the cost of building a wall. Closing the border gives the people in each state or local community a choice about accepting immigrants. Closed borders and secession go hand-in hand

Let’s do everything we can to end the hoax of “open borders.” Doing so is a step in the preservation of Western civilization and the American heritage.

I spoke about the difference between the classical gold standard and the fake gold standard. This might seem a technical issue, but it’s one of vital importance. Joe Salerno, the leading contemporary Austrian School authority on monetary economics and Academic Vice President of the Mises Institute, explains:

“The historical embodiment of monetary freedom is the gold standard. The era of its greatest flourishing was not coincidentally the 19th century, the century in which classical liberal ideology reigned, a century of unprecedented material progress and peaceful relations between nations. Unfortunately, the monetary freedom represented by the gold standard, along with many other freedoms of the classical liberal era, was brought to a calamitous end by World War I.

Also, and not so coincidentally, this was the “War to Make the World Safe for Mass Democracy,” a political system which we have all learned by now is the great enemy of freedom in all its social and economic manifestations.

Now, it is true that the gold standard did not disappear overnight, but limped along in weakened form into the early 1930s. But this was not the pre-1914 classical gold standard, in which the actions of private citizens operating on free markets ultimately controlled the supply and value of money and governments had very little influence.

Under this monetary system, if people in one nation demanded more money to carry out more transactions or because they were more uncertain of the future, they would export more goods and financial assets to the rest of the world, while importing less. As a result, additional gold would flow in through a surplus in the balance of payments increasing the nation’s money supply.

Sometimes, private banks tried to inflate the money supply by issuing additional bank notes and deposits, called “fiduciary media,” promising to pay gold but unbacked by gold reserves. They lent these notes and deposits to either businesses or the government. However, as soon as the borrowers spent these additional fractional-reserve notes and deposits, domestic incomes and prices would begin to rise.

As a result, foreigners would reduce their purchases of the nation’s exports, and domestic residents would increase their spending on the relatively cheap foreign imports. Gold would flow out of the coffers of the nation’s banks to finance the resulting trade deficit, as the excess paper notes and checks were returned to their issuers for redemption in gold.

To check this outflow of gold reserves, which made their depositors very nervous, the banks would contract the supply of fiduciary media bringing about a monetary deflation and an ensuing depression.

Temporarily chastened by the experience, banks would refrain from again expanding credit for a while. If the Treasury tried to issue convertible notes only partially backed by gold, as it occasionally did, it too would face these consequences and be forced to restrain its note issue within narrow bounds.

Thus, governments and commercial banks under the gold standard did not have much influence over the money supply in the long run. The only sizable inflations that occurred during the 19th century did so during wartime when almost all belligerent nations would “go off the gold standard.” They did so in order to conceal the staggering costs of war from their citizens by printing money rather than raising taxes to pay for it.

For example, Great Britain experienced a substantial inflation at the beginning of the 19th century during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, when it had suspended the convertibility of the British pound into gold. Likewise, the United States and the Confederate States of America both suffered a devastating hyperinflation during the War for Southern Independence, because both sides issued inconvertible Treasury notes to finance budget deficits. It is because politicians and their privileged banks were unable to tamper with and inflate a gold money that prices in the United States and in Great Britain at the close of the 19th century were roughly the same as they were at the beginning of the century.

Within weeks of the outbreak of World War I, all belligerent nations departed from the gold standard. Needless to say by the war’s end the paper fiat currencies of all these nations were in the throes of inflations of varying degrees of severity, with the German hyperinflation that culminated in 1923 being the worst. To put their currencies back in order and to restore the public’s confidence in them, one country after another reinstituted the gold standard during the 1920s.

Unfortunately, the new gold standard of the 1920s was fundamentally different from the classical gold standard. For one thing, under this latter version, gold coin was not used in daily transactions. In Great Britain, for example, the Bank of England would only redeem pounds in large and expensive bars of gold bullion. But gold bullion was mainly useful for financing international trade transactions.

Other countries such as Germany and the smaller countries of Central and Eastern Europe used gold-convertible foreign currencies such as the US dollar or the pound sterling as reserves for their own domestic currencies. This was called the gold-exchange standard.

While the US dollar was technically redeemable in honest-to-goodness gold coin, banks no longer held reserves in gold coin but in Federal Reserve notes. All gold reserves were centralized, by law, in the hands of the Fed and banks were encouraged to use Fed notes to cash checks and pay for checking and savings deposit withdrawals. This meant that very little gold coin circulated among the public in the 1920s, and residents of all nations came increasingly to view the paper IOUs of their central banks as the ultimate embodiment of the dollar, franc, pound, etc.

This state of affairs gave governments and their central banks much greater leeway for manipulating their national money supplies. The Bank of England, for example, could expand the amount of paper claims to gold pounds through the banking system without fearing a run on its gold reserves for two reasons.

Foreign countries on the gold exchange standard would be willing to pile up the paper pounds that flowed out of Great Britain through its balance of payments deficit and not demand immediate conversion into gold. In fact by issuing their own currency to tourists and exporters in exchange for the increasing quantities of inflated paper pounds, foreign central banks were in effect inflating their own money supplies in lock-step with the Bank of England. This drove up prices in their own countries to the inflated level attained by British prices and put an end to the British deficits.

In effect, this system enabled countries such as Great Britain and the United States to export monetary inflation abroad and to run “a deficit without tears” — that is, a balance-of-payments deficit that does not involve a loss of gold.

But even if gold reserves were to drain out of the vaults of the Bank of England or the Fed to foreign nations, British and US citizens would be disinclined, either by law or by custom, to put further pressure on their respective central banks to stop inflating by threatening bank runs to rid themselves of their depreciating notes and retrieve their rightful property left with the banks for safekeeping.

Unfortunately, contemporary economists and economic historians do not grasp the fundamental difference between the hard-money classical gold standard of the 19th century and the inflationary phony gold standard of the 1920s.” See here.

Many people think that even if 100% reserve banking is desirable as an ideal, it would never work in practice. How could banks stay in business if they couldn’t lend their checking deposits? Doesn’t the supply of money need to expand as the economy grows? Murray Rothbard demolishes these objections with characteristic force:

“Certain standard objections have been raised against 100 percent banking and against 100 percent gold currency in particular. One generally accepted argument against any form of 100 percent banking I find particularly and strikingly curious: that under 100 percent reserves, banks would not be able to continue profitably in business. I see no reason why banks should not be able to charge their customers for their services, as do all other useful businesses. This argument points to the supposedly enormous benefits of banking; if these benefits were really so powerful, then surely the consumers would be willing to pay a service charge for them, just as they pay for traveler’s checks now. If they were not willing to pay the costs of the banking business as they pay the costs of all other industries useful to them, then that would demonstrate the advantages of banking to have been highly overrated. At any rate, there is no reason why banking should not take its chance in the free market with every other industry.

The major objection against 100 percent gold is that this would allegedly leave the economy with an inadequate money supply. Some economists advocate a secular increase of the supply of money in accordance with some criterion: population growth, growth of volume of trade, and the like; others wish the money supply to be adjusted to provide a stable and fixed price level. In both cases, of course, the adjusting and manipulating could only be done by government. These economists have not fully absorbed the great monetary lesson of classical economics: that the supply of money essentially does not matter. Money performs its function by being a medium of exchange; any change in its supply, therefore, will simply adjust itself in the purchasing power of the money unit, that is, in the amount of other goods that money will be able to buy. An increase in the supply of money means merely that more units of money are doing the social work of exchange and therefore that the purchasing power of each unit will decline. Because of this adjustment, money, in contrast to all other useful commodities employed in production or consumption, does not confer a social benefit when its supply increases. The only reason that increased gold mining is useful, in fact, is that the large supply of gold will satisfy more of the non–monetary uses of the gold commodity.

There is therefore never any need for a larger supply of money (aside from the non-monetary uses of gold or silver). An increased supply of money can only benefit one set of people at the expense of another set, and, as we have seen, that is precisely what happens when government or the banks inflate the money supply. And that is precisely what my proposed reform is designed to eliminate. There can, incidentally, never be an actual monetary “shortage,” since the very fact that the market has established and continues to use gold or silver as a monetary commodity shows that enough of it exists to be useful as a medium of exchange.

The number of people, the volume of trade, and all other alleged criteria are therefore merely arbitrary and irrelevant with respect to the supply of money. And as for the ideal of the stable price level, apart from the grave flaws of deciding on a proper index, there are two points that are generally overlooked. In the first place, the very ideal of a stable price level is open to challenge. Hoarding, as we have indicated, is always attacked; and yet it is the freely expressed and desired action on the market. People often wish to increase the real value of their cash balances, or to raise the purchasing power of each dollar. There are many reasons why they might wish to do so. Why should they not have this right, as they have other rights on the free market? And yet only by their “hoarding” taking effect through lower prices can they bring about this result. Only by demanding more cash balances and thus lowering prices can the dollars assume a higher real value. I see no reason why government manipulators should be able to deprive the consuming public of this right.

Second, if people really had an overwhelming desire for a stable price level, they would negotiate all their contracts in some agreed-upon price index. The fact that such a voluntary “tabular standard” has rarely been adopted is an apt enough commentary on those stable-price-level enthusiasts who would impose their ambitions by government coercion.

Money, it is often said, should function as a yardstick, and therefore its value should be stabilized and fixed. Not its value, however, but its weight should be eternally fixed, as are all other weights. Its value, like all other values, should be left to the judgment, estimation and ultimate decision of every individual consumer.” See here.

If we want a true gold standard, can we get back to it? Of course we can. The inflationary monetary policy we have today is the key to the financial elites control over us. Without it brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers couldn’t function. We must prevail, and we can prevail. As I said in 2002,

“The power to create money is the most ominous power ever bestowed on any human being. This power is rightly criminalized when it is exercised by private individuals, and even today, everyone knows why counterfeiting is wrong and knavish. Far fewer are aware of the role of the federal government, the Fed, and the fiat dollar in making possible the largest counterfeiting operation in human history, which is called the world dollar standard. Fewer still understand the connection between this officially sanctioned criminality and the business cycle, the rise and collapse of the stock market, and the continued erosion of the value of the dollar.

In fact, I would venture to guess that a sizeable percentage of even educated adults would be astounded to discover that the Federal Reserve does more than manage the nation’s money accounts, that, in fact, its main activity consists in actually creating money that distorts production and creates inflation and the business cycle. In fact, I would go further to suggest that many educated adults believe that gold continues to serve as the ultimate backing of our monetary system, and would be astonished to discover that our money is backed by nothing but more of itself.

We have our work cut out for us, to be sure, mainly at the educational level. We must continue to state the obvious at every opportunity, that the fiat system is exactly what it is, a system of paper money backed by nothing of real value. We must continue to point out that because of this, our economic system is not depression proof, but rather highly vulnerable to complete meltdown. We must continue to draw attention to the only long-term solution: a complete separation of money and state based on the commodity that the market has always chosen as money, namely, gold.

This takes us back to our original question: is the gold standard history? Is it so preposterously unrealistic to advocate it that we might as well move to on other things? It won’t surprise you that my answer is no. If there is one thing that a long-term view of politics teaches, it is that only the long-term really matters.

There will come a time when the current money and banking system, living off credit created by a fiat money system, will be stretched beyond the limit. When it happens, attitudes will turn on a dime. No advocate of the gold standard looks forward to the crisis nor to the human suffering that will come with it. We do, however, look forward to the reassertion of economic law in the field of money and banking. When it becomes incredibly obvious that something drastic must replace the current system, new attention will be paid to the voices that have long cast aspersions on the current system and called for a restoration of sound money.

Must a crisis lead to monetary reforms that we will like? Not necessarily, and, for that matter, a crisis is not a necessary precursor to radical reform. As Mises himself used to emphasize, political history has no predetermined course. Everything depends on the ideas that people hold about fundamental issues of human freedom and the place of government. Under the right conditions, I have no doubt that a gold standard can be completely restored, no matter how unfavorable the current environment appears towards its restoration.

What is essential for us today is to continue the research, the writing, the advocacy for sound money, for a dollar that is as good as gold, for a monetary system that is separate from the state. It is a beautiful vision indeed, one in which the people and not the government and its connected interest groups maintain control of their money and its safe keeping.

What has been true for hundreds of years remains true today. The clearest path to the restoration of economic health is the free market undergirded by a sound monetary system. The clearest path toward economic destruction is for us to stop working toward what is right and true.” See here.

Let’s do everything we can to end the Fed and restore the real gold standard!

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

How can they stop him from losing? Simple. If it looks like he’s losing, the elite forces will create enough fake ballots to ensure victory. Our corrupt courts won’t stop them. They have done this before, and they will do it again, if they have to.

I said the Democrats have done this before. The great Dr. Ron Paul explains one way they did this in 2020. The elite covered up a scandal that could have wrecked Biden’s chances:

“Move over Watergate. On or around Oct. 17, 2020, then-senior Biden campaign official Antony Blinken called up former acting CIA director Mike Morell to ask a favor: he needed high-ranking former US intelligence community officials to lie to the American people to save Biden’s lagging campaign from a massive brewing scandal.

The problem was that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, had abandoned his laptop at a repair shop and the explosive contents of the computer were leaking out. The details of the Biden family’s apparent corruption and the debauchery of the former vice-president’s son were being reported by the New York Post, and with the election less than a month away, the Biden campaign needed to kill the story.

So, according to newly-released transcripts of Morell’s testimony before the House judiciary Committee, Blinken “triggered” Morell to put together a letter for some 50 senior intelligence officials to sign – using their high-level government titles – to claim that the laptop story “had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.”

In short, at the Biden campaign’s direction Morell launched a covert operation against the American people to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election. A letter signed by dozens of the highest-ranking former CIA, DIA, and NSA officials would surely carry enough weight to bury the Biden laptop story. It worked. Social media outlets prevented any reporting on the laptop from being posted and the mainstream media could easily ignore the story as it was merely “Russian propaganda.”

Asked recently by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) why he agreed to draft the false sign-on letter, Morell testified that he wanted to “help Vice President Biden … because I wanted him to win the election.” Morell also likely expected to be named by President Biden to head up the CIA when it came time to call in favors.

The Democrats and the mainstream media have relentlessly pushed the lie that the ruckus inside the US Capitol on Jan. 6th 2021 was a move by President Trump to overthrow the election results. Hundreds of “trespassers” were arrested and held in solitary confinement without trial to bolster the false narrative that a conspiracy to steal the election was taking place.

It turns out that there really was a conspiracy to steal the election, but it was opposite of what was reported. Just as the Steele Dossier was a Democratic Party covert action to plant the lie that the Russians were pulling strings for Trump, the “Russian disinformation campaign” letter was a lie to deflect scrutiny of the Biden family’s possible corruption in the final days of the campaign.

Did the Biden campaign’s disinformation campaign help rig the election in his favor? Polls suggest that Biden would not have been elected had the American electorate been informed about what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop. So yes, they cheated in the election.

The Democrats and the mainstream media are still at it, however. Now they are trying to kill the story of how they killed the story of the Biden laptop. This is a scandal that would once upon a time have ended in resignation, impeachment, and/or plenty of jail time. If they successfully bury this story, I hate to say it but there is no more rule of law in what has become the American banana republic.” See here.

But the main way the lection can be rigged is by fraudulent “voting.” It’s much easier to do this with digital scanning of votes than with old-fashioned ballot boxes.

Dr. Naomi Wolf explains how electronic voting machines make it easier to steal elections:

“People could steal elections in this ‘analog’ technology of paper and locked ballot boxes, of course, by destroying or hiding votes, or by bribing voters, a la Tammany Hall, or by other forms of wrongdoing, so security and chain of custody, as well as anti-corruption scrutiny, were always needed in guaranteeing accurate election counts. But there was no reason, with analog physical processing of votes, to query the tradition of the secret ballot.

Before the digital scanning of votes, you could not hack a wooden ballot box; and you could not set an algorithm to misread a pile of paper ballots. So, at the end of the day, one way or another, you were counting physical documents.

Those days are gone, obviously, and in many districts there are digital systems reading ballots.” See here.

This isn’t the first time the Left has stolen an election. It happened in the 2020 presidential election too. Ron Unz offers his usual cogent analysis:

“There does seem to be considerable circumstantial evidence of widespread ballot fraud by Democratic Party forces, hardly surprising given the apocalyptic manner in which so many of their leaders had characterized the threat of a Trump reelection. After all, if they sincerely believed that a Trump victory would be catastrophic for America why would they not use every possible means, fair and foul alike, to save our country from that dire fate?

In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities—Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that are both totally controlled by the Democratic Party and also notoriously corrupt, and various eye-witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump margins they provided may have been heavily ‘padded’ to ensure the candidate’s defeat.” See here.

In a program aired right after Biden’s pitiful State of the Union speech, the great Tucker Carlson pointed out that Biden’s “Justice” Department has already confessed that it plans to rig the election. It will do this by banning voter ID laws as “racist.” This permits an unlimited number of fake votes:

“If Joe Biden is so good at politics, why is he losing to Donald Trump, who the rest of us were assured was a retarded racist who no normal person would vote for? But now Joe Biden is getting stomped by Donald Trump, but he’s also at the same time good at politics? Right.

Again, they can’t win, but they’re not giving up. So what does that tell you? Well, they’re going to steal the election. We know they’re going to steal the election because they’re now saying so out loud. Here is the Attorney General of the United States, the chief law enforcement officer of this country in Selma, Alabama, just the other day.

[Now Carlson quotes the Attorney General, Merrick Garland:]

“The right to vote is still under attack, and that is why the Justice Department is fighting back. That is why one of the first things I did when I came into office was to double the size of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division. That is why we are challenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes and voter ID requirements. That is why we are working to block the adoption of discriminatory redistricting plans that dilute the vote of Black voters and other voters of color.

[Carlson then comments on Garland:]

“Did you catch that? Of course, you’re a racist. That’s always the takeaway. But consider the details of what the Attorney General of the United States just said. Mail-in balloting, drop boxes, voter ID requirements. The chief law enforcement officer of the United States Government is telling you that it’s immoral, in fact racist, in fact illegal to ask people for their IDs when they vote to verify they are who they say they are. What is that? Well, no one ever talks about this, but the justification for it is that somehow people of color, Black people, don’t have state-issued IDs. Somehow they’re living in a country where you can do virtually nothing without proving your identity with a government-issued ID without government-issued IDs. They can’t fly on planes, they can’t have checking accounts, they can’t have any interaction with the government, state, local, or federal. They can’t stay in hotels. They can’t have credit cards. Because someone without a state-issued ID can’t do any of those things.

But what’s so interesting is these same people, very much including the Attorney General and the administration he serves, is working to eliminate cash, to make this a cashless society. Have you been to a stadium event recently? No cash accepted. You have to have a credit card. In order to get a credit card you need a state-issued ID, and somehow that’s not racist. But it is racist to ask people to prove their identity when they choose the next President of the United States. That doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s a lie. It’s an easily provable lie, and anyone telling that lie is advocating for mass voter fraud, which the Attorney General is. There’s no other way to read it. So you should know that. You live in a country where the Attorney General is abetting, in fact calling for voter fraud, and that’s the only chance they have to get their guy re-elected.” See here.

Because of absentee ballots, the voting can be spread out over a long period of time. This makes voting fraud much easier. Mollie Hemingway has done a lot of research on this topic:

“In the 2020 presidential election, for the first time ever, partisan groups were allowed—on a widespread basis—to cross the bright red line separating government officials who administer elections from political operatives who work to win them. It is important to understand how this happened in order to prevent it in the future.

Months after the election, Time magazine published a triumphant story of how the election was won by “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”  Written by Molly Ball, a journalist with close ties to Democratic leaders, it told a cheerful story of a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” the “result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”

A major part of this “conspiracy” to “save the 2020 election” was to use COVID as a pretext to maximize absentee and early voting. This effort was enormously successful. Nearly half of voters ended up voting by mail, and another quarter voted early. It was, Ball wrote, “practically a revolution in how people vote.” Another major part was to raise an army of progressive activists to administer the election at the ground level. Here, one billionaire in particular took a leading role: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg’s help to Democrats is well known when it comes to censoring their political opponents in the name of preventing “misinformation.” Less well known is the fact that he directly funded liberal groups running partisan get-out-the-vote operations. In fact, he helped those groups infiltrate election offices in key swing states by doling out large grants to crucial districts.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization led by Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla, gave more than $400 million to nonprofit groups involved in “securing” the 2020 election. Most of those funds—colloquially called “Zuckerbucks”—were funneled through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a voter outreach organization founded by Tiana Epps-Johnson, Whitney May, and Donny Bridges. All three had previously worked on activism relating to election rules for the New Organizing Institute, once described by The Washington Post as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.”

Flush with $350 million in Zuckerbucks, the CTCL proceeded to disburse large grants to election officials and local governments across the country. These disbursements were billed publicly as “COVID-19 response grants,” ostensibly to help municipalities acquire protective gear for poll workers or otherwise help protect election officials and volunteers against the virus. In practice, relatively little money was spent for this. Here, as in other cases, COVID simply provided cover.

According to the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), Georgia received more than $31 million in Zuckerbucks, one of the highest amounts in the country. The three Georgia counties that received the most money spent only 1.3 percent of it on personal protective equipment. The rest was spent on salaries, laptops, vehicle rentals, attorney fees for public records requests, mail-in balloting, and other measures that allowed elections offices to hire activists to work the election. Not all Georgia counties received CTCL funding. And of those that did, Trump-voting counties received an average of $1.91 per registered voter, compared to $7.13 per registered voter in Biden-voting counties.

The FGA looked at this funding another way, too. Trump won Georgia by more than five points in 2016. He lost it by three-tenths of a point in 2020. On average, as a share of the two-party vote, most counties moved Democratic by less than one percentage point in that time. Counties that didn’t receive Zuckerbucks showed hardly any movement, but counties that did moved an average of 2.3 percentage points Democratic. In counties that did not receive Zuckerbucks, “roughly half saw an increase in Democrat votes that offset the increase in Republican votes, while roughly half saw the opposite trend.” In counties that did receive Zuckerbucks, by contrast, three quarters “saw a significant uptick in Democrat votes that offset any upward change in Republican votes,” including highly populated Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, and DeKalb counties.

Of all the 2020 battleground states, it is probably in Wisconsin where the most has been brought to light about how Zuckerbucks worked.

CTCL distributed $6.3 million to the Wisconsin cities of Racine, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee, and Kenosha—purportedly to ensure that voting could take place “in accordance with prevailing [anti-COVID] public health requirements.”

Wisconsin law says voting is a right, but that “voting by absentee ballot must be carefully regulated to prevent the potential for fraud or abuse; to prevent overzealous solicitation of absent electors who may prefer not to participate in an election.” Wisconsin law also says that elections are to be run by clerks or other government officials. But the five cities that received Zuckerbucks outsourced much of their election operation to private liberal groups, in one case so extensively that a sidelined government official quit in frustration.

This was by design. Cities that received grants were not allowed to use the money to fund outside help unless CTCL specifically approved their plans in writing. CTCL kept tight control of how money was spent, and it had an abundance of “partners” to help with anything the cities needed.

Some government officials were willing to do whatever CTCL recommended. “As far as I’m concerned I am taking all of my cues from CTCL and work with those you recommend,” Celestine Jeffreys, the chief of staff to Democratic Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich, wrote in an email. CTCL not only had plenty of recommendations, but made available a “network of current and former election administrators and election experts” to scale up “your vote by mail processes” and “ensure forms, envelopes, and other materials are understood and completed correctly by voters.”

Power the Polls, a liberal group recruiting poll workers, promised to help with ballot curing. The liberal Mikva Challenge worked to recruit high school-age poll workers. And the left-wing Brennan Center offered help with “election integrity,” including “post-election audits” and “cybersecurity.”

The Center for Civic Design, an election administration policy organization that frequently partners with groups such as liberal billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, designed absentee ballots and voting instructions, often working directly with an election commission to design envelopes and create advertising and targeting campaigns. The Elections Group, also linked to the Democracy Fund, provided technical assistance in handling drop boxes and conducted voter outreach. The communications director for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, an organization that advocates sweeping changes to the elections process, ran a conference call to help Green Bay develop Spanish-language radio ads and geofencing to target voters in a predefined area.

Digital Response, a nonprofit launched in 2020, offered to “bring voters an updated elections website,” “run a website health check,” “set up communications channels,” “bring poll worker application and management online,” “track and respond to polling location wait times,” “set up voter support and email response tools,” “bring vote-by-mail applications online,” “process incoming [vote-by-mail] applications,” and help with “ballot curing process tooling and voter notification.”

The National Vote at Home Institute was presented as a “technical assistance partner” that could “support outreach around absentee voting,” provide and oversee voting machines, consult on methods to cure absentee ballots, and even assume the duty of curing ballots.

A few weeks after the five Wisconsin cities received their grants, CTCL emailed Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, to offer “an experienced elections staffer that could potentially embed with your staff in Milwaukee in a matter of days.” The staffer leading Wisconsin’s portion of the National Vote at Home Institute was an out-of-state Democratic activist named Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein. As soon as he met with Woodall-Vogg, he asked for contacts in other cities and at the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Spitzer-Rubenstein would eventually take over much of Green Bay’s election planning from the official charged with running the election, Green Bay Clerk Kris Teske. This made Teske so unhappy that she took Family and Medical Leave prior to the election and quit shortly thereafter.

Emails from Spitzer-Rubenstein show the extent to which he was managing the election process. To one government official he wrote, “By Monday, I’ll have our edits on the absentee voting instructions. We’re pushing Quickbase to get their system up and running and I’ll keep you updated. I’ll revise the planning tool to accurately reflect the process. I’ll create a flowchart for the vote-by-mail processing that we will be able to share with both inspectors and also observers.”

Once early voting started, Woodall-Vogg would provide Spitzer-Rubenstein with daily updates on the numbers of absentee ballots returned and still outstanding in each ward­­—prized information for a political operative.

Amazingly, Spitzer-Rubenstein even asked for direct access to the Milwaukee Election Commission’s voter database: “Would you or someone else on your team be able to do a screen-share so we can see the process for an export?” he wrote. “Do you know if WisVote has an [application programming interface] or anything similar so that it can connect with other software apps? That would be the holy grail.” Even for Woodall-Vogg, that was too much. “While I completely understand and appreciate the assistance that is trying to be provided,” she replied, “I am definitely not comfortable having a non-staff member involved in the function of our voter database, much less recording it.”

When these emails were released in 2021, they stunned Wisconsin observers. “What exactly was the National Vote at Home Institute doing with its daily reports? Was it making sure that people were actually voting from home by going door-to-door to collect ballots from voters who had not yet turned theirs in? Was this data sharing a condition of the CTCL grant? And who was really running Milwaukee’s election?” asked Dan O’Donnell, whose election analysis appeared at Wisconsin’s conservative MacIver Institute.

Kris Teske, the sidelined Green Bay city clerk—in whose office Wisconsin law actually places the responsibility to conduct elections—had of course seen what was happening early on. “I just don’t know where the Clerk’s Office fits in anymore,” she wrote in early July. By August, she was worried about legal exposure: “I don’t understand how people who don’t have the knowledge of the process can tell us how to manage the election,” she wrote on August 28.

Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich simply handed over Teske’s authority to agents from outside groups and gave them leadership roles in collecting absentee ballots, fixing ballots that would otherwise be voided for failure to follow the law, and even supervising the counting of ballots. “The grant mentors would like to meet with you to discuss, further, the ballot curing process. Please let them know when you’re available,” Genrich’s chief of staff told Teske.

Spitzer-Rubenstein explained that the National Vote at Home Institute had done the same for other cities in Wisconsin. “We have a process map that we’ve worked out with Milwaukee for their process. We can also adapt the letter we’re sending out with rejected absentee ballots along with a call script alerting voters. (We can also get people to make the calls, too, so you don’t need to worry about it.)”

Other emails show that Spitzer-Rubenstein had keys to the central counting facility and access to all the machines before election night. His name was on contracts with the hotel hosting the ballot counting.

Sandy Juno, who was clerk of Brown County, where Green Bay is located, later testified about the problems in a legislative hearing. “He was advising them on things. He was touching the ballots. He had access to see how the votes were counted,” Juno said of Spitzer-Rubenstein. Others testified that he was giving orders to poll workers and seemed to be the person running the election night count operation.

“I would really like to think that when we talk about security of elections, we’re talking about more than just the security of the internet,” Juno said. “You know, it has to be security of the physical location, where you’re not giving a third party keys to where you have your election equipment.”

Juno noted that there were irregularities in the counting, too, with no consistency between the various tables. Some had absentee ballots face-up, so anyone could see how they were marked. Poll workers were seen reviewing ballots not just to see that they’d been appropriately checked by the clerk, but “reviewing how they were marked.” And poll workers fixing ballots used the same color pens as the ones ballots had been filled out in, contrary to established procedures designed to make sure observers could differentiate between voters’ marks and poll workers’ marks.

The plan by Democratic strategists to bring activist groups into election offices worked in part because no legislature had ever imagined that a nonprofit could take over so many election offices so easily. “If it can happen to Green Bay, Wisconsin, sweet little old Green Bay, Wisconsin, these people can coordinate any place,” said Janel Brandtjen, a state representative in Wisconsin.

She was right. What happened in Green Bay happened in Democrat-run cities and counties across the country. Four hundred million Zuckerbucks were distributed with strings attached. Officials were required to work with “partner organizations” to massively expand mail-in voting and staff their election operations with partisan activists. The plan was genius. And because no one ever imagined that the election system could be privatized in this way, there were no laws to prevent it.

Such laws should now be a priority.” See here.

Let’s do everything we can to publicize the steal. That way, we have a chance to prevent it.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Because of this, the American government, now headed by brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, wants to destroy him. In what follows, I’ll explain the facts of the case and why they are important and detail the persecution of Assange.

Chris Hedges outlines what is at stake:

“The nearly 15-year-long persecution of Julian, which has taken a heavy toll on his physical and psychological health, is done in the name of extradition to the U.S. where he would stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years.

Julian’s “crime” is that he published classified documents, internal messages, reports and videos from the U.S. government and U.S. military in 2010, which were provided by U.S. army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. This vast trove of material revealed massacres of civilians, torture, assassinations, the list of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and the conditions they were subjected to, as well as the Rules of Engagement in Iraq. Those who perpetrated these crimes — including the U.S. helicopter pilots who gunned down two Reuters journalists and 10 other civilians and severely injured two children, all captured in the Collateral Murder video — have never been prosecuted.

Julian exposed what the U.S. empire seeks to airbrush out of history.

Julian’s persecution is an ominous message to the rest of us. Defy the U.S. imperium, expose its crimes, and no matter who you are, no matter what country you come from, no matter where you live, you will be hunted down and brought to the U.S. to spend the rest of your life in one of the harshest prison systems on earth. If Julian is found guilty it will mean the death of investigative journalism into the inner workings of state power. To possess, much less publish, classified material — as I did when I was a reporter for The New York Times — will be criminalized.” See here.

It’s important that we understand in detail what was in the WikiLeaks documents. In an article published in March, 2020, the 10^th anniversary of their publication, Arjun Walla gives us some of the highlights:

“Last month marked the 10th anniversary of WikiLeaks’ publication of the Collateral Murder video. The video shows how two Apache helicopters murdered 11 Iraqi people including two Reuters journalists. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.  This is one of the publications Julian Assange is being indicted for espionage. He faces 175 years in a US jail if extradited from the UK.  WikiLeaks obtained the video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. They analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material and spoke to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work

After the video was released, one of the soldiers involved in the incident, Ethan McCord, said the following:

“If you feel threatened in any way, you’re able to engage that person. Many soldiers felt threatened just by the fact that you were looking at them, so they fired their weapons on anybody that was looking at them because they (I) felt threatened. We were told if we were to fire on anybody, and if it were to be investigated, that ‘officers will take care of you.’ ”

“We were told by our battalion commander to kill every m***** f****** on the street.  Many soldiers would not do that, we decided we were going to shoot into the rooftops of buildings because, if you didn’t fire, the NCOs in your platoon would make your life hell.”

“This happens on a daily basis, destroying vans full of children, the destruction of the Iraqi people happens on a daily basis.” See here.

The WikiLeaks documents also showed how the US military and the CIA manipulate the banking and financial system. Arjun Walia is again on top of this:

“I recently came across an article published on MintPress News. It was written by Whitney Webb, who is a staff writer for MintPress News and has contributed to several other independent, alternative outlets. Her work has appeared on sites such as Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire among others. She also makes guest appearances to discuss politics on radio and television. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

In her article, she references a leaked military manual on “unconventional warfare” that was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks. The U.S. Army states that major global financial institutions — such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war,” as well as in leveraging “the policies and cooperation of state governments.”

The rest of her article is posted below:

The document, officially titled “Field Manual (FM) 3-05.130, Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare” and originally written in September 2008, was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks on Twitter in light of recent events in Venezuela as well as the years-long, U.S.-led economic siege of that country through sanctions and other means of economic warfare. Though the document has generated new interest in recent days, it had originally been released by WikiLeaks in December 2008 and has been described as the military’s “regime change handbook.”

WikiLeaks’ recent tweets on the subject drew attention to a single section of the 248-page-long document, titled “Financial Instrument of U.S. National Power and Unconventional Warfare.” This section in particular notes that the U.S. government applies “unilateral and indirect financial power through persuasive influence to international and domestic financial institutions regarding availability and terms of loans, grants, or other financial assistance to foreign state and nonstate actors,” and specifically names the World Bank, IMF and The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), as “U.S. diplomatic-financial venues to accomplish” such goals.

The manual also touts the “state manipulation of tax and interest rates” along with other “legal and bureaucratic measures” to “open, modify or close financial flows” and further states that the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) – which oversees U.S. sanctions on other nations, like Venezuela — “has a long history of conducting economic warfare valuable to any ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] UW [Unconventional Warfare] campaign.”

This section of the manual goes on to note that these financial weapons can be used by the U.S. military to create “financial incentives or disincentives to persuade adversaries, allies and surrogates to modify their behavior at the theater strategic, operational, and tactical levels” and that such unconventional warfare campaigns are highly coordinated with the State Department and the Intelligence Community in determining “which elements of the human terrain in UWOA [Unconventional Warfare Operations Area] are most susceptible to financial engagement.”

The role of these “independent” international financial institutions as extensions of U.S. imperial power is elaborated elsewhere in the manual and several of these institutions are described in detail in an appendix to the manual titled “The Financial Instrument of National Power.” Notably, the World Bank and the IMF are listed as both Financial Instruments and Diplomatic Instruments of U.S. National Power as well as integral parts of what the manual calls the “current global governance system.”

Furthermore, the manual states that the U.S. military “understand[s] that properly integrated manipulation of economic power can and should be a component of UW,” meaning that these weapons are a regular feature of unconventional warfare campaigns waged by the United States.” See here.

I mentioned that the US seeks global hegemony, and its closest ally in this futile and deadly quest is Britain. The WikiLeaks document showed how close their on-going collaboration really is, as Mark Curtis reveals:

“Whitehall’s special relationship with Riyadh is exposed in an extraordinary cable from 2013 highlighting how Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council. Britain initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support.

The Wikileaks releases also shed details on Whitehall’s fawning relationship with Washington. A 2008cable, for example, shows then shadow foreign secretary William Hague telling the U.S. embassy that the British “want a pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it.”

A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had “put measures in place to protect your interests”.

It is not known what this protection amounted to, but no U.S. officials were called to give evidence to Chilcot in public. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between former U.S. President George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair written in the run-up to the war.

Also in 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised the prospect of reducing the number of British nuclear-armed Trident submarines from four to three, a policy opposed in Washington. However, Julian Miller, an official in the UK’s Cabinet Office, privately assured U.S. officials that his government “would consult with the U.S. regarding future developments concerning the Trident deterrent to assure there would be ‘no daylight’ between the U.S. and UK.” The idea that British decision-making on Trident is truly independent of the U.S. is undermined by this cable.

The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I’ve extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him.

However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the U.S. deputy secretary of state, having talked with now Foreign Secretary Hague about a “post-Qaddafi” Libya. This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing.

Another case of British duplicity concerns Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which is now a major U.S. base for intervention in the Middle East. The UK has long fought to prevent Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland after forcibly removing them in the 1960s.

A secret 2009 cable shows that a particular ruse concocted by Whitehall to promote this was the establishment of a “marine reserve” around the islands. A senior Foreign Office official told the US that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.”

A week before the “marine reserve” proposal was made to the U.S. in May 2009, then UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband was also conniving with the U.S., apparently to deceive the public. A cable reveals Miliband helping the U.S. to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at U.S. bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year.

Miliband approved a loophole created by diplomats to allow U.S. cluster bombs to remain on UK soil and was part of discussions on how the loophole would help avert a debate in Parliament that could have “complicated or muddied” the issue. Critically, the same cable also revealed that the U.S. was storing cluster munitions on ships based at Diego Garcia.” See here.

The CIA was so angered by Wikileaks that its director, Mike Pompeo, plotted to kill him. Philip Giraldi gives us the inside story:

“In an April 2017 speech, Donald Trump’s new CIA Director Mike Pompeo said “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” It was a declaration of war. The label “non-state hostile intelligence service” is a legal designation which more-or-less opened the door to non-conventional responses to eliminate the threat. CIA Stations where WikiLeaks associates were known to be present were directed to increase surveillance on them and also attempt to interdict any communications they might seek to have with Assange himself in the embassy. A staff of analysts referred to as the “WikiLeaks Team” worked full time to target the organization and its leaders.

At the top level of the Agency debate over more extreme options prevailed, though there were legitimate concerns about the legality of what was being contemplated. In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over possible kidnapping and/or assassination, the Agency picked up alarming though unsubstantiated reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing plans to help Assange escape from the United Kingdom and fly him to Moscow.

CIA responded by preparing to foil Assange’s possible Russian-assisted departure to include potential gun battles with Moscow’s spies on the streets of London or crashing a car into any Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange to seize him. One scenario even included either blocking the runway or shooting out the tires of any Russian plane believed to be carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. Pompeo himself reportedly favored what is referred to as a “rendition,” which would consist of breaking into the Ecuadorian Embassy, kidnapping Assange, and flying him clandestinely to the U.S. for trial. Others in the national security team favored killing Assange rather than going through the complexity of kidnapping and removing him.” See here.

Fortunately, the plot failed. But now it looks like Assange will be shipped to the US, where this ill man, who suffered a stroke in a British jail, faces a dire fate. Let’s do everything we can to prevent this and to honor this true American hero.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Our enemies have an answer. They plan to allow illegal immigrants from Third World countries to join the armed forces. They will have no loyalty to Americans and won’t hesitate to kill them.

Samantha Chang, writing in the Western Journal, explains:

A 79-year-old Democrat who has been feeding at the public trough for more than four decades wants to give the unvetted armies of illegal aliens invading the southern border access to guns and military intel.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois advanced the harebrained proposal Monday during a speech on the Senate floor.

He claimed giving citizenship in exchange for military service to the migrant mobs breaking federal laws to sneak into the United States would enhance national security.

“Do you know what the recruiting numbers are at the Army, Navy, and the Air Force? They can’t reach their quotas each month. They can’t find enough people to join our military forces,” the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman said.

“And there are those who are undocumented who want the chance to serve and risk their lives for this country. Should we give them a chance? I think we should.”

Let this sink in: Durbin — a “gun-control” advocate who’s spent a career trying to restrict Americans’ Second Amendment right to self-defense — thinks it’s a great idea to arm foreign nationals whose first act in this country was to break its laws.

Not only that, but he wants to give illegal aliens access to sensitive military weapons and information networks — in the name of bolstering “national security.” Senator Dick Durbin Proposes Arming Illegal Immigrants, Providing Them with Military Training (msn.com)

Here is Durbin’s speech:

“In a speech on the Senate floor, U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, today called on his Republican colleagues to work with Democrats on comprehensive immigration reform that will help secure America’s border and address our nation’s shortage of workers.  During his speech, Durbin condemned Republicans’ attempt to attach punitive border policies to essential national security emergency funds for Ukraine, Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian crises.

“I’m a person who believes in immigration.  My mother was an immigrant to this country, and I’m proud to be in the Senate [as a] first-generation American representing the great state of Illinois.  But I understand the overwhelming numbers [that] we are facing at the border, and President Biden is facing—[I would] really argue for us to take a hard look at the way we approach this,” Durbin said.  “It’s hard to explain [that] in the United States of America, a nation of immigrants, why immigration is such a hot, controversial topic.”

Durbin noted that the U.S. military is experiencing low levels of recruitment, which have become a grave threat to our national security.  Durbin argued in his speech that we are also in desperate need of workers to fill key jobs in industries like health care and agriculture, which can be filled by immigrants.

“Do you know what the recruiting numbers are at the Army, Navy, and the Air Force?  They can’t reach their quotas each month.  They can’t find enough people to join our military forces.  And there are those who are undocumented who want the chance to serve and risk their lives for this country.  Should we give them a chance?  I think we should.  In my state of Illinois, in Chicago, [and] in the rural areas downstate, we’re holding our breath hoping that we can keep hospitals open.  You know why?  We don’t have enough medical personnel.  And yet there are people all around this world who have medical credentials as doctors and nurses and skilled technicians who want to come to the United States, but we don’t give them the chance,” Durbin continued

Durbin also told the story of Mitchell Soto-Rodriguez, a Dreamer, who came to Blue Island, Illinois, at nine-years-old with her family.  When Mitchell was in high school, she got into a car accident and the responding police officer made a lasting impression on her by speaking Spanish to make her mother feel more comfortable.

From that moment on, Mitchell decided that she wanted to serve her community as a police officer as well.  Today, Mitchell is a part-time police officer while she is attending the police academy and working as a security officer at a local high school.

However, as a DACA recipient, Mitchell’s future is still in limbo.  Until the Dream Act is passed, Mitchell’s service to her community and to our nation is at risk.

“But DACA was always intended to be a temporary solution for Dreamers like Mitchell.  Since President Obama established the program, Republicans have waged a relentless campaign to overturn it and deport these Dreamers back to countries they may not even remember.  The permanent solution is enacting a piece of legislation I first introduced more than twenty years ago: the Dream Act.  It would provide a path to citizenship for Dreamers all across the country.  Without permanent protections, these young people have been forced to live in limbo and in fear that DACA will be overturned in the courts.  They have to renew their status every two years—which means they plan their lives in two-year increments,” Durbin continued. “Until the Dream Act is passed, Mitchell’s service to her community and to our nation is at risk—as is the service that so many Dreamers are providing to their communities through their work as teachers, medical professionals, service members, and so much more.”

If DACA is struck down, experts predict that our economy would lose an estimated $11.7 billion each year in lost wages.  And without continued immigration, the U.S. working-age population will shrink by over six million by 2040.

As more Americans retire, this could contribute to a 23 percent reduction in the monthly Social Security checks that beneficiaries have been promised.

With over nine and a half million jobs open last month, our farmers, hospitals, and small business owners desperately need immigrants to meet their workforce needs.

Durbin continued, “To resolve these challenges, we should create additional lawful pathways for immigrants to work in the United States. We should also give our undocumented population—most of whom have been here for decades—legal status, so that they can fully contribute to our society.  I am ready to negotiate with my Republican colleagues in good faith to solve our problem at the border.  It needs a solution.  I readily acknowledge that.  But at the same time, I hope they [Republicans] will take a positive approach as well, knowing that we desperately need legal immigration.  And if people are clear to come into our country for that purpose, we will be better for it at so many different levels.”

Durbin concluded, “There are some on the other side, I’m going to be very blunt about this, who believe in the theory of ‘not one more immigrant’ in this country.  They don’t know the history of the United States.  They don’t know what these immigrants have meant to us.  In my family and the families across the whole country, you can point to immigrants who made a solid difference in building a family, [and] building an economy, which we all prosper from today.  So let’s get it right when it comes to enforcement at the border, but let’s not tell half the story.  Let’s tell the other half of the story that legal immigration is critical to our future and people like Mitchell Soto-Rodriguez who is wanting to serve as a police officer in her community in Illinois is an asset to this country, and we need her in our future.” Press Release | Press Releases | Newsroom | U.S. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois (senate.gov)

There is a vast number of immigrants available to be used in this way. Samantha Chang again hits the target:

Under Joe Biden’s failed presidency, the United States has devolved into a dumping ground for unvetted armies of illegal aliens, including suspected terrorists and convicted felons.

So it’s no surprise the administration is trying to keep the unprecedented scope of the harrowing border disaster under wraps.

Accordingly, U.S. Customs and Border Protection released its September monthly report on Saturday, Oct. 21, clearly hoping few Americans would notice the frightening numbers over the weekend.

The terrifying statistics paint a grim picture of a nation under siege: CBP’s total border encounters in September hit a record high of 269,735.

CBP releases RECORD BREAKING Sept FY23 Encounters – 269,735 – highest month ever on record – brings FY23 Total to highest year ever on record – 2,475,669,” Fox News Washington correspondent Griff Jenkins noted on the social media platform X. Border Numbers So Disastrous Feds Release Them When No One Is Paying Attention (westernjournal.com)

Senator Tammy Duckworth also proposed allowing illegal immigrants who have been in America for five years to enlist in the military. Here is an account from American Military News:

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) is spearheading an initiative to address recruitment shortfalls within the U.S. military by expanding the eligibility for non-citizens to serve.

According to Stars and Stripes, the proposed legislation, labeled the Enlist Act, is intended to bolster the military’s ability to meet its manpower requirements by increasing the number of eligible recruits in the United States.

Allowing highly qualified, long-time residents of our great nation the opportunity to serve the country they’ve come to love is a commonsense way to give the services better access to talented potential recruits and improve our military’s readiness in the process,” Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran and former Army Black Hawk pilot, stated.

If passed, the legislation would open the military’s doors to individuals who have resided in the U.S. for a minimum of five years. This includes those protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, persons with temporary protected status and those who hold approved petitions for immigrant visas.

Duckworth claims that the bill would address the “unprecedented challenges” the military services are facing in recruitment, citing a “historically small pool of eligible recruits.”

The gap between recruitment goals and enlistment numbers has been steadily widening in recent years. Current statistics suggest that a mere 24%-27% of young people, ages 18-24, qualify for service, with even fewer expressing the desire to serve.

According to Duckworth, the Enlist Act would not only increase the pool of potential recruits, but also provide an avenue for enlisted non-citizens to attain naturalized citizenship. This pathway complements an existing process that allows non-citizen service members to naturalize.

Despite previous proposals to expand enlistment eligibility for non-citizens failing to gain support in Congress, Duckworth remains optimistic about her latest endeavor, which has been filed as an amendment to the Senate’s annual defense policy bill.

The Enlist Act represents a potentially transformative policy, reigniting efforts to enhance the military’s  recruitment capabilities and, by extension, national security.” Non-citizen enlistment bill proposed in Senate (americanmilitarynews.com)

Let’s do everything we can to stop illegal immigrants from joining the armed forces. Don’t let Biden and his gang of neocon controllers use foreign troops to destroy our freedom.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Dr. Paul gives an apt illustration  of this point, applied to the difficult issue of abortion:

“Former President Donald Trump infuriated many anti-abortion voters last week when he refused to commit to national abortion restrictions and seemed to blame them for Republican losses in the 2022 mid-term elections. Trump even criticized the six-week abortion ban signed by Florida Governor (and fellow Republican candidate) Ron DeSantis. So, not only is Trump balking at national restrictions but he is criticizing a state restriction. What are pro-life voters to do?

Politically, Trump may feel he does not need the pro-life vote as much as he did in his previous presidential runs. After all, he is so far ahead in all primary polls that absent an extremely unusual event he is all but the presumptive Republican nominee. He hasn’t even felt compelled to participate in any of the primary debates, skipping the first one to sit for a hugely popular interview with Tucker Carlson.

Trump has attempted to placate pro-life voters by repeating that he is the most pro-life president in American history and by touting that the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade on his watch and with his nominees. He is positioning himself as a moderator and dealmaker, promising to finally make peace on the abortion issue after 52 years of political warfare.

It is understandable that Trump may feel he has more wiggle room on the abortion issue this time. Pro-life voters are likely sufficiently angered by the rapid advance of Cultural Marxism and social chaos of the past three years under Biden that they are ready to jump at even the possibility of a return to more socially conservative values to the White House. If pro-life voters just stay home on election day, they may end up with something far worse than a generally friendly occupant in the White House.

But it doesn’t need to be this way. I strongly believe that the more difficult the issue is, the more local should be its solution. That is the real success of the Dobbs decision, because abortion should have never been a federal issue in the first place. Overturning Roe v Wade returned us to where we belonged, with state and local laws governing all issues not Constitutionally reserved for the Federal Government.

Bigger problems are best decided closest to home. Look for example at what happened when parents started going to school board meetings and demanding accountability on everything from Covid restrictions to transgenders in school bathrooms. Parents were extremely effective because they only had to travel to the local school board meeting to demand – and get – results. Does anyone think they would have been able to get the same results at the Department of Education in Washington DC?

Similarly, immigration is much better handled by those closer to the action. Ideally it would be a property rights issue, but at the least states like Texas should be taking an active role in preventing a foreign invasion into its borders rather than waiting for Washington to make a move.

The pro-life voters and a seemingly more moderate Trump are making a mistake drawing federal battle lines on the issue. The doors are wide open for state and local activism on the abortion issue. All in all, it is a win rather than a loss for power to be devolved from Washington to your local capital or city hall.”

One vital area in which we must oppose central control is education. Schools should be run locally, but one thing is even better: homeschooling. Ron Paul has for decades been a champion of homeschooling. He attacks centralized education tyranny and supports home schooling here:

“A 12-year-old Colorado boy became a victim of “woke” education when he was taken out of class and told he could not return unless he removed a Gadsden flag, or “Don’t Tread on Me,” patch from his backpack. The school backed down after a video went viral in which a school official told the boy and his mother that the problem with the patch is that the Gadsden flag’s origin is related to slavery and the slave trade. The school was criticized by individuals from across the political spectrum for seeming ignorance of the role the Gadsden flag played in the American Revolution. Among the critics was Colorado Governor Jared Polis, one of the few remaining Democrats willing to defend free speech from the woke mob.

This incident reminded me of a 2009 Department of Homeland Security “fusion center” report warning that individuals with Gadsden flag bumper stickers, or bumper stickers supporting my presidential campaign or the Libertarian or Constitution parties, were potentially dangerous extremists. After I and many other Americans objected, the offending report was withdrawn. But, the fact that it was issued in the first place, just like the fact the Colorado student was ever removed from class for his Gadsden flag patch, shows how the authoritarians view the “Don’t Tread on Me” symbol.

The reason the woke authoritarians hate the Gadsden flag has nothing to do with racism or extremism. It is because the flag represents a rejection of authoritarianism and an embrace of liberty. Benjamin Franklin originally used the rattlesnake to symbolize the rebellious American colonies. He chose the snake because the rattlesnake “never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders.” In other words, rattlesnakes follow the nonaggression principle that forbids the use of offensive force against another’s person or property, but allows the use of force to defend against any violations of one’s rights — including those committed by government officials.

In contrast, authoritarianism is rooted in the notion that politicians, bureaucrats, and their favored special interests have the right to tread on everyone.

The smearing of the Gadsden flag as racist is just the latest example of how the woke left is using its power in American education and cultural institutions to discredit the symbols and ideals of limited government and free markets. The woke left views schools as a place to indoctrinate children into Cultural Marxism rather than a place where children can gain a good education.

The rise of woke education is leading many parents to consider homeschooling. Parents looking to provide their children a quality home-based education that promotes real learning that does not push a political agenda, but does instruct in the history and philosophy of liberty, should look into my homeschooling curriculum. My curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes rigorous programs in history, mathematics, and the physical and natural sciences. The curriculum also provides instruction in personal finance. Students can develop superior communication skills via intensive writing and public speaking courses. Another feature of my curriculum is that it provides students the opportunity to create and run their own businesses.

The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize free-market economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. I encourage all parents looking at alternatives to government schools — alternatives that provide children with a well-rounded education that introduces them to the history and ideas of liberty without sacrificing education for indoctrination — to go to RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information about my homeschooling program.”

Dr. Paul notes that we need to separate culture from the state:

“A Florida bill restricting classroom instruction regarding sexuality in kindergarten through third grade has become the latest culture war skirmish.

Supporters of the bill say government schools have no business being involved in this type of instruction with young students. They make a good point. The use of government power to indoctrinate children in certain political and social beliefs — regardless of the wishes of parents — is a major problem.

While the instruction at issue in Florida is associated with efforts of leftists, the temptation to seek to achieve ideological objectives through education policy can be strong among conservatives as well.

The Ohio legislature is considering a bill similar to the Florida bill. Because the Ohio bill applies to private schools participating in Ohio’s taxpayer-funded school voucher program in addition to government schools, conservative legislators supporting the Ohio bill are vindicating the warning of conservatives and libertarians that allowing government to subsidize private school tuition would lead to government control of private schools.

Other conservatives are trying to force schools to adopt a “patriotic” curriculum. This is just as pernicious as leftists’ efforts to force schools to teach critical race theory. Students indoctrinated in critical race theory will graduate believing that white male capitalists are the source of all evil. Students indoctrinated in “patriotism” will graduate believing every bit of propaganda sponsored by the war party and will smear all dissenters from the “party line” as unpatriotic spreaders of disinformation from Russia or whatever country replaces Russia as global enemy number one.

In a free society, parents — not politicians, bureaucrats, or teachers unions — would control education. Parents would decide whether and when their children’s education will include topics like sexuality, race theory, and the evidence for and against Darwinism.

Parents’ demand that their children receive a quality education reflecting the parents’ values could be met by a free market if the government got out of the way. A free-market education system would provide parents with a variety of options, including religious and secular private schools, community-based schools, and homeschooling.

People searching for a quality homeschooling program that incorporates libertarian ideas without ever sacrificing education for indoctrination should look into my homeschooling curriculum.

The Ron Paul Curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes rigorous programs in history, mathematics, and the physical and natural sciences. The curriculum also provides instruction in personal finance. Students can develop superior communication skills via intensive writing and public speaking courses. Another feature of my curriculum is that it provides students the opportunity to create and run their own businesses.

The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize Austrian economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. However, unlike government schools, my curriculum never puts ideological indoctrination ahead of education. Interactive forums provide students with the opportunity to interact with their peers outside of a formal setting.”

Let’s do everything we can to promote localism, homeschooling, and the great Ron Paul!

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Dr. Paul gave a succinct summary of the case against the Fed in 2009.

“What unprecedented anti-Fed days these have been! We had our Audit the Fed Congressional hearing, in which the central bank — for the first time in 96 years — was put on the defensive. End the Fed was chosen as a Main Selection of the Conservative Book Club; this book, the first anti-central banking bestseller in American history, debuted at #2 on Amazon.com and #6 on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.

End The Fed — which the Mises Institute’s Lew Rockwell calls “readable and persuasive beyond belief” — can climb up the NYT and WSJ lists week by week, eventually reaching #1, if you help me. Please, buy a copy. Buy one for a friend or family member. Spread the word. One businessman bought copies for all his 23 employees. Others have given them to students, a favorite use of mine.

Since 1913, the Fed has had it all its own way: booms and busts, dollar depreciation, redistribution to the government and the big banks from the middle and working classes. But just as Andrew Jackson abolished the predecessor of the Fed, we too can knock over this dangerous institution. End The Fed teaches all the fascinating history, and tells us what we can do for the future. It gives the constitutional, economic, moral, and libertarian arguments against what Jackson called “the Monster.”

Ever seen the Fed’s marble palace in Washington, DC, on Constitution Avenue (of all streets!)? That bunch sure knows how to live. I’ve long had a dream of being the auctioneer when the Fed is sold off for private offices, or maybe a Museum of Sound Money! Help me dull its scissors and then break them, so the Fed can’t cut down our dollar’s value. Indeed, I believe that people ought to be ashamed to work at such a place; an institution that has done so much damage to American prosperity and freedom, as well as to the freedom and prosperity of the whole world. For example, I want no more bowing and scraping to the Fed chairman when he goes to Capitol Hill to peddle his nonsense. He is just a bureaucrat, albeit a disastrous one.

Together, you and I can change things. Indeed, we must. Buy End The Fed. Get copies for those you love. Certainly get copies for those who disagree with us. For all our futures, nothing is as important as cutting the Fed down to size. Join me: let’s End the Fed.”

Dr. Paul gave a brilliant account of what is wrong with the Fed’s bailout policy in an article he wrote in 2019.

“Since September 17, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has pumped billions of dollars into the repurchasing (repo) market, the first such intervention since 2009. The Fed has announced that it will continue to inject as much as 75 billion dollars a day into the repo market until November 4.

The repo market provides a means for banks that are temporarily short of cash to obtain short-term (usually one day) loans from other banks. The Fed’s interventions were a response to a sudden cash shortage that caused interest rates for these short-term loans to climb to 10 percent, far above the Fed’s target rate.

One of the factors blamed for the repo market’s cash shortage is the Federal Reserve’s sale of assets it acquired via the Quantitative Easing programs. Since launching its effort to “unwind” its balance sheet, the Fed had reduced its holdings by over 700 billion dollars. This seems like a large amount, but, given the Fed’s balance sheet was over four trillion dollars, the Fed only reduced its holdings by approximately 18 percent! If such a relatively small reduction in the Fed’s assets contributed to the cash shortage in the repo market, causing a panicked Fed to pump billions into the market, it is unlikely the Fed will be continuing selling assets and “normalizing” its balance sheet.

Another factor contributing to the repo market’s cash shortage was a major sale of US Treasury securities. Sales of government securities leave less capital available for private sector investments, increasing interest rates. This “crowding out” effect provides one more justification for the Federal Reserve to pump more money into the markets.

The crowding out effect is just one way federal debt increases pressure on the Fed to keep interest rates low. Increasing federal debt increases pressure on the Fed to maintain low interest rates to keep the federal government’s interest payments from reaching unsustainable levels. The over one trillion dollars (and rising) federal deficit is the major reason the Federal Reserve is likely to keep interest rates low or even adopt the insane policy of negative interest rates.

The American people are not even allowed to know what banks benefited from the Fed’s intervention in the repo market, or what plans the Fed is making for future bailouts — even though the people will pay for those bailouts either through increased taxes, debt, or the Federal Reserve’s hidden inflation tax when the next crash occurs. Of course, the average people who will lose their savings and their jobs in the next crash will not be bailed out. This is one more reason why it is so important Congress takes the first steps toward changing monetary policy by passing Audit the Fed.

The need for the Fed to shove billions into the repo market to keep that market’s interest rate near the Fed’s target shows the Fed is losing its power to control the price of money. The next crash will likely lead to the end of the fiat money system, along with the entire welfare-warfare state. Those of us who understand the Fed is the cause of, not the solution to, our problems must redouble our efforts to educate our fellow citizens on sound economics and the ideas of liberty. This way, we can create the critical mass necessary to force Congress to cut spending, repeal the legal tender laws to restore a free market in money, and audit, then end, the Fed.”

I firmly believe today what I said about the great Ron Paul last year:

“Many people wish they could have met a great figure in history. What would it be like to talk to Newton, to Tesla, to Shakespeare? Those of us lucky enough to know Dr. Ron Paul don’t have to speculate. We know one of the truly great figures in American history, the best Congressman we have ever had. I have known him for decades, and I’d like to tell you something about him as a person and about his achievements.

I had the rare honor of serving as Ron Paul’s congressional chief of staff, and observed him in many proud moments in those days, and in his presidential campaigns. People today sometimes compare Ron Paul with Bernie Sanders. The comparison of Bernie to Ron goes like this: both launched insurgent, anti-establishment presidential campaigns while in their 70s, shook up their respective party establishments, and attracted large youth followings. But Bernie is no Ron.

Just on the surface: Bernie is a grump and difficult to work with; Ron is a kindhearted gentleman who always showed his appreciation for the people in his office.

More importantly, Ron urged his followers to read and learn. Countless high school and college students began reading dense and difficult treatises in economics and political philosophy because Ron encouraged them to. Ron’s followers, meanwhile, were curious enough to dig beneath the surface. Is the state really a benign institution that can costlessly provide us whatever we might demand? Or might there be moral, economic, and political factors standing in the way of these utopian dreams?

It’s not hard to cultivate a raving band of people demanding other people’s things, as Bernie Sanders does. Such appeals arouse the basest aspects of our nature, and will always attract a crowd. It’s very hard, on the other hand, to build up an army of young people intellectually curious enough to read serious books and consider ideas that go beyond the conventional wisdom they learned in school about government and market. It’s hard to build up a movement of people whose moral sense is developed enough to recognize that barking demands and enforcing them with the state’s gun is the behavior of a thug, not a civilized person. And it’s hard to persuade people of the counter-intuitive idea that society runs better and individuals are more prosperous when no one is “in charge” at all.

Yet Ron accomplished all these things.

As the person who reached more people with the message of liberty than anyone in our time, Ron has also taught us how that message can and must be spread. I want to talk about some of these lessons.

First and foremost, Ron is a critic of the warfare state. The subject of war cannot, and should not, be avoided.

Ron is not a pacifist – an ancient charge against those who oppose constant war. He believes in the right to self-defense, but he does not believe in the initiation of violence, whether by private criminals or the state. The state has recently taken more than a million lives in its imperialist anti-Muslim wars. Ron Paul has opposed them with all his heart and soul. He is a man of peace and the golden rule, in his private life and his policy.

The war in Iraq, which was still a live issue when Ron first ran for the Republican nomination, had been sold to the public on the basis of lies that were transparent and insulting even by the US government’s standards. The devastation – in terms of deaths, maimings, displacement, and sheer destruction – appalled every decent human being.

Yes, the Department of Education is an outrage, but it is nothing next to the horrifying images of what happened to the men, women, and children of Iraq. If he wasn’t going to denounce such a clear moral evil, Ron thought, what was the point of being in public life at all?

Still, this is the issue strategists would have had him avoid. Just talk about the budget, talk about the greatness of America, talk about whatever everyone else was talking about, and you’ll be fine. And, they neglected to add, forgotten.

But had Ron shied away from this issue, there would have been no Ron Paul Revolution. It was his courageous refusal to back down from certain unspeakable truths about the American role in the world that caused Americans, and especially students, to sit up and take notice.

Worried about the budget? You can’t run an empire on the cheap. Concerned about TSA groping, or government eavesdropping, or cameras trained on you? These are the inevitable policies of a hegemon. In case after case, Ron pointed to the connection between an imperial policy abroad and abuses and outrages at home. While still in his thirties, Murray Rothbard wrote privately that he was beginning to view war as “the key to the whole libertarian business.” Here is another way Ron Paul has been faithful to the Rothbardian tradition. Time after time, in interviews and public appearances, Ron has brought the questions posed to him back to the central issues of war and foreign policy.

Inspired by Ron, libertarians began to challenge conservatives by reminding them that war, after all, is the ultimate government program. War has it all: propaganda, censorship, spying, crony contracts, money printing, skyrocketing spending, debt creation, central planning, hubris – everything we associate with the worst interventions into the economy.

But Ron Paul permanently changed the nature of the discussion on war and foreign policy. The word “nonintervention” rarely appeared in foreign-policy discussions before 2007. Opposition to war was associated with anti-capitalist causes. That is no longer the case.

In exposing the fraudulent American foreign policy debate, Ron exposed an overlooked truth about American political life. The debates Americans are allowed to have are ones in which the real decisions have already been made: income tax or consumption tax, fiscal stimulus or monetary stimulus, sanctions or war, later war or war right away. With debates like these, it hardly matters who wins. Ron pulled back the curtain on all of it. Ron kept insisting that there was no real foreign policy debate in America because all we were allowed to do was argue over what kind of intervention the US government should pursue. Whether intervention itself was desirable, or whether the bipartisan assumptions behind US foreign policy were sound – this was not even mentioned, much less debated

Of course, Ron applies his wisdom to the current war between Russia and the Ukraine. In contrast to brain-dead Biden and his gang of neo con warmongers, he urges us to stay out of it. Likewise, he wants us to avoid a confrontation with China. We can have friendly relations with both China and Russia, and neither country threatens us. Why provoke a war that could lead to the nuclear annihilation of the world? As Ron said in a recent article, ““War is a racket, wrote US Maj. General Smedley Butler in 1935. He explained: ‘A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.’

Gen. Butler’s observation describes the US/NATO response to the Ukraine war perfectly.

The propaganda continues to portray the war in Ukraine as that of an unprovoked Goliath out to decimate an innocent David unless we in the US and NATO contribute massive amounts of military equipment to Ukraine to defeat Russia. As is always the case with propaganda, this version of events is manipulated to bring an emotional response to the benefit of special interests.

War is a racket, to be sure. The US has been meddling in Ukraine since the end of the Cold War, going so far as overthrowing the government in 2014 and planting the seeds of the war we are witnessing today. The only way out of a hole is to stop digging. Don’t expect that any time soon. War is too profitable.”

Let’s look at the other key issue in Ron’s congressional career. After he suspended his 2008 campaign for president, he gave an extraordinary speech. No focus groups urged Ron to talk about the Federal Reserve. No politician had made an issue of the Fed in an election in its 100-year history. Stick to the script, the professionals would have said: lower taxes and lower spending, the monotonous refrain uttered by every Republican politician, who typically has no interest in carrying through with either one anyway.#5 The Fed cannot be ignored.

Here again, had Ron adopted conventional political advice, he would have forfeited these historic moments and the Ron Paul phenomenon would have been greatly diminished, if not compromised altogether.Yet Ron pointed to the Fed as the source of the boom-bust cycle that has harmed so many Americans. His dogged insistence on this point got a great many Americans curious: what, after all, was the Fed, and what was it up to? An unlikely issue, to be sure, and yet it was his willingness to talk about it that in my view helps to account for much of his fundraising success. There was a small but untapped portion of the public that responded with enthusiasm to Ron’s very mention of the Fed, and they wanted more.

Only a few months after Ron officially suspended his 2008 campaign, the financial crisis struck. Just as Ron had said, there was something indeed wrong with the economy.

Because he hadn’t hesitated to say what he believed, even if it meant dealing with an issue no political operative would have encouraged him to discuss, Ron was a prophet. That point alone opened countless more people to Ron’s ideas: here was the only guy in Washington who warned us of what was to come. (And incidentally, has there been a time in American history in which more people were reading – and writing! – anti-Fed books?)

People could see, too, that Ron hadn’t just gotten lucky in 2007 and 2008. In 2001, Ron said on the House floor that the Fed-fueled bubble in tech stocks, which had just burst, was being replaced by a Fed-fueled real-estate bubble, which would burst just as surely.

Of course, it’s not enough just to get rid of the Fed, essential as that is. We need sound money, and for Ron, following Mises and Rothbard, this means the gold standard. Once, when our Ron was invited on the other Ron’s Air Force One for a flight to Houston, Ron Paul commented on Reagan’s watch, which was made from a $20 gold piece. “I wish we still had that monetary system,” said Ron Paul. “You know, no nation that abandoned the gold standard has remained great,” said Reagan. Don Regan told the president to drop the subject.

In 1982, Ron Paul served on the U.S. Gold Commission to evaluate the role of gold in the monetary system. In fact, the Commission was his idea. It was carrying forth a promise made in the Republican platform.

Ron couldn’t pick the members, so from the beginning, the deck was stacked. The majority was dominated by monetarists, who saw gold as too scarce and paper as just fine. Ron Paul’s team was ready, however, with this marvelous minority report.

Rarely has a dissent on a government commission done so much good!

The result was The Case for Gold, and it was the greatest result of the commission. It covers the history of gold in the United States, explains that its breakdown was caused by governments, and explains the merit of having sound money: prices reflect market realities, government stays in check, and the people retain their freedom.

The scholarship and rigor impressed even the critics of the minority. Ron and Lewis Lehrman worked with a team of economists that included Murray Rothbard, who was the main author, so it is hardly surprising that such a book would result.

I am convinced that historians, whether or not they agree with him, will continue to marvel at Ron Paul for many, many years to come. Libertarians a century from now will be in disbelief at the very notion that such a man actually served in the US Congress of our time.

One of the most thrilling memories of the 2012 campaign was the sight of those huge crowds who came out to see Ron. His competitors, meanwhile, couldn’t fill half a Starbucks. When I worked as Ron’s chief of staff in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I could only dream of such a day.

Now what was it that attracted all these people to Ron Paul? He didn’t offer his followers a spot on the federal gravy train. He didn’t pass some phony bill. In fact, he didn’t do any of the things we associate with politicians. What his supporters love about him has nothing to do with politics at all.

Ron is the anti-politician. He tells unfashionable truths, educates rather than flatters the public, and stands up for principle even when the whole world is arrayed against him.

Of course, Ron Paul deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. In a just world, he would also win the Medal of Freedom, and all the honors for which a man in his position is eligible.

But history is littered with forgotten politicians who earned piles of awards handed out by other politicians. What matters to Ron more than all the honors and ceremonies in the world is all of you, and your commitment to the immortal ideas he has championed all his life.

It’s Ron’s truth-telling and his urge to educate the public that should inspire us as we carry on into the future.

Little did he know that those thankless years of pointing out the State’s lies and refusing to be absorbed into the Blob would in fact make him a hero one day. To see Ron speaking to many thousands of cheering kids, when all the while respectable opinion had been warning them to stay far away from this dangerous man, is more gratifying and encouraging than I can say. I was especially thrilled when a tempestuous Ron, responding to the Establishment’s description of his campaign as “dangerous,” said, you’re darn right — I am dangerous, to them.

Even the mainstream media has to acknowledge the existence of a whole new category of thinker: one that is antiwar, anti-Fed, anti-police state, and pro-market. The libertarian view is even on the map of those who despise it. That, too, is Ron’s doing.

Young people are reading major treatises in economics and philosophy because Ron Paul recommended them. Who else in public life can come close to saying that?

No politician is going to trick the public into embracing liberty, even if liberty were his true goal and not just a word he uses in fundraising letters. For liberty to advance, a critical mass of the public has to understand and support it. That doesn’t have to mean a majority, or even anywhere near it. But some baseline of support has to exist.

That is why Ron Paul’s work is so important and so lasting.

Let’s do everything we can to help our greatest living American, Dr. Ron Paul, End the Fed Ron Paul for President!

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Here is Ron Unz’s exposure of the cover-up of the AIDS section of RFK Jr.’s book: “When hostile journalists seek to destroy a candidate, they naturally direct their coverage where they believe he is most vulnerable and do their best to ignore his greatest strengths. A shrewd campaign might use such biased reporting as a road-map, one that provides the photographic negative of the issues that should be emphasized. So if the Times and other media outlets seek to avoid the Kennedy assassination conspiracies, perhaps those are exactly the right issues to discuss.

But there is another incendiary topic on which the silence surrounding Kennedy’s position has been far more absolute across both the mainstream and the alternative media, so much so that probably only the tiniest sliver of Americans are even aware of Kennedy’s views. Based upon his extremely controversial writings, the candidate would seem so tremendously vulnerable that any such media coverage would immediately destroy his campaign and his reputation. Yet not a single hostile publication has ever reported those facts, suggesting that the true situation is actually quite different from what it appears to be. Perhaps this total silence implies that the Times and other media outlets dread that subject, fearing that it could destroy their entire media establishment if the facts came out and Kennedy were proven correct.

Until late 2021 I’d been only slightly aware of Kennedy, having vaguely heard that he’d become a leading figure in the growing anti-vaxxing movement. My own views on vaccines had always been quite conventional, not too different from those advocated by the Times, but I was persuaded to read his new book in order to get his side of the story.

To my utter amazement I discovered that the main subject of his text was something entirely different than what I had been led to believe. Kennedy had devoted nearly half the length—200 pages—to promoting the theory that AIDS did not exist as a real disease and was instead merely a medical media hoax concocted by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his greedy corporate allies. But not a single one of those describing his book, whether supportive or critical, had ever hinted at this. Indeed, when I mentioned the true subject of Kennedy’s text to a couple of people, they almost seemed to think that I was delusional, considering it impossible that no one would have revealed such a startling fact.

Kennedy’s book quickly became the #1 Amazon bestseller and he soon drew extremely harsh media attacks, including a 4,000 word article produced by a large team of Associated Press journalists. But as I noted, although they denounced him on every other point none of them ever mentioned his explosive AIDS claims.”

Dr. Donald W. Miller, Jr., tells the story of Duesberg’s work exposing the AIDS myth: “Peter H. Duesberg (b.1936) is a molecular biologist. He is Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Duesberg questions, on a submicroscopic scale, two tenets of biology. One is the germ theory of AIDS. He contends that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. The other is the gene mutation hypothesis of cancer. Duesberg claims that mutations in genes are not the cause of cancer.

Admired as a “wunderkind” in the 1970s, the NIH (National Institutes of Health) awarded him a long-term Outstanding Investigator Grant; he was a candidate for the Nobel Prize; the U.S. National Academy of Science, in 1985, invited him to join the academy, a high honor among scientists, especially for one then only 49 years old; and in 1986 he was awarded a Fogarty fellowship to spend a year at the NIH studying cancer genes. But in 1987 Duesberg ran afoul of the establishment. He published a paper in Cancer Research titled “Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality,” followed a year later by one in Science, “HIV is Not the Cause of AIDS.” Thereafter, Duesberg was subjected to the punishment now accorded modern-day heretics. The NIH ceased giving him grants (the NIH and other federal and state funding sources have rejected his last 21 consecutive research grant applications), colleagues labeled him “irresponsible and pernicious” (David Baltimore) and his work “absolute and total nonsense” (Robert Gallo), and graduate students at Berkeley were advised not to study with Duesberg if they wanted to go on and have a successful career in biology. He was branded a “rebel,” a “maverick,” an “iconoclast,” and by one writer, in an article in Science in 1988 titled “A Rebel Without a Cause of AIDS,” a “gadfly.” Blocked from receiving grants, he obtained private funds to maintain his laboratory at UC Berkeley, and he now spends part of each year doing research in Germany.

His principle work on HIV/AIDS is Inventing the AIDS Virus, published in 1996. In this book, and in other papers he has written on the subject, Duesberg systematically dismantles, piece by piece, the germ theory of AIDS. This theory/hypothesis has two parts: 1) HIV causes AIDS, and 2) HIV is sexually transmitted.

With regard to sexual transmission, only 1 in 1,000 unprotected sexual contacts transmit HIV. One in 275 U.S. citizens has antibodies to this virus. Therefore, an uninfected person could have up to 275,000 random unprotected sexual contacts without acquiring sexually transmitted HIV. Prostitutes do not get AIDS, unless they are drug addicts; and wives of HIV-positive hemophiliacs do not contract AIDS from their husbands. Proponents of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis ignore these facts. The dire heterosexual AIDS epidemic predicted to occur in the U.S., Canada, and Europe twenty years ago has not happened, and the disease remains confined to the original two main risk groups – gay men (66 percent of all AIDS cases) and intravenous drug users, male and female (32 percent). The other 2 percent are hemophiliacs and babies born to mothers who used intravenous drugs during pregnancy. The easiest way to acquire HIV sexually is through receptive anal intercourse.

Unlike other viruses, which cause diseases such as smallpox, mumps, and herpes, a retrovirus is like a hitchhiker going along for the ride. It enters a cell, mixes its genes up with those the cell possesses and aligns its fate with that of the cell. Retroviral genes make up an estimated 8 percent of the approximately 35,000 genes in the human genome. It is not in the retrovirus’ self-interest to destroy the cell it lives in. Its survival is contingent on the host cell staying healthy. But HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), a retrovirus, supposedly causes AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) by killing the T cell it infects. Without an adequate number of T cells immunodeficiency results, rendering a person susceptible to AIDS. As Duesberg points out, however, two important facts argue against this model: HIV infects, at most, only 1 in 500 T cells. And T cells infected with HIV placed in a test tube (in vitro) grow and thrive. The cells do not die. Instead, they manufacture large quantities of the virus, which providers use to detect antibodies to HIV in their patients’ blood. For these and a dozen other reasons, the germ theory of AIDS is wrong. HIV is a harmless passenger on the AIDS airplane, not its pilot.

Perhaps Duesberg’s final statement on HIV/AIDS will be “The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition,” published in 2003. Rebel he may be, as Science avers, but Duesberg is not without a cause for AIDS. He wrote this paper with Claus Koehnlein and David Rasnick. I heard Dr. Rasnick, also a Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, present this paper at the 2003 meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. They hypothesize that AIDS is caused by three things, singly or in combination: 1) long-term, heavy-duty recreational drug use – cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, and nitrite inhalants; 2) antiretroviral drugs doctors prescribe to people who are HIV positive – DNA chain terminators, like AZT, and protease inhibitors; and 3) malnutrition and bad water, which is the cause of “AIDS” in Africa.

AIDS appeared in young gay men in the early 1980s following an explosion of recreational drug use that began twenty years earlier in the 1960s. Male homosexuals are the highest users of recreational drugs. AZT, given to people who are HIV-positive, first used in 1987, is another cause of AIDS. As Duesberg and coauthors show in this paper, a chemical (noninfectious) basis for AIDS is supported by a lot of important data. One fact is this, which government spokespersons and the media do not report: HIV-positive people treated with antiretroviral drugs have a four to five times higher annual mortality rate compared to HIV-positive people who refuse treatment with these drugs – 6.6–8.7 percent vs. 1.4 percent. Duesberg writes, “AIDS is stabilized, even cured, if patients stop using recreational drugs or AZT – regardless of the presence of HIV. The drug hypothesis predicts that AIDS is an entirely preventable and in part curable disease.”

There are other, larger societal issues that resonate around AIDS. In AIDS: Virus or Drug Induced (1996), Duesberg writes:

The AIDS virus [HIV] also proved to be the politically correct cause of AIDS. No AIDS risk groups [e.g., gay men] could be blamed for being infected by a God-given egalitarian virus. A virus could reach all of us. Nobody would be ostracized. We are all in this together.’ Not so with drugs. The consumption of illicit psychoactive drugs implies individual and social responsibilities that nobody wanted to face… The perceived danger of an AIDS virus decimating the general public also provided the scientific and moral arguments for quick and unreflective action and for the complete dismissal of the competing drug-AIDS hypothesis.”

K. Lloyd Billingsley details Fauci’s efforts to ruin Duesberg: “Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but his bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry. In 1984, Fauci became head of the NIAID and in that role contended that AIDS was caused by a virus known as HIV. Peter H. Duesberg, professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, found no scientific evidence for that claim.

As Duesberg explained in “Inventing the AIDS Virus,” HIV is “one of the many harmless passenger viruses that cause no clinical symptoms during the acute infection,” and he was hardly alone. Scientists challenging the HIV-AIDS hypothesis included Nobel laureate Kary Mullis; Charles Thomas, former professor of microbiology at Harvard University; and biologist and science historian Robert Root-Bernstein, author of “Rethinking AIDS.”

Unable to refute Duesberg scientifically, Fauci did his best to “cancel” the distinguished medical scientist. In 1988, the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour sent camera crews to interview Duesberg, but the PBS show pulled the interview and replaced it with a short segment of Fauci attacking Duesberg.

In 1989, Fauci complained in an editorial that Duesberg’s ideas were getting too much publicity. ABC’s “Good Morning America” flew Duesberg to New York for an in-studio interview. That same evening, the Berkeley professor got word that the interview had been cancelled. When viewers tuned in, they saw Fauci.

In 1993, Fauci tried unsuccessfully to get Duesberg cancelled from ABC’s “Day One” program. In 1994, Ted Koppel of ABC’s “Nightline” agreed to give Duesberg a hearing, but when the show finally aired, there was Fauci once again.

As Duesberg contended, Fauci was the government mouthpiece for “AIDS thought control.”

Fauci doesn’t want any public discussion of Duesberg’s views on AIDS. He said in 1994, according to a story in the Washington Post, “ “It’s extremely dangerous to all the educational efforts about safe sex and IV drug use,” Fauci said. “If they [the speakers at a conference of AIDS skeptics] were just blowing off steam and it didn’t matter, then we wouldn’t care. But these statements can take a terrible toll on the public health.”

Let’s do everything we can to support the heroic Dr. Peter Duesberg and end “Dr.” Fauci’s tyranny.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Article cross-posted from Lew’s site.