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Cancer is one of the most challenging conditions to deal with in medicine, as two seemingly identical cancers can have very different causes. As a result, any standardized (holistic or conventional) protocol will inevitably fail some of the patients it is meant to treat.

Furthermore, since there is so much fear surrounding cancer (e.g., from what the primal fear brings up inside you, from how your social circle reacts to it and from how the medical system uses all of that to push cancer therapies) it is often very difficult to have a clear head about the ordeal or find the right source of advice.

Likewise, since so much money is involved (e.g. 65% of oncologist’s revenues comes from chemotherapy drugs and cancer drugs are by far the most profitable drug market), there is significant pushback (e.g. from medical boards or unhappy relatives) against anyone who attempts alternative cancer therapies making it very difficult to practice unconventional cancer care—particularly since no alternative treatment works all the time.
Note: in a recent article, I highlighted how urologists initially would not touch Lupron (which is now also used as a the puberty blocker) because of how unsafe and ineffective it was, but once they started being paid a lot of money to prescribe it for prostate cancer, it rapidly became their number one drug.

In contrast, while the conventional cancer therapies often have serious issues that make them far worse than any benefit they offer, some conventional cancer therapies are frequently the only available option which can save someone’s life (which has led to me at different times having fights with close friends or relatives either not to do chemotherapy or to get them to start it in cases where I felt it was absolutely necessary).

Given all of this, I presently believe that no “ideal” cancer treatment exists, but if it can be done (e.g., it’s effective for the cancer and feasible to implement), the most ideal to least ideal treatments are as follows:

•Identifying the root cause of a cancer, removing it, and having it quickly and permanently go away on its own (which is sometimes possible).

•Have enough time to rebalance the body so that its terrain no longer supports the cancer and the cancer can fade away on its own (which is often doable but a fairly involved process many have difficulty carrying out).

•Significantly enhance the function of the immune system so that it will eliminate the cancer.

•Find a treatment that is toxic to the cancer but relatively benign to the rest of the body.

•Find a treatment with an acceptable toxicity level and find ways to mitigate its side effects.

•Accept a moderately toxic treatment with significant side effects.

•Focus on living with the cancer rather than curing it and then finding ways to mitigate the symptoms you experience both from it and any existing treatment protocols.

•Use a costly conventional therapy that is unlikely to work and live with all the side effects until your life ends (which in more extreme treatment regimens can be quite severe).

If we take a step back, what’s truly remarkable about DMSO, depending on how it is used, is that it can effectively provide most of the benefits listed above with the least amount of collateral damage (e.g., side-effects, toxicity, etc.).

Dimethyl Sulfoxide (DMSO)

Exactly six months ago, I used this newsletter to bring the public’s attention to DMSO, a simple naturally occurring compound that has a number of immense therapeutic benefits and virtually no toxicity (detailed here). In turn, when it was discovered in the 1960s, it quickly became America’s most desired drug (as it cured many incurable ailments). A lot of the scientific community promptly got behind it and before long, thousands of papers had been published on every conceivable medical application for it.

As such, throughout this series, I’ve presented the wealth of evidence that DMSO effectively treats:

Strokes, paralysis, a wide range of neurological disorders (e.g., Down Syndrome and dementia), and many circulatory disorders (e.g., Raynaud’s, varicose veins, hemorrhoids), which I discussed here.

A wide range of tissue injuries, such as sprains, concussions, burns, surgical incisions, and spinal cord injuries (discussed here).

Chronic pain (e.g., from a bad disc, bursitis, arthritis, or complex regional pain syndrome), which I discussed here.

A wide range of autoimmune, protein, and contractile disorders such as scleroderma, amyloidosis, and interstitial cystitis (discussed here).

A variety of head conditions, such as tinnitus, vision loss, dental problems, and sinusitis (discussed here).

A wide range of internal organ diseases such as pancreatitis, infertility, liver cirrhosis, and endometriosis (discussed here).

A wide range of skin conditions such as burns, varicose veins, acne, hair loss, ulcers, skin cancer, and many autoimmune dermatologic diseases (discussed here).

Many challenging infectious conditions, including chronic bacterial infections, herpes, and shingles (discussed here).

In turn, when I published this series (because of both how effective and easily accessible DMSO is) it caught on like wildfire, this publication went from being the ninth to top ranked newsletter in the genre, there was a nationwide DMSO shortage, and I’ve received almost two thousand testimonials from people who benefitted from DMSO (and often had remarkable results—particularly for chronic pain).

That response was quite surprising and in my eyes, a testament not only to how well DMSO works, but more importantly, how effectively DMSO’s story was erased from history (e.g., many long-time enthusiasts of natural health shared that they were blown away they’d never heard of it). This sadly illustrates how effectively the medical industry can bury anything threatening its bottom line (e.g., the FDA—for rather petty reasons—used everything at their disposal to make sure DMSO was forgotten).

In turn, within the DMSO story, I believe one of the least appreciated (or even known) facets of it are the remarkable contributions DMSO makes to the treatment of cancer—which is even more remarkable given that far more research has been done with DMSO and cancer than all the other topics I just listed. Consequently, for months I’ve wanted to publish an article on this (particularly since one incredible natural cancer therapy utilizes DMSO), but simultaneously, it just wasn’t feasible to as there was so much literature to go through.

That’s been weighing on me considerably (e.g. many readers have asked me to prioritize this article over everything else), so over the last three months (and particularly the last three weeks), I shifted my responsibilities to focus on the topic thoroughly. While it took a bit of a toll on me, the article is now done. As such, I greatly hope some of what’s in here can benefit you and I likewise thank each of you who has supported this newsletter and made it possible for me to spend so much time delving into these critical forgotten sides of medicine.

Cancer Differentiation

When life begins, the first cell has the potential to turn into anything. Then as it divides, its range of possibilities becomes more finite until each needed type of cell populates its assigned region of the body. This process is known as differentiation, and is a frequent interest in medicine as undifferentiated cells (e.g., stem cells) can replace lost cells by differentiating into them. Cancer is a disease of dedifferentiation where normal cells adopt an ancient survival program, lose their structure, order, and connection to the whole body, and instead voraciously divide through the body and consume it.

As such, an agent that could induce differentiation of cancer cells so they become normal could be immensely helpful in treating cancer. Unfortunately, only one “effective” agent has entered general medical practice, all-trans retinoic acid (a metabolite of vitamin A) for the treatment of promyelocytic leukemia (a relatively rare cancer).

There are now twelve tumor-cell types in the test tube in which DMSO tends to stimulate the tumor cell toward changing into a more normal cell, Dr. Jacob told me. — Morton Walker 1983

Sadly, to quote a 2023 review paper that compiled many studies where DMSO differentiated cancers:

Recently, DMSO has been included in biological cancer treatment and several FDA approved cancer immune therapeutic modalities such as CarT cell therapy and melanoma drug Mekinist (trametinib DMSO). However, besides its recognized biological role as a pharmaceutical solvent and cryoprotectant, there was no mention of DMSO’s possible ability to potentiate therapeutic activity as a component of these cancer treatments.

Note: while there is a general bias in medicine to avoid researching natural cancer therapies, DMSO has been extensively used in cancer research because it effectively facilitates many aspects of it (which had led to the truly curious scenario described above).

This saga began in 1971 when one of the nations top virologists accidentally discovered that if DMSO was given to leukemic cells (specifically erythroblasts—which cause a relatively rare type of cancer), at a 2% concentration, it caused most of them to differentiate back to normal cells (which took up to 5 days), at 3% it stopped their growth, and at 5% it killed them.

Additionally:

•Mice injected with the DMSO-treated cancer cells lived roughly twice as long as those injected with untreated cancer cells (suggesting DMSO made the cancer less aggressive).

•The cancer cells did not evolve resistance to DMSO (although subsequent research sometimes showed a small portion of cancer cells in a tumor were resistant to DMSO1,2). Additionally, for erythroleukemic cells that were resistant to DMSO inducing differentiation, butyrate did induce it (while butyrate and DMSO each antagonize the inducing action of the other).

Eight months later, she published another study that found that within five days, 2% DMSO caused 95% of erythroleukemic cells to differentiate. This was followed by studies that:
•Explored the mechanisms of differentiation, provided detailed descriptions of it, and showed it occurred in a consistent manner.
•Explored how certain steroids blocked (or supported) DMSO’s ability to induce erythroleukemic differentiation.
•Found increasing concentrations of DMSO caused increasing alterations of cancer DNA (which was an initial step in the differentiation process).
• Found the differentiation continued long after DMSO was no longer present and could be irreversible.
•Found the differentiation did not appear to be synchronized with the cell cycle.1,2

Following this, it became generally accepted that DMSO differentiates erythroleukemic cells, and decades of studies corroborated that.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62

Note: DMSO’s ability to differentiate erythroleukemic cells was so well recognized that in 1992, it was selected for a microgravity experiment on the international space station.

Since erythroleukemia is closely related to the more common acute lymphoblastic leukemia (AML), decades of studies also showed DMSO differentiated AML.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95

Additionally, DMSO was also shown to differentiate many other cancers.

Blood Cancers: acute promyelocytic leukemia,1,2 chronic myeloid leukemia,1,2,3 cutaneous erythromyeloleukemia,1 hairy cell leukemia,1 histiocytic lymphoma,1,2,3 non-Hodgkin lymphoma,1 T-cell leukemia,1 T-cell lymphoma1

Organ Cancers: bladder1, brain,1,2,3,4,5,6 breast,1 colon,1 esophageal,1,2 intestinal1,2 kidney,1,2 liver,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 lung,1,2,3,4 prostate,1,2 rectal,1 ovarian,1,2 stomach1, thyroid1

Other Cancers: embryonic carcinoma (into heart cells),1,2,3,4,5,6 fibrosarcoma,1,2 melanoma,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11, nasopharyngeal,1 rhabdomyosarcomas1,2 tumors (in potatoes)1

Collectively, these studies showed:

•DMSO normally differentiated the cancer (it was rare for me to find studies where it did not) and did so in a dose-dependent fashion (e.g., 0.5-2% was often used). At higher concentrations (e.g. 1.5%), those changes were often permanent. However, in some cases, a minority of DMSO resistant cells did form, which then required another differentiating agent.

•Cancer growth, proliferation, and survival in tandem frequently decreased. In parallel, tumor suppressing genes (e.g., P21, PTEN, RB) increased, tumor promoting proteins were suppressed, and the cancer cells were weakened (e.g., with transient DNA strand breaks1,2) or induced into programmed cell death. Conversely, cancer triggers (e.g., C-myc1,2,3, C-myb, nucleolar antigen p145) were suppressed.

•Many metabolic pathways (e.g., JAK–STAT, ERK, NF-kB), histone H2A phosphorylation, and key cellular enzymes were increased during differentiation (e.g., Protein Kinase C,1,2,3 PI 3-kinase, TXA2, and TXB2 synthase, COX-21,2, 5-Lipoxygenase, phospholipase, CYP3A4, cytochrome b5 reductase and drug metabolism, acetylcholinesterase, carbonic anhydrase,1,2 disphosphase, and diaphorase).

•Other proteins and receptors were also increased (e.g., GPI-80, angiotensin II, Desmoplakins and Fibronectin) as were a variety of metabolites and signaling molecules (TNF-α, melanin, diacylglycerol inositol). Intercellular calcium was also increased1,2,3 as was the ion flux in and out of cells (except for potassium), the cellular transport of nucleosides. Finally, there were changes in G-protein signaling, and some cells were sensitive to staphylococcal leukocidin.

•Certain aspects of metabolism decreased (e.g., glucose transport, insulin receptor availability, general protein and transferrin synthesis, diacylglycerol synthesis, glycosaminoglycan synthesis and sulfate incorporation, heme oxygenase-1 activity,1,2) along with a decrease in histone expression and the association of Phosphatidylinositol-Transfer protein with the nucleus.

•Some things increased DMSO’s differentiation (e.g., TNF-α1,2,3, sphinganine, alpha-lipoic-acid, PP2, or suppressing PTEN) while others suppressed it (e.g., asbestos1,2, dexamethasone,1,2 hydrocortisone, hyperthermia, diacylglycerols and phospholipase C, blocking protein kinase C, lithium chloride, Mu IFN-Alpha1). Additionally, low frequency EMFs did not affect it.
Note: other agents also exist that can sometimes induce cell differentiation, but in many cases, DMSO works much better (e.g., oxytocin can turn certain cells into heart cells, but does not fully differentiate them if they are initially only one layer, whereas DMSO does).

•Vitamin D has been repeatedly found to synergistically enhance DMSO’s ability to differentiate AML1,2,3,4 (except in this study) and to commit AML to differentiate into macrophages1,2 while it counteracted DMSO differentiating erythroleukemia.1,2

•Retinoic acid (a vitamin A metabolite) has also shown promise for inducing cancer differentiation, works synergistically with DMSO1,2 and uses a different differentiating pathway than DMSO.1,2

In addition to these biochemical changes, some other effects of DMSO have been proposed to explain its differentiating activity (e.g., one study proposed that DMSO’s interactions with free radicals allowed it to induce differentiation).

Note: I have strong ethical objections to animal research and it is my sincere hope that since so much of it has already been done that it will not need to be redone to “prove” DMSO works.

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In continuing to unpack the ideologies of the oligarchs who are part of the new Trump administration, Iain Davis examines how their ideas are being translated into policy. He considers the consequent infrastructure rollout that is preparing the US and the world for an imminent Gov-corp Technate within a multipolar world.

In Part 1 of this series, we explored the political philosophies that have long been adopted and promoted by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and considered the implications, given both men’s obvious influence on the Trump administration. Musk is a high-profile advocate of Technocracy, and Peter Thiel is an accelerationist neoreactionary who favours, in particular, the Dark Enlightenment. Before you read this article (Part 2), I urge you to familiarise yourself with the explanations of Technocracy and the NRx (the neoreactionary movement) provided in Part 1. Otherwise, many of the references here will lack context.

As we noted in Part 1, Thiel and Musk are part of the oligarchic class by virtue of being invited to join a network led by other oligarchs whose stratospheric wealth far surpasses that of the names published on the “richest people in the world” lists. Welcomed into their exclusive club, Thiel and Musk are made men. In Part 2, we will explore how the political philosophies and the associated economic theories of Thiel and Musk are shaping public policy. Keep in mind that these two men are far from alone in attempting to create an American gov-corp Technate.

Libertarian Technocrats?

Although they borrow some libertarian ideas, there is nothing truly “libertarian” about either technocrats or accelerationist neoreactionaries. Their convoluted theories, once applied, could not be more authoritarian, more anti-liberty. Just as it is an oxymoron to describe Musk as a “libertarian technocrat,” so is it absurd to think of Peter Thiel as an “anarcho-capitalist.” Yet propagandists persist in encouraging us to see them in these terms. Witness a 2014 article in The Atlantic titled “The Libertarian Capitalist’s Case for State Power and Making No Money.”

It is possible that people like Thiel and Musk self-identify as libertarians because they think “liberty” means freedom granted by — and to — the oligarchy.

In Part 1, we referenced the Venetian Republic. The Doge of Venice was the ruler of the banking, finance, and commercial empire of the Venetian Republic. That is to say, the Doge was given the liberty to rule by the oligarchs of the day. We might wonder if the naming of the Department of Government Efficiency (the DOGE) that Musk leads deliberately references the Venetian magistrate. Some say it does, while others suggest another possibility.

Created as a joke in 2013 by cryptographers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, the Dogecoin, a memecoin, has seen its price and market cap soar and fluctuate wildly thanks in no small measure to Elon Musk’s comments about it. Much of Musk’s talk about Dogecoin has been deliberately provocative. For example, in 2019 he declared himself the “former CEO of Dogecoin,” though that was never the case. His social media posts alone have provoked major changes in the price of Dogecoin. Musk has also aggressively hiked its value by, for instance, hinting it might become the basis of the proposed “X pay” payment system on his newly acquired ‘X’ platform — formerly Twitter.

Musk encouraged bullish investment in Dogecoin. Of course, just because someone encourages you to do something that doesn’t negate your personal responsibility to conduct due diligence. When some investors lost their shirts, as Dogecoin prices tumbled, they tried to sue Musk in 2022 with a potential $258 billion class action lawsuit. The case was dismissed last year. The judge ruled that Musk’s comments were just “aspirational and puffery, not factual and susceptible to being falsified.” Though it is worth noting the offhand comments of one man took the Dogecoin from a literal joke — a crypto parody — to achieving a market capitalisation of $14.5 billion in 2021.

If there is an in-joke to the naming of the DOGE, nominally led by Elon Musk, some argue it is Musk’s fondness for the Dogecoin that is reflected in the D.O.G.E acronym. Yet, the symbolism of “the Doge ”— one who is granted the liberty to rule by oligarchs — is perhaps more conspicuous. Just as with the term “Accelerator” — meaning high-impact investment to accelerate the growth of a startup — an obvious underpinning ideology is implied, even if rarely discussed.

In the introduction to his 2012 treatise, “The Dark Enlightenment,” political philosopher Nick Land highlighted the importance of an article written three years earlier by oligarch Thiel.

Land wrote:

One milestone was the April 2009 discussion hosted at Cato Unbound among libertarian thinkers (including Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel) in which disillusionment with the direction and possibilities of democratic politics was expressed with unusual forthrightness. Thiel summarized the trend bluntly: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

In a related article Thiel penned, titled “The Education of a Libertarian,” he was describing himself, and yet the personal philosophy he outlined in it was pure accelerationist neoreactionism.

Thiel opined that “the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed,” given that the government’s response to every crisis was “more government.” He also claimed that the post-WWI deflationary depression in Western nations was the last “sharp but short” shock to have allowed the alleged advantages of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” to flourish. After that depression, he said, so-called “democratic” politics had stifled the opportunities to capitalise on crises. As a result, Thiel said he no longer believed “that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world.”

Asserting, in so many words, that democracies were useless, Thiel announced he had found a new life goal:

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.” The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it.

For Thiel, the “unthinking demos” is us: the holders of the “neo-puritan faith” in progressive “social democracy” — the acolytes of the Cathedral (and the people whom Nick Land considers “inarticulate proles”). In Thiel’s view, we must embrace our “technoplastic” future, become intelligible, move beyond politics, and liberate capitalist innovation by swearing fealty to the gov-corp model.

To this end, Thiel identified three “technological frontiers” upon which he could construct his darkly enlightened aristocracy.

[1] Cyberspace was the first frontier he identified. There, Thiel focused on creating “a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution.” Cyberspace would enable “new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states” — and would result in a new world that would “force change on the existing social and political order.”

[2] Outer space would be another Thiel frontier, where the “libertarian future of classic science fiction” could be built.

[3] Seasteading would be his interim frontier, where the unclaimed oceans could be settled by humans. He called seasteading “more tentative than the Internet, but much more realistic than space travel.” Seasteading would at least give us the time to develop the outer-space ideas on earth, prior to colonising the stars.

These frontiers are necessary, Thiel insisted, because “we are in a deadly race between politics and technology.” He concluded:

We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person [Trump?] who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism. [Emphasis added.]

Between 2006 and 2012, Thiel was instrumental in organising the Singularity Summits convened by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute — originally the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) — in partnership with Stanford University. Thiel provided much of the funding.

Thiel cannot be both an advocate of accelerationist neoreaction and simultaneously an anarcho-capitalist — a libertarian. The two philosophies are mutually exclusive.

In Part 1, we noted the technocrats’ rejection of the notion that “all men are created equal.” In a similar vein, Land, Yarvin, Fisher, and other accelerationists consider it essential to have a ruling entity, which can only be comprised of a few human beings exercising an unequal, additional right to rule. Both the technocrats and the accelerationists fundamentally misunderstand, or misinterpret, what the Preamble to The Declaration of Independence means. They completely ignore the second clause of the relevant declaration — namely, “that they [human beings] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“Equality,” in real libertarian thinking, does not infer a held belief that everyone is the same — though that is certainly how technocrats interpret the word.

Libertarian “equality” doesn’t deny that people have relative strengths and weaknesses. It is not a rejection of either leadership or possible forms of meritocracy. It self-evidently means that every human being has an equal right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” These rights are unalienable — or inalienable. Our rights are not decided for us by others or limited by others, and no one on earth has any more or any fewer “equal rights” than anyone else.

This idea is not difficult to grasp. It is central to the political philosophy of anarcho-capitalism, as clearly enunciated by Murray Rothbard (1926–1995):

[N]o man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else.

Anarcho-capitalism wholeheartedly rejects the initiation of the use of force — the aggressive imposition of claimed authority — by the state to coerce individual persons or seize their property. An example is the threat of fining or imprisoning someone who hasn’t paid taxes to the “proper” authorities. Anarcho-capitalism resoundingly rejects the state and all its dictatorial demands.

By contrast, the proponents of Technocracy and the proponents of the Dark Enlightenment, such as Musk and Thiel, are not interested in restricting state power, though they may say otherwise. Instead they wish to move the state from the public to the private sector and expand its power once sufficiently privatized. True, they oppose “representative democracy” and characterise it as both a “democracy” (which it isn’t) and a bureaucratic system riddled with problems (which it is), but the solutions they offer, to all intents and purposes, magnify the power of the very state they supposedly condemn.

What the believers in Technocracy and the believers in the Dark Enlightenment both propose are compartmentalised, hierarchical sociopolitical power structures that couldn’t be more state-like or more authoritarian. They seek to expand and maximise the power of the state, though in slightly different ways. Calling their new model of the state either a Technate (as technocrats do) or a gov-corp (as accelerationist neoreactionaries do) doesn’t change the nature of the tyrannical statism they desire to foist on the rest of us.

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“Accomplished fingers begin to play./Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,/Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”
– W. B. Yeats, Lapus Lazuli

The old man in the Irish cap sat on a chair on the sidewalk outside his house across from ours. I would usually see him on my way home from school. He would raise his shillelagh to greet me and sometimes played a tune on the penny whistle he kept on his lap. Often he was puffing on a pipe which I could smell even as I kept to my side of the street because he frightened me a bit, but when he played his fipple flute, the sounds of his playing enchanted my young ears. It struck some secret ancient chord in me.

One Saturday morning in spring when I came home wild with sweaty hot excitement from playing basketball in the schoolyard, I ran up our flight of twelve stone steps and froze on the landing before the wooden porch steps. To my shock, the Irishman was sitting on our porch, shaded by the canvas awning I had recently rolled down, a glittering one-eyed Cyclops to my young eyes. I ran into the house without giving him a nod.

My father was home and I told him the man from across the street was on the porch. He said it’s okay, he’s a friend, his name is Eamonn McGillicuddy, he was a good friend of my father’s and his brothers and sisters, your great uncles and aunts, and I’ve told him he can sit on the porch whenever he wants. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll introduce you to him.”

That was my introduction to the Irish rebel tradition, the man who taught me to never be bullied and to remember where our family came from and why. Something else as well – the power of music. And he taught me this while he showed me how to plant rows of potatoes, leeks, and peas in our back yard. I was eleven years old and our yard was quite barren except for a small beautiful Japanese maple tree my father had planted. Something soon blossomed in me and in the garden. To name it is to lose it.

Mr. McGillicuddy, as I always called him, had emigrated from western Cork, Ireland sometime in the 1920s, in the decade after the 1916 Easter Rising. Why he came I never learned. Much of what he told me had a vagueness to it, as if he were a man of many secrets. His brogue was still very strong, which, at first, made it a bit hard for me to understand him. After a while, in imitative young boy style, I too had a slight brogue as we became simpatico and he let me in on some of his secrets. Listening to his tales always reminded me of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver from Treasure Island, talking to young Jim Hawkins, as if we were treasure seekers, soon to be digging down in the earth for something to lift us up to the heavens.

My grandfather, his parents, and his eight siblings – four boys, all brawlers, and five girls in all – had lived from the 1890s in a large house in our Bronx neighborhood. The house stood on a slope backed by the Williamsbridge Reservoir, which was actually a natural saucer-shaped lake that was eventually drained in the 1930s and made into a park – the Williamsbridge Oval Park – by the Works Progress Administration. The house had a large garden with numerous fruit trees. By the time I met McGillicuddy, my grandfather and all his family had died and the house and garden, while still standing, had become derelict, with an old low-lying building up the slope from the house having become a hangout for local teenager boys when I became one. It was a place where fights would take place before an audience of dozens. Bloody boy rituals that served as our local Colosseum.

My great grandparents had emigrated from Cork because of the potato famine. The stories that came down to me were of a bitter family hatred for the English colonizers of Ireland and a love for all the Irish rebels who stood up to them over the years.

Mr. McGillicuddy was slightly younger than my great aunts and uncles. He never told me why he came to the US in the 1920s, and when I asked him, he only smiled and played a few notes on his penny whistle while doing an old man’s little pathetic jig that made me laugh.

He told me a lot, however, and much of it while showing me how to plant the garden. With each potato piece we pushed down in the hills that we had prepared on a slant – he emphasized the necessity of the slant – he would laugh and say to me, “Eddy, my boy, I must askew always, always askew; it’s all about the slant and sláinte, never straight, always askew,” and he would laugh maniacally. I never got his joke until one day he said, “Suppose I askew you this question,” and then it clicked, redundancy and all. And when we planted each potato, he told me a different tale about the potato famine and why the English were bastards.

The next door neighbor’s son, Mikey Fraina, had a huge German Shepard named Rex who was often locked in their adjacent yard. The dog always frightened me. It would bark and try to jump the fence. McGillicuddy would tell me if I was afraid of a dog, that dogs will bully me to death, and just like the English dogs and colonizers everywhere, you had to find a way to subdue them. One day he asked me to watch, and when Rex was at the fence with his front paws up on it, growling and showing his huge teeth, the old thin man walked over and started to play some eerie tune on his penny whistle. The dog’s eyes rolled in its head and he fell on its back with all four paws reaching for the sky to just surrender.

For weeks after that, I couldn’t sleep well, thinking of the incident. I kept hearing the uncanny sound of McGillicuddy’s playing as the dog’s eyes rolled back like pitched marbles.

Maybe a month later he did something similar with a squirrel that I often fed out of my hand against my mother’s wishes. The squirrel jumped off the pantry roof into the yard while we were checking the garden, and McGillicuddy quickly started to play his penny whistle. This time the tune was jig-like and festive and the squirrel started to dance upright on his hind legs, moving his front paws in circles. My mother heard it and looked out the pantry window, laughing. She was so shocked that she called my father at work and told him. He told her that McGillicuddy was a magician who could mesmerize anyone; that is why he was sent to the States. My mother was confused. I was overwhelmed with delightful shock.

As the season stretched on, I remember the vegetables growing, the leeks standing tall, the peas greening, and potatoes leafing and growing stems. The garden was flourishing but something went missing.

Sometime that late summer, Mr.McGillicuddy vanished. No one, not even my father, knew what happened to him. Even the neighbors, who had gotten used to his presence high about the street on our porch, the sound of his playing, and the feeling that he cast a cold eye down on them from his perch, missed him. They asked us but we had no answer.

One day while I was doing one of my chores, sweeping off the front porch, I found his penny whistle under the cushion of the chair where he used to sit. It was wrapped in a piece of paper with the words – “Tell it always, Eddy, with a slant and a fine tune. Sláinte!  It’s all music.”

I never learned to play the penny whistle, but whenever I sit down to use my fingers to play with words, I remember Mr. McGillicuddy’s glittering eyes as he played his magic flute. He came and went like a young boy’s dream, not a tattered coat upon a stick, but a soul-clapping apparition that remains, even as I sail into the country of old men.

The post A Tuneful Irish Tale appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

The post Gaps appeared first on LewRockwell.

 Gail Appel wrote:

The insidious deceitfulness of Pence, Leo and Short is made evident in this article.

A politico who can’t complete three sentences without reiterating their godliness, is lying.

RFK Jr., Tulsi, Elon and Bessent are 1,000x more righteous than any of the grifters who questioned their motives, past loyalties and moral fiber.

The post Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo Assists Mike Pence Effort to Torpedo RFK Jr.’s HHS Nomination appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Gail Appel.

See here.

The post Mark Carney, Harbinger of Death appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Tablet

The post Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ellen Finnigan wrote:

Dear Lew,

I thought I’d make a war protest video that might make Christians self-reflect a little bit.

The post Time to pick a side appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew, 

Podcaster Kate Dalley loves the Mises Institute and has had you, Mises President Tom DiLorenzo and Tom Woods on as guests. Her broadcast on 3/14 covered election fraud, President Trump’s advocacy for “freedom cities” and birthright citizenship. Freedom cities are the 15 minute cities the World Economic forum and technocrats plan for people to live in a total digital surveillance grid. In the election fraud segment (starts at 42), activist Sophia Anderson explains how the nationwide cellular network called FirstNet still exists connecting election equipment and giving federal government access to election systems. ERIC (the Election Records Information Center) is also still operational. See here.

In the interview, Anderson also states the individual who reported the pipe bombs on J6 was a senior employee of FirstNet. The article she wrote on FirstNet is still on The Gateway Pundit’s web site.

FirstNet is used at the county and state levels for county commissioner, school board, board of supervisor elections and votes on bond issues. 

Kate Dalley’s web page.

The post Election Fraud System Still in Place and Trump Promotes 15 Minute Cities appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Mike Sanders.

New Atlas

The post World’s first “Synthetic Biological Intelligence” runs on living human cells appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Smith. 

Common Dreams

The post ‘This Felt Like a Kidnapping Because It Was’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

See here.

The post Volunteer doctor in Gaza describes Israel brutally shooting 6-year-old Palestinian boy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Vasko Kohlmayer.

The post Not Great appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

Leaked to CNN. Followed up with they “might be motivated to take what they know to a foreign intelligence service”.

Where is John Ratcliffe? These “disgruntled” former employees were given 10 months severance pay, a hefty “ buyout” chunk of change, full retirement benefits and are likely to move on to cushy jobs with Teneo, Brookings Council, Aspen Forum, McKinsey or any number of other  CCP backed “ private security” and “ consulting” firms. Or Soros NGOs.

No consequences- guaranteed. Treason only applies to the opposition . Particular without having committed a crime.

The post CIA “DOGE us, there will be consequences” appeared first on LewRockwell.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock this week, on entering a “new era of nefariousness”:

I say clearly and across the Atlantic, what is right and what is wrong shall never be irrelevant to us. No one wants and no one needs peace more than the Ukrainians and Ukraine. The diplomatic efforts of the U.S. are of course important here. But such a peace must be just and lasting and not just a pause until the next attack… We will never accept a perpetrator-victim reversal. A perpetrator-victim reversal would be… the end of security for the vast majority of countries. And it would be fatal for the future of the United States.

Baerbock’s declaration that a “perpetrator-victim reversal” (a Täteropferumkehr, I’m reliably informed) would be “fatal” to the U.S. was historic. It was accompanied by a promise that “as transatlantacists,” Europeans must “stand up for our own interests, our own values, and our own security.” Although new leaders are ready to take the reins in Germany, she said, there can be no waiting for the transfer of power. Immediately, “Germany must take the lead at this historic milestone.”

A few years ago Baerbock pleaded for patience with a British conservative who demanded to know why Germany wasn’t providing Leopard tanks to Ukraine.

Now, with Donald Trump cutting off weapons deliveries and shutting down access to ATACMS missiles, Baerbock’s speech is an expression of more enthusiastic European support for continued fighting.

The war in Ukraine is often called a proxy conflict between Russia and the West or Russia and the U.S., but it increasingly looks more like a fight between Baerbock’s “transatlanticists” and those who believe in “spheres of influence.” In preparing Racket’s accompanying “Timeline: The War in Ukraine,” I found both sides articulated this idea repeatedly.

In January, 2017, as he was preparing to relinquish his seat to Mike Pence, Joe Biden alluded to the recent election of Donald Trump in a speech at Davos. Describing the “dangerous willingness to revert to political small-mindedness” of “popular movements on both the left and right,” Biden explained:

We hear these voices in the West—but the greatest threats on this front spring from the distinct illiberalism of external actors who equate their success with a fracturing of the liberal international order. We see this in Asia and the Middle East… But I will not mince words. This movement is principally led by Russia.

Biden even then lumped Trump and Putin together, as enemies of the “liberal international order.” Russian counterparts like Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, meanwhile, spoke of a “post-West world order” where diplomatic relations would be based on “sovereignty” and the “national interests of partners.” These are two fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews. Was conflict inevitable, or could peace have held if Russia didn’t strike in 2022?

There’s no question who invaded whom. Hostilities began in February, 2022 with an angry speech by Vladimir Putin and bombs that landed minutes later in Ukraine. Little discussion of the “why” of the war took place in the West, however.

Phrases like “unprovoked aggression” became almost mandatory in Western coverage. Politico interviewed a range of experts and concluded that what Putin wanted was “a revanchist imperialist remaking of the globe to take control of the entire former Soviet space.” This diagnosis of Putin’s invasion as part of a Hitlerian quest for Lebensraum and a broader return to national glory might have merit, but it was also conspicuously uncontested. A differing article by University of Chicago professor John Mearshimer declaring the crisis “the West’s fault” made him, as The New Statesman just put it, “the world’s most hated thinker.” Few went there after.

Russians and Ukrainians don’t have the typical profiles of ancient warring tribes. They have a deeply intertwined history, with citizens of both countries retaining many of the same customs, jokes, and home remedies, while living in the same crumbling Soviet buildings, with fondness for the same cabbage soup and moonshine. There are huge numbers of mixed/bilingual families and many famous cultural figures (including my hero Nikolai Gogol) are claimed by both countries. They’ve fought before, but what jumped out reviewing this “Timeline” is how much it seemed that these old Slavic neighbors mostly fall out now over attitudes toward the West.

It’s hard looking back not to be struck by the superior tone of bodies like the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), whose “reviews” of Ukrainian and Russian elections often read like zoological descriptions of inferior species. Same with a tsk-tsking report by a mission of visiting IMF economists in 2013, who were appalled by Ukrainian energy subsidies that were among of the few popular remnants of Soviet life.

These imperious Western assessments of childlike Slavs, and the panic and shame of some local officials before such foreign judgments, recall familiar satires in Russian literature (The Government Inspector comes to mind). Nationalists in both countries balked at this “advice,” and by the late nineties some came to the conclusion that the cost of cooperation with the West was greater than the benefit. These dynamics accelerated after the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Maidan events of 2013-2014, which Russians still see as a West-backed coup and the beginning of the current war. Russians will say “first blood” was drawn in military operations against Donbass protesters around the same time. Those in the West will point at the 2014 annexation of Crimea as the beginning of territorial war.

The idea of Germany “taking the lead” in a war to secure the primacy of “transatlanticists” worries me more than trying to pronounce Täteropferumkehr. However, whether or not you think Baerbock is right, and a peace deal now would be a worthless “pause,” depends a lot on how you read this history. What do you think, and why?

This originally appeared on Racket News.

The post Is Russia at War With Ukraine, or With the West? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The war in Ukraine is, but in reverse, the same situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable; Obama, Biden, and Trump, are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of a WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (Obama, then Biden, and now Trump), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink — into WW3 — in order to become able to achieve world-conquest. This is as-if Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962 — but, thankfully, he didn’t; so, WW3 was averted, on that occasion.

How often have you heard or seen the situation in the matter of Cuba being near to the White House (near to America’s central command) being analogized to Ukraine’s being near — far nearer, in fact — to The Kremlin (Russia’s central command)? No, you probably haven’t encountered this historical context before, because it’s not being published — at least not in America and its allied countries. It’s being hidden.

The Ukrainian war actually started after the democratically elected President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, shortly following that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in 2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to become allied with the United States against his adjoining country Russia. This was being urged upon him so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.

The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said (NOT in 2022 as is alleged in the U.S.-controlled nations). This war was started in February 2014 by a U.S. coup which replaced the democratically elected and neutralist Ukrainian President, with a U.S. selected and rabidly anti-Russian leader, who immediately imposed an ethnic-cleansing program to get rid of the residents in the regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the overthrown President. Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear strike. (As I headlined on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. The U.S. had demanded this, especially because it will place American nuclear missiles far nearer to The Kremlin than at present, only 507 miles away — not as close as Ukraine, but the closest yet.)

Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled goverment an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

The U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic (where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783), regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires.)

Then came the Minsk Agreements (#1 & #2, with #2 being the final version, which is shown here, as a U.N. Security Council Resolution), between Ukraine and the separatist region in its far east, and which the U.S. Government refused to participate in, but the U.S.-installed Ukrainian government (then under the oligarch Petro Poroshenko) signed it in order to have a chance of Ukraine’s gaining EU membership, but never complied with any of it; and, so, the war continued); and, then, finally, as the Ukrainian government (now under Volodmyr Zelensky) was greatly intensifying its shelling of the break-away far-eastern region, Russia presented, to both the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance against Russia, two proposed agreements for negotiation (one to U.S., the other to NATO), but neither the U.S. nor its NATO agreed to negotiate. The key portions of the two 17 December 2021 proposed Agreements, with both the U.S. and with its NATO, were, in regards to NATO:

Article 1

The Parties shall guide in their relations by the principles of cooperation, equal and indivisible security. They shall not strengthen their security individually, within international organizations, military alliances or coalitions at the expense of the security of other Parties. …

Article 4

The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. With the consent of all the Parties such deployments can take place in exceptional cases to eliminate a threat to security of one or more Parties.

Article 5

The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.

Article 6

All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.

And, in regards to the U.S.:

Article 2

The Parties shall seek to ensure that all international organizations, military alliances and coalitions in which at least one of the Parties is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.

Article 3

The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.

Article 4

The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.

Any reader here can easily click onto the respective link to either proposed Agreement, in order to read that entire document, so as to evaluate whether or not all of its proposed provisions are acceptable and reasonable. What was proposed by Russia in each of the two was only a proposal, and the other side (the U.S. side) in each of the two instances, was therefore able to pick and choose amongst those proposed provisions, which ones were accepted, and to negotiate regarding any of the others; but, instead, the U.S. side simply rejected all of them.

On 7 January 2022, the Associated Press (AP) headlined “US, NATO rule out halt to expansion, reject Russian demands”, and reported:

Washington and NATO have formally rejected Russia’s key demands for assurances that the US-led military bloc will not expand closer towards its borders, leaked correspondence reportedly shows.

According to documents seen by Spanish daily El Pais and published on Wednesday morning, Moscow’s calls for a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted as a member of NATO were dismissed following several rounds of talks between Russian and Western diplomats. …

The US-led bloc denied that it posed a threat to Russia. …

The US similarly rejected the demand that NATO does not expand even closer to Russia’s borders. “The United States continues to firmly support NATO’s Open Door Policy.”

NATO-U.S. was by now clearly determined to get Ukraine into NATO and to place its nukes so near to The Kremlin as to constitute, like a checkmate in chess, a forced defeat of Russia, a capture of its central command. This was, but in reverse, the situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did agree to, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable, America’s recent Presidents are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (America’s recent Presidents), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink in order to become able to achieve world-conquest.

Russia did what it had to do: it invaded Ukraine, on 24 February 2022. If Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962, then the U.S. would have invaded and taken over Cuba, because the only other alternative would have been to skip that step and go directly to invade the Soviet Union itself — directly to WW3. Under existing international law, either response — against Cuba, or against the U.S.S.R. — would have been undecidable, because Truman’s U.N. Charter refused to allow “aggression” to be defined (Truman, even at the time of the San Francisco Conference, 25 April to 26 June 1945, that drew up the U.N. Charter, was considering for the U.S. to maybe take over the entire world). Would the aggression in such an instance have been by Khrushchev (and by Eisenhower for having similarly placed U.S. missiles too close to Moscow in 1959), or instead by JFK for responding to that threat? International law needs to be revised so as to prohibit ANY nation that is “too near” to a superpower’s central command, from allying itself with a different superpower so as to enable that other superpower to place its strategic forces so close to that adjoining or nearby superpower as to present a mortal threat against its national security. But, in any case, 317 miles from The Kremlin would easily be far “too close”; and, so, Russia must do everything possible to prevent that from becoming possible. America and its colonies (‘allies’) are CLEARLY in the wrong on this one. (And I think that JFK was likewise correct in the 1962 case — though to a lesser extent because the distance was four times larger in that case — America was the defender and NOT the aggressor in that matter.)

If this finding appears to you to be too contradictory to what you have read and heard in the past for you to be able to believe it, then my article earlier today (March 4th), “The Extent of Lying in the U.S. Press” presents also five other widespread-in-The-West lies, so that you will be able to see that there is nothing particularly unusual about this one, other than that this case could very possibly produce a world-ending nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. People in the mainstream news-business are beholden to the billionaires who control the people who control (hire and fire) themselves, and owe their jobs to that — NOT really to the audience. This is the basic reality. To ignore it is to remain deceived. But you can consider yourself fortunate to be reading this, because none of the mainstream news-sites is allowed to publish articles such as this. None of the mainstream will. They instead deceived you. It’s what they are hired (by their owners and advertisers) to do, so as to continue ruling the Government (by getting you to vote for their candidates).

Furthermore, I received today from the great investigative journalist Lucy Komisar, who has done many breakthrough news-reports exposing the con-man whom U.S. billionaires have assisted — back even before Obama started imposing sanctions against Russia in 2012 (Bill Browder) — to provide the ‘evidence’ on the basis of which Obama started imposing anti-Russian sanctions, in 2012 (the Magnitsky Act sanctions), recent articles from her, regarding how intentional the press’s refusals to allow the truth to be reported, actually are: on 28 February 2025, her “20 fake US media articles on the Browder Magnitsky hoax and one honest reporter from Cyprus”, and on 4 December 2024, her “MSNBC killed reporter Ken Dilanian’s exposé of the Wm Browder-Magnitsky hoax. State Department knew about it.”

This isn’t to say, however, that ALL mainstream news-reports in the U.S. empire are false. For example, the Democratic Party site Common Dreams, headlined authentic news against the Republican Party, on March 4th, “Trump Threatens Campus Protesters With Imprisonment: ‘Trump here is referring to pro-Palestine protests so you won’t hear a peep from conservatives or even pro-Israel liberals,’ said one journalist.”, by Julia Conley; and so did the Republican site N.Y. Post, headlining on 15 October 2020, against the Democratic Party (which Democratic Party media similarly ignored), “Emails reveal how Hunter Biden tried to cash in big on behalf of family with Chinese firm.” However, NONE of the empire’s mainstream media publish reports against the U.S. Government or against its empire; so, the lies that have been covered here are virtually universal — go unchallenged — throughout the empire.

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

The post Why America, the EU, and Ukraine, Should Lose to Russia in Ukraine’s War appeared first on LewRockwell.

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When I started this publication, my primary goal was to help those injured by the COVID-19 vaccines, as other vaccines had severely damaged many people I was close to, but what I was seeing with the COVID-19 vaccines was rapidly eclipsing all the injuries those earlier vaccines had caused.

Sadly, as I’ve seen again and again, one of the most significant challenges people in that situation face is getting any type of recognition for their situation as it’s in too many people’s interest to sweep everything under the rug and deny the injury ever occurred, so in many cases, creating that simple recognition is one of the most critical steps to take. Consider for example, this woman’s experience, which sadly is quite representative of what the injured are going through.

Recently, I was asked to review “Follow the Silenced” a new documentary (which the above clip is from) that attempts to shed light on what the vaccine injured are going through and is having its premier in Hollywood this Saturday (and I highly encourage you to attend if you are in the area).

After watching it, I realized the documentary accomplished two things that are quite challenging to do: provide a clear window into what the vaccine injured are really going through and piece together how an inconceivable catastrophe like this could have ever happened.

Design Constraints

Frequently, when trying to understand a complex and disorienting process from the outside, one of the most beneficial approaches is to understand the fundamental constraints under which those orchestrating it are working, and then use those constraints to predict and model their behavior.

Sensitivity and Specificity

One of the most common constraints is the trade-off between sensitivity (ensuring you hit your intended target) and specificity (ensuring you do not overshoot your target and cause collateral damage), which often forces you to prioritize one over the other. For example:

•Do you want a justice system that consistently convicts criminals (“guilty until proven innocent”) or one that prevents wrongful convictions (“innocent until proven guilty”)?

•Do you want a diagnostic test that consistently doesn’t miss any cases of the disease (e.g., COVID-19 or cancer) or a test that avoids many false diagnoses?

•Do you want to protect the most vulnerable members of society (e.g., with lockdowns and mandates) or consider the general population’s well-being (e.g., making the COVID policies voluntary)?

In turn, I would argue that many problems in our society result from an existing policy or technology having either poor sensitivity or poor specificity and neither side (the one that wants sensitivity or the one that wants specificity) being willing to see the importance of the other side’s position and find a palatable compromise between them.

Likewise, in many cases, there are no “easy” compromises, so frequently the compromise our society has (and the institutions built around accommodating that compromise), while not ideal, took an immense amount of work to arrive at. This is important to recognize because in most cases if attempt to quickly create a compromise between these two conflicting polarities out of scratch, it will often fall short and have many major issues that are arguably far worse that what preceded it (e.g., you frequently see this in countries after the existing government collapses and people try to create new institutions out of thin air).

Note: in many cases, if it’s impossible to find a satisfactory balance between sensitivity and specificity on an issue, it means that the wrong approaches are being used to navigate the situation. For example, I always believed it was fundamentally impossible to address COVID by “stopping the spread” and mass vaccination. In contrast, if we’d made the effective early COVID-19 therapies available to the public, this would have solved COVID (as natural immunity was vastly superior to vaccine immunity and the existing treatments were effective enough that they kept you out of the hospital and thus all the societal consequences of COVID-19). In contrast, when these unsatisfactory trade offs exist, the government will typically default to using its power to force the public to comply with its chosen approach.

Drug Dosing

In the case of drug design, a similar issue exists, as you want a drug to “work” but you also want to avoid “toxicity.” Since everything has a toxic dose (with the possible exception of oxygen), every drug must be dosed so that there’s enough of it for it to “work,” but simultaneously not enough that it causes significant side effects. In the real world, this results in major challenges such as:

•While some drugs have a fairly wide window between an effective and toxic dose (e.g., ivermectin) others have a fairly narrow one (e.g., chemotherapy). Because of this, some drugs will inevitably have side effects, and in many cases the more toxic ones (e.g., chemo) need to be given in a very controlled manner (e.g., intravenously at an infusion center) where acute side effects can be immediately managed.

•Everyone metabolizes drugs differently, so as a result, the standard dose is often not appropriate. For example, the elderly have a slower drug metabolism and thus are more likely to develop toxic blood levels of a drug (but nonetheless get the same dosing as young adults) and many members of the population are much more sensitive to pharmaceuticals, so they will react to much lower doses that the standard patients.
Note: “sensitive” patients (discussed here) share many characteristics (e.g., joint hypermobility), but despite being quite common are rarely recognized by the medical system, something I believe is a result of their existence undermining the existing pharmaceutical dosing paradigm.

In turn, I believe the correct solution for all of this is to tailor your dose to the individual patients (e.g., many pharmaceuticals that frequently cause a large number of problems have a vastly improved risk benefit profile when far lower doses are used and as a result many of my colleagues often use these non-standard lower doses).

Unfortunately, the business of medicine requires doctors to quickly evaluate patients and then prescribe a medication to them, so if doctors needed to take the time to precisely ascertain the correct dose for each drug they gave out, this would radically reduce their prescribing (and thus drug sales). As such, doses are routinely chosen that will inevitably injure a certain number of patients.
Note: while I disagree with many of the standard doses, a lot of work goes into creating them (e.g., it frequently takes years of research to bring a “safe enough” and “effective enough” drug to market). As a result, the odds are quite high that a rushed pharmaceutical developed in under a year (e.g., the COVID-19 vaccines) will have incorrectly chosen doses that create significant issues

Vaccine Dosing

Vaccines are more complex to dose than standard medications because they work by creating a permanent immune response, and hence persist long after being given to the recipient. Since people’s immune systems vary, the degree to which they persist varies greatly. As a result, it is much harder to find vaccine doses that have an acceptable balance of sensitivity and specificity (efficacy and safety). Because of this, the “solution” has been to declare all vaccines ‘safe and effective’ and then simply bury the inevitable injuries that come up. For example:

•An extensive apparatus has been created to demonize and discredit anyone who does not believe vaccines are entirely safe and effective (e.g. which I’ve seen happen to many people I knew who were injured by dangerous products like the HPV vaccine).

•Drug regulators all prioritize efficacy over safety. This in turn, incentivizes drug manufacturers to use excessive doses that are guaranteed to elicit the desired antibody response rather than ones that avoid unneeded toxicity.

•Thanks to the 1986 The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, vaccine manufacturers cannot be sued for injuries from their products.

•Since the justification for many routine vaccines is quite questionable, a vast framework of vaccine mandates has been created to sidestep informed consent or discussion of vaccines prior to taking them.
Note: as detailed here, the risk to benefit ratio of vaccines varies greatly (e.g., some of the routine vaccines given to our children cannot be justified), so the industry cannot afford ever to have discussions on those topics commence (as that would significantly reduce sales).

COVID Vaccine Dosing

With the development of vaccines for COVID-19, a few additional challenges emerged such as:

•It was very hard to develop a vaccine for SARS as the virus rapidly mutated, and vaccines would frequently worsen SARS infections.

•There was a huge rush to get a vaccine to market as quickly as possible, in part because whoever got the first ones to market would get the billions allocated for the vaccines and in part because it was likely the virus would disappear on its own (due to herd immunity or it mutating to a less dangerous strain) so before long the market would disappear.
Note: despite not vaccinating, COVID disappeared in many parts of Africa that did “nothing” to stop the virus, whereas in contrast COVID has persisted in the countries that jeopardized our herd immunity by pushing vaccines.

In turn, the mRNA platforms offered an enticing solution to addressing the pandemic, as it was both:

•A technology individuals had wanted to get to market for years (but until an “emergency” could not due to the immense difficulty of finding an mRNA dose that was both somewhat effective and safe enough to bring to market).

•A platform that made it possible to produce a vaccine in a few months rather than waiting far longer with the more traditional vaccine designs.

Unfortunately, the mRNA vaccines also had a significant number of issues, such as it being an untested technology (with serious safety issues that had remained unsolvable for decades). Furthermore, it was even more difficult to determine the correct dose for them, as:

•There was very little time to conduct the studies needed to determine the correct dose.

•The vaccine functioned by mass producing spike protein in the body. This both created acute and chronic issues, due to the clots it created (e.g., due to the spike protein being highly disruptive to the physiologic zeta potential of the body) and due to the spike protein (along with the vaccine being designed to have those spike proteins coat your cells) being highly highly conducive to creating autoimmune disorders (which often could not be detected in brief clinical trials).

•There was not enough time to create a robust and consistent manufacturing process (which led to significant variations in the doses people received and many “hot” vaccine lots).

•Since the amount of vaccine produced in the body depended upon how long the body decided to turn its mRNA into spike protein, the total dose wildly varied—to the point that it was essentially not possible to predict what a given dose would ultimately correlate to inside the recipient. To “address” this, the industry decided to modify the mRNA so that it resisted degradation (thereby ensuring “enough” spike protein would be produced), which unfortunately had the consequence of causing it to persist for years in some of the recipients.

Note: given all of this, I was immensely curious to see what dose would be chosen. In turn, Pfizer (despite being notorious for pushing profitable but unsafe products on the market) decided to use a dose 3.3X lower than Moderna (which I attributed to Moderna’s desperation to get a successful product to market). Remarkably, despite Moderna causing 50% more injuries than Pfizer, the drug regulators never recommended against it.

Vaccine Trials

To address many of these issues, large double blind clinical trials are conducted to figure out the best path forward, which due to their “robustness” are given a very heavy weight by the drug regulators and doctors in practice. Unfortunately, adverse events will frequently emerge in these trials due to the inherent difficulty in making “safe” vaccines.

In turn, since so much money is invested in the vaccine and its costly trial, the trials will inevitably be doctored so that vaccine efficacy is inflated and most of the injuries are swept under the rug (e.g. by relabeling them as something benign or claiming they were completely unrelated to the vaccine).
Note: a 2014 Cochrane review proved that smaller (affordable) observational trials will get the same results as larger RCTs

As such, appalling conduct is frequently observed throughout vaccine clinical trials. For instance, I was able to predict most of the gross malfeasance that happened throughout the COVID vaccine trials because the exact same thing had occurred throughout the HPV vaccines trials—but despite being repeatedly informed about it (and petitioned by many parties to do something) the FDA refused to admit the vaccines were not safe or effective and instead actively worked to cover up the evidence of their harm.
Note: in this article, I showed how the exact same gross malfeasance we saw with the HPV vaccines occurred throughout the COVID-19 trials.

Fortunately, due to the public spotlight on the COVID vaccines, the large number of people in the trials and a robust alternative media (e.g., Substack) being will to cover what transpired, many whistleblowers from the trials came forward to share exactly what actually happened in the (fraudulent) vaccine trials—many of whom are featured in Follow the Silenced.

Marketing the COVID Vaccines

If a product or policy has poor sensitivity or specificity, a few common mechanisms exist to prevent it from being rolled out. These include:

•Having drug regulators require a product to prove it is safe and effective before allowing it to be sold.

•Lawsuits being filed against a manufacturer for the injuries their product creates.

•Mass political protest against it (and dissident politicians being willing to advocate for the protesters within government).

•The public refusing to comply with the policy or buy the product.

Since the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines were quite poor and much remained uncertain, one of the industry’s greatest challenges thus was ensuring people would take them. As such, the standard protections were quickly eliminated (e.g., the regulators green-lighted the vaccines regardless of the issues brought to their attention, and the COVID vaccines were given complete immunity from lawsuits).

Since this was not enough, a massive effort was made to sell the vaccines which used increasingly severe tactics to convince people to vaccinate, each of which was phased in once the previous one had done all it could and harsher tactics gradually became politically feasible as the unvaccinated constituted a smaller and smaller minority of the population.

Essentially, that campaign went as follows:

1. Create as much fear about COVID-19 as possible (which was made possible by the mass media initially denying COVID would ever turn into a problem).
2. Use that fear to justify heavy disruptions to everyday life (e.g., lockdowns and social isolation).
3. Present vaccines as the wondrous solution that could get us our freedom and lives back and then have the entire media relentlessly promote them regardless of what happened.
4. Politicize the vaccine issue so many (on the left) would become vaccinated purely to “win” and hence not examine the risks and benefits with the vaccines.
5. Have healthcare workers initially market the vaccines since they have the highest rate of compliance with vaccination and their recommendations are highly trusted by the public.
6. Initially sell the vaccines under a scarcity model where many demographics weren’t yet eligible to have it (and as a result people would jump on the chance to get the vaccines the moment they could).
7. Use incentives (e.g., gift cards, lotteries, junk food, drugs or sex workers) to convince those on the fence to vaccinate.
8. Blame the (“95% effective”) vaccine’s inevitable failures on people not vaccinating, and use that to justify both social stigma toward the unvaccinated (particularly from those politically invested in the issue) and soft mandates.
9. Use the soft mandates to pave the way for harsh mandates.
10. Slip in boosters (and then booster mandates) once no one was looking and the regular vaccine sales market had been saturated.
11. Do all of the previous quickly enough, that people would not have time to discover the vaccines were unsafe and ineffective before getting theirs.

Note: since this push was so aggressive and unprecedented, many still wonder if there was an ulterior motive (e.g., convincing the population to vaccinate before they became personally aware of how dangerous the vaccines were, population reduction, changing the genetic makeup of humanity or eliminating unvaccinated controls that could show how harmful the COVID vaccines were to their recipients).

Since this progression was fairly logical (given the constraints being worked with), I thus knew the moment vaccine incentives came out that mandates were around the corner. At the same time however, given how unsafe and ineffective the vaccines were, enacting it placed significant stress on our institutions, which in turn required them enacting a series of draconian tactics that forestalled (but did not eliminate) the public’s loss of trust in the vaccines and eventually resulted in the public losing their trust in both our healthcare authorities, doctors and hospitals and the mass media.

Those tactics included:

•Having the mass media use every tactic possible to promote the vaccines (e.g., the H.H.S. spent almost a billion dollars marketing them).

•Having the FDA and CDC stonewall all evidence of harm and relentlessly push the vaccines.
Note: as I showed in a recent article, this was done to such an extreme degree that the FDA’s two top vaccine scientists (who had been in their positions for over a decade and deeply believed in vaccines) eventually resigned because they felt a few months was not enough time to complete a rudimentary safety assessment of the vaccines.

•Targeting any doctor who spoke out about the vaccines (so others would be too scared to speak out), and censoring any criticisms of vaccination from both the mainstream media and social media (despite this being unconstitutional).

•Politicizing the vaccine issue so much that individuals who were injured did not feel safe speaking out about their injuries (as they would be attacked for “fueling vaccine hesitancy”).

•Encouraging doctors to disregard vaccine injuries from their patients.

Read the Whole Article

The post What Happens After a Vaccine Injury? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one of the 13 agencies Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy oversees, last week quietly linked to a database (via an X post) that lists conflicts of interest within the CDC’s powerful vaccine decision making committee — the Advisory Commission on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

The post on the agency’s website last Friday is part of Kennedy’s drive to promote ‘radical transparency’ within HHS. While refreshing, it’s also worrisome how much some members of ACIP have direct ties to Big Pharma.

Established in March 1964, the ACIP is composed of fifteen regular members, who are experts in the fields of immunization practices and public health; in the use of vaccines in clinical practice or preventive medicine; in clinical or laboratory vaccine research; and in the assessment of vaccine efficacy and safety. The ACIP also requires that at least one member have expertise in consumer perspectives and/or social and community aspects of immunization programs.

On its face, it looks like ACIP takes necessary steps to prevent conflicts of interest: Members are disallowed to be employed by, or involved with, employees of vaccine manufacturing companies – and individuals who hold patents for a vaccine can not be on the ACIP.

But the ACIP also includes ex-official members from Federal agencies involved with vaccine issues, and non-voting liaisons from medical and professional societies and organizations. That raises red flags.

The group typically meets in front of the public three times a year. Once voted on and approved by the director of the CDC, the vaccines that are given a green light are typically mandated for children by individual states. Little known fact: ACIP members are the people who decide what vaccines your children must take to be permitted to attend public schools.

The companies that make the vaccines – Merck, Pfizer, Moderna, among others – are granted protection from civil liability under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. This is why claims of vaccine injury are brought against the Secretary of HHS – not pharmaceutical companies.

All this aside, the CDC recent posting reveals compelling details about ACIP members’ conflicts of interest and thereby opens the organization up to further scrutiny.

One case in point of a conflict of interest the CDC revealed involves Dr. Wilbur Chen, who served on the ACIP from December 13,2020 to June 30, 2024. At a February 28, 2021 meeting, Chen reported that, according to the CDC posting, he was “involved in clinical studies of COVID vaccines until October 2020. He abstained from COVID-19 vaccine approval vote.”

This is interesting information, and it is good that Dr. Chen did not participate in the vote. However, one must wonder about the influence of Chen on the ACIP members who were voting on research on a vaccine with which he was deeply involved. Dr. Chen is clearly a person with great influence in the field of vaccinology, as described here.

Chen served as a principal investigator under Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute on Allergic and Infectious Disease (NIAID) and received funding for his work by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Chen is connected to the most influential power brokers in the world of vaccinology and virology. How can we assess the impact of Chen on the votes of other commission members? Just because he recuses himself on one or more votes, is it ethical for him to be a voting member of the ACIP at all?

Another example: Dr. Robert Atmar, who served on the ACIP from July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2020. At the December 19-20, 2020 meeting Atmar, the CDC revealed, “Abstained from COVID-19 vaccine vote and voted on a general vote on prioritization for which no members need to abstain.”

Atmar, the CDC’s new post reveals, reported that he “is serving as the Co-Director of the Clinical Operations Unit (COU) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium (IDCRC) that is working within the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN) to evaluate Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine candidates in Phase 3 clinical trials. He is the Site Principal Investigator (PI), including those produced by Moderna, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Novavax, and Sanofi.”

Dr. Atmar is yet another federally-funded principal investigator, another person of great importance in vaccinology as explained here. Being a principal investigator on federal research initiatives is a highly desirable position for scientists.

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), “The Principal Investigator (PI) has overall responsibility for the design, conduct, reporting and scientific integrity of the research.” Further, “The NIH PI may assign responsibility for specific aspects of the conduct of the research to appropriately qualified individuals. However, at all times the PI retains overall responsibility for the conduct of the research and must assure both the protocol and the research team’s actions are compliant with law, regulation, and policy.”

Again, just because these disclosures about Dr. Atmar have been made, it still begins the question: why was he permitted to be a voting member of ACIP at all?

In his book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy documented Dr. Fauci’s use of PI’s as agents for his agenda going back to his handling of the HIV crisis in the 1980s and the promotion of the toxic drug, AZT.

In just the above two examples from the CDC webpage, we see the pervasive involvement of ACIP members with the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Chen and Dr. Atmar may well be good people, but it is clear that both men are industry insiders.

The American people should know that and be able to assess whether members of the ACIP are beholden to them or to Big Pharma.

One would think that the legacy media would support Kennedy’s moves for transparency.

One would be wrong.

In its reporting on the recent CDC disclosures, NBC downplayed the issue. It instead rolled out experts who immediately criticized the conflict-of-interest disclosures.

One such expert – Arthur Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. “The database could be used to sow doubt about the advice given by ACIP, giving a false appearance that members have strong ties to the industry,” Caplan told NBC.

The two samples I selected demonstrate that Caplan is wrong. ACIP members are deeply embedded within the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex.

Could it be that Caplan’s employer, NYU, also has pharmaceutical industry ties which influence Caplan’s comments?

This National Library of Medicine report exposes the ties between medical schools and drug companies.

NYU professor Dan Littman, for example, is on the Board of Pfizer.

NYU adjunct instructor, Raymond Kerins, has long standing ties to Merck, Bayer, and Pfizer.

Here are the Pfizer’s Board Members. You might recognize Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA Commissioner.

NYU and Merck have worked together on vaccines in the past, as shown here.

It should also be noted that Caplan’s employer, NYU, received over 72 million dollars spread out over 131 federal grants, as detailed in this NIH report.

One would think that Dr. Caplan, a medical ethicist, might be a little more forthright about the pervasive influence of Big Pharma, given his own employers’ deep ties to the larger complex of organizations that constitute the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex.

NBC also featured another industry expert – the ubiquitous Dr. Paul Offit – who criticized Kennedy, saying the HHS Secretary is wrong to suggest Big Pharma influences vaccine policy. “There is not a single shred of evidence showing that is true,” Offit proclaimed.

In my article in The Kennedy Beacon last week, “Measles Mania: What the Legacy Media Won’t Tell You,” I noted that in 2009, Age of Autism’s Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill reported that Offit earned 29 million dollars from a vaccine he invented that the ACIP approved while he was an active commission member.

Just like in the examples of current ACIP members shown above, Dr. Offit also recused himself from that vote. But does that really put him off the hook?

In the end, Dr. Offit and the rest of the Big Pharma insiders still got exactly what they wanted.

Is 29 million dollars enough evidence for you, Dr. Offit?

The corruption at the CDC’s ACIP runs deep. Offit, Chen and Atmar are just the tip of the iceberg.

This originally appeared on The Kennedy Beacon.

The post The CDC Reveals ACIP Members’ Conflicts of Interest. It’s Just the Tip of the Iceberg. appeared first on LewRockwell.

This collection of essays by experts in diverse fields applies libertarian philosophy and free-market economic theory to literature and media. The volume proceeds largely according to the chronological order of the works under consideration, moving from sixteenth-century literary texts and drama to comic books to contemporary cinema and television series. Several chapters bring to bear the contrast between capitalism and statism, mostly focusing on the workings of the market economy versus central planning but with some attention also devoted to the theme of freedom versus government coercion. Some of the more specific economic concepts used in the analyses—such as the principle of marginal utility, scarcity, division of labor and autarky, private property, and entrepreneurism—not only provide insights into the economic and political premises embedded in creative works but can help clear up common misconceptions related to capitalism as well.

As the subtitle suggests, the project was inspired by the achievement of Paul A. Cantor (1945–2022), Clifton Waller Barrett Professor at the University of Virginia. One of the most adventurous culture critics of our time, Cantor was edgy and iconoclastic while always deeply grounded in historical research. He achieved a large scholarly and popular following in part because he was interested in everything—from Shakespeare to South Park, from H. G. Wells to Gilligan’s Island. His scholarship was so prolific and all-embracing that it led some to question whether the same person could have authored such a breadth of work. “Yes,” replies Peter Hufnagel, creator of the website prof.Cantor, “the Paul A. Cantor who writes about Averroism in Dante’s Divine Comedy is the same Paul A. Cantor who writes about Walter White as a tragic hero in Breaking Bad” (“The Nature of the Website”). As John Rodden has put it, “Cantor was not just an eminent scholar of the European Renaissance but a Renaissance man himself in the sphere of arts and letters” (“Paul Cantor: Renaissance Scholar as Renaissance Man”).

Yet it is not only the stunning range of Cantor’s interests that motivated this volume, but also, and especially, his pioneering interdisciplinary methodology which brought libertarian philosophy and sound economic theory to bear on matters of culture. Working against the grain, Cantor turned specifically to free-market economics in his analysis of literature and media. As Alberto Mingardi aptly remarked, such an approach made Cantor a “rare thing,” that is, “an intellectual in the humanities— even more, a literary critic—who had some sympathy for capitalism. At one level, this sympathy emerged in the very fact that he was not a snob: together with his Shakespeare studies, he cultivated an interest in popular culture that he understood as a living thing, and sometimes a beautiful thing too” (“Paul Cantor RIP”).

[…]

The present collection of essays, like Cantor and Stephen Cox’s seminal volume Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture (Mises Institute, 2009), applies libertarian criticism across different genres and media, time periods, and geographical locations.

[…]

The first three chapters may serve as a reflection on and further development of the methodology in different ways. The opening chapter provides further insight into Cantor’s interpretations of Shakespeare’s Roman plays with the assistance of Cantor’s private correspondence on the subject (David Gordon). The next chapter uses tools of libertarian analysis to develop a new theory of comedy and then test it against various types of humor, including some that have not fit previous theories (Stephen Cox). The third essay of this group applies an Austrian lens to the “commercial self-fashioning” of an early seventeenth-century public and literary figure known as the Roaring Girl, arguing that “capitalism does not constrain but enables the disruption of rigid frameworks that govern who or what one can be” (Katharine Gillespie).

The following five chapters provide new readings of canonical English, Russian, Italian, and German literary works from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, namely, Ben Jonson’s comedy The Alchemist (Peter Hufnagel), Leo Tolstoy’s historical novel War and Peace (Edward P. Stringham and Spencer D. Brown), Carlo Collodi’s children’s book Pinocchio (Salvatore Taibi), H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The War of the Worlds (Michael Valdez Moses), and Hermann Hesse’s spiritual novel Siddhartha (Jo Ann Skousen). Each chapter moves deftly between the literary and historical context of the author and a close reading of the text. While all five uncover a contrast between collectivist and free-market visions within the fictional work itself, two contributors find this opposition to be part of the author’s educational intention while the other three contributors see the varied representations of capitalism and state power to be the result of the authors’ ambiguous or contradictory economic notions.

But canonical literature is only half the interest—and half the fun—of this book. In keeping with Cantor’s deep interest in the popular and the vernacular, contributors offer much that is new about non-literary genres. The chapter analyzing the evolution of Scrooge McDuck (Alberto Mingardi) may serve as a bridge between the previous five essays focused on single- authored classics of early modern and modern literature to the volume’s subsequent chapters devoted to popular film and television. Tracing the development of this fictional character—one of Cantor’s favorites—across comic book and TV cartoon series from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, this chapter brings to light different attitudes toward business in American society.

The final four chapters bring a libertarian perspective to the study of film and television in the United States. The chapter on four films by different directors centered on the 2007–2009 financial crisis both analyzes the techniques used within the films to represent the crisis and assesses the accuracy and completeness of the narratives, particularly with regards to the governmental actions and policies that led to the problem (Stefano Adamo). The next two chapters explore television shows that take us to the fictional frontier of outer space and the American Far West, respectively. The chapter on science fiction TV series reveals ways in which some of the most popular shows from the 1970s to the 2020s dramatize core economic issues and concepts (Matthew McCaffrey and Carmen-Elena Dorobat). The chapter on “the Yellowstone universe,” in particular the prequels 1883 and 1923, analyzes recent TV Westerns along the lines established by Cantor and McMaken in their scholarship on the American Western genre (Matt Spivey).

The concluding chapter of this section and of the volume as a whole, written by Paul A. Cantor himself, scrutinizes the treatment of capitalism in the reality show Undercover Boss. This global television series, which originated in England in 2009 and has continued to the present there, has been both independently produced and rebroadcast in several countries. Cantor sets the U.S. version of Undercover Boss against another reality television series featuring the business world, Shark Tank, which premiered in the United States in 2009 and follows the format of a Japanese reality show originating in 2001.

In sum, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism aims to contribute to the scholarly conversation in this burgeoning field by bringing together some of its newest as well as some of its most prominent voices. The volume not only builds upon Cantor’s groundbreaking work but offers a range of directions for libertarian literary and media scholarship in the future. The essays in this collection should be of interest to both humanists and social scientists working across disciplines, traditions, languages, and eras. It is also designed to capture the attention of general readers outside the academy. Analysis of the arts, after all, is a vital part of “praxeology,” the term coined by Mises to indicate the analysis of all human action. What one learns from the study of Shakespeare—or Scrooge McDuck—can provide authentic insights into the workings of the world we inhabit.

[The above paragraphs are excerpted from the volume’s introduction.]

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