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“No mountain or ocean can distance people who have shared aspirations,” China’s President Xi Jinping said in July 2024, addressing leaders from fellow Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states and a few other nations in Astana, Kazakhstan.

It is not reaching too far, saying that this year’s 25th SCO Summit (SCO) in Tianjin, China, from 31 August to 1 September 2025, fulfilled – and more – President Xi’s vision of 2024. The summit caused a tectonic shift in the conventional world order.

China’s Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Bin told a news conference in Beijing, shortly before the SCO summit, that the 2025 SCO event be

“One of China’s most important head-of-state and home-court diplomatic events this year”.

As the Economist says, “A New Reality is Taking hold.” The “new reality” is not anti-US or anti-West; it is just separating the western unipolar aspirations from the newly created multi-polar, or perhaps better, multi-block, world, where countries aim at a peaceful cooperation towards a joint future with shared benefits.

The SCO was established in 2001 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Today the SCO consists of ten member-states with headquarters in Beijing. In addition to the founding members, SCO members have increased by India, Iran, Belarus, and Pakistan. SCO members account for 23% of the world’s GDP and for 43% of the world’s population.

Further attendance included high-level government officials from Myanmar, Egypt, Cambodia, Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives, Turkey, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn, and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

This year’s summit made clearly the SCO the guiding light for the Global South which includes the 11 BRICS countries, plus the 10 BRICS partners, added at the 16th BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, in October 2024.

While even the UNSG, Mr. Guterres, was invited – while the UN was or still is (?) considered by the US and the West in general as the World Organization in the western camp – President Trump felt snubbed by China, “left out” from the world shifting SCO event in Tianjin.

So, Trump invented a last-minute opportunity to leave his mark on the meeting by requesting President Xi literally on the eve of the SCO summit for “military talks,” a phone call between the two defense ministers (in the US now called War Minister, as the Ministry of Defense has been re-christened by Trump as War Ministry).

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said that Beijing rejected the proposal, reasoning “a lack of mutual understanding between the two countries”, asking a pertinent question:

“Is there any sincerity in and significance of any communication like this?”

Of course not. Trump just wanted to interfere in the SCO summit, showing his self-styled emperor head. But to no avail. The West was absent – the “naked emperor” as well as his European puppets, the (almost) defunct European Union, and especially the non-elected and every time more rejected European Commission (EC).

Imagine just a few weeks earlier, a delegation of the EC including Kaja Kallas, the Commission’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, the Commission’s top-diplomat so to speak, visited Beijing to discuss tariffs, but on the side they were insinuating that China should distance herself from Russia.

So much aggression, let alone undiplomatic thinking and acting – like at home spending taxpayers’ money destined for social programs, instead for a monster armament to go to war against Russia – aggression and a war philosophy that can only lead to a EU downfall which is accelerating by the day.

To add insult to injury, the symbolic leader of the EU, Germany, her Chancellor Friedrich Merz said recently:

 “Putin is a war criminal. He is perhaps the most serious war criminal of our time that we have seen on a large scale. We must be clear about how to deal with war criminals: There is no room for leniency.”

It is time for the Real World, the Global South, to distance themselves from the western warmongers and war-makers. This is just happening with the 25th SCO Summit – a new awakening for peace, cooperation, and togetherness in the spirit of working towards a future of shared benefits.

A future with shared benefits is not possible by western economic standards and principles, that followed since 1989 the so-called Washington Consensus, an un-stated agreement between the three most powerful western financial institutions, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank – to “subdue” the “emerging and developing world” with debt, so as to get a hold of their natural resources.

This disequilibrium already started with the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference during which the World Bank and IMF were created, two institutions which were and still are veto-dominated by Washington. Real economic equality and development had and up to now has no chance under these circumstances. Instead, it is abusive exploitation and neocolonialism.

The SCO decision at their Summit to create an SCO Development Bank bodes well with a new future of togetherness and cooperation. It fits right in with the Chinese Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB). It is a vivid sign of pulling free from the neoliberal western financial institutions making their living by exploiting “socioeconomic development”, instead of enhancing it.

Together and perhaps with a newly furbished BRICS New Development Bank, they will allow the Global South to evolve and grow according to their sovereign and independent terms, using instead of an isolating “protective” tariff system – Trump-style – their comparative advantages to deal and trade with each other – tariff-free. No conflicts but cooperation.

See also this.

This SCO Summit was not a western-style aggression event of “The Willing”, but a China-initiated reorientation of the world order, in which long-term objectives were envisioned by real leaders who had seen and lived enough of western-dictated aggressions, wars and destruction, but instead opted for Peace and Cooperation – and it very much looks like they may succeed.

In his opening speech, President Xi made this point clear:

“Humanity is again faced with a choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, and win-win outcomes; or zero-sum games.”

This clearly creates a growing chasm between East and West. The former seeking peaceful constructive development, while the latter are still clinging to their destructive economic model, wars and killing for a growing military complex and a tech-world that goes hand in hand with the agenda of transhumanization and destruction of humanity.

The highly successful SCO Summit in Tianjin was deliberately staged just before China’s Grand Military Parade on Tiananmen Square, marking 80 years since the end of World War II. It was the culmination of a new “World Order”, one of Peace – demonstrating the West, silently but visibly, that a new epoch is about to begin.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post The End of the Unipolar World Order – A Tectonic Shift Away from the West appeared first on LewRockwell.

Here is the detailed explanation from a user’s.

Assuming the whole world starts sharing a common currency whilst maintaining all existing border controls and barriers to trade and the movement of goods, capital and labour, there would be some fairly disastrous effects.

(TL;DR: most countries would exist in a state of disequilibrium, with very high unemployment in some and very high inflation in others, due to asymmetric economic shocks. Exporting firms would find it cheaper to obtain finance and international trade would increase significantly. Most nations would end up finding a World Currency very painful, and the only way to conceivably even slightly make it work is with a World Federation, i.e.: abolishing the idea of sovereign nations).

First, defining what a single currency entails: it means that all countries would give-up control of their money supply and interest rates (i.e.: monetary policy) to a hypothetical World Central Bank. This is NOT the same as the World Bank, which gives loans for development projects in countries – the World Central Bank instead would control the global money supply and interest rates for this new currency.

Secondly, some definitions: monetary policy is control the money supply and interest rates, and is managed by the central bank. Fiscal policy is control of government finances, and includes things like tax rates, government spending etc. The exchange rate is the value of the currency against other outside currencies – in a common global monetary union, take that to be the nominal value of the currency.

Now, it’s important to understand the idea of an “Optimum Currency Area (OCA)”, that is, a cluster/region of countries that can form a currency union without significant negative economic effects.

There are various theories for what constitutes an OCA, but the most famous is the one developed by Canadian economist Robert Mundell, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work on OCAs and monetary union in 1999. Mundell theorised that currency unions need to have a high level of labour and capital mobility to work successfully. Say country A and country B share a currency (enter a currency union). Now, an asymmetric shock (which is an economic shock that impacts different countries in different ways) hits A negatively, causing a contraction of aggregate demand (AD) in country A. If it had its own currency, its exchange rate would depreciate against the rest of the world to restore competitiveness, reducing the price of exports and increasing the quantity of exports sold. This will allow AD to start increasing again and equilibrium will be restored. In a currency union, the exchange rate will depreciate slightly, but not all the way, as country B has not had a contraction of demand. This means both countries will now exist in a macroeconomic disequilibrium: A’s exchange rate is overvalued, hurting competitiveness and causing unemployment, and B’s exchange rate is undervalued, increasing exports and causing inflationary pressure. To restore equilibrium, labour and capital needs to be able to move from A into B – hence, an Optimum Currency Area needs a high level of labour and capital mobility across borders.

The incredibly highly integrated Eurozone, which has open borders and a common factor markets, already suffers from insufficient labour mobility across borders for a number of reasons, including differences in pension schemes, language barriers, differences in qualification acceptance etc. So the world does not in any capacity have sufficient mobility of labour and capital across borders: there are way too many barriers to the movement of factors of production. A world-currency implemented under anything close to the status-quo idea of independent nation states and borders would result in most countries being in a permanent state of disequilibrium, with high unemployment in some places and high inflation in others.

The world as a whole is also far too vulnerable to asymmetric shocks for it to be an OCA. Commodity-exporting countries in particular struggle to join OCAs as shocks to commodity markets are often far sharper than shocks that hit other industries.

In addition, countries would lose the ability to use monetary policy to correct economic shocks, that is, raising interest rates in times of high inflation and lowering them in times of high unemployment and low inflation. They would be forced to use fiscal policy to correct shocks, but different countries have different approaches to fiscal policy and without some sort of fiscal-policy rules and fiscal transfers implemented by the World Authority overseeing this, there would likely be many cases of countries’ fiscal responses negatively impacting other nations who are in different stages of their economic cycle; the global interest rate for some countries would end up too high and for others, too low. There is also the issue that many countries would become more vulnerable to sovereign default as they would have foregone control of interest rates and the money supply. This would likely result in a series of Greek-like disasters in countries with severe downturns, particularly in countries with poor fiscal discipline.

The case of the Eurozone shows its almost impossible to make a successful currency union without fiscal union and transfers, which effectively means to make a currency union work it needs to be federal entity with a common government.

Finally, Ronald McKinnon and the McKinnon Criterion tells us that in order to minimise the likelihood of asymmetric shocks, countries that enter a currency union should/must have a high level of trade amongst each other. This is not true for the whole world, and likely will not be for the forseeable future purely down to distances (the Gravity Model of trade tells us the value of trade between two nations is inversely proportional to the distance between them).

Now, common currency areas DO see increases in trade as common currencies reduce the cost of exporting and importing. It also reduces the uncertainty export-industry firms face in what their foreign revenues will be, which without a currency union, would fluctuate depending on the exchange rate. This increases investors’ and banks’ confidence in these firms, reducing their cost of obtaining finance and increasing production, thereby increasing exports. When this occurs in all currency union members, you get a surge in trade. Some economists therefore theorise that the creation of OCA is endogenous to STARTING a currency-union, in that a common currency facilitates more trade which brings the union closer to an OCA.

It also can make firms more efficient. As an example, pre-Eurozone, it was common for unions to negotiate high wages, which firms would accept, expecting the government to devalue the exchange rate to reduce the price of exports and make up for the lost competitiveness. Workers in different countries were effectively competing against each other; the introduction of a common currency, the Euro, removed this mechanism, making wage-setting more economically sensible and firms more competitive, reducing prices.

Overall, in the status-quo, a world currency union would result in the vast majority of countries being in a state of economic disequilibrium. For it to even slightly work, you would need a common world government with fiscal rules at the very least, and a world federation at best – and even then, much of the world would remain in disequilibrium as asymmetric shocks can never be totally removed.

Now, if you propose a global currency union AND the removal of all barriers to the movement of goods, capital and labour (i.e.: an open border world), with a common government, that gets more interesting but is beyond the scope of what I can answer at the moment.

This article was originally published on Preppgroup.

The post How Would it Impact Global Finance a World Currency? appeared first on LewRockwell.

It was a moment somewhat like this, 30 years ago, that turned me into a biblical scholar. In the lead-up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, political and religious leaders quoted scripture to justify shutting down food programs and kicking mothers and their babies off public assistance. Those leaders, many of them self-described Christians, chose to ignore the majority of passages in the Bible that preached “good news” to the poor and promised freedom to those captive to injustice and oppression. Instead, they put forward unethical and ahistorical (mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations of biblical texts to prop up American imperial power and punish the poor in the name of a warped morality.

Three decades later, the Trump administration and its theological apologists are working overtime, using Jesus’s name and the Bible’s contents in even more devastating rounds of immoral biblical (mis)references. In July, there was the viral video from the Department of Homeland Security, using the “Here I am, Lord. Send me” quotation from Isaiah — commonly cited when ordaining faith leaders and including explicit references to marginalized communities impacted by displacement and oppression — to recruit new agents for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, a job that now comes with a $50,000 signing bonus, thanks to Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s former pastor went even further in marrying the Bible to anti-immigrant hatred by saying, “Is the Bible in favor of these ICE raids?… The answer is yes.” He then added: “The Bible does not require wealthy Christian nations to self-immolate for the horrible crime of having a flourishing economy and way of life, all right? The Bible does not permit the civil magistrate to steal money from its citizens to pay for foreign nationals to come destroy our culture.”

A month earlier, during a speech announcing the bombing of Iran, President Trump exhorted God to bless America’s bombs (being dropped on innocent families and children): “And in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

And in May, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Republican congressional representatives formed a prayer circle on the floor of the House as they prepared to codify the president’s Big Beautiful Bill. Of course, that very bill threatens to cut off millions of Americans from life-saving food and healthcare. (Consider it a bizarre counterpoint to Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 and providing free health care to lepers.)

The Antichrist

And if that weren’t enough twisting of the Bible to bless the rich and admonish the poor, enter tech mogul Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the man behind the curtain of so much now going on in Washington. Though many Americans may be increasingly familiar with him, his various companies, and his political impact, many of us have missed the centrality of his version of Christianity and the enigmatic “religious” beliefs that go with it.

In Vanity Fair this spring, journalist Zoe Bernard emphasized the central role Thiel has already played in the Christianization of Silicon Valley: “I guarantee you,” one Christian entrepreneur told her, “there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel.”

Indeed, his theological beliefs grimly complement his political ones. “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief,” he said, “you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.” Remember, this is the same Thiel who, in a 2009 essay, openly questioned the compatibility of democracy and freedom, advocating for a system where power would be concentrated among those with the expertise to drive “progress” — a new version of the survival of the fittest in the information age. Such a worldview couldn’t contrast more strongly with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus demonstrates his preferential option for the poor and his belief in bottom-up strategies rather than top down ones.

More recently, Thiel has positioned himself “right” in the middle of the Republican Party. He served as Trump’s liaison to Silicon Valley in his first term. Since then, he has convened and supported a new cohort of conservatives (many of whom also claim a right-wing Christianity), including Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump’s Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton, AI and crypto czar billionaire David Sacks, and Elon Musk, who spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected the second time around. Thiel is also close to Curtis Yarvin, the fellow who “jokingly” claimed that American society no longer needs poor people and believes they should instead be turned into biofuel. (A worldview that simply couldn’t be more incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.)

Particularly relevant to recent political (and ideological) developments, especially the military occupation of Washington, D.C., Thiel is also close to Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founder of the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank behind a coordinated attack on the homeless now sweeping the nation. That’s right, there’s a throughline from Peter Thiel to President Donald Trump’s demand that “the homeless have to move out immediately… FAR from the Capital.” In July, Trump produced an executive order facilitating the removal of housing encampments in Washington, a year after the Supreme Court upheld a law making it a crime, if you don’t have a home, to sleep or even breathe outside. And Thiel, Lonsdale, and the Cicero Institute aren’t just responsible for those attacks on unhoused people and “blue cities”; they also bear responsibility for faith leaders being arrested and fined for their support of unhoused communities and their opposition, on religious grounds, to the mistreatment of the poor.

On top of this troubling mix of Christianity and billionaires, however, I find myself particularly chagrined that Thiel is offering an oversold four-part lecture series on the “antichrist” through a nonprofit called ACTS 17 collective that is to start in September in San Francisco. News stories about the ACTS 17 collective tend to focus on Christians organizing in Silicon Valley and the desire to put salvation through Jesus above personal success or charity for the poor. That sounds all too ominous, especially for those of us who take seriously the biblical command to stop depriving the poor of rights, to end poverty on earth (as it is in heaven), and defend the very people the Bible prioritizes.

For instance, Trae Stephens (who worked at Palantir and is partners with Thiel in a venture capital fund) is the husband of Michelle Stephens, the founder of the ACTS 17 collective. In an interview with Emma Goldberg of the New York Times, Michelle Stephens describes how “we are always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized… I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”

In an article at the Denison Forum, she’s even more specific about her biblical and theological interpretation of poverty and the need to care for those with more rather than the poor. She writes, “Those who see Christ’s message to the poor and needy as the central pillar of the gospel make a similar mistake. While social justice movements have done a great deal to point out our society’s longstanding sins and call believers to action, it can be tempting for that message to become more prominent than our innate need for Jesus to save us.” Such a statement reminds me of the decades-long theological pushback I lived through even before the passage of welfare reform and the continued juxtaposition of Jesus and justice since.

A Battle for the Bible

Of course, such a battle for the Bible is anything but new in America. It reaches back long before the rise of a new brand of Christianity in Silicon Valley. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul’s epistles to claim that slavery had been ordained by God, while ripping the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached what was called a “prosperity gospel” that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism. Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubber-stamp Jim Crow practices, while the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, Sr., helped mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists in national politics.

Over the past decades, the use of the Bible to justify what passes for “law and order” (and the punishing of the poor) has only intensified. In Donald Trump’s first term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border with a passage from the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans: “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders summed up the same idea soon after in this way: “It is very biblical to enforce the law.” And in his first speech as speaker of the House, Mike Johnson told his colleagues, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” an echo of the New Testament’s Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul writes that “the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”

Over the past several years, Republican politicians and religious leaders have continued to use biblical references to punish the poor, quoting texts to justify cutting people off from healthcare and food assistance. A galling example came when Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX), rebutting a Jewish activist who referenced a commandment in Leviticus to feed the hungry, quoted 2 Thessalonians to justify increasing work requirements for people qualifying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). And that was just one of many Republican attacks on the low-income food assistance program amid myriad attempts to shred the social welfare system in the lead-up to President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history and a crowning achievement of Russell Vought’s Project 2025.  Arrington said: “But there’s also, you know, in the Scripture, tells us in 2 Thessalonians chapter 3:10 he says, uh, ‘For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: if a man will not work, he shall not eat.’ And then he goes on to say ‘We hear that some among you are idle’… I think it’s a reasonable expectation that we have work requirements.”

And Arrington has been anything but alone. The same passage, in fact, had already been used by Representatives Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Stephen Lee Fincher (R-TN) to justify cutting food stamps during a debate over an earlier farm bill. And Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) used similarly religious language, categorizing people as deserving and undeserving, to argue against a healthcare plan that protects those of us with pre-existing conditions. He insisted that only “people who lead good lives” and “have done the things to keep their bodies healthy” should receive reduced costs for health care.

Such “Christian” politicians regularly misuse Biblical passages to blame the impoverished for their poverty. There is never a suggestion, of course, that the rich, who have functionally stolen people’s wages and engorged themselves by denying them healthcare, are in any way to blame.

A Theology of Liberation for a Time Like This

Such interpretations of biblical texts are damaging to everyone’s lives (except, of course, the superrich), but especially the poor. And — though you wouldn’t know it from such Republicans — they are counter to the main themes of the Bible’s texts. The whole of the Christian Bible, starting with Genesis and ending with the Book of Revelation, has an arc of justice to it. The historical equivalents of anti-poverty programs run through it all.

That arc starts in the Book of Exodus with manna (bread) that shows up day after day, so no one has too much or too little. This is a likely response to the Egyptian Pharaoh setting up a system where a few religious and political leaders amassed great wealth at the expense of the people. God’s plan, on the other hand, was for society to be organized around meeting the needs of all people, including describing how political and religious leaders are supposed to release slaves, forgive debts, pay people what they deserve, and distribute funds to the needy. The biblical arc of justice then continues through the prophets who insist that the way to love and honor God is to promote programs that uplift the poor and marginalized, while decrying those with power who cloak oppression in religious terms and heretical versions of Christian theology.

My own political and moral roots are in the welfare rights and homeless union survival movements, efforts led by poor and dispossessed people organizing a “new underground railroad” and challenging Christianity to talk the talk and walk the walk of Christ. Such a conviction was captured by Reverend Yvonne Delk at the 1992 “Up and Out of Poverty Survival Summit,” when she declared that society, including the church, must move to the position that “poor people are not sinners, but poverty is a sin against God that could and should be ended.”

Delk’s words echo others from 20 years earlier. In 1972, Beulah Sanders, a leader of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the largest organization of poor people in the 1960s and 1970s, spoke to the National Council of Churches. “I represent all of those poor people who are on welfare and many who are not,” she said, “people who believe in the Christian way of life… people whose nickels and dimes and quarters have built the Christian churches of America. Because we believe in Christianity, we have continued to support the Christian churches… We call upon you… to join with us in the National Welfare Rights Organization. We ask for your moral, personal, and financial support in this battle for bread, dignity, and justice for all of our people. If we fail in our struggle, Christianity will have failed.”

In a Trumpian world, where Christian extremism is becoming the norm, we must not let the words of Beulah Sanders be forgotten or the worst fears of countless prophets and freedom fighters come true. Rather, we must build the strength to make a theological and spiritual vision of everybody-in-nobody-out a reality and create the capacity, powered by faith, to make it so. Now is the time. May we make it so.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post You Can’t Worship God and Money appeared first on LewRockwell.

Philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas remind us to begin with first principles: to see things as they really are. Even Marcus Aurelius counseled, “Of each particular thing, ask, what is it in itself?” Strikingly, this same wisdom is expressed in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), albeit through the words of a villain.

In the context of assisting a student detective in tracking down a serial killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter—both psychiatrist and serial killer—taunts Clarice Starling: “First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius.” The line is frightening because it exposes a perennial truth: evil begins when we refuse to acknowledge the true nature of things. Gender ideology does just this, denying the most basic truth of our humanity: that we are male and female. And as recent school shootings tragically show, such denial does not remain abstract; it can culminate in violence against the most innocent.

Ironically, the film goes further still. In one exchange, Clarice protests, “Dr. Lecter, there’s no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive.” To which Lecter replies, “Clever girl. You’re so close to the way you’re going to catch him—do you realize that?” Even here, Hollywood conditioned audiences to disconnect transgenderism from violence, even while viewers watched the film’s antagonist, Buffalo Bill, murder women in order to construct a grotesque “woman suit” as a substitute for sex reassignment. The message was clear: gender confusion could be exploited for shock but never acknowledged as having any real-world consequences.

What Hollywood once exploited for shock, society now refuses to confront in reality. And the cost has been devastating. On August 27, 2025, 23-year-old Robert Westman, who’d been wrestling with gender dysphoria, carried out a horrific attack at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. During the back-to-school Mass, Westman, who had his name legally changed to Robin, fired through the church windows with multiple guns, killing two kids and injuring 17 others before ending his own life. The FBI labelled it a hate crime targeting the Catholic community.

Sean Fitzpatrick recently wrote an essay in Crisis Magazine titled “Transmurderer,” highlighting how our culture fosters gender dysphoria and ignores its deadly consequences. Fr. Nick Ward has also reflected on the Annunciation shooting in Crisis Magazine (“Transgenderism and the Ruin of Souls”), offering a primarily pastoral and theological response that emphasizes the demonic roots of transgender ideology. My essay approaches the issue differently: by tracing the recent cultural and psychological dynamics of gender ideology before turning to its theological culmination, showing how in this case the shooter’s own writings explicitly testify to the demonic. The Annunciation atrocity cannot be explained solely by social disintegration; it must be considered an assault on truth itself, rooted in relativism, biological denial, and, ultimately, the demonic.

Cultural Conditioning and Denial

For decades, Hollywood has portrayed sexually ambiguous characters, often linking distorted gender identity to chaos, perversity, horror, or violence. Films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp (1983), Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992), and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (2011) all returned to these discomforting themes. The Skin I Live In presents a bizarre story where a father kidnaps his daughter’s rapist, subjects him to forced sex-reassignment surgery, and later assaults him, illustrating how gender manipulation can be weaponized, even outside the trope of a deranged killer.

Gene Simmons even played a flamboyant, psychotic hermaphroditic villain in Never Too Young to Die (1986), showing how far pop culture was willing to exploit gender confusion for shock value. At times, the transgender element is explicit, as in Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda (1953) or William Castle’s Homicidal (1961). Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) took a different angle: Al Pacino’s character robs a bank to fund his partner’s sex-reassignment surgery, motivated by his desire to marry him.

It is worth noting that both Psycho’s Norman Bates and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill were inspired by real-life murderer Ed Gein, who committed gruesome acts such as unearthing corpses, killing two women, and crafting a human skin suit to embody his deceased mother. These themes have captivated and horrified the public. Gein’s crimes will soon be depicted in Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story (2025).

Across both mainstream and obscure cinema, the message has been clear: distorted gender identity does not represent true liberation but is a source of danger, ambiguity, and mental instability. Contrast this scenario with modern cinema, television, educational systems, government policies, and mainstream media, where now, all too often, transgender identity is depicted as empowering and heroic. This narrative has become so pervasive that it has led to a cultural contagion, with unprecedented numbers of children and adolescents questioning their identities.

Nevertheless, for years, the cultural imagination was shaped by images of violent men attempting to erase or redefine their sexual identity. Yet when real-world cases emerge, society’s leaders insist there is no connection.

Read the Whole Article

The post Gender Ideology and Violence: Cultural Confusion and the Spiritual Battle appeared first on LewRockwell.

Abstract

Relying on live-ink letters discovered in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022, this article provides a fresh look at an old controversy: Murray Rothbard’s bitter parting from the inner orbit of Ayn Rand. The correspondence from Rothbard to National Review senior editor Frank S. Meyer pertaining to the Randians details Rothbard’s rollercoaster of responses toward the Collective. The letters on Rand begin shortly before the release of Atlas Shrugged in October 1957 and end after the publication of an unsigned 1961 Newsweek article belittling the novelist. The newly discovered correspondence undermines the persistent claim that Rothbard fabricated unflattering descriptions of the Objectivists in response to their accusing him of plagiarism. The letters, sent long before Nathaniel Branden leveled those charges, reflect the general description of the group in Rothbard’s “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,” issued in 1972. The article further details the influence of Meyer’s Moulding of Communists on Rothbard in his structuring of “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.

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On the day of Atlas Shrugged’s release, Murray Rothbard wrote Frank S. Meyer to further justify another about-face on Ayn Rand, a subject the two had previously discussed. “Thanks for trying to save my soul,” he wrote Meyer in the recently unearthed October 10, 1957, letter. “You know, however, that I have always been an extreme libertarian purist, anti-prudence, atheist, natural rightser, Aristotelian, etc. so that whatever shifts I may make in a Randian direction will be a logical development and not any sudden conversion. No matter how much you disagree with her system I think you should hail her as a great genius and system-builder” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Meyer failed to disabuse Rothbard of his enthusiasm. Rand eventually did. Perhaps more accurately, her lieutenant, Nathaniel Branden, especially did.

The story of Murray Rothbard’s close encounters of the Rand kind, first told by Rothbard to a mass audience in 1972, the year of Frank Meyer’s death, has been retold in the Rothbard biography An Enemy of the State (Raimondo 2000, 109–35), in the Rand biographies Goddess of the Market (Burns 2009, 182–84), Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Heller 2009, 295–301), My Years with Ayn Rand (N. Branden 1999, 229–31), and The Ayn Rand Cult (Walker 1999, 28, 33–34), and in countless articles, speeches, and podcasts.

This article offers fresh information on an old story: Rothbard’s contemporaneous observations of his 1950s interactions with Ayn Rand and “the Collective,” the group of admirers who surrounded the novelist. Original, live-ink letters discovered in a Pennsylvania warehouse in 2022, as part of research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, provide Rothbard’s perspective not from more than a decade later or distilled through the intermediary of other authors, but firsthand and conveyed in real time to an older, more experienced friend whom he knew as a skeptic of the burgeoning philosophy of Objectivism. The Rothbard file folder contains, among other items, thirty-five letters between him and Frank and Elsie Meyer, of which six letters from Rothbard pertain directly to novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. This warehouse find came within a larger trove that included scores of folders that hold documents pertinent to other figures of relevance on the postwar American Right. Meyer, an ex-Communist, National Review editor, and exponent of fusionism, met Rothbard in 1954 (as a November 28 letter from Rothbard that year shows) and remained friends with him until Meyer’s death in 1972 (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Atop using his friend as a sounding board in these letters, the younger man relied on him again, in a way that has gone largely unnoticed, when he opted to finally publicize what he had observed and experienced among Rand, Branden, and company.

Many of the charges Rothbard ([1972] 2025) issued against Ayn Rand and her followers in a public way in 1972 he had shared privately with Meyer fifteen years earlier. This included using the word “cult” to describe the group that surrounded Rand, noting their humorlessness, and observing the way emotion frequently overwhelmed reason in their leader in contradiction to her philosophy. In at least one instance, the letters provide an account somewhat different from the one Rothbard gave years later. Two letters present evidence that weighs in Rothbard’s favor in disputes that outlived the various parties involved.

In the passage quoted above, for instance, Rothbard speaks of always subscribing to natural rights and Aristotelian views. For the last sixty-seven years, some Objectivists have claimed that Rothbard swiped his Aristotelianism and beliefs about natural rights from Rand. He did personally acknowledge a “debt” to her in developing his appreciation of Aristotle and natural rights (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 14–15). The idea that this required a hat-tip citation whenever he wrote about such concepts, or that a man with three degrees from an Ivy League institution had been ignorant of Aristotle and natural rights before he entered Rand’s inner orbit, seems like a difficult position to defend. Nevertheless, this conjecture continues to animate discussions many decades after the initial dispute.

“Murray Rothbard never cites Ayn Rand once in any of his works in which he defends Aristotle, in which he defends natural rights, or free will—ideas he clearly got from Ayn Rand without giving her a single citation,” Objectivist writer James Valliant claimed on a 2021 podcast. His interlocutor, Jonathan Hoenig, a Fox News Channel talking head, speculated that Rothbard “largely fictionalized” his accusations against Rand. “It’s a load of bullshit, basically, just designed to denigrate Ayn Rand because he was called out plagiarizing her,” he said to Valliant. “Am I summing it up?” Valliant maintained during the podcast that Rothbard “got Aristotle and natural rights straight from Ayn Rand” (Hoenig and Sotirakopoulos 2021).

But in a postcard to Frank Meyer postmarked October 10, 1957, nine months before Nathaniel Branden originated that charge and shortly before Rothbard became a member of sorts of the Collective, the economist described Aristotelianism and natural rights as long-held, core beliefs (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). The plagiarism charge, heretofore regarded as outlandish by non-Objectivists, would seem even weaker given Rothbard’s words typed months before he faced an accusation he could hardly have prophesied. Furthermore, the imputation that a petty Rothbard libeled Rand and her followers in revenge for their exposure of his “plagiarism” cannot stand based on these letters that sat unnoticed since their receipt in Woodstock, New York, nearly seven decades ago.

Rothbard had detailed privately to Meyer in a December 4, 1957, letter the same notion of a rigid, conformist atmosphere within the Collective which imbued “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Rothbard [1972] 2025). Any genesis story on Rothbard’s claims cannot, therefore, attribute their origins to Rothbard devising them as a tit-for-tat response to Branden’s charges of plagiarism. This does not mean, as letters presented later in this article demonstrate, that a degree of vengeance did not motivate Rothbard to publicize what he saw and experienced. An August 24, 1958, letter clearly shows Rothbard seeking to engineer a small amount of payback against people he regarded as his slanderers, and an undated letter from 1961 exudes schadenfreude in response to bad press received by the Objectivists (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

Rothbard’s ([1972] 2025) published reflections on Rand and the Collective arrived with the perspective of years removed from her orbit and jaundiced by the events that led to the bitter parting of two figures of massive import among libertarians. His recently discovered correspondence with Meyer snapshots his views, complex and changing from one letter to the next, while he was inside the group. A reader gleans both what attracted him to the novelist and what ultimately drove him away. Once upon a time, long before Rothbard’s public criticism of Rand, as friend Ralph Raico would later put it, “Murray was very enthusiastic about Ayn” (Raico [2013] 2016).

Rothbard Shrugged

Murray Rothbard first ventured into Ayn Rand’s orbit as a twentysomething Columbia University PhD candidate short of his doctorate. Rand biographies claim that the brothers Richard and Herb Cornuelle, both affiliated at various times with the William Volker Fund (which generously supported, among others, both Rothbard and Meyer), took the Ludwig von Mises disciple to her salon-apartment in 1952 (Burns 2009, 144; Heller 2009, 251). Rothbard credited Herb Cornuelle with the introduction (Rothbard 1989, 27).

From a distance, the Circle Bastiat meetings at Rothbard’s apartment and those attended by the Collective at Rand’s apartment looked the same. Both featured advocates of liberty discussing philosophical topics at a high level in Manhattan, a place not as hostile to those ideas as Moscow but nonetheless quite unfriendly to them. The similarities evaporated upon closer inspection. Rothbard, for instance, noted that Circle Bastiat meetups included “song composing, joint moviegoing, and fiercely competitive board games.” He described them as a “helluva lot of fun” (Rothbard 1989, 27). Few ever described the agora of Objectivism at 36 East 36th Street as fun.

Whereas his encounters with Ludwig von Mises in the early 1950s fueled his intellectual output until the end of his days, the young Rothbard found Rand’s dogmatism off-putting and draining. Her tremendous intellect and individualism, however, seduced him into coming back. He first returned for two nights in the summer of 1954. This time, he ventured into her domain accompanied by the Circle Bastiat. Internally, he found himself intellectually taking Rand’s side in her browbeating of George Reisman but rooting for his teenage friend (Raimondo 2000, 110). As he explained three years later to Rand, the visits left him exhausted, depressed, and threatened by a perceived potential loss of independence should he continue to see her (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16). So, again, he stayed away.

Three years later, after one of the Circle Bastiat obtained an early copy of Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard, now boasting a PhD in economics from Columbia University, found himself not merely intrigued by but enamored of Rand and her ideas (Heller 2009, 295–96). His vacillation, if nothing else, remained consistent.

He wrote her an especially obsequious fan letter on October 3, 1957, the aim of which seemed, at least in part, to return him to Rand’s good graces. To that end, he emphasized his internal defects to explain what had earlier pushed him away from her. His absence, in other words, stemmed from a problem of his and not of hers. Hyperbole constituted most of this letter that its writer insisted lacked hyperbole. He noted his regret that his mother had been able to read merely Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy but never such a work as Atlas Shrugged, which he called “the greatest novel ever written,” from “a mind that I unhesitatingly say is the most brilliant of the twentieth century” (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16). The overstatement here wasn’t necessarily puffery. Rothbard, writing on the day he had finished reading the novel (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12), probably believed much of what he wrote. Countless others, after all, would experience similar exhilaration upon completion of Atlas Shrugged and also regard it as a profound accomplishment.

Rothbard again returned to Rand’s orbit, but for a much longer period than his previous forays. This time, he became not so much a visitor but a member of sorts of the Collective, the small but growing coterie surrounding the Russian immigrant. His letters to Meyer reflect enthusiasm, hesitation, and seeds of the issues that would eventually sunder him from the group.

“We’ve seen Ayn a few times, a couple of times ourselves and once with the whole group,” he wrote Meyer on December 4, 1957. “When Joey [Rothbard’s wife] and I were up there alone, everything went fine, since I asked her questions and she answered them, which is about the only relationship the Randians enjoy having with others: as lecturers. You know I am a 98% Randian: I like their atheist-rationalist-libertarian-Aristotelianism. However, when the group got to Ayn’s a bit of strain set in: in fact, despite her nice words at the end, I could see that fanatical hatred in her eye” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Rothbard had unwisely submitted to a course of what he described to Meyer as “Brandian psychoanalysis” for his “phobia,” identified elsewhere as a fear of travel (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Heller 2009, 297). Rand lieutenant Nathaniel Branden lacked proper credentials at this point to conduct such treatment (Heller 2009, 297–98), and the information he collected, in providing him potential leverage against jaded or jilted members of the group, made such sessions a conflict of interest. Much of this did not occur to Rothbard at the time, as he described the psychoanalysis to Meyer as “pleasant.” He noted that Circle Bastiat members Ralph Raico and George Reisman also visited Branden to cure their illnesses, and that Reisman’s problem remained unknown to him (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

If Rothbard did not yet grasp the imprudence of turning over personal secrets to a man more interested in collecting and keeping followers for Ayn Rand than in helping his patients overcome various mental health ailments, he at least understood his own place in the Objectivist orbit as tenuous. Part of this involved his wife JoAnn, whose Christianity clashed with Objectivism’s zeal for atheism. “Joey says that she would like to see the day when George, Ralph and I are all cured,” her husband continued in that December 4 letter to Meyer, “and then spit in Nathan’s face and walk out; this would be swell but I’m afraid things will come to a head long before that” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

Rothbard went on to enumerate various points of disagreement between himself and the emerging guru. While Rand had once socialized among peers, to include Isabel Paterson, Ludwig von Mises, and Henry Hazlitt, she increasingly operated in a curated world inhabited by vetted admirers (Burns 2009, 114, 125–32, 141; Heller 2009, 245–51). Despite the subservient tone of his October letter to Rand, Rothbard, though two decades her junior, constitutionally did not fit for long in any such sycophantic environment. The fact that he dared to disagree with and even ridicule her demonstrated this. He wrote to Meyer that while Rand’s belief in natural rights appealed to him, he regarded her extension of them to animals as crazy—and confessed to joking about the natural rights of cockroaches with his clique. Rothbard pointed out his belief, contra Rand, in natural instincts and disbelief, contra Rand, that “everyone on the same intelligence level could do anything in any field on the comparable intelligence plane.” He noted a split on the seemingly uncontroversial idea of making support of children compulsory for parents, which, despite Atlas Shrugged’s reputation as a kid-free zone, Rand endorsed. The group’s harsh rejection of his idea of private courts similarly alienated him, he wrote (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). He claimed in the letter that the Randians joined him in support of private police forces, though Nathaniel Branden later cited that as an idea held by Rothbard that Rand rejected as a recipe for civil war, so it is possible that Rothbard misunderstood (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; N. Branden 1999, 230). He opined to Meyer that “to the Randians no differences are minor, and all are crucial,” and that emotion rather than reason governed many of the leader’s pronouncements (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

To illustrate this controversial point, he juxtaposed Rand’s embrace of her Random House editor, who had rejected her ideas but not her book, with her rejection of a classical liberal whose love of God seemed more powerful than his love for Atlas Shrugged. “Bennett Cerf is ‘really’ and metaphysically a great libertarian because he liked Atlas, even though ‘he doesn’t agree to specific issues,’” Rothbard reported to Meyer as the chief Objectivist’s subjective outlook, “while Leonard Liggio is a son of a bitch because he didn’t like Atlas, and also not really a libertarian” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). This intolerance extended, perhaps especially, to the small but growing group of admirers who imitated Rand: Rothbard further told Meyer in that December 4, 1957, letter that his younger associates, Raico and Bruce Goldberg, drove the Collective “wild with fury” by embracing a “logical positivism” that they integrated with Randian ethics (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). This disagreement set off an explosive conflict.

As Rothbard described it to Meyer, Nathaniel Branden and others at the meeting declared Ayn Rand not only the greatest mind since at least Aristotle, but the greatest person as well. Those who did not share this view, Rothbard noted, they labeled as evil. They further acknowledged that Randians were obligated to collectively spurn any person holding such an evil opinion. Both Raico and Goldberg dissented. They conceded that Rand ranked as one of the greatest minds of the century. They just regarded Ludwig von Mises as her intellectual superior. This set Branden and others off. While this blowup involved Randians and not Rand herself, and Rothbard received the story distilled telephonically from Raico and Goldberg, the tale likely evoked in their older friend a déjà vu of sorts concerning the unease he had felt at Rand’s dressing down of Reisman more than three years earlier (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Rothbard 1989, 28–29).

By the late 1980s, Rothbard recalled the Goldberg excommunication slightly differently from what he had communicated to Meyer in the December 4, 1957, letter. In Rothbard’s 1989 Liberty article, the question did not pertain to the greatest mind in history. Instead, Branden asks, “Who has been the most intellectually important person in my life?” And to this perfunctory question presupposing rote answers of “Ayn Rand,” Goldberg answers not “Ludwig von Mises,” as Rothbard had told Meyer contemporaneously with the excommunication, but “Ralph Raico,” who followed Goldberg out of the Collective just as a grateful Goldberg had earlier followed Raico into libertarianism (Rothbard 1989, 28–29). Possibly time played mischief with memories of the event. Possibly time allowed for the accumulation of more detail that provided greater accuracy. Possibly what Rothbard wrote to Meyer in 1957 and what he wrote in Liberty in 1989 both happened. What is definite is that in certain details, the depiction of this event in 1957 differed from the depiction of it thirty-two years later.

The December 1957 experience so jarred Raico and Goldberg—the latter of whom four years later would pen a brutal review of Rand’s For the New Intellectual (Goldberg 1961)—that they called Rothbard at two in the morning with their concerns. Rothbard confessed to Meyer in that December 4, 1957, letter an impulse to immediately share this information with him through a morning-part-of-the-night call, of the type regularly dialed and received on Meyer’s farmhouse’s line, but that his financially “embarrassed” situation restrained him (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). “Do you know the Randians are a grim lot?” he continued. “Even at their most friendliest, which we had seen till recently, they are at best genial, never wildly dramatic and humorous in the Grand Tradition. Ayn’s doctrine is that a sense of humor is permissible: provided one [laughs] at one’s enemies” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

Circling the Wagons

A few weeks later, Rothbard, writing in longhand atop a carbon copy of a typed December 28 letter sent to William F. Buckley Jr., asked Meyer to disregard his negative depiction of Rand and her followers from his previous letter. It was, he had since discovered, a misrepresentation. He now knew what they had really meant. And what was that? He did not say. He did fixate on attacks on Atlas Shrugged in the letter to Buckley, so possibly a circle-the-wagons effect hastened the reorientation of Rothbard’s epistolary depictions of the Collective and its leader (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

In the October 3, 1957, letter, Rothbard had offered to Rand to write letters to the editor on behalf of Atlas Shrugged, which he noted he had already done in response to a negative article on the book by former Communist Granville Hicks in the New Leader (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 15–16). He had continued this crusade in the late fall by writing a letter objecting to a review in Commonweal (Raimondo 2000, 120–21).

He had lamented in an October 8 letter to Meyer the critique of Atlas Shrugged by Helen Beal Woodward in the Saturday Review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Therein, Woodward (1957, 25) had praised Rand’s talent while describing the book as “the equivalent of a fifteenth-century morality play” with “stylized vice-and-virtue characters” that “serve as dummies on which to drape the author’s ideas.” Atlas Shrugged, Woodward wrote, “sets up one of the finest assortments of straw men ever demolished in print.” Rothbard had noted to Meyer, National Review’s “Books, Arts, and Manners” editor, that the “idiot” who wrote that piece also wrote “stupid” reviews for his magazine. The fact that Woodward conceded Rand’s abilities, and fixated less on her ideology than on the notion that her ideology overpowered aesthetics and story and all else, made for a more damaging review than a politicized review in which the prejudices of the critic, rather than the faults of the author, became apparent. He wrote Meyer, “I think I would have preferred an outright leftist attack than this moronic nonsense that makes the book out to be some sort of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

Now, in late December, Rothbard’s ire turned toward the section of National Review that libertarianish Frank Meyer oversaw. Months earlier, Meyer had taken over the “Books, Arts, and Manners” section from Willi Schlamm, after the tempestuous Austrian clashed with his National Review cofounder, William F. Buckley Jr., and fellow senior editor James Burnham. The departure elevated Meyer to editor of the reviews section and facilitated the arrival of Whittaker Chambers, a fellow senior editor who had likely viewed Schlamm’s involvement in the magazine as one reason to rebuff its editor’s repeated invitations to him to join the staff (Tanenhaus 1998, 491–500; Flynn 2025, 218–19). Early in his short National Review tenure, Chambers wrote an infamous, or famous (depending upon one’s perspective), review of Atlas Shrugged that was published in the December 28, 1957, issue. Technically, Meyer oversaw the section that printed the review. However, his newness in the position and the magazine’s desire to hold on to a figure of Chambers’s stature made any potential question of tempering the review moot. An intervention seemed unlikely for another reason: laissez-faire governed Meyer’s editing as well as his economics.

Chambers had already submitted a review of imprisoned Yugoslavian dissident Communist Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, which he demanded the magazine suppress, which it did, until he delivered part two of the review, which he never did. Based on the false supposition of a forthcoming completed Chambers review, Meyer rebuffed, as correspondence from September 1957 shows, attempts by the better-suited Slobodan Draskovich, a Yugoslavian who had witnessed his father’s murder by the Communists and who had spent several years in a Nazi concentration camp, to review his countryman’s book (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Rothbard had noted to Rand in his October 3 letter to her that John Chamberlain, a figure within National Review’s orbit who was far more amenable to Atlas Shrugged’s outlook, might instead review her book for the magazine if Chambers did not produce a review—information likely gleaned from conversations with Meyer (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16).

The idea of a Chamberlain rather than a Chambers review necessarily unleashes what-might-have-been, counterfactual histories of the American Right. But, in contrast to his handling of the Djilas volume, Chambers did submit a full review of Atlas Shrugged, one that forever alienated Rand from Buckley, Chambers, National Review, and much of the burgeoning conservative movement. The backup Chamberlain review, which ultimately appeared in The Freeman, prophetically described the book as “so deftly plotted, so excitingly paced, and so universal in its hero-villain intensity, that it will carry its message to thousands who would never be caught dead reading a textbook—or even a difficult article—on economics” (Chamberlain 1957, 56). While Chamberlain mentioned the author’s “dogmatic ethical hardness” (55), his article mainly consisted of elongated quotations from the novel—hardly the stuff to inspire visceral hatred of the type engendered by the Chambers piece.

From labeling Atlas Shrugged “a remarkably silly book” in the second paragraph to judging in the penultimate paragraph that it commands, “To a gas chamber—go,” the Chambers (1957, 594, 596) review struck as less criticism than condescension. For Chambers, Rand owed a debt not to Aristotle but to a less fashionable thinker: Friedrich Nietzsche. Chambers objected in a philosophical sense to what he dubbed materialism informing the work and in a literary sense to caricatures instead of characters populating its pages. He judged, “Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world” (595).

The review had the opposite effect on Rothbard of what Chambers had intended—at least initially. Rothbard’s early December letter to Meyer sounded in places like Chambers’s late December review for Meyer’s section in National Review. In that December 4, 1957, letter, Rothbard had described Objectivism to Meyer as “a little cult, whose ‘mass base’ consists of a corporals’ guard of stupid young Jewish girls,” that appeared “perilously close to outright insanity, if not over the brink” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Yet after reading Chambers’s harsh review, Rothbard rallied around the Randians. “I am surprised and chagrined to find that the only right-wing best-seller of the decade—Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged—has received its most unsympathetic and unfair review in the pages of National Review (Dec. 28),” Rothbard wrote Buckley on the same date in a missive that he shared with Meyer. “It is no wonder that our intellectual and cultural life is dominated by the Liberals” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). The three-page letter to Buckley resembled a three-page April 8, 1956, letter published by Commentary in June of that year in which Rothbard objected to Dwight Macdonald’s snobbish piece in the publication’s pages about the birth of a new magazine, National Review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Eventually, however, Rothbard adopted a position that, though substantively different, was tonally the same as the one expressed by Chambers so controversially in the pages of National Review.

The Moulding of “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult”

In his December 28, 1957, letter to Buckley, Rothbard cited Chambers’s comparisons of Rand with Adolf Hitler as the “most outlandish error” of his review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). He came around, judging that “the Rand line was totalitarian,” comparing the movement that coalesced around her to the ones that ultimately surrounded “Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao,” describing Nathaniel Branden as “the Führer,” and labeling Objectivism “a totalitarian Cult” (Rothbard [1972] 2025, 1989, 27–28). This conclusion did not seem a far cry from “To a gas chamber—go.”

Whittaker Chambers did not influence Rothbard here. Another National Review senior editor did. Frank Meyer and Murray Rothbard worked in the 1950s and early 1960s as the Volker Fund’s two analysts who reviewed scholarly journals and books. The magnum opus of each man, In Defense of Freedom by the former and Man, Economy, and State by the latter, came about through grants from Volker. Meyer, in his capacity as “Books, Arts, and Manners” editor at National Review, regularly ran reviews written by his friend during the late 1950s and early 1960s.[1] Even during a time when Rothbard’s attempts at political organizing brought him into an alliance with the New Left, he described Meyer in a 1967 article about him as the most libertarian-oriented National Review editor and in a March 4, 1969, letter to him as the only reliably profreedom voice, with the possible exception of John Chamberlain, within the conservative movement (Rothbard 1967; Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Their friendship stemmed not merely from political similarities. Both men hailed from Jewish backgrounds in the New York area, gained reputations as nocturnal creatures, and transformed their homes into salons by welcoming a long line of pilgrims who visited to discuss and debate over weekends and into the night. Rothbard liked and respected Meyer, and vice versa.

Rothbard first took public the private concerns which he had shared with his older friend and others in 1957 and 1958 in a 1972 publication. His “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult” cites Meyer by name, uses “cadre”—one of the former Communist’s favorite words—to make the point that Rand’s inner circle encountered esoteric teachings at odds with her exoteric ones, and references Meyer’s (1961) Moulding of Communists to demonstrate the similar indoctrination processes of Communists and Objectivists (Rothbard [1972] 2025). A curious style that omits dates and names for all but major events and leading figures imbues both Rothbard’s 1972 publication and Meyer’s 1961 book with a hazy quality. A careful reading of the two works reveals the former’s reliance in a broad, structural sense on the latter.

In The Moulding of Communists, a sort of anthropology of the folkways of the party’s vanguard, Meyer recalled a “great sureness” accompanying his embrace of Marxism. He noted that “no conceivable area of life, of action, even of speculation” existed in which the Marxist believes “his judicious use of theory cannot quickly yield certainties and clarities which fit with precision into the well-ordered pattern of his total outlook.” He cited the notion of instructing a physicist to abandon scientific principles in favor of Marxist guidance or the novelist to disregard the judgments of veterans in his field in favor of those from party leaders as examples of how fealty to the group eclipsed individual reason and wisdom (Meyer 1961, 52–53).

One detects echoes of this and other parts of Meyer’s analysis while reading “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.” Yet Rothbard delivered what he guessed amounted to the first negative review of The Moulding of Communists upon the issuance of a paperback edition in 1967. What Meyer described as special to communism, Rothbard characterized as prosaic. IBM, GM, and other large organizations all imposed conformity, he reasoned (Rothbard 1967, 25–26). Meyer, who had worked closely with Prince Mirsky, who later died in the gulag; Walter Ulbricht, who later erected the Berlin Wall; and Michael Straight, who later engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union, certainly witnessed the Communist Party’s “organization men” engage in activities foreign to IBM, GM, and the Randians (Flynn 2025, 43, 54, 70, 75–77). However, the book dealt mainly in generalities and, when citing specifics, did so vaguely. Rothbard (1967) consequently offered a ho-hum reaction to the rather staid expression of Meyer’s wild experience as a Communist from 1931 through 1945.

In The Moulding of Communists, Meyer detailed how the party broke up marriages when one partner lacked sufficient devotion not to the other but to the cause (Meyer 1961, 128–30). In his review, Rothbard characterized marital interference as normal throughout any large organization, where “even the choice of a wife is thoroughly checked and corrected by the criterion of whether or not she fits into the company executive mould. Yet Mr. Meyer seems to believe that only the Communist Party has presumed to dictate the private lives of its members!” In response to the outlining of a similar party expectation of insular, ideologically based friendships in The Moulding of Communists, Rothbard scoffed: “Now Good Heavens! Has Meyer never heard of friendships being formed on the basis of deeply-shared interests?” (Rothbard 1967, 25–26, 30).

The excuses Rothbard afforded Bolsheviks he did not extend to the Objectivists five years later: “In the manner of many cults, loyalty to the guru had to supersede loyalty to family and friends—typically the first personal crises for the fledgling Randian,” points out his vaguely memoirish 1972 broadside. “If non-Randian family and friends persisted in their heresies even after being hectored at some length by the young neophyte, they were then considered to be irrational and part of the Enemy and had to be abandoned. The same was true of spouses; many marriages were broken up by the cult leadership who sternly informed either the wife or the husband that their spouses were not sufficiently Randworthy” (Rothbard [1972] 2025). Rothbard later insisted that he and JoAnn had experienced this heavy-handed tactic (Rothbard 1989, 27–30). Meyer had experienced it, too, albeit in the attempt of the Communists to keep Elsie Meyer within the party by convincing her to ditch her unsalvageable Browderite husband (J. Meyer, pers. comm., July 11, 2023). Each exposé omitted this autobiographical detail even as they both discussed the general phenomenon.

“As in the case of all cults and sects, a particularly vital method for moulding the members and keeping them in line was maintaining their constant and unrelenting activity within the movement,” Rothbard noted in his 1972 tract. “Frank Meyer relates that Communists preserve their members from the dangerous practice of thinking on their own by keeping them in constant activity together with other Communists. He notes that, of the major Communist defectors in the United States, almost all defected only after a period of enforced isolation” (Rothbard [1972] 2025). This was certainly true of Meyer, who spent about two years away from the party in the army and then recuperating from surgeries necessitated by training injuries (Flynn 2025, 105–18). To illustrate the broad point of isolation breeding independence, Rothbard inserted himself in the story in his 1989 Liberty article, where he recalled that Nathaniel Branden had asked him in 1958 why he attended Objectivist meetings only two days a week (Rothbard 1989, 29).

Why did a man known for allegiance to principle zigzag so dramatically on both Ayn Rand and the obscure book by Frank S. Meyer that provided him a template for writing “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult”? In the case of the former, the twists and tacks primarily involved not principle, which he never sacrificed or renounced to ingratiate himself to the Collective, but personality. He countenanced differences in philosophy and what he called “bizarreries” in behavior because he believed Rand offered something special through Atlas Shrugged. Ultimately, his distaste for overbearing people who preached a hands-off policy drowned his earlier enthusiasm for the novel that brought them all together.

In the case of the latter, his shifting standard was possibly influenced by desired outcomes. In 1967, when he reviewed The Moulding of Communists, the Vietnam War was escalating—and Rothbard’s noticeable outrage over the state again taking human life was, too. Rothbard and Meyer agreed on so much. They disagreed on anti-communism. Meyer contemplated a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, shouted “Tear down the Berlin Wall” more than a quarter century before Ronald Reagan did, and offered “Invade Cuba!” as a Madison Square Garden response to the Cuban Missile Crisis (Ebert 1962; Newberry 1962; Judis 1988, 174). Rothbard, who came up through the Old Right, perhaps found it difficult to understand the passion of his friend, who had seen communism up close. A book that depicted Communists—the very people fighting the US government in Vietnam—as robotic ideologues programmed to abjectly follow orders inconvenienced the foreign policy point Rothbard then sought to stress. Meyer, whom Rothbard regarded as a libertarian in just about every respect save for his strident, bellicose anti-communism, probably irked him at that point more than ever (Rothbard 1981, 352–63). Whatever the reason, what Rothbard dismissed as humdrum in his review of The Moulding of Communists, he highlighted as tremendous injustice in “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.”

“A Calm Contempt”

Rothbard once exhorted Meyer to acknowledge Rand as a genius expositor of freedom. Then he used the template of Meyer’s Moulding of Communists to illustrate the various means that the Randians had employed to exert control over followers. What happened between his initial, glowing 1957 letter to Meyer on Rand and the publication of the Meyer-reliant “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult” in 1972? The available Rothbard writings do much to explain. The heretofore unavailable Rothbard letters to Meyer do as well. They also underscore that emotions, which Rothbard often explained motivated Rand (despite her philosophy’s eschewal of a reliance on them even in terms of musical preferences or romantic partners), also fueled him to some degree (Walker 1999, 105–39; B. Branden 1986, 363–64, 386–87, 395).

By mid-1958, the tolerance from Rothbard toward the Randians and the tolerance for Rothbard from the Randians had expired. Dispositive factors for the split included Rothbard’s refusal to turn over a recording of a skit performed by the Circle Bastiat that mocked the Collective; pressure on Rothbard to coax his wife to drop Christianity; Nathaniel Branden’s attempt to damage Rothbard professionally with plagiarism accusations; and Rothbard’s refusal, despite his stated enthusiasm for private courts, to show up for his Randian trial (Rothbard 1989, 27–32; Raimondo 2000, 123–30).

After Branden contacted academics in Rothbard’s field in 1958 with his bill of particulars, the young economist sought to damage the people who sought to damage him. “I just remembered that the Randians get a great number of their raw material channeled to them through Lyle Munson, who, whenever he hears of an admirer of Atlas, sends the person on to Nathan and his lectures,” Rothbard wrote to Meyer on August 24, 1958. “Behind his back, Ayn and Nathan of course dislike Munson greatly (a Catholic you know) but, despite their Higher Morality, are well willing to use him. It occurs to me that one blow you could strike for the anti-Randian, anti-Brandian cause, is to alert Lyle Munson about the nature of these bastards, and thus cut off much of their supply of potential converts” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). By summer’s dog days of 1958, the 98 percent Randian of less than a year earlier described the group with offensive language and sought ways to undermine their project. He now recruited others to “the anti-Randian, anti-Brandian cause.”

The extant correspondence between Frank and Elsie Meyer and Munson, who with his company, the Bookmailer, effectively operated a clearinghouse for right-wing titles and acted as a middleman between buyers and publishers, does not include a note of the type suggested by Rothbard. Meyer compiled a reading list, for light remuneration, for the Bookmailer in 1958, so the correspondence between the two appears heavier that year than in any other. Possibly, given Meyer’s preference for the telephone over the mail, the pair spoke about it; however, Meyer’s papers do not provide any evidence that such a conversation took place (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

In fact, Meyer’s papers provide little evidence that he gave much thought to Objectivism at all. The gauge of Meyer’s interest comes through the almost complete absence of Ayn Rand mentions within the tens of thousands of his letters extracted from the warehouse. Meyer’s elder son, John, subscribed to the Objectivist Newsletter as a teenager. He said in an interview for this article that he regarded Rand’s ideas more favorably than did his father. “I think he considered Rand significant,” John Meyer recollected, “but that there were errors. I am pretty sure that my father’s view was that, on balance, Rand was actually a positive influence.” That said, Frank Meyer regarded Objectivism as not under the broad umbrella of American conservatism, a sentiment Rand would undoubtedly have seconded (J. Meyer, pers. comm., June 16, 2025). Though she did not operate beyond his notice, she did operate outside his passion.

Almost three years after the petition to Meyer to alert Lyle Munson about his false friends, Rothbard remained scarred by his experience within the Collective. In 1961, he sent Meyer a venomous March 27, 1961, Newsweek article, which he described in an undated note as “precious to me” and emphasized that he meant it by petitioning for the article’s return (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). The article examined Ayn Rand and the courses on her theory that Nathaniel Branden oversaw in Manhattan. If the Whittaker Chambers review dripped with condescension, the Newsweek piece flowed with it. Therein, an unsubtle Leslie Hanscom, whom Rothbard identified as the author of the nonbylined piece, places The Fountainhead among the worst novels ever written and defends Rand from charges of Nazism by pointing out that she hates the majority of mankind impartially (Newsweek 1961, 104–5).[2] “God bless Mr. Hanscom—he did a beautiful job on The Rand—he really caught the spirit of the atmosphere, the cult, etc., extremely well,” he wrote Meyer. Just a few years earlier, Rothbard had spun off critical letters to National Review, the Saturday Review, the New Leader, and Commonweal for their negative articles on Rand not nearly as snarky as the Newsweek piece. By 1961, such negative publicity inspired celebratory notes to his friend in Woodstock including an insulting nickname of “The Rand,” which conjured up hive-brain imagery for a group espousing rationalism and individualism. “Newsweek did such a fine job of doing something that I wanted badly to see done,” he wrote, “that it has freed me from passionate hatred of The Rand, and transmuted it into a calm contempt” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

Passions indeed cooled. Contempt calmed. They did not, as Rothbard’s periodic revisitations of this unhappy period demonstrate, entirely dissipate. As he had concluded to Meyer in the August 24, 1958, letter, “To the ordinarily good slogan ‘no enemies to the Right,’ the Randians offer a striking exception” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).

References

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The post Murray Rothbard’s Lost Letters on Ayn Rand appeared first on LewRockwell.

The crime in Charlotte was breathtakingly horrific. Almost unimaginable.

But to the battalions of right wingers out there with their race-based crime charts, pointing the fingers and hooting about “the Blacks” and “Black fatigue,” etc. here’s a clue: The real villain in this whole thing is the State.

It was the State, starting well before the “Great Society” nonsense, that sought to intervene in the lives of American Blacks to “bring them up” to “our” level.

And “fight racism,” of course.

They only succeeded in destroying the one thing that actually helped bring Black people out of poverty and despair: Black Families.

Just as it was the state that passed the “Jim Crow” laws in the first place, when the State decided to clean up its act and make amends, it only succeeded in making matters worse.

The white “do-gooders” who substituted the State for the Black father through welfare and all manner of state-intervention have blood on their hands.

You like statistics? Have a look at how many Black kids grow up with Uncle Sam as their surrogate father.

And it’s easy to blame white liberals for the mayhem the State has unleashed on Black people for the past 70 or so years. But conservatives did next to nothing to make a coherent argument against the State interfering in our families. In fact they have been all for it.

The thug who killed that beautiful young woman should pay dearly for his crime. But the real hand on the knife was the State.

The post The Real Hand on the Charlotte Knife appeared first on LewRockwell.

America’s Untold Stories
With Eric Hunley and Mark Groubert

Ruth Paine: The Woman Who Took JFK Secrets to the Grave

Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley of America’s Untold Stories sit down with filmmaker Max Good following the death of Ruth Paine on August 31, 2025. As the woman who housed Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina Oswald in the weeks leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy, Ruth Paine has long been viewed as a key figure in the JFK mystery—and one who may have taken explosive secrets to her grave.

Max Good, director of The Assassination & Mrs. Paine, shares rare insights from his years researching and interviewing Ruth Paine for his acclaimed documentary. Was she just a well-meaning Quaker—or a knowing participant in a larger intelligence operation? Why did so many JFK researchers question her story for decades? And what questions remain now that she’s gone?

This episode dives deep into Ruth’s connection to the assassination, her CIA-linked relatives, and the lingering doubts surrounding her involvement.

The JFK case just lost a living witness—don’t miss this.

Find out more about “The Assassination and Mrs Paine” and how to watch it at https://www.jfkpaine.com/

Join us November 21st–23rd, 2025 in Dallas at JFK Lancer Conference (or Virtually)

Tickets now available at https://assassinationconference.com/
Virtual tickets start at $75.99
In-person tickets start at $149.99

Discount Code: Use UNTOLD10 at checkout for 10% off

The post Ruth Paine: The Woman Who Took JFK Secrets to the Grave appeared first on LewRockwell.

Senator Ron Johnson joins us today to discuss the official 9/11 conspiracy theory and the legitimate questions that he and many other Americans have about that story. We discuss Senator Johnson’s problems with the official 9/11 investigation, whether the Senate can and should hold new hearings on the subject, and what he will be discussing at the upcoming Turning the Tide: 9/11 Justice in 2025 conference in Washington, D.C. We also delve into harm caused by the experimental mRNA injections and the subsequent erosion of public trust in government and institutions.

The post Senator Ron Johnson Dares to Question 9/11 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Bill Madden wrote:

Please read what Gary has to say about central bank digital currency (CBDC) as total control of our currency by our rogue government will destroy our financial freedom.  Our dollar and all currencies in the world are fiat – and, they shouldn’t be. 

By reading Aristotle’s Definition of Money, you will learn that money must be a “store of value” and no currency in the world is a store of value.  As J.P. Morgan said: “Only gold is money.  Everything else is credit”.  If a currency is fiat paper or a fiat accounting entry backed by gold, anyone holding the fiat currency must be able to convert the fiat currency to gold at some official rate at any time.  Backing a currency with oil or some B.S. basket of other fiat currencies is government hocus pocus.

Voltaire said that fiat currency always returns to its true value of zero. 

Since there was major opposition to the CBDC, the government will attempt to force their control on us with the stable coin.  Interestingly, they intend to back up the fiat stable coin with fiat dollars.  Please remember what Voltaire said.

The Constitution directs the Congress to coin money with no mention of interest and, yet, we have been finessed into a central bank, the Federal Reserve Bank, creating our dollars from thin air and issuing the dollars into circulation with interest currently about one trillion dollars a year.  Adding insult to injury, we are paying interest on fake money.

The post Central bank digital currency (CBDC) appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Maureen McKerracher.

The post Russia & the US Are Sending Lengthy Nuclear Coded Messages! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm. 

Religion & Liberty Online

The post When “Reproductive Rights” Become Cultural Imperialism appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Israel Bombs Hamas Negotiators In Qatar appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

The post Why Israel Is More Evil Than You Thought appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Europe’s Self-Destruction Is Now Irreversible appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes R. M. Givens:

Hi Lew,

Here are the links for the three episodes and the trailer.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/XNl-qfl5iq0

Ep. 1 https://youtu.be/NjQ7hqAcXPI

Ep. 2 https://youtu.be/y0IgB1n_6PY

Ep. 3 https://youtu.be/MSdwZDnGhpU

The post wWonderful new film on how southern Jews loyally and courageously fought for their beloved Homeland during WBTS appeared first on LewRockwell.

Jerome Barber wrote:

Palantir.   They are not hiding anything anymore.  We can all tell freedom bye-bye.

The post Pure Evil appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Christopher Condon.

WorldNetDaily News

The post Psych meds and mass murder appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin wrote:

“Every accusation is a confession.”

The post Israel: The Narcissistic State appeared first on LewRockwell.

Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato fuori controllo negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

________________________________________________________________

di Richard Poe

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/come-gli-inglesi-hanno-inventato-5c3)

QUIZ: Come ha fatto a diventare famoso Julian Assange?

RISPOSTA: Nel 2007 Assange e il suo sito web, Wikileaks, contribuirono a destabilizzare il Kenya. Assange interferì nelle elezioni generali della nazione contribuendo a innescare un bagno di sangue che uccise più di 1.100 keniani.

Assange ha ammesso apertamente il suo ruolo nella rivoluzione colorata keniota. Nel 2010 si vantò con il Guardian che Wikileaks aveva “cambiato il risultato” delle elezioni keniote del 2007. Tali operazioni, affermò Assange, facevano parte dell'“importante” “ruolo globale” di Wikileaks.

Naturalmente Assange stava esagerando, sopravvalutando la propria importanza. Ovviamente non cambiò da solo il risultato delle elezioni in Kenya. Assange ottenne questo risultato solo con l'aiuto critico di un governo sovrano. Il Kenya è un'ex-colonia britannica e la sua rivoluzione colorata del 2007 aveva tutti gli aspetti di un'operazione britannica. Consapevolmente o inconsapevolmente, Assange sincronizzò i suoi sforzi con quelli del Ministero degli esteri britannico e di George Soros. Ho già scritto in precedenza dei legami di Soros con l'establishment britannico.

Sagoma britannica?

Il 20 aprile 2019 Martin Minns del The Star (Kenya) scrisse un rapporto investigativo approfondito in cui rivelava, tra le altre cose, che Wikileaks.org era registrato a Nairobi nell'ottobre 2006. Condivideva una casella postale con Mars Group Kenya, una ONG finanziata in parte dal Dipartimento per lo sviluppo internazionale (DFID) del Regno Unito.

Mars Group Kenya è stata fondata da Mwalimu Mati e sua moglie Jayne nel dicembre 2006. Mati aveva precedentemente diretto la sede keniota di Transparency International, un gruppo “anticorruzione” finanziato da Soros con sede a Berlino.

Mati aveva quindi forti legami con il governo britannico e con la rete di ONG di Soros. Era nella posizione ideale per fungere da intermediario, da tramite, tra Assange e gli altri partecipanti all'imminente rivoluzione colorata in Kenya.

Molte prove suggeriscono che questo fu esattamente il ruolo svolto da Mati nell'operazione.

Il rapporto Kroll

Assange si vantava di aver innescato la rivoluzione colorata in Kenya del 2007 pubblicando un rapporto segreto della Kroll Associates UK Limited, una società di intelligence privata con sede a Londra. Il rapporto accusava l'ex-presidente keniota, Daniel Arap Moi, di corruzione su larga scala.

Accusando Moi, il rapporto Kroll gettò un'ombra sul presidente in carica Mwai Kibaki, che si era candidato alla rielezione con l'appoggio di Moi. Wikileaks pubblicò il rapporto Kroll il 30 agosto 2007. Il quotidiano britannico The Guardian pubblicò la notizia il giorno successivo.

Il quotidiano The Star (Kenya) citò poi Assange affermando di aver scelto la data di pubblicazione per “motivi politici”, che il rapporto trapelato “ha influenzato le elezioni” “spostando il voto del 10%” e che Assange credeva che le sue azioni avessero “cambiato il mondo”.

Rivoluzione colorata

Nonostante gli sforzi di Assange, Kibaki ottenne una vittoria risicata nel dicembre 2007. I cospiratori scatenarono quindi una rivoluzione colorata. Il loro candidato favorito, Raila Odinga, denunciò la frode elettorale. Gli inglesi sostennero Odinga; gli Stati Uniti sostennero Kibaki (inizialmente).

A poche ore dal voto, il Ministero degli esteri del Regno Unito e il Dipartimento per lo sviluppo internazionale (DFID) del Regno Unito rilasciarono una dichiarazione congiunta in cui esprimevano “reali preoccupazioni” circa possibili brogli elettorali.

Si trattava dello stesso DFID che in precedenza aveva erogato fondi iniziali al Mars Group Kenya, con cui Wikileaks condivideva una casella postale a Nairobi. Lo stesso Mars Group aveva anche fatto trapelare il rapporto Kroll ad Assange.

Assange avrebbe poi definito il rapporto Kroll il “Santo Graal del giornalismo keniota”, ma quel “Santo Graal” ebbe risultati disastrosi. Dopo due mesi di rivolte, 1.133 persone morirono, migliaia rimasero ferite, torturate, mutilate e stuprate.

Soros smascherato

I manifestanti pro-Odinga vennero finanziati e diretti dall'Open Society Initiative for East Africa (OSIEA) di George Soros, come rivelato in un articolo dell'11 novembre 2010 che scrissi per GlennBeck.com.

Alla fine i cospiratori ottennero ciò che volevano: le elezioni furono annullate. Gli arbitri internazionali negoziarono un accordo di condivisione del potere con Odinga e Kibaki. Il Kenya fu definitivamente destabilizzato, con ogni futura elezione oscurata da minacce di violenza.

Quando denunciai il ruolo di Soros nel massacro in Kenya, Glenn Beck promosse il mio articolo lo stesso giorno su Fox News, a un pubblico di milioni di persone, nel suo programma dell'11 novembre 2010.

Il gruppo di Soros nega il coinvolgimento nella violenza

Due giorni dopo, il 13 novembre, l'Open Society Initiative for East Africa (OSIEA) di Soros rimandò pubblicamente al mittente le mie accuse sul Daily Nation di Nairobi.

Il 20 novembre 2010 Murithi Mutiga, scrivendo sul Sunday Nation di Nairobi, accusò Glenn Beck di aver cercato di danneggiare l'allora presidente degli Stati Uniti, Barack Obama, attaccando uno dei suoi principali sostenitori, George Soros.

Lo stesso Mutiga ricopre ora il ruolo di “Direttore del programma per l'Africa” ​​per l'International Crisis Group, una ONG co-fondata e ampiamente finanziata da Soros.

L'enigma di Assange

Voglio essere chiaro. Non ho una teoria ben delineata su Julian Assange. Non so perché sia ​​stato arrestato nel 2010, né riesco a immaginare perché sia ​​stato improvvisamente liberato di recente. Sembra che a un certo punto sia caduto in disgrazia con i suoi referenti britannici; sembra anche che gli inglesi fossero determinati a impedire ad Assange di parlare con gli americani, per qualche motivo. Forse sapeva troppo... Alla fine Assange potrebbe essere diventato un martire della libertà di parola, proprio come lo dipingono i mass media (anche se forse per ragioni diverse). La verità è che non lo so per davvero.

Ciò che posso affermare con certezza è che le origini di Wikileaks sono a dir poco dubbie. I servizi segreti britannici usarono chiaramente la neonata Wikileaks come piattaforma per fomentare la crisi elettorale del 2007 in Kenya. Qualunque sia la strada che Assange ha scelto di seguire negli anni successivi, lui e Wikileaks devono il loro primo grande successo a rapporti segreti con il governo britannico.

Chi volesse approfondire l'argomento farebbe bene a iniziare con un'attenta lettura del rapporto investigativo del 2019 di Martin Minns, già citato, pubblicato su The Star (Kenya).

Guerra psicologica britannica

Quando Assange scelse di intromettersi in quelle elezioni, fu inevitabilmente coinvolto nella sfera operativa di George Soros. Per saperne di più su Soros e le sue rivoluzioni colorate, si veda The Shadow Party che ho scritto insieme a David Horowitz.

Allo stesso modo, l'interesse di Assange per il “cambiamento” rivoluzionario lo ha inevitabilmente trascinato nelle braccia dei servizi segreti britannici. La rivoluzione colorata è una loro vecchia specialità. La praticano da secoli. Una parte fondamentale della strategia britannica è stata quella di reclutare aspiranti rivoluzionari ingenui e creduloni – come Karl Marx e Lev Trotsky – e addestrarli a fungere da agenti di influenza per il loro Impero. Immagino che la carriera di Assange abbia seguito una traiettoria simile.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una mancia in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

President Trump has recently endorsed a policy that is arguably as socialist as anything proposed by New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani or Sen. Bernie Sanders — partial government ownership of private corporations.

Earlier this year, as a condition of approving Nippon Steel’s purchase of US Steel, President Trump demanded Nippon give the US government a “golden share” in US Steel. This golden share allows the US government to overrule Nippon’s management if the government determines Nippon is acting against US “national security,” which means the government can overrule many decisions made by Nippon‘s management.

Unfortunately, Nippon was not a “one-and-done” excursion into corporatism. President Trump recently struck a deal with computer chip manufacturer Intel to give the company 8.9 billion dollars in government subsidies in exchange for ten percent of Intel’s stock. This deal makes the US government Intel’s largest stockholder!

The Trump administration has promised that it will not use its position to undermine Intel’s board. However, the administration is reserving the right to counter Intel’s board if the administration determines the board is taking an action that would adversely impact the relationship of the company or its subsidiaries with the US government. So, the Trump administration is yet again giving itself power to manage a nominally private company.

Enabling the government to control a private company (even if the government does not actually exercise its power) means the company’s management will base its decisions on what will please those currently in power, rather than on the desires of consumers.

Government investment in corporations will cause politicians to make decisions based on what will profit the companies the government has “invested” in while those companies’ competitors will seek to attract government investment in order to win special privileges for themselves.

A corporation partially owned by government will be considered “too big to fail” since its failure would cause the government to lose the money “invested” in the businesses. So, the argument will be that a bailout will save the taxpayers money.

According to a 2024 analysis by the World Bank — an organization not known as a supporter of free-market economics, companies of which government owns ten percent or more are six percent less profitable and have workforces that are 32 percent less productive.

Some members of the Trump administration have suggested that the federal government take a partial ownership interest in defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has pointed out that big defense contractor Lockheed Martin, for example, is “basically an arm of the US government” since almost all its revenue comes from the US government. Secretary Lutnick has a point, but the closeness between the Pentagon and big corporations is an argument for restoring a noninterventionist foreign policy. Giving the government an ownership interest in defense contractors would allow the war party to argue that militarism is good for the taxpayer because it boosts the value of the government’s “investments”!

Government “investment” in private businesses will only worsen the twin plagues of corporatism and cronyism that afflict our political and economic systems. Instead of further entangling government and business, those seeking to make America great again should work to end the welfare-warfare-regulatory state and the fiat money system that makes it possible. The only path to prosperity is through a true free market, limited government, and a foreign policy of peace and free trade.

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