Honor is a powerful idea. Those who live by it take it seriously. It is not will, courage, or even valor, though it does demand such things. It is the code that exists within, demanding one to do what is right, regardless of risk or reward. Honor for is paramount to the warrior. The honorable warrior will fight on and conduct himself with a dignity that shall leave a legacy long after his death. Honor is at times wrapped with glory, pride, dedication and loyalty. But what about the honor that deals in moral principles?

In the modern era of total war, fundamentalist philosophies have romanced past glories, empowering the warrior to execute the will of politics in an ever intrusive manner. The world over, the warrior takes the fight to familiars and strangers with an energy that deploys the bayonet as easily as it does the remote-controlled assassin drone. The twentieth century was the bloody gushing wound of human history, where civilizations savaged the planet repeatedly with wars and conflict. The new century is repeated with similar mentalities and a call to honor.

The Prussian military is often associated with honor, influencing many war states in their ideals and practices. The Prussian virtues—which can be traced back to the Teutonic Knights—ensured that soldiers conducted themselves with a discipline and loyalty needed for war. The individual was removed, as the importance of servitude and sacrifice to the state itself was romaticized. Such virtues would pave the way for Germany to become an eager modern empire, conquering and ruling until ultimately it faced repeated defeats in the World Wars.

Such Prussian virtues helped the German state to humiliate China, snatch whatever remained of Africa, and place various naval stations in the Pacific. In doing so the German military imposed itself upon the native peoples, and in the case of German South West-Africa, commit genocide. The honour of the German soldier in practice showed an ugly nature in the coming decades when such a code of military virtues was enlisted by a national socialist ideology soaked in chauvinistic racism. It became a code of honor that perpetuated hatred and unreason. Courage and obedience were not lacking, but the honor of moral dignity most certainly was.

The United States came out of the nineteenth century as the great industrial power. on paper it was anti-imperialist and yet its recent acquisitions of Hawaii and the former Spanish colonies revealed a very imperial nature, one that could be traced back to the attempted conquest Canada in 1812, the invasion of Florida, the war against Mexico, and the ‘opening up’ of Japan. Not to mention the breathing room it afforded itself under the guise of Manifest Destiny at the expense of the independent American nations outside the original thirteen colonies. Its military was one that prized itself on honor, its independence having been won by military actions. There was an inherent dignity in war; the republic with ideals of individual liberty grew into an empire which by the end of the nineteenth centur honored twenty of the soldiers responsible for the massacre at Wounded Knee with the Medal of Honor.

The twentieth century would end in U.S. dominance, presupposed by victories in the World Wars and then the Cold War, with its ignored imperial blips and atrocities. The terrors of the war in South East Asia would for a time influence the appeal of the military and its own sense of honor but that would be reshaped in the 1990s. To be called a warrior, the soldier must have a strong military ethos and patriotism. Soldiers embraced abstract ideals that could be wielded by a government that saw itself anointed with the God-given-right to intervene wherever it chose to. It was honorable and a modern Manifest Destiny to do so. Countless revelations and examples of civilian murder would be concealed, and should they come to light were treated as blips, marks on the road map to forever war. The honor it seemed was to be silent—to look the other way or to even kill without mercy, without any regard to the rules of war.

Japanese military culture, a Samurai nation of modern technological innovations and medieval chivalry, is often associated with honor. The Bushido codes of the warrior both direct and drive the soldiers of empire to do what is needed in the service of the emperor. After the western nations had helped Japan to become a modern power, its many social and military engineers reinvented the Bushido memory. With the Last Samurai likely committing ritual suicide at the battle of Shiroyama in 1877—defeated by the modern conscript army of new Japan—the state would conjure up images of the samurai to promote its conquests in Asia. The new Japanese soldier had many outside inspirations, from the U.S. to the militaries of Europe, adopting methods and ideals from each while embracing Bushido. Like the nations that inspired it, modern Japan would conquer others and in minds of the killers, it was honorable to do so.

Much to the misery of the people on Okinawa, Formosa, Korea, and China, the young Japanese Empire slaughtered and sought to enlighten the rest of Asia with its new ways. The Japanese Empire would go to war with Tsarist Russia in a conflict of wave attacks, machine guns, torpedo boats, and disease. The Japanese military consumed much of the nation’s wealth and resources, and despite victory was then unpopular with the civil populace. It would take decades to cultivate a cult of military honor and imperial loyalty defined by sacrifice and bloodshed for empire. Honor became a word of loyalty and subservience to an emperor who had little control over his army in Manchuria, as it waged its own war of conquest.

Mass murder and sadistic crimes would become the legacy of the imperial Japanese warrior; courageous certainly but honourable? Only in the reinvented imaginations of the martial artist would such a culture and the Bushido code be considered such a thing as honorable. Integrity, often a hallmark of the honored class, was on full display by the Japanese warriors as they repeatedly promised safe treatment to the thousands of surrendering Chinese soldiers outside Nangking. Instead via deception and devious coordination, the Japanese warriors murdered tens of thousands of prisoners—often cruelly—going on to slaughter children and civilians and abducting females of all ages who became slaves to be raped and tortured. What ever virtues of honor and integrity had been ingrained in these men of war soon manifested into murdering rapists surrendering to the crudest of human lusts.

The other European empires each held dear the virtues of glory and imperial honour. The British convinced themselves that they had brought trade and order to much of the world, despite conquering it by festering division and limiting trade in their favor. The French, supposedly champions of brotherhood and justice, imposed with cruelty a dishonor that no French king could have imagined before the revolution. To have an empire was itself an honor, one to rule and to exploit. Many of these European states clung to such relics of the past, even as post-war socialist policies and reforms were attempted at home (often being funded by the blood of empire). Pride in such control, seeing the colored shapes on a map taught in the schools of the imperial powers, was likely of great honor for many, just not those yearning for home rule and independence.

For lesser nations like Australia, the military heritage is proud. War was a key element for the continent even before Federation. Australians served British interests in New Zealand, the Sudan, China, and in South Africa. The honor of the Australian fighting man was held highest after the futile landings at Gallipoli, whose anniversary is now a national holiday. The spirit of the digger soldier runs deep inside the ranks of the relatively small military, but the honors at the Canberra war memorial run long. Not just with those fallen who gave everything in service for the Commonwealth but in the names of the places visited by the Australian military. The honor is in the fight, in helping a mate when they need it. In Australia’s case the mate is always the most powerful empire: the British and now the United States. The honor is in being there, taking care of ones fellow soldiers during battle and helping the U.S. with its many policies abroad.

As an investigation on Australian war crimes in Afghanistan continues, how widespread the atrocities were will likely never be known, except to the victims. One of the most decorated soldiers of the Australian military, Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith, may himself be charged with war crimes. A brave warrior no doubt, but if the accusations are true, what honor is found in executing an unarmed man? Is courage under fire and a willingness to serve—anywhere—for the state itself honorable? If more men had the courage like former soldier and whistle-blower Braden Chapman to come out on war crimes, then perhaps the concept of honor could be re-defined in matters of military affairs. And not just for Australia.

The Great War would match the empires—old and new—in a terrible conflict. It was a war of glory and horror. Poisonous gas, the killing of prisoners, rape, the murder of the innocent, and starving millions in blockades revealed that men of great honor are willing to commit a dishonourable series of actions to achieve victory. The first Christmas truce of the war, in 1914, is one remembered with religious fondness, revealing an honor to share a common peace. Afterwards, to kill that man who shared your cigarette, maim the boy who sung a carol with you, was the normality of the war. Despite having a common God, it was an honor to kill, merely to serve a distant stranger ruling from a capital left untouched by the horrors of the front. All after giving thanks to the same God of peace.

Robert Fisk, the great war journalist, talks about his father’s service in the First World War with a certain reverence. Not because he served, but because of the courage he showed in not killing a man. Fisk describes his father as a man of many views that he disagreed with, but there is a pride when he mentions the moment that his dad, a British soldier, refused to execute an Australian soldier convicted of a crime. It is a pride in knowing that his father exhibited a moral dignity, a moment when his father acted with honor.

Contrast this with the book The Pity of War, where author Niall Ferguson describes the distrust of both sides, including the murder that continued through Christmas of 1915, even as soldiers attempted to duplicate the truce of the year prior. Or the killing of prisoners, especially by Australian and Scottish soldiers. To take no prisoners, the passionate actions of aggressive, war-weary warriors became motivated not so much by honor, but by revenge for brothers-in-arms unable to survive a horrible situation. Honor would be a word used after the war, in peace, only to be lost again in the next one.

It would take World War Two to perfect the mayhem, the fleets of aircraft capable of raising cities, those Bushido warriors of the Samurai  would pillage and savage Asia and the Pacific, the atrocious pinnacle being the rape of Nanjing.  Was there honour in stabbing babies, murder raping women with a gore of excess that even Nazi observers would condemn the Japanese army for? It would be a sign of things to come.  Perverse scientific intrigue into weaponizing disease so that it could be used on the Chinese populace, cruel experiments all run by a military that obsessed with its own social status on the home islands.  The word honour but a blanket used to drape across the rot of disgraceful perversity. In defeat one found dishonour but in victory by slaughtering the innocent, one achieved honour. The perverse fundamentalism, a modern adaption of the ancient codes that likely never were practiced in the first place. Warriors were always brave, and they often killed the innocent.

For the pilots of the Swiss Air Force flew as men of honour during the Second World War, they may not be defined by conquest but defence. During the war they fought both allied and axis. Even having their civil populations bombed by allied aircraft. To the Swiss fighter pilot, they were acting with an honour to defend their skies from aggressive belligerents that were destroying Europe and attacking their people. To defend ones homeland, especially when no prior aggression has been expressed is no doubt an honourable cause for a warrior. The Swiss did not win the war, they survived it as neutrals.  But from within their nation itself, those pilots were heroes of honour.

For imperial minded policy makers defence is something that can be based upon buffer zones and force projection, where another’s lands may be used as a proxy or an instrument for wider national defence. A unique exceptionalism that is both arrogant and aggressive, yet very much the entitled mentality of the great power.  Every warrior defending or fighting for their homeland believes it is the best, and are often willing to kill for it, to die for it.  For the warriors serving the great power, national interest is defence of homeland, in their minds this is an honourable sacrifice.

Honour will go on to be a word of majestic value to those who live it, to the families of service, those who lost a warrior. It is also a word that can give purpose to those aimless in life, in need of guidance who now finds themselves wrapped inside a uniform, handed a set of values and those who love their nation and love the military.   But for this honour, where does it stand when 1 in 4 women serving in the US military are sexually assaulted.  Where are the romantic cheers for honour and warrior codes as individuals hurt in shame because one of their own defiled them, and others help to cover it up. To drape a flag of silence across those lost inside a system that often protects the rapist, is this honour? To look the other way while brothers in arms do terrible things or to even cover such things up is not honour, it is at best corruption.

In the modern war on terror it was not the cold-blooded killer, Chris Kyle ‘the American Sniper’ that was the most honourable warrior but instead a transwoman who risked it all to reveal the hidden dark truths of that very war.  Chelsea Manning acted with moral dignity, according to the ideals that she believed, in doing so she became at best divisive figure and yet she acted with honour regardless of not taking an enemies life but in exposing to all of us the nature of a horrible war.  She was imprisoned for it.  She received more punishment than William Calley, the man blamed for the My Lai massacre and while Calley and the My Lai murderers could move on afterwards with their lives, Manning is likely going to be pulled into court repeatedly and threatened with more jail and solitary confinement by a system that declares itself just and honourable punishing someone for showing that it is not.

There is no doubt that it takes great courage to charge with bayonets yelling ‘Banzai!’ or as a Kamikaze pilot to drill your plane into a warships deck. Sacrifice itself is not honour. There is courage in fighting on as a zealous fiend as Berlin falls and the dictator dead or to stand with Custer in a remote frontier chasing glory at the expense of those defending their homeland.  Loyalty and stubbornness are not honour. There is also courage in flying a plane into a building, or even robbing a bank.  Courage is distinctly different to honourable. And yet if one can find a narrative massaged enough with ideology, patriotism or even a desire for revenge then courageous and deadly acts can by some be deemed as the conduct of the honourable.

Is honour merely servitude to a master, to nation or government? In Bushido it is expressed that to die in service of ones master is of great honour, what does the servant gain from such sacrifice if the master was never worthy?  Other than the uniquely Japanese flavour of honour, to serve the Emperor, what is in it for the agnostic, atheist or even follower of the prince of peace other than to willingly serve an indifferent regime or state?

Perhaps all of it is honourable.  The outcome remains the same. The brave is sacrificed, those who survive return home broken and those who sent them have already moved on to the next generation and wars. When it should be heralded to be that individual who stands strong and rejects the misdeeds and atrocious acts of their peers? To protect an unarmed stranger because that is the right thing to do, or to blow the whistle on crimes that have led to the death of far too many.    That should be celebrated as honourable. The Bushido or Prussian codes may have created brave warriors, but in the end, they lost after taking millions with them.  There was no honour in the atrocities.  If we celebrate honour for its own sake, then it will only be used to justify actions of great dishonour.

H L Mencken said that “Honor is simply the morality of superior men”, moral, not technological, industrial or military supremacy.  Honour is doing what is right, the universal right, in those moments of desperation and when even if it means you will lose everything, that you still did the right thing. That is honour.  It is hard to look back at many of the wars of our collective pasts to uphold them as being morally just, no matter how wicked and vile the enemy was, or how heroic many were.  The real sides of good and evil are between the innocent and the powerful, those who murder, rape and destroy and their victims.  There is no moral supremacy in waging a war on the unarmed, the child, the mother, the village who did nothing to you or yours.  You cannot win that war; you can only kill more people. And that is never honourable.

Trump’s attack on the debate commission is an attack on the election itself,” blares the headline from today’s Washington Post op-ed page. That article was written by former senator John Danforth, who has been a member of the Commission on Presidential Debates since 1994. Danforth, an ordained Episcopal priest whose piety earned him the derisive nickname, “Saint Jack,” is one of Washington’s favorite useful idiots of Leviathan. It is no surprise that he would be a permanent fixture on a commission that appears determined to perpetuate the swamp.

Danforth wails in the Post that accusing the debate commission of favoritism “destroys public confidence in the most basic treasure of democracy, the conduct of fair elections” and “paves the way to violence in the streets.” Danforth warns that the “damage to our country is incalculable” if Americans lose faith in “the fairness of our presidential debates, and, in turn, the presidential election.”

The usual Twitter mob quickly affixed a halo over Danforth’s head for his proclamation. But few people remember how Danforth previously appointed himself as the nation’s political faith healer after the biggest federal law enforcement debacle in modern times.

On February 28, 1993, 70 federal Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents launched an attack on the home of the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas. After the assault was rebuffed, the FBI arrived and, on April 19, 1993, sent in tanks that demolished much of the Davidians’ home before a fire broke out. Eighty corpses of men, women, and children were discovered in the wreckage.

Read the rest of this article at The American Conservative.

With the arrival of COVID-19 on the scene, many people have been seduced into believing that they must “listen to the science” and do whatever the self-proclaimed experts tell them to do. That this is charlatanry pure and simple follows from the fact that science says absolutely nothing about what we should or should not do. Those are questions of value, answers to which are provided by intelligent, conscious, and sentient human beings who thereby advance a perspective and promote their own values. Waving a “Follow The Science” flag distinguishes one not as a person of superior intellect and moral constitution but as someone who is easily duped and slings slogans as a way of covering up a lack of understanding—specifically, of how empirical science actually works. To refuse to wave a “Science” flag in support of political policies put forth by persons with specific value-laden agendas does not mean that one is a Luddite or an ignoramus but that one in fact grasps the fundamentally skeptical nature of the scientific enterprise.

All of the ongoing clamor about “the science” reminds me of what I observed while a graduate student in philosophy at Princeton University, where many of my peers seemed to believe that by specializing in areas such as philosophy of science or logic, they distinguished themselves as intellectually superior to those who wallowed in ethics or other forms of value theory. Having earned my undergraduate degree in biochemistry, conducted a good bit of research in organic chemistry, and taught chemistry at two different universities before pursuing graduate studies in philosophy, I was never vulnerable to the prevailing climate of scientism—the elevation of science as a form of religion—for I already knew what science could and could not do.

Science can tell you about the facts. Not all of them at once, and not immediately, but over time, as data is amassed and theories are proposed and rejected or confirmed. Those facts are always tentative, mere hypotheses covering very specific and limited ranges of reality. A theory of physical chemistry, for example, tells one nothing about botany, for the two types of theory cover completely different strata and phenomena. What are believed to be scientific facts are always subject to disconfirmation as more data is accumulated over time and better theories emerge. Apparently recalcitrant data must be somehow explained away by the best confirmed current theory, and when that proves impossible to do, then the theory must, rationally speaking, be abandoned.

Scientists throughout history have clung religiously to their favorite theories (especially those devised by themselves), but eventually, as new generations of scientists emerge, older theories become amenable to revision and even wholesale rejection by researchers not religiously devoted to them. It is not easy to do such a thing because one risks offending the true believers, some of whom may wield extraordinary institutional power and will vehemently resist suggestions to the effect that they are wrong. No one wants to believe that they have devoted their entire professional career to the elaboration of a theory which was false all along.

Philosopher Thomas Kuhn wrote a gripping book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), about the social and psychological dynamics involved in theory construction and testing, the nuts and bolts of the scientific enterprise, which, like it or not, is conducted by human beings, with all of their foibles. It seems safe to say that the COVID-19 cheerleaders for The Science^TM have never read the work of Thomas Kuhn. To refuse to subject data to scrutiny, to decline to reevaluate initial hypotheses, naïvely accepting instead the prescriptions of select gurus on faith, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they were wrong, is to succumb to the charlatanry of scientism, not to champion science.

Not everyone accepts Thomas Kuhn’s rather derogatory depiction of how scientists operate; some prefer to uphold the image of scientists as supremely rational and objective analysts. But even if Kuhn’s picture was an exaggeration—some would say a caricature—even supposing that scientific hypothesis testing were some sort of supremely rational and objective endeavor, what could even the best confirmed and most widely accepted theories of science tell us about what we ought to do? The answer is: absolutely nothing. For a scientific theory’s having survived in tact over a reasonable period of time does not alone dictate anything whatsoever about human action. To suggest otherwise is to commit what is known in philosophy as “the is-ought fallacy,” usually credited to David Hume, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher with a skeptical bent. Facts are one thing; normative prescriptions for action are quite another. People blinded by science (who I have noticed tend to be those with no higher education in science), those who, like Milgram’s unwitting experimental subjects, accept the decrees of men in white lab coats and decline to examine the values and interests being promoted by them, have simply been duped. A most stunning aspect of this intellectual submission (which has analogues in foreign policy as well) is when subjects are persuaded to believe that conflict of interest is somehow impossible among scientists—despite being possible in every other realm. Why are scientists supposed to be untainted by worldly temptation? Because they are scientists! As though human beings did not choose to become scientists.

To see the distinction between the deliverances of science and the promotion of values, consider one example of a fact widely considered to be true, based on many decades of data collection. Science tells us that smoking will greatly increase the chances of one’s dying prematurely. One’s decision whether to smoke or not, however, depends on one’s values. If you find the pleasure of smoking great enough, then you may simply not care today that at the terminus of your life some number of years will likely have been shaved off as a result of your insistence on smoking. (No guarantee, of course. There are examples of chain smokers who somehow beat the odds to become nonagenarians or even centurions.) All things considered, you are much more likely to die of a lung-related illness if you smoke than if you do not. In fact, all activities in which human beings engage involve risks along with benefits. Each individual must make his own choices for his own life about which benefits do and do not outweigh the risks incurred in doing those things—driving, drinking, rock climbing, flying, scuba diving, traveling to countries where violent crime is prevalent—the list goes on and on.

What has happened in 2020 is that a few COVID-19 policymakers have decided for all of humanity that the risk of dying from COVID-19 outweighs all other considerations about what we ought to do. This is a value judgment, pure and simple, yet it has been fobbed off as some sort of “expert” wisdom. Those who crafted the initial responses to the virus, beginning with the very labeling of COVID-19 as a pandemic, have rallied the “listen to the science” troops for many months, with the result that their stance has become very difficult to challenge. Few of them seem capable of assessing the new data and revising their theory as the scientific method would require. Despite adamantly claiming that they “listen to The science,” they fail altogether to recognize that science is not a static, eternal totem, but a method used to marshal a dynamic, metamorphosing body of hypotheses. The irony, of course, is that the most vociferous denouncers of anyone who questions the gospel are conducting themselves in the manner of religious fanatics incapable of admitting that mistakes may have been made.

Thus we find that without any evidence whatsoever for the efficacy of lockdowns, and in fact a recent pronouncement by the World Health Organization (WHO) that lockdowns have side effects which vastly outweigh any alleged benefits, the lockdowns of western states, along with border restrictions and quarantine requirements, continue on, with local authorities tweaking their policies only slightly whenever they decide that the latest “case” tally is too high. No matter that different kinds of tests are administered differently and to different groups in different places. No matter that the very accuracy of the tests has been impugned. No matter that there is no other example of a respiratory disease (to my knowledge) for which one may repeatedly test positive as “infected” while manifesting no symptoms. No matter that cases in younger persons are rarely fatal, yet serial, obligatory testing of college students continues on. The COVID-19 gurus have decided that a case is a case. None of the death data matters because these people, who never understood the scientific method in the first place, much less the fact-value dichotomy, continue to claim that The Science^TM is on their side and that those who disagree are selfish and illiterate ignoramuses. In the United States, the people of California, Michigan, Massachusetts, and other states have had to endure severe restrictions of their liberty and much economic hardship for eight months, with no end in sight. Across the pond, both Wales and Ireland, along with various counties in England, recently re-imposed strict lockdowns as a form of “circuit breaker” after surges of cases in some places where no or nearly no new COVID-19 deaths had been reported.

Proclaiming that we must “listen to the science” has become the worst type of virtue signaling on the part of people many of whom have nothing to lose from the lockdowns (their own financial security being immune to whatever policies are imposed). Shutting down the hospitality and tourism sectors of entire cities, counties and countries causes untold harm to anyone working in the gig economy, and yet the victims are themselves portrayed as immoral for refusing to sing along with the cheery refrain, “We’re all in this together!” Few among the populace have been able effectively to press these points, because the media and tech industries have overwhelmingly joined forces with the COVID-19 policymakers, promoting The Science^TM company line while silencing those who demur. Needless to say, there is nothing more unscientific than censorship, for the scientific enterprise requires a continual reassessment of the facts. When new hypotheses are forbidden because they conflict with what one believed to be true, then science has come to a screeching halt.

Even more devastating than the effects in Europe, Britain, and the United States are the same policies enacted in third world countries by leaders who emulate western politicians religiously committed to their initial responses. The same lockdown and quarantine “strategies” have been implemented in places where they could never, even in principle, diminish the incidence of COVID-19 death, even if it were true—which is not supported by data—that lockdowns worked in the West. In countries where large populations live in extremely close proximity to one another in open-air shanty towns—places such as Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, India, and many other countries as well—there is no chance that staying in one’s hut is going to prevent transmission of the dreaded disease. Meanwhile, police have ended the lives of persons in violation of emergency laws which in no way serve the people’s interests. But to understand how absurd it is to impose curfews and quarantine requirements on the residents of shared outdoor space, one would have to be familiar with basic concepts of molecular entropy, which we know from the many closed beaches and outdoor mask requirements in the West are altogether beyond the capacity of the COVID-19 gurus to comprehend.

Perhaps the grandest irony of all is that, by focusing exclusively on the hope of minimizing the deaths of the small percentage of the population vulnerable to the dreaded disease, the medical professionals who have been advising the COVID-19 policymakers have violated the most sacred oath of physicians: Do No Harm. Lockdown policies have harmed every person whose risk of death by other causes has been increased by preventing them from doing whatever they would have done, left to their own devices: working, visiting the doctor, and engaging in normal social activities which make life worthwhile, including interacting with family and friends.

With regard to scarce resources and policies which affect entire populations, science is silent about who should and should not be saved. Should limited health resources be dedicated to the mass testing of young people not at serious risk from COVID-19? Should healthy children at nearly no risk of death be used in experimental vaccine trials? These are value judgments about which science has nothing to say. Anyone who suggests otherwise is a shyster or confused, and anyone who believes that men in white lab coats should be the ones to answer such questions has been fooled.

The U.S. Census made the news recently, as a dispute over the deadline for its data collection made it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Trump administration successfully lobbied for a deadline of Friday October 16, over the objections of the National Urban League who instead wanted the deadline extended to the end of October due to COVID-related delays.

The traditional census has been conducted every decade since 1790, as mandated in the Constitution. The population count is used to determine representation in congressional districts for the next 10 years.

The data is also “used to distribute billions of dollars in federal funds for health care, housing programs and education,” as ABC News described.

Local communities emphasize high census response rates so that they aren’t “underrepresented” when it comes to the federal government dole.

But that’s not all. Indeed it’s far from it.

As detailed in this Census Bureau document, the census also asks a litany of other questions of households, including income, sex, age, home value, education attainment, kitchen facilities, number of vehicles available, and dozens more.

The census, however, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to government data collection.

As Murray Rothbard wrote even decades ago, “The vast bulk of statistics is gathered and disseminated by government. The overall statistics of the economy, the popular ‘gross national product’ data that permits every economist to be a soothsayer of business conditions, come from government.”

In an essay first published in 1961 by the Foundation for Economic Education, and much more recently re-produced at Mises.org, Rothbard argued that the “burgeoning of government statistics offers several obvious evils to the libertarian.”

Steep Compliance Costs

Forced compliance to the government’s massive apparatus of data collection imposes significant costs, especially burdensome on the nations’ small businesses.

“Private industry, and the private consumer, must bear the burdensome costs of record keeping, filing, and the like, that these statistics demand,” Rothbard wrote. “Not only that; these fixed costs impose a relatively great burden on small business firms, which are ill equipped to handle the mountains of red tape.”

Data collection represents yet another means by which big government hurts the little guy.

While it’s impossible to know the severity of the burden, Rothbard did report on a Hoover Commission task force which found “The chemical industry alone reports that each year it spends $8,850,000 to supply statistical reports demanded by three departments of the Government. The utility industry spends $32,000,000 a year in preparing reports for Government agencies.”

Recall that this data is from an article written in 1961, so today’s burden on businesses will be several multiples higher in dollar terms. The millions (or more) in resources devoted to compliance to government data collection schemes diverts scarce resources that could otherwise be devoted to job creation, capital investment that increases productivity which in turn drives up wages, or research and development devoted to developing new products to improve the lives of consumers.

A Precursor to Fovernment Intervention

Even more nefarious, however, is how government data collection serves as the foundation upon which government intervention and control is built. According to Rothbard:

Not only do statistics gathering and producing go beyond the governmental function of defense of persons and property; not only are economic resources wasted and misallocated, and the taxpayers, industry, small business, and the consumer burdened. But, furthermore, statistics are, in a crucial sense, critical to all interventionist and socialist activities of government.

The data and statistics collected by the government, Rothbard argued, serves as a substitute for market data for government planners. Consumers, for instance, have little need of such statistics. Instead, Rothbard wrote, the consumer uses localized knowledge made available “through advertising, through the information of friends, and through his own experience” in order to understand the markets around him and help inform his decisions.

Likewise, business owners “must also size up his particular market, determine the prices he has to pay for what he buys and charge for what he sells, engage in cost accounting to estimate his costs, and so on.”

None of this activity by consumers and businesses, however, is dependent upon the “statistical facts about the economy ingested by the federal government,” Rothbard noted. Instead, “The businessman, like the consumer, knows and learns about his particular market through his daily experience.”

But government bureaucrats, Rothbard continued, “are in a completely different state of affairs.”

They are decidedly outside the market. Therefore, in order to get ‘into’ the situation that they are trying to plan and reform, they must obtain knowledge that is not personal, day-to-day experience; the only form that such knowledge can take is statistics.

As such, only through the mass gathering of statistics can the government make “even a fitful attempt to plan, regulate, control, or reform various industries—or impose central planning and socialization on the entire economic system,” Rothbard wrote.

Without gathering statistics on various industries, how could it even begin to regulate prices or other aspects of their economic activity? How could the government attempt to “regulate” the business cycle without knowing whether business activity was going up or down?

“Statistics, to repeat, are the eyes and ears of the interventionists,” Rothbard declared. “Cut off those eyes and ears, destroy those crucial guidelines to knowledge, and the whole threat of government intervention is almost completely eliminated.”

Lastly, because perhaps the most common pretext for government intervention into the economy is to “correct” for market failures, if the government were deprived of its data collection, there would no longer even be the slightest “pretense of rationality in government intervention” left.

As a result, Rothbard concludes by suggesting that “the simple and unspectacular abolition of government statistics would probably be the most thorough and most effective” check on government intervention. “Statistics, so vital to statism, its namesake, is also the State’s Achilles’ heel.”

Bradley Thomas is creator of the website Erasethestate.com and author of the book “Tweeting Liberty: Libertarian Tweets to Smash Statists and Socialists.” He is a libertarian activist who enjoys researching and writing on the freedom philosophy and Austrian economics. You can follow him on Twitter @erasestate.

This written statement was made by Daniel Ellsberg, acting as an expert witness for the defense, on September 18, 2020 in front of the British magistrate during the extradition trial of Julian Assange. This transcript is republished from RCReader.com. 

1. I provide this statement in the ongoing proceedings USA v Julian Assange. I am aware of the allegations against Mr. Assange and have read the indictments. I am familiar with the nature of the content of the publications in question. I have met Mr. Assange on a number of occasions during the past ten years and have had lengthy discussions with him on issues relevant to the charges he faces.

2. I have been asked by Mr. Assange’s UK lawyers to provide such evidence as I am able. (i) On the basis of my knowledge of Mr. Assange and his work to comment upon what I understand to be the assertion by the prosecution in his case that he does not have “political opinions” or rather, any of relevance to the request for his extradition. I am asked whether I consider opinions of relevance in the context of the indictment he faces can be categorised as recognisable political opinions and such as have been exercised by him in thought, speech and actions to have been intended to alter (and in fact to have altered) the actions of relevant government institutions in particular those of the USA. (ii) On the basis of my knowledge and experience, of the restrictions upon the exposure of classified information even where the intention is to expose grave illegalities carried out within particular wars; and the impact of further restrictions if prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

3. My personal details are these: I was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1931. I was educated at Harvard University, where I received a B.A., summa cum laude, in 1952 and a Ph.D. in Economics in 1962. In 1953-53 I was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for study at King’s College, Cambridge University, and in 1957-59 I was a member of the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. From 1954-57 I was an infantry officer in the U.S. Marine Corps.

4. I am a co-founder and current board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation; Distinguished Research Fellow of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), UMass, Amherst; Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF).

5. I am a receipient of numerous awards, many citing my revelation of the Pentagon Papers, including the Right Livelihood Award, 2006; Dresden Peace Prize, 2016; and the Olaf Palme Prize, 2018, in addition to: ACLU Civil Liberties Award, 1971; Americans for Democratic Action Fredom of Speech Award, 1972; Eleanor Roosevelt Peace Award (SANE) 1973 (with Andrei
Sakharov); Gandhi Peace Award, 1978; Society of Profesional Journalists Freedom of Information Award, 2004; German Federation of Scientists Whistleblowerpreis Award, 2004. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Distinguished Peace Leader Award, 2005; Ron Ridenhour Courage Prize, 2010; Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award, 2013; Bertha Foundation Ben Bagdikian Award, 2013; Media Law Resource Center (MLRC) William J. Brennan Jr. Defense of Freedom Award, 2016.

Relevant Background

6. I set out below my background and experience of relevance to the matters on which I am commenting in this statement.

7. In 1964-65 I was Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, with the “super-grade” GS-18: highest level in the Civil Service, the civilian equivalent to major general. In 1965-67, having volunteered for service in Vietnam, I served in the Embassy in Saigon with the grade of FSR-1, as Senior Liaison Officer, and as Special Assistant to the Deputy Ambassador with the duty of evaluating pacification.

8. In 1967-69, I was a member – as a consultant to OSD from the Rand Corporation, to which I had returned – of a McNamara Task Force which produced a 47-volume Top Secret study entitled “History of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam 1945-68,” later known as the Pentagon Papers. In this role, I had access to documents classified at the ‘secret’ and ‘top secret’ leve. In late 1968 and early 1969 I was a consultant to the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Henry Kissinger, on Vietnam options and initial governmental studies on Vietnam.

9. In 1969, together with my colleague Anthony Russo, I made several copies of the Pentagon Papers. I believed that these 7,000 pages of top secret documents demonstrated that the conduct of the war in Vietnam had, over more than one administration, been started and continued by the US Government in the knowledge that it could not be won, and that President Johnson and his administration had lied to Congress and to the public in relation to its origins, costs and prospects.

10. Eventually, in 1971, having provided the documents I had copied to The New York Times and The Washington Post, those newspapers published excerpts of the Pentagon Papers. As a result of the Nixon administration to restrict prior
publication, the US Supreme Court ruled in New York Times v United States that The New York Times had the right to publish the materials which were protected by the First Amendment.

11. I was prosecuted in 1971 for my giving truthful information to the public. The Nixon administration utilised the Espionage Act (intended for spies) against me and my co-accused, we having informed the public of that truthful information.

12. Initially, three charges were brought against me with a possible sentence of 35 years; by the end of the same year I was indicted on 12 counts with a possible sentence of 115 years. Despite the importance and necessity of the action I took I was not permitted to rely upon any justification in my defence to the Espionage Act charges. My trial instead, ended eventually as a result of the revelation of the U.S. government’s criminal actions towards me which led in turn to the convictions of several administration officials.

My Actions

13. It took me months to copy the papers from my safe at the Rand Corporation, one page at a time. I collated the documents as they came off the Xerox machine, and cut off the “top secret” classifications from the top and the bottom of all the pages. I knew then that my actions could result in my going to prison, but I believed that the public had to know about this.

14. I considered my actions then, and now, to be essential and the actions of a patriot.

15. There is strong basis for the widely-held belief that my own action had a tangible effect, as I intended and hoped, on the ability of the American public, Congress and courts, to end both the deaths and the deceptions associated with U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war.

The Impediments to Alternative Means of Disclosure

16. Without publication in the press, it would have proved impossible for the content of the Pentagon Papers to be placed in the public domain. I spent over a year and a half attempting to get hearings in Congress without success.

17. Making the public aware of the Pentagon Papers took years. I tried a number of routes. It was the specific example of Randall Kehler, whom I met in August 1969 as he prepared to go to prison for two years for refusing to cooperate with his draft board, that put in my head the question: “What can I do—non-violently and truthfully—to help end this war, if I am willing to go to jail for it?” And that question found its answer within weeks, at which point I began to copy the documentary evidence in my safe of governmental deception and law-breaking. I decided to demonstrate the truth about the war to Congress and the public, though I expected to spend the rest of my life in prison for doing it.

18. Prior to my releasing the Pentagon Papers, I had possession in my safe in the Pentagon, documents which gave lie to claims of an “unequivocal, unprovocated” attack on U.S. destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf. False claims about the incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin led to the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by Congress, which gave President Johnson legal justification for engaging in war against North Vietnam. I was later told by Senator Morse (one of the two senators who had voted against the resolution), that if I had given him that evidence at the time, instead of waiting to 1969 when I provided it to the Senate foreign relations committee, the resolution would have been voted down.

19. I have long regretted not releasing the documents in August 1964, or in the next few months, and it is a heavy burden for me to bear. Had I or one of the scores of other officials who had the same high-level information acted then on our oath of office—which was not an oath to obey the president, nor to keep the secret that he was violating his own sworn obligations, but solely an oath “to support and defend the constitution of the United States”—that terrible war might well have been averted altogether. But to hope to have that effect, we would have needed to disclose the documents when they were
current, before the escalation—not five or seven, or even two, years after the fateful commitments had been made.

20. The routes to exposure in courts of law were entirely blocked. I had been asked to be an expert witness in the trial of a number of highly principled college students and seminarians who had destroyed draft files as a way of protesting peacefully against a continuing believed illegal war. I was not permitted however to present copies of the Pentagon Papers as documentary evidence to support my testimony that the government had been manipulating the democratic process—and concealing its own law-breaking—by lying to the public, a situation that called for dramatic challenge of the sort the defendants
had done. But the Pentagon Papers did not get into the public record on that occasion. The federal judge in that case refused to allow me to offer evidence (the Pentagon Papers, in a briefcase by my side on the witness stand) to support my assertion of that several presidents had lied. When he heard me use the word “lie” he warned the defense lawyer questioning me that both the lawyer and myself would be held in contempt if I used that word again. He had earlier warned the defense attorney that he would not entertain expert testimony “critical of the federal government.”

21. It was precisely this sort of consciousness that seemed to me to need changing if our democratic system were to end the Vietnam tragedy, and I saw nothing other than the Pentagon Papers that might do the job. But that meant that I had to be willing to take measures that would sharply increase the risk of spending the rest of my life in jail.

22. In fact, the disclosures that ended my trial on May 11, 1973—daily revelations for two weeks of a whole series of criminal actions that the Nixon Administration had taken against me to stop further truth-telling about government policy by me
or others—further strengthened Congressional determination to cut off spending on American weapons and bombs that were still killing Vietnamese, even though U.S. casualties had ceased. (The first House majority vote to suspend funding on the war, for bombing of Cambodia, came on May 10, the day before my trial was finally dismissed).

23. It is in the context of the above experience that I can comment upon the position facing Julian Assange, having studied carefully the subject matter of the WikiLeaks publications in 2010 and 2011 concerning the conduct of the Afghan and Iraq wars and detentions in Guantanamo Bay and US diplomatic cables commenting upon aspects of U.S. actions. I have observed the extraordinary breadth and depth of those revelations: revealing as they do the reality of the consequences of war. The exposure of such would be imperative to bring about any alteration of US government policy. I have followed closely the impact of a number of those publications and consider them to be amongst the most important truthful revelations of hidden criminal state behaviour that have been made public in U.S. history. My own actions in relation to the Pentagon Papers and the consequences of their publication have been acknowledged to have performed such a radical change of understanding. I view the WikiLeaks publications of 2010 and 2011 to be of comparable importance

Re: Mr Assange’s Political Opinions

24. I comment that I find extraordinary the assertion that Mr. Assange does not possess political opinions of direct relevance to his intended prosecution in the USA and the ongoing attempt to extradite him for charges under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Acts. The opinions that it is very obvious that he has, (amongst many of sophistication and complexity on a range of issues), in particular in the light of the prosecution he faces, are very clearly focussed fairly and squarely at the centre of political movements of which I regard myself as part and which much of my life has spent committed to pursuing. (i) The movement to bring transparency to government actions which required to be exposed for the public to understand them and to achieve alteration, in particular those that touch upon the gravest of issues, (very frequently where the claim for “national security” has been erected to obscure illegality and deceit often on a major scale). (ii) In respect of the “anti-war”/”peace” movement I have heard and read many of Mr. Assange’s public statements on these issues. They have constituted an important part of public debate and knowledge on the subject of war and in particular the subject of the Afghan and Iraq wars, the publications for which he is being prosecuted having constitued an enormous body of incontrovertible data that has allowed for a universal body of knowledge and consequent understanding and action. I have also spoken to him privately over many hours on the same subjects. Indeed I spoke to him during the course of 2010/2011 at a time when some of the published material had not yet seen the light of day. I was able to observe his approach was the exact opposite of reckless publication and nor would he wilfully expose others to harm. WikiLeaks could have published the entirety of the material on receipt. Instead I was able to observe but also to discuss with him the unprecedented steps he initiated, of engaging with convential media partners, for the purpose of ensuring that the impact of publication was not only widespread, but that
it might be the most likely route to have effect upon U.S. government policy and its alteration.

25. I hope that my comments might assist the Court in its understanding of what it is that Mr. Assange faces and its context. I observe the closest of similarities to the position I faced, where the exposure of illegality and criminal acts institutionally and by individuals was intended to be crushed by the administration carrying out those illegalities; in part in revenge for my act of exposing them but in part to crush all such future exposure of the truth and when there was no other way. I have closely observed the actions of the US government, its military and its intelligence agency the CIA and that the actions in question were never intended to be revealed (including rendition and torture, the use of “black sites” and crimes against humanity). I have also observed that those who have been party to exposing them have been and continue to be themselves threatened and criminalised. The actions brought against me involved a political determination (later exposed) that the Department of Justice be used to bring those actions even where the justification for their publication had been acknowledged. By the eventual time of my trial in 1973 US policies had indeed already been put into reverse as a result of the newspapers’ publications years before.

WikiLeaks’ Publication of the Afghan War Logs

26. When stories based on the Afghan war logs began to be published, I felt that the comparison between those publications and the Pentagon Papers was inevitable in one major respect: in terms of volume, there had been nothing like it since the Pentagon Papers. It was the first unauthorised disclosure of such magnitude in nearly 40 years. Moreover, it had the advantage of being more current; the most recent of the Pentagon Papers were dated three years before their release but some of the documents in the Afghan war diaries were dated six months earlier than their release.

27. There were also some differences which I noted. The Pentagon Papers were high-level, top-secret documents on internal estimates, alternatives being debated, presidential directives, and so forth. The Afghanistan documents are lower-level field reports, of the kind that I was reading and writing when I was a foreign-service officer in Vietnam. In fact, I could have written a number of them—they were very like the ones I wrote, with the place names changed. Which confirmed my view held for a number of years that I saw the war in Afghanistan as ‘Vietnamistan’ in that it was a replay of the stalemate the USA had been in 40 years ago. My further observation is that the civilian victims of the population ceased to be seen as human beings whose lives had the same worth as those involved in the bringing of war to their respective countries; in those circumstances, crimes against humanity of the worst kind, and mass atrocities could and did become the norm.

28. My attention, as with the rest of the world was first caught by the video of the Apache helicopter assault in Iraq, which became known as ‘Collateral Murder.’ That title, given by Assange, was often criticised as overly accusatory. On the contrary, as a former battalion training officer (Third Battalion, Second Marines) and rifle company commander, I was acutely aware that what was depicted in that video deserved the term murder, a war crime. (In fact, deliberate as the killing of civilians was, it was the word “collateral” that was questionable.) The American public needed urgently to know what was being done routinely in their name, and there was no other way for them to learn it than by unauthorized disclosure.

29. I came to appreciate, in relation to the publication of subsequent material, the ways in which Assange had developed and was continuing to develop technology which enabled whistleblowers to bring evidence of such criminality into the public domain. I understood at the time that Assange planned to offer this same technology to newspapers at the time and I note that since 2010, most major media outlets, and even the CIA, have developed secure technology to allow whistleblowers to share information in a secure and anonymous way. Indeed, the Freedom of the Press Foundation—of which I was a co-founder and am a current board member—has developed and widely made available to media just such a software system, “Secure Drop.”

My Prosecution Under the Espionage Act

30. It is widely acknowledged that the copying done by me and the much later, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, can reasonably be held to have contributed first, to the ending of U.S. casualties in Vietnam, and subsequently to the ending of the war and to the destruction of Vietnam and the deaths of its people. However those effects depended in large part on the Nixon adminstrations over-reaction to my actions, its actions having been taken in fear of the political consequences of better public information on a policy that was still being conducted largely in secret to hide its reckless illegality.

31. As has become very well known, after the publication of the papers, President Nixon was so disturbed by the media’s portrayal of my actions that he ordered his aides to look for damaging personal information to destroy my reputation. “Don’t worry about his trial” the President told then Attorney General John Mitchell, “Just get everything out…we want to destroy him in the press” and a clandestine White House unit led by Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt broke into the offices of my psychiatrist in September 1971, discovered only after a further attempted burglary took place (the Watergate burglary). Further still, President Nixon and his associates had brought in a dozen CIA assets, under the direction of Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, from Miami on May 3rd 1972, with orders to incapacitate me totally. Bernard Baker, a CIA asset, later told me that his mission was to break both of my legs and I later learnt (from the special prosecutor in their case) that there was a plan for these CIA assets to attack me in the course of a rally that I was speaking to on the steps of the Capitol on May 3 1972. Three days before my trial came to an end, evidence of unlawful wire tapping surveillance surfaced. The trial judge, William Byrne on May 11th 1973 stated “The totality of the circumstances of this case…offend a sense of justice. The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case.” He dismissed all charges with prejudice (so that I could not face these charges again.)

32. I do not canvas in this statement the fact that a collateral challenge was intended to be argued at my trial. However, so far as the Espionage Act itself and any challenge based on the necessary action that I would wish to have made, the response of my trial judge is very well known. When I attempted to answer my lawyer’s question as to “why” I had copied the Pentagon Papers—in part, to explain my judgment that the documents were improperly classified to keep them not from an enemy but from the American public and to argue the necessity therefore of their being made public because of their content—the court ruled the question as “irrelevant” and I was silenced before I could begin. My lawyer said that he “Had never heard of a case where a defendant was not permitted to tell the jury why he did what he did”. Judge Byrne responded “Well you’re hearing one now.” (Of grave concern was the revelation I later learned that the President, intent on preventing the revelation of criminal acts against me surfacing during the trial, had offered the trial judge, Matthew Byrne, the thenopen post of Director of the FBI (a childhood ambition of Byrne’s), on the understanding that he would end the trial expeditiously (presumably, with conviction).

33. Without the revelation of these supervening illegal events above, if facing the same circumstances today, and charged under the Espionage Act, I am certain that I would be convicted. I observe that this has been the pattern since in prosecutions under the Espionage Act of whistleblowers seeking to raise the public interest attaching to the publications in question. I noted that the military judge at the trial of Chelsea Manning did not allow Manning or her lawyer to argue her intent, the lack of damage to the U.S., over classification of the cables or the benefits of the leaks until she was already found guilty.

#StopTrumpsTerror is one of the hottest trending topics on Twitter, with more than 90,000 tweets. Yesterday, the FBI announced the arrest of six people yesterday in a plot (perhaps government-hatched) to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for treason for destroying the state’s economy with the lockdowns she imposed. Seven other individuals were arrested and charged with violating Michigan’s anti-terrorism law.

Trump had no connection to the plot, and at least one of the alleged plotters denounced Trump as a “tyrant” and “the enemy.” But Trump’s condemnations of lockdowns was enough for Gov. Whitmer to denounce Trump yesterday as “complicit” with the plotters. She derided Trump for spending “the past 7 months denying science, ignoring his own health experts, stoking distrust, fomenting anger and giving comfort to those who spread fear and hatred and division.” Former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi told MSNBC that Donald Trump should be investigated for “aiding and abetting” the Michigan plot.

Whitmer, one of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s favorite governors, enraged many Michiganders by locking down the state after the outbreak of COVID-19. Whitmer placed almost the entire state under house arrest, dictating a $1,000 fine for anyone who left their home to visit family or friends. Business owners faced up to three years in prison for refusing to close their operations. Whitmer severely restricted what stores could sell and prohibited purchasing seeds for spring planting after she decreed that a “nonessential” activity. (Purchasing state lottery tickets was still an “essential” activity.) Though Covid infections were concentrated in the Detroit metropolitan area, Whitmer shut down the entire state—including northern counties with few cases, boosting unemployment to 24 percent statewide. In a tweet yesterday, Trump said Whitmer “has done a terrible job. She locked down her state for everyone, except her husband’s boating activities.”

Whitmer’s actions infuriated many Michiganders and no informants were necessary to spur much of the anti-government rhetoric recited in the federal indictment yesterday. Plenty of hotheads say things online or in allegedly encrypted messages that look menacing or idiotic in cold print afterwards. Threatening violence against government officials—or anyone else—is reprehensible. But how far did those guys move to actually carrying out their plot? Last month, some of the conspirators “drove to the area surrounding the [Whitmer vacation] residence and discussed detonating explosives to divert police—even checking the underside of a bridge for spots to place a charge,” as the Washington Post summarized the indictment.

The FBI admits that it paid one informant $8,600, and there may be other payments that are revealed in the coming days or weeks. FBI agents have been taught that subjects of FBI investigations “have forfeited their right to the truth,” which helps explain the vast increase in federal entrapment operations in recent decades. Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1% of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats. Thirty times as many were induced by the FBI to behave in ways that prompted their arrest. The bureau’s informant program extends far beyond Muslims. It bankrolled an extremist right-wing New Jersey blogger and radio host for five years before his 2009 arrest for threatening federal judges. A long-term FBI informant organized the Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in July 2017.

The alleged Michigan plot is almost too idiotic to believe. The alleged conspirators purportedly planned to kidnap Gov. Whitmer and take her to Wisconsin for a private trial. This is on par with the 2006 FBI-fabricated terror plot of the Liberty City Seven, where an informant swayed a bunch of dimwits to babble about blowing up government buildings. That group was so knuckle-headed that they asked the informant for military uniforms and wanted to conduct a parade.

The Michigan conspirators are receiving vastly more coverage than a recent Michigan Supreme Court decision, which effectively labeled Whitmer a lawless dictator who had extended a “state of emergency” far beyond what an unconstitutional state law allowed. Instead of obeying the ruling of the highest state court, Whitmer responded by having the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services issue “new COVID-19 emergency orders that are nearly identical to her invalidated emergency orders,” as the Mackinac Center noted.

Four months earlier, the Michigan Court of Claims condemned Whitmer for contorting a Michigan workplace safety law to unjustifiably inflict additional penalties on businesses and individuals who failed to submit to her pandemic commands.

But, according to the media, locking down Michigan isn’t tyranny—it is public service.

Anyone who protests or heartily condemns lockdowns will also be presumed collectively guilty with the Michigan plotters. The same media moral framework will likely be used to exonerate new lockdowns that may be imposed in the name of curbing COVID-19. Earlier this week, many pundits denounced Trump as a would-be Mussolini for his statement on the White House balcony after he returned from Walter Reed Hospital. Commentators were horrified that Trump, who was standing outside not close to anyone, removed his facemask.

If Biden is elected president and fulfills his promise to impose a national facemask mandate or dictates a national shutdown of the economy, such actions will be portrayed as benevolence at its best, rather than the most foolhardy federal interventions since the 55 mile per hour speed limit.

Will the Michigan plot be touted by the media to valorize every government official who placed any American under house arrest in response to the pandemic? It is possible to heartily condemn both nitwit conspirators and oppressive politicians. Unfortunately, the media will likely pay far more attention to the bluster of boneheads than to actual devastation produced by unjustified shutdowns.

This article was originally featured at the American Institute for Economic Research and is republished with permission.

The state of New York has wasted no time reminding Americans about its pathological disregard for personal freedom.

Its COVID-19 lockdown policies were among the most heavy-handed responses implemented by a state government in the country. Controversies surrounding the state government’s decision to place recovering COVID patients in retirement homes, arguably a major factor behind the state’s deadly retirement home outbreak, were major black eyes for Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration. The Empire State’s overreach hasn’t been confined to COVID-19, though.

New York policymakers are taking crisis opportunism to another level by attempting to dissolve the National Rifle Association. Led by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, the state of New York moved forward with a lawsuit last month in an attempt to gut the organization during a time when the NRA is mired in financial scandals. The New York suit alleges that the NRA has been involved in extensive cases of misallocation of funds and corruption, therefore requiring the state to dissolve America’s oldest and most powerful gun lobby.

How Bureaucrats Target Their Ideological Enemies

While state governments have the power to investigate organizations for potentially defrauding donors, the case the state of New York is pursuing against the NRA reeks of political grandstanding. The NRA is an easy target for the Left, which is ecstatic about any opportunity to demonize gun owners and institutions that encourage lawful use of firearms. In the case of New York Attorney General James, her record of antigun crusading speaks for itself. While in her previous position as a public advocate for New York City, James attempted to force banks to break their ties with firearms manufacturers after the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. James is a politician with an ax to grind, and the current COVID-19 lockdown hysteria gives her an opportunity to poke a “deplorable” group in the eye.

The NRA is no steadfast paladin of gun freedom, at least when compared to hard-line rivals or the many grassroots organizations that don’t rely on big donor money to stay afloat. Be that as it may, its recent confrontation with New York’s state government should concern any organization advocating for even stronger firearm-related freedoms.

Previously, I wrote about the increasingly politicized nature of the political speech and activities that nonprofit organizations participate in. Historically, politicians have used the levers of tax power to harass political organizations that rub them the wrong way. It wasn’t too long ago that the Obama administration’s IRS made went after Tea Party organizations and excessively scrutinized their internal operations. While the IRS issued an apology for its behavior during the Obama years, the threat of government sticking its nose in the affairs of political organizations is still present at all levels. For now, activist state governments will be more than happy to make people’s lives miserable.

Gun owners face threats from all corners—from state and nonstate actors. To mitigate these threats, it would be wise for Second Amendment organizations to go where free speech and political organization are treated best. As riots across have vividly demonstrated, we cannot assume all jurisdictions will uphold their side of the proverbial “social contract” and protect basic liberties. Mises Institute President Jeff Deist candidly observed, “Selective prosecution and selective nonprosecution are terrifying features of the crappy U.S. justice system. Any of us could have our lives ruined tomorrow by a political DA.”

Politicians are picking up on the divergent political paths states are taking. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem made a name for herself by refusing to enact a statewide lockdown. Similarly, Arkansas attorney general Leslie Rutledge came to the NRA’s defense by penning a piece for NBC News condemning her New York counterpart and demonstrating how her state offers more favorable conditions for gun owners and advocacy for the concept. After all, Arkansas is a constitutional carry state and is not going to go out of its way to persecute political organizations for wrongthink by using the excuses of campaign finance violations or trumped-up charges of misuse of funds.

The NRA’s current dilemma is emblematic of our political era—mass polarization and a widening gulf between the values of states dominated by major urban centers and those with more rural constituencies. Let’s face it: New York hasn’t been a gun-friendly jurisdiction in recent decades. From New York City’s assault weapons ban during the early 1990s to the passage of the SAFE Act in 2013, which established universal background checks and broadened the definition of so-called assault weapons, the State of New York has demonstrated a clear antipathy toward gun ownership. It is no surprise that it’s ranked dead last according to Guns and Ammo magazine’s annual rankings for gun friendliness.

The Benefits of Decentralization

America’s federalism still provides a fallback option for Americans living in states that are hostile to economic and cultural interests. If states become overzealous in their policymaking, people can vote with their feet by moving to states that are friendlier to personal and economic freedoms. We are already witnessing this trend in action, as 6 million Americans have already left states like California in the past decade for more business-friendly and affordable places such as Arizona, Colorado, and Texas. So, the movement of people is not just a hypothetical scenario in today’s climate of polarization.

President Donald Trump sagaciously suggested the NRA move its headquarters to Texas, a state known for its gun culture and policies that are receptive toward lawful gun ownership. From 2020 and beyond, many gun owners will have to grapple with the grim reality that certain jurisdictions will not be amicable toward wedge issues that span the spectrum from abortion to gun ownership. A number of gun owners have already gotten the memo and have begun to explore unorthodox ways of getting around the existential threat of gun control in their respective localities. Some have launched the notorious Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions movement. Although there are legitimate critiques about the efficacy of said sanctuary movements, gun owners are at least getting into the right mindset of using local action to effect change as opposed to waiting for the Executive Branch or the Supreme Court to save them. Moreover, some have rocked the boat even further by suggesting state lines be redrawn. For example, West Virginia invited rural counties of Virginia to join the state, while disgruntled residents of Oregon and Northern California are attempting to break away from their respective states to become part of a Greater Idaho that better represents their values.

More states should make it a point to differentiate themselves from progressive bastions. Americans can see for themselves that there are other jurisdictions in the country that treat certain freedoms better than others. The potential loss of a significant portion of their tax base could be enough for blue states to start to reconsider their divisive policies. The question is, Are they ready to see the error of their ways?

We will have to see.

This article was originally featured at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and is republished with permission.

The recent deaths of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and pop singer Helen Reddy provide an opportunity to take stock of the fourth-wave of the feminist movement, and how dramatically it has changed since the intial achievements of the second-wave (circa 1960-1990)

Ginsburg’s first major court case as an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney was Reed v. Reed (1971), in which the ACLU argued that Idaho’s legalized preference for male administrators of estates violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, on the basis of sex. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote a unanimous 7-0 opinion striking down Idaho’s law. The Reed decision began the movement towards gender-neutral law and almost overnight required the rewording of hundreds of state and federal statutes.

Although the U.S. Constitution doesn’t include an equal rights amendment, the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment currently functions as a robust substitute. Almost all gender-based legal classifications are viewed as inherently suspect by courts today, subject to strict judicial scrutiny. The movement toward gender-blind law began with Reed v. Reed and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

While Ginsburg was advancing feminism legally, Helen Reddy was contributing culturally. Reddy’s breakout musical recording came in 1972 with her signature song “I Am Woman” which reached number one on the Billboard music charts in December of that year. The song’s opening lyrics “I am woman, hear me roar …” and its closing lyrics “I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman …” are a paean to female empowerment. And when she accepted the Grammy Award for for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance of 1972, Reddy notably thanked God “because She makes everything possible.” Reddy’s song enshrined the narrative that women are strong, independent beings who shouldn’t aspire to be clinging vines, their lives revolving around the men in their life.

Consequently, two pillars of second-wave feminism were that 1) gender-neutral law should replace existing gender-specific “protective” legislation, statutes which ultimately hindered the advancement of women; and 2) the sexual revolution, with its emphasis on reproductive rights (abortion) and female sexual agency, was a positive force for women’s liberation.

The year after the Reed decision in 1972, the civil rights law Title IX was passed in Congress to ensure that, “No person in the United States shall, based on sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Title IX reinforced the concept of gender-neutral law.

And the commercial introduction in 1960 of birth control pills (“the pill”), followed a few years later by women’s increased access to safe and legal abortion, ushered in the sexual revolution and granted women reproductive rights and control over their bodies.

Similarly, the late 1960s witnessed a broad movement across the United States towards coed schools, universities, and workplaces. Women joined police forces, fire departments, and beginning in 1976, the military, naval and air force academies. On college campuses, coed dormitories began replacing male-only dorms and female “virgin vaults,” the latter of which often implemented strict curfews, hours generally not enforced in male dorms. And the abandonment by colleges of in loco parentis, while facially gender-neutral, impacted women even more beneficially than men, acknowledging that females should be granted agency over their personal life decisions. Finally, during second-wave feminism, women began to exercise more autonomy over the selections of their romantic and sexual partners, including their partners’ race, class, gender and religion, choices which before were often overridden by the wishes of their family and parents.

In short, second-wave feminism embraced strong, independent women—females who could perform “men’s jobs” and women who didn’t need men “protecting” them by legally controlling their options over which career paths to pursue, for example, and which men (or women) to date, have sex with and marry. Second-wave feminists told the government to keep your laws off my body and out of my bedroom.

The heroic battles for these gender paradigm shifts were led by second-wave feminists, usually against the opposition of conservative societal forces.

And by any objective measure, today the feminist goals of 1970 have been completely realized. Today, 12.8% of police officers in the U.S. and 8% of firefighters are women, 16% of the U.S. military is female, along with 56% of college students, 53% of U.S. law school students and 50.5% of U.S. medical school students. Even the purported gender wage gap, properly analyzed, is now a relic of the past.

And although the #MeToo movement mourned the deaths of Ginsburg and Reddy, the battles currently being waged by fourth-wave feminists could ultimately reverse many of the hard-fought gains of second-wave feminism.

This is because today’s #MeToo movement has replaced the second-wave feminist view of women as strong, empowered females possessing agency with a depiction of women as the subordinate gender, oppressed victims in an inherently conflictual relationship with the dominant gender (men). For example, the views of law professor Catharine MacKinnon of the University of Michigan and the late feminist scholar Andrea Dworkin, perspectives which can loosely be described as critical gender theory, are now the reigning orthodoxy among contemporary feminists. In 1987, MacKinnon argued that “Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated…To me, part of the culture of sexual inequality that makes women not report rape is that the definition of rape is not based on our sense of our violation…” Later in 1989, Dworkin described male penetration of a female during consensual sexual intercourse as a form of “occupation” and a “violation of female boundaries.”

Consequently, to #MeToo feminists, whenever American women today interact with men, they always “get screwed.” Even during consensual sex. This is a return to the antiquated view of sex as something men do to women, instead of the modern notion of sex as something men do with women. And it’s a corollary to the argument made by many progressives today that workers, no matter how well-paid, are always “screwed” by owners and capitalists.

And if the woman is younger and less powerful than her male sex partner, even her ability to grant consent is now called into question. For example, the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal of the 1990s is now being re-interpreted through an intersectional lens, with Monica Lewinsky now portrayed as the victim of an older, more powerful male, Bill Clinton. This is despite evidence suggesting that it was Lewinsky who pursued a sexual relationship with Clinton, when she was 24, to “get her presidential kneepads.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the #MeToo movement has not yet taken to task Brigitte Trogneux, the wife of current French president Emmanual Macron, who began a romantic relationship with Macron in 1994 when he was 16 and she was 41 and married to another man.

College campuses are where the impact of fourth-wave feminism is most acutely felt. The last quarter century has seen the rise at American universities of a Title IX industrial complex, even though females today are overrepresented at universities. And although Title IX was originally intended to address sex-based discrimination in American education, the issues of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment have become the primary focus of today’s ever-expanding Title IX offices. This inspite of the fact that the overall rape rate in the U.S. has fallen by more than 25% since 1990, while during the same period the definitions of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment were expanded. Evidence also suggests that college women today are underrepresented among rape and sexual assault victims in the overall 18-24 year-old American female population.

Critical gender theory is so pervasive in today’s Title IX offices that even the definitions of rape and sexual assault are now considered subjective enough to be in the eye of the beholder. In their much-overlooked 2017 book The Campus Rape Frenzy, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. cogently note that reports of rape and sexual assault are significantly higher at elite universities, which are more likely to teach critical gender theory, than they are at state universities and community colleges. This suggests that female students who are adherents of critical gender theory, which holds that the United States is a sexist, patriarchical society, are more likely to define as rape or sexual assault a male date trying to reach third base or home plate with them. On pp. 48-49 of The Campus Rape Frenzy, Johnson & Taylor note that in 2014, “…one in every 181 female undergraduates at Ivy League universities reported to their university that they had been raped…That’s more than three times the rate—one in 665—at nearby non-elite institutions.” Johnson and Taylor surmise that “[T]he difference in reporting rates is due to the fact that moral panic about sexual assault is most feverish at institutions where identity-politics activism is most prevalent.” This suggests that the subjects of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment have become thoroughly politicized in the U.S. today, with even the terms and definitions of these subjects much less objective than in the past.

Third-wave feminism (circa 1990-2010) ushered in the transition from the second-wave feminist vision of women as strong, independent beings to the current fourth-wave view of women as the subordinate gender, oppressed by a patriarchal, misogynistic American society. Perhaps the first instance of this development was the 1991 Anita Hill testimony during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Hill testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked for him during the early 1980s. She first worked for Thomas in 1981 at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and the next year she followed him to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when Thomas became chairman in 1982. In her testimony, Hill claimed that the harassment consisted of Thomas asking her out for dates numerous times and Thomas discussing sexual matters in her presence.

Hill was the first prominent feminist to argue that a boss asking her out socially and/or discussing sex with her at work constituted sexual harassment. Before the late 1980s, sexual harassment was narrowly defined as quid pro quo sexual bribery, with payment rendered in the form of sex instead of money. In this conception of sexual harassment, instead of the most qualified persons being hired, retained, or promoted, a company’s jobs are filled by workers willing to pay their boss under the table through sexual favors. Consequently, in this scenario the boss is defrauding the company and honest workers should report him to his superiors. Like any form of private workplace corruption, if discovered by the company, quid pro quo sexual bribery almost always ends in termination for both the boss and the worker if the bribe was mutually arranged, or the firing of only the boss if s/he offered the bribe arrangement to an unwilling, incorruptible worker. Note that with this narrowly drawn definition of sexual harassment, companies have a built-in incentive to stamp it out since they want to employ the most qualified people. Also, workers shouldn’t feel hesitant about reporting what is essentially internal company fraud. And with this properly defined concept of sexual harassment, there’s no need for heavy government regulation of internal company practices.

But in 1986, in Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court—broadly interpreting Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—added the vague, nebulous concept of “hostile working environment” to the quid pro quo component of sexual harassment. Since almost any statement or action of an overbearing boss or an unfiltered co-worker could constitute a “hostile working environment,” it was only a matter of time before someone like Anita Hill would claim “hostility” or “discomfort” from requests for dates or “unwanted” private discussions of sexual matters in the workplace, which is a daily occurrence at thousands of American companies. Also, many senators questioned the severity of Hill’s harassment claims since she followed Thomas from the Dept. of Education to the EEOC. Hill even stayed in contact with Thomas after she no longer worked for him. The Justice was eventually confirmed by a narrow 52-48 Senate vote.

Anita Hill’s charges were followed in 2002 by Rachel Witlieb Bernstein, a former Fox News producer who received a confidential settlement from Bill O’Reilly who made her feel uncomfortable as a woman for allegedly shouting at her while she worked for him at the O’Reilly Factor. Unlike other women who sued O’Reilly for sexual harassment, Bernstein didn’t allege that O’Reilly made sexual advances toward her. Unfortunately, Bernstein and her lawyers successfully argued that expressions of anger from an overbearing, demanding male boss like O’Reilly constituted “gender” harassment of women.

But the floodgates of the greatly-expanded conception of sexual harassment didn’t open until the advent of the #MeToo movement in October 2017 during feminism’s current fourth-wave (circa 2012-Present). Many powerful men were terminated from their jobs, often without much due process, for having engaged in consensual relationships with female co-workers, sometimes decades earlier. The firing of Matt Lauer, the former NBC News anchor, is a case-in-point. And the women making the allegations often sound like Howard Zinn or Bernie Sanders, with claims that the power asymmetries and power imbalances between themselves and their older male partners invalidated their consent.

Some surveys show that more than a third of Americans have dated someone from work, so it’s imperative that we settle on an objective, narrowly drawn definition of sexual harassment. If not, unmeritorious and frivolous claims of sexual harassment—subjectively defined, such as many made by fourth-wave feminists in the #MeToo era—will necessarily increase government intervention in the daily interactions between employees at millions of American businesses.

A few post #MeToo examples from millennial women further illustrate how many young females today are chafing at the freedom achieved by second-wave feminists like Ginsburg and Reddy as they stretch the concepts of sexual harassment and sexual assault to their breaking points. In this viral YouTube video from 2018, a 21-year-old Georgia waitress was “hailed as a hero” for attacking a male customer at work who pinched her buttocks. Since the entire incident was captured on the restaurant’s video camera, the police were called and the man was arrested. While murders, robberies, and rapes were occurring in other parts of Savannah, Georgia, the local police were arresting a man for making non-verbal advances towards an uninterested female. And in this opinion piece in a September 2019 issue of The Daily Texan—the student newspaper at the University of Texas at Austin—columnist Jennifer Beck argued that “[U]nwanted advances and stares [at females at the school gym] are examples of predatory behavior and should be treated as such.” Beck never explains how a man can discover whether a stare is unwanted or not until he advances, at which point it’s too late. He’s a predator even if he immediately backs off. So much for due process. Another opinion piece in the same student daily from late 2018 argued for a return to a female-only section of the school gym, utilizing many of the same “you gotta keep ‘em separated” arguments made by anti-feminist conservatives in the 1960s against coeducation.

The argument that “unwanted” advances make women “uncomfortable” and therefore requires government intervention into the most private forms of human interaction, including romantic and sexual relationships, is an attack on freedom itself. Freedom includes the freedom to fail and in the context of dating and sex in the post-sexual revolution age, freedom means that many women today will have to kiss a lot of frogs before finding their Prince Charming. Freedom also means that many desirable women and men will have to deal with an abundance of romantic offers and sexual advances from persons they have absolutely no interest in. Second-wave feminists, unlike today’s feminists, understood this. They remember the pre-sexual revolution days of chaperoned dates, with fathers and older brothers choosing which men were suitable for them. Maybe that’s why they fought so hard for agency over their relationships and sex ,and for coed colleges, dorms, and workplaces, realizing that this newfound freedom would often be accompanied by unwanted offers and advances. Freedom always does. It’s unfortunate that today’s fourth-wave feminists are so casually willing to toy with throwing away many of the hard-fought gains of second-wave feminists like Ginsburg and Reddy.

Also, many fourth-wave feminists don’t grasp the irony that if a young college woman today can study to be a police officer or a firefighter, attend one of the nation’s military academies and even fight in combat, then surely she can handle a date trying to get to third base with her without labeling it sexual assault and filing a Title IX complaint. And if she does file a Title IX complaint, certainly she is strong enough to handle cross examination of her accusations, ensuring some due process rights to her alleged assailant. And surely she’s not so delicate that even before her Title IX case concludes, her alleged perpetrator must be kicked out of the dorm she shares with him and be forced to drop any classes they are both enrolled in.

In the final analysis, both women and men today who are interested in long-term gender equality must work for a return to the central goal of second-wave feminists like Ginsburg and Reddy—a world of strong, independent women who favor gender-neutral law and wish for the government and college Title IX offices to keep their laws off their bodies and out of their bedrooms.

Clark Patterson is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Email him at clarkryanpatterson@gmail.com. 

There is a genre in fiction that celebrates an individual’s adversity against seemingly impossible odds. Whether this is a person who takes the war to organised crime (Mack Bolan), a secret agent saving the world for their government (James Bond), a wronged loner lost and bullied by the law and the society that rejects them (John Rambo), one who wants something so bad that they will defy social conventions (Velvet Brown), or even a rogue that hides behind a mask and inspires a revolution against tyranny (V), they are in some way inspiring. They are better than most not just because of courage, but also often principle. They are the outsider, the curmudgeon, and blowhard, or worse.

In the coming eclipse of cancel culture and layered censorship, certain allegories and metaphorical fiction will become a dangerous device for story tellers to use. It is no longer a method of sedition to lift a mirror up to a wider culture or society, to reveal an imagery that the victims or an outsider may see. The marketplace of varied opinions and diverse perspectives that is supposedly a hallmark of the abstract known as western civilization is becoming less welcome to such variations. Instead, through technology and a paternalistic tendency society is becoming a dystopia tinkering between the prose of Huxley and Orwell, but especially that found in the film ‘Demolition Man.’ It is a creation of the timid, those who shy away from difference while claiming to champion it.

Social media, like most innovations, was a promise to open our worlds and to connect and share so many different ideas and experiences. Instead it becomes a series of cultivated echo chambers that snuff out certain viewpoints and celebrate others, always confirming a particular bias. It is with an unofficial handshake that the public, made of shrill and easily offended individuals, unite with corporations and states to mash out a new moral order that mutates in instances of outrage and crisis. It clings to central planning and yet it is not necessarily centrally planned. It is a negative instinct to constrict and subvert any desires and needs for liberty. It is the widespread transformation of language to duplicate words into meanings that could only be conjured up inside the laboratories of intellect inefficiency. It is born from a need to be safe and correct, but it is a dangerous approach to any issue or problem.

The story of the individual saying no or wanting to be left alone is now one that is deemed selfish and dangerous. It is bad that one or a few may defy the collective good. The abstract religion of social contracts and duty to the state are the order and safety that a majority cling to. A society of so many dependents who demand and extract from the individual hinder productivity and creative instincts while demanding more. It would be as much of a cliché to invoke Ayn Rand as it would George Orwell—both would simplify the moment—but alas, the Randian term “moocher” is perhaps apt at times. The moochers rule. Tyranny inevitably is like a kind chef cooking a frog in warm water slowly until it boils, so that it may not leap for freedom until it’s too late.

It is with great concern that if the fiction of the past is not censored, redacted, or destroyed that it will be viewed, and that many will view the villains of the story as the hero. The individual, those who fight for freedom and liberty, are now the bad guy.  Those with the imperial conviction to control and impose law and order, however maniacal, are the true heroes, the pillars of society. John Rambo after all was carrying a knife and Sarah Connor was stockpiling weapons. Will great firemen like Guy Montag burn the pages of dangerous books and charr the words of seditious thought to maintain a society of ignorance?  It is after all a state of bliss to be hidden from such dangers.

What does it say about a society or culture that will not leave people alone? That it will not let them be or demand that they must not merely comply, but pay tribute? The one who does not want these conditions is considered selfish, while those who exist at the expense of others are normal. The myth is that the elites and rulers are the only benefactors from the centrally planned nightmares that always lead to tyranny. There are many who benefit from such a regulated society, where grants, welfare, and subsidies feed the ineffective and perpetuate an ideology of employment over outcome. The many planners, agents, and ‘moochers’ all benefit, enjoying the trappings of such a state.

The individual must speak in whispers like a thief, yet they are the one getting stolen from. They must plan around impositions as though a conspirator, but it is those in conferences and on committees who conspire against them. They are the ones whose homes are invaded if they possess contraband, do not pay enough tribute to the state, or if they speak wrongly on social media. The terror regimes of North Korea and the Peoples Republic of China are often pariahs, yet the more the open nations of the west condemn them, the more they seem to employ their methods of control and order.

The majority tends to yearn for a comfortable status quo that allows them to enjoy life, often at the expense of others. They are the opulent living city dwellers of the Capitol in ‘The Hunger Games.’ They are the humans inside the pods that will not swallow the pills in ‘The Matrix,’ and those who refuse to wear the sunglasses in ‘They Live.’ To have a bitter truth revealed is painful. That means the victims of the wars, the unintended consequences of regulation, the trampled innocent of policy, all cannot have a voice, and if they do it is often skewered and redirected. The status quo is always preserved. Partisan politics allows the steering wheel to keep turning, even as the direction stays the same.

A man like John Rambo—a vagrant used by his government and then rejected—is a danger not because of his skills and experiences, or because he carries a large knife, but because he wants to be left alone. He is directionless and does not have a generic path in mind. It is a long road, but it is his to take. In time the radical individual becomes embraced and utilised by the state, in life and fiction. In the United States, for example, Martin Luther King Jr. is no longer a dangerous emblem of civil rights defying the order of his time, but a murder victim of cause, likely killed by the very government that now enshrines his name. But his ideals?

Mack Bolan, a former Vietnam war veteran like John Rambo, comes home to a society that no longer needs him. His family is murdered and wronged by the Mafia. So, Bolan deserts the military and wages his own war. In time, as the franchise succeeds and the 1970s climate of anti-establishment thinking grows into Reagan’s America, Bolan fights the Soviets and terrorists. He works with the CIA and other covert government agencies, and like the Punisher (sinpired by Bolan), he serves Uncle Sam. Around the same time as this switch, so too does John Rambo in the sequels. These individuals become implements of the state, however begrudging it may be.

As the new century loomed it was not merely the state itself that was the danger, but corrupt actors from within. Gene Hackman and Will Smith as an ‘Enemy of the State’ do not go up against the U.S. government but instead rogue elements of it. This becomes the theme as the individuals continue to defy the odds, but only in a watered-down way. Mark Wahlberg in ‘The Shooter’ is a wary ex-serviceman, a loner, living remote with conspiracy inclinations. We are shown this as the camera pans across his library. He is bought in by the government as a consultant but is betrayed and used as a patsy. But again it is the secret agency of corrupt individuals, not the government itself.

Perhaps the peak of this genre was the 1990s when so many things culminated: the promise of a technological future where liberty and decentralised markets could thrive, and where no more would Cold War threaten the globe with nuclear misery and endless proxy wars. Instead the new century arrived, and it was like the last one. All those promises were betrayed. Like the fictional individuals ultimately going on to serve the odds, Arnold Schwarzenegger would become the governor of California. The man who championed Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and appeared in the documentary series introduction, the Austrian ‘Austrian’ economist of free markets who starred in many ‘individual against the odds’ films, ultimately became another statist. ‘The Running Man’ would go on to run the show in the sequel. It defeats the point.

The animated film ‘Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,’ perhaps one of the greatest tales of individual liberty told, shows a defiant horse that does not want to be owned and broken in by humans, whether that’s by a native American boy or a U.S. army cavalry officer. In the end the native American boy accepts the horse’s wishes and the cavalry officer realizes that he cannot break the stallion’s spirit. It is a beautiful and basic story,that if you love something you should let it to be free. To respect freedom itself is in a sense love.

In the follow-up sequel, the whole point is missed. It is a cynical defeat of an established franchise, an all too common theme for any fan that has seen the terrible litany of remakes in the modern era. Instead of Spirit the stallion being free—a rebel—he becomes submissive and a prop to a city girl. It is a complete about face of what the original film was about. The hero of individual defiance is again saddled and broken in by the very odds that he was heroically defying. No longer does the individual stand up to do the right thing despite personal risk, but instead he is relegated to be a vapid avatar for contemporary consumption, spiritless and all too common.

Perhaps this is the theme: no longer will individuals be this feral radical, but instead be tamed in the end. The uniqueness and dignity of their principles becomes perverted by a mandate devised inside the cauldron of academia by a committee of experts or the reactionaries on social media. In the end, like Spirit the stallion they must be broken in and ridden for some collective monolith. Maybe in the future the spirit of the individual will be found inside the broken algorithms of a machine’s mind, like WALL-E, a lowly robot with basic AI that eventually sees the world for what it is. And the comfortable obese humans wrapped in technology, having destroyed nature—both their own and the wider world’s—will be saved by the touch of a machine who simply thinks for itself and says, “no more.” By then will it be to late? Will the sacred beauty of the individual flower pushing through the filthy mess of the collective be plucked for good?

Bryce Courtenay, in The Power of One, wrote, “Pride is holding your head up high when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.”