Video interview (February 22, 2021; UK) with Diana West.* In less than an hour, she traces the genesis of her research into Communist subversion via her interest in Islam immediately post-9/11.
Trump supporters, who vastly outnumbered security, could have “stormed” the Capitol building, but didn’t. They had the means and opportunity, but no motive. January 6, 2021
President Trump brushed aside the notion of running again in four years. If the theft of the 2020 general election stands, why wouldn’t the thieves do it again?
In Georgia, the crooked machines that shifted votes away from him eight weeks ago shifted them yesterday to give Democrats control of the Senate. Right under our noses. Should we expect different effects from similar causes four years from now?
Trade Secretary Peter Navarro summarized with great clarity evidence that widespread, results-altering electoral and voter fraud occurred. It’s enough to show probable cause to investigate apparent interstate criminal conspiracy (if there’s ever been such a thing). Navarro’s case remains as unrefuted as it is unexamined.
Trump said “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.” And when theft is proven, shouldn’t something analogous to asset forfeiture apply? Traces of performance-enhancing drugs cost athletes who ingest them their medals. Drug kingpins lose their homes and cars.
Should political actors who rip off 74 million voters occupy their ill-gotten offices?
Trump’s attorney Rudolph Giuliani tirelessly marshaled the evidence before cameras, at risk to his stellar reputation, but it’s been systematically ignored.
Not only by scores of jurists, who are simply not interested in it and who concoct one erudite rationale after another to evade its force.
Not only by a militant leftist media who for years fantasized about a non-existent Russia-Trump conspiracy, while ignoring massive evidence of Chinese Communist Party-Biden Family collusion .
Ben Garrison, “The Back Stabbers”
But some of Trump’s so-called friends have outdone jurists and pundits by stabbing him in the back.
Martin Luther King memorably lamented the silence of friends, but the fair-weather variety that bedevil Trump are profiles in cowardice.
Jeff Sessions’s pathetic recusal led the way. It was followed by Mitt Romney’s impeachment vote and Brian Kemp’s refusal to call the Georgia legislature into session to weigh evidence of fraud there.
State legislatures certified electors chosen in violation of their own state laws, thereby violating the U.S. Constitution. They’re complicit in the theft.
Some of them, however, realizing and regretting their error, petitioned VP Mike Pence, President of the Senate, whose office it is to open the envelope and accept or object to the votes, to send the matter back to them for ten days. That’s all Pence had to do. He didn’t have to assume the role of One-man Decider of the Election.
Instead, he waxed sanctimoniously, and irrelevantly, about his alleged inability to object to electors chosen unconstitutionally. His blather about counting all, but only, legal votes turned out to be just that.
The half million peaceable assemblers at the Ellipse on January 6th represented Trump’s 74 million voters. They’re now being smeared as “insurrectionists” by the moral equivalent of Der Stürmer, a Nazi rag that didn’t merely lie—as Pravda and Izvestia did daily under Stalin—but also slandered and defamedmillions of innocent people.
What is to be done?, Lenin famously asked. Should workers fight only to improve their economic well-being? Or also to rid the country of Czarist tyranny? (Yes, he replaced it with another.)
Should we naively continue run candidates in electoral systems that have no integrity ? How has that worked out?
Yes, we prefer deliberation to violence. But the other side is interested in vengeance—state-directed or otherwise—not deliberation over regular order.
And vengeance not only against Trump, but also his supporters who are being slandered indiscriminately and collectively in the public mind for the misdeeds of a few.
Regarding election integrity, there’s a case to be made for 100% paper ballots. Nothing online. I suggest the same goes for what is to be done about the coup.
In the wake of the Secure the Steal movement’s success, ought we not conclude that the Constitution is a dead letter, a tissue of instructions for ceremonies which the mendacious and vindictive perform to lend their crimes an air of legitimacy?
As the Deep State decides on their course of violence against the people who voted for Trump, its corporate, media, and congressional puppets decry violence (which they call “mostly peaceful” when BLM and Antifa perpetrate it).
Patriotic Americans outnumber their enemies, but are not yet strategically positioned to crush the latter. How might they get there?
Again, ask yourself, family members, and friends what is to be done, but before you answer, keep the conversation offline.
Trump has been compared to Lincoln. What we may need at this hour, however, is a George Washington.
“All-Negro Comics” (1947), the first such book “to be drawn by Negro artists and peopled entirely by Negro characters” (Time Magazine).
Election integrity, or rather the lack thereof, is the topic of the day. Some Americans are now reflecting on how we might avoid social conflagration, even secession.
Fifty-seven years ago my late friend Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the great economist, political philosopher, and author of Conceived in Liberty (a five-volume history of the American republic’s founding) pursued the logic of revolutionary resistance to oppression in the essay appended below.
Its relevance to our time should be clear. There is no better example of Rothbard’s historical insight, politically incorrect frankness (which would get him “canceled” today), adherence to principle, and polemical adroitness. It should go without saying that this anticommunist’s citations of communists implies no endorsement of their illiberal program (but I can’t take any chances these days).
Some readers may need to be reminded, or told for the first time, that those who identify as “African Americans” are descendants of those who once preferred “Black,” “Afro-American,” “Negro,” and “Colored.” (See this post’s initial illustration above.)
“The Negro Revolution” appeared in the Summer 1963 issue of The New Individualist Review, a classical liberal-libertarian scholarly journal edited by John P. McCarthy (another friend), Robert Schuettinger, and John Weicher; its book review editor was Ronald Hamowy. Besides Rothbard, NIR’s distinguished contributors included Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, Ludwig von Mises, Richard Weaver, and Henry Hazlitt (a far from exhaustive list).
On the 28th of August in the summer of ’63, millions of Americans heard and saw Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I’m happy to promote Rothbard’s essay on the eve of another march in that city, one that portends another revolution.
—Anthony Flood
The Negro Revolution
Murray N. Rothbard
In his thirties; he wrote this article when he was 37.
DESPITE INCREASING USE of the term, it is doubtful that most Americans have come to recognize the Negro crisis as a revolution, possessed of all the typical characteristics and stigmata of a revolutionary movement and a revolutionary situation. Undoubtedly, Americans, when they think of “revolution,” only visualize some single dramatic act, as if they would wake up one day to find an armed mob storming the Capitol. Yet this is rarely the way revolutions occur. Revolution does not mean that some sinister little group sit around plotting “overthrow of the government by force and violence,” and then one day take up their machine guns and make the attempt. This kind of romantic adventurism has little to do with genuine revolution.
In a previous post I disclosed my interest in George Novack, the Trotskyist philosopher who, but for the accident of geography, might have taken the place of ideological influencer that Stalinist historian Herbert Aptheker held when I began to study philosophy. Today I republish Novack’s review of The Black Jacobins, a magisterial study of modern history’s only successful slave revolt.
That its author, C. L. R. James (1901-1989), was a Fourth International Trotskyist explains not only Novack’s appreciation of this work, but also Aptheker’s lack thereof—even though slave revolts formed his area of scholarly specialization. In my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, I explore in detail the scotosis suffered not only by Aptheker but also, apparently, by many of James and Aptheker’s academic fans.
Herbert Aptheker, 1945 or 1946
In this review Novack also refers to A History of Negro Revolt, a booklet of James’s that Aptheker merely lists in the bibliography of American Negro Slave Revolts (his 1943 Columbia University dissertation) without mentioning Black Jacobins. As I showed in another post, the second page of that booklet sports a full page ad for Black Jacobins, virtually eliminating the possibility that Aptheker was unaware of the book.
C. L. R. James, 1946
I post this partly for its historical interest, partly as a personal reflection on my intellectual path. I trust no one thinks I do so to promote the “revolutionary internationalism” of Novack or James. Were they alive, I’m sure that Novack, James, and Aptheker, each in his own way (qualified, of course, by the strictures of “scientific socialism”), would side with the woke mob, which I abominate, and that the mobsters, at least the literate among them, are steeped in their writings. Novack, James, and Aptheker would, if they could, put down their pens and pick up a gun.—Anthony Flood
Revolution, Black and White
George E. Novack
New International, May 1939, Vol. 5, No. 5, p. 155
The Black Jacobins, 316 pp. Illus. New York, Dial Press. [1938] $3.75
A History of Negro Revolt, Fact Monograph, No.18. [UK, [1938] ] 6s[hillings]
The Black Jacobins tells the story of one of the major episodes in the great French Revolution: the struggles in the West Indian island of San Domingo which culminated in the only successful slave uprising in history and the establishment of the free Negro republic of Haiti.
Historians have done little to remove prevailing ignorance concerning these significant events. Even such authorities on the French revolution as Mathiez systematically belittle the importance of the colonies and slight their influence upon revolutionary developments in France. Historians of Haiti commit the opposite error of treating its early history without proper regard for its profound connections with Europe.
One of the singular merits of James’ work is that he avoids both forms of narrow-mindedness. Throughout his book he views the class struggles in San Domingo and France as two sides of a unified historical process unfolding in indissoluble interaction with each other. With a wealth of precise and picturesque detail he traces the parallel and inter-penetrating phases of the revolution in the colony and mother country. Continue reading “The history book the philosopher reviewed but the historian ignored”
Anticapitalist propaganda—a subset of the Communist propaganda now increasingly in vogue—often takes the form of denying the reality of free markets and mocking those who affirm it. “So-called” usually precedes the reference. The mockers deem market-realists as being in need of therapy, not argument.
Given the platforms that anticapitalist forces have, I decided to use mine to lay out a pro-market argument, one that presupposes that human flourishing is a good thing. It’s a slightly modified excerpt of chapter 20 of Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic. The “polemic” was my apologia for the free-market Austrian School of Economics against a critic, but you won’t need to know that spat’s background to follow this theoretical portion.
Yes, theoretical: you’ve been warned! Unless philosophy is your meat and drink, you might be skip it (or save it as a substitute for Sominex for your next sleepless night). I have little doubt, however, that you’re dealing with the malign consequences of anticapitalist error. What follows might help you think about ways to engage its purveyors.
—Anthony Flood
What are “Free Markets”?
Defining terms
By “real” we mean the logical contrast of the illusory, the delusional, the fictional, the artificial, etc. When we know or suspect that we are in the presence of the latter, we appeal to some notion of the real to negotiate our encounter with it. A good analogy is found in the contrast between the true and the false: the notion of truth emerges only through the experience of falsehood. (If we could never experience being in error, or being deceived or lied to, we’d have no use for a notion of truth.)
Whatever is a function of real entities is also real. A market is a network of exchanges that persons, according to their human nature, spontaneously form. (That is, they do not engage in exchange because they read in some book that that’s what they must do.) Markets are functions of persons, and persons are real. (Persons are entities with causal efficacy, however, markets are not.)
The market is an order—specifically, a network of exchanges—that persons naturally create in pursuit of their flourishing (which exceeds in value their mere biological sustenance and continuance).
Since persons generate that order by acting in accordance with their nature, it is a natural order, one level, aspect, or dimension of several that make up the universal natural order. Violations of that order, which tend toward human self-destruction, is not to be put on the same ontological level as that which contributes to human flourishing.
Before the New York Times became the ultraleft rag it is today, one could at least count on its reporting a story’s basic facts. Or an obituary’s. And so in 2003, when I read the paper’s notice of the passing of Herbert Aptheker, whom I knew, I was surprised to see how many easily discoverable facts the Times’s esteemed book review editor, the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, got wrong. To its credit, it published a correction (three weeks later). The New York Times didn’t publish this letter, and neither did I in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. I do so hereunder, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also in shameless promotion of the book.
—Anthony Flood
March 22, 2003
To the Editor:
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s March 20 obituary of Herbert Aptheker contains several errors of commission and omission.
Aptheker’s Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States runs to seven volumes, not three. He edited and annotated three volumes of W.E.B. Du Bois’ correspondence and 40 volumes of his published writings, including a 600-page annotated bibliography.
The obituary fails to mention that Aptheker’s 1937 Master’s thesis was about Nat Turner’s 1831 slave revolt and written on the basis of primary source research. This should be considered when weighing William Styron’s accusation that only politics motivated Aptheker’s criticism of his novel.
In American Betrayal, Diana West exposes the role that name-calling plays in inhibiting, even shutting down, critical thinking about vital subjects. Her words are worth quoting at length, given the relevance of our conditioned reflex both to criticism of Islam and how we’ve been conditioned to disarm before the Communist threat (present as well as past).
I would not entertain this argument except that today the Anglophone world’s firmest conservative-libertarian hand has marshaled it. Here are its opening paragraphs. For the rest of the essay, please take this link to Sean Gabb’s site.—Anthony Flood
Universal Basic Income: Some Political and Economic Advantages
Sean Gabb, 16th August 2020
Sean Gabb
My vision of Utopia has remained constant since I was thirteen. It is a nation of free citizens, keeping jealous watch over a state strong enough to defend the borders and keep a minimal internal peace, but restricted from doing anything else. Sadly, this vision is further out of reach today than when I was thirteen. The modern British State is a vastly extended despotism, limited only by incompetence and corruption. It is also a despotism to which the majority of people, with whatever success and at whatever overall cost, look for immediate benefits. Libertarians and conservatives may dream of a coup in which the present order of things will be torn apart and replaced with something more natural and sustainable. But we might more usefully dream of winning the Lottery or being offered three wishes by a fairy. Any scheme of change requires the acceptance that, even if it can somehow be captured, the British State cannot in the short and medium term be minimised.
Given enough political will at the top, an end could be made in days to political correctness and lifestyle regulation. Beyond the readership of The Guardian, I see no yearning for political censorship and surveillance. I doubt there would be a general outcry if the BBC were closed, and the universities purged and the schools depoliticised. None of the fake charities would be missed. Ditto the Green agenda and most bureaucracies of intrusion. The health and welfare budget is another matter. Regardless of how little health is preserved and how little welfare is delivered, any government that announced an attack on that budget would lose immediate legitimacy. A riot of sacked BBC apparatchiks could be dispersed by a half-hearted truncheon charge. Touch the welfare state, and the demonstrations might fill a triangle tipped by Marble Arch, St Clement’s and Parliament Square.
This being said, pragmatic acceptance is not the same as acceptance of present arrangements. The principle of universal welfare cannot be touched. Its modes of provision can and should be harmonised with a new and more libertarian and conservative order of things. I will leave aside health and education. I have already discussed these here and here. I will instead focus on welfare entitlements. I propose abolishing every present entitlement, including old age pensions, and replacing them with a universal basic income.
Talk of fascism is in the air; fascist violence, masquerading as opposition thereto, in the streets. Its appeal crosses racial lines, and it isn’t the first time. It seems opportune to republish “‘We were the first fascists’: from Garvey to Farrakhan.” — Anthony Flood
“We were the first fascists”: from Garvey to Farrakhan
On August 13, 1920 Marcus Garvey presided at the convention of the United Negro Improvement Association held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. There he promulgated the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. Its 54 points comprise the farthest thing from a fascist manifesto.
And yet, as my friend Hugh Murray noted a quarter-century ago, Garvey “admired . . . leading anti-communists, such as Mussolini. Indeed, in 1937 Garvey proudly proclaimed of his Universal Negro Improvement Association, ‘We were the first fascists.'”[1]
Here’s the full quote:
We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.[2]
He said this in 1937, after Mussolini consolidated his rape of Ethiopia.
While many liberals [Murray continues] are the first to hurl the word “fascist” at those with whom they disagree, they usually ignore the fascism of blacks, even when publicly advocated.[3]
A few years after Hugh wrote those words, King’s College Professor of American and English Literature Paul Gilroy came out with “Black Fascism” (Transition, Indiana UPress, 2000, 70-91), a scholarly monograph on Garvey’s boast, the first instance of Black public advocacy of fascism. I recommend it to students of this overlooked chapter of Black American history.
George Lincoln Rockwell, center
On June 25, 1961 American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell sat in the Uline Arena, Washington, DC (where the Beatles would give their first US concert a few years later). He was there at the invitation of Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Elijah Muhammad. Thousands were in attendance. During the collection, Rockwell shouted:
I was so impressed by the video John A. Lancaster posted today that I feel compelled to join him in getting the word out. He entitled his post “Is the Current Unrest a Communist Prophecy?,” but I decided to drop the rhetorical question mark.
The presenter is G. Edward Griffin (b. 1931). When he delivered this talk, so calmly, so professionally, the Left called him a “Red baiter.” Today he’s called a “conspiracy theorist.” Both are empty tags signalling the tagger’s determination not to have a conversation.
Griffin’s topic is a conspiracy—the Communist conspiracy, its self-understanding and its exploitation of America’s racial tensions. As you watch and listen, ask yourself whether the violence, mayhem, and frank advocacy of communism you see nightly on television is not exactly what Griffin was warning Americans about.
The film has the “look-and-feel” of the early ’60s. At the 2.47 mark, Griffin holds up and quotes from The Nature of Revolution, a 1959 pamphlet by Communist Party theoretician Herbert Aptheker (for whom I worked as a research assistant in the early ’70s). That made me think the film is earlier than 1969, the date given for Griffin’s pamphlet on Amazon. (In 1969, would he cite something from 1959?) I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who can settle the date of the original filmed presentation.
Welcome to my shortest blog post to date.
Anticapitalist propaganda—a subset of the Communist propaganda now increasingly in vogue—often takes the form of denying the reality of free markets and mocking those who affirm it. “So-called” usually precedes the reference. The mockers deem market-realists as being in need of therapy, not argument. 
Before the New York Times became the ultraleft rag it is today, one could at least count on its reporting a story’s basic facts. Or an obituary’s. And so in 2003, when I read the paper’s 
Aptheker’s Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States runs to seven volumes, not three. He edited and annotated three volumes of W.E.B. Du Bois’ correspondence and 40 volumes of his published writings, including a 600-page annotated bibliography.
holds up and quotes from The Nature of Revolution, a 1959 pamphlet by Communist Party theoretician