Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2175

The Most Dangerous Man in the World?

At the press conference following their summit meeting in Helsinki, Russian President Vladimir Putin and American President Donald Trump discussed the possibility of resolving potential criminal cases involving citizens of the two countries by permitting interrogators from Washington and Moscow to participate in joint questioning of the individuals named in indictments prepared by the respective judiciaries. The predictable response by the American nomenklatura was that it was a horrible idea...

Is Putin’s Russia an ‘Evil Empire’?

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” a saying attributed to Karl Marx, comes to mind in this time of Trump.

To those of us raised in the Truman era, when the Red Army was imposing its bloody Bolshevik rule on half of Europe, and NATO was needed to keep Stalin’s armies from the Channel, the threat seemed infinitely more serious. And so it was.

There were real traitors in that time.

Alger Hiss, a top State Department aide, at FDR’s side at Yalta, was exposed as a Stalinist...

Alt-Left Celebrity Extraordinaire

What is commonly referred to as “the conservative movement”—an alliance between Republican politicians and media polemicists—is what I call Big Conservatism, or the Big Con.

The movers and shakers of the Big Con, though styling themselves as an alternative to the left are, in actuality, an alternative-left, the alt-left.

That Big Conservatism is an alternative-left is gotten readily enough by their respective stances on a range of issues.

Ben Shapiro, widely hailed as a rock star of the Big C...

Building and Shooting

Over the last year I’ve had the opportunity to build and shoot a couple of Polymer 80 handgun frames. I started with the PF940C Compact (Glock 19 size) which now has over 6,000 rounds through it without an issue. I’ll admit I was at first surprised by that. It seems to me that whenever you deviate from the proven recipe of a firearm that it never works as advertised. So it would be safe to say that I was very skeptical when I first laid my hands on one.

Polymer 80’s are “80 percent lowers,” h...

An Unnecessary Bill

Oklahoma voters last month, during a midterm primary election, approved a ballot measure to legalize medical marijuana. The measure, which passed by a vote of 57 to 43 percent, will allow doctors to recommend cannabis to treat any medical condition they see fit. Most other states that have legalized medical marijuana only provide a list of diseases and disorders for which physicians can authorize a cannabis treatment.

The ballot title reads as follows:

This measure amends the Oklahoma State S...

Brexit: May’s Way

In a Mises wire, Daniel Lacalle explains May’s Way Is Not The Only Way.

In a nutshell, May’s Brexit is the worst solution for Leavers and Remainders. It tries to please Remainders, who are obviously not satisfied as they want a full reversal of the EU exit.

In essence, the plan is the worst of both worlds. Leaves the UK with all the perceived negatives that led to a “Yes” vote in the referendum and none of the alleged benefits of staying in the European Union.

May’s way is not the only way. T...

Putin and Chris Wallace

This idiotic fantasy congealed in the political matrix last week as everyone across the spectrum of parties and factions scrambled for patriotism brownie points in what is shaping up as an epic game of Capture-the-Flag for the mid-term elections. Listen to me for a moment, as our arch-nemesis Vlad the Putin said to Fox News knucklehead Chris Wallace in an interview aired Sunday Night — when Wallace interrupted Mr. Putin for perhaps the fourth time, saying, “I don’t want to interrupt you, sir,...

Christianity and Western Civilization

Freedom’s Progress?: A History of Political Thought, by Gerard Casey

I have skipped ahead to Casey’s review of the European Middle Ages.  His first chapter regarding this period is entitled “Christianity,” as seems appropriate if one is discussing freedom’s progress in the Middle Ages.

For its first three hundred years, Christianity was a non-establishment religion.  Christians learned to live beyond the action of the state, without state protection, and even had to struggle against the state...

Obama Is All Wet About Social Darwinism

The Free Market 30, no. 5 (May 2012)

In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 3, 2012, President Obama called a budget proposal of his Republican opponents in Congress “thinly veiled Social Darwinism.”

What did did the president mean by this comment? The budget proposal in question, he claimed, would require drastic cuts in government programs designed to aid the poor. “And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last—education and traini...

Lisa Page Spills the Beans

Former FBI attorney Lisa Page has reportedly told a joint committee of the House of Representatives that when FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok texted her on May 19, 2017 saying there was “no big there there,” he meant there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

It was clearly a bad-luck day for Strzok, when on Friday the 13th this month Page gave her explanation of the text to the House Judiciary and Oversight/Government Reform Committees and in effe...