An essential list of the warnings listed in The Flight of the Barbarous Relic

If there is something we’ve learned in the 2020s, it’s that the government and their Big Tech henchmen are perfectly fine with suppressing speech and viewpoints that it doesn’t like, often labeling it as ‘hateful,’ or, in some cases, mis, dis, and mal-information. 

Back in 2008, when punk rock and wearing shorts that ended just past the knees were cool—just for the record, I still listen to mid-2000s punk (I currently have Simple Plan’s You Suck at Love in my head as I write this) and go out of my way to wear longer shorts—we probably wouldn’t have thought that our own government would go as far as to suppress free speech. Unfortunately, few of us saw that coming, but it seems like George Ford Smith had some foresight.

At least to some degree, as in his libertarian political thriller that primarily focuses on the Fed, one way to suppress not just speech but information came by the means of issuing the Liberty Browser. In case you may not know what that is, it’s the internet browser that our federal antagonists in the book have sold to—a polite way of saying forced on—the masses. 

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And it’s one that would ‘protect people’ from viewing information on websites that didn’t quite fit the browser’s standards. I can literally see this becoming a thing at some point in the not-so-distant future, especially since Big Tech is already about halfway there.

Warnings via George Ford Smith’s The Flight of the Barbarous RelicUsing influential athletes and celebrities to support intense regulation

This one hits home for a lot of us, as it involves using influential figures like athletes and celebrities to ‘sell’ an idea to the masses via the government, whether direct or indirect. When President Maxwell Gage was looking to ‘sell’ the concept of the Liberty Browser, who better to enlist and help out the cause than all-pro quarterback Danny Flynn?

Honestly, I kept wanting to write the name Matt Flynn here, who, following one monster start back in 2011 with the Green Bay Packers, managed to win over just about every NFL franchise that needed a quarterback. While the real-life Flynn flamed out, Danny Flynn was big enough of a name to draw an audience while Gage delivered a speech ‘selling’ Liberty Browser to the nation. 

Later in the book, Gage’s Establishment also threw around the idea of filming celebrities installing the latest updates to Liberty Browser. 

Overall, if there’s anything we’ve seen utilized more in the 2020s in an attempt to ‘get people’ to do something the government wants them to do, how many times has it turned to athletes and celebrities? Or, even entire sports leagues saying, It takes all of us…

‘Selling’ an idea with benevolent words and sinister intentions

On the surface, and during President Gage’s speech after he played some catch with Danny Flynn, Gage over-delivered so much that my 17-year-old self (I was 17 back in ‘08) would have been all for this regardless of whether then-President George W. Bush or then President-Elect Barack Obama would have spoken on stage. 

Why? Well, Gage equated “a new internet browser that would enforce a commonly accepted set of rules on our surfing experience’ to the Liberty Browser. Basically, Gage sought to protect freedom by introducing a set of rules because “the internet has existed in a state of anarchy, a condition fundamentally at odds with our American sensibilities.”

Sounds great when a President puts it that way, right? Unfortunately for America, it was nothing more than a cover-up for Gage and his administration to put a stranglehold on the former Fed Chairman’s mission to sell the gold standard to the nation by blocking, or censoring, his website.

Lying about history and passing it off as truth

I recently read an incredible article by the great Lew Rockwell entitled Why We Need Revisionist History. One reason I love revisionist history is that if we didn’t have what I also like to call ‘thought diversity’ on such subjects, then the Establishment, the winners, or those in control get to tell it. 

The biggest warning George Ford Smith gave us occurred in Chapter 20 through a conversation between Gage and one of his advisors. What jumped out at me was the following passage from Gage:

“Compared to the size of government today, what we had then would fit on the head of a pin. And with a pinhead government, society was being swallowed up by the powerful. It came down to a fight between the Morgans and Rockefellers. The money powers controlled everything. Fortunately, we had some intellectuals put a halt to it with progressive social legislation. Government, in other words, needed to grow to stop the Robber Barons. And in growing it found itself incompatible with any semblance of the gold standard. Listen, Stewart—gold can’t support the government we have now. Nothing can. We need massive amounts of debt. Make no mistake, Mathews as a gold proponent is an enemy of the state. If we don’t put a permanent end to this Jolly Roger crap, he’ll bring us down and destroy the common man in our wake.”

Mel Stewart, one of Gage’s advisors and one that he looked down on has an epic counter to the President’s claim.

“Excuse me, Mr. President, but I must respectfully disagree with your history. It was the Morgans and Rockefellers, along with other big names, that pushed for more government-backed cartels and other interventions as a means of protecting their turf against competition. We’ve corralled the fox, but the fox is in charge of the corral.”

Gage’s response?

“Well, whatever the facts are, great sage, big government is here, and we will perish without it. We need to protect our turf from competition, too.”

Clearly, Gage isn’t worried about what’s fact and what’s fiction. He’s only interested in protecting his status and that of big government. To do this, Gage is perfectly fine with passing off the myth of the Robber Barons as fact to preserve the status quo that keeps him and the Establishment, and future establishments in control. 

Hop into any college and university, and you’ll see such a myth passed off as fact. I don’t need to link a source to this one since my own sibling and I heard this myth repeated in the same college with the same history professor, a few years apart, mind you. Their first impression of them was this when they came home for the weekend back in 2014: “I think they’re a communist.” 

Mind you, this particular relative has never been quite what I call a libertarian, so it speaks volumes.

Ignoring and lambasting reputable works and sources

This one was the kicker, as Preston Mathews’ treatise on the overall benefits of the gold standard. While the treatise garnered a few positive reviews, Ford also wrote that “most of the financial commentators followed the government’s cue and ignored Mathews and his book.”

Ford also inserted a list of Establishment figures tossing in their criticisms, such as cultural critics and a Harvard pop psychologist. One would think that something coming from an ex-Fed Chairman would draw nothing but praise from the Establishment and pop culture figures unless that ex-Fed Chairman wrote about something the Establishment didn’t like or could threaten their power in a battle over ideas. 

How many times have we seen this one played out recently? Heck, I can’t even erroneously swipe to a headline on my iPhone without seeing CNN, MSNBC, or the HuffPost talk about ‘false claims’ or ‘false information,’ or similar phrases.

Correlations to 2020s America

My motivation for this article came from the one negative review on the book over at Goodreads, in which the reviewer in question stated, “As economics, it a stretch--bordering on conspiratorial. There are much better books to spend my time on.”

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You can argue that might have been the case back in April 2011 when that review was posted. But I hope that you, after reading this lengthy listicle, could make more than a few correlations that, in 2020s America and in the age of censorship, using celebrities and athletes more than ever to garner support and lambasting works that you don’t like is alive and well in today’s America and across the globe.