The Ukrainian Boondoggle Must End - Opinion. By Michael Rectenwald. Newsweek. 25 January 2024.

Claudine Gay, DEI, and the War in the Middle East. By Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D. Mises Wire. 6 January 2024. Claudine Gay's unceremonious exit from the Harvard University presidency ultimately was not due to her plagiarism issues, but rather because of her disastrous appearance at a congressional hearing on Israel and Hamas. (Originally published on the Mises Wire. January 6, 2024.)

COP28: Climate Catastrophism Wins as the World Loses. By Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D. Mises Wire. 16 December 2023. COP28 has ended. While the 200 member states are not legally bound to execute anything treated in the agreement, delegates and climatologists have suggested that it will force the hands of nations, oil companies, industrial producers, and investors to divest from fossil fuels, accelerating a sea change toward renewable energy and climate change mitigation. Likewise, the terms, when pursued, will have a devastating impact on the world economy. (Originally published on the Mises Institute Wire. December 16, 2023.)

From Leftism to Liberty, a Personal Journey. By Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D. 16 October 2023. In the fall of 2016, I began to have deviationist thoughts. That’s how my thoughts might have been labeled in the Soviet Union anyway—that is, had I lived through the Red Terror, the Stalinist purges, or the Great Terror. In fact, I might have been characterized as a “right deviationist.” Although I wasn’t living in the Soviet Union, a cultural revolution had been getting underway at home, and I was about to step right into the whirlwind. (Published in Libertarian Autobiographies: Moving Toward Freedom in Today’s World. Jo Ann Cavallo and Walter E. Block, eds. Palgrave Macmillan. September 2023. Click here or on title).

COP28: Scandal on Top of Fabrication. By Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D. Mises Wire. 9 December 2023. As climate activists gather in Abu Dhabi, there is trouble in climate paradise. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the meeting's host, is not on the same page with the climate apocalypse. This gives him the dreaded moniker of “climate denier.” (Originally published on the Mises Wire. December 9, 2023.)

Statist Ideology and War: Israel versus Hamas. By Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D.. Mises Wire. 8 November 2023. As I wrote in my previous piece on statism and the Israel-Hamas conflict, states are organized crime rackets. Wars between states thus represent warfare between rival gangs. The proper libertarian position with reference to such gang wars is neutrality, or the opposition to all state parties to war.

Statism Is the Cause of the Israel-Hamas War. By Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D.. Mises Wire. 30 October 2023. The state is an organized crime racket. It appropriates wealth by coercion and regularly uses force in violation of the nonaggression principle.

Two political, economic, and cultural movements are vying for the soul of America. One is a program from above, and the other, a movement from below. But neither is nationalist as such. One aims to dissolve the nation into a universalist glob, while the other intends to starve the state of resources and disempower its means of centralized command and control. The dominant, top-down political orientation of the current regime is globalism. It makes no practical difference to the U.S. whether the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, or any other globalist organization is behind its program, although they are. It has been fully embraced by the government and its corporate partners, or what I call, in my book Google Archipelago, “governmentalities,” otherwise “private”companies that operate as state apparatuses and undertake state functions. Globalism has as its aim the de facto if not legal dissolution of the sovereignty of the United [...]

I am tasked with talking with about how the regime seeks to control our schools, our families, and even our speech by denouncing everything it dislikes as “hate.” First, although I am the last speaker today, I will have to define what I mean by “the regime.” Just what is this regime that we speak of? The regime, of course, includes the government itself. The government, as I will show, is exerting its power to control expression and information, peddle official narratives, dictate to schools, and control and alter the substance of families themselves. It seeks to define and delimit our rights by suggesting that they have been accorded to us by the government in the first place. For example, when asked by a reporter whether she was upholding her oath to the Constitution upon issuing a public health order suspending the right to carry guns in public in Albuquerque and [...]

I’ll begin by addressing the elephant in the room. Isn’t the Great Reset simply a “conspiracy theory” concocted by “rightwing extremists?” According to the New York Times[1] and the Anti-Defamation League,[2] the Great Reset has no basis in fact. Or, as the BBC claims,[3] the Great Reset is a benign effort on the part of “leading thinkers”[4] to bring about “a fairer, greener future,”[5] based on a reset of capitalism. Meanwhile, Time devoted an issue to the Great Reset, effectively hailing it as the solution to all our problems post-covid.[6] Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), suggests that the Great Reset is merely an attempt to address the weaknesses of capitalism exposed by the covid crisis, as well as the looming catastrophes posed by unmitigated climate change and environmental degradation. I don’t mean to suggest that the truth lies somewhere between denial and [...]