Author: Thomas DiLorenzo

“The violence of the criticism aimed at Lincoln by the great men of his time on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line is startling.  The breadth and depth of the spectacular prejudice against him is often shocking for its cruelty, intensity, and unrelenting vigor.  The plain truth is that Mr. Lincoln was deeply reviled by many who knew him personally, and by hundreds of thousands who only knew of him.” –Larry Tagg, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: America’s Most Reviled President In his book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, historian Larry Tagg, a native of Lincoln, Illinois, constructs a powerful case that … Continue reading →

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Americans are ruled by a lawyereaucracy.   Most of our “citizen legislature” (i.e. Congress) is comprised of lawyers; executive branch agencies are crawling with them; and the federal judiciary is dominated by left-wing politicians posing as objective “judges.”  This last point was demonstrated once again when, after President Trump issued his revised “travel ban” executive order an old law school pal of Obama’s from Hawaii, who is now an Obama-nominated federal judge, issued another one of those lawyerly Decrees From Upon High declaring  the executive order null and void everywhere – not just in Hawaii. This is a very old story:  … Continue reading →

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Is President Trump a “Jacksonian”?  He apparently believes so:  On his fifth day in office he installed a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, and he recently visited the last resting place of his presidential predecessor in Nashville.  His top political strategist, Steve Bannon, has said that the president likes to compare the populist movement behind him to a similar movement that supported Andrew Jackson and which infuriated the entrenched elites of his day. And infuriate he did.  Court historians and other propagandists for the state and state power have long portrayed Andrew Jackson as a country … Continue reading →

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Have you noticed that traffic congestion in your city always seems to get worse and worse, year after year?  Have you also noticed that local governments rarely, if ever, do anything about it?  Or that the things that they do actually make it worse?  If you have noticed these things and assumed that it is yet another example of the inherent ineptness of your typical bungling bureaucrats you may be dead wrong. The latest trend in “urban planning” is to intentionally make traffic congestion as bad as possible.  The main proponents of this scheme are: 1) environmentalist extremists who hate … Continue reading →

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Back in the 1980s, some conservatives began distinguishing between old-school, New Deal welfare statists like a Ted Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey or a Lyndon Johnson and the “Lunatic Left,” the hardcore Marxist Left that had emerged from the universities in the 1960s.  The former group “only” wanted to tax and regulate capitalism; the latter group wanted to destroy it and replace it with as much totalitarian government control and domination that they could get away with in American society.  They wanted the Sovietization of America, in other words.  Indeed, many of them traveled to the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other … Continue reading →

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Donald Trump makes an essential point when he visits black churches and predominantly black inner-city neighborhoods and tells the people there that they “have nothing to lose” by supporting the abandonment of almost a century of statism run amok in their communities.  While Republicans share some of the blame for this, it has primarily been the Democratic Party’s urban political machines that have sabotaged millions of black lives (and many others) with socialistic central planning scheme after central planning scheme for generations.  America’s inner cities are islands of socialism that have proven time and again that Americans are no better … Continue reading →

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As a U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton helped arrange for $1.65 billion in low-interest, federally guaranteed “Liberty Bonds” (supposedly earmarked for post-9/11 rebuilding in New York City) to subsidize the construction of Goldman Sachs’ gleaming new headquarters building in Lower Manhattan.  During the 2005 groundbreaking ceremony for the project, she affectionately called the firm her “partner in government.”  Three years later she supported the $10 billion Federal Reserve bailout of her too-big-to-jail “partner.”  In return, Goldman paid her at least $675,000 for three speeches; has donated huge sums to her campaign; and recently prohibited its employees from donating anything to the … Continue reading →

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As a U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton helped arrange for $1.65 billion in low-interest, federally guaranteed “Liberty Bonds” (supposedly earmarked for post-9/11 rebuilding in New York City) to subsidize the construction of Goldman Sachs’ gleaming new headquarters building in Lower Manhattan.  During the 2005 groundbreaking ceremony for the project, she affectionately called the firm her “partner in government.”  Three years later she supported the $10 billion Federal Reserve bailout of her too-big-to-jail “partner.”  In return, Goldman paid her at least $675,000 for three speeches; has donated huge sums to her campaign; and recently prohibited its employees from donating anything to the … Continue reading →

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In his new book Nullification: Reclaiming Consent of the Governed, Clyde Wilson pinpoints the folly and futility of “presidential politics” – of hoping against hope that some Great Savior will somehow restore American liberty.  Only those who are almost completely ignorant of American history could be fooled by such a farce.  Unfortunately, that seems to include most Americans. Early Americans were never so naïve as to believe that national politicians could preserve their freedom; that was their job.  They are the ones who, acting through their state-level political societies, created and gave authority to the Constitution.  The government was to … Continue reading →

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Every society has a segment of its population that obsesses over totalitarian control of others.  They are called “politicians” or “political activists.”  (There are one or two exceptions, every now and then, such as former Congressman Ron Paul).  These are people who just cannot stand the fact that many others prefer to live their own lives, abiding by the basic laws protecting life, liberty and property, and the moral codes that help to enforce such behavior.  They just cannot stand the fact that so many others prefer to plan their own lives instead of having the political authorities plan their … Continue reading →

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By now just about everyone has heard of the zika virus, transmitted by mosquitos, which is said to cause brain damage in children.  As worrisome as this is, an even bigger brain damage threat to young people is what I call the academic zika virus, transmitted by left-wing, politically-correct “educators.”  There are exceptions, but undergraduate education in America has become one big socialist indoctrination academy that fills students’ heads with cultural Marxist myths, superstitions, and falsehoods while inculcating an infantile culture that teaches students to run crying to “safe rooms” if a dissenting voice should somehow appear on campus.  All … Continue reading →

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Latin America is once again demonstrating the social poison of “democratic socialism,” the ideology that won Bernie Sanders more than 13 million votes in the Democratic primaries.  Socialism – democratic or otherwise – is not only destructive of a nation’s economy, as history proved over and over again during the twentieth century; it is also ecological poison.  After the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 1980s/early 1990s, we got a first look at what a country’s environment under a socialist system that banned private profit-making for decades looked like.  In a word, it was a catastrophe, as described in … Continue reading →

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A quarter of a century after the spectacular collapse of socialism in the Soviet empire, a large segment of the “millennial” generation (those born between 1982 and 2004) thinks socialism should be the wave of their future.  A 2016 Pew Foundation poll found that 69 percent of voters under the age of 30 expressed “a willingness to vote for a socialist president,” and a 2015 “YouGov.com” poll revealed that 43 percent of young Americans between 18 had 29 had a “favorable” opinion of socialism” and prefer it to capitalism.  Who says the public schools aren’t teaching the kids anything these … Continue reading →

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Beating the Hillary Hate Brigades (HHB) to the punch with what appears to be the first book published about the political rise of Donald Trump, Ilana Mercer has written an insightful short history of the ascendancy of “The Donald” entitled The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed.  The HHB in the media will undoubtedly do its best to rewrite history (i.e., lie) when it comes to how Donald Trump repeatedly exposed them as mostly a bunch of frauds, imposters, and biased political hacks during the primary campaign season. The Trump Revolution sets the record straight on all of this, and … Continue reading →

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The problem with Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate is not that she is a corrupt and dishonest politician, as her critics have charged.  No, the problem with Hillary is that she is just as big a socialist as Bernie Sanders is.  “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good,” she announced to a San Francisco audience in 2004, echoing the Communist Manifesto mantra, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”  “We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society,” she once … Continue reading →

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