Dwight D. Murphey on progressivism and the civil rights movement from the early 1900s to 1930s

[Modern] liberals in the United States did not provide conspicuous leadership to a movement for racial and ethnic equality until the issue came to life during and after World War II.  Most Americans will be amazed to hear that it was the Progressives who were most instrumental in establishing the Jim Crow system in the South; they did so after the Populist movement created a fear of the potentially corrupting effects of a movement that would combine blacks and poor whites.  Theodore Roosevelt is reputed to have made an embarrassingly bigoted comment about Negroes at the time of the Brownsville Affair.  Woodrow Wilson originally wanted to include blacks in his administration, but backed off when this led to criticism from his Southern supporters.  Franklin Roosevelt did not make civil rights legislation for blacks a significant part of the New Deal. 

During all those years the many liberals connected with the liberal journals as editors and writers, while favorable to Negroes and horrified by lynchings, made no move to make "civil rights" a priority issue.  As we look back from the ethos of the 1980s and '90s, we tend to think, racial, ethnic and sexual equality have held a place in the pantheon of liberal philosophy from the beginning.  But that is just not so.

~ Dwight D. Murphey, Liberalism in Contemporary America, p. 19

George Orwell on falsifying history

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.  And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.  History has stopped.  Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

~ George Orwell, 1984

Jim Grant on free speech being under threat in America

[T]here’s a cyclicality, there’s an episodic quality to our politics.  I don’t think these are end times politically.  I think it’s worrying, for example, that freedom of speech seems to be back on its heels as much as it has ever been.   I think freedom of speech, in America, was not quite so endangered even in the ’30s as it is now.  That is genuinely frightening.  I’m frightened by it.

~ Jim Grant, "Living Economic History: Q&A with Jim Grant," The Coffee Can Portfolio, December 10, 2020

Tom Woods on the beauty of economics

[Economics] really is something beautiful.  It reveals to you an order that can be hidden or obscured by your own eyes.  I think Mises or Rothbard put it this way in theory and history...  If you were just to look at Grand Central Terminal in New York and not think it through, all you would see is just a bunch of people running hither and yon, and that would be the end of it.  But when you think through what's actually going on, you realize that each one of those people has a goal and is pursuing that goal, and that that's not chaos, but it's actually order that you're observing.  Well likewise for the entire economy, to a Marxist it looks like "There's duplication of production," "It's not the way I would run it if I had a bullhorn."  But the more you understand it, the more you perceive the hidden order beneath it all.  And once you perceive that, you do want other people to understand it.  In my case not just because they'll derive intellectual pleasure from understanding it, but because they'll stop wrecking it 24 hours a day!

~ Tom Woods, "Ep. 1806 From Left to Libertarian: How He Did It," The Tom Woods Show, January 5, 2021

George Orwell anticipates the political Left circa 2021

Now I will tell you the answer to my question.  It is this.  The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.  We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.  What pure power means you will understand presently.  We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing.  All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.  The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.  They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.  We are not like that.  We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.  Power is not a means; it is an end.  One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.  The object of persecution is persecution.  The object of torture is torture.  The object of power is power.  Now you begin to understand me.

~ George Orwell, 1984

Murray Rothbard on the alliance between the State and intellectuals

[T]he majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives.  Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the "intellectuals."  For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals.  The intellectuals are, therefore, the "opinion-molders" in society.  And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear. 

It is evident that the State needs the intellectuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need the State.  Put simply, we may state that the intellectual's livelihood in the free market is never too secure; for the intellectual must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men, and it is precisely characteristic of the masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual matters.  The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a secure and permanent berth in the State apparatus; and thus a secure income and the panoply of prestige.  For the intellectuals will be handsomely rewarded for the important function they perform for the State rulers, of which group they now become a part.

~ Murray Rothbard, Anatomy of the State

Jeff Deist on the future of free, decentralized communications

The underlying ideology, the impulse towards freedom which includes free communications and speech, is not so easily quashed.  And for that reason, I'm actually quite optimistic about a highly decentralized future where we don't have these huge gatekeepers like Google search, or Amazon Web Services, or Facebook and Twitter and Instagram as the only big 800 lb. gorillas in social media.  So I'm actually quite optimistic.

~ Jeff Deist, "Dealing With Big Tech Censorship - With Jeff Deist," 22:30 mark, Ron Paul Liberty Report, January 14, 2021