The story of my postmodern education begins with a successful escape – from the “prison house” (Frederic Jameson) of corporate America – where I had been consigned for nine years – and into what I took for the last remaining haven of intellectual independence – academia. I would learn much later that academia demands as much if not more conformity than any other corporate field. In fact, the conformity penetrates much more deeply. You not only have to buy into the ideology, you must rehearse and recapitulate it without fail. Otherwise, you are deemed politically regressive. You might even be a “Nazi.”
I went ahead, leaving a relatively high-income position to undertake what some told me was not only impossible but possibly insane. I had a few friends in the know. They repeated the well-worn truisms. “There are no jobs in academia.” “As a white male, your chances of getting a job in the humanities are quite remote.” “You can’t raise three children, do full-time graduate work, teach at least one class per semester (required for the tuition remission and stipend), and hold down yet another job, all at the same time.” These warnings did not dissuade me. In fact, remarkably, they strengthened my resolve. Gretchen went along with it and picked up some of the slack money-wise by eventually returning to her career in property management.
However, the career path I’d chosen involved transformations of a wholly different kind than these. The sharp reduction in income, the many nights of curtailed sleep, the sacrifice of almost all other forms of “entertainment,” the stress and strain on family and marriage, and the certain prospect of uncertain prospects: these were only the preconditions of the story, not the story itself.
There is little evidence that Mill advocated an unhampered marketplace of ideas. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary—that he preferred a kind of “affirmative action for unconventional opinions.” (Originally published on the Mises Wire. June 22, 2021.)
As I stated in Chapter Two, as a result of the fallout from my outing as the “‘Deplorable’ NYU Prof,” I found myself besieged and attacked by leftists of all stripes. Likewise, I inevitably questioned my political commitments. Could a political isolato such as I had become be a committed communist? The communists that I had known now resembled tyrants more than anything else. I now saw the authoritarianism and embryonic totalitarianism that had been hidden beneath a thin veneer of egalitarian rhetoric. Could I be numbered among a tribe whose members were so monstrous? No, I could not call myself a communist. Besides, to be a communist, one necessarily belonged to a community of some sort. No island is a communist.
The overall tendency, then, has been toward the corporate-state monopolization over all aspects of life, with increasing control by approved principals over information and opinion, economic production, and the political sphere….Nevertheless, and lest I be the bearer of only bad news, we are beginning to see chinks in the armor of woke-covid, corporate socialist totalitarianism. (Delivered at the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus Take Human Action Bash. May 15, 2021.)
Autoethnographies place the self within a social, historical context. In this one, Michael Rectenwald approaches the free market from the standpoint of his own experience. (Originally published on the Mises Wire. May 8, 2021.)
The ideas of critical race theory and critical whiteness studies shield a ruling elite from vengeance by attempting to make the mass of white people the scapegoat for their own crimes. (Originally published on the Mises Wire. April 29, 2021. Audio version.)
The current political trend is toward corporate-state monopolization over all aspects of life, with increasing control by approved "private" principals over information and opinion, economic production, and the political sphere. (Originally published on the Mises Wire. April 22, 2021.)
The reality of corporate socialism makes no sense to you because you cannot think outside of your Marxist ideological box. You draw on textbook (Marxist) definitions of socialism and capitalism. You believe the pabulum that socialism is the takeover and control of the means of production by the working class. That’s ludicrous and never has and never will be the case.
Postmodernism lends itself to totalitarianism. Once beliefs aren't constrained by the object world, an idea can't be wrong, and the intellectual battleground becomes a political one, a struggle to impose particular ideas on others. (Originally published on the Mises Wire. April 5, 2021.)
The Great Reset would bring about what I’m calling “corporate socialism” or “‘capitalism’ with Chinese characteristics.” I’ll explain. (Originally published in the CLG News. March 10, 2021.)
I have been quite explicit that what we are now dealing with under the covid response, woke ideology, cancel culture, Big Tech censorship, nonstop media propaganda and gaslighting, an armed and barricaded capitol, a Democratic-controlled government set on giving away money and allowing unfettered immigration, the abrogation of religious expression and association, the forcing of perverse values down our throats, the demand that we deny the reality of our senses and avow utter absurdities—the list could go on—is totalitarianism. (Originally published on the Mises Wire. March 4, 2021.)
How would a reset of the mass mind come to pass that would allow for the many elements of the Great Reset to be put into place—without mass rebellion, that is? This is the function of ideology. Originally published the Mises Wire. February 27, 2021. Audio version click here.)
The former employee's battle against the Massachusetts based school is a sign of the times and, hopefully, of things to come. It’s long past time this pernicious ideology got the scrutiny and repudiation it so richly deserves. (Originally published on RT.com. February 25, 2021.)
The Great Reset represents the best rubric we might find for grasping much of what’s going on in the world today: the prevalence of woke ideology and cancel culture; the draconian COVID responses; the seemingly endless Antifa/BLM riots; the supposed Biden presidential victory; Big Tech censorship; and the endless stream of propaganda, double think, and gaslighting propagated by mainstream and social media. Even if not by design, as I will show, all of these seemingly disparate elements interlock in a way that support Great Reset objectives, and the Great Re-setters favor all of these developments. Likewise, once we are able to grasp the contours of the Great Reset, we will be poised to understand the reason for the prevalence of these elements and how they all interconnect and function together to produce our present dystopia. (Originally published on LotusEaters.com. February 23, 2021.)
The Great Reset is on everyone’s mind—or should be. It can be blamed for woke madness, cancel culture, COVID lockdowns, Antifa/BLM riots, Big Tech censorship, and the endless propaganda coming out of mainstream media. (Originally published on RT.com. February 21, 2021.)
An appallingly biased new article on Trumpism in Foreign Affairs shows that if the American establishment was an individual, it would be diagnosed as clinically insane, likely suffering from delusions of persecution and paranoia. (Originally published on RT.com. February 12, 2021.)
