Because of the particular nature of some of my articles and blogs at LRC, many readers over the years have inquired concerning my personal views and scholarly assessment of the Bavarian Illuminati and its genuine impact on world history. Did such an organization really exist? Does it exist today? What role did it play in the French Revolution of 1789? The Revolutions of 1848? The Russian Revolutions of 1917? etc. Since its founding on May 1, 1776, the Illuminati has been the subject of more controversy, disinformation and fear-mongering than almost any other topic analyzed by historians. But today, from impeccable archival research compiled over the past several decades, we now have an almost complete true picture of this clandestine organization and its nexus of influence. Here are the seminal primary and secondary documents I recommend which present that historical portrait: Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, by James H. Billington; Perfectibilists: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati, by Terry Melanson; The Secret School of Wisdom: The Authentic Ritual and Doctrines of the Illuminati, edited by Josef Wäges, Reinhard Markner and translated to English by Jeva Singh-Anand; Philo’s Reply To Questions Concerning His Association With the Illuminati, by Adolph Freiherr Knigge and translated to English by Jeva Singh-Anand; Illuminati Manifesto of World Revolution (1792): L’Esprit des Religions, by Nicholas Bonneville and translated to English by Marco di Luchetti Esq.; Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism: A Translation from the French of the Abbe Barruel, by Augustin Barruel; The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, by Robert Darnton; The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, by Robert Darnton; Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, by Robert Darnton; Critique and Crises: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, by Reinhart Koselleck; and The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti, 1761-1837, by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein.

(The fictional works of Robert Anton Wilson are in a whole separate category or parallel universe.)

Were we to hold a contest for “Brassiest Politician,” an astounding number of entries would deluge us. But I wonder whether the stunningly shameless Andrew Guano–sorry, Cuomo of New York wouldn’t win based on this quote alone: regarding his “state‘s skyrocketing gun violence,” he announced, 

“We know how to deal with an epidemic … We wanna do with gun violence, what we just did with COVID…”

You guessed it: granny-killing jokes are ricocheting around cyberspace. 

Thanks to Bill Martin for starting our day with a laugh.

America’s Drug Wars, by Alfred McCoy

Between the 1960s and 2021, the United States fought two disastrous drug wars in distant lands and historian Alfred McCoy covered them both. The initial one was, of course, the Vietnam War, which, as he reminds us today, left staggering numbers of American soldiers hooked on heroin. In those years, McCoy quite literally tramped the “heroin trail” in Laos, “meeting gangsters and warlords in isolated places,” while covering the grim role our leading intelligence agency played in drugging American troops, first for Harper’s Magazine and then in his book (which the CIA tried to suppress), The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.

America’s second disastrous drug war was, of course, the Afghan one that the U.S. is now, at least theoretically, leaving in its wake almost 20 years after its 2001 invasion. Meanwhile, the Taliban, which kept itself afloat all those years at least in part on money made from growing, refining, and marketing opium, now threatens to fell the U.S.-supported regime there. And McCoy covered that drug war (even if from a distance) for TomDispatch.  From 2010 on, he’s written vividly and repeatedly about how, as he put it in 2016, “Washington’s single and singular accomplishment in all its years there has been to oversee the country’s transformation into the planet’s number one narco-state.” How grimly true.

And for this, unfortunately, there’s a long history. As he wrote in 2010 in the first of his TomDispatch pieces on the subject, the CIA’s covert Afghan war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s “served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world’s largest heroin-producing region.” Oh, the irony of it all!

Today, McCoy, author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and the upcoming To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, turns to the third drug war this country has been involved in since the Vietnam era. As it happens, this one has been taking place not thousands of miles away in distant war zones, but right here at home and it couldn’t be grimmer.

A COVID emergency, naturally, says the Olympic organizers.

First Ever Bastille Day “Celebration” To Be Held In NYC’s Central Park

Operation Parricide: Sade, Robespierre & the French Revolution

Bastille Day Is Nothing to Celebrate

The French Genocide That Has Been Air-Brushed From History

The Hidden Rebellion

Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith

American Vendée

Reports The Hill: “COVID-19 vaccines likely saved more than a quarter of a million lives and prevented more than a million hospitalizations according to new estimates from Yale University and the Commonwealth Fund.”

Is this the most bogus research ever? This lie ranks right up there with Biden saying that 40,000 lives would be saved if everyone wore face masks for the last three months of 2020.

Reports The Hill: “Pfizer and BioNTech announced Thursday that they plan to seek authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a third dose of their COVID-19 vaccine, saying it would provide even stronger protection.”

Pfizer is “also developing a version of its vaccine to include the rapidly spreading Delta variant.” Pfizer knows a cash cow when it sees one.

An author named JL Fuller invites all of LRC’s readers to the launch of her cleverly titled book, ‘Romans 13 and Covid 19,‘ tomorrow evening (that link is for the USSA; Canadians can use this one, while folks in the UK should go here). Already Amazon’s “#1 Best Seller in Church Leadership,” Ms. Fuller addresses a question we have often explored on LRC:

Many people have been asking in the advent of Covid, “Where is the Church?” and “Why is the Church so silent and not standing up?”

The new book, ‘Romans 13 and Covid 19 – Knowledge, Warnings and Encouragement for the Church and World’ seeks to put this right. … This unique, timely book gives a comprehensive analysis and exposure of the deceptive dangers and errors entering the Church under Coronavirus mandates … and a clear, Biblical roadmap out of it.

‘Romans 13 and Covid 19’ is for Pastors, Church leaders, disciples of Jesus Christ and anyone who is concerned by what’s being imposed on the Body of Christ and world at large by our Governments, as a result of the Covid crisis.

The book examines Biblical principles on the scope and limits of civil authority, looking at examples from both the current situation and the past (namely the misuse of Romans 13 in 1930s Germany to quell resistance to Hitler). It surveys the key aspects and implications of the Covid directives – from the medical mandates, lockdowns and gene therapy rollout, to systematic State propaganda and the ‘Great Reset’. You’ll find much-needed knowledge and wisdom about not only what’s going on now but also the wider, one-world technocratic agenda at play and where it’s headed: Equipping you with all you need to know to accurately understand the times and obey Jesus’ command in Matthew 24:4 to “Take heed that no one deceives you”, as well as to watch and pray, wake up from sleep, cast off the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light.

If you’d like to join the launch on Zoom this Friday, July 9th, at 7pm BST (2pm EDT, 11am PDT, 9pm IDT; allow about 75 minutes for this event), please write to book@romans13revival.com for the “Meeting ID” and “Passcode.”

Hint: It Begins With A “J” As In “Jab” inspired a medical doctor in Brooklyn to report on “rising disability claims,” as he entitled his email to me:

In my primary care office it is very clear that most people are filing for disability because:

A) They are afraid of catching covid at work or during their commute.

B) They are afraid of being compelled to “vaccinate” as a condition of employment.

C) They are sick of the masking, social mitigation and generally oppressive work environment found at most NYC jobs.

Very few of my patients are genuinely disabled by a physical impairment. On the other hand, many are genuinely disabled by the rampant depression, anxiety and other psychological illnesses that have arisen as a direct result of lockdown policies implemented across the country and around the world.  While I have definitely seen a small but unacceptable number of serious adverse reactions to all the covid jabs, the disability claims have not been for those cases of apparently transient “vaccine” illness as yet, but I am very concerned about the tsunami of mRNA death and disability that may be coming.

Meanwhile,

…out of the couple dozen covid cases I have personally treated in my office or in an urgent care setting (admittedly a small number), all recovered without any chronic residual symptoms or so called “Long Covid” syndrome.

Do I detect yet more lies in COVIDCon?

Heard over a loud speaker in the voice of “someone with an American accent” the moment the Haitian president and his wife were assassinated by a caravan of hitmen early this morning.

The true believers in COVIDiocy must boast IQ’s in the single digits because nothing about the plandemic adds up—and that includes the numbers surrounding The Jab. Dave Darby compiled some intriguing stats:

…according to the CDC, there were 375,000 Covid deaths in the US during the year 2020.

Now this … article says the current total is 605,000 deaths. Subtract that 375K, and at mid-year 2021 we have 230,000 deaths for this year. Last July 6th, the Guardian reported “US death toll surpasses 130,000”.  (With no vaccines available until late December 2020).

So July 2020: 130,000 covid deaths. (With no vaccine).

July 2021 we are already at 230,000? With vaccines? And people think they are working?

Morons think they’re working. There’s a difference.

A flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, to the Bahamas was pushed back a day after a group of more than 30 high school students refused to wear masks on board the plane before takeoff. … The standoff reportedly lasted for hours before the flight was cancelled until Tuesday.

And did the adults onboard support the kids as they stood (or sat, as the case may be) on principle? Of course not:

“It was bad. First, they were yelling. They were cursing. They were being very obnoxious,” Malik Banks, who was seated next to the kids, told  WSOC-TV. “It wasn’t all of them. I would say 75% to 80% of them were being terrible kids, saying smart stuff.”

“Some people’s vacations are ruined. They were only going for a couple of nights. Now, they have to get rebooked,” another passenger, Stephanie Krzywanski, told the outlet.

Oh, poor baby. Teens protest tyranny, and all this cretin cares about is her vacation.

Meanwhile, our young patriots paid for their dissidence: 

The adults passengers who were stranded were given hotel vouchers, while the students were too young to be eligible and had to spend the night inside the airport …

Miraculously, cops arrested none of these heroes.

Oh, for more students cut from this same courageous cloth! Thanks to David Mueller for alerting me to this encouraging story.

Lewis Lapham is the editor of Lapham’s Quarterly and former Editor of Harper’s Magazine. He is the author many books including, PRETENTIONS TO EMPIRE: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration and MONEY AND CLASS IN AMERICA: Notes on Our Civil Religion.

. . . to watch a golf match.  No word from Obama yet on how, in his “post-racial society,” the government schools are going full bore in teaching that all white people — even newborn babies — are “the devil.”  If he doesn’t speak up soon, some people will think he actually agrees with this.

A look at the little-known history of Burr’s attempt to create a new country, seceding from the United States. See also this earlier presentation, The United States v. Aaron Burr.

Something called “The Morning Joe” sententiously announces, 

Six months after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the FBI is still working to identify individual rioters who took part in the insurrection. The Morning Joe panel discusses.

I’m sure I’d vastly prefer the liquid version of “Morning Joe” to the propaganda these coiffed and groomed liars spewed, especially on a stomach as empty as their heads.

Meanwhile, no matter how often the corporate media smears the Patriots of January 6 as “rioters” and “insurrectionists,” no matter how relentlessly the FBI and other fedbugs persecute these folks, no matter how much hatred Marxists heap on them, they are shining heroes to me and to millions of Americans.

One day historians will categorize these martyrs with the victims of the Boston Massacre. May the former’s abuse now sow the seeds of a revolution as effective and successful as that which the “riot” of March 5, 1770 did. 

On Friday,

the labor department published a jobs report that shows a wildly rising — and at an accelerating rate — disability rate among all people 16+ in the workforce, totaling close to 3 million newly disabled people since January…

There are 2.8 million more disabled workers than there were six months ago. The very reasonable question that Karl Denninger is asking is: what started happening in January that could have rendered that many workers unable to work? 

Thanks to Bill Martin for sending this intriguing info. 

. . . now that U.S. troops are leaving Afghanistan after a twenty year quagmire.  (If you believe that, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona I’d like to sell you).

Older readers may remember how Cheney and all the other neocons lost it and became apoplectic twenty years ago whenever someone in the media even mentioned the word “quagmire.”  And how Cheney personally fired the president’s top economic advisor, Larry Lindsey, after he said that the war could cost $65 billion?  (The bill so far is reportedly a couple trillion.  Not to mention the future billions in healthcare costs for all the maimed veterans who lost arms and legs and other body parts –and their sanity — FOR NOTHING).

When his worthless bureaucracy of Thieves and Sexual Assailants “predicted airports across the nation would see pre-pandemic travel volumes for the Independence Day weekend,” “TSA Administrator David Pekoske” warned: “TSA will not tolerate aggressive actions toward our officers…”

Yep, these are the perverts who grope passengers between their legs while stealing their money, computers, and jewelry. But ah, ah, ah: no matter how egregiously the TSA injures us, we must never indulge in “aggressive actions toward” its deviants and robbers.

Is there any better definition of tyranny?

Lewis Lapham’s The American Ruling Class, is a classic devilish and illuminating “dramatic-documentary-musical satire” on our plutocratic power elite.

No one is better equipped to pull off this dark seriocomedic venture than the wry master of patrician sensibility himself, the author of Fortune’s Child, Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations On Our Civil Religion, and Imperial Masquerade.

Lapham is joined by a sterling cavalcade of establishment note-worthies playing themselves, as this sly Luciferian guides two befuddled innocents through the Oz-like, kaleidoscopic maze composing the elite corridors of power in America.

Lapham is the former editor of Harpers magazine, and America’s premier essayist.

He ranks with H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock in his stylistic elegance and keen ability to dissect the bloated rotting corpse of the American body politic, exposing the frailties, pretentiousness, and rank imbecilities of what he aptly describes as its “equestrian class.” America, where the masses are born with saddles on their backs, for a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God, the GOP, and Donald Trump.

“Moldovan [Russia] Church Denounces COVID Vaccine as Anti-Christian Plot” screams the headline on an article that Ivan the Liberterrible forwarded. A sub-head adds, 

…the main Church in Moldova has claimed that a vaccine against COVID-19 could allow Microsoft, or other entities, to take remote control of human beings in Moldova and elsewhere.

The story gets better:

The Moldovan Metropolitan Church, the largest faith group in the country, is canonically subordinated to the Russian Orthodox Church. Official data say almost 97 per cent of people in Moldova are officially Orthodox Christians, and most of them belong to this denomination.

A survey commissioned by the International Republican Institute in February 2020 said the Church enjoys more trust from citizens in Moldova than any other body.

And even better:

The Church also warned Moldovan Prime Minister Ion Chicu that if he did not lift restrictions on gatherings in churches sooner than the planned date of June 30 he would be struck off the prayer list.

“Otherwise we will take the canonical and moral right to exclude you from remembrance in the Church’s prayers. Do not fight against the Church, for it is Christ who defends it,” the Church said.

Imagine Parson Goat’s chastising godless politicians and bureaucrats! Good gracious, at this point, I’d be happy if he merely declined the stolen loot with which Our Rulers bribe him. His holding their feet to the fire … well, who dares even dream of such a feat? So thank you, Moldovan Metropolitan Church!

Lest our spirits rise too high at the common sense and truthfulness from these brothers in the Lord, Ivan sent another article. This one, about the Russian Orthodox Church as a whole, reports,

Those who refuse to be vaccinated against Covid-19 are committing a sin they will have to repent for the rest of their lives. That’s according to the Russian Orthodox Church, whose spokesman said rejecting a jab is selfish.

Speaking to TV channel Russia 24, the head of the Russia Orthodox Church’s Department for External Church Relations, Metropolitan Hilarion, explained that his parishioners regularly repent to him for not being vaccinated. They feel guilty because they passed the virus on to someone else who eventually died, he claimed.

“They come and say, ‘How am I supposed to live with this now?’ And it’s hard for even me to say how to live with it,” he explained. “All your life, you have to make up for the sin you committed.”

“The sin is thinking about yourself instead of thinking about other people,” the metropolitan said. “We are responsible – each of us – not only for ourselves and not only for our loved ones, but also for all those who come into contact with us.”

Ivan responded to this heresy by noting, 

Orthodox hierarchs are not considered infallible. This is Metropolitan Hilarion’s opinion.

And a really bone-headed one, too.

…What the Metropolitan either seems not to grasp, or chooses not to accept, is that each of us is responsible for his own safety – or, as Paul put it, “Each one shall bear his own burden (Galatians 6:5).” What happened to all the magical masks that were supposed to keep other people safe?

This announcement by the Metropolitan is regrettable. I hope the Russian Orthodox laity will think for themselves and not allow their church to turn into an Eastern version of Catholicism.

Yep. One traitor to the Faith is enough.

In “The Defrosted Progressive,” an article published in Taki’s Magazine, July 5, 2021, “The Z Man” is less than enthusiastic about the Mises Institute. He says that “so-called conservatives” embrace “libertine culture and libertarian economics.” This, the Z Man tells us, “was what left-wing deviationists were pushing at the end of the Cold War.”  Now, “National Review now reads like Von Mises Center for Transgender Studies.”

Z Man knows nothing about the Mises Institute. We do not embrace libertine culture, and left-libertarians often attack us for defending conservative social values. But I suspect that this does not matter to our author. His article contains so many weird remarks that he ought to have adopted the pseudonym “The LSD Man.”

It is utterly false to say that “The aggressive defense of global capital, the hard defense of order, the corporatism. These are things that were on the right half a century ago, but today they are the defining qualities of the left.” The contemporary left continues, as always, to be against capitalism. Who are the progressives Z has in mind? Bernie Sanders? Thomas Piketty?

Z thinks that capitalism is outmoded. It is just one of several ideologies that grew out of the Industrial Revolution.  Nowadays, ”The titans of modern industry do not rely upon a monopoly of capital, but rather a monopoly of information. Wall Street controls the global financial system, which is just an endless stream of information. They make their money through informational asymmetry, which allows them to skim a little from every transaction.”

If the global financial system is just an endless stream of information, where does money come in at all?  Z, in writing about Wall Street’s “mak[ing] their money” fails to notice that he has contradicted himself.

But more important than Z’s errors is a fundamental fact, often stressed by Mises. There are only two ways to distribute goods and services in a complex modern economy:  market prices and centralized control. Informational asymmetry, which is as Z notes important, does not alter the essential choice, capitalism or socialism, and if Z thinks there is another alternative, he is mistaken.

. . . “it will confess.”  I heard Ronald Coase say that many years ago at an American Enterprise Institute lecture in which he ridiculed all the econometric game playing that goes on in the economics profession.  I was reminded of this while reading numerous articles on the Web about how the state’s increasing the amount of payment and length of payment for unemployment insurance has caused millions of workers to stay home because they can make more doing that than working.  Even my local seafood restaurant had to close on Sundays and Mondays (in peak tourist season) because they simply can’t get enough kitchen help.

What I was reminded of, specifically, is how a former faculty colleague was congratulated by all the other economics faculty for publishing an econometric study that concluded that increasing the amount and length of unemployment insurance does NOT increase unemployment.  Coase knew what he was talking about.

For over 120 years America has been held captive by the satanic virus of Progressivism, first inflicted by the Progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson. This incubus of collectivism infiltrated and seduced the body politic regardless of empty party labels.

Most notably, there is nothing new in the intellectually bankrupt public policy agenda of the Democrats for over 77 years. All major policy prescriptions and programs of modern Democratic Party regimes, from FDR to Joe Biden, can be traced back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s promulgation of his Second Bill of Rights that was filmed after he delivered his State of the Union Address via radio on January 11, 1944.

However it was Lyndon Johnson, who adored FDR and the New Deal, who created The Great Society, as an attempt to fulfill this collectivist legacy.

As Murray N. Rothbard notes:

The Great Society was the lineal descendant and the intensification of those other pretentiously named policies of 20th-century America: the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Era, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the New Frontier. All of these assorted Deals constituted a basic and fundamental shift in American life – a shift from a relatively laissez-faire economy and minimal state to a society in which the state is unquestionably king.

Major Hollywood celebrities & actors reading the Declaration of Independence from Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 2002. Narrated by Morgan Freeman it includes Mel Gibson, Michael Douglas, Kathy Bates, Winona Ryder, Kevin Spacey, Edward Norton, Whoopi Goldberg, Ming-Na, Beneccio Del Toro, Graham Green & Renee Zellweger. One cannot conceive this patriotic performance being staged today in the divisive totalitarian climate of Critical Race Theory promulgated by willfully ignorant cultural Marxist woke bicoastal elites.

For anyone who thinks of Murray Rothbard as only an economic theorist or political thinker, these books are something of a surprise. Rothbard’s ambition was to shed new light on Colonial history and show that the struggle for human liberty was the heart and soul of this land from its discovery through the culminating event of the American Revolution. These volumes are a tour de force, enough to establish Rothbard as one of the great American historians.

The American Revolution and Classical Liberalism, by Murray N. Rothbard

Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution, by Murray N. Rothbard

Conceived in Liberty (volumes 1-4), by Murray N. Rothbard

Conceived in Liberty (volume 5), by Murray N. Rothbard