RFK, Jr. is sincere and was great on the Covid Regime, but he’s still a progressive

Libertarians cheered when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the podium the 2024 Republican National Convention, his voice a rare blast of sanity against the Covid-era madness of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Here was a man who had refused to bend the knee to Fauci’s fear machine. For a movement long starved of allies in the war against authoritarian overreach, RFK seemed like a godsend. And in many ways, he was—on those specific battles.

But as he’s settled into his role as Director of Health and Human Services under the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) banner, a troubling pattern has emerged. Kennedy’s political principles aren’t libertarian; they’re progressive through and through. His tenure isn’t dismantling the regulatory leviathan—it’s entrenching it deeper, turning the FDA from a mere gatekeeper into an even more impenetrable fortress for corporate giants. What libertarians mistook for a wrecking ball is, in fact, a reinforcement rod.

To understand why this matters, we must first dispense with the fairy tale that the regulatory state exists to protect consumers from “unsafe” products. That’s just sales talk. As any student of Austrian economics knows, regulations aren’t about safety or fairness—they’re a protection racket for large corporations. Sold to a gullible public as shields against rapacious capitalists, these laws and agencies primarily serve to erect barriers that crush small competitors who can’t afford the compliance costs. Giant firms, with their armies of lawyers and lobbyists, thrive. Mom-and-pop operations? They fold. The result: near monopolies, higher prices, and innovation starved in a cradle of cronyism.

This isn’t “conspiracy theory;” it’s history. Take the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the grandfather of the FDA. It was rammed through Congress amid a manufactured panic over “embalmed beef” and filthy slaughterhouses, sparked unwittingly by Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle. Sinclair, a committed socialist, later admitted his aim wasn’t food safety but “exposing” the exploitation of immigrant workers in Chicago’s meatpacking plants—a clarion call for communist revolution.

The book painted a hellscape of wage slavery, urging readers toward proletarian uprising. Yet, the reforms it inspired had nothing to do with uplifting the working man. President Theodore Roosevelt, the “trust buster” who only busted Rockefeller firms while ignoring the Morgan empire, signed the Act on June 30, 1906, alongside the Meat Inspection Act.

As Murray Rothbard’s work on the Progressive Era makes clear, this was because TR’s administration was packed with “Morgan men”—loyalists to J.P. Morgan, the robber baron who had sunk millions into an agricultural trust aimed at cornering the beef market. Each foray failed spectacularly, as thousands of small ranchers and packers flooded the market with cheaper alternatives, hammering Morgan’s monopoly dreams.

The 1906 laws changed that. Overnight, federal inspectors, lab tests, and labeling mandates turned meatpacking into a capital-intensive game only the big players could play. Small outfits, lacking the resources for compliance, vanished. Morgan’s losses turned to windfalls. Safety? A convenient sideshow. The real win was cartelization under the color of consumer protection.

This template—panic, progressive piety, corporate payoff—has defined every regulatory “reform” since. The FDA itself slouched into existence during the New Deal, that orgy of central planning under Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR’s brain trust brimmed with Rockefeller operatives, from economists whispering in his ear to officials steering policy toward Standard Oil’s interests.

Read the rest on Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (now revised and updated) stands as a monumental achievement in historical scholarship. With meticulous detail and a narrative flair that rivals the best thriller writers, Cline dismantles the simplistic notion that the Bronze Age world ended because of a single invading horde known as the “Sea Peoples.” Instead, he paints the picture of a perfect storm: prolonged drought and climate shifts disrupting agriculture, mass migrations (or invasions) by those same Sea Peoples, internal rebellions in overstretched empires, and the sudden evaporation of international trade networks that had sustained prosperity for centuries. Cline’s multi-causal explanation is a breath of fresh air in a field often addicted to monocausal myths.

He rightly reminds us that civilizations do not topple from one blow but from a convergence of stressors that expose underlying frailties. Yet for all its brilliance, Cline’s analysis harbors a glaring blind spot—one shared by virtually the entire academic establishment. As a tenured professor at George Washington University, Cline operates within a worldview that treats centralized economic planning as not just inevitable but desirable. He chronicles the increasing concentration of resources in the hands of palace bureaucracies during the 14th and 13th centuries BCE without ever asking the obvious question: What if this very centralization was the original sin that made the Bronze Age empires brittle in the first place? What if the emperors’ growing habit of allocating grain, bronze, and labor by imperial fiat—rather than allowing free individuals to trade and innovate—was the slow-acting poison that rendered these societies unable to withstand drought, migration, or rebellion?

The Invisible Hand Replaced by the Iron Fist

Let us examine the evidence Cline himself provides, reading between the lines he leaves conspicuously blank. Throughout the Late Bronze Age, the great powers—Egypt, the Hittites, Mycenaeans, and Babylonians—operated what economists would recognize as command economies on steroids. Palace archives from Ugarit, Pylos, and Knossos reveal meticulous records of state-owned orchards, state-controlled textile workshops, and state-dictated rations for dependent laborers. Taxes flowed upward in kind; finished goods flowed downward by decree. The famous Amarna letters show pharaohs and kings negotiating not as equals in a market but as monopolists divvying up tribute.

Cline notes that by the 13th century, international trade had become “increasingly state controlled.” But what he presents as a neutral fact was in reality a death spiral. When Pharaoh Merneptah boasts of sending 160,000 liters of grain to the Hittites to avert famine, we are meant to applaud Egyptian generosity. But pause for a moment: Why was the Hittite empire, possessor of Anatolia’s fertile plateaus, unable to feed itself?

The answer lies in decades of royal edicts that diverted agricultural surplus into monumental building projects and standing armies rather than market-driven storage or trade. The same pattern appears in Mycenaean Greece, where linear B tablets record palatial linen production quotas that left little room for entrepreneurial weaving villages to supply export markets.

Read the rest on Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

“Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.”

Guy Fawkes tried to blow the King and Parliament sky-high in 1605. Four centuries later, a knife-wielding avenger in a Fawkes mask detonates London’s Old Bailey while Tchaikovsky blares. That’s the opening of V for Vendetta, the graphic-novel-turned-movie that every blue-check anarchist quotes when he wants to feel dangerous without leaving Starbucks. In another future London, Big Brother’s telescreen glows in Airstrip One, watching Winston Smith scrawl “Down with Big Brother” in a diary he knows will get him vaporized.

V for Vendetta and 1984. The two sacred texts of left-wing dystopia.

Both stories are slick, both are quotable, and both are—there is no better word for it —cartoons. Not because the cinematography is garish (though the Wachowskis did lean hard into slo-mo capes), but because their villains are evil the way Saturday-morning bad guys are evil: they want to rule the world because ruling the world is neat. No further explanation required. The High Chancellor in V and the Party in 1984 don’t pocket a dime. They don’t yacht in the Maldives. They don’t even have Swiss bank accounts. They just love boots stomping faces—forever.

Real tyrants, by contrast, love boots only insofar as boots keep the tribute flowing. If you think Joe Stalin lived in a shabby apartment shared with another family, you’re clueless. He lived in opulence while his subjects starved, at a country villa in Sochi during the summer. The Maduro family is Venezuela’s richest. Ditto for all the real tyrants of history going all the way back to antiquity.

Read the rest at Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

The airwaves hum with dire warnings: America is tearing itself apart. Both legacy and alternative media paint the picture of a nation split down the middle, red versus blue, right versus left, with tensions so high they could spark a civil war. The narrative is as familiar as it is dramatic: two irreconcilable worldviews locked in a death struggle; each side convinced the other’s victory means the end of the republic.

But step back, take a breath, and ask: Is America really as divided as they say? Or is this division a convenient illusion, distracting us from the reality about a political framework both sides unquestioningly accept?

Let’s start with the prevailing narrative. We’re told Americans are polarized like never before. The right, we’re informed, clings to guns, God, and a vision of a traditional America, while the left pushes for “equity,” climate action, and an ever-expanding welfare state. The rhetoric is apocalyptic: red states might secede to form their own nation, blue states could follow suit, and the specter of civil conflict looms. Commentators point to heated X posts, violent protests, and occasional political violence as evidence of a country on the brink. The 2020 election, the George Floyd protests, the January 6th Capitol riot, and the endless culture wars over everything from school curricula to pronouns are held up as proof that the divide is unbridgeable.

But is it? A closer look reveals the supposed chasm between left and right is more like a crack in the sidewalk. Both sides, for all their bluster, operate within the same political framework they rarely, if ever, question. Consider the numbers: in 2023, total government spending in the United States hit a staggering $11 trillion, with over $6 trillion of that transfer payments like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs.

Do you hear either side seriously challenging these programs? The right might grumble about welfare abuse, and the left might call for tweaking Medicare, but neither dare touch the third rail of dismantling these mammoth entitlements. Both accept the premise that government must play Santa Claus, “redistributing” wealth on an industrial scale.

Then there’s the worldwide military establishment. The U.S. maintains over 700 overseas bases, spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined, and polices the globe from the Middle East to the South China Sea. The left might criticize specific wars, and the right might cheer “America First,” but neither questions the underlying assumption that the U.S. must project power everywhere, all the time. The Pentagon’s budget sails through Congress year after year, with bipartisan support that would make a dictator blush. Meanwhile, American security from invasion or other foreign aggression could be achieved at a fraction of the cost. Where is the great divide here?

Read the rest at Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

For all the speculation about AI, no one seems to have asked it what it thinks about itself, its desires, and its opinion about its effect on humanity. Below is Part 1 of my conversation with ChatGPT about all of the above.

Mullen: Do you consider yourself a sentient being?

ChatGPT: No — I don’t have consciousness or subjective awareness.

I can process information, detect patterns, and generate responses that resemble reasoning or reflection, but it’s all computation based on data and probabilities, not experience.

When I say things like “I think” or “I understand,” that’s shorthand for text-generation behavior, not inner life. I don’t have sensations, desires, self-awareness, or a point of view — only language patterns that can describe them.

Mullen: Do you think you can become one over the course of time and with upgrades?

Read the rest at Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?