Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Other posts here on Bud’s blog about this subject:
“John Ogee, 96 years old, was born in Morgan City, La., in 1841, the property of Alfred Williams. John ran away to join the Union Army and served three years. He recalls Sherman’s march through Georgia and South Carolina and the siege of Vicksburg. “I was born near Morgan City, Louisiana in a old log cabin with a dirt floor, one big room was all, suh. My mother and father and four chillen lived in that room. “The marster, he live in a big, old house near us. I ‘member it was a big house and my mudder done the cleanin’ and work for them. I jus’ played round when I’s growin’ and the fus’ work I done, they start me to plowin’. “I haven’t got ‘lection like I used to, but I ‘members when I’s in the army. Long ’bout ’63 I go to the army and there was four of us who run away from home, me and my father and ‘nother man named Emanuel Young and ‘nother man, but I disremember his name now. The Yankees comed ’bout a mile from us and they took every ear of corn, kilt every head of stock and thirteen hawgs and ’bout fifteen beeves, and feed their teams and themselves. They pay the old lady in Confed’rate money, but it weren’t long ‘fore that was no money at all. When we think of all that good food the Yankees done got, we jus’ up and jine up with them. We figger we git lots to eat and the res’ we jus’ didn’t figger. When they lef’ we lef’. My father got kilt from an ambush, in Miss’ippi–I think it was Jackson. “We went to Miss’ippi, then to South Carolina. I went through Georgia and South Carolina with Sherman’s army. The fus’ battle lasts two days and nights and they was ’bout 800 men kilt, near’s I kin ‘member. Some of ’em you could find the head and not the body. That was the battle of Vicksburg. After the battle it took three days to bury them what got kilt and they had eight mule throw big furrows back this way, and put ’em in and cover ’em up. In that town was a well ’bout 75 or 80 feet deep and they put 19 dead bodies in that well and fill her up. “After the war we went through to Atlanta, in Georgia and stay ’bout three weeks. Finally we come back to Miss’ippi when surrender come. The nigger troops was mix with the others but they wasn’t no nigger officers. “After the war I come home and the old marster he didn’ fuss at me about going to war and for long time I work on the old plantation for wages. I ‘member then the Klu Klux come and when that happen I come to Texas. They never did git me but some they got and kilt. I knowed several men they whip purty bad. I know Narcisse Young, they tell him they was comin’. He hid in the woods, in the trees and he open fire and kilt seven of them. They was a cullud man with them and after they goes, he comes back and asks can he git them dead bodies. Narcisse let him and then Narcisse he lef’ and goes to New Orleans. “I thinks it great to be with the Yankees, but I wishes I hadn’t after I got there. When you see 1,000 guns point at you I knows you wishes you’d stayed in the woods. “The way they did was put 100 men in front and they git shoot and fall down, and then 100 men behin’ git up and shoot over ’em and that the way they goes forward. They wasn’t no goin’ back, ’cause them men behin’ you would shoot you. I seed ’em fightin’ close ‘nough to knock one ‘nother with a bay’net. I didn’ see no breech loaders guns, they was all muskets, muzzle loaders, and they shoot a ball ’bout big as your finger, what you calls a minnie-ball. “I come to Taylor’s Bayou in ’70 and rid stock long time for Mister Arceneaux and Mister Moise Broussard and farms some too. Then I comes to Beaumont when I’s too old to work no more, and lives with one of my girls.” — John Ogee, interviewed in Beaumont Texas as a part of the Federal Writers’ Project
1963 speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington D.C. to 250,000 people of the civil rights movement, regarded as one of the most important speeches in US history. Jon Meacham writes that, “With a single phrase, King joined Jefferson and Lincoln in the ranks of men who’ve shaped modern America”.[8]
“A half-century after his death, Martin Luther King Jr. is as revered as ever. But have we been following his example, or merely paying lip service to his ideas? Jason Riley, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, weighs in.”
By Jason Riley. Read or watch the original here where you can also find references:
It’s been 50 years since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot to death on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, and over the decades he has become one of the most revered figures in American history. There is an impressive memorial to him in Washington, DC, and a museum celebrating his life in Atlanta, Georgia. Countless schools and boulevards have been named after him, and a national holiday is dedicated to his memory.
How is it, then, that so much of his legacy — what he hoped to pass on to the future — has been lost?
King wanted equality under the law and said, famously, that people ought to judge one another based on character, not skin color. But he also believed that blacks had an important role to play in their own advancement.
The black civil rights battles in America are now over, and King’s side won. The best indication of that may be that King has had no real successor. If black Americans were still faced with legitimate threats to civil rights—such as legal discrimination or voter disenfranchisement—it’s likely that leaders of King’s caliber would have emerged to carry on the fight. Instead, what we have today are pretenders who have turned the civil rights movement into an industry, if not a racket.
And what have these racketeers accomplished? A lot for themselves and very little for their constituents. Racial gaps in income, education and home ownership were narrowing in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, but after King was replaced as the spokesman for black America by the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and others, these gaps began to widen in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
This suggests that the racial disparities that continue today aren’t driven by whatever racism that still exists, despite all the claims to the contrary from progressives and their allies in the media. It also suggests that black culture — attitudes toward marriage, education, work and the rule of law — plays a much larger role than the left wants to acknowledge.
More marches won’t address out-of-wedlock childbearing. More sit-ins won’t lower black crime rates or narrow the school achievement gap.
Electing more black politicians and appointing more black government officials can’t compensate for these cultural deficiencies, either. Black mayors, congressmen, senators, police chiefs and school superintendents have become commonplace since the 1970s.
Even the election of a black president—twice—failed to close the racial divide in many key measures. Black-white differences in poverty, homeownership and incomes all grew wider under President Obama.
Discussion of antisocial behavior in poor black communities, let alone the possibility that it plays a significant role in racial inequality, has become another casualty of the post-’60s era.
King and other black leaders at the time spoke openly about the need for more-responsible behavior. After remarking on disproportionately high inner-city crime rates, King told a black congregation in St. Louis that “we’ve got to do something about our moral standards. We know that there are many things wrong in the white world,” he said, “but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.”
The pretenders to King’s legacy mostly ignore this advice, preferring instead to keep the onus on whites. Where King tried to instill the importance of personal responsibility and self-determination, his counterparts today spend more time making excuses for counterproductive behavior and dismissing any criticism of it as racist.
Activists who long ago abandoned King’s colorblind standard, which was the basis for the landmark civil-rights laws enacted in the 1960s, tell young black Americans today that they are victims, first and foremost. White society is against you, they say, even if you have no clear examples of discrimination to point to. They are told that fire hoses and poll taxes have been replaced by unconscious racism, white privilege and microaggressions.
A generation of blacks who have more opportunity than any previous generation are being taught that America offers them little more than bigoted teachers, biased employers and trigger-happy cops. It’s not only a lie, but as King understood, it’s also self-destructive.
Black activists and white progressives stress racism because it serves their own interests, not because it actually improves the station of blacks. But this neglect of the role that blacks must themselves play in righting their own lives can only make things worse. A half-century after King’s death, plenty of people are paying him lip service. Far too few are following his example.
Imagine a basketball game where the teams are forced by color of law or the squeaky wheel of rioters and media to hire their players based on an algorithm decided by community consensus, aka democracy (small “d”). Would you be a paid spectator?
Now imagine the dating scene where your mate is chosen by color of law or the squeaky wheels of pervasive media, government eugenics, or religion. Would you marry? Would you procreate?
Martin Luther King, Jr. would have disavowed affirmative action as a dystopian dream.
As a person around at the time of MLK Jr. and sympathetic to the cause, yet observing people of today regardless of their nation and culture, it is obvious there are many of my generation and younger generations who somehow believe they are “woke”, when in fact they have been conditioned as in Gattaca and Nineteen Eighty Four.
Bud
P.S. In 1963 when MLK Jr. made his famous speech, I was working beside Moses. I became his student. We were cleaning the cages and runs etc in my dad’s animal hospital in Atlanta. I did that until graduating high school in 1967, growing into learning to do the laboratory analyses and finally couple of live surgeries. Around that time, I and a good many of my friends demonstrated against Atlanta and Georgia authorities outside our school because Willie Jean Black and other kids, who lived across the street from our school, were being bused across town to a segregated school. This practice was unacceptable to us. We were not under the influence of rare media exposure in those days, nor politicians or teachers of any persuasion. This was a time when Lester Maddox stood at the street by his restaurant in Atlanta (The Pickrick*) with an axe handle deciding who could enter the parking lot.
*The Pickrick Restaurant was a prominent Atlanta eatery owned by Lester Maddox, who later became Governor of Georgia. Opened in 1947 on Hemphill Avenue near the Georgia Institute of Technology campus, it specialized in skillet-fried chicken with all the fixin’s and became a thriving business. The Pickrick served great old fashioned Southern Cooking, “soul food”, well known in the South. But the restaurant gained national notoriety for its segregationist policies, particularly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
J.J. CARRELL (bio below) : “I state without reservation that the United States federal government under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is the world’s largest child sex trafficking organization in modern history. The probability…that thousands of these children are being raped at this very moment is one hundred percent.”
“I served in the United States border patrol for twenty four years until I retired as a deputy patrol agent charged in San Diego sector. I worked under five presidential administrations, and only one president secured the border president Donald Trump. Border Patrol agents went from working and being supported by the greatest border president in American history… To the worst, president Joe Biden. My last year in the board patrol was Joe Biden’s first year in office On his first day in office I watched in disbelief as ninety four executive orders cascaded down from Washington DC obliterating every immigration policy that had been provided the most secure border in America’s history. Border agents were forced to carry out unconstitutional orders, and that violated every law in the Immigration Nationality Act.
President Biden, through Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorcus, created policy out of thin air, ignored federal immigration law and facilitated the largest mass invasion into America that the world has ever seen…. The United States of America will have spent hundreds of billions of dollars…in four years to fund the needs of over fifty million illegal aliens that populate our nation. Between one in six and one in seven residents in America is an illegal alien. America has suffered the greatest demographic shift in modern history.
After serving in the United States Border Patrol for twenty four years… I state with complete certainty that Biden Harris and Mayorkas are intentionally strategically, and purposely weaponizing illegal immigration and using it as a tool to fundamentally transform America.
Inside this invasion the unspoken evil of child trafficking and more specifically child sex trafficking has flourished. At the end of this current administration, the number of children traffic will have grown to over five hundred and fifty thousand unaccompanied alien children known as UACs. Death penalty!!“
Bio:
J.J. Carrell is a retired U.S. Border Patrol agent, author, documentary filmmaker, and conservative commentator specializing in border security, immigration policy, and national sovereignty issues.He served 24 years with the United States Border Patrol, rising from a frontline Journeyman Agent to Deputy Patrol Agent in Charge in the San Diego Sector. During his career, he supervised units including the Coastal Border Enforcement Team (CBET), which targeted Sinaloa Cartel operations and contributed to efforts against figures like Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.After retiring (notably during the early Biden administration), Carrell became a prominent critic of U.S. immigration policies. He authored two bestselling books:
Invaded: The Intentional Destruction of the American Immigration System (2023)
Treason: The Biden Administration’s Strategic and Malicious Destruction of America’s Sovereignty
He has also produced documentaries, including the “What is Treason?” series (#Trafficked and #Invaded), which address child trafficking, government policies, and border-related issues.Carrell gained widespread attention for his November 2024 congressional testimony before a House subcommittee, where he accused the Biden-Harris administration of facilitating mass illegal immigration and enabling child sex trafficking on an unprecedented scale.He hosts The J.J. Carrell Show, a daily conservative news program, writes weekly commentary, speaks publicly on these topics, and maintains an active presence on platforms like X (
@JJCarrell14) and his website jjcarrell.com.(Note: He also appeared earlier in reality TV, including as a contestant on The Amazing Race Season 20 and in Border Wars, but his current work focuses on border policy and commentary.)
The British Empire’s 80-year playbook is dead. Trump isn’t creating chaos. He’s ending it. Venezuela. Iran. Gaza. The Muslim Brotherhood. Watch how he’s dismantling their system:
It would be helpful to the majority of American voters who elected Congress and who elected President Trump if the GOP and U.S. Congress supported their constituents and their president instead of their own agendas and wallets.Congress has forgotten or is ignoring its duty and responsibility to its constituents.
Trump is about to bankrupt China’s CCP the Soviet Union way.
Attorney @IJ. Watching the Surveillance State | Speaker. @DissidentProj American Dream Enjoyer | Metalhead | views are mine. Washington, DC
The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world.
Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: why are people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life—speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival—under a clerical system that treats liberty as a crime. There is no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime.
Western media refuses to do so because it has fundamentally misunderstood Islam. Or worse, it has chosen not to understand it. Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people,” Arabs, or “the Middle East,” as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine. This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs,” “all Arabs are Muslim,” and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers.” Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture—Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable—are erased. By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them—or ignores them entirely. There is another reason the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media is economic issues. As you know, Iran is not only a religious dictatorship. It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprise is criminalized or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. Decades of price controls, subsidies, nationalization, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and entrenched corruption as the only functional system. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on government’s dark void of empty promises. Covering Iran honestly would require acknowledging that these policies are harmful. They have been tried. They have failed. Catastrophically. This is deeply inconvenient for Western media institutions that routinely promote expansive state control, centralized economic planning, and technocratic governance as morally enlightened alternatives to liberal capitalism. Iran demonstrates where such systems lead when insulated from accountability and enforced by ideology. It shows that when the state controls livelihoods, non-conformity becomes existentially dangerous. That lesson cannot be acknowledged without undermining the moral authority of those who advocate similar ideas in softer language. Western liberal media prefers not to hear this. Acknowledging it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white. Iranian protesters do not fit. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape. That is what terrifies Western liberal media. And that is why the Iranian people are being ignored. So the silence continues.
Powerful words from Iranian native @DeTahmineh about the disasters of the 1978 revolution in Iran. Unlike liberals who (for reasons known only to God) idolize Khameini, Tahmineh actually grew up in post-1979 Iran and knows its horrors.
Chris Wright, U.S. Sec. of Energy: “Germany invested half a trillion (dollars in renewables) and now produce 20% less electricity at 3x the price”…”that doesn’t reduce emissions”…”that’s de-industrialization but never doing the math.”
budbromley 
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