[The Lecturer’s Art: Gems of American History by Walter A. McDougall. Encounter Books, 2025. xxii + 291 pp.]

It is difficult to find a seemingly more unobjectionable term that “equality” is the modern West and America. Equality is often understood to be an unqualified good and part of the American creed: “all men are created equal.”

I’m all in favor of a thorough and public audit of the US’s gold reserves. This includes the gold, not only at Fort Knox, but also at the other gold storage facilities at West Point, Denver, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Ron Paul was right when, in 2011, he tried to force the federal government to be transparent about its gold holdings.

Several key figures in the Trump administration have declared that the “gold at fort Knox” ought to be audited. I’m all in favor of this, but the gold at Fort Knox is less than sixty percent of the federal government’s gold holdings. The rest of the gold reserves needs to be audited as well.

In a previous essay, I pointed out that it is very likely that the US will isolate itself from the worldwide trading system due to its past—frankly unlawful—actions to steal the assets of other countries and the increasing assault on the purchasing power of the dollar. My goal was to recommend actions that the US government could adopt to reassure its trading partners that neither outright theft of assets or decline in the purchasing power of the dollar could happen.

An X exchange over the weekend is bringing new light to an issue long shrouded in mystery—the status of America’s purported stockpile of 8,133 tons of gold stored in Fort Knox and other government vaults across the country.

News aggregator ZeroHedge tweeted at President Trump’s head of government efficiency, Elon Musk, “It would be great if @elonmusk could take a look inside Fort Knox just to make sure the 4,580 tons of US gold is there. Last time anyone looked was 50 years ago in 1974.”

Once upon a time, in a land known as Washington, DC, the experts wisely governed the people, and the people were happy. Everything from the nation’s nuclear arsenal to the Internal Revenue Service was run with precision and, most of all, trust. The happy people trusted the experts to always do the right thing which they did.