While there exists the beautiful and productive possibility of cooperation between individuals and groups, there is also the opportunity for and reality of conflict.

In high school, I was exposed to the conventional wisdom concerning our nation’s founding—Battles of Lexington and Concord, Declaration of Independence, British defeat at Saratoga and Yorktown, and the Peace of Paris 1783. Finally, the Articles of Confederation were given short shrift, as the failed initial attempt at self-government that necessitated a stronger federation under the Constitution.

Two lightbulb moments changed my history book view of the Articles:

Accusations of genocide in Gaza are present everywhere except where most people get their news—mainstream media—but is it fair to call the military action in Gaza a genocide?

Mercer: “Whether such crass utilitarians like it or not, the Anglo-Israeli-American genocide in Palestine is a moral matter.”

Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale will be paid millions to oversee an effort to ensure that online research is slanted to push the views of the Israeli state. 

[FDR: A New Political Life by David T. Beito, Chicago: Open Universe, 2025, 283 pp.]

The president pushed for policies that would confound trade abroad and create economic havoc on the home front. Surrounding himself with inflationists, protectionists, and economic interventionists, the president forced up the costs of production of nearly everything all the while claiming he was saving the economy.

“I am getting more and more convinced the war-peace question is the key to the whole libertarian business,” Murray Rothbard wrote to his friend Kenneth Templeton in 1959. Rothbard had seen an article recently rejected by National Review in which he proposed a return to a restrained foreign policy and nuclear disarmament by both the USSR and United States. This marked one of the moments that would push Rothbard to abandon the New Right of William F. Buckley Jr.