Ibram X. Kendi, the controversial author of How to Be an Antiracist, has been revealed as not only a hustler of horrid ideas but also a poor businessman. Kendi was appointed the head and founder of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research in 2020 following the aptly named “summer of love,” which saw riots in most major cities over calls for “racial justice.”

Did someone recently flip a switch? It seems as though Wokeism, the Great Reset, ESG, DEI, and an assortment of other radical left-wing positions, have just taken over. It is in the movies, media, sports, finance, retail businesses, and even in the beer industry. Yet, it is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Wokeism is a part of the international Zeitgeist. For example, this past June, I inadvertently experienced a huge “Pride” parade (reported as having tens of thousands of participants) in Wroclaw, Poland.

[In recent months, Senior Fellow Mark Thornton has been covering today’s economy in detail in his Minor Issues podcast, so we asked him some questions about where the economy is headed now.]

This week, Hillary Clinton publicly proposed “formal deprogramming” for MAGA enthusiasts, piling on a repeated President Biden theme of trying to deal with “an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA movement.”

There are hundreds of headlines all over the news warning of the negative impact of a government shutdown. The negative impact on GDP, according to Bloomberg, is estimated at 0.5% of the quarterly annualized rate if the shutdown lasts for two weeks. Obviously, that is an annualized rate, not the overall hit. The last government shutdown lasted between December 22nd, 2018, and January 20th, 2019, and the United States economy still grew at a 2.2 percent rate.

[This article is the preface to the new Iranian edition of Mises’s Epistemological Problems of Economics. The book is available in English on mises.org, and in the Mises Institute book store.]

In 1996, we produced a documentary titled Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. For the next ten years, we distributed copies all around the world, to our students, our members, and the public. Thousands of people were introduced to the evils of the Fed and central banking. At that time, not many people or organizations were calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve. The Mises Institute was. And that hasn’t changed.