On August 9, the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed Craig Robertson, a seventy-four-year-old Utah man, during a raid on his home. The man had posted numerous online threats, saying he wanted several state officials dead and had the means to make that happen. The authorities took his declarations at face value, although he was a near octogenarian dependent upon a cane to walk and was described as being “frail of health” by his neighbors.

In the past decade, the growth of the Internet and social media has brought with it a dramatic uptick in populist sentiment. Legacy institutions have declared war against populism, referring to its claims as “misinformation” or “disinformation” and calling on the government or government-adjacent actors (herein referred to as “the censors”) to clamp down on such claims as they spread across the Internet like wildfire. The censors rarely decline these opportunities to silence criticism, justifying the censorship as a matter of “national security.”

U.S. presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy took aim at the Federal Reserve recently:

The reality is, if the dollar is volatile, it’s as bad as if the number of minutes in an hour fluctuated. None of us would be here at the same time. […] When the number of dollars [in relation] to a unit of gold or an agricultural commodity is wildly fluctuating, money doesn’t go to the right projects. It’s just wild—it doesn’t make any sense. That’s been an impediment to economic growth…

[A new article by Mises Senior Fellow Alex Pollock and Paul Kupiec at the Wall Street Journal]: