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The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, though well known, does not receive the attention it deserves. Let us remind ourselves of the words and ominous cadence of the Declaration’s all-too-neglected opening sentence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The better-known second sentence, the one that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . ” receives most of the attention in any serious discussion of the Declaration’s core philosophic principles. The first sentence is, however, quite extraordinary in that it announces the moral impulse and moral logic that caused the American people to declare their independence from their mouther country and the world’s greatest military power.

The first sentence introduces in abstract form the Declaration’s purpose and the actions that follow therefrom. Its purpose is to identify and “declare” to the world the “causes which impel” the colonists to separate from Great Britain, and its actions are defined by the necessity to dissolve their connection to the mother country. By publicly declaring the “causes” which impel them to the separation and by showing their “respect to the opinions of mankind,” American revolutionaries demonstrated that their actions were to be guided by reasoned discourse and moral principles. Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Americans appealed to nature (i.e., to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God) as the standard of moral and political right, and they appealed to man’s reason as the means of knowing and demonstrating those principles.

According to the Declaration’s first sentence, man’s reason is capable of apprehending three important things: first, the evidentiary facts that prove a design on the part of British imperial officials to enslave them; second, the moral standard against which these unjust acts are to be judged; and third, the necessity of separation. The overarching principle of the Declaration’s first sentence is that reason can distinguish between right and wrong, just and unjust, freedom and tyranny.

The main burden of the Declaration was to demonstrate that the actions of King George III and the British Parliament necessarily amounted to despotism. From the beginning of the imperial crisis, the most impressive American minds charged British authorities with a “design” to enslave them. As early as 1765, John Adams raised the alarm in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law in response to the Stamp Act: “Nothing less than this seems to have been meditated for us, by somebody or other in Great Britain. There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.” Likewise, Thomas Jefferson warned in his 1774 Summary View of the Rights of British-America that “single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions begun at a distinguished period, and pursued, unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” And according to the Declaration, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

To “prove” to a “candid world” the charge that there was indeed a design to impose a tyranny over the American colonies, the Declaration enumerates twenty-seven injuries and usurpations allegedly committed by the king. Each of the charges refers to a specific action taken or not taken by the king. The list of injuries and usurpations can be divided into three main sections.

The first section—counts one through twelve—enumerates the king’s abuse of his executive powers. His offenses include disallowing or suspending colonial legislation, dissolving colonial legislatures, obstructing the colonial system of justice, corrupting the separation of powers by making judges dependent on his will, and keeping standing armies. The second section—counts thirteen through twenty-two—details the king’s collusion with Parliament to subject the colonies “to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.” His offense here was having not vetoed Parliament’s abuses, such as: quartering British troops in America and putting them above criminal law, restricting American trade, restricting trial by jury and other common law rights, imposing taxes without the consent of the governed, and destroying the colonists’ right to self-government. Of special significance is the charge that Parliament has declared its power to be arbitrary in America through the passage of the Declaratory Act of 1766. The third section—counts twenty-three through twenty-seven—identifies those abuses that amount to an undeclared state of war. The king’s abuses include what might be described as war atrocities: he has initiated the use of physical force by turning his navy and army against the lives and property of the colonists.

In sum, George III had violated the British constitution, the colonial charters, common-law rights and liberties, and, most importantly the colonists’ natural rights to life, liberty, property, and their pursuit of happiness. In response, the Americans did not view these actions as discrete and separate events unconnected from each other. They were not concrete-bound pragmatists. The Americans studied, weighed, and measured the separate actions of king and Parliament (i.e., the evidence of the crime); they integrated the totality of British actions and drew the conclusion that king and Parliament had a “design” (i.e., the motive) to reduce them under absolute despotism (i.e., the ultimate crime itself); and then they contrasted the actions of British imperial officials with their own moral principles (i.e., the standards of natural justice).

In 1768, John Dickinson in his famous Letters from a Farmer described perfectly the Americans’ mode of reasoning: “Ought not the People therefore to watch? to observe facts? to search into causes? to investigate designs? And have they not a right of Judging from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness?” The revolutionaries’ Enlightenment moral principles provided the touchstone by which to judge the actions of king and Parliament, and their principles necessitated the nature of their response.

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The American Spirit of Liberty

Returning now to the Declaration’s first sentence, let us ask: Why in the course of events from 1765 to 1776 did it become “necessary” for the Americans to dissolve their political connection to their king and mother country?

To say that separation is necessary is to say that it must be, but why must it be? Imagine how the meaning of the Declaration would have changed if Jefferson had not written “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary . . .” but instead substituted “optional,” “possible,” “expedient,” “preferable,” or even “prudent” for the word “necessary.” To repeat: Why was separation said to be necessary?

Our entry point for examining why this was so is a phrase the Americans of the 1760s and 1770s invoked repeatedly: the “spirit of liberty.” The phrase “spirit of liberty” united theory and practice for America revolutionaries; it implied an action in defense of a principle; it was characterized by certain virtues in defense of liberty. The spirit of American liberty is a sentiment, a mindset, a disposition, a virtue. As a sentiment, it loves freedom and hates slavery. As a mindset, it is watchful, suspicious, and skeptical. As a disposition, it is active, jealous, restless, resolute, protective, and, most of all, vigilant. And as a virtue, it is defined by integrity, fortitude, perseverance, courage, and patriotism.

The American spirit of liberty was virtually synonymous with the colonists’ moral constitutions, and it provided them with a worldview through which they interpreted and responded to the cascade of events between 1764 and 1776. No theme ran as broadly or deeply through American culture in the 1760s and 1770s. The colonists’ spirit of liberty served as a kind of moral and psychological tripwire that was first triggered by the passage of the Stamp Act and kept active with the passage of every piece of British legislation aimed at the Americans in the decade leading up to 1776. During these years, American Whigs developed objective standards by which to measure the justice and injustice of British legislation. These standards, when combined with their spirit of liberty, provided the Americans with an early-warning system that alerted them day or night to the abuse or growth of arbitrary power. That early-warning system was most famously expressed in Paul Revere’s galloping words—“The redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming!”—during his midnight ride on April 18, 1775, to warn American minutemen of British troop movements before the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Rekindling and stoking the spirit of American liberty became a central theme repeated countlessly in the writings of leading American Patriots. Let us consider just one example of how American revolutionaries thought about the spirit of liberty.

In 1767, John Dickinson penned his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which many historians regard as one of the most influential pamphlets of the Revolutionary period. Dickinson’s Letters present a powerful analysis of the ways in which unchecked power asphyxiates liberty. The letters also provide the best analysis of the American spirit of liberty written during the Revolutionary period.

Dickinson’s primary concern in the Letters was to sound the alarm against the Townshend Acts, particularly the New York Suspending Act and the Townshend duties. The Americans, he warned, must be vigilant and exert “the most watchful attention” against Parliament’s subtle designs; they must prevent a creeping form of slavery under the guise of legalities, otherwise “a new servitude may be slipped upon us, under the sanction of usual and respectable terms.” He goes on to warn against those “artful rulers” who attempt to “extend their power beyond its just limits” by subtly manipulating language and legal technicalities. And with every passing generation the noose tightened just a little bit more. Every usurpation, whether large or small, eventually requires additional usurpations to keep all prior usurpations in force: “A free people therefore can never be too quick in observing, nor too firm in opposing the beginnings of alteration either in form or reality, respecting institutions formed for their security. The first kind of alteration leads to the last: Yet, on the other hand, nothing is more certain, than that the forms of liberty may be retained, when their substance is gone.” Thus, it was necessary, Dickinson argued, that the people should always be on guard to protect their liberty as they protect their property. He encouraged them to “watch,” “observe facts,” “search into causes,” and “investigate designs,” and of course he insisted that they assert their “right of judging from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness.” He implored his fellow Americans to be ever vigilant. Quoting from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Dickinson reminded his readers that “slavery is ever preceded by sleep.”

Dickinson equated the American spirit of liberty with jealousy, watchfulness, and vigilance. “A perpetual jealousy, respecting liberty is,” he told the American people, “absolutely, requisite in all free states.” They must keep up the “utmost vigilance,” and they must be “watchful of their liberty.” He went on to remind his fellow colonists of Machiavelli’s famous chapter in Discourses on Livy, which “prove that a state, to be long lived, must be frequently corrected, and reduced to its first principles.” The lesson of all history proves “that every free state should incessantly watch, and instantly take alarm on any addition being made to the power exercised over them.”

Dickinson attacked the Townshend duties precisely because they were so comparatively small. It would be a “fatal error,” he warned, to disregard and therefore to acquiesce in these new duties because of their trifling amount. In fact, the “smallness” of the duties is a trap. No matter how inconsequential the tax, no matter how reasonably and equitably applied, the colonists should regard the act with “abhorrence.” He suggested that the Townshend duties were intentionally designed to be small so that the Americans would not notice or object and a noose-tightening precedent could therefore be established. He went on to posit that the British were testing the moral disposition of the colonists. He then raised the very real possibility that the goal of the British imperial officials in establishing such a small tax was to establish a “precedent, whereupon the future vassalage of these colonies may be established.” Once the precedent was established, Dickinson argued, Parliament might then levy any amount of tax on the colonists. Thus, it was imperative that the colonists resist every attempt to tax them without their consent regardless of the size or amount.

The Townshend Act “is founded,” according to Dickinson, “on the destruction” of the colonists’ “constitutional security.” If members of Parliament “have a right to levy a tax of one penny upon us,” Dickinson noted, then “they have a right to levy a million upon us.” What this means, of course, is that the possession and control of American property depended not on the will of the colonists and their rights but on the pleasure of Parliament. The Townshend duties are clearly a tax, Dickinson concluded, and “Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves or our representatives. We are therefore—slaves.” The logic of Dickinson’s moral reasoning was simple, compelling, motivating, and explanatory. It’s what made the American revolutionary mind unique and distant from the twenty-first-century way of thinking. This idea of preserving natural liberty in its pristine form and so resisting even one small precedent against it had come close to the center of the American consciousness. This idea is precisely why the colonists viewed the rather trifling stamp tax and Townshend duties so ominously: they viewed each as the entering wedge of a broader campaign to deprive them of rights and liberties.

Like modern historians, British imperial officials never understood the principles, temperament, and character of the American revolutionaries, which meant they never understood their deepest motives. They had no way to know that the revolution’s trigger was embedded in the spirit of American liberty. British officials therefore could never understand why it was necessary for the Americans to dissolve the political bands that had connected them to Britain for over 150 years. Likewise, twenty-first century Americans who still revere the revolutionaries’ spirit of liberty are beckoned to recover the moral impulse and moral logic that drove their ideological ancestors to independence and freedom.

Happy Independence Day!!! Long live the United State of America!

Alan Greenspan, a friend and associate of Ayn Rand, has died, at the age of 100. He is known to the public as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for almost two decades, and known to Objectivists for his excellent articles that Ayn Rand included in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “Antitrust,” “Gold and Economic Freedom,” and “The Assault on Integrity.”

But this is not a eulogy, because while Alan Greenspan started out as a basically good man, he ended up as a traitor to capitalism, Objectivism, Ayn Rand, and his own soul. He went to Washington, and began to play the game. He chose the road of power.

Here are some points of acceleration in his decline. He “saved” Social Security by expanding its range of destruction. At a State of the Union address, he rose up–next to Hillary Clinton–to join in giving a standing ovation to the call for universal (socialist) medical care. After the fall of communism, he refused to recommend capitalism to the newly freed regimes.

In the end, he abjured capitalism and, indirectly, Objectivism, as the logic of his premises required. He was an inexcusable blend of Ayn Rand’s pathetic Peter Keating and traitorous Robert Stadler.

In October 2008, Greenspan testified before Congress that he had been “partially wrong” in his push for deregulation. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” said Greenspan, a conservative acolyte of philosopher Ayn Rand, a leading advocate of free-market capitalism. [Politico]

He added: “I’d been going for 40 years or so with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

That’s his idea of “evidence”–statistics. Forget your knowledge of economic principles. Forget your knowledge of man’s nature and of the nature of a mixed economy. Blame man, blame principles, blame “irrational exuberance”—in order to escape blame for the Fed’s cheap money policy, the policy that arguably led to the 2008 financial crisis.

Greenspan was arguing, in effect, that we should blame greedy, selfish capitalists, not the kindly, naive regulators, like him. He was shocked, shocked to learn that when the Fed hands out easy money, people take it.

And notice that what he had thought to be “working exceptionally well,” is the mixed economy/welfare state, because we haven’t had anything remotely like capitalism in a century or more. He once knew that it is impossible according to first principles for a mixture of freedom and controls to “work” at all.

In July 1966, Greenspan wrote,

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.
[“Gold and Economic Freedom” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal]

I’m proud to say that I decided Greenspan was not our friend back in 1969, when Barron’s published as its page-one editorial Greenspan’s speech to the National Association for Business Economics, the very prestigious organization he had just been elected president of.

I knew that Greenspan was in “the Collective.” I knew he had published very good articles in Ayn Rand’s publications. I had taken, on tape in Boston, his NBI course on economics, which was pretty good. I expected his speech to be a clarion call to understand and defend laissez-faire capitalism. I expected some references to Ayn Rand and an appeal to these business economists to read Atlas Shrugged and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Instead, what I read in Barron’s was a lame, boring explanation of what he referred to as “fiscal constituencies”—the idea that politicians had become beholden not to the general public, whom they are supposed to represent, but to campaign donors, lobbyists, and those getting government funds.

Where Ayn Rand called the welfare state an “institutionalized civil war” among pressure groups, Greenspan was faulting the (unnamed) system for luring politicians away from representing “the people” and, presumably, “the common good.”

At that stage of history, the peak of New Left rampages and bombings, when we were to expect “The Age of Aquarius,” when Herbert Marcuse gained fame by advocating “polymorphous sexuality” combined with censorship, when LSD trips and Che Guevera posters were popular among the young, and communism “with a little c” was de rigeur on campus—the fact that Greenspan would not speak out for capitalism even to business economists told me all I needed to know about his moral character, or lack of it.

I put him down as a statistics-captured coward. I didn’t know then that he was to become far worse. I kept alive for many years the hope that he would use his position and then his post-Fed retirement to publicize Ayn Rand, her novels, and Objectivism.

Not only did he fail to ever do that, he wrote a positive blurb for the back cover of Barbara Branden’s ugly and distorted “biography” of Ayn Rand.

He will not be missed.

Taylor Swift is many things.

• Beautiful
• Talented
• Fortunate
• Smitten (with Travis Kelce)

She’s definitely not dumb.

She has crafted her superstar career to near-perfection. The results speak for themselves.

One example?

After the 2016 presidential election, she realized it might be wise to drop her apolitical pose and align with the Democrats.

After all, she was starting to get savaged in the media, with some outlets suggesting she was a white supremacist.

Why? She didn’t support Hillary Clinton and didn’t publicly denounce Donald Trump. Embracing the Left proved the right call for her career, which only grew bigger as a result.

RELATED: IT’S THE TAYLOR SWIFT/JOE ROGAN ELECTION

Now, in the hours before what appears to be her Madison Square Garden wedding day, she’s giving away millions of her fortune to charities.

That’s $26 million, to be exact. And she’s making the news oh, so public.

Thank you @taylorswift13 and @tkelce for the generous gift to @dollyslibrary! I wish you both the best, and know that I will always love you. pic.twitter.com/HHxNzYTl7z

— Dolly Parton (@DollyParton) July 3, 2026

This isn’t the first time Swift has given to those in need. She’s been very generous to her tour workers over the years. She has also donated millions to other causes over time.

It’s who she is, and it’s a sign of her character and generosity.

But why now? Why this week? Why so much? Why so … public? Stars often donate generously, but they do so in private, without fanfare. Keanu Reeves is a good example.

It’s hard not to see the reason staring us in the face.

Just look at these faces.

Democrat Socialist Melat Kiros:

“Every single issue that I looked at…we already figured out the solution a long time ago.”

“You solve homelessness by giving people housing.”

“You solve hunger by giving people food.”

“You solve health care by going to a single payer system.”… pic.twitter.com/Zuo2vYyA1Z

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) July 3, 2026

NYC DSA Leader Won’t Condemn Darializa Avila Chevalier’s Post About Wiping Her Dirty Hands on U.S. Flag https://t.co/c3dsVhwpQW

— Dallys1515 (@Dallys1515) July 2, 2026

Democratic Socialists are on the march in Colorado, New York and other states. And, with them, not just radical policies that should frighten us all, but an “Eat the Rich” mantra.

You didn’t earn that money. And we’re gonna take it from you.

It’s the reason they’re going to war with Elon Musk, ignoring how much his businesses have helped humanity in recent years.

Just as in every other communist revolution, their first goal is to make foes of society’s most productive and wealthy people. 

Swift and Kelce are about to stage a marriage dripping in wealth, luxury and extravagance. No expense will be spared. It’s going to fly in the face of everything Swift’s party, now controlled by the far-Left, loathes.

And she’ll become the poster child for the 1 percent overnight. That will be damaging to her brand, her party and her political cachet moving forward.

Why does she get to have that extravagant wedding, but I can’t pay my Netflix bill? All she does is sing…

Voila, she just donated a massive amount to some noble charities. It’s all about optics and playing defense against the cultural tide swarming against the rich and powerful.

Will that keep the mob at bay?

Maybe. Perhaps. For now? Sure.

For now.

The next time? That $26 million won’t be nearly enough. 

The post Does THIS Explain Taylor Swift’s Massive Charity Gift? appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

(June 23, 2026 / JNS)

A great many libertarian leaders, loyal to every other aspect of the creed, lose their footing the moment the subject turns to war. They can recite the non-aggression principle in their sleep and then abandon it just when it matters most.

Start with Antiwar.com. Asked to explain itself, the site declares: “Our politics are libertarian: our opposition to war is rooted in Randolph Bourne’s concept that ‘War is the health of the State.’ With every war, America has made a ‘great leap’ into statism, and as Bourne emphasized, ‘it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution [the State].’ At its core, that nature includes an ever-increasing threat to individual liberty and the centralization of political power.”

Bourne was a gifted writer and, on much else, a sound libertarian. Look at the load-bearing word in the site’s creed: its opposition to war is “rooted” in the claim that war fattens the state. The claim is true, and worth shouting from the rooftops. But a reliable tendency cannot by itself condemn a whole category of acts. Hospitals spread infection, but a man still has his broken leg set there. That war usually grows the state is reason to watch it warily, but not to fault the man fighting off an invader. From a genuine aspect of what war tends to do, Antiwar.com has rendered a blanket verdict on what war always is. A tendency has been mistaken for a principle.

Hand the microphone to Murray Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian himself, who drew the line his admirers at the site have erased: “My own view of war can be put simply: A just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.”

Defense on one side of the ledger, aggression on the other. A libertarian foreign policy fits within that single sentence.

Next, there is LewRockwell.com, whose masthead announces three commitments: “Anti-State, Anti-War, Pro-Market.” The first and third are beyond reproach. The middle one trips over its own author. Lew Rockwell has defended two American wars as just: the War of Independence in 1776 and the South’s part in the Civil War of 1861-1865, due to what he claims is the legitimacy of Southern secession. A masthead that forbids what its proprietor endorses is a masthead in want of editing.

Third, there is the Future of Freedom Foundation, which offers as a kind of catechism these lines from Frank Chodorov’s 1938 essay “When War Comes”: “Every day we must repeat to ourselves as a liturgy, the truth that war is caused by the conditions that bring about poverty; that no war is justified; that no war benefits the people; that war is an instrument whereby the haves increase their hold on the have-nots; that war destroys liberty.”

The Foundation salutes Chodorov as “arguably ... the most effective voice of isolationism.” Effective he was, and on most questions a genuine sage. But that one line, “no war is justified,” reads beautifully and ends in disaster. It throws over the right of self-defense, which is the bedrock upon which the whole libertarian structure rests. Tell a man he may not lift a hand against the aggressor at his door, and you have not made him peaceful. You have made him prey.

Fourth, there is the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Prosperity, by all means, but “peace” as the headline virtue is where the trouble starts. “Justice and Prosperity” would be far more honest, since justice every so often calls for a defensive war that no candid person would describe as peaceful. Ron Paul himself knows this, whatever his institute’s letterhead says. The Congressional Record reveals that, on Dec. 4, 2001, Paul called for legislation authorizing, in his words, “the President to issue letters of marque and reprisal to appropriate parties to seize the person and property of Osama bin Laden and any other individuals responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.”

Letters of marque, the seizure of persons and property, and the hunting of bin Laden across the globe are many things, but peaceful is not among them.

Four organizations, one mistake repeated four times. The truth is that libertarianism stands against aggressive war, the war of the initiator, the war waged to conquer or to keep an unjust grip on a subject people. It has never objected to defensive war and never will. It objects just as fiercely to the deliberate killing of innocents, on any side and under any flag, because repelling an aggressor never licenses the murder of his civilians.

Erase that distinction and “anti-war” quietly becomes pacifism in libertarian dress; pacifism blown up to the scale of a nation. A libertarian may, of course, be a pacifist, should his conscience demand it, but their philosophy requires nothing of the kind.

None of this is a matter of slogans for us. We have argued the case at length in a study of what we call Rothbard’s “foreign-policy paradox,” in which the very universalism that forbids the killing of a foreign innocent in wartime ought, carried through honestly, to permit the rescue of that same innocent from slaughter at the hands of his own government. Rothbard balked at that second step, and the four organizations above balk at the first. The libertarian principle they all profess to serve is steadier than any of them.

Picture the thing at its simplest: Country A attacks Country B without cause. B fights back. Both are now “at war,” and the antiwar purist, counting only the noun “war,” drops them in the same file. The libertarian, however, reads the verbs: A initiated, B defended.

Suppose Canada or Mexico were to invade the United States tomorrow morning. The president could repel the attack immediately, the Constitution squarely behind him, and Congress could argue later about the wider war. No one calls that aggression.

Anyone can condemn Washington’s adventures, but the libertarian principle only holds when one can still name aggression for what it is, even when the victim is politically unfashionable.

Here, the mask slips. The antiwar passion of these libertarians is directed, time and again, at Israel, and seldom at the parties that attacked Israel. A man who opposes war as such, all of it, in every instance, would have no earthly reason to keep training his guns on one side of a Middle Eastern fight while waving the other through. One might expect even-handedness from so principled a pacifism, but one would be expecting too much.

This selectivity is no abstraction to the authors of these lines.

After Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, one of us, Walter E. Block, said plainly that Israel had the right to ward off the assault, which is to say, to fight a just war by Rothbard’s own definition, with the obvious proviso that the innocents of Gaza not be deliberately harmed. For saying so, Block was stripped of the unpaid senior fellowship he had held at the Mises Institute for the better part of a lifetime. LewRockwell.com, whose masthead we analyzed a few paragraphs ago, walled him off from more than a hundred articles he had written for it. The self-styled heirs of Rothbard had excommunicated a man for taking Rothbard at his word.

The episode has been set down in full in an essay on what the affair laid bare about the libertarian movement’s fragility. We will not reiterate it here. The point for present purposes is narrower and sharper: An “antiwar” libertarianism that too often excuses the aggressor, reserves its moral fury for the defender and at last turns that fury on its own founders has inverted the very doctrine it professes to inherit from Rothbard.


Originally published here.

The two pictures (cover and inside) of the 1969 rock classic album In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson are today more relevant than ever. They were made by Barry Godber, a computer programmer who was friendly with the band’s lyricist Peter Sinfield and who just drew images as a hobby. Godber created the images after listening to the early recordings of the album and gave them to Sinfield, who

“arrived at the studio with the now-famous painting tucked under his arm. The band was immediately captivated by what Godber had produced. The painting—said to be based on his own reflection in a mirror—perfectly encapsulated the raw emotion and otherworldly themes of the album. The central figure, The Schizoid Man, dominates the outer cover with a scream so visceral you can almost hear it. This striking visual power compelled many to purchase the album without knowing anything about its contents. Inside the gatefold, listeners were introduced to another character: The Crimson King. Round-faced and bald, he appears serene and jovial at first glance, but a closer look reveals unsettling details, like his melancholy eyes and sharp canines. Together, these two characters embody the shifting moods of the album—jarring and chaotic on one side, melodic and tranquil on the other.”1

I see in these two images the face of the individual caught in an AI agent, and the way he experiences/personalizes the AI agent who dominates him, which is none other than Satan himself. The visceral scream is a quite appropriate image of an individual becoming aware of how totally he is manipulated by AI agents; but even more interesting is the “Crimson King,” whose benevolent smile and melancholy eyes cover up the violence betrayed by the sharp canines – Satan as a rule addresses us with a smile and does his horrors in a melancholic mood, as if he is sad that he has to accomplish his perverted duty of tearing our flesh with his sharp teeth. So who is Satan?

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Today’s unbridled capitalism is approaching a new, even more dangerous stage, that of digital feudalism – unfettered, profit-driven AI risks concentrating wealth and algorithmic power into the hands of a few tech monopolies. There are many critics drawing attention to different aspects of this threat, but what we were missing till now is a clearly written broad overview which would provide an analysis of the role AI plays in our societies, avoiding both traps of rejecting AI as inherently evil and of elevating AI into an instrument of the miraculous solution of our biggest problems. What no politician or social theorist was able to do, Pope Leo’s encyclical letter Magnifica humanitas did in an unsurpassable way. His starting point is that technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. The Pope insists on the need to ensure that technologies are not concentrated in the hands of only a few people, thereby widening the gap between those included and those excluded from the digital revolution. He also correctly rejects “any form of paternalistic or welfare-based management of societal life”: what we need is shared responsibility of all of us, not a new elite which masks its brutal power with a fake human face. And, to make this point even clearer, the Pope insists that algorithmic development cannot be left solely to the “invisible hand” of the free market: a new form of social action is needed.

The question we should ask here is: who, then, comes close to the figure of Antichrist the Pope is warning us against? The answer is easy: the very person who, in an act of brutal irony, is permanently attacking his opponents as figures of Antichrist. Peter Thiel, the founder of data intelligence company Palantir Technologies – the Pentagon contractor whose AI systems are being used in the US and Israeli attack on Iran – is preoccupied with the risk of a “one-world, totalitarian state” obstructing scientific and technological progress. He depicts those who lobby for tech regulation as harbingers of the Antichrist:

“The way the Antichrist would take over the world is, you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. The thing that has political resonance is: we need to stop science, we need to just say ‘stop’ to this.”1

So what concrete features make Thiel’s state a figure of Antichrist? Thiel names “tax treaties, financial surveillance and sanctions architecture” as defining features of the international “Antichrist-like system” of international governance. Thiel explains how “it’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money” in the wake of the Patriot Act, the “extensive” administrative state (the Treasury Department, in particular), and the international messaging network known as SWIFT, which banks use to process global payments. All of these factors make it impossible to “escape from global taxation if you’re a U.S. citizen.”2

In this sense Thiel is effectively a liberal Fascist. He advocates total dictatorship of AI, but grounded in conservative religion and state power to maintain social stability and cohesion. He is right in his presumption that in our societies, which still maintain the appearance of openness, unity and cohesion cannot be enforced through direct strong state and ideological measures (as in Russia and China), so why not do it through the digital space, controlling and regulating what people think and how they act by way of ruthlessly using their mimetic desires? In this way, we can combine total liberalism outside state control (of the AI neofeudal masters like Thiel) with the control of individuals exerted by state and religion. This is why Thiel is not alone in his project. In mid-April 2026, Palantir released a 22‑point summary of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, the 320‑page book that the billionaire CEO co‑wrote and published in early 2025. The main point of his manifesto3 is that Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation:

“The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.”

Is this stance not the exact opposite of the Pope’s call for AI to be “disarmed”? And are the topics that Thiel denounces as a threat to our freedoms – uncontrolled AI, environmental catastrophes, threats of a new global war – from the Pope’s view not precisely the big problems that push us towards self‑destruction? There is no shared ground here: one has to make a choice. However, the Pope goes here a crucial step further, towards the deepest philosophical and theological level. It is not enough to analyze the social, economic, and political context of AI. The ultimate question is: is there something in the very core of human being that resists the logic of AI? The Pope’s answer is: the productive role of failure and limitation:

“Everything that appears as a ‘limit’—incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability—tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them. /.../ Herein lies the radical departure [for the Christian] from Promethean dreams: what saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms /…/ a technology that merely classifies and optimizes what already exists can, however unintentionally, become an obstacle to change and growth. For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.”

I cannot emphasize enough the universal reach of these insights. Take “The House of the Rising Sun,” an old English folk song recorded dozens of times by many great names, white and Black, from Pete Seeger to Nina Simone; its definitive version was done by the British rock band the Animals in 1964. Dozens of texts were written and explorations made to determine the historical origins of the song, plus to locate the real house in New Orleans to which the twentieth‑century version of the song refers. An ambiguity resides already in the nature of the “sin” mentioned in the song: there are hints at alcoholism (the house as a bar to get drunk), prostitution (a brothel), gambling (a corrupted casino), theft (the home of a gang of robbers), and, why not, the combination of some of them or all four. All these options are versions of the excess of enjoyment, so that the very plurality of possible meanings draws its strength from remaining unspecified: all meanings refer to a vague excessive X of a jouissance which cannot be directly named. It is this very unsayability which makes the house function as a subject: the unsayable X is like an additional part of the excessive Thing. And my hypothesis is that an AI agent is not able to perceive this unsayable, blurred aspect as part of reality itself: the AI agent would continue to search for possible definitive meanings of the house and would count the failure of its search as a simple failure, not as a positive result.

Some followers of Nietzsche argue that being‑human is a failed passage from being‑animal to some higher stage (“superman”), a thwarted progress, and that what we usually perceive as the indications of human greatness or creativity are precisely reactions to this fundamental failure. Can we then imagine a stage which would be a humanity that somehow overcame its constitutive failure, a humanity without sex and mortality? Today, we can do it easily: it would be a human being fully immersed into AI and, for this very reason, deprived of the spiritual dimension. This brings us back to the topic of the constitutive role of limitation in being‑human: our – humanity’s – “highest” achievements are rooted in our very ultimate limitations (failure, mortality, and the concomitant sexuality), i.e. in what we cannot but experience as the obstacle to our “higher” spiritual existence. It is not only true that a human being is never fully transparent to itself: this non‑transparency defines it ontologically.

The idea that the “higher” level can survive without the obstacle, without what prevents its full actualization, is an illusion that can be accounted for in terms of the paradox of what Lacan called objet a, a disturbing obstacle to perfection which engenders the very notion of perfection to which it serves as the obstacle, so that if we abolish the obstacle, we simultaneously lose what it is an obstacle to. This paradox is operative at multiple levels, up to feminine beauty. A voluptuous lady from Portugal once told me a weird anecdote: when her lover had first seen her fully naked, he told her that, if she lost just one or two kilos, her body would be perfect. The truth was, of course, that had she lost the kilos, she would probably have looked more ordinary – the very element that seems to disturb perfection itself creates the illusion of the perfection it disturbs: if we take away the excessive element, we lose the perfection itself. So what happens when you notice the imperfection of your partner? One of the reactions is: you fall in love. Sexual love means you learn to deal with the ultimate failure of sex, with the fact that “there is no sexual relationship” (Lacan).

This is why a human subject only emerges when it is confronted by an impenetrable Other: being human is an unanswered question – or, paraphrasing what Claude Lévi‑Strauss said about the prohibition of incest that grounds human sexuality, it is the answer to a question, but we do not know which question. For us humans, limitation and failure are not just obstacles to be overcome; they open up the space for transcendence. You take away the limitation and you lose transcendence itself, what glimmers beyond it.

So what has this to do with Christianity? Everything. The uniqueness of Christianity is that it applies this insight of finitude as the only path to transcendence onto God himself: in Christ, God became a finite mortal human being not just to deliver a message to mortal humans but to fully become God. Divinity is not somewhere up there out of our world; it is something we have to struggle for in this miserable world.