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despotism – XtremeCuztoms

Tag: despotism

The Return to a Premodern State

Commentary Throughout these three most difficult years of our lives, many friends have predicted that there would be justice on the other side. The courts will speak out. Fairness and truth will prevail. The people who have done these deeds—lockdowns, mandatory face coverings, forced medicines we don’t need and which are often harmful—won’t get away…


What Does It Mean to Be a Rich Nation?

Commentary I’m sitting at the bar at a restaurant in the center of Mexico City, a country ranked 71 in the list of nations in GDP per capita. Most people in the United States would call it poor. And of course Americans are somehow under the impression that the place is dangerous, which, so far…


Fauci’s Contribution to Tyranny in China

Commentary The grim news from China again puts lockdowns on trial. It seems simply incredible that the United States and most Western nations tried some version of what vast numbers of Chinese citizens are protesting now. Moreover, the tactics that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are using to crush dissent were tried at a lower…


The Quarantine of Healthy Populations

Commentary A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles alongside my friend and colleague, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. A month prior, we had also lectured together also at a conference in Rome (which, alas, was not recorded). Fortunately, the LA talks were—link below. When the COVID-19 pandemic…


Freedom Itself Is Gravely in Peril

Commentary The FBI has raided Donald Trump’s home in Florida and opened a private safe, hanging around for hours looking for classified material that might be there. They were likely looking for items that Trump believed he had declassified—the president can do this with anything—but is still holding in his possession. Top officials of the…


Dictatorship Chic

Commentary In the trajectory laid out by F.A. Hayek in his 1944 book, “The Road to Serfdom,” dictatorship is the end game of a period of immense government failure. The ruling class begins by tinkering with the normal function of markets and society with some high goal in mind (think: virus eradication) and the results are…


The US President Finally Gets COVID

Commentary The political hierarchy of infectious disease has finally come full circle. Biden got COVID. COVID pandemic policies have always been driven by class bias. Right from the outset, governments divided people by essential and nonessential, and medical services by elective and nonelective. How all this came to be, and so suddenly, cries out for explanation. But the…


Italy’s Covid Despotism Just Got Worse

Commentary The news from Italy has started to sound like good incipits for a dystopian fantasy novel or like a déjà vu recalling the Soviet Union. This week, a new decree of the Draghi government established yet more rules restricting the lives of people who have not been injected with the latest vaccine booster and who therefore cannot…


Equality in Servitude: From Citizen Competence to Therapeutic Despotism

Commentary A dozen or so years ago, I took temporary leave from Georgetown University and moved to Iraq for two years to preside over The American University of Iraq-Sulaimani. Some of the young men and women enrolled in our fledgling university carried the double burden of having survived both the American invasion and the Kurdish…


Machiavellian Necessities and the Fragility of Liberty

Commentary In the introduction to their translation of Machiavelli’s “Discourses on Livy,” Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov make a profound observation about Machiavelli’s political wisdom. “He tries to show,” they write, “that to understand political situations correctly, one must not listen to the intent of the words people use but rather look at the necessities they…