George Orwell, Joy Reid, and the Economics of Fascism

October 9, 2025 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

From a wonky economic perspective, fascism is a system based on nominal private ownership but de facto government control.

 

For most people, however, I think George Orwell had the best description.

Fascism is simply something you don’t like, especially if it can be mixed with accusations of authoritarianism or racism.

With this in mind, Joy Reid was recently interviewed by BET. As a former host on MSNBC, she’s definitely a leftist, so almost nothing she said was surprising (read this Fox report on her interview if you want criticism from a right-of-center perspective).

I also was not surprised that she channeled Orwell and described the Trump agenda as being fascist.

But here’s the part that made me laugh.

I have two reactions.

• First, I wish Trump had a serious plan to shrink government, end regulations, and get rid of the income tax.
• Second, that agenda is the opposite of fascism, which is very much a big-government ideology.

Here’s an article from Econlib. Written by Sheldon Richman, it explains the economic component of fascism. Here are some excerpts.

 

As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. …Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism. Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. 

Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. …fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. …As with communism, under fascism, every citizen was regarded as an employee and tenant of the totalitarian, party-dominated state.

Sheldon then points out that interventionism is basically a halfway step on the road to fascism.

Fascism is to be distinguished from interventionism, or the mixed economy. …Under fascism, the state, through official cartels, controlled all aspects of manufacturing, commerce, finance, and agriculture. Planning boards set product lines, production levels, prices, wages, working conditions, and the size of firms. Licensing was ubiquitous; no economic activity could be undertaken without government permission. Levels of consumption were dictated by the state, and “excess” incomes had to be surrendered as taxes or “loans.”

My two cents can be summed up by this adaptation of my philosophy triangle.

I’ve augmented it to make fun of Joy Reid.

I don’t include “interventionism” as a category, but if I did, it would be probably be right beneath “technocratic governance.” So my analysis would be consistent with the Econlib analysis.

P.S. Here’s one final excerpt from Sheldon’s article.

In the United States, beginning in 1933, the constellation of government interventions known as the New Deal had features suggestive of the corporate state. …It is a matter of controversy whether President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was directly influenced by fascist economic policies. Mussolini praised the New Deal as “boldly . . . interventionist in the field of economics,” and Roosevelt complimented Mussolini.

For what it’s worth, there are ample similarities between Mussolini and FDR.

When Democrats Were Called Fascists: Corporate Socialism and Roosevelt’s New Deal

February 7, 2025 By Neil M. Tokar

The presidential election of 1932 was about Wall Street selecting a candidate willing to implement actual fascist plans in America. Unlike the Democratic party candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, Republican party candidate Herbert Hoover refused to submit to Wall Street’s demands. Hoover recorded the details of the courageous decision that cost him the White House in his memoirs:

Among the early Roosevelt fascist measures was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of June 16, 1933. The origins of this scheme are worth repeating. These ideas were first suggested by Gerard Swope (of the General Electric Company) at a meeting of the electrical industry in the winter of 1932. Following this, they were adopted by the United States Chamber of Commerce. During the campaign of 1932, Henry I. Harriman, president of that body, urged that I agree to support these proposals, informing me that Mr. Roosevelt had agreed to do so. I tried to show him that this stuff was sheer fascism; that it was merely a remaking of Mussolini’s ‘corporate state’ and refused to agree to any of it. He informed me that in view of my attitude, the business world would support Roosevelt with money and influence. That, for the most part, proved true.

So how did the United States, the land of the free and the home of the brave, turn into a fascist country? Let’s begin by defining my terms.

Defining Some Key Terms.........

During Roosevelt’s first eight years the guiding phrases of the New Deal were not ‘Communism,’ ‘Socialism,’ and ‘Fascism,’ but ‘Planned Economy.’ This expression was an emanation from the caldrons of all three European collectivist forms. The phrase first popularized by Mussolini, and often mouthed by the Communists and the Socialists, was itself a typical collectivist torture of meaning. It was not a blueprint, but a disguise. It meant governmental execution and dictation......................

The Thesis of Corporate Socialism

Frederic Bastiat’s dictum is that “socialism is a system where everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else.” Corporate socialism is, according to Antony C. Sutton’s book Wall Street and FDR, a system consisting of a few big businesses who live at the expense of everyone else in society because these privileged businesses possess legal monopolies in key sectors of the economy....................

How Sutton Developed and Defended His Thesis

“One can trace a literary path,” Sutton wrote in Wall Street and FDR, “by which prominent financiers have pushed for national planning and control for their own benefit and that ultimately evolved into the Roosevelt New Deal.”..............” Howe’s monopoly strategy advised corporate socialists to cover all of this up by saying that they were acting in “the name of the public good” and in “the public interest.”.............Secretary of Labor under FDR recorded how Baruch brought fascism to America:

At the first meeting of the Cabinet after the President took office in 1933, the financier and adviser to Roosevelt, Bernard Baruch, and Baruch’s friend General Hugh Johnson, who was to become the head of the National Recovery Administration, came in with a copy of a book by Gentile, the Italian Fascist theoretician, for each member of the Cabinet, and we all read it with great care............

To Read More.....

Three Days in January

By Rich Kozlovich

The title is a take off on the movie Seven Days in May which I think is a great movie, and I think more people should watch it and realize just how close America came to be taken over by a cabal of wannabe dictators in the military, the bureaucracy, and the Democrat party.  

“Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” ― David Horowitz

Seven days in May was about a military take over, but the principles are identical to what we saw going on for the last four years, which actually started with the Obama administration.     

Well, there will be no "Seven Days in May" because Trump has, in just Three Days in January, scared the daylights of those working (and I use the word working loosely) in the Stygian stables of the federal government.  

I read where generals are saying they're willing to work with Trump.  What?  Talk about delusional!  They're not required to "work with" the President of the United States, they're require to work for the President of the United States.  They're required to salute, say "Yes Sir", shut their mouths, do what they're told or resign.  It's just that simple! 

I will say this, if there ever was a time to be a junior officer in America's military, it's now, as promotions are going to be coming fast as furious as Trump fires a lot of generals, admirals (Of which 41 of them are four star officers.  All during WWII there were only 7 four star generals) along with others who've failed to understand their proper role.  Some of whom need to be court martialed. 

1. Milley's game
2. General Mark Milley: “You’re Fired!”

I had conversation with a very good friend who is also very conservative, and I commented that Trump was 78, and I understand how his mind works because I'm 78, and time is running out for both of us, and make no mistake, he will not let anything get in his way to save the nation from the leftist insanity of the Democrats, academia, the media, the bureaucracy, the military, or corrupt insane billionaires like George Soros.  Nothing is going stop him this time, and make no mistake the efforts by the left to do so will be massive. 

He's going all out since time isn't on his side.  He has nothing to lose, and everything to gain.  What will that gain be?  Restoring sanity to the nation, and as a result, he may end up being the greatest President America ever elected since George Washington. 

The Election Wizard listed what Trump has done in his first three days:

1. Humiliated the World Economic Forum. 
2. Released JFK, RFK, and MLK assassination files. 
3. Fired woke DEI employees. 
4. Designated cartels as terrorist organizations. 
5. Authorized ICE to remove illegal immigrants. 
6. Restored freedom of speech. 
7. Revoked security clearances for certain officials.
8. Withdrawn the U.S. from the WHO. 
9. Pardoned January 6th political prisoners and other political prisoners. 
10. Moved toward controlling Greenland and the Panama Canal. 
11. Secured one trillion dollars in support from Saudi Arabia. 
12. Made progress in ending wars that started under Biden.

I remember when the media would cite FDR's first 100 days as the touchstone for what a President should be like.  That's horsepucky because his presidency was a socialist disaster the corrupt media and Hollywood supported.  Fortunately that media is dying, both electronic and print, and it won't be long before they're going down the drain, and no one cares what these celebrity pinheads think.  America and the world is hearing the truth for a change since the "alternative" media is now ascendant.  Even P&D is getting over 100,000 hits a month, from all over the world, and P&D isn't tied into any group or system that promotes P&D. 

1. CNN, NBC Planning Mass Lay-Offs Amid Tumbling Ratings, Revenue 
2. Disgraced CNN to Lay off Hundreds as Viewership Collapses

 If this is what Trump can do in three days, think what the next four years will be like. 

Blame Washington for the Great Depression, Part II

November 19, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

With regards to economic policy, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt were two peas in a pod. They both responded to an economic downturn by dramatically expanding the size and scope of government. As a result of those mistakes, they turned a recession into the Great Depression.

But that statement doesn’t come close to capturing the terrible consequences of their statism. So I went to the Maddison database and created two charts that illustrate the utter failure of Hoover’s interventionism and FDR’s New Deal.

The first chart is very straightforward, showing that there was almost zero growth in per-capita GDP between 1929 and 1940.

That’s a miserable performance, and it is also is a massive historical anomaly.

Here’s another chart comparing the 11-year change in per-capita GDP during the Hoover-Roosevelt era of statism with the average of every other 11-year period from the end of the Civil War until today.

The bottom line is that there have been plenty of recessions in American history, but they usually have not lasted very long and they’ve been more than offset by periods of growth.

 

It was only when Hoover and Roosevelt delivered 11 years of statism that America suffered 11 years of stagnation. Let’s now augment GDP data with some analysis. In a column for Law & Liberty, Amity Shlaes wrote about how the Hoover-Roosevelt policies were a failure that deepened and lengthened the Great Depression.

If you’re in a rush, these excerpts summarize her findings.

…many historians have been unwilling to probe the effect of Roosevelt’s multi-year recovery program, the New Deal. …Why did recovery not return after five years, or after seven? …It was the duration that made the Depression great. …These days, politicians routinely invoke the New Deal as a model of inspiration…even though the New Deal never…“put America back to work.” …other factors, well documented by the extensive studies of the early years, exacerbated the subsequent downturn: the young Fed’s missteps, an international crisis, the collapse of vulnerable small banks across the land. …

Historian Robert Higgs has developed a useful thesis to explain this lost decade: “regime uncertainty,” the notion that an erratic, aggressive government can terrify businesses into slowdown. …the downturn after 1929 would not have become the Great Depression had Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt replayed the restrained federal policy of the early 1920s: reduce uncertainty and allow the market to take the lead.

She documents some of Hoover’s failures.

Congress passed, and President Herbert Hoover went along with, a damaging tariff, Smoot-Hawley. …Hoover, unlike Harding or his successor Calvin Coolidge, was inclined to action. …Hoover therefore turned to measures his “do less” predecessors would have eschewed. …

Hoover loaded burdens on business with a large tax hike, raising the top income tax rate to 63% from 25%. Even Hoover’s smaller interventions today look perverse: At a time when transactions were difficult, Hoover threw sand in the gears by introducing a tax on checks. …Hoover likewise tried to manage prices in another new area: labor. …Under a then-novel theory, higher wages would prompt recovery because they would invigorate workers and enable workers to spend more, stimulating the economy.

Amity then explains that Roosevelt delivered more of the same.

Like Hoover before him, …Roosevelt promised..new interventions. …With his New Deal, the President claimed that license. In the famous 100 Days, his first legislative drive, Roosevelt established dozens of large programs to oversee or alter virtually every sector of the economy. The National Recovery Administration, tasked with managing the industry, became the centerpiece of the New Deal. …

Under statutes bearing visible traces of Benito Mussolini’s syndicalism, the NRA assigned large firms and industry leaders, to draft codes to promote efficiency in their markets. These codes spelled out in magnificent detail right down to what price a cleaner might charge to press pants, or which chicken a butcher must kill first — every aspect of daily business. …the NRA’s corollary agency in agriculture, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration both forced and paid farmers to destroy their crops, again on the principle that less product would drive up prices. …Though Hoover had raised taxes, Roosevelt boosted them yet again, specifically targeting those who were most likely to create jobs through investment: top earners.

Amen. Amity is right (and historians are wrong) about the destructive policies of the 1930s.

P.S. Amity also includes some discussion of what happened during the “Forgotten Depression” shortly after the end of World War I. Harding did the opposite of Hoover and Roosevelt and got infinitely better results.

In the early 1920s, …Washington and the young Fed addressed a severe downturn by halving federal spending and raising interest rates. These moves would today be considered counterintuitive, to put it politely. …a new president, Warren Harding, sent a signal: there was no need for grand reform from the government, despite the downturn. …

Assailing the heavy burden of taxes postwar, Harding, once elected, made it clear to the public that he intended to reduce taxes wherever and whenever he could. Fewer burdens would free the private sector to pull the country forward. It did. Indeed, the economy recovered so rapidly that the early 1920s downturn is today known as The Forgotten Depression. Stock prices rose dramatically, more than tripling over the decade. Jobs materialized, and most importantly, the standard of living increased. Productivity gains meant the old six-day work week could drop to five days. That gave America a gift we still enjoy: Saturday.

P.P.S. Fortunately, FDR was not able implement his “Second Bill of Rights” or his proposal for a 100 percent tax rate.

P.P.P.S. Some claim that World War II spending shows that Keynesian economics can work, but proponents of that view have never been able to explain why the economy didn’t fall back into depression when the war ended.

 

 

Kamala Harris Is Poised To Revive The Worst Aspects Of FDR’s Socialist Agenda

Kamala Harris seems to think quoting FDR will reassure voters, but it should terrify them.

By Mary Grabar October 08, 2024 @ The Federalist

At the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris recently said she would “engage in what Franklin Roosevelt called ‘bold, persistent experimentation,’” as he had told the 1932 graduating class at Oglethorpe University. But she did not mention FDR’s vision of “remaking the world,” which included fundamentally changing “our popular economic thought” to see to “a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.”

Instead, she said she would seek “practical solutions” and even declared, “I am a capitalist.” She said she’s “been working with entrepreneurs and business owners” for her “whole career.” (No one has yet even been able to verify Harris’ job at McDonald’s.)

She also professed her belief in “an active partnership between government and the private sector,” sounding much like FDR at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in September 1932. There he called for a new “economic constitutional order” built together by an “enlightened administration” and “enlightened businessmen” who together would “[adjust] production to consumption.”

Indeed, the desire to control production and fix prices was the aim of the largest contributor to the Roosevelt campaign, Wall Street speculator Bernard Baruch. He got the wish he paid for, the NRA (National Recovery Administration). Similarly, Harris supporter and billionaire Mark Cuban is vying for the position as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and calling those who call Harris a Marxist “idiots.”

It was natural that Harris would quote Roosevelt. Biden referenced FDR in his speeches, especially in his last State of the Union address, when he invoked the “Four Freedoms,” which became the basis of his campaign (before it was usurped by Harris). The media hailed Barack Obama as the second coming of FDR, with the Nov. 24, 2008, Time magazine cover showing Obama posed as FDR in a convertible, clenching the characteristic cigarette-holder.

But as Ben Shapiro pointed out, Roosevelt’s “bold, persistent experimentation” actually prolonged the Depression. So also warned James Freeman. Relying on Amity Shlaes, Freeman noted that FDR’s impulsiveness made it impossible for businesses to plan ahead.

FDR’s Ignorance

Indeed, as I point out in my book, FDR was barely capable of keeping a sustained thought, flitting from one subject to another, like Harris does in “word salads.” He would tell two advisors with diametrically opposed solutions to compromise. He would incorporate contradictory statements into the same speech. He was ignorant about economics and made no effort to learn. Prejudices learned in childhood guided his foreign policy.

Yet, he felt himself qualified to plan the economy and the lives of all Americans.

FDR experimented, indeed. He followed the economic theories of his Brain Trust (“cornfield philosophers” with Ph.D.s, as John T. Flynn called them). Instead of letting prices bottom out and the economy recover as it had after World War I, the Brain Trust ordered farmers late in the spring of 1933 to plow under crops and then taxed processors. The NRA set prices, driving out small businesses.

The result? Food shortages and increased prices for people already hungry.

Harris’ “first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging” by food companies promises the same results.

The Politically Connected

Another experimental idea was to confiscate the gold that American citizens had been “hoarding.” Average Americans who had tried to protect their investments were ordered, by threat of a 10-year prison term and a $10,000 fine, to hand in gold bars and even Christmas gold coins. FDR then determined the price of gold, sometimes by multiples of “lucky numbers.”

But Baruch kept his gold. Today, politically connected stock market speculators, e.g., those married to the former Democratic Speaker of the House, use advance knowledge about legislation to sell stocks at a profit.

Similarly, Harris’ economic policies will not provide the “opportunity” she promises to all equally. Just as FDR doled out federal funds to court votes, federal funds will be doled out selectively. She promises to increase the startup deduction from $5,000 to $50,000 and “provide low- and no-interest loans” to small businesses. On what basis? Will the loans be forgiven, just like student loans? As business owner Chad O. Jackson asks, is even a $5,000 loan needed to start a business?

Redistribution of Wealth

On MSNBC, after her speech, Harris said that she would cut the “red tape” involved in housing and low-income housing construction. She explained, “some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars, and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritizing affordable housing for working people.”

Out of this holistic mess we can gather that federal assistance will be contingent on where the housing is built (near public transit). Such stipulations indicate more “red tape” and an exacerbation of a housing crisis largely created by the government.

Her “$25,000 down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers,” she explains, would mean “creating the ability of that working person to build intergenerational wealth.”

Like FDR, she wants a redistribution of wealth. Her ideas about “intergenerational wealth,” referred to twice in her speech and then on MSNBC, echo Nikole Hannah-Jones’ argument for reparations because of advantages in white “generational wealth.” Harris is a big fan of Hannah-Jones. She called Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project a “masterpiece” that told the “truth” of how “the very foundation of our country was built on the backs of enslaved people.” Which first-time homebuyers will get $25,000 from the government? Look at the model Evanston, Illinois, reparations program. Number one priority is “restorative housing.”

Democrats seem to think that quoting FDR will magically reassure voters. Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz tried to salvage a disastrous debate by paraphrasing FDR’s nonsensical statement about having nothing to fear but “fear itself.”

FDR’s Real Legacy

History books, overwhelmingly written by FDR fans, quote his line about fear as if it were a gem of profundity and cast the blame for the extended Depression on other factors, such as obstructionist Republicans and judges. Some argue that FDR did not spend enough money. The fact that he was president during the crisis of depression and war, plus his long-established celebrity status as a Roosevelt, etched him into the national memory as a hero.

Historian David M. Kennedy admits that the Great Depression was “a catastrophic economic crisis that Roosevelt failed to resolve, at least not until World War II came along.” But FDR had “larger purposes.” In 1937, as a second depression hit, FDR worried that economic recovery might be “politically premature.” It might “dismantle the fragile edifice of reforms” he had instituted, and it might weaken the executive branch.

So, Roosevelt’s “reforms” and his power in the executive branch were more important than the well-being of Americans, whose life expectancy was declining. According to Kennedy, the president knew the Depression offered “a rare political opportunity, and Roosevelt made the most of it, to the nation’s lasting benefit.”

What is assumed to be the “lasting benefit” includes such things as unemployment insurance, Social Security, and banking deposit insurance. But these programs’ costs are borne by consumers. Americans’ taxes pay for deposit insurance. While “too big to fail” financial institutions were bailed out during the 2008-2009 recession, average Americans lost their homes. Under Democrat “Green New Deals,” politically connected companies, from Solyndra to Blue Whale Materials, get the loans and contracts. Obama’s make-work plan, with huge signs announcing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 at sidewalks that went nowhere, mimicked the make-work boondoggling of the FDR administration. In both administrations, Washington, D.C., grew and prospered. FDR never really pulled the United States out of the Depression. Obama’s first-term recovery was the slowest one ever.

Like FDR, Kamala Harris is interested in growing the government for political power and transforming the country. If more Americans understood the real FDR, they would be able to see that they do have something to fear: another FDR-like administration.

---

Mary Grabar, Ph.D., a resident fellow at The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, is the author of "Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths" (November 2024), "Debunking The 1619 Project," and "Debunking Howard Zinn." She taught college English for 20 years and founded the Dissident Prof Education Project (DissidentProf.com). Her writing can be found at marygrabar.com.

Harris Repackages False ‘Happy Warrior’ Claims As Old As FDR

By Mary Grabar 

Editor's Note:  Mary gave me permission to publish her work years back. This appeared in The Federalist, so I hope that permission is still in effect.  If not, I will break this down to a link.  But either way, this needs as broad a distribution as is possible.  RK

Can you feel the joy yet? The whole week after the announcement on Aug. 6 about the selection of Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has been a joy fest within the Democratic Party not seen since the days when Franklin D. Roosevelt wowed the press corps. What with pundits declaring Harris and Walz “happy warriors,” you would think “Happy Days Are Here Again,” as FDR’s 1932 presidential campaign theme song blared out constantly.

The Washington Post headline was “Harris and Walz seize on joyful message in contrast to darker Trump themes.” Jennifer Rubin exulted Walz’s “happy-warrior vibe” at the first joint rally in Philadelphia.

At The New York Times, Charles Blow called Walz “the epitome of the happy warrior,” “the dad figure,” “the soldier,” “the coach.” Tom Elliott at Grabien captured nine utterances of “happy warrior” by pundits on TV. And Harris’ laughter has been measured and shown to be four times greater than Biden’s was on the campaign trail!

The New York Times Belabors the Joy

Times reporter Katie Rogers in her Aug. 9 “analysis” offered that at one time Harris, given the criticism by conservatives, “wondered to confidants whether she should laugh, or show a sense of humor, at all.” They reassured her that she should. Yet, even as she “focused on issues like abortion rights and worked to bolster her foreign policy chops,” the “laughter never really left her.”

It was a good thing, for “joy — a battle-tested version of it — has become the backbone of Ms. Harris’s campaign in recent days,” and her running mate, “a walking bear hug,” is trying “to strike a contrast with what he casts as the gloomy vision of former President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans,” according to Rogers.

Walz said in Detroit, “The one thing I will not forgive [the Republicans] for is they try to steal the joy from this country.” But the “next president … emanates the joy.”

Rogers noted that in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted the song “‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ to offer a promise of a bright future to Americans stricken by the Great Depression.” She did not note that the reality failed to match up to the theme song, as the Depression dragged on longer than for most other countries until industry geared up for World War II, which Roosevelt was as eager to get the country into as he had been for World War I during his stint as assistant secretary of the Navy, as I reveal in my book, Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths.

FDR Didn’t Like the Term ‘Happy Warrior’

More analogies were made to the mythical FDR (a favorite comparison during Barack Obama’s campaign). Bill Kristol, with co-author Andrew Egger at the Bulwark, waxed on about their appearance with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in Philadelphia. “They were happy warriors,” a term “introduced to modern American politics by Franklin Roosevelt, who lifted it from Wordsworth to describe Al Smith — but Smith prevailed neither in the fight for the nomination in 1924, when FDR bestowed the moniker on him in his nominating speech, nor in the general election in 1928.”

But it turns out that Walz, though he is “happy,” was not the “warrior” he claimed to be in Iraq, having quit the unit he had been trained to lead before he could be deployed into battle. Since his run for Congress, the ostensible reason for retiring from the National Guard, Walz has been misrepresenting his military record.

Kristol and Egger get the history wrong. In fact, it was Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, an advisor to Al Smith, who inserted the phrase into the speech written by others, as the path-breaking Roosevelt-scholar and Harvard University professor Frank Freidel notes.

Roosevelt objected to the line about the “happy warrior.” He thought it was “too poetic” for “a gang of delegates” and wrote a new draft of the speech. Proskauer did not like it. Nor did Herbert Swope, managing editor of the New York World. Without knowing the authors, Swope, according to Proskauer, threw Roosevelt’s speech down in disgust and called Proskauer’s “the greatest nominating speech since Cleveland was nominated by Bryan.” After Proskauer, speaking for Smith, gave him an ultimatum to use his text or not give the speech, FDR gave in, predicting it would be “a flop.”

Roosevelt was wrong, of course. The June 27, 1924, New York Times headline stated, “Roosevelt Offers Name of Gov. Smith / Declares He Would Restore Executive Prestige and Faith in the Government / Calls Him ‘Happy Warrior.’” When he was later asked how he came up with “that wonderful idea of the happy warrior,” Roosevelt had replied that he had written the speech and gave it to Proskauer, who approved it. But Roosevelt thought that it needed “a phrase” to give it “punch.” When Proskauer suggested, “Why don’t you call Al the happy warrior?” Roosevelt had agreed and “stuck it in.” 

FDR Liked to Twist History

This was just one of the innumerable cases of Roosevelt’s twisting of history and taking credit for the work of others. Other whoppers included the claim in his 1932 acceptance speech to have had “Navy training,” which he attributed to helping him get through turbulence in a plane on the way to the Democratic Convention. Roosevelt had been assistant secretary of the Navy, an administrative and ceremonial position. He was never in the Navy to receive Navy training.

Another analogy to the earlier Democrat is appropriate. While Roosevelt seemed to exude warmth and optimism, his treatment of those closest to him revealed something darker, as his attorney general, Francis Biddle, a fellow alum from Groton Preparatory School, revealed in his memoirs.

FDR was “intuitive of a man’s weaknesses,” Biddle wrote. He “loved to tease.” It was “genial” but also “an edged and acid weapon, never far from his hand.” When Roosevelt “felt in that particular mood,” he pointed the weapon “with a prick of torment, and went to the essence of a man … Occasionally he could not resist yielding to such an impulse when he knew that the other was emotionally defenseless … I saw him wound members of his entourage …” 

Kamala Off-Camera

Laughing and smiling Kamala seems to similarly be quite different when not in front of the camera. Her toxic work environment resulted in an “unprecedented” 92 percent staff turnover, her former employees say.

All the happy talk surrounding the Harris-Walz campaign is to cover up misery, just like Soviet propaganda about happy farm and factory workers covered up compulsory labor and starvation. They may have been happy days for Roosevelt and the advisors and bureaucrats who swelled Washington, D.C., but they were not for the legions of unemployed.

We should be wary about such myths as the “happy warrior” and “happy days.” Given their records, the future under Harris-Walz is no laughing matter.

Mary Grabar, the author of "Debunking Howard Zinn," earned her PhD from the University of Georgia and taught college English for 20 years. She is now a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York. She is also author of the "Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America" (Regnery, September 7, 2021). Her writing can be found at DissidentProf.com and at marygrabar.com.

FDR and the Democrats’ Unmatched Undemocratic Ways

The founder of the modern Democrat party would be cynically proud of how undemocratically it swept Kamala Harris to power. 

 By Mary Grabar August 3, 2024

 

June 7th 2019 Bronze statue by Neil Estern of Franklin D Roosevelt sitting down in a cape and his (unshown) dog Fala (Stu Jones/Shutterstock) 

Commentators such as Victor Davis Hanson have called the “coronation” of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive Democrat presidential nominee a coup coming upon another coup: the 2020 primary when front-runner Bernie Sanders was pressured by shadowy party bosses to drop out in order to leave the “moderate” electable Joe Biden.

As David Samuels says, we do have a shadow government … with Obama’s people in the White House running the show.

Now the elected candidate has been forced out and replaced with Harris, who had “entered no primary,” won not a single delegate in 2024 — or in 2020, when “she dropped out of the race even before the first Iowa and New Hampshire balloting.” Delegates will be denied the ability to put forth nominees, as Harris is nominated virtually.

Many wonder how the Democrat Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt could come to such high-handedness, where such party bosses as Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama subvert the democratic process. The editorial board of the New York Post asked what happened to the party of “‘Lunch Bucket Joe,’” who “always aimed to identify with … the working class — the party’s base from the days of FDR and Harry Truman.” Democrats were now embracing “hyper progressive” and elitist Kamala Harris.

David Samuels presents a similar, commonly held view of American political history, of five American Republics with the last one founded by Barack Obama, who had toppled the Fourth Republic, which had been founded by Franklin Roosevelt.

FDR, presumably, “excised the New England elites in favor of the ‘New Deal alliance’ of Southerners and northern urban immigrant voters.” But then Bill Clinton embraced “global trade treaties like NAFTA and GATT, and China’s entry into the WTO, which blew up the broad middle class that FDR’s party had spent decades building and turned the Democrats into the party of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.”

Today’s Obama-led Democrat Party is “college-educated, corporate-controlled,” an “alliance of civil rights, anti-imperialism, and identity politics.”

Such assumptions — which are making the “conservatives” at Compact agitate for another New Deal — are based on the false idea that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a self-identified member of the Hudson River Valley landed gentry, became a “traitor to his class” and championed the cause of workers and the “common man,” thus instituting a “golden age” for the middle class.

This is a myth that FDR and his retinue promulgated and which I debunk in my book, Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths (2024). While Roosevelt’s name and class brought him unequaled favorable publicity, the truth is that he lived off of his family’s riches, mostly handed down by his maternal grandfather, an opium-pusher in China. Other sources came from monopolizing coal mines (a company town in Pennsylvania was named Delano) and railroads.

But from the beginning, during his one-term stint (January 1911–January 1913) as a 29-year-old New York State Senator, FDR presented himself as a “reformer.” One of the headline-grabbing issues of the day was the direct primary in the election of United States Senators, to be wrested from the party “bosses.”

Roosevelt had his doubts that a direct primary bill would have much effect, but it was a good issue to support to elevate his reputation. Knowing that star-struck reporters would favorably record his words, he gave public speeches for the direct primary, supported direct primary bills that actually accrued more power to party bosses, and played to the press corps in Albany by precipitating a headline-grabbing angry three-hour debate that ultimately ended in a recess with nothing passed.

Roosevelt’s decision to appeal to Southerners and northern urban immigrants was similarly based on political calculation as demographics shifted. He cast himself as a “farmer,” even claiming to be nothing more than a “Georgia cracker farmer” after investing in the Warm Springs property.

But as a letter to fellow Hudson River Valley gentleman farmer Henry Morgenthau, Jr. revealed, Roosevelt thought a “large number” of Upstate farmers displayed “sheer, utter, and complete ignorance.” FDR actually did the bidding of Wall Street, where he worked for several years as a Wall Street lawyer (though not a very good one) and invested in dubious schemes involving German currency and selling stock in his various companies to gullible Americans who ended up losing most of their investments.

Nor was the New Deal, presumably instituted to end the Depression, designed by the Brain Trust, the Ph.D.s with new ideas about how to uplift the masses as commonly thought. It was a creation of the very elites — bankers, corporate heads, and Wall Street speculators — to make institutional changes to their own benefit.

John T. Flynn, one of FDR’s most consistent contemporary critics (who has now been memory-holed), in the June 1939 Yale Review, called the Brain Trusters “messenger boys” for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Steel, other corporations, and Wall Street speculators and bankers. More recently, in 1989, scholar Thomas Ferguson presented them as providing “a transmission belt for the ideas of others, including, notably, investment bankers from Lehmann Brothers.”

FDR may have rejected J.P. Morgan but only to allow the advancement of rival Chase National Bank, on whose board sat FDR’s cousin Vincent Astor. The Agricultural Adjustment Act was not designed by farmers but by “messenger boys” funded by the Rockefellers and the Chamber of Commerce.

The National Recovery Administration, which fixed prices and set codes to benefit the six-hundred or so largest businesses in the country, was architected by Wall Street speculator Bernard Baruch. The AAA benefited large landowners and drove small farmers and tenant farmers from the land, and the NRA destroyed small businesses.

The poor got very little of the New Deal funding, which was largely a patronage scheme — Tammany Hall on a national scale, with taxpayer-supported New Deal funds going to party bosses and areas where votes were needed.

Social Security similarly exploits workers. As Flynn wrote in 1939, “the Social Security Act was made the excuse for laying upon the workers under the guise of creating a vast reserve a pay-roll tax to support ordinary expenses.” Taxpayer-supported deposit insurance has been used to bail out banks in the 1980s and in 2008/2009. Obamacare, as David Garrow has pointed out, is “a great achievement for the health insurance industry.”

The progressive policies were designed to benefit the wealthy. When conservative Democrats like Senator Walter George, of Georgia, opposed his policies, such as court-packing, FDR publicly, in their presence, ridiculed them during the 1938 midterm “purge.” Today, the purge has been completed, with Democrats voting in lock-step or as a bumper sticker says, “Vote Blue, No Matter Who.”

As David Samuels says, we do have a shadow government, a “spooky arrangement” with Obama’s people in the White House running the show. But contrary to Samuels’ view of history, the “shadow government” was in place during the FDR era. Baruch was the largest donor to the Democrats in 1932. He also reviewed all the speeches Roosevelt gave during the presidential campaign.

Since at least the regime of FDR, the Democratic Party has been un-democratic. “Lunch Bucket Joe” was as unreal as “Georgia Cracker Farmer” FDR. We need to understand that as hyper-progressive Kamala Harris is refashioned into another working-class icon and the party bosses start playing “Nine to Five” as her theme song.

Let Me Tell You About Harry Hopkins

By Rich Kozlovich 

If you looked up Hopkins in Wikipedia you could only come away with the impression he was a dedicated public servant from his early life who was called into service by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s to administer New Deal programs such as the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration. Hopkins became a major policy voice in the Roosevelt administration and he easily had more access to the President than any other advisor, especially since he ended up living in the White House for three and one half years, even living there with his third wife for a time. His influence was so strong he was known as the “deputy President.” It is also believed that he was a Soviet agent.

This appeared in Wikipedia regarding comments from one of his defenders:

“Verne W. Newton, author of FDR and the Holocaust, said that no writer discussing Hopkins has identified any secrets disclosed, nor any decision in which he distorted American priorities in order to help Communism. As Mark demonstrates, Hopkins was not in fact pro-Soviet in his recommendations to FDR, he was anti-German and pro-U.S. Any "secrets" disclosed were authorized. Mark says that at the time, any actions were taken specifically to help the American war effort, and to prevent the Soviets from making a deal with Hitler.”

Well, that is what we shall examine, especially since so much information has come out in the 1990’s regarding Soviet spies, communists and fellow travelers who infiltrated the highest levels of the Roosevelt Administration, including Hopkins.

We have to understand that the media was heavily infiltrated with Stalinist sympathizers or outright Communists from the 1920's on. But not only the media! During the Great Depression FDR expanded government tremendously when he created all those new agencies. Agencies which very quickly became infiltrated by Communists, allowing them to act secretly as agents for the Soviet Union while on America's payroll; largely with the help secret communists acting as agents for Stalin like Harry Hopkins.

In the book entitled The Sword and the Shield information about this era and the people involved in Soviet spying during the 20th century was based on copied KGB documents smuggled out of the USSR, which had been hidden under the floor of his country home until “1992 when British intelligence managed to get both him and his six trunks of copied documents out of Russia”.

Hopkins was in fact a Soviet agent, as confirmed by KGB defector Oleg Godievsky named as a Soviet intelligence agent. In fact he quoted another KGB operative Iskhak Akhmerov as saying that Hopkins was “their most important Soviet war-time agent in the United States”. The intercepted messages between the Soviet Union and their agents in the U.S. (known as the Venona intercepts) clearly showed that Hopkins was contact No. 19.

Hopkins was directly responsible for getting Roosevelt, who was totally unprepared and extremely ill, to go to Yalta and negotiate what would become the fate of Eastern Europe under Stalin's iron boot, as Reed Irvine states in his January 5, 2000 article, “Harry Hopkins: Traitor, Not Hero”, saying:

“Hopkins said the Russians had been "reasonable and farseeing." Robert Sherwood, a Roosevelt speechwriter, called Yalta "a monstrous fraud." Hopkins had been instrumental in our supplying, with no conditions, the arms that enabled Stalin to defeat the Germans. He helped seal their control of Eastern Europe, and he is suspected of having authorized shipments of uranium that helped them develop their A-bomb."

Hopkins would time and time again come down supporting Soviet positions, including sabotaging the Polish government in exile’s efforts while extolling the Soviet puppets as the true leaders of Poland. He even denounced in vehement terms the Red Cross investigation of the murders of several thousand captive Polish officers murdered in Russia’s Katyn Forest. A crime we in fact know was committed by the Russians, in order to be assured there would be no leadership in Poland that could work against their long term goal of absorbing Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. 

There is an argument in his defense that he was and “unconscious agent” and "simply acting as a "back channel" to the Russians, maintaining informal East-West contact." Evans and Romerstein point out that this is an explanation that doesn't fit the facts: 

"If Hopkins were merely trying to maintain such contact, he could have done so through Soviet ambassadors Litvinov, Constantine Oumansky, or Andrei Gromyko, or members of the Soviet Purchasing commission, all of whom were in the United States in legal fashion at one time or another, and with whom Hopkins could have had all the dealings that he cared to."

They go on to say:

Akhmerov, however was an illegal operating under false cover and would not have revealed himself to Hopkins unless absolutely certain his secret KGB identity would be protected. So, whatever Hopkins’s motivation, “unconscious agent” doesn’t fit the picture.

Hopkins died young in 1946 at 56 years old, but Hopkins may have been one of the most influential people of the 20th century because through his deception and treason he left a legacy of Communist imposed tyranny on much of the world.

But he didn't do it all by himself!

The History Lesson You Never Learned! The History Lesson You Were Never Taught!

By Rich Kozlovich

This is the history lesson everyone should have gotten and never received.  As I have said they in the past – they just won’t teach history. 

I have known about the Venona Intercepts for years, and I have known about the infiltration of Soviet agents and fellow travelers who worked to support and promote Stalin and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the 1920’s and on.  I knew that Joe McCarthy was a nut job, but I also knew he was accurate in his description of Communist infiltration of the State Department.  Remember that the House of Representatives, run by the Democrats at the time also held hearings on this, known as the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  But that was only the tip of the ice berg. 

Wartime agencies such as the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) were heavily penetrated by "Communists, fellow travelers, and Soviet agents".  They were in positions to exert influence regarding intelligence, information flow and procurement. When the war ended thousands of those staffers would end up being transferred to the State Department, many of them Soviet agents.   "The security problems hatched in the war would thus come to roost at State." 

Soviet spies and sympathizers infiltrated the White House, Department of Defense, and all of the agencies created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  But mostly they heavily infiltrated the Treasury Department, which had enormous influence on FDR in his frail dealings with Stalin at Yalta and Teheran, virtually giving Eastern Europe to Stalin and later Asia via the Communist takeover against the Nationalist government run by Chiang Kai-shek.  

I have posted information in the past discussing this, but two things happened recently that have motivated me to really expand on this important history.  A history that is virtually unknown to most people.  First, I have been reading, Stalin’s Secret Agents, The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, and secondly I watched the attacks on Michelle Bachmann.  Mark Levin noted the scorn congressional colleagues directed at “Reps. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and three other House members who asked for an examination of evidence that the parent organization of jihadist groups such as al-Qaida and Hama were wielding influence on U.S. policy from within”, saying “The lawmakers were “treated like pariahs”!  

It was impossible to miss the similarities to what is happening now and what happened to those who challenged this massive infiltration of Communists in the federal government.  This included military personnel whose career advancement ended for speaking up, along with investigative personnel, including the FBI.  When the upper echelon is sympathetic and those around them are able to control the information flow and decision making long term problems are created that can't be easily overcome or ever overcome.   

So I have decided that we need an in depth history lesson.  There are names here that you may recognize but don’t really know the details about them, and there will be names unfamiliar to you.  That will all change. 

The Silvermaster File

Arguably the most comprehensive, detailed FBI file on attempted Communist and Soviet penetration of the Federal government, based initially on the allegations of former Soviet espionage courier Elizabeth Bentley (code-named "Gregory" by the FBI, by which name this file is also known), beginning in November 1945.  (This list is tip of the iceberg. RK)

The Silvermaster File of the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation is a 162-volume compendium of some 26,000 pages of documents relating to the Bureau's investigation of Communist penetration of the U.S. federal government during the Cold War.

 

Beginning in 1945 with the allegations of defecting Soviet courier Elizabeth Bentley (Venona cover names “Myrna”; Umnitsa, “Clever Girl”), the file is also known as the Bentley file or Gregory file ("Gregory" was the FBI code name for Bentley).

 

The file takes its name from Nathan Gregory Silvermaster (Venona cover names Pel, Pal, "Paul"; "Robert") of the War Production Board, whom Bentley named as head of an underground Communist network known as the Silvermaster Group. Among the people named in the file in connection with this group are President Franklin Roosevelt's Administrative Assistant Lauchlin Currie (Venona cover name "Page") and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White (Venona cover names “Lawyer”; “Jurist”; "Richard").

 

Also named in the file are Victor Perlo (Venona cover name "Raider " ), chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board, and contacts of his Perlo group, including Alger Hiss (Venona cover name “Ales”secretary general of the United Nations Charter Conference. (Like several others identified by Bentley, Hiss had been identified independently by another defecting Soviet courier, Whittaker Chambers, to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle in 1939.) Among dozens of others named by Bentley in this file in connection with this network is Duncan Lee (Venona cover name “Koch”), confidential assistant to William Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), wartime predecessor of the CIA.

 

Joe McCarthy was right. 

 

 

Will the circle be (un)broken?

Beating the unbeatable FDR Democrat coalition

Michael D. Shaw May 16, 2024  @ Mike's Point Of View

Many readers will recognize the title of this piece as being from an old gospel tune, written way back in 1907. The lyrics were reworked a few decades later, but the basic idea remains: A bereaved person wonders if he will meet his departed loved one when he himself leaves this mortal coil. Here’s a nice rendition of the song.

The circle under consideration in this article is a collection of disparate groups that have enabled the stranglehold maintained on much of this country by the Democrat party. I’m certainly no fan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), but give credit where it’s due. He broke the power of Tammany Hall, and he created the “collection” I speak of.

FDR’s Democrat power grouping included the poor of all races; essentially every conceivable minority group; union members; a large percentage of Catholics; nearly all Jews; a significant number of farmers; anti-Establishment types of all description; white Southerners; and those who hated Prohibition.

As to Prohibition, it should be noted that the Republicans were the dominant political party from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Depression, and saw fit to wrap themselves in the supposed “morality” of the temperance movement. Few Left-wing historians (and that’s most of them) are willing to admit that Republican Herbert Hoover, who ran against FDR in 1932, proposed a far more socialist agenda than did Roosevelt.

Unfortunately for Hoover, he was perceived as the captain of the Titanic, and that, coupled with his relatively lukewarm support of Prohibition, did him in. With his loss came the Democrat steamroller.

So how fares FDR’s collection currently? Today’s poor are of course far more affluent than in the 1930s, and since they are already the beneficiaries of scores of entitlement programs, are less interested in politics than their 1930s predecessors.

The minority groups—many of whom have benefited from decades of Civil Rights legislation—are steadily being turned off by the very non-FDR issues of abortion, gay and transgender rights, the decline of public schools, and the deteriorating economy. Blacks are waking up to the fact that they are heavily campaigned to every four years, but see scant attention being paid to high crime rates, and the culture rot being promoted by the elites.

Jews who are not Orthodox have been some the staunchest supporters of the Dems, but are finally waking up to the fact that antisemitism has always been the purview of the Left. One can hardly imagine a greater perfidy than the notion—eagerly portrayed by propagandists of the Allies—that Nazism was a movement of the Right. I guess no one noticed that “Nazi” was an acronym for National Socialist German Workers' Party.

And, at the very same time, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was regarded as a dominion of the Left.

Those arguing that the socialist movements of Hitler and Mussolini were on the Right hung their hat on the fact that nominal private ownership of business was still allowed, conveniently forgetting that those very businesses were strictly controlled by the government.

At any rate, all but the most diehard Tikkun Olam Jews are acknowledging the virulent antisemitism of the Left. Practicing Catholics have long been turned off by amoral proclamations of the Dems, but some are still laboring under tired prejudices of the past. Biden making the sign of the cross before an abortion speech was not a good look.

With improvements in technology, farmers are doing a whole lot better than they did in the 1930s, and are drifting away from the Dems. The white South became 100 percent Democrat during the Civil War, but that started to change 50 years ago.

The last remaining Democrat bastion consists of the major cities, but owing to crime, massive corruption, and minorities leaving the fold, this too is starting to disintegrate. The disgraceful performance of such degenerate officials as Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis are proving to be a major embarrassment, and a “Come to Jesus” moment for Blacks trapped for generations in the Dem swamp.

I think that THIS circle will be broken.

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