The first clear sign that something truly big may be happening was the historic comeback and victory of Donald Trump in last November’s election.

Eight weeks later the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation.

It now appears increasingly likely that in the coming weeks we will see the fall of ruling governments and coalitions in Austria, Germany, France, and Britain. Others, such as Romania, are likely to follow.

The globalist puppets and technocrats that run these western governments are losing their grip even as we speak. The pool of popular discontent filled to the brim by the self-serving actions of the globalist elite is boiling over. And now they are being roundly booted out by the populist movements across the world.

Here are some of the sufferings and depredations the global elites have inflicted upon the masses in recent years:

• Covid lockdowns
• Covid vaccine mandates
• Unfettered immigration
• Cronyism and government corruption
• Inflation
• Out-of-control government spending
• Falling real wages
• Endless warmongering
• Imposition of LGBT and transexual agendas
• Racism against native populations
• Widening wealth disparities
• Attacks on traditional western values and Christianity
• Political correctness
• Widespread censorship
• Demonization and cancellation of those seeking redress of rightful grievance

Up until now the global elitists have been largely successful in keeping the lid on popular discontent stemming from the above. This they managed by demonization and cancellation of objectors and by imposition of a highly efficient censorship regime by means of which they controlled mainstream discourse.

But now, largely through Elon Musk’s uncensored platform X, the pain and resentment of the masses are being brought into the open and aired in the public square.

As a result, the elites are being swept away by the resurgent populist movements that are becoming empowered and quickened by their access to free speech.

The panicked elites predictably blame Elon Musk for their loss of control.

“European leaders unite in sharp rebuke of Elon Musk,” reads a recent news headline. Further down we read:

“[H]highlighting growing tensions between European leadership and tech giant Elon Musk’s political activities, French President Emmanuel Macron has emerged as the latest prominent voice opposing the billionaire’s involvement in continental politics… The French leader’s stance comes amid a broader pushback from European officials, including the prime ministers of Norway and Britain.”

These leaders are not incorrect, just not in the way they think.

Because Musk has made certain political comments, they accuse him of meddling in elections. It is not his statements, however, that have accelerated a shift in the political dynamic. After all, Musk’s pronouncements are neither revolutionary nor particularly remarkable.

The things that Musk has said are simple truths, which is apparent to anyone with common sense. The problem was that those truths were not allowed to be brought up in public discourse under the strict censorship regime that the globalists have imposed on societies.

Because Musk’s widely popular X can reach large swathes of the world’s population, he was able to bring discussion of these forbidden truths back into the public square. And once enough people see the obvious truths articulated out in the open, they join in en masse and something powerful begins to stir.

The global populist revolution now underway has been accelerated by the whiff of free speech that Elon Musk allowed to blow through X rather than by his opinions per say.

The corrupt, fragile, and sclerotic regimes that globalists erected in Western nations – the regimes based on lies, corruption, and suppression of truth – are being brought down by freedom of expression.

As they scramble, the globalists are being exposed for who they truly are: undemocratic totalitarians whose rule rests on merciless across-the-board censorship. These people are the true heirs of the totalitarians of the past – such as communists and fascists – with whom they share a deeply-ingrained reflexive desire to silence opposing voices.

It is the pinnacle of paradox that these censoring totalitarians call those whom they censor and cancel the “enemies of democracy.” The truth is the exact opposite of what they claim. They cannot withstand the truth, which is why they suppress – in true totalitarian fashion – those whose views differ from their own.

Elon Musk may not be perfect, but the fact remains that he has done more for the cause of free speech and democracy than any other man today. This is why the failing censorious globalist totalitarians hate him so.

Needless to say, Elon Musk deserves to be applauded for his effort. After all, free speech is the foundational western value. Without free speech it is not possible to have real freedom or democracy.

On this we should all be able to agree.

About the Author

Vasko Kohlmayer (email) was born and grew up in former communist Czechoslovakia. You can follow his writings by subscribing to his Substack newsletter ’Notes from the Twilight Zone’. He is the author of The West in Crisis: Civilizations and Their Death Drives.

We can say this in the knowledge that over long periods the purchasing power of gold is remarkably stable, while those of fiat currencies are not. This is why everyone should examine their exposure to credit, which is always fiat usually with systemic risk thrown in (unless you hold cash notes). But we are all human, and from time to time worry that the headline values of our gold or silver might fall and we have missed a selling opportunity.

Having broken into new high ground, there is no doubt that there’s much speculation embedded in gold and silver prices. While we should not tie events together to tightly, this build up has been ahead of the BRICS summit in Kazan next week, with speculation that a new trade settlement currency backed by gold might be announced. Well, President Putin said on Friday that “talk of creating a single currency for the BRICS grouping was premature”. It is not ruled out, only it is not for this agenda

That would suggest that this coming week will see profit-taking in gold and silver and perhaps a shake-out of speculative longs as their stops are triggered on Comex. But Putin made his statement deferring the introduction of a new currency on Friday, after which gold and silver soared higher. It was probably wrong therefore to associate rising prices for gold and silver with speculation about a new BRICS currency.

The other material statement was that Putin was open to admitting new members. A few weeks ago, I suggested that this could be accelerated by creating a class of associate members as a stepping stone to full membership and I would take this to now be the case. Could that have been behind the surge in gold and silver?

We cannot know. But looking at last night’s Commitment of Traders figures for last Tuesday and adjusting for Open Interest since then it is clear that gold is now in overbought territory, but could go further.

A consolidation here would be the healthy outcome, at least from a technical point of view. We can bet that central banks and other statist interests would welcome the opportunity to pick up some cheap bullion, underwriting the market. And recently, Russia announced that it was in the market for silver bullion. That’s our last chart.

I wouldn’t rule out a back-test, maybe to $30.50 or so. But the bullish message of the chart is clear. And even that might not happen.

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

While it is true that inequality makes the poor better off and that restricting inequality interferes with liberty, these are not the best arguments that defenders of the free market should use. They accept that inequality is bad, but we should reject this assumption. There is nothing bad about inequality.

People are unequal in every dimension of their being, including weight, height, muscle build, intelligence, and so on. This just the way the world is. Why should we try to change it? People who attempt this have a grudge against the world. They are not satisfied with the way God created it.

And of course they can’t succeed. As the great Murray Rothbard points out, absolute equality is impossible. No two places on earth, for example, offer precisely the same view.

If we shouldn’t defend the free market by arguing that it decreases equality, what should we do? Fortunately, there are many better arguments available. I’m going to list a number of them, but if you want more details, you should read Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market and Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action.

One of the best of these arguments is that the free market makes possible mutually beneficial gains from trade. If I have something that you want and you have something I want, we can make an exchange, so we are both better off. But what if our exchange makes someone else worse off? This question is a version of the “externalities” or “market failure” argument. The claim is that some of our activities, including trade, impose costs on others. If so, this indicates a failure to define property rights. Once we do so, the so-called “problem” dissolves.

This obviously raises another question. How do people acquire property rights? The best answer is given by Rothbard, further developed and extended by the great Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Everybody owns himself and, given that the earth starts out unowned, he can “mix his labor” with the land and thus acquire it.

Before leaving externalities aside, we should note another important argument. People who talk about externalities want the government to correct them, but what reason is there to think that the government will change things so that the supposedly “correct” amount is produced? There is every reason to think that the government will make matters worse.

There is an assumption that we have been making so far that should now be dropped. This assumption is that in deciding what sort of economic system to adopt, we have a choice. We can pick the free market, socialism, or some intermediate system that is a mixture of the free market and socialism. For any developed economy, this is not so, as Mises proved in his famous article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920), expanded into his great book Socialism. Mises proved that without free market prices, economic calculation is impossible. Entrepreneurs cannot tell whether their investments are profitable. So, they are unable to use their resources efficiently. If they cannot do this, the economy will collapse into chaos.

Further, there is no third system intermediate between the free market and socialism. Interference with the market fails to achieve the ostensible goals of its supporters. Minimum wage laws create unemployment. Price controls lead to shortages. Faced with failure, the interventionists must either return to the free market or intervene again, in an effort to remedy the defects of the previous intervention. If this is continued, there will be no free market left. The result will be full-scale socialism, which has already been shown to be impossible.

How did the socialists and interventionists respond to Mises’s conclusive demonstration that their schemes cannot work? They denied the existence of economic laws that restricted what they could do. As Mises says in Human Action, “It is a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the debates concerning the essence, scope, and logical character of economics to dismiss them as the scholastic quibbling of pedantic professors. It is a widespread misconception that while pedants squandered useless talk about the most appropriate method of procedure, economics itself, indifferent to these idle disputes, went quietly on its way.

In the Methodenstreit between the Austrian economists and the Prussian Historical School, the self-styled ‘intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern,’ and in the discussions between the school of John Bates Clark and American Institutionalism much more was at stake than the question of what kind of procedure was the most fruitful one.

The real issue was the epistemological foundations of the science of human action and its logical legitimacy. Starting from an epistemological system to which praxeological thinking was strange and from a logic which acknowledged as scientific–besides logic and mathematics–only the empirical natural sciences and history, many authors tried to deny the value and usefulness of economic theory. Historicism aimed at replacing it by economic history; positivism recommended the substitution of an illusory social science which should adopt the logical structure and pattern of Newtonian mechanics. Both these schools agreed in a radical rejection of all the achievements of economic thought. It was impossible for the economists to keep silent in the face of all these attacks.”

Thus, it’s the free market or nothing. We are fortunate that the only economic system is on that benefits everybody through the chance of making mutually advantageous exchanges.

This point leads to another argument we can use to defend the free market. In the free market, it’s to my advantage that others do well, because they can offer more goods and services to exchange. This will promote peace between nations. Why go to war with people who are making you better off?

Given the abundance of excellent arguments in favor of the free market, there is no need to use argument that accept the enemy’s premise that equality is a good thing. Let’s do everything that we can to support the genuine arguments in favor of the free market, as best expounded by Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises.