Michael Rectenwald

Michael Rectenwald

Michael Rectenwald is the author of eleven books, including Thought Criminal (2020), Beyond Woke (2020), Google Archipelago (2019), Springtime for Snowflakes (2018), Nineteenth-Century British Secularism (2016), and others. He was a professor at NYU from 2008 to 2019.

Articles by Michael Rectenwald

Reparations Are a Statist Cudgel for Bludgeoning Property Owners

San Francisco, as well as the government of California, is calling for millions in "reparations" for black people in that state. Reparations, unfortunately, are fast becoming another anti-property-owner racket.

Original Article: "Reparations Are a Statist Cudgel for Bludgeoning Property Owners"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Read More »

Reparations Are a Statist Cudgel for Bludgeoning Property Owners

San Francisco’s panel on reparations has issued a recommendation that qualified black residents in that city receive $5 million in reparations for the financial effects of slavery and/or racial discrimination. There was never slavery in the city of San Francisco, but the panel nevertheless suggested that city inhabitants must atone for racial discrimination. Such calls for reparations to black people are based on the notion of collective white guilt. But collective guilt is a false notion, and reparations based on it would violate the property rights of those whose ancestors gained nothing from slavery, even if such parties benefited from so-called discrimination.
Leftists and left-leaning liberals extol the merits of reparations. Like New York Times columnist David Brooks, they call for

Read More »

The Attack of the Subversive Elites

We can be sure that the "natural elites" of which Hans Hoppe wrote are not among the Davos crowd. That group of "elites" has an agenda, and it is not liberty and free markets.

Original Article: "The Attack of the Subversive Elites"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Read More »

The Attack of the Subversive Elites

It is tempting, as Naomi Wolf has done recently, to ascribe the breakdown of Western civilization to the debasing of “Judeo-Christian” ethics and the reemergence 0f malignant supernatural forces. Witnessing the many assaults on the infrastructure and social order of the United States of late, I wouldn’t rule out metaphysical causality either. But to blame the pagan gods, or, in specifically Christian terms, to blame Satan, is to take comfort in an obscured perspective on the current global arrangement. To lay culpability strictly on gaseous, unknowable forces is to let the global elite off the hook.
As I write in The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty, the Western world is in the grips and under the control of “subversive elites.” With inordinate power and influence, these people

Read More »

The Great Leap Backward*

[This piece is an excerpt from Chapter 13 of The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda, to be released January 10, 2023.]
This chapter derisively refers to the notorious Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) as the Great Leap Backward. But China’s Great Leap Forward is not the ultimate object of my scorn. That scorn is reserved for the contemporary project conducted by people, who, if they knew anything about history, or cared about its results, would never propose this treacherous and potentially world-devastating campaign called the Great Reset—unless their intentions are evil and not merely misguided.
Meanwhile, I’m not the first to think of this appellation in connection with Mao’s Great Leap. That distinction may be held by a Soviet critic of Mao’s quixotic

Read More »

Notes from the Digital Gulag

As the author of Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom, I guess I should not be surprised to find myself squarely in the digital gulag—banished, perhaps permanently, from Twitter and Facebook. Twitter permanently suspended my account several weeks ago, mere days before Elon Musk took over the helm. Although I cannot be sure, I may have been banned because I suggested that the transgender movement is part of a multipronged neo-Malthusian depopulation campaign. (Note that I said nothing to or about any transgender individuals and thus broke no “Twitter rules,” whatever they may be. I may have been mistaken, but surely being “correct” is not a condition for major social media use. Or is it? Of course it is.)
Now Facebook has demanded proof that I am who I say I

Read More »

Who Really Owns Big Digital Tech?

By now it should be perfectly clear that the most prominent Big Digital companies are not strictly private, for-profit companies. As I argued in Google Archipelago, they are also state apparatuses, or governmentalities, undertaking state functions, including censorship, propaganda, and surveillance.

Read More »

Myth versus Ideology: Why Free Market Thinking Is Nonideological

I’ll begin with a provocative thesis: socialism is ideological and free market thinking, while involving myth, is nonideological. I will show why socialism is ideological and why free market thinking involves myth but is nonideological by defining the terms myth and ideology and distinguishing them from each other.

Read More »

The Backstory of the Great Reset, or How to Destroy Classical Liberalism

As should be clear by now, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration in The End of History: The Last Man (1992) that we had arrived at “the end of history” did not mean that classical liberalism, or laissez-faire economics, had emerged victorious over communism and fascism, or that the final ideological hegemony signaled the end of socialism.

Read More »

Do Conspiracies Really Exist? Murray Rothbard Thought So

The quickest way to discredit an intellectual opponent is to accuse that person of being a "conspiracy theorist." But what happens when real conspiracies occur?

Original Article: "Do Conspiracies Really Exist? Murray Rothbard Thought So"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Read More »

The Great Reset, Part VI: Plans of a Technocratic Elite

In previous installments, I introduced the Great Reset idea1 and treated it in terms of its economic2 and ideological3 components. In this, the sixth installment, I will discuss what the Great Reset entails in terms of governance and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4-IR), closing with remarks about the overall Great Reset project and its implications.

Read More »

The Great Reset, Part IV: “Stakeholder Capitalism” vs. “Neoliberalism”

Any discussion of “stakeholder capitalism” must begin by noting a paradox: like “neoliberalism,” its nemesis, “stakeholder capitalism” does not exist as such. There is no such economic system as “stakeholder capitalism,” just as there is no such economic system as “neoliberalism.” The two antipathetic twins are imaginary ghosts forever pitted against each other in a seemingly endless and frenzied tussle.

Read More »

What Is the Great Reset? Part I: Reduced Expectations and Bio-techno-feudalism

The Great Reset is on everyone’s mind, whether everyone knows it or not. It is presaged by the measures undertaken by states across the world in response to the covid-19 crisis. (I mean by “crisis” not the so-called pandemic itself, but the responses to a novel virus called SARS-2 and the impact of the responses on social and economic conditions.)

Read More »