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October
31
2022

The United States Has Been Overthrown
Paul Craig Roberts

What has taken its place?

The United States has undergone a coup. Having observed no martial conflict, you might think that I have gone off my rocker. But not all coups are physically violent. They can occur because poisonous ideas take hold and subvert the society. The United States is defined by the Constitution, and when the Constitution is eroded away, so is the United States.

The Constitution has been eroding away for a long time. The liberals said the Constitution had to be a living document, which means that it is forever changing, which means redefined, which means eroded.

The Tenth Amendment was lost to Abraham Lincoln. George W. Bush got rid of habeas corpus in the name of national security when he declared that the “terrorist threat” gave him the power to hold American citizens indefinitely without presentation of evidence to a court, without trial and conviction. And he did. Obama one-upped Bush. He said he could execute American citizens on suspicion alone without due process of law. And he did. They were not held accountable for their violation of the US Constitution.

Today free speech and association are dead letter rights. Everyone can now censor our free speech–employers, school boards, people claiming they are “offended,” social media, print and TV media. People who say something “offensive” can be erased and never heard from again. What this means is that whoever controls the right to be “offended” can cancel the free speech of those who cannot claim to be “offended.” Without free speech, there is no debate, just the imposition of approved views.

In Woke America, this is the situation today.

You can also tell a coup has occurred when traditional patriots like Make America Great Again Trump supporters and Oath Keepers are demonized by media and government officials as “domestic extremists,” persecuted, and imprisoned on false charges, such as the Americans who attended a rally in support of Trump and were  turned, with Republican complicity, into “insurrectionists” who tried to seize control of the government by taking selfies of themselves sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s chair.

When something so juvenile can be designated an insurrection, you know a coup has occurred. The message is clear. Those supporting the established order against the coup that is being imposed are enemies of the people.

You can also tell a coup has occurred when perversity of all kinds, particularly sexual, is celebrated and normality is derided as “fascism” or some form of phobia or other word of abuse. When the moral high ground is held by LGBT– people who cannot reproduce–and nature’s norm of heterosexual is regarded. as an unjustified definition of normality, the natural order has been overthrown.

That’s where we are today. Soon pedophilia will be declared normal, and there will be brothels where formerly depraved people, now normalized, can have sex with children.

Impossible, you say, but not, for once one perversity is legitimized, all others follow, as we have experienced. It is just a matter of time. Once the rot starts, it doesn’t stop until the job is finished.  We already have one foot in Sodom and Gomorrah, and the other foot is drawing nearer.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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