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Feature / September 30, 2023

While most celebrity goldbugs are on the far rightthe list includes Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, Candace Owens, Ron Paul, and Jordan PetersonDemocrats are not immune from the strange charms of this economic delusion.

While most celebrity goldbugs are on the far rightSteve Bannon, Glenn Beck, Candace Owens, Ron PaulDemocrats are not immune from the strange charms of this economic delusion.

When Steve Bannon isnt trying to get Donald Trump back into the White House, hes busy hawking gold. But then the two projects are essentially the same: nostalgic sales pitches to anxious seniors who rely on exciting, apocalyptic right-wing nightmares on a regular basis. Since June 2020, Bannons podcast has been sponsored by Birch Gold, a nifty arrangement that unites politics and financial interest. The merger of pseudo-journalism and salesmanship could be seen in a March 2021 episode in which Bannon talked to a Birch Gold spokesman, Phillip Patrick. Bannon warned of the coming inferno that was ready to ignite because of Joe Bidens alleged mismanagement of the economy, with high spending and deficits inevitably leading not just to inflation but to the possible end of the US dollar as the worlds reserve currency. In a typical Bannon move, the former Trump adviser even echoed some arguments that have traction on the left, notably the idea that the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are on the cusp of shaking off US financial dominance. All of this doom and gloom is not just designed to rally GOP voters for a Trump-Biden rematch; its also a sales pitch for gold, a product Bannon touts in commercials and even in a 2022 booklet, the ominously titled The End of the Dollar Empire.

In mainstream journalism, this merging of punditry and product placement would be considered an ethical lapse. Even Fox News, a network not famous for being scrupulous about media ethics, became concerned in 2009 when its then-host Glenn Beck, who was being sponsored by Goldline (a company Beck praised as the people I trust), made a hard-sell argument for buying gold. Beck told his viewers that to survive Barack Obamas evil regime, they needed the protection of the Three Gs: God, gold, and guns. Fox pushed Goldline to clarify that Beck, who had been described on Goldlines website as a paid spokesman, wasnt in fact directly given money for his advocacy.

Bannon and Beck are not alone in having murky ties to gold boosterismor as critics of the shiny metal call it, goldbuggery. In July 2023, The Washington Post reported on the controversy surrounding a company called Lear Capital, which sells gold coins as a retirement investment, often to elderly clients. According to the newspaper, While the legitimacy of the gold retirement investment industry is the subject of numerous lawsuitsincluding allegations of fraud by federal and state regulators against Lear and other companiesits advertising has become a mainstay of right-wing media. Ads for Lear are a staple on Fox News, among other right-wing venues.

As Axios reported in 2021, With inflation rising and Congress pumping out massive spending bills, conservative media have focused renewed attention on financial issuesand lent significant airtime to some of the very companies underwriting their shows. Axios cited the conservative journalist Ben Shapiro as well as Bannon as having ties to Birch Gold. A fuller list of Birch Gold endorsers reads like the guest list for a Donald Trump birthday bash: Ron Paul, Candace Owens, Dinesh DSouza, Michael Savage, Jordan Peterson, Ben Carson, and many more.

These MAGA metal peddlers have the ears not just of the credulous consumers of right-wing media but also of many politicians, especially in red states. In recent years theres been a flurry of state-level activity, with Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, Ohio, and Arkansas removing the sales tax on gold and silver coins, bars, and rounds, partly on the argument that these metal objects are currency. Wyoming has passed a bill authorizing the state treasury to have a stock of gold and silver and also allowing the state to be paid in those metals in certain circumstances. A lawmaker in Tennessee is pushing for the creation of an in-state bullion depository (to serve as a backup currency and as a barrier to any federal expropriation of the sort Franklin Roosevelt ordered in 1933). These moves seem quixotic because the US Constitution bars states from issuing their own currency. They are best understood instead as attempts to create the preconditions for the long-held right-wing dream of returning to the gold standard.

In 2016, Trump cagily tried to harness the GOPs gold mania by gesturing toward goldbuggery without fully committing to it. Bringing back the gold standard would be very hard to do, but, boy, would it be wonderful, Trump enthused. Wed have a standard on which to base our money. Like many Trump statements, it displays some cunning ambiguity. But Trump did nominate goldbug Judy Shelton to the Federal Reserve, an appointment that stalled when even some Republican senators balked at her radicalism.

Goldbuggery is on the upswing. The current rebirth of shiny-metal fetishism is strange, though. As a practical matter, the most common financial argument for goldthat its a hedge against inflationdoesnt hold water. Gold peaked in August 2020 at $2,035.55. Three years later, it stands at $1,936.56. Given the post-Covid spike in inflation, anyone who invested in gold on Bannons advice has lost ground. Even among the cranky right, gold now has a formidable digital competitor in the form of bitcoin, which promises to do everything that gold allegedly does: act as a store of value beyond the reach of governments or inflation (though the rising price of bitcoin probably has more to do with irrational exuberance than with anything intrinsic to the cryptocurrency). Superficially, gold and bitcoin seem like radically divergent alternative currencies. The whole appeal of gold is that it is solid as can be, hard to destroy, and, with its value as a piece of metal, possesses all sorts of extrinsic uses (from jewelry to dental fillings to transistors). Bitcoin, by contrast, is as intangible as a mathematical formula. What unites the two is that they are both finiteand thus beyond the scope of any government to newly mint, as can be done with fiat money.

Even Ronald Reagan, an earlier and ardent admirer of the gold standard, found it hard to rally the requisite team of economic experts to attempt a hard-metal restoration, since there was no consensus among GOP economists as to whether a gold standard was desirable or even how to implement one. Still, Bannon and Trump shocked the world once by winning the presidency in 2016. Will gold restoration be their second act?

The far rights love affair with gold is an old story, but its a passion that has been rekindled in the Biden era. In his deeply researched book One Nation Under Gold (2017), the journalist James Ledbetter demonstrates that for the first century and a half of American history, gold polarized our politics into hard-money factions (who favored the interests of rich creditorsand states rights) and soft-money advocates (who skewed toward the concerns of debtors and believers in a more expansive national governmentmost famously the perennial populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan).

A pivot point came in 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard and outlawed the private ownership of gold as a way to prevent hoarding during the Great Depression. This generated a backlash, which Ledbetter argues created a permanent political coalition deeply opposed to [Roosevelts] view of the federal government, using gold as its central symbol and occasionally veering into the politics of conspiracy and hate. Gold bricks are thus part of the very building blocks of the modern American right.

FDRs move was only temporary: In 1934, the United States returned to a partial gold bullion standard (with the government setting the price of gold). This type of gold managementwith some portion of US currency backed by goldwas codified in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference, which established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Bretton Woods system was always a hodgepodge, with the promise of partial gold payment for US dollars hedged by backdoor manipulation of the price of gold by central banks in Europe and North America. But the combined financial pressures of Lyndon Johnsons Great Society programs and Vietnam War military budgets finally led Richard Nixon to formally abandon the gold standard in 1971.

Initially a hobbyhorse of wealthy investors and inveterate FDR haters, the cause of gold-standard restoration slowly gained intellectual clout thanks to the advocacy of libertarian economists such as Murray Rothbard (the author of the influential 1963 tract What Has Government Done to Our Money?) and Alan Greenspan (who in 1966 wrote an essay arguing for the superiority of the gold standard in a newsletter published by his philosophical guru, Ayn Rand). But while Rothbard and Greenspan fought in the abstract realm of theory, the real battle for gold was waged among the right-wing masses by apocalyptic investment advisers who flamed the threat of doomsday to sell metals.

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In 1970, Harry Browne, a financial tout who later ran twice as a presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, wrote the massively successful bestseller How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation. Browne was right that inflation was a looming threat at the time (thanks in no small part to the financial shenanigans of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as they tried to hide the costs of the Vietnam War from the public). And like many other works of that tumultuous era, Brownes book had the whiff of Armageddon. He advised not just buying gold to protect against inflation but burying it in the ground. Readers were also told to take survivalist measures, buying rural retreats with a years supply of goods, in order to have freedom from the chaos and rioting that would accompany runaway inflation.

On the plus side, Browne was confident that the complete collapse of the social order would offer the properly prepared an opportunity to new wealth. The prepper mentality of antisocial selfishness persists today. In 2017, The New Yorker profiled this breed of ber-rich gold obsessives, including the head of an investment firm who had an underground bunker with an air-filtration system. He claimed that a lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins.

Brian Doherty, an editor at the libertarian magazine Reason and the author of Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement (2007), notes that gold in the libertarian imagination was very connected with this sense of crisis and collapse. He describes the belief that your money is going to be worthless, everything is going to be worthless. The only thing that matters is the lead in your gun and the gold in your yard.

Browne was in many ways a precursor to Bannon and his ilknot least in also taking money from the firms he promoted as investments. He was a strong advocate for Pacific Coast Coin Exchange. A Securities and Exchange Commission investigation revealed that Browne was the director of marketing for PCCE and received $100,000 in commissions in the early 1970sa fact undisclosed to his many readers. In 1974, the New York State attorney general described PCCEs actions as a colossal fraud. The company sold gold coins that it claimed were in its depository but that in fact never existed. In 1975, the legal scholar James C. Treadway Jr. concluded that a between-the-lines reading of the allegations indicates that a Ponzi [scheme] probably existed.

As Ledbetter documents in his book, this type of fraud is all too common in the gold commodity world, which considers loose regulation a feature, not a bug.

Theres a parallel level of intellectual fraud as well, since gold is both an investment opportunity and an ideological cause. But the Republican Party has long played a shell game on this issue, uttering goldbug sentiments to stir the base while keeping policy securely in the hands of Wall Streeters who know there is no plausible path for a return to gold.

The Republican hypocrisy can best be seen in the 1982 Report to the Congress of the Commission on the Role of Gold in the Domestic and International Monetary Systemsa commission convened to placate the goldbug faction. On the stump, at least, President Ronald Reagan often preached the goldbug gospel. Another goldbug, the notorious conspiracy nut and extremist Lyndon Larouche, submitted a statement to the commission. Congressman Ron Paul, for whom gold and opposition to the Federal Reserve were career-long obsessions, was among the commissions members.

But all this pro-gold sentiment was just for show. Reagans chief of staff, Donald Regan, and his secretary of state, George Shultz, were opposed to any return to the gold standard. Reagan adviser Murray Weidenbaum claimed that his role on the commission was a damage-limitation function or the avoidance of economic harm. The eminent economist Anna Schwartz, the executive director of the commission, claimed that it was hobbled by the fact that the Reagan administration had no intention to return to the gold standard.

On the gold standard, Republicans say one thing to stir up votersand do another when holding office. This is true even of their intellectuals. In his 1966 essay, Alan Greenspan insisted that an unhampered free international gold standard serves to foster a world-wide division of labor and the broadest international trade. Greenspan also provided a clue as to why the right loves the gold standard, noting that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). In his ringing conclusion, Greenspan insisted, Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

Yet even in this fervent essay, Greenspan hedges, noting that a fully free banking system and fully consistent gold standard have not yet been achieved. In other words, to paraphrase many discussions of socialism, true goldbuggery has never been tried. Among those who would never try it was Greenspandespite serving as chairman of the Federal Reserve under four presidents.

Rothbard was similarly theoretical in his advocacy, making the axiomatic claim that only privately created coins are true money, with fiat money (currency issued by a government without any exchange value of its own) always a fiction. Government is powerless to create money for the economy, Rothbard insisted; it can only be developed by the processes of the free market. This flies in the face of the reality that virtually every government on earth uses fiat moneyand has done so for many decadeswithout any sign of the economic apocalypse predicted by the likes of Rothbard.

Greenspan acknowledged the point of this critique during his Senate confirmation hearings in 1987. Disavowing the Randian indiscretions of his youth, Greenspan carefully walked back his position. Under the conditions of the nineteenth century, he said, the gold standard probably worked more effectively than critics assert today, and if the key conditions could be replicated we might be well served by such a standard. However, considering the huge block of currently outstanding dollar claims in world markets, fixing the price of gold by central bank intervention seems out of reach. Yet Greenspan didnt completely abandon his support for gold. He once claimed that he was the sole vote for returning to gold on the Federal Open Market Committeea purely symbolic gesture with no chance of affecting policy.

A similar double-mindedness about gold can be seen in other libertarian advocates. Milton Friedman acknowledged that fiat money was unlikely to be dislodged, so his recommendations were aimed at a monetary policy that suited the free market. But on occasion, hed make gestures indicating that a return to the gold standard would be desirable.

A parallel battle between theoretical preference and reality can be seen in an interview given in 1984 by Friedrich Hayek, the towering free market advocate. I sympathize with the people who would like to return to the gold standard, Hayek wistfully said. I wish it were possible. I am personally convinced it cannot be done for two reasons: the gold standard presupposes certain dogmatic beliefs which cannot be rationally justified, and our present generation is not prepared to readopt beliefs which were old traditions and have been discredited. But even more serious, I believe that any attempt to return to gold will lead to such fluctuations in the value of gold that it will break down.

Hayeks reference to dogmatic beliefs is not that far from the view of his ideological foe, John Maynard Keynes, who referred to the gold standard as a barbarous relic.

The historian Rick Perlstein, who has written many books about the American right, told me that the roots of goldbuggery lie in the need conservatives have for something solid. As he sums up their credo: There are two genders, the Bible is the way God wrote it, the Constitution is the way the founding fathers wrote it, and gold is the only real money. In other words, goldbuggery is not just an economic preference but a kind of superstitionthe fetishization of a hard and tangible object to ward off the fact that social reality (including the reality of money) inevitably entails fluidity, abstraction, and the creation of consensus-based agreements.

By considering it as a species of superstitious delusion, we can make sense of goldbuggerys inevitable cognitive dissonance. For example, goldbugs want both a gold standard (which for much of the 20th century meant government regulation, including laws prohibiting private ownership) and a robust speculative market. As James Ledbetter told me, You cannot have a sustainable system where gold is both a standard for a currency and a speculative investment. These [aims] are completely at odds with one another. But it doesnt seem to matter to this audience. The contradiction can only be sustained because the mere discussion of the idea of gold touches some lizard part of the brain, Ledbetter said, which thinks: Both things are good. I want both of those things.

As a libertarian, Brian Doherty is sympathetic to the goldbug critique of fiat money, which he notes is shared by bitcoin advocates. He sums up this idea as the belief that if the government can make more of it at will, its going to lead to inflation; its going to lead to wars.

I do detect a real turn in the libertarian community of currency cranks and visionaries, a turn away from hard money towards crypto, Doherty says. But he adds that as a practical matter, gold makes much more sense than crypto. Its easy for a crusty old libertarian to say, Well, my gold coins are buried in my yard in a cannister, and they are safe and I know where they are. The fucking electricity doesnt have to be on for them to work.

But short of such a post-apocalyptic scenario, does using gold as the basis for the monetary system of a nation make any sense? As even Doherty admits, For now, that question is purely academic because the market has shown that the money that most people prefer is the fucking US dollar, no matter what flaws that libertarians see in it.

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column Morbid Symptoms. The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Moulys Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman(2013) andSweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles(2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian,The New Republic,and The Boston Globe.

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Senator Menendez Is Just the Latest Sucker to Fall for Fool's Gold - The Nation

Our college exists to combat nihilism by opening our students to the integral wisdom of the pastthe great traditionand to the truth of nature directly experienced. We are firmly centered in God, not in the abstract, but in the real world, in what He has revealed about His action in human time, and more specifically still, in the cross that pierces the center of history.

In 1967, an English professor gave a talk at the annual Honors Banquet at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and the University later sent it out to its alumni, saying that it was eminently worthy of note. The professor defended the idea of tradition against those who argue that the advances of the modern world have made the past useless. In The Use of Education, his critique was harsh: When a person says, in all honesty and not just to be smart, but sincerely, that he cannot comprehend the past, he means that he cannot rightly comprehend anything at all. He has no capacity for wonder, he has no imagination, and therefore thought for him is nonsense. A little later in the talk, sounding like an Old Testament prophet, he said that our own children are being stolenand not from us, but from their heritageby low philosophies of leisure and luxury, a shameless materialism, cheap notions of success.

What Dr.John Senior said was eminently worthy of note. A few years later, he left Wyoming and moved to the University of Kansas, where he became a seminal figure in the renowned Integrated Humanities Program. An undergraduate named Robert Carlson was his student as an undergraduate, and several decades later, Dr. Carlson wrote the founding document of WCC, the Philosophical Vision Statement. The PVS draws everywhere upon the spirit of education articulated by Senior in his teaching and his writing, not only in the 1967 lecture, but in his later books, notably The Death of Christian Culture and The Restoration of Christian Culture.

Why found a new college? That was Dr. Carlsons question, and in the PVS, he explains the need for WCC. He lists major changes in contemporary life, including the loss of the authority of the traditional family and the evaporation of content from education on every level. The major problem, he explains, is the disintegration that results from the absence of a center. Reflecting on the various devastations that result from the loss of God, he comes to this conclusion:

Today, more and more students come to our colleges and universities enmeshed in nihilism acquired from their early education and from our culture at large. This nihilism is further nourished in our colleges and universities. It is rooted in the denigration of objective truth and feeds a denial of any objective meaning in life. It leads to a loss of hope that ends in the despairing cry of Macbeth: Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Dr. Carlson wrote the PVS in 2005, but strong contemporary thinkersJordan Peterson comes to mindcontinue to emphasize the corrosive nihilism of the culture. What exactly do they mean? What do they understand nihilism to be?

The history of the word goes back to the early 1800s, when it had a different meaning, but the pertinent sense was fully present 150 years ago, from about the time that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto:total rejection of prevailing religious beliefs, moral principles, laws, etc., often from a sense of despair and the belief that life is devoid of meaning. Also more generallynegativity, destructiveness, hostility to accepted beliefs or established institutions. The question to askand the answer entails a study of the past 500 yearsis why the advancement of science over these centuries coincides with the denigration of objective truth in the moral and religious spheres.

No one has escaped the fundamental argument, which goes something like this: science is about facts, and meanings are about values. Through some evolutionary trait, once useful, people want their lives to mean something, so they collectively invent ways to value things so that meanings exist. Baseball might be an example. What does it take to understand the excellence of Shohei Ohtanis 2021 season for the Los Angeles Angels? Sports Illustrated compared Ohtani to Babe Ruth and even implied that he might be a better player than the Sultan of Swat himself. To baseball fans, such comparisons are monumental. To those ignorant of baseball (which is obviously an invented game), the attention paid to Ohtani might draw a mild interest, but not awe, not the reverence he has earned, especially in Japan.

In fact, the argument continues, isnt all meaning invented in the same way? Nothing means anything in itself, but only in terms of its place in a constructed system of value, and such systems include all religions, all laws, all philosophies. In the world per se, there is no objective meaning or good. We invent all systems of value. We are just kidding ourselves that being good makes any difference. Nihilism is simply the default position of the mind convinced that it has to invent its own meaning.

On the other hand, if a good and loving God gave his creatures an intelligible world, and if it takes every bit of human capacity to understand even the smallest bit of what exists, what we have been given, then baseball looks very different. It offers a brilliantly complex imitation of the order built into the world as we really experience it. The better the double play or walk-off home run, the better the analogy. Every challenging game, every good legal system, every morally responsible code reflects the given order and teaches us more about it. We have reason to exclaim over Shohei Ohtanis incredible season.

As the PVS makes clear, Wyoming Catholic College exists to combat nihilism by opening our students to the integral wisdom of the pastthe great traditionand to the truth of nature directly experienced. We are firmly centered in God, not in the abstract (as though He were a useful organizational idea like Orwells Big Brother), but in the real world, in what He has revealed about His action in human time, and more specifically still, in the cross that pierces the center of history.

Republished with gracious permission fromWyoming Catholic College.

This essay was first published here in December 2021.

The Imaginative Conservativeapplies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politicswe approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please considerdonating now.

The featured image is Der Dorfschulmeister seine Gebhren einsammelnd (1854) by Carl Schrder, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Why We Teach - The Imaginative Conservative

If the right gets its way, maybe in a decade or two, the United States will be free of its slave-owning past.

All gone gone with the wind. Its just not taught anymore. Yeah, we had a civil warabout states rightsand then we moved on: We conquered the West, saved the world first from the Nazis, then from the commies, and remain the greatest country ever. Hurray for capitalism! Any questions?

Oh, one last thing: The commiesa.k.a., the Marxistsare still around. Theyre everywhere. As Ben Burgis noted, Marxism means anything conservatives find frightening. I recently learned, for instance, that theyve invaded the Smithsonian Institution specifically, an exhibit about Latino history in the United States.

As critics wrote a year ago in The Hill: A new Latino exhibit at the National Museum of American History offers an unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history, religion and economics. It is, quite frankly, disgraceful.

Indeed, the exhibitwhich focuses on the history of Latino youth movementsis so outrageous, according to the critics, that it clearly demonstrates the need to immediately cut congressionally approved funding for the construction of the National Museum of the American Latino, because . . . you know, the Marxists. Among their current tactics to undermine the greatest country ever is to write their own version of American history, which focuses on all the stuff we need to forget about.

By now everyone knows about the ongoing conservative furor over American schools teaching what they called critical race theory. This is a name they plunked from the world of academia and turned into an evil, Marxist plot to make (white) American children feel uncomfortable by forcing them to learn about how there used to be systemic racism in this country. That is, once upon a time, white America, in the wake of freeing the slaves and outlawing slavery, maintained its sense of supremacy by legally, and often violently, enforcing, as George Wallace once put it, Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. And of course, the essence of segregation was separate and unequalfrom housing, jobs and schools to bathrooms and drinking fountains.

From the conservative point of view: poof! It no longer exists, so it never happened. And those who insist otherwise are caught in the grip of Marxistsa term nowadays that simply means the purveyors of absolute evil.

Beyond the teaching of history, here are a few other ways that Marxists, according to conservative writers and pundits, have infiltrated America:

2. Black awareness, a.k.a., being woke. Ron DeSantis has described it as a form of cultural Marxism, which of course is pervading American schools.

3. Gender equality. As AP reported, various Republicans, including DeSantis and Ted Cruz, have used the term cultural Marxism to characterize fights for gender or racial equity that they argue are woke and threaten a traditional American way of life.

4. Racial integration. Ah, the old days. In 1959, according to Current Affairs, protestors surrounded the Arkansas state capitol building in Little Rock, carrying signs that declared: Race Mixing Is Communism.

5. The prosecution of DonaldTrump. According to AP: Hours after pleading not guilty in federal court, Trump told a crowd of his supporters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, that Biden, together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy. He added that, even if the communists get away with this, it wont stop me.

Im sure there are plenty more ways that conservatives envision the Marxists are trying to skewer the countrys greatness, or will in the future. For the moment, what continues to consume my attention is the right-wing desperation to control history and not simply challenge but banish any version of it that counters their certainty about who we are.

For instance, Alex Skopic at CurrentAffairs quotes author James Lindsay, who described efforts to address racial injustice in America as, in actuality, the tip of a one-hundred-year-long spear that is being thrust into the side of Western civilization.

Ouch!

The present moment comes and goes. Apparently what matters is how or whether you talk about it afterwards. In other words, establishing our history creates the present. Thats the reason critical race theory is such a serious nuisance to the right wing. While I am absolutely willing to acknowledge that virtually any version of history is likely factually flawed and politically influenced, I would suggest to conservatives that trying to banish versions they dont like, and writing them off as Marxist, will not make the truth go away.

History is not some kind of Biblical narrative: In the beginning, God wrote the Declaration of Independence . . . Or whatever. History is deeply complex and full of chaos. Our understanding of it is ever-shifting. Terrible things have occurred that need to be faced, addressed and, eventually, transcended.

Johanna Fernandez, one of the historians who put together the Latino history exhibit that caused such a stir, said: We live in La-La Land. White Americans, Black Americans, Latino Americans walking around, really not understanding who we are, why were here, and how we got to this place. Whats so dangerous about honestly grappling with the history of this country?

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The Painful Facts of American History Cannot Be Erased - Common Dreams

In August, 2021, a new, shirtless figure appeared on Instagram and TikTok. With a great shaggy beard and muscles the approximate size and color of ripe pumpkins, he was part cowboy, part Conan the Barbarian. Im Brian Johnson, he said in his third Instagram video. My family and tribe call me Liver King. He is the owner of Ancestral Supplementswhich sells desiccated organ meat in capsule formand a walking marketing campaign.

Within eight months, the Liver King had amassed a million and a half followers on Instagram and nearly three million on TikTok. He was mellow at first, but he embraced the new persona, growing crasser and more meme-worthy, and less clothed. (On a podcast in March, 2022, he said that the Liver King broke out of his cage, and he fucking ate Brian Johnson.) Most of his videos centered on eating meat, lifting heavy stuff, and doing punishing, unorthodox workouts. His body, he said, was all natural, the product not of steroids but of exercise and eating animals.

The Liver Kings premise, a familiar one by now, is that we are mismatched with the modern world and that many of our problems can be solved by reconnecting with long-lost ways. He insists on nine ancestral tenets. These include reasonable suggestions like sleep, move, and bond, but, as he once explained, if I tell you all nine, you dont remember anything. Instead, he boiled his recommendations down to one: I say, Eat liver, because liver is king. The best-selling, stand-alone product on ancestralsupplements.com is Grassfed Beef Liver.

The craze for eating the way our ancestors did is nothing new; it has been more than two decades since the exercise physiologist Loren Cordain published The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat (2001), helping launch a billion-dollar industry. But the Liver King, along with a crew of other meatfluencers, has pushed paleo to an extreme of carnivory. They maintain that humans evolved to kill animals similar in size and constitution to domesticated cattle, to devour their organs (often raw), and to eat vegetables only in the most desperate of circumstances.

Forget the leaves and fibrous tubers, were going hunting! Paul Saladino (IG followers: 1.6M) writes in The Carnivore Code, the closest thing the new movement has to a manifesto. He asserts that this approach appears to be exactly what our ancestors did. (Saladino co-owns a supplement company, Heart & Soil, with the Liver King.) According to The Carnivore Code, plants are poisonthey dont want to be eaten, and have, as a result, evolved defensive chemicals designed to disrupt your digestion. Likewise, in The Carnivore Diet, Shawn Baker (IG followers: 319K) says that the most efficient way proto-humans got protein and calories was to take down a big, fatty, energy-filled megafaunal animal. They may have nibbled on the occasional fruit or nut, he admits, but the time and energy needed to get the same payoff would have been greater by at least an order of magnitude. The Liver King himself came up with the pithiest tagline: Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?

The notion of the meat-loving ancestor has a history. In the nineteen-fifties, the anatomist Raymond Dart, famous for discovering the first authentic fossil of an early African hominin, advanced what became known as the killer ape theory. Hunting, Dart thought, made us human. Our furry forebears climbed down from the trees to gorge on the more attractive fleshy food that lay in the vast savannahs of the southern plains, he wrote in the book Adventures with the Missing Link (1959). Elsewhere, he described the earliest hominins as confirmed killers: carnivorous creatures that seized their quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh.

The killer-ape theory seeped into the mainstream. In 1955, Dart, then based at the University of the Witwatersrand, met the playwright Robert Ardrey, who was in South Africa for a reporting trip. Like a convert seeing the holy truth, Ardrey came away transformed. He was convinced that the predatory transition not only made us human but also explained what he described as mans bloody history, his eternal aggression, his irrational, self-destroying inexorable pursuit of death for deaths sake. Ardrey was inspired to write the Nature of Man series, a set of books about human nature and evolution, published between 1961 and 1976. Time later named African Genesis, the first in the series, the most notable nonfiction book of the sixties. It was cited as an influence on Stanley Kubricks film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose opening sequence showed primate violence as a turning point in the development of our species.

As Ardrey and Kubrick popularized the killer ape, anthropologists started to review the evidence. In 1966, at a meeting remembered in anthropological lore as the beginning of hunter-gatherer studies, seventy-five experts assembled in Chicago to synthesize our knowledge about foraging peoples. More than ninety-nine per cent of human history was spent without agriculture, the organizers figured, so it was worth documenting that way of life before it disappeared altogether. The symposiumand an associated volume that appeared two years later, both titled Man the Hunterexemplified an obsession with hunting, meat-eating, and maleness. Man was meant to cover all humans; hunter was shorthand for anyone who subsisted on wild food. The book devoted an entire section to the role of hunting in human evolution. Hunting is the master behavior pattern of the human species, a chapter began. It is the organizing activity which integrated the morphological, physiological, genetic, and intellectual aspects of the individual human organisms and of the population who compose our single species.

The meeting also revealed problems with the meat-centric story. Dart had asserted that all prehistoric men and the most primitive of living human beings are hunters, i.e., flesh eaters. But contributors to Man the Hunter showed how one-sided this perspective was. The anthropologist Richard Lee reported that the !Kung, one of the so-called Bushman people of Southern Africa, got two-thirds of their calories from plants. Nor were they an exception. When he compared fifty-eight foraging societies from around the world, Lee found that half got the majority of their calories from plant foods; another eighteen relied mostly on fishing. Only elevenless than a fifthrelied on hunting as their primary means of subsistence, and all but one were limited to either the highest or the lowest latitudes, far beyond our African homeland.

Since the publication of Man the Hunter, scientists have incorporated genomic as well as new archeological and paleontological methods into the study of diets from deep history. The details differ and its easy to get lost in the weeds, but the overarching message from each is clear: we evolved as opportunistic omnivores, Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, writes in his recent book, Burn. It includes a takedown of paleo-style tropes, including carnivory. Humans eat whatevers available, which is almost always a mix of plants and animals (and honey).

Pontzer shows just how far the consensus has shifted. Dart had insisted that Australopithecus, an early group of human ancestors, gulped down blood and guts, and yet scratch patterns on their molars suggest that they were lovers of tubers. Our more recent forebears ate plants, too, including ones vilified by paleo advocates. Consider Neanderthal diets, which Rebecca Wragg Sykes covers in vivid detail in Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Neanderthals certainly ate big beasts; sites are filled with the bones of butchered bison and red deerthere are even indications that they took down mammoths. Yet Neanderthals living in warm, wet environs had tooth-wear patterns similar to those of agricultural peoples who eat lots of fibrous plants. Further evidence has come from investigating Neanderthals dental calculusthat is, from probing their plaque. Shortly before he died, an individual known as Shanidar 3 consumed dates, a lentil-like plant, and an unidentified tuber or root. The remains of two adults found in Belgium had traces of grasses and water-lily-root starches, suggesting that they had foraged for plant food. A sample from El Sidrn, in Spain, had no large-mammal DNA, but it turned up matches for pine, mushroom, and moss. Scattered morsels of prehistoric diets reveal an enduring taste for veggies.

No controlled studies have been published that validate the extravagant health claims made for the carnivore diet, but the meatfluencers are undeterred. In The Carnivore Diet, Shawn Baker lists eczema, depression, and fibromyalgia as ailments that seem to respond positively to the carnivore diet. The psychologist Jordan Peterson claims that a regimen of beef, salt, and water sharpened his thinking, cleared up his psoriasis, and eliminated his gum disease; his daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, insists that the same diet, supplemented with lamb, bison, and the occasional vodka or bourbon, cured her arthritis. In The Complete Carnivore Diet for Beginners: Your Practical Guide to an All-Meat Lifestyle, by Judy Cho (IG followers: 99.8K), carnivory is presented as a powerful remedy, with potential for alleviating depression, inflammation, eating disorders, and autoimmune issues.

Living off flesh alone is not easy, though, and Cho lays out suggestions for how to survive. Too much lean protein can cause problems, so make sure at least seventy per cent of your calories come from fat. Too little mastication can lead to constipation, so try to chew each piece of meat twenty to thirty times. Carnivores tend to have messed-up thirst cues, so drink more often than might feel natural. If you dont like meat, stop snacking until youre so hungry that it becomes appealing. To ease the transition, Cho offers various weeklong meal plans, along with helpful tables of permissible items and their nutritional statistics.

Some meatfluencers stress that human beings are animals and maintain that, if allowed to eat according to our animal instincts, we will favor a meaty menu. But the biologists David Raubenheimer and StephenJ. Simpson have been investigating animal alimentation for more than thirty years, and their new book, Eat Like the Animals, suggests that the meatfluencers have it all wrong. The authors started collaborating at Oxford, studying the eating preferences of locusts (grasshoppers, basically). First, they found that locusts preferred a certain ratio of carbohydrates to protein. When forced to live on foods higher in carbs and lower in protein, the insects ate a lot, becoming obese, and took longer to molt to adulthood. Conversely, when put on the insect version of the Atkins diet, they ate far fewer calories and were less likely to make it to adulthood. Second, they found that locusts with a decent food selection always ended up with near-identical ratios of protein and carbohydrates. Its as if, regardless of whether we were offered meat and pasta, or egg and bread, or beans and rice, or fish and potatoes, we always consumed the exact same balance of protein and carbs. The critters somehow track which nutrients are in which foods.

These findings arent limited to insects. Raubenheimer and Simpson have since determined that the pattern is widespread across the animal kingdom, from beetles to baboons. And they have found that protein-loaded diets dont just age animals; they kill them faster. Our sexy, lean mice who ate high-protein, low-carb diets were the shortest lived of all, they wrote of research published in 2014. They made great-looking middle-aged corpses.

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Is an All-Meat Diet What Nature Intended? - The New Yorker

If you live in California, New England, or a certain corner of the internet where Christian Reformed pastor Paul VanderKlay posts long, deep think pieces on the big questions of life, you might have heard of Estuary. Its a place where things get stirred up and people who might have been alienated from Christians are finding themselves in fascinating conversations with them.

CrossPoint Church, a large, multilingual Christian Reformed congregation in Chino, Calif., is home to the Inland Empire Estuary meetup group. Meeting since 2021, this group is part of a growing number of groups that use the Estuary model to facilitate two-hour conversations on big questions the group chooses at each session.

Many Estuary groups meet in person; some meet online by video conference. The Chino group was started by John Vandonk, a former CRC pastor who is one of roughly 26,400 subscribers to Paul VanderKlays YouTube channel. VanderKlay is pastor of Living Stones CRC in Sacramento, Calif. Responding at first to things he found interesting about psychologist, author, and speaker Jordan Peterson, VanderKlay started a thinking out loud YouTube channel in 2009. He hosts conversations and commentaries on cultural happenings, movements in the CRC, and the intellectual explorations of people like the controversial Peterson, Awakening From the Meaning Crisis lecturer John Vervaeke, and The Symbolic World commentator Jonathan Pageau. Vandonk encouraged VanderKlay to find a way to extend and improve on the disjointed and disembodied conversations comment sections on social media are known for. Together they developed Estuary to be a place and a way to have those conversations.

In addition to meetup groups24 are currently listed on estuaryhub.comthere have been conferences: in September 2022 in Thunder Bay, Ont., and in May 2023 in Chino, Calif. And Pleasant Street CRC in Whitinsville, Mass., hosted VanderKlay for a sample Estuary meeting Aug. 2.

The name Estuary was chosen because of the imagery it projects. In geography an estuary is where rivers meet the ocean. It is a sometimes chaotic space where mighty currents may encounter crashing waves, where floods may change the boundaries, where the water is neither fresh nor salt, but something in between, where shifting currents may alter the wetlands, the CrossPoint website explains. Vandonk said Estuary is a place for the exchange of ideas, where questions are encouraged, where judgment is not tolerated, and where finding answers is secondary to the journey. The discussion groups use specific protocols to ensure that their conversations are fruitful, nonjudgmental, and well-run.

Vandonk said its common for a group to include a wide variety of viewpoints, backgrounds, and religions. He recalled a meeting earlier this year where there was an atheist, a few Christians, a Muslim, and a Jew all participating in the same conversation.

The discussions we have are rooted around the bigger idea of what it is to be human; these are questions that every person of every tribe and religion is trying to answer, Vandonk said.

The conversations are not purposely centered on spiritual or religious topics, but VanderKlay and Vandonk each said the discussions theyve participated in usually turn in that direction because thats where the deep truths of what it is to be human lie.

Vandonk said he doesnt like to put too many labels on what Estuary is because then it limits what it can become. Estuaryhub.com offers this definition: Estuary is a place where people come for conversation. Honest conversation. Not ideological warfare, memes, and trolling, but mutually respectful attempts to understand one another, and to learn to appreciate different perspectives and viewpoints. Estuary is a place where different ideas and ideologies meet. Where participants allow themselves to be exposed to new ways of thinking, where listening may be as important as talking, where being open to feedback will force you to hear yourself think.

Although most Estuary groups on the Estuary Hub are in the U.S., there are some in Canada, Australia, Germany, and Greece, and new groups are popping up all the time. Many of the groups use Meetup, an online events calendar, to keep track of their gatherings. Leaders are encouraged to follow the protocols for conducting conversations so every group is run in a similar way. Leaders attend an online group to be introduced to the process, which Vandonk said is designed to ensure that the conversation does not become a debate about who is right or wrong and instead encourages mutual understanding and respect.

Spreading The Word

In August of 2022, VanderKlay and Vandonk took the Estuary concept on tour. They spent some time in Germany, introducing the conversation model in a festival format. It was an introduction for the uninitiated and encouragement for those who were already participating in online and in-person gatherings. VanderKlays online presence drew many interested people to the festival. Im somewhat of a celebrity, he said, albeit only in one specific corner of the vastness that is the internet. It is a great pleasure to meet people face to face after having shared many conversations with them via comment sections and forums.

After the trip, Vandonk, VanderKlay, and other festival speakers talked about their experiences on VanderKlays podcast.

A month later, several Estuary leaders and subscribers gathered in Thunder Bay, Ont., for a four-day event on Consciousness and Conscience. That successful conference sparked plans for an event this past May in Chino, The Quest for a Spiritual Home, which featured lectures, a tour of a Greek Orthodox church, and an afternoon of paintball. One of the conference attendees, Moises Pacheco, pastor at Grace in Garfield CRC in Chicago, Ill., said, The lectures and the panel discussions were really insightful. Having a couple of Protestants, an Orthodox artist, and a non-Christian cognitive scientist all talking about a spiritual home and seeing similar things and giving common language for it to (speak to) people from all over is something important.

Pacheco said that while many of the talks can be viewed online, the way most conference attendees usually consume content, the embodied nature of the conference gave the opportunity to do some things that are likely not common in an academic conference or even a religious conference with this level of intellectualism.

Vandonk said that many attendees expressed gratitude for the opportunity to meet people from different walks of life, different religions, and different backgrounds all coming together in an effort to broaden their understanding. Pacheco shared how one evening he, a Protestant pastor, ended up on stage singing Leaning on the Everlasting Arms with a Sikh man who seemed to know the song better than I did.

Nothing Quite Like It

VanderKlay and Vandonk share a passion for Estuary, believing there is nothing else like it around today. In a world of cancel culture, groupthink, and binary thinking, VanderKlay said, a space for the free exchange of ideas and experiences with fellow humans is a cool breeze on a hot day, a gentle rain falling on a parched landscape.

Lon Wagner, pastor of discipleship at CrossPoint CRC in Chino, called Estuary a ministry of the church, but not for the church, recognizing it instead as a place for people to ask questions and explore in ways they might not be comfortable doing or able to do in regular Sunday morning services.

VanderKlay would love to see every church have an Estuary group. In a YouTube video describing his vision, he said churches have a long history of hosting various kinds of not-specifically-religious groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, other recovery groups, or community groups, and theyd benefit from welcoming the spectrum of people Estuary groups attract.

Churches are too insular. Churches dont know whats going on in the hearts and minds of the people around them too often, VanderKlay said. Churches need these kinds of credible conversations that are on the edge.

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What Is 'Estuary' All About, and Is It Coming to a Church Near You? - The Banner