Good to see Professor Gottfried contributing to the Unz Review.
He’s someone that I’ve heard many times as a regular listener to the Tom Woods show where he’s a regular guest.
Here’s an audio interview he conducted late last year with Tom Woods on Antifascism:

Video Link

Professor Gottfried may have an academic background as a philosopher/historian, but as an associated scholar at the Libertarian Mises Institute, he knows a thing or two about REAL economics – which is more than we can say for pretend-economists like Michael Hudson.

Ron Unz, why don’t you arrange for an article that involves Paul Gottfried challenging Hudson on his crackpot ideas.

Better still, get a hold of the Austro-Libertarian and anarcho-capitalist Emeritus Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and let’s see him wipe the floor with Hudson.

I agree with his implied criticism that I do not fully explain the bizarre relationship between wokeness and corporate capitalism.

What explains the close neocon/neolib relationship to wokeness and corporate capitalism?Judeofascism explains it.

What do ((Jews)) do when confronted with what they are? Project their own worst characteristics onto their opponents. They know they’re Judeofascists, so they call themselves anti-fascists to both disarm their critics (You oppose anti‐fascism, therefore you’re a fascist!) and claim they can’t possibly have any positive relationship to fascism because they’re Jewish (that’s the narrative, for example, whenever ((Zelensky)) is accused of being in bed with Right Sector neo-fascists).

You hace to remember how psychotic and schizo ((Jews)) and their stooges really are to have any hope of accuratelyy comprehending American politics and geopolitics and wars. If you’re unwilling to confront the reality of Judefascism (which predates traditional fascism and Nazism, and goes back to the British ((Cousinhood)) and today is epitomized by the neocons and left-wing billionaires like ((Soros)) et al), then you’re totally lost.

Actually, the antifascists are engaged in a continuing upheaval, while pretending to oppose a threat that is of their own making.

Change antifascists to Judeofascists and their affection for controlled and staged “permanent revolution” (which serves the Anglo-Zionist Empire) and the picture becomes clear.

((Gottfried)), your feigned clulessness becomes tiresome, probably even to you. You ((Jews)) really are boring old saws and psychotics.

Corporations and financial institutions implementing ESG requirements to conduct business is indeed revolutionary and heralds the death of liberty and individualism in the withering on the vine West. This civilizational suicide is why the BRICS bloc will eventually dominate the world.

Reading this Jew on the subject of ‘fascism’ and ‘antifascism’ is the height of both irony and idiocy, and the damndest waste of time imaginable.

Just in general, with the war between the US/NATO and Russia showing no sign of ending, without even an imaginable end other that WW III, it seems to me that Unz should be devoting a hell of a lot more space to that subject.

Mr. Gottfried you sound quite like Jordan B. Peterson lately. Two voices of reason. I hope your distinct and clear voices will be heard.
I want to thank Greg Hudson too for his insightful review of Paul Gottfried’s book Antifascism -The Course of a Crusade.

Corporations and financial institutions implementing ESG requirements to conduct business is indeed revolutionary

The way to understand strange new stuff is to figure out who benefits from the revolution.

My take is that the large corporations are trying to crush their competition, present and prospective.

The more rules and restrictions the tougher it is for small business and future entrepreneurs to compete.

The “ideology” is just an excuse–putting “virtue” earrings on the monopoly seeking pig.

Well my complaint of late has been of the grave getting closer faster than the reading list getting shorter.
I may compromise and get the audio book. Reading while driving is still frowned upon in my State.

Interesting.

I would say that the jewish communists, i.e. Trotsky, was more akin to the dingbats that run around in america today. They were fully committed to abortion, remaking humanity in its entirety, destroying christians, etc…

Luckily Stalin killed them all.

After that communism in the soviet union was culturally more akin to the Republicans circa 1980, i.e. quite conservative.

I agree with his implied criticism that I do not fully explain the bizarre relationship between wokeness and corporate capitalism. That troubling connection continues to puzzle me, and I’m not quite sure which is the stronger force in driving it: the fear among the corporate class of irritating BLM, the LGBT lobby, and other woke activists, or the sympathy felt by this class for what I call the “post-Marxist leftist ideology.”

I would suggest two other factors that may be contributing to the rise of this unholy alliance. One may be that corporate executives feel, now more than ever, the importance from a business perspective of ingratiating their companies to government (and particulary the administrative state component of government). The administrative state seemingly has greater ability and willingness today than it had in previous eras to punish or shame corporate America by publicly accusing it of racism, sexism and the like. Civil fines, judgments, and government agency press releases announcing them are bad PR; and adopting wokeness is a kind of preventive measure against their occurrence. The second posssible factor (which may be related to the first) is that at least in the retail sector, minorities have seemingly grown in importance as a segment of the public that still patronizes brick and mortar retail stores. Corporate wokeness may be part of a conscious strategy to preserve and develop that segment of the retail customer base.

What is real economics – only Austrian school? I agree that the thing that is taught for economics in the West is not real economics; I also accept that there is no surer way of undermining an economy than corrupting its money supply; but it does not mean Prof. Michael Hudson is not aware of other viewpoints. Austrian school gets everything correct, but their prescription for the economic ills, a hard gold standard, is not feasible any more; the Western ruling class has discovered how to corrupt the whole process of price discovery, through their paper markets. When the quantities of the fundamental of the money supply – gold – can be hidden from people, price discovery will fail; and the whole economy will be built on wrong foundations. One probable alternative is backing the currency with energy – one unit of currency must be always equal to a fixed quantity of energy. But again, the problem is, as technology improves, cost of producing energy will also go down, and therefore, this is also a form of inflation.

We must get used to an economic space where nothing can retain its value for a long time. Unfortunate, but no other option.

OBF, I appreciate your commentary and you remarks are invariably thoughtful and well reasoned.
However, I’d like to address this comment of yours :

I also accept that there is no surer way of undermining an economy than corrupting its money supply; but it does not mean Prof. Michael Hudson is not aware of other viewpoints.

I have no doubt that Hudson and all the other crackpot Keynesian economists/Marxists/Trotskyists etc, are well aware of the Austrian School of Economic thought and the ABCT (Austrian Business Cycle Theory) and how said Austrian School always gets it right.

But they NEVER MENTION it or give it the much deserved credit that it’s due. Similarly the major Zio controlled universities of the western world GO OUT OF THEIR WAY to either never mention the Austrian School or, to the extent they do, they only mention it in passing and attach derogatory labels to it like : ‘Of No Use’ and ‘Discredited Theory’ or some such.

Let’s face it, to acknowledge the worth of he Austrian School is to ADMIT THAT CENTRALISED CONTROL OF MONETARY POLICY THROUGH THE ZIO OWNED CENTRAL BANKS is the ROOT OF ALL THE FINANCIAL CALAMITIES and episodes of INFLATION that we are experiencing.

That’s why Hudson will NEVER mention the Austrian School. Because said school is about HONEST MONEY, it is about liberty and freedom.

In contrast, Central Banking is all about CENTRALISED AUTHORITARIAN CONTROL by BIG GOVERNMENT and that’s what Hudson is all about.

He is a BIG GOVERNMENT STATIST that believes in a system where a select politburo of hardline socialists decide what’s best for the proles – because he believes the masses are too stupid to decide for themselves.

I eviscerated Hudson time and again in the past and exposed his DISHONESTY and what a thin-skinned petulant thing he is.
He’d run off sulking and then banned me from posting commentary in his threads. (Hudson has banned a few others I’ve been informed).

This is what tyrants do when they cannot reason with you, when they are intellectually bankrupt.

Larry Romanoff is another such Marxist/Maoist that banned me from posting commentary.

That’s why all UR readers, whether they agree with my viewpoints or not, should :

BOYCOTT ALL MICHAEL HUDSON and LARRY ROMANOFF ARTICLES.

ie: do not READ them, do not post COMMENTS below them.

Because, if you truly believe in Free Speech, if you’re truly against Censorship, you will advocate for First Amendment freedom of speech rights for those your DISAGREE with, every bit as much as those you agree with.

You also wrote this :

Austrian school gets everything correct, but their prescription for the economic ills, a hard gold standard, is not feasible any more; the Western ruling class has discovered how to corrupt the whole process of price discovery, through their paper markets.

There is no question that the Western Ruling Class (let’s call a spade a spade and address them by their precise name – ie: the Zionist Usury Banking Cartel that controls the entirety of the western financial system), are indeed manipulating the gold and silver prices through the paper market.

And they’ve been very successful indeed – so far.

But as with their attempts to suppress the gold price from the late 80’s through the 90’s, all they achieve is a temporary delay in the ultimate price discovery.
Think of the analogy of a compressed spring. With every manipulation of the gold price lower, the Zio manipulators just manage to further compress an already incredibly compressed spring.

There comes a point where compression is no longer possible and the spring breaks the artificially imposed shackles and rebounds ferociously.

Case in Point : Gold was manipulated down to around $260 – $270 /oz at the beginning of the millennium but rebounded to $ 1900 by 2011 ( a SEVEN fold increase).

And it will prove to be the case again in the coming years as the U.S enters an inflationary depression which will be made worse as holders of USD and USD denominated assets, start DUMPING THEM on the market – which will further fuel inflation in the U.S over and above that experienced elsewhere in the world.

But, to the extent that paper market manipulation of gold and silver is occurring, this CAN ONLY OCCUR under a Fiat monetary system. Let me explain.

WHY did Nixon take the U.S off the Gold Standard in August 1971 ?

The reason is that the wily De Gaulle of France (taking heed of his financial advisers), knew that there were far too many USD circulating than gold to back up said paper currency. The Germans did too.

So both countries in the late 1960’s exchanged their USD for gold at the [arbitrarily suppressed] fixed rate of USD $ 35/oz. This resulted in thousands of tonnes of gold holdings being depleted from U.S holdings – a precipitous drain.
The Americans could have been proactive and massively DEVALUED THE USD relative to gold, to correct the imbalance. This would have been the honest way to do it and that would’ve meant that they could have stayed on the gold standard,

Instead they chose to suspend convertibility of USD to gold.

END RESULT : From August 1971 to January 1980 (a period of less than eight and half years), the gold price went from $ 35/oz to $ 850 /oz (a TWENTY FOUR FOLD increase).

In fact, the gold price would have kept going up indefinitely, implying that the USD would have eventually become worthless, had not then Fed Chairman Paul Volcker done the ONLY THING POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE USD.

And that was to raise the Fed Funds Rate (FFR) to 20 %.

Volcker did this (which was 7 % higher than the then inflation rate), to BREAK THE BACK OF INFLATION.
ie: The FFR had to be set several point higher than inflation to ENTICE INVESTORS back into the USD and USD denominated assets like stocks, bonds etc, and OUT of speculation in precious metal price appreciation.

Now, I have news for you OBF, there are many, MANY more USD in existence today and the U.S is the world’s largest debtor nation in human history – by a WIDE margin.

The U.S of 1980 when Volcker raised the Fed Funds rate, was a CREDITOR nation (ie: the world owed America more than America owed the world), and was running during the 1970’s, for the most part, trade surpluses.

Today the U.S runs catastrophic trade deficits that are getting cataclysmically worse by the month.
If the U.S was a Fortune 500 company using GAAP accounting standards, it would have been declared INSOLVENT a long time ago.

In the coming years gold and silver will go to the moon because the manipulators will NOT be able to keep this ‘compressed-to-infinity’ spring shackled for much longer.

SUMMARY: Contrary to your statement that ‘a hard gold standard is not feasible anymore’, the truth is the 180 degree opposite.
Not only is a Gold Standard as feasible now as it has always been [with NO EXCEPTIONS] over the last 5000 years, but is it THE ONLY SOLUTION that will solve the coming inflationary depression that the world is about to enter into.

As for this remark of yours :

We must get used to an economic space where nothing can retain its value for a long time. Unfortunate, but no other option.

The Gold Standard has worked beautifully for over 5000 years of recorded history and will once again come to the fore as fiat currencies, printed recklessly, result in uncontrolled inflation.

We KNOW this because China and Russia (and several other countries) are accumulating gold like a man possessed and have been doing so for the best part of the last 20 years – in anticipation of the the USD losing its reserve currency status and a return to the Gold Standard.

ONLY a Gold standard (or ideally a Gold-Silver bimetallic standard as existed for millennia), will do the trick of introducing FISCAL and MONETARY discipline and breaking the back of inflation.

In the words of the immortal Dr Ron Paul :

Because gold is honest money, it is disliked by dishonest men.

Or, put another way :

A gold standard is the ideal monetary system for those who create wealth through ingenuity, entrepreneurship and hard work.
Gold standards are disfavoured by those who do not create wealth but instead seek to extract wealth from others through inflation, inside information and market manipulation.

…. Jim Rickards – ‘The Death of Money’.

I suggest you take a look at the following 5 min video titled ‘Gold is liquidity and central banks will return to it as money’ featuring the legendary financial commentator Peter Schiff.

See for yourself why a return to the Gold Standard is not only feasible, but is destined to occur as the fiat monetary experiment implodes :

Video Link

Presumably, Prof. Gottfried is familiar with James Lindsay & his “New Discourses” channel on YouTube, which ably promotes the claim that Woke-ism is just neo-Marxism…

It would be interesting to see them talk to each other.

The best way to sum up Antifa is to refer to them as the Jews’ brown shirts. But I think Gottfried is a pretty decent guy overall and can be forgiven if he doesn’t want to implicate his own tribe as the head of the snake.