Year: 2023

My old friend Yuri Maltsev passed away on Thursday.  As many LRC and Mises.org readers know, Yuri was part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika staff until he defected from the Soviet Union in 1989 and came to America.  He earned a Ph.D. at Moscow State University during the Cold War and, lo and behold, became an Austrian School economist!  I met Yuri soon after he arrived in the U.S. and asked him how he became familiar with the Austrian School.  His answer was that part of his job for Gorbachev was to read and criticize the literature of the bourgeois capitalist exploiters.  As such, he was given special permission to access that literature, some of which came with a long prison sentence to any ordinary Soviet citizen caught with it.

Yuri said that he read a contraband copy of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in mimeograph form, and passed it on to someone else immediately after he finished it.  Everything in the book was absolutely true about collectivism and government planning, he said.  Years later, in 2009, right after the crash of 2008, Yuri and our friend Tom Woods appeared on the Glenn Beck television program to discuss The Road to Serfdom.  After that discussion, the sales ranking of this 1943 book went to #1 on Amazon.  I then put together a five-week online course on the book for the Mises Institute that attracted several hundred students from all over the world.

Having spent so much of his life in socialist hell, once he got a good-paying job in America Yuri reveled in consumerism.  He would buy a $3,000 car, drive it for a while, then sell it back to the dealer he bought it from.  He said he did that about thirty times.  He also bought foreclosed real estate from HUD and rented or resold them, typically offering say, $5,000 for a house listed at say, $35-50,000 – and succeeding!

Yuri was associated with the Mises Institute for many years as a guest speaker at conferences and a lecturer at the annual Mises University.  What an amazing time it was for me in the early days of Mises University to sit around at a place like Stanford University shortly after the worldwide collapse of socialism talking with such people as Murray Rothbard and Yuri Maltsev.  He was always an extraordinarily popular speaker because of his wit and his unique knowledge of both Austrian economics and real-world experiences of having lived much of his life in the former Soviet Union.  No one in the world was better able to explain in such vivid detail why Mises was right about socialism all along.  If anything, Mises may have understated the barbarity of socialism which, in the Soviet case, was “all about mass murder,” as Yuri said.

When I first met Yuri I asked him what he thought the biggest difference was between life in the Soviet Union and life in America.  He said that in the Soviet Union no one believed anything the government said, but Americans believe everything the government says.  The response of at least 90 percent of Americans to covid totalitarianism is the most recent example of this truism.

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From LRC, here.

Thanks to the latest release of the “Twitter Files,” we now know without a doubt that the entire “Russia disinformation” racket was a massive disinformation campaign to undermine US elections and perhaps even push “regime change” inside the United States after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

Here is some background. In November, 2016, just after the election, the Washington Post published an article titled, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” The purpose of the article was to delegitimize the Trump presidency as a product of a Russian “disinformation” campaign.

“There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in US democracy and its leaders,” wrote Craig Timberg. The implication was clear: a Russian operation elected Donald Trump, not the American people.

Among the “experts” it cited were an anonymous organization called “Prop Or Not,” which in its own words claimed to identify “more than 200 websites as peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.”

The organization’s report was so preposterous that the Washington Post was later forced to issue a clarification, even though the Post provided a link to the report which falsely accused independent news outlets like Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com, and even my Ron Paul Institute as “Russian disinformation.”

The 2016 Washington Post article also featured “expert” Clint Watts, a former FBI counterintelligence officer who went on to found another outfit claiming to be hunting “Russian disinformation” in the US, the “Hamilton 68” project. That project was launched by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a very well-funded organization containing a who’s who of top neocons like William Kristol, John Podesta, Michael McFaul, and many more.

Thanks to the latest release of the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi reveals that the Hamilton 68 project, which claimed to monitor 600 “Russian disinformation” Twitter accounts, was a total hoax. While they refused to reveal which accounts they monitored and would not reveal their methodology, Twitter was able to use reverse-engineering to determine the 600-odd “Russian-connected” accounts. Twitter found that despite Hamilton’s claims, the vast majority of these “Russian” accounts were English-speaking. Of the Russian registered accounts – numbering just 36 out of 644 – most were employees of the Russian news outlet RT.

It was all a lie and the latest Twitter Files release confirms that even the “woke” pre-Musk Twitter employees could smell a rat. But the hoax served an important purpose. Hiding behind anonymity, this neocon organization was able to generate hundreds of media stories slandering and libeling perfectly legitimate organizations and individuals as “Russian agents.” It provided a very convenient way to demonize anyone who did not go along with the approved neocon narrative.

Twitter’s new owner, who has given us a look behind the curtain, put it best in a Tweet over the weekend: “An American group made false claims about Russian election interference to interfere with American elections.”

The whole “Russia disinformation” hoax was a shocking return to the McCarthyism of the 1950s and in some ways even worse. Making lists of American individuals and non-profits to be targeted and “cancelled” as being in the pay of foreigners is despicable. Such fraudulent actions have caused real-life damages that need to be addressed.

From LRC, here.