Progressivism: A Primer Hits a Milestone

Tonight (Sat. Aug. 17, 7-10pm), in Buffalo, New York, I will celebrate my 40^th year in the libertarian movement and reaching the milestone of 10,000 sales of Progressivism: A Primer on the Idea Destroying America.  The event will be at the Polish Falcons in Depew, NY, a suburb of Buffalo accessible to all points in Western New York.  I expect the event will be well-attended and more books will be sold tonight and online, moving toward the goal of a much broader distribution of the book that cracked the code of progressivism, our ruling ideology for 100 years.  I note that the first time I heard Murray Rothbard speak in 1980, his topic was Progressivism.  I did not forget.

I want to thank Lew Rockwell and his great site for promoting my work and making most of these sales possible by drawing libertarians here from around the world every morning.

Yes, I am an eternal optimist and in fact, my goal is to sell one million copies and I am thrilled to have reached one percent of that goal.  I have always been a positive thinker and have puzzled over why that is.  I suspect it has something to do with having a larger than life Dad who seemed to be effortlessly great at everything he did from swimming across the Niagara River to warding off a German infantry attack to save his company in World War II to being president of his class at Canisius College to being a great lawyer, then a great judge, then a great lawyer again, with a building named after him across from the Supreme Court for being a volunteer lawyer for the pro-life movement.  To me growing up, striving for excellence was normal.  Thanks Dad!

I also need to thank my older brother Mike.  Mike and I loved sports and followed “Little Three” college basketball on the radio after we were supposed to be sleeping.  I adopted many of his own sports heroes as my own including Billy Williams from the Cubs, the great miler Jim Ryun and Larry Bird.  I would add Jerry West and David Thompson in my favorite sport, basketball.  We loved these men for what they did in their sports, not their personal lives of which we knew nothing.  It was the pursuit of excellence through hard work that we loved and we would then try to emulate them.  Watching their example of what is possible gave us confidence in ourselves.

It is the power of positive thinking that I think is sorely needed in the Liberty Movement these days.  We have taken our lumps since the high water mark of the Ron Paul campaigns and have been eclipsed by competing movements on the left and right and by of course, Trumpism.  It is time to get back into the fight as I argue in my speech tonight.

I am announcing tonight that, effective immediately, I am ending my full-time law practice to work full-time for the Liberty Movement as a writer, activist and strategist.  This is my fortieth year in the movement and, after seeing the movement grow and prosper for decades, I cannot accept the fact that in recent years, other movements, bankrupt of useful ideas, have nevertheless seized the momentum from us.   I have an ambitious agenda of publishing books that further expose and explain the destructive mindsets that have us stuck in statism and promote innovative direct action tactics in place of the same old failed political approaches.

Here’s an excerpt from my remarks:

“Thank you for coming to this celebration of the improbable success of the book that finally cracked the code of progressivism, the ideological mindset that has dominated our politics for 100 years; which has a firm lock on the idea-disseminating organs of society; that launched a counter-revolution against liberty in a country founded on liberty after mankind suffered and struggled through thousands of years of dark and dreary slavery, exploitation, mindless violence and official tyranny; and finally which is causing the very first period of palpable decline in America since we first got off the boat in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia.

“With little marketing, no book tour and while being completely ignored by the mainstream media, Progressivism:  A Primer on the Idea Destroying America, has sold over 10,000 copies.  But that is just a drop in the bucket of what we can accomplish with your help.  Just in the last day, our Book Bomb has managed to sell many additional copies. With your help, in the coming months, we will saturate the country with copies and begin to turn the tide against the destructive idea of progressivism.  I want to thank some of the great people in our movement who helped to promote the book and have otherwise done tremendous work on behalf of liberty for many, many years: Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Ilana Mercer, Tom Woods and Robert Wenzel.”

For the rest, come to the party tonight or watch the live stream.

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