[This is an edited and extended version of a speech I gave on August 29, 2026 at the Brownstone Institute Retreat at Polyface Farms in Virginia.]
Good afternoon! I want to thank Jeffrey Tucker for creating a sanctuary for dissident scholars during the most troubling era in American history. I cannot imagine what the last five years would have been like without the courageous leadership of Brownstone Institute.
And I want to thank Joel Salatin for hosting us at his beautiful farm where he is creating the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
The argument that I want to make over the next twenty minutes goes something like this... For the last 500 years our economy has been based on conquest and domination. It started with the conquest of the New World by Europeans, who had gun powder, horses, and hardened steel. The indigenous did not, horrors ensued. Europeans took their gold, land, and labor. And this has continued in various forms for five centuries. Yes, some of the economic growth since the 1800s has been driven by innovation. But it was built on a foundation of ill-gotten wealth that created the leisure time and the early capital that funded creativity — and then industrialization often led to new waves of exploitation. We’ll talk about each of these different eras in a moment.
The current crisis that we’re in stems from the fact that eventually there were no new lands left to conquer — so the ruling class decided to exploit all of us in the developed world via vaccine injury. So the violence and exploitation that used to be directed from the First World outward to the periphery in the Third World is now directed inward toward enslaving the middle class in the U.S. and Europe via iatrogenic illness. Jeffrey coined the phrase “biological colonialism” to describe this moment and I think that’s exactly right.
But what’s striking to me about all of this is that every time the ruling class figures out a new way to exploit people, it requires a Fairy Tale in order to justify the exploitation — to launder it and make it okay. In every era there has been the actual mode of production — usually based on exploiting other people and taking their stuff — and the official story which glosses over the exploitation and says that it’s justified or maybe even sanctified.
And the immediate question is why? Why would Empire need a Fairy Tale to justify its actions?
For that, we turn to the great evolutionary biologist Frans de Waal who discovered that even primates have an innate sense of empathy and fairness. It seems to be the result of a long evolutionary process. Chimpanzees reconcile with each other after a fight, care for the dying elderly, and share food with those who have none. These animals display a sort of rudimentary kindness, even when there is nothing in it for themselves, or even when it costs them something (time, reputation, energy).1
De Waal is arguing against what he calls “Veneer theory” which is the view that human morality is only a thin cultural layer over a fundamentally selfish, amoral animal nature. De Waal believed that morality isn’t a surface layer at all but grows out of deep, evolved social emotions (empathy, reciprocity, fairness) that we share with other primates.
Primates aren’t always benevolent of course. They go to war and kill each other and often behave in ways that are brutal. They are bivalent like us — they have both prosocial and violent tendencies and it’s not always clear which one will win.
My point being, if Empire is going to take the gold, labor, and lives of another civilization, it needs to find a way to turn off our fundamental sense of empathy and it does that through official narratives that I’m calling Fairy Tales. I believe that if we can unmask these Fairy Tales and show the world as it really is, we can begin to address the current crisis.
The first Fairy Tale is that conquest was about bringing infidels, pagans, and idolaters to Christ
In the 1400s, innovations in ship building and navigation enabled the Portuguese to begin sailing down the coast of Africa. Along the way they conducted raids and returned home with Africans whom they auctioned off as slaves. Portugal was a deeply Christian nation and papal bulls — official decrees by the pope — in 1452, 1455, and 1456 gave the Portuguese crown the right to attack, conquer, and subdue “Saracens, pagans… and other enemies of Christ,” to seize their lands and goods, and to reduce those people to perpetual slavery.2
The year after Columbus first landed in the new world, Pope Alexander VI issued a new papal bull, the Inter Caetera, that drew an imaginary line from pole to pole through a point about 370 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands and gave everything west of it to Spain and everything east to Portugal.3 Soon thereafter the line was moved to about 1300 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) which gave Portugal the rights to what became Brazil.4
The idea underneath these official decrees was that the Pope was not merely a religious leader but the steward of the whole Earth — Christ’s deputy, holding a spiritual authority that ran over all of creation. That gave the Pope the standing — in his own eyes and in the eyes of the Christian kings who wanted his blessing — to treat the planet as something he could assign.
What gives the game away is that conversion to Christianity did not bring freedom to these newly enslaved people. So the official story is that they were bringing the infidels, pagans, and idolaters to Christ but really they were just engaged in theft of gold, land, and labor.
The next Fairy Tale is that the “invisible hand” of the market produced the economic takeoff of Scotland in the 1700s.
As some of you know, early in my Ph.D. studies I spent a year working on what’s called “The Adam Smith Problem.” The idea is that there is a tension between Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments which is based on sympathy for one’s fellow man and his later book, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations which is based on self-interest. So I got curious as to what actually caused Scotland to go from dirt poor in 1700 to one of the richest countries on Earth by 1776 when Wealth of Nations was published.
Smith argues that when the butcher, the baker, and the brewer pursue their own self-interest, “the invisible hand” of the market solves the problem of distribution better than any government could. He’s probably right that markets do a good job with distributing resources. But that’s not why Scotland got rich in the 1700s.
Scotland got rich from cornering the market for slave grown tobacco from the Chesapeake. The 1707 Acts of Union gave Scotland equal access to English colonies in the New World. Scottish merchants capitalized on the opportunity by stationing stores up and down the coastline of what is now Virginia and Maryland where they lent manufactured goods on credit in return for a share of the farmer’s tobacco crop when it came in.5
However, picking tobacco is miserable work, the nicotine from the leaves soaks in through the skin and by the end of the day the field hand is nauseous. Free people generally don’t like picking tobacco at industrial scale. So the farmers turned to slaves for one of the most profitable products in the history of the world. In 1762 ,slave grown “tobacco constituted 40 percent of all Scottish imports from abroad (excluding England)” and “52% of all Scottish exports.”6
The Carron Iron Works, that was just across the river from where Smith lived in Kirkaldy, provided the cannons that were used on transatlantic ships and the sugar pans that were used to refine slave grown sugar cane in the Caribbean.7 The profits from slave grown tobacco funded the universities where Smith studied and taught.8 The invisible hands that made Scotland wealthy were not the small merchants where Smith shopped but the African laborers in the New World who were not paid for their work. Smith’s “invisible hand” is the Fairy Tale that turns globalism’s winners into the beneficiaries of an almost providential design and quietly erases the conquest and domination underneath.
Terra Nullius
When the British Empire claimed Australia in 1788, it did so based on a theory that later came to be called terra nullius, “nobody’s land.” The continent was declared legally empty — which is odd because hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal people already lived there and had lived there for tens of thousands of years.9 But the colonizers argued that the indigenous people had not fenced the land, plowed it, or issued private title as the British did, and so had never truly possessed the ground underneath their feet. This was a weaponized version of John Locke’s theory of property: mix your labor with the land and it is yours; fail to improve it as the British define improvement, and it is available for the taking.10 Terra nullius was the Fairy Tale that made a population disappear in the eyes of the law. It remained on the books in Australia until 1992, when the High Court finally overturned it in the Mabo decision — two hundred and four years later.11
A necessary aside for a moment...
As you probably know, historiography is the study of the methods, sources, practices, and changing interpretations used by historians over time. One of the practices that is looked down upon by historians is judging the past by the values of the present. It’s called “presentism” or “moral presentism.”12 It’s unfair because it’s like shooting fish in a barrel — nearly all ancient people, except Jesus, will fail to measure up to our present day values. It’s also a bad way to do history because it does not give us much insight into the former era.
If I were engaged in presentism, that would be a bad thing. But remember what I said earlier about Frans de Waal — even animals have a built in sense of fairness and empathy even when it doesn’t benefit them. Empire would not need Fairy Tales to justify its actions if empathy was not already built into what it means to be human. The fact that Empire in every era has to come up with these cognitive devices to turn off empathy is the tell that we are not judging the past by the present, instead we are judging every era by the deep-seated moral values that reside in all of us. Furthermore, in each of the examples I give there were people at the time who contested the actions of Empire — who knew right from wrong at the time.
By now you already see the pattern: Empire wants to take people’s stuff, it usually does that by hurting people, but in order to get away with it, Empire requires a Fairy Tale to turn off empathy. I’ll mention a few more examples quickly before getting to our present day crisis.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830
In 1830, slave grown cotton plantations were generating enormous wealth for the owners and gold had just been found on Cherokee land in the deep south. So President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act — and sold the expulsion of tens of thousands of indigenous people as an act of benevolence. The Cherokee had done everything the “civilizing” story demanded: they had a written alphabet, newspaper, Constitution, farms, churches. They were removed anyway. That is how you know the Fairy Tale was a cover for conquest. It was contested in real time, even taken to the Supreme Court where the Cherokee won. President Jackson expelled them regardless — sixteen thousand indigenous people forced down the Trail of Tears, four thousand died along the way.13
Fifteen years later, Manifest Destiny took the same appetite for land that drove Indian Removal and elevated it from policy into providence.14 It was now something above the law — it was described as God’s plan unfolding and to stand in its way was to stand against destiny itself.
Opium as free trade
In 1839, Britain forced China to import opium and justified it by calling it “free trade.” To pay for Chinese tea, the East India Company smuggled Indian opium into China until millions were enslaved by addiction. When China moved to stop it and destroyed the opium, Britain sent the Royal Navy to bomb Chinese ports. Britain forced a sovereign nation to keep buying a narcotic against its will, seized Hong Kong, and cloaked the whole enterprise in the language of economic freedom.15
1884 — “The Civilizing Mission”
In the winter of 1884, representatives of thirteen European nations and the United States gathered at the Berlin Conference and carved up Africa for themselves. The discovery that quinine could prevent and treat malaria opened up the entire continent to exploitation. The world’s great powers seized these lands on no authority but their own, reinstituted forced labor a generation after abolition in their own countries, and described the whole thing to the world as a humanitarian, anti-slavery crusade.16 The Powers That Be took the mobilizing energy of abolitionism and used it to re-enslave millions of people. The British and French called it “the civilizing mission.” Rudyard Kipling called it “The White Man’s Burden.”17 These twisted Fairy Tales recast the robber as the weary martyr and the robbed as the ungrateful debtor.
The horrors of the 20th century had their own twisted Fairy Tales:
The Racial Hygiene junk science of the Nazis that was used to justify the murder of millions;
“The radiant future” of Soviet Communism where the promised workers’ paradise was always over the horizon while millions were starved by collective agriculture or sent to the gulag to stifle dissent;
The “Great Leap Forward,” of Maoism that killed tens of millions in the name of industrialization; and
“The Washington Consensus” in the 1980s and 1990s where the IMF and the World Bank forced countries in the global south to privatize, deregulate, cut public spending, and open their markets to first world products and ownership in return for loans that they could never actually repay.18
Safe & Effective™
Which brings us to the present. The Fairy Tale used to launder the exploitation of our current era is the phrase “Safe & Effective™.” All vaccines are deemed safe and effective just by virtue of the word on the outside of the package. What’s really going on is that widespread vaccine injury is the new method by which the ruling class engages in conquest and domination and they need a thought-terminating cliché to get away with the crime.
Following the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act the ruling class discovered that every autism case generates an addition $5 to $7 million in lifetime care costs that go to doctors, hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry. Other vaccine injuries including ADHD, autoimmune disorders, arthritis, life-threatening allergies, Alzheimer’s, childhood cancers, diabetes, eczema, and seizure disorders similarly generate hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in additional costs over a lifetime. In 1970, the autism rate in the population was 0.01%. Today, over three percent of all children are disabled for life with this condition. The percent of children with one or more chronic conditions in the 1970s was in the single digits. Today over 50% of all children in the U.S. have one or more chronic conditions.
Once Big Pharma figured out that they could profitably poison children and not face any legal consequences they turned their attention to the rest of the population.
The biggest prize was the wealth sitting in retirement savings accounts — IRAs, 401(k), and pension funds. The Baby Boomers were going to retire with $85 trillion in net assets — the wealthiest generation in the history of the world. To put that in perspective, total gold reserves in all of the mines around the world are only worth $10 trillion.19
So the ruling class through their minions at NIH, the University of North Carolina, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology created and released a gain-of-function virus and produced an elaborate global theater production to generate fear and shut down the global economy to create the market for the Covid mRNA vaccines.
Covid mRNA vaccines have negative efficacy and the worst side effects of any vaccine in history. But the Fairy Tale was that these shots were “Safe & Effective™,” that the government just wanted the best for its citizens, and that anyone who raised any questions was a Nutter who should be censored, fired, banned, or worse.
Covid shots cause blood clots, strokes, autoimmune disorders, cancer, dementia, and thousands more harms — and each of those adverse events generates thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars for the Pharmaceutical Hospital Industrial Complex and the investors who own shares in these companies. Moderna’s own clinical trial data showed a 17.4% Grade 3 adverse event rate in the first few days after these shots were administered.20 From the public’s perspective, that’s a disaster. From the investor’s perspective, that’s a jackpot — the PREP Act provides liability protection so this is a scheme that’s guaranteed to pay out.
Vaccine injury is the most profitable form of slavery anywhere in the world — because the underlying assets of people in the first world are literally worth more than gold. Once all wealth has been drained from a person and their extended family via endless hospital stays, expensive pharmaceutical products, and appointments with specialists, the person is allowed to perish — by Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada, Europe, and blue states in the U.S.
This is why I call it the iatrogenocide — physician-caused genocide.
As bad as things are now, the process is accelerating with the new Moderna mRNA flu shot and the new mRNA cancer vaccines that will give these companies a permanent way to introduce their toxic biologics into the population. Lest you think that you are okay because you’re not getting vaccinated, remember that these vaccines shed and so every time you travel or you’re in public you are potentially exposed. The Independent Medical Alliance has protocols for vaccine injury that we should all be following on a preventive basis going forward. And at every step along the way we are told by public health officials and the media that these shots are Safe & Effective.™
The Fairy Tales of Empire are Seductive
Regardless of where you are at in the societal hierarchy, the Fairy Tales of Empire are seductive. No one wants to admit that they are part of a vast machinery of genocide and theft. Far better to say,
We brought people to Christ,
The invisible hand of the market provides,
We discovered the place for the first time,
We civilized them,
This is free trade,
or divine providence,
or the government really loves us and wants us to have Safe and Effective™ vaccines.
But we’re not children anymore. We can tell the story of the world as it really is. And when we tell the truth it creates the conditions for the necessary revolution. So here is our red pill reality:
Conquest and exploitation are bad economic strategies because they just move money from one party to another, they don’t actually generate any new economic activity on their own.
The state is not our friend. The modern state is an upper middle class committee for carrying out the orders of the ruling class and enslaving the working class via iatrogenic injury.
In a previous era — when the state needed men for wars and workers to generate profits for the ruling class — the state had an interest in keeping people alive. Those days are over. In the age of AI, most human labor is seen as unnecessary. So government is profitably eliminating us via iatrogenic injury.
There is no “outside” of a totalizing system — no rural jungle hideaway where we can regroup and build the revolution. The eyes and ears of the surveillance state are everywhere. The only choice is to stand our ground and fight the fascist Pharma state everywhere and always.
The Resistance — and by that I mean small “l” libertarians, the medical freedom movement, independent ranchers and farmers, and critical thinkers of all kinds — needs to be much more ambitious in our aims and purpose. We’re the only people who know how to stop the iatrogenocide and put the economy on a sustainable path. We have the winning hand, we need to act like it.
We need to call for the end of corporate personhood, the end of Limited Liability Corporations as a category of law, and the end of intellectual property protections for pharmaceutical products.
We have to effectively repeal the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and the 2005 PREP Act. There are ways to gut each of these laws without waiting for Congress — for example, in most cases fraud invalidates them and the entire vaccine industry is based on fraud.
We need to figure out what to do with NIH, FDA, CDC, the medical journals and medical societies. It’s a mistake to think that we are just dealing with bad people, instead we are dealing with bad structures. These institutions need to either be radically restructured or completely eliminated.
To achieve these goals we need to lay siege to the federal government through protests, civil disobedience, and general strikes. When we finally fill the streets with our moral outrage and we stay until our demands are met, that’s when we win.
At the same time we need to build our own parallel institutions. We need our own healthcare system, mutual funds, educational institutions, and food supply. Lots of those superior alternatives are being built right here at Polyface Farms.
As many have noted over the last couple days, no one is coming to save us. No hero, no politician, no political party is coming to save us. This work is on all of us.
The story that I want to tell to future generations is that in the Year of Our Lord 2026, the people finally said ENOUGH and began flipping tables and fighting back with all of our might to end the era of conquest and domination and replace it with an economy based on personal sovereignty, mutual respect, and actual innovation.
Okay those are my thoughts. Thank you for your time.
Blessings to the warriors. 🙌
Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. 🙏
Huzzah for everyone building the parallel society our hearts know is possible. ✊
In the comments, please let me know what’s on your mind.
As always, I welcome any corrections.
Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006),
The three bulls are Dum Diversas (June 18, 1452), Romanus Pontifex (January 8, 1455), and Inter Caetera (March 13, 1456). For English translations, see Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917), 9–32; the authorization to reduce “Saracens and pagans . . . and other enemies of Christ” to perpetual slavery and to seize their lands and goods appears in the translation of Romanus Pontifex at 20–26.
Pope Alexander VI, Inter Caetera (1493). On the bull’s place in the Doctrine of Discovery, see Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 9–24.
“Treaty between Spain and Portugal Concluded at Tordesillas, June 7, 1494,” in European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648, ed. Frances Gardiner Davenport (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917), 84–100. See also, Stephen R. Bown’s 1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval Spain Divided the World in Half (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2012).
T. M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and Their Trading Activities, c. 1740–90 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1975); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
Jacob M. Price, “The Rise of Glasgow in the Chesapeake Tobacco Trade, 1707–1775,” chap. 1 in Tobacco in Atlantic Trade: The Chesapeake, London and Glasgow, 1675–1775 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995).
R. H. Campbell, Carron Company (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1961), 105.
T. M. Devine, ed., Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land, 3rd ed. (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 2003).
Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1 (Austl.).
Lynn Hunt, “Against Presentism,” Perspectives on History, May 1, 2002, https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/against-presentism-may-2002/.
Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York: Viking, 2007), esp. 42–85, 116–140.
John L. O’Sullivan coined the phrase “manifest destiny” in his article “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (July–August 1845): 5–10; See also Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).
Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (London: Picador, 2011); Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).
Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: The White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York: Random House, 1991); Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands,” McClure’s Magazine, February 1899. For the classic critical reckoning with Kipling’s politics and art, see George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” Horizon, February 1942.
John Williamson, “What Washington Means by Policy Reform,” in Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened?, ed. John Williamson (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1990), 5–20.
U.S. Geological Survey, “Gold,” in Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 2026), https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-gold.pdf.
US Food and Drug Administration, Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine: FDA Briefing Document, Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee Meeting, December 17, 2020, 37, https://www.fda.gov/media/144434/download.
I can’t imagine a more brilliant summing up of how we arrived at our present crisis of humanity. It is so obvious to many of us, in particular those of us who saw through the whole CV scam.
Thanks Toby for your challenging and searing chronicle of the fairytales told by empires to justify the unspeakable. I appreciated your talk at the Brownstone Institute retreat at the Polyface Farm. And I'll take this opportunity to thank you now. Fairytales are enchanting and direct our attention away from the scene of the crime unfolding in broad daylight. I'll think about this framing of our current dilemma as I engage with some of my historic friends who are still enthralled with public health measures of the recent past.