Rothmus 🏴
@Rothmus • 673,987 subscribers
Rugged Individualism. Voluntaryism. Laissez-faire. Propertarianism.
Shorts
Videos
Three Mile Island produced zero deaths, a chest X-ray dose, and a 30 freeze on new American reactors. A stuck valve and a misread gauge caused a partial meltdown on March 28, 1979. “The China Syndrome”, a movie about a cover up at a nuclear plant, released in theaters 12 days earlier, so newsrooms had a field day with this one. While Thornburgh advised pregnant women and small children only inside a five mile radius, national coverage turned it into a regional evacuation. Panic eased when Carter walked the control room 4 days later, but the damage was done. Columbia’s 1990 study of 32,000 nearby residents found no significant cancer increase. Nuclear stayed one of the safest energy sources ever measured. But the movie and the headlines didn’t allow a return to normalcy.
Rothmus 🏴4,215,533 просмотров • 1 день назад
This was the day every sane person realized these folks didn’t “just want to be left alone.” Colorado spent over a decade trying to force Jack Phillips to bake cakes his faith forbids, and a 7-2 Supreme Court win only bought him a short pause. He declined one custom wedding cake in 2012 and offered the couple every other item in the shop. The Civil Rights Commission ordered him to design cakes for same sex weddings anyway, retrain his staff, and file regular compliance reports. One commissioner compared his Christianity to the justifications used for slavery and the Holocaust. Kennedy wrote that this was hostility toward religion and the Court ruled for Phillips. Days later, Colorado opened a new case over a cake celebrating a gender transition and kept him in court for years. The state treated his conscience as a problem that needed monitoring and correction. Winning at the highest court did not change that.
Rothmus 🏴719,915 просмотров • 1 день назад
East Germany failed to “guarantee” a car for every citizen, but it succeeded in (1) proving central planners can’t innovate and (2) replicating the breadline model to everything they touch. Because steel was never available for private citizens, the “Trabant” automobile was made out of Duroplast pressed over cotton waste and scrap. >same timeless design for 30 years >super innovative 23-horsepower two-stroke engine >no oil pump so people had to mix oil into the tank by hand at every fill up because labor itself is a worthy end And people still had to wait 10-13 years on a waitlist. 40 years by the late 1980s. So the government did in fact “guarantee” a car for every citizen. Just not that it wouldn’t be shit. Or that they’d ever get one.
Rothmus 🏴4,570,854 просмотров • 4 дней назад
The legacy of FDR’s New Deal is to screw people over for all of time. In 1942, Roscoe Filburn planted 23 acres instead of his 11 acre quota and grew 239 extra bushels to feed his own family and livestock. They fined him anyway. The Court said 9-0 his homegrown wheat counted as interstate commerce since he wouldn’t buy from the open market and enough farmers doing the same would move national prices. Wickard v. Filburn has never been overturned. Courts still cite it to regulate activity that never crosses a state line and never touches a market.
Rothmus 🏴33,953 просмотров • 3 часов назад
No amount of penance will suffice to stop the suicide of the West. In 2006, Pascal Bruckner diagnosed the illness as “Western masochism”, a civilization so convinced its own sins explain every problem on earth that it turns self-hatred into a strange form of narcissism. >Corporate America pledged over $50 billion in racial equity penance after George Floyd >California set up a slavery reparations task force even though it entered the Union in 1850 as a free state that never legalized slavery >The New York Times pushed the 1619 Project claiming slavery was the real founding, then edited the most absurd claims instead of retracting them A nation that can only feel guilty eventually loses the capacity to feel proud of anything, and a people that cannot defend their own story will not keep one for long.
Rothmus 🏴5,582,153 просмотров • 10 дней назад
The original Antifa helped Hitler take power. Moscow ordered communist parties to treat social democrats as the main enemy under the “social fascism” line, so Antifaschistische Aktion spent its energy fighting the SPD instead of the Nazis. Their street fighters clashed with socialists more than with the SA, and in 1932 they even coordinated pickets with Nazis against an SPD-run transit company in Berlin. The two biggest parties that could have blocked Hitler were at war with each other, the left stayed fractured, and by January 1933 there was no united front left to build.
Rothmus 🏴882,066 просмотров • 6 дней назад
“Eat liver pie instead”, replied the commie Marie Antoinette director of the Novocherkassk locomotive plant when the workers asked him how they will afford meat. The Soviet government had just hiked meat and dairy prices while simultaneously slashing factory wages in 1962. The wage dispute escalated into an uprising. Marches headed toward the Communist Party HQ, protesters singing revolutionary songs, and holding portraits of Lenin in defense of “real” communism against the Soviet authorities. So they shot them. 7 organizers were executed, 26 dead were thrown in unmarked graves so there wouldn’t be any public memorials, and people living under the commie regime never found out any of this happened until the Soviet Union fell nearly 30 years later.
Rothmus 🏴921,175 просмотров • 6 дней назад
Every gun, mine, and guard tower on the Berlin Wall was pointed at East Germans. In 1957, the communist regime in East Germany made unauthorized emigration treason after an estimated 2.5 million people voted with their feet, fleeing the communist East towards the West. So in 1961, the authorities closed the border, called the wall “the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”, and gave border guards shoot to kill orders. People only ever risked their lives escaping in one direction.
Rothmus 🏴5,045,202 просмотров • 27 дней назад
Communists and Nazis are two sides of the same totalitarian coin. After Stalin’s commies had spent years promoting themselves as true “anti-fascists” >they signed a non-aggression pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop) with the Nazis >a secret protocol to carve up Eastern Europe >they invaded Poland together >held a joint victory parade in Brest-Litovsk So the Soviets demanded every Communist Party in Europe and America to change their tune and push the narrative that their feud with the Nazis was an imperialist conflict not worth fighting. It wasn’t until Hitler’s sudden betrayal of their agreement and the Nazi march into Soviet Territory in 1941 (Operation Barbarossa) that the commies relaunched their anti-Nazi propaganda campaigns and declared the fight against fascism the moral struggle of the century.
Rothmus 🏴863,286 просмотров • 7 дней назад
As a young socialist, Hayek read Ludwig von Mises’ 1920 paper “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” Mises showed that socialist central planning isn’t merely inefficient, it’s impossible. Without private property and genuine market prices, planners lack any rational way to allocate scarce resources or determine real costs and needs. Even Oskar Lange, a leading socialist in the calculation debate, effectively conceded the point. While he promoted “market socialism” with trial-and-error pricing by a central board, real-world socialist planners in Eastern Europe quietly relied on world capitalist market prices as a guide. Without external free-market price signals, pure socialism would be economically blind and coordination would collapse. Mises went further, arguing that interventionism, the “middle way” of government meddling, is inherently unstable. Each intervention creates problems that invite more interventions, eventually leading to full socialization. Price controls cause shortages, subsidies distort production, and the cycle continues until the economy is fully planned. The lesson is clear. Rational economics requires genuine market prices emerging from voluntary exchange and private property. Half-measures don’t stabilize the system. They accelerate the drift into central planning. The Austrian School understood this decades before the collapse of the Soviet bloc proved it in practice.
Rothmus 🏴27,708,304 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
In 2009, federal prosecutors tried to confiscate a paid off family motel worth over $1 million without charging the owner with a crime, because a handful of guests out of hundreds of thousands got arrested for drugs. They sued the building itself under civil forfeiture, and under equitable sharing the Tewksbury police who referred the case stood to keep up to 80% of the proceeds. In 2013, a federal judge ruled the government never proved he knew about or took part in those isolated crimes. The case became one of the clearest examples of civil asset forfeiture abuse and helped drive state reforms requiring a conviction before police can permanently keep what they seize.
Rothmus 🏴92,527 просмотров • 1 день назад
“But the Nazis weren’t socialists because they crushed labor unions!” It wasn’t until 1980 that the first independent union was legalized in the Soviet bloc. “Solidarity” in Poland reached 10 million members in a year which was absolutely terrible for the commies. So in 1981, the Communist Party declared martial law. They sent their tanks into the streets, shot protesting miners, and jailed tens of thousands just to keep their grip on Poland. Jaruzelski cut the phones, sealed the borders, banned the union, and imprisoned the their leader Lech Wałęsa for 11 months. 3 days after that, riot police stormed the Wujek mine and killed 9 strikers who refused to accept the crackdown. Internments, censorship, and surveillance continued for years afterward.
Rothmus 🏴1,065,599 просмотров • 9 дней назад
FDR (filthy socialist) signed a 1937 marketing order law that let USDA run a raisin reserve that later forced growers to physically hand over a share of the crop, often for little or nothing and in typical commie collectivization fashion. When Marvin and Laura Horne refused the 47% demand in 2002–03, the USDA billed them roughly $700,000 for raisins that never left the farm. It took a unanimous 2013 ruling so they could raise the takings defense without paying first, then an 8–1 Roberts opinion in 2015 that the reserve was an unconstitutional taking and they were owed the full value. That finally killed the program.
Rothmus 🏴77,456 просмотров • 1 день назад
The Bolsheviks declared war on the Russian Orthodox Church as soon as they seized power. They stripped it of legal status and property, then executed thousands of priests, monks, and believers in the Red Terror. Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev was dragged from the Monastery of the Caves, tortured, and shot in January 1918. Patriarch Tikhon publicly excommunicated the Bolshevik leadership and spent his remaining years under arrest until his death in 1925. In 1922, while the country starved, the Soviets seized church gold and jewels under the pretext of famine relief. When believers in Shuya tried to stop them, troops opened fire on the crowd. Lenin then issued a secret memo ordering the most merciless suppression of the clergy possible, arguing conditions would never again be so favorable for crushing the Church’s influence for decades. By year’s end thousands of clergy had been shot and a 1000 year old institution was driven underground by the regime that claimed to liberate the peasants who built it.
Rothmus 🏴1,021,003 просмотров • 9 дней назад
The bad news is Cash for Clunkers wasted $3 billion destroying 690,000 working cars. It also raised used car prices on people who can’t buy new ones. Economist Ted Gayer also showed the cost of each extra sale the program caused was about $24,000 because most were going to buy new cars in the following months anyway. And the carbon cuts cost 7x what the government’s economists said the carbon was worth. But the good news is… jk it’s all bad lmao.
Rothmus 🏴124,085 просмотров • 1 день назад
Communist authorities engineered cannibalism on purpose. In May 1933 they dumped 6,000 ordinary people on a bare island in Siberia’s Ob River with no food, no tools, and almost no shelter. Local police had grabbed them off city streets to meet arrest quotas during Stalin’s collectivization drive, many still carrying valid papers, and shipped them east without trial. Guards left a single sack of flour on the shore and departed. Within days the starving started dying by the hundreds and the living began eating the dead. A Communist Party inspector documented the mass graves and the cannibalism in a secret report. 4,000 were dead by the time the survivors were pulled off the island 2 months later. That report stayed locked in a Soviet archive for 60 years until the regime that buried it finally collapsed.
Rothmus 🏴890,004 просмотров • 9 дней назад
So here’s how America ended up with Ilhan Omar and Learing Centers. The rebels in Somalia overthrew the Marxist dictator in January 1991 and then they started killing each other over who got to rule next. General Mohamed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi Mohamed both claimed the presidency, and then from November 1991 to March 1992, the two sides slaughtered an estimated 14,000 people in Mogadishu (the capital) alone. The clans united to remove Barre, but they failed to replace him with anything functional. And so, Somalia has been a failed state for 35 years and Minnesota has welfare fraud.
Rothmus 🏴3,439,342 просмотров • 28 дней назад
When the Weather Underground declared war on America, they bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the State Department. And then they became respected professors. The FBI put Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers on the most wanted list, but prosecutors later dropped the charges in the 80s because the FBI used illegal surveillance during the manhunt. By the 90s, Ayers was teaching education at the University of Illinois and Dohrn a law clinic at Northwestern because a civilized society hands its way future generations over to terrorists.
Rothmus 🏴195,937 просмотров • 3 дней назад
In May 2025, France finally admitted the extremist Muslim Brotherhood have infiltrated and built a parallel society inside the country. A report published by the interior ministry found 139 mosques, 280 associations and 21 schools connected to the Islamist extremists. The source of the funding was mainly Qatar and Kuwait. When Macron called for new measures, Muslim groups accused the report of being an attack on Muslims, as they always do. TLDR: infiltration is the new invasion
Rothmus 🏴270,501 просмотров • 4 дней назад
Britain sacrificed thousands of working class girls to protect a racial narrative. Telford’s inquiry found organized grooming dating back to the 1980s with over a thousand victims in one town alone. Ann Cryer went public in 2003 and got called racist for saying it. Rotherham logged 1,400 children between 1997 and 2013 while officials sat on their hands. Rochdale’s network finally got convictions in 2012 after prosecutors had already walked away from an earlier case. Same thing in Oxford, Derby, Newcastle, Bristol, Peterborough and Halifax. Casey reviewed it again in 2025, admitted the real numbers were higher, and still had to recommend a full national inquiry. The police files already told them everything.
Rothmus 🏴921,236 просмотров • 11 дней назад