Lew Rockwell Festschrift in the Works—Sans Hoppe, French, Deist, DiLorenzo …

by Stephan Kinsella on June 12, 2026

Tom, re “LewRockwell.com Publishes a Communistic Screed about “The Need to End Capitalism” and your comment: “I have no idea who is editing LewRockwell.com these days.” Case in point, despite the obvious bad blood between Rockwell/Mises and Jeffrey Tucker, for some reason on Wednesday this week LRC ran a Tucker article. It is apparent the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing and Rockwell is not running LRC. I suppose the left hand did not realize Tucker’s LRC archives had been disappeared and memory-holed Orwell-style after he was ousted from MI in November 2011.¹ [Update: Tucker’s articles apparently are still there, but the link on the Columnists page has been removed to make them harder to find.]

The Mises Institute is also planning a Festschrift for Rockwell. See this email from Ryan McMaken from about a month ago:

From: Ryan McMaken <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, May -, 2026
To:
Subject: Invitation to contribute to new book of essays in honor of Lew Rockwell

Dear X,

This should have happened many years ago, but I’m putting together a festschrift for Lew Rockwell featuring a wide array of authors who have been influenced by Lew over the years.

Often, these books can feature some very long and academic essays, but as Lew has always called himself a “layman” I think that these essays in his honor should be a bit more for the “educated layman” while still being erudite. In other words, they should be a little like an essay Lew Rockwell would write—more journalistic in the tradition of Hazlitt, perhaps.

Nonetheless, I think the format calls for essays that are a bit longer than the usual op-ed, so we’re shooting for essays that are in the 2,000-3,000 word range. Moreover, they should not be written in academic-journal style with “works cited” or parenthetic page numbers, etc. Footnotes can still work, though.

As to topics, there is wide flexibility here. The Rothbard festschrift, for example, (Man, Economy, and Liberty) contains a multitude of topics that are inspired by Rothbard in some way or contribute to his areas of interest. But, there are some essays that are personally about Rothbard. So, I think these essays could go either way, and some of the essays in this new volume could be about how Lew personally inspired or influenced the writer.

I’m hoping you can contribute to this collection, and I’m hoping to get submissions in by June 18.

Are you interested? Would this be possible for you?

Let me know what you think!

Thank you!

Ryan

As the editor of three Festchrifts now,² and a contributor to others (some already published,³ some in the works⁴), I know that this is not an easy task. But I’m afraid Rockwell’s Festchrift is doomed from the start, as it will be missing some of the most important and obviously suitable contributors.

To-wit: the archives at LewRockwell.com show literally thousands of articles and blog posts written by: Doug French, Jeff Deist, Tom DiLorenzo, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Stephan Kinsella (permalinked in case they, too, like Tucker’s, get disappeared). Three of these are former Presidents of the Mises Institute. Hans was its only ever Distinguished Senior Fellow. I was a Senior Fellow.

But all three MI presidents—hand picked by Lew himself—were lost. Tucker, with his open publishing, Mises.org, and other projects, was a threat to various competing interests and factions at MI,⁵ so he had to go. And then there is the treatment of the three ex-presidents, Hoppe, me, and others such as Joe Stromberg, Joe Becker, former Board members (e.g. Andrew Napolitano) and donors, and on and on. They obviously will not be invited to participate in Lew’s Festchrift.

(As for who is running LewRockwell.com: at one point Rockwell indicated he wanted Karen De Coster to take over LRC; she also has a huge LRC archive and used to have many articles up at Mises.org, as a simple search indicates; but she was purged along with DiLorenzo since she, like Tom, sought to bring order and professionalism to the Institute so she, too, had to go; her articles are apparently still up at Mises.org but her name has been stripped, e.g. this one, apparently written by … nobody.

Of course when you submit an article to a journal or website for publication, the reason it’s not copyright infringement when they publish it is that by submitting it you give an implied license to them to publish it.⁶ I suppose it could be argued that this implied license has an implied condition that it be published with attribution—with author’s name. Removing the name from such an article, it could be argued, might mean that it is being published without license or permission and it thus an infringement of the author’s copyright. For which there are potentially hefty statutory damages, per 17 U.S. Code § 504.)

Rockwell was either behind all these or allowed others such as Salerno, Klein, Holmes and Barnett et al. to do what they did to Doug French, Jeff Deist, Tom DiLorenzo, the others, and now Hans Hoppe. Although given Lew’s apparently extremely poor state of health and the way his emails and other information flows to him are apparently being controlled and intercepted,⁷ the chaotic state of his site, the fact that “Lew Rockwell” continues to write daily columns and emails and make fundraising pitches even though it is obviously not Rockwell writing any of this, he may not even be aware of the Hans purge at all. Who knows what is being kept from him or done in his name.

In any case: in normal times most or all of these former associates would have been approached about the Festschrift project, if MI had not so royally botched all these relationships. But obviously none of them will appear now in any book of tributes to Lew, which will be a very conspicuous absence. Actions have consequences. What a shame.

Update: Regarding memory holding and website problems, see the recent brouhaha over Liberalism:

Mises’s Liberalism used to be easy to find at https://t.co/3MMAhH9RpV. It is no longer linked here: https://t.co/ecaFHh3ljx
I believe https://t.co/1RuOkZSvBC used to link to the pdf and epub. But I guess it has been taken down either because of incompetence/bent priorities, an…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) June 16, 2026