Peace Racket
is a daily editorial on the war-economy apparatus that Major
General Smedley Butler called a racket in 1935 — and on the citizens,
across twenty-three centuries, who have named it and refused it.
The argument is structural, not sentimental. The Way of the Peacekeeper
is not pacifism. The project tracks a continuous line of witnesses from
Mozi in the Warring States, through Erasmus and Newton and Burns and
Douglass, to Butler, Marshall, Eisenhower, and Martin Luther King Jr.
The line is virtually unbroken across two hundred and nine years — from
Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 to King’s Beyond
Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence in 1968. It runs forward to today.
Peace Racket was born on Memorial Day 2026. [Link to that first post.]
This is the introduction video:
Each day’s missive falls in one of five movements:
I. Witnesses — the figures across history who saw the racket and named it
II. Manufactured wars and propaganda — the Maine, Tonkin, Nayirah, Curveball
III. The mechanism — iron triangle, military-industrial complex, the receipts
IV. Peace itself — what peace is when it is the working condition
V. Citizen action — the work the founders’ design assumed
Three books anchor the project: Peace Racket Volume I (the structural
argument), The Essential Edition (short on purpose, written to be read
in a single sitting), and Peace Racket Volume II: The Line of Witness
(forthcoming). A poem accompanies the project. A song is in production.
The project is by Nathan Ayers — thirty years of fifteen- and
thirty-second radio and TV ad copy training the cadence. Now thinking about why peace has to be argued for at all.
If War Is a Racket, Peace must make a racket too.
Why subscribe?
The daily editorial is free. Five movements rotating across the
calendar; one missive per day. Subscribing is how each one reaches you
the morning it publishes.
Stay up to date.
Every missive arrives by email the morning it goes live. For a spam-free, ad-free reading experience — plus the audio narration when it ships, and the archive search — the Substack app is the cleanest reader.
Join the conversation
Peace Racket depends on the conversation continuing — across centuries,
across registers, across the people doing the work now. Comments are
open to subscribers. The project exists to start it and keep it going.
More about the project
The launch piece is pinned to the home feed — Prayers on Memorial Day,
paired with the launch video. PeaceRacket.com is the project’s home.
To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication,
visit Substack.com.
How The Substack Missives Are Made
Every Peace Racket missive starts with an argument I’ve been working out for years — often decades — and continues with a conversation between me and an AI drafting partner. I direct the thinking, the positioning, the voice. The AI puts my direction into sentences faster than I could alone, which matters, because the moment we are in requires more sounding of the beat than any single writer working alone can produce.
This is the same arrangement CEOs have with speechwriters, celebrities with ghostwriters, politicians with communications staff. Mine is faster, cheaper, and available at three in the morning when the argument won’t wait until morning. It is not, however, an arrangement in which authorship is unclear. If a missive is wrong about a fact, I am responsible for the fact. If it makes a moral argument, that argument is one I would make face to face, over coffee. If it says something worth quoting, I said it. — Nathan Ayers
