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.

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.