The Project, the Author, the Argument
Peace Racket is a two-volume argument. It runs, in one long line of witness, from Adam Smith in 1759 through Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 — and forward to the reader who arrives now.
The Project
Peace Racket riffs on Major General Smedley D. Butler's 1935 pamphlet War Is a Racket. Butler was, at the time of his death in 1940, one of the most decorated Marines in American history — thirty-three years of service, two Medals of Honor, personal command of American military interventions across Central America, the Caribbean, China, and the Philippines. In 1935 he wrote a short book naming what he had spent his career executing.
The pamphlet is still in print. The apparatus Butler named is still running.
Peace Racket takes Butler's insight and expands it into a longer argument: that peace is a working condition, that its maintenance is not automatic, and that the line of witness naming what the apparatus produces stretches from Mozi and Ashoka in the ancient world forward across more than two thousand years. From Adam Smith on the moral foundations of markets in 1759, through Robert Burns on the dignity of the common man in 1795, through John Newton naming the slave trade in his own former voice in 1788, through Katharine Lee Bates writing America the Beautiful from Pike's Peak in 1893, through Frederick Douglass at Corinthian Hall in 1852, through Butler in 1935, through Thurgood Marshall arguing Brown v. Board in 1952 and 1953, through Dwight Eisenhower naming the military-industrial complex in 1961, through Martin Luther King Jr. at Riverside Church in 1967 — the line of witness has held.
The volume the newsletter accompanies carries it forward.
The Argument in Brief
Three claims, in ascending order of consequence.
First. War is a racket. Butler said so in 1935 and named the specific mechanisms by which it operates: manufactured consent, profit privatized to the few, cost socialized to the many, and the honest counter-record deliberately kept out of the citizen's view. The mechanisms Butler named in the 1930s remain the mechanisms operating now.
Second. Peace is a working condition, not a natural default. When the Framers set down the purposes of the Constitution in the Preamble, they named the insurance of domestic Tranquility among them — and they placed it as a work to be ordained and established by We the People, not issued by government. Peace, like the unalienable Rights the Declaration had named twelve years earlier, is closer to a right that must be exercised than a condition that will hold itself. The Constitution's role is protective rather than generative: it restrains what government may do to the rights the People already hold.
That means peace requires deliberate maintenance — of institutions, of vocabulary, of civic capacity, of the honest counter-record itself. Peace as maintained working condition is not the same thing as peace as absence-of-war. One is peace as the medium in which ordinary human life flourishes. The other is peace as the fear that stays the hand at the button.
Third. A line of witness runs across twenty-three centuries of moral, philosophical, and practical thought about how peace is maintained, and how it is lost. The volumes trace that line — from Mozi and Ashoka in antiquity through the Enlightenment witnesses forward to Martin Luther King Jr. in the twentieth century. The newsletter sounds it in the register of the day and the anniversary. Together they carry the line into the present tense.
The Author
Nathan Ayers is a Colorado-born writer. Peace Racket is his first published work of long-form argument — but not his first work with words. For the previous three decades he has worked as a copywriter and creative in the advertising trade, delivering thousands of campaigns in the discipline of the fifteen- and thirty-second bite. Each spot was an exercise in saying a thing in the fewest words that would hold it. The Peace Racket voice — short paragraphs, declarative sentences, closing lines that stand alone — carries that inheritance forward into a longer register. The subject is different. The craft habits are the same. Ad copy is written for the ear as much as the eye — rhythm, cadence, chord, register — and Peace Racket carries the same music forward into a longer form.
The project's Colorado inheritance is not incidental. Katharine Lee Bates wrote the first draft of what became America the Beautiful on Pike's Peak in the summer of 1893. The verse she gave the country — the country's flaws named beside the country's beauty — is the register Peace Racket runs in. Nathan grew up looking at the same mountain.
Volume I was published in May 2026 by Tava Press, on the Memorial Day holiday. The timing was not incidental: Memorial Day names the cost the book is arguing about. Volume II is being written now, with publication scheduled for December 10, 2026 — Nobel Peace Prize day.
Tava Press
Tava Press is the independent publisher of the Peace Racket volumes. Tava — pronounced with a soft first syllable and a hard second — is the Ute word for "shining mountain," their name for the peak that Anglo settlers later renamed for Zebulon Pike. The renaming did not change the mountain.
Tava Press exists to publish Peace Racket and related works in the same peace-witness tradition. The press honors the Ute inheritance of the region without claiming it, in the same spirit that Bates honored what she saw from the summit without claiming to have made it.
Where to Go From Here
Volume I is available in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle. The Substack publishes ongoing missives in the same peace-witness register. Volume II is being written now.