Show Me the Money!

Can Elon Break Into Fort Knox?

Joe Biden always admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and wanted to be like him. Now I know why. Back in 1933, FDR signed Executive Order 6102, requiring Americans to sell any gold they might own to the government. That’s right, FDR made owning gold a crime and forced American citizens to sell their personal gold (if they had any) to the government at the price FDR set. It wasn’t a crime if the government owned gold—only you.

For a time in America, it became illegal for citizens to own gold, except for small amounts like perhaps a gold ring or maybe a gold tooth. In the words of the Executive Order, it forbade Americans from “hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States.” Hoarding in this case meant just owning. If you owned a gold dollar, you were a criminal. This executive order was not repealed until New Year’s Eve 1974.

FDR’s rule required people to cough up their gold on or before May 1, 1933, and people received $20.67 per troy ounce. This was the price FDR set. No wonder socialists love the guy. Failure to comply with FDR’s gold heist was punishable to up to ten years in prison plus substantial fines. Yes, this was the United States government under Democrat control in action. Individuals could hold up to $100 worth of gold coins (maximum) and special exemptions were made for dentists and those who used gold in their professions.

By mid-May of 1933, FDR had all of the gold in America in his greasy Democrat hands, so he then issued the 1934 Gold Reserve Act, which said the price of gold just went up—he set the value at $35 an ounce. Nice profit margin, buy at $20 then declare it worth $35. The U.S. government was rich! Note one cent of this price increase was shared by those who were forced to sell their gold to FDR at fire sale prices.

This netted FDR and his merry band of thieves, I mean Democrats, a tidy profit but devalued the U.S. dollar.

One good thing about those old days was that all paper money had to be backed by precious metals, mostly gold but sometimes silver. This meant that not one single dollar bill could be printed by the U.S. Mint unless there was precious metal to back it up. That’s why FDR needed gold! The days of runaway printing presses churning out trillions of dollars were not yet upon us. There were limits to what the government could spend because they could not print money that was not backed by gold.

That changed in 1971, when President Richard Nixon separated gold from paper, in other words, we could now print money that had no backing. And print they did! That’s how we spend trillions of dollars on nothing—we just print the money as we go along.

(By the way, you coin collectors—in 1933 there was a U.S. “double eagle” gold coin minted. FDR’s executive order made these coins subversive, so he ordered all of those 1933 coins destroyed. However, about 20 of them eluded the feds. One of those famous “double eagle” coins was sold in 2002 for $7.5M.)

Fort Knox

The U.S. allegedly stores a good portion of its gold reserves in Fort Knox in Kentucky. Located near a military post named Fort Knox, the building above the underground vaults where the gold is kept looks like an abandoned insane asylum from a Steven King movie.

It is said they keep the gold many levels underground. I phrase this carefully because no authorized outsider—not even a President—has seen it recently.

The creepy Fort Knox building was constructed in 1936 and although it’s named for the military post which guards it—it is actually part of the Treasury, not the Department of Defense. Back in the 1930s, a total of 13,000 metric tons of gold were shipped there by railroad, along with some other precious metals and artifacts. The original copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are there, too. Or so they say.

The Treasury used to store a great deal of gold in New York, but coastal cities were considered more vulnerable to foreign attack, so the Treasury headed for the hills, building this vault in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky. The real action is many levels below ground. Only a handful of people know the secret codes to get into the underground vaults.

If you’d like to go on a tour of the Fort Knox vault, forget it. They’ve never had them except under extreme circumstances. No President has ever visited there except FDR. If you look up tours to Fort Knox online, they try to deflect you to visit the military post or the Patton Museum.

Nobody goes to Fort Knox. Nobody.

Elon Wants to Go to Fort Knox

Fort Knox has periodically been audited, meaning an outside agency has gone in and seen the gold, which is reported to amount to 4,580 tons. There have been 13 audits previously, starting with one that began in 1974—half a century ago—and ended in 1986. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to see the paperwork associated with those audits turn up astounding results. Apparently, there were 13 audits in that time span and the paperwork was lost in 7 of them. And no subsequent audits have ever been conducted.

Senator Rand Paul has suggested we audit Fort Knox again—after all, it’s been decades since the last audit—and even thought Elon Musk might be able to roll this into his various Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) activities.

Elon Musk responded to Senator Paul’s request by asking if audits were not conducted annually—and he was surprised when he found out audits have not been conducted at all in over 30 years and most of the reports from the earlier audits most went missing.

Elon seems amenable to a DOGE visit to Fort Knox. It is hard to say how Congress will receive this good news.

No one knows how the last audit was conducted, other than it sounds implausible. The audit was started in 1974 but it took more than a decade to finish—it was completed in 1986. And despite taking so long to do the audit, the auditors claimed they only were able to audit 97% of the gold reserves. The audit was run by the General Accounting Office, the U.S. Treasury, and the Bureau of the Mint, all of whom have a vested interest in making sure the audit comes out squeaky clean.

This is not the first time somebody wanted to break into Fort Knox to get an accounting. In 2021, a Representative from West Virginia named Alex Mooney proposed legislation to audit the gold in Fort Knox and provide detailed reporting on all gold transactions conducted by the government. Congressman Mooney is no longer in office, and his bill languishes untouched in the Capitol. For some reason, the U.S. government has zero interest in the gold in Fort Knox. Do they know something we don’t?

So let’s assume Elon Musk is able to do what no one else has done before—he’s got a precedent for that sort of thing, what with rockets and electric cars and PayPal and other stuff. Let’s assume he gets in to inspect the gold that allegedly belongs to the citizens of the United States. What will he find?

There are three main conspiracy theories about the gold in Fort Knox.

• The gold is gone—it’s been stolen, squandered, or sequestered elsewhere by the criminal class in power

• Some of the gold is gone. Same as above, but they just haven’t taken it all yet. After all, moving large quantities of gold is hard work

• The gold is somewhere else, and Fort Knox is just a decoy set up for security purposes

These conspiracy theories are not new. The first round of rumors that the gold had been plundered happened in 1974.

It is also possible everything is hunky-dory and the gold is all there in nice, neat stacks. That’s what Congress would have you believe. In fact, the apologists for our corrupto-crat class have argued that the audit is unnecessary and, besides, even if some gold is missing, it is likely that the gold has been legally bought and sold and moved around. This is the “nothing to see here” defense. It is generally invoked when there is something awful to see.

Except Fort Knox is not a busy place. There are no records or official transfers of any substantial amount of gold in and out of Fort Knox ever.

Of course, Fort Knox doesn’t exactly keep many records and even if they did, they wouldn’t show them to us. The only gold on record to have ever been taken out of Fort Knox (and brought back) are small amounts used to test for the purity of the metal. There have been no larger gold shipments in or out of Fort Knox in years and years.

Half of the U.S. Treasury’s worth is stored in Fort Knox. This is allegedly the largest repository of gold on earth. Doesn’t that make it worth an audit? What could happen if all or some of the gold is gone? What if, like Al Capone’s vault on that old TV show with Geraldo Rivera—we get there and find out that the vault is empty?

That would be bad.

• It immediately undermines the “full faith and confidence” in the U.S. government

• There would be an international monetary crisis since a lot of the world’s transactions are done based on the U.S. dollar

• It could cause domestic economic panic, and it would undermine confidence in the government

• It means you can kiss your 401(k) goodbye

• But even worse, wars could break out

• Nancy Pelosi will go on the lam

It seems bizarre that a place like Fort Knox with its legendary security measures (remember Goldfinger?) is unwilling to allow high-ranking officials, like Presidents or their authorized agents, into the facility. It’s even more remarkable that no one is allowed to audit the place. And it’s very suspicious to me that Congress wants to avoid audits at all costs. People in Congress are more concerned with fighting for sanctuary cities than they are about whether our gold reserves are safe and accounted for. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist here to smell a big stinky rat.

As Tom Cruise once said in a different context in Jerry Maguire, “Show me the money!”