By medieval standards, the Danish-Hanseatic War was fast. It took just three years for King Valedmar IV of Denmark to be vanquished. And on May 24, 1370, he was forced into one of the most humiliating peace treaties of all time.
Poor Valdemar wasn’t humiliated because the peace terms were onerous or expensive. It’s because his enemy wasn’t even a real country.
Denmark hadn’t been invaded by some heathen army or neighboring ruler. He was beaten by what was essentially a private corporation.
It was known as the Hanseatic League, and it had grown to one of the most powerful political forces in Europe.
The Hanseatic League started off as a loose patchwork of merchant guilds across central and northern Europe; these were essentially the professional trade unions of the medieval era.
At first the guilds were established to protect merchants and artisans against professional risks and give them a tiny voice in feudal.
But in time they became incredibly powerful.
Soon they began to regulate wages and prices in their industries. Then tariffs and tolls. The guilds grew wealthy by extorting fees from their members… as well as selling wares at heavy markups.
As their wealth and power grew, they were able to bribe lords into granting them monopolies. Eventually no one was allowed to trade, build, or create without guild approval.
They were gatekeepers, deciding who could/could not practice a particular craft. And anyone who defied the guild’s rules was chased out of town, or worse.
Above all else, the guilds demanded loyalty; historian Georges Renard described all members as having to pass purity tests of “morality, orthodoxy, political loyalty [to the guilds].”
The guilds strangled commerce and trade across Europe for centuries. And, in many respects, the Medieval era never truly ended until their power finally waned.
Despite their destructive nature, however, many modern ‘guilds’ exist in our world today.
For example, who decides if you can practice law? It’s a private club of lawyers called the American Bar Association. In 17 states you can’t even take the bar exam unless your law school has its seal of approval.
An engineering license also typically requires ABET approval, a private nonprofit run by the engineers’ own professional associations.
The US Department of Education (they still exist!) admits that just seven private accreditation organizations “serve as gatekeepers for more than three thousand” colleges and universities— and therefore also gatekeepers for taxpayer-funded university grants and student loans.
Like medieval guilds, many of today’s accreditation organizations have ideological purity tests.
ABET’s criteria required every civil engineering program to teach students to apply “principles of sustainability, risk, resilience, diversity, equity, and inclusion to civil engineering problems.”
Seattle University volunteered its engineering programs to pilot ABET’s DEI program; this included capstone design courses with “microaggression and implicit bias training.”
Who cares if a building collapses? Apparently it’s more important that phallic columns don’t trigger nonbinary construction workers.
Then there’s the American Bar Association, whose rules require every law school to teach “bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism”. Twice.
The American Medical Association demands that med schools pursue “diversity outcomes” among students and faculty. And medical residency programs must demonstrate “recruitment and retention of a diverse and inclusive workforce.”
In other words, MEDICAL school is not just about intelligence, skill, and rigor. The melanin in your skin and what’s between your legs also had to be considered.
The AMA even published a guide that calls meritocracy a “malignant narrative” that “must be named, disrupted and corrected.”
These are the people gatekeeping HEALTHCARE!
Never forget that in the spring of 2020, more than a thousand health professionals signed an open letter, organized by infectious-disease doctors at the University of Washington, declaring that “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”
The point of the letter was to bless the George Floyd protests as “vital to the national public health,” while protests against the lockdowns were “rooted in white nationalism.”
The list goes on and one with the many ‘guilds’, i.e. professional associations across America… (and one of the strangest examples is the American Psychological Association holding a drag show at a psychoanalysis conference).
Just like medieval guilds, these associations have become incredibly powerful. They don’t have armies or navies, but they are able to buy political clout… and that clout effectively guarantees them the monopoly in gatekeeping their respective industries.
Ironically, the US government runs an agency whose entire job is to PREVENT monopolies.
Remember Lina “Genghis” Khan, who ran the Federal Trade Commission in the Biden administration?
She didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow at the American Medical Association, even though the AMA used its monopoly to blackball physicians who were against COVID lockdowns.
The Trump administration has rightfully made a lot of efforts to force DEI out of these guilds. And the guilds paid lip service to the new rules by changing their mission statements.
But, as an example, the American Society of Civil Engineers wrote last year that it “strongly supports the concept of DEI and hopes that it will return to the criteria in the future.”
In short, they temporarily adjusted their policies and are waiting for the political winds to change.
These modern guilds represent a destructive power that few people think about— but the rot is deep. They’re poisoning the next generation of professionals: teachers, doctors, engineers… and that takes years (if not decades) to correct.
