Featured Articles

Politicians Come and Go. The Machinery of Oppression Remains

Politicians Come and Go. The Machinery of Oppression Remains

by | Nov 6, 2026 |

There is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there?— V for Vendetta A revolution can topple a tyrant without dismantling tyranny. An election can replace a president without curbing the powers of the presidency. A new political majority can inherit the instruments of repression and adapt them to their own purposes. In other words, what good is a political change if the weapons of oppression merely change hands? After a midterm election that saw billions of dollars spent on...

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Some Truly Independent Democrats may be Joining the US Congress

Some Truly Independent Democrats may be Joining the US Congress

by | Nov 5, 2026 |

Here is the way congressional elections often work. The vast majority of incumbents seeking reelection win, and many races that do not have an incumbent are decided in the primary of the party that dominates in the electoral district. Meanwhile, there is a small portion of races where the outcome is up for grabs in the general election. Further, it seems easy to understand with high confidence way ahead of time what will be the case for most districts come election day. This situation is a...

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How the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic Became a Country

How the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic Became a Country

by | Nov 5, 2026 |

The former Soviet administrative unit that emerged as independent Ukraine in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union was bounded by the exact borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). That is, it comprised a wholly unnatural polity whose borders and population had been assembled by successive Soviet leaders for the administrative convenience of their brutal communist dictatorship. Once the external scaffolding of this Moscow disappeared, that construct quickly polarized along...

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What Has the Government Done to Our Freedoms?

What Has the Government Done to Our Freedoms?

by | Nov 5, 2026 |

Does the government work for us, or do we work for the government? We pay its taxes, obey its laws and regulations, finance its wars and submit to its surveillance. We are told that all of this is necessary for personal safety, collective prosperity and national security. Yet the government has become totalitarian while individuals have become powerless. The very institution established to protect our natural rights has become our greatest threat. The Fourth Amendment protects the right to...

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Iran War Drags Republicans Down, Gives Democrats Blowout Victories

Iran War Drags Republicans Down, Gives Democrats Blowout Victories

by | Nov 4, 2026 |

When Republicans put America First, they won. When they put Israel First, they lost. That’s it. That’s the plain and simple of last night’s elections. Tuesday night showed very clearly that the American people do not want forever war. They do not want our military fighting a war, any war, for another country when there is no serious threat to our own country. The elections were a huge rejection of President Trump’s decision to go to war in Iran. The biggest losers were Trump, the war criminal...

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Western News Media Propagandists Describe US Bombing Iran As ‘Defensive’

Western News Media Propagandists Describe US Bombing Iran As ‘Defensive’

by | Nov 4, 2026 |

The propagandists of the American press have been uncritically describing recent US airstrikes on Iran as “defensive” despite the US being the clear aggressor in this ongoing conflict, and despite the United States existing on the other side of the planet from Iran. CBS News was the most egregious offender with its headline, “U.S. launches defensive strikes at Iranian targets near Strait of Hormuz.” The title frames it as an objective fact that the attack was defensive in nature, without...

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The Ground on Which Europe Stands is Shaking

The Ground on Which Europe Stands is Shaking

by | Nov 3, 2026 |

Configuring the European-wide hostility towards Russia has been the long-standing project for Europe since at least the 1990s. The US security cadre long embraced the eastward expansion of Europe as a key post-war objective — firstly to combat communism in post-war Europe; and secondly, the expansion of NATO and then the EU served to lock EU states into a US-led security architecture. This structural engineering caused the EU’s foreign and security structures to become dysfunctional, caught as...

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The Crisis In Poland

The Crisis In Poland

by | Nov 3, 2026 |

I was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Warsaw 1994-98. While that was a long time ago, I knew personally many of the people at the heart of the current crisis, such as Donald Tusk and Radek Sikorski. 1) The first thing to say about Poland is that the current crisis is unlikely to turn violent, certainly not in a sustained way. There will be a lot of yelling and name-calling and a lot of references to obscure old feuds and scandals, but Poland is not Ukraine or even France, and will...

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Ron Paul’s 2001 Alternative: What Could Have Been

Ron Paul’s 2001 Alternative: What Could Have Been

by | Nov 2, 2026 |

“Should we just have done nothing?!” The former question is a common incensed objection whenever someone dares to question the wisdom, appropriateness, or success of the War on Terror. Part of this is because many hold to an unrealistic and idealized “War on Terror”—which was just and, despite mistakes, imperfectly accomplished most or all its stated objectives—instead of the historical War on Terror. Even recognizing significant missteps and disasters of the War on Terror, many defenders...

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Republicans Deserve to Lose, but Democrats Do Not Deserve to Win.

Republicans Deserve to Lose, but Democrats Do Not Deserve to Win.

by | Nov 2, 2026 |

Anyone wondering why the Republicans are facing historic losses in this week’s midterm elections should consider these two numbers: 3.7 percent and 0.6 precent. The first is the latest one year increase in prices from the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The second is how much wages and salaries for private industry workers are reported to have fallen in the last year when adjusted to account for the rise in prices. Even Americans with increasing incomes are struggling with inflation. In the 2024...

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Please Mr. President: Be A Peace President Like Eisenhower

Please Mr. President: Be A Peace President Like Eisenhower

by | Oct 31, 2026 |

n October of 2002, the night before the U.S. House voted to go to war in Iraq, my sister Beverly called to tell me a Knoxville television station had conducted a poll and found that 74 percent in its viewing area were in favor of the war, 9 percent were opposed, and 17 percent were undecided. The next day, when I voted against going to war, I wondered if I was also voting to end my political career. This was clearly the most unpopular thing I had ever done. About a year later, I was scheduled...

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Trump Can Start It But He Can’t Finish It. Now He Wants to Island-Hop

Trump Can Start It But He Can’t Finish It. Now He Wants to Island-Hop

by | Oct 31, 2026 |

Washington has a plan for Iran. According to a source close to the White House, the plan is to seize one or more of Iran’s islands in the Persian Gulf. Senator Chris Murphy, who says he has been briefed on what the administration intends to do after Tuesday’s midterms, summed it up this week in four words: “their plan is insane.” For once, a United States senator has understated something. My friend Karl Miller has just finished a report on the limits of American and Israeli war power, and its...

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Gun-Free School Zones and Students’ Safety

Gun-Free School Zones and Students’ Safety

by | Oct 30, 2026 |

Earlier this month, a mass shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon appears to have been cut short by Kaylub Giamanco, a father of two students at the school. Giamanco, using a handgun in contravention of gun-free school zone law, killed the murderer. Brady Leonard provided in a Wednesday Independent Institute article some details regarding Giamanco’s heroic intervention. That intervention, wrote Leonard, depended on Giamanco breaching legal restriction on the exercise of his...

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Trump Speaks His Mind On the Campaign Trail

Trump Speaks His Mind On the Campaign Trail

by | Oct 30, 2026 |

President Donald J Trump has been rampaging around the United States delivering campaign speeches that are all about himself as America’s “greatest president” when he is not smearing someone else employing his own unique brand of maniacal hatemongering. Recent sorties to the hinterland have including Trump in Michigan admiring the prominent asses of incumbent Senator candidate Jon Husted and celebrity rapper Nicki Minaj, to include expressing to the MAGA audience with a leering grin how much...

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America’s Deadly Addiction to War

America’s Deadly Addiction to War

by | Oct 29, 2026 |

America has a deadly addiction to war. Since 1950, presidents of both political parties have sent American troops into conflicts across the globe, killed countless people, sacrificed the lives and limbs of American servicemen and women, and wasted trillions of dollars. Yet these wars have consistently failed to achieve the objectives proclaimed when the killing began. Enemies are replaced by new enemies, dictators give way to new dictators, and supposedly decisive victories become endless...

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Ukraine News

Lies, Damn Lies, and Ukraine News

by | Oct 29, 2026 |

It's been said that truth is the first casualty of war. What about the Ukraine war? I've followed the news closely, and have found ample evidence in headlines and storylines that the old adage holds true today. Too often the Ukraine news stories we see are misleading instead of informative. For instance, in March 2014 CNN reported that Ukraine's Maidan Revolution was "standing up on behalf of democracy." A month earlier, The Week cited many pundits and policymakers also characterizing events...

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Peace & Prosperity Blog

The Antisemitic Ad That Wasn’t

by | Oct 31, 2026

In August, Abdul El-Sayed defeated Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary, making El-Sayed the Democratic nominee for United States Senate for the state of Michigan. Though the...

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Phantom Trump Checks

Phantom Trump Checks

by | Oct 5, 2026

President Donald Trump’s promise to send 5,000 dollars to each adult American citizen after the November election has one big contingency explicitly built in — that Republicans...

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Trump’s Pump and Dumps

by | Oct 5, 2026

In the Wednesday episode of his Peter Schiff Show, economics and current affairs commentator Peter Schiff focused in on two situations in which he argued United States President...

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Thank You for Your Coup

Thank You for Your Coup

by | Sep 25, 2026

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that Donald Trump is the worst United States president in history. Still, is he so bad that you would like to see him overthrown via a military...

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