I was born in Iowa, raised in the mountains of Virginia, and attended Virginia Tech sporadically from 1974 to 1976 before dropping out to try my luck writing. At some point in the late 1970s, individual liberty became my highest political value and I resolved to do what I could to defend it. I had seen the federal government sabotage the currency, ravage southeast Asia with an unjust war, and tumble into disgrace with the Watergate scandal. The pratfalls of the Carter administration, following...

Doctors are human and subject to human mistakes. Even doctors with exceptional “expert” credentials are still human and like all humans fallible. That’s why patients often seek a second or even third opinion from other expert physicians BEFORE implementing a treatment program. That’s especially true if said treatment is potentially life threatening or subject to severe side effects that may be as deadly as the illness itself.  The Mayo Clinic published a study three years ago with the...

Shell-shocked is a good way to describe the mood in the US for a good part of the Spring of 2020. Most of us never thought it could happen here. I certainly did not, even though I’ve been writing about pandemic lockdown plans for 15 years. I knew the plans were on the shelf, which is egregious, but I always thought something would stop it from happening. The courts. Public opinion. Bill of Rights. Tradition. The core rowdiness of American culture. Political squeamishness. The availability of...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proposed the next multi-trillion dollar "coronavirus relief” spending bill that will support testing, tracing, treatment, isolation, and mask policies that have been part of a “national strategic plan” she has been advocating. The Trump administration is not opposing Pelosi’s plan on principle. Instead, it is haggling over the price.But, even if the strategic plan could be implemented at little or no monetary cost, it would still impose an unacceptable cost in...

Travis Gayles, Montgomery County (MD) County Health OfficerAcross the nation, politicians and bureaucrats have invoked the COVID pandemic to seize dictatorial power to ban activities they disapprove. One of the most brazen examples recently occurred in super-lefty Montgomery County (MoCo), Maryland, where local health czar Travis Gayles announced last Friday that he would impose a $5,000 fine and up to a year in prison on private school teachers that teach students in person between now and...

From the beginning of time, humans have used mythology to make sense of a chaotic natural world. Sir G.L. Gomme dubbed myths “the science of a pre-scientific age.” Folklore provided pre-scientific people a comforting sense of control over nature. To address dry spells, they deployed rain dances. Sunless stretches hindering crops prompted offerings to Helios. Then, our ancestors sat back and waited. The rains always came. The sun always reappeared, validating their “wisdom,” the illusion of...

Facebook and Twitter have taken down the US president’s claims on the insusceptibility of children to Covid-19 – a fact on which the science supports him – proving that Big Tech is increasingly acting in a nakedly political way. In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Donald Trump declared that “children are almost immune” from coronavirus. The videos posted online have been deleted, but the trimmed audio is available here from CNN, which helpfully titled it “Trump falsely says kids are...

So now we don’t have to listen to what those doctors said in front of the US Supreme Court, because it turns out that one of them has some whacky beliefs about sex with demons causing reproductive disorders. What a relief. I’m not going to pretend that the things Dr. Stella Immanuel has said don’t sound just a little crazy to me. They do. But I’ve been observing this game long enough to have a pretty good idea of how this works: Someone says something that contradicts the dominant narrative...

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While proponents of the bombings have long justified them on the basis that they shortened World War II, the fact is that they were war crimes. The only reason why President Truman and the pilots who dropped the bombs were not prosecuted as war criminals is because the United States ended up winning the war. It has long been pointed out that Japan had expressed a willingness to surrender. The only...

Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on yesterday’s hearing in the Senate, which ended abruptly with Sen. Hirono walking out after a confrontation with Sen. Cruz over his objection that the Democrats were avoiding direct criticism of Antifa. In roughly 50 hearings as a witness in Congress, that was a first for me. I have been in a hearing with a lock down but I have never been in hearing with a walk out. I was not sure if I was expected to turn off the lights after both senators left. The...

Virginia has become the first state in the nation to offer for download a contact tracing Apple and Google API app aimed — according to government — at stopping and slowing the spread of the coronavirus. And so it begins: One of modern government’s cleverest means of tracking and surveilling its people, and all for the good health of the people, to boot. COVIDWISE, as it’s called, is being pushed by the state’s Department of Health with a promise of unrivaled privacy protections and the dangly...

While America continues to fixate on the drama-filled reality show scripted by the powers-that-be, directed from the nation’s capital, and played out in high definition across the country, the American Police State has moved steadily forward. Nothing has changed. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a convenient, traumatic, devastating distraction. The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have allowed themselves to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the...

The United States was once thought of as the country with rugged individuals. You left such individuals alone and they left you alone. The country was filled with such men and women. They appear to be mostly gone from America now. Stunningly few think or act for themselves. Governments in many parts of the land have ordered mask-wearing to "battle" a virus that is about as deadly to the average American under 80 as hay fever. The mask-wearing order has resulted in near 100% compliance in such...

In recent days governments in Australia, Europe, and the US have moved toward imposing a new wave of forced lockdowns in the name of fighting the spread of COVID-19. Australia has imposed harsh new lockdown measures, including a curfew from 8 pm to 5 am. CNN reports: Those restrictions include a curfew in Melbourne for the next six weeks, a ban on wedding gatherings, and schools must go back to online classes. ... Only one person per household is allowed to leave their homes once a day --...

While the Trump administration sells the decision to withdraw US troops from Germany as a strengthening of NATO force alignment, the reality is it’s merely the latest manifestation of a relationship on the decline for decades. The announcement by Secretary of Defense Mike Esper that the US has finalized plans for the withdrawal of some 12,000 troops from Germany came as a surprise to no one. This decision, minus the details concerning implementation, was originally announced back on June 30....