As the influence of the US and Europe wanes in the face of a new geopolitical reality, their Cold War progeny, NATO, seeks to redefine itself as a global player. The problem is NATO is not capable of even stepping onto the field. During a video presentation this week sponsored by the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund of the United States, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told an attentive audience that while the alliance “does not see China as the new enemy,” it must be...

Gordon Klein, an accounting professor in the Anderson School of Business has taught at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) for almost 40 years. He is now suspended and under police protection in his home. The reason? Klein refused to exempt black students from his final exam and sent a pointed rebuttal to students asking for the “no harm” exam. Parts of the response was certainly mocking in tone, more so than I would have considered appropriate. The school has launched a formal...

In response to the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin and accomplices, woke culture has intensified cringy prostration and humiliation rituals that can be traced to the Maoist Cultural Revolution. In social media and physical encounters across the US and beyond, the Black Lives Matter movement, left-leaning political groups, and mainstream organizations have engaged in soft forms of struggle sessions and forced self-criticism routines, eerily resembling those the Red...

Jean-Paul Marat, one of the key leaders of the French Revolution, once mocked the notion that liberty could be established by his fellow revolutionaries since “apart from a few tragic scenes, the revolution has been nothing but a web of farcical scenes.” Welcome to the French Revolution 2.0. The tragic killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis resulted in an important focus on race relations and justice in this country. However, it is being lost to an emerging radicalism that challenges people to...

It seems like only yesterday. Americans were denied the right to go to their churches. They were denied the right to visit their loved ones in the hospital. They were denied the right to open their businesses and go to work to provide for themselves and their families. They were denied the right to go to restaurants, to bars, to hair salons.No laws were passed denying these rights. Even that would be illegal and immoral. But what happened was worse. They were denied these basic rights by...

The FBI has publicly justified its suppression of dissenting online views about US foreign policy if a media outlet can be somehow linked to one of its adversaries. The Bureau’s justification followed a series of instances in which Google and other social media platforms banned accounts following consultations with the FBI. In a particularly notable case in 2018, the FBI encouraged Facebook, Instagram and Google to ban the American Herald Tribune (AHT), an online journal that published...

Republican senator Tom Cotton’s controversial op-ed demanding US troops be deployed against American protesters would have been embraced by the New York Times if he’d just stuck to cheering on military actions abroad. The Times has been consumed with angst over the backlash to the Arkansas senator’s piece, which called for the military to be turned loose in US cities as an “overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” Hundreds of the outlet’s staffers have...

America’s youth have taken to the streets in Santa Monica, in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles, in New York City, in Washington, D.C., and more, in protest of the horrible police killing of George Floyd, and they’re setting fires, burning businesses — burning St. John’s Church, the historic place of worship for American presidents — looting stores, smashing glass, tossing Molotov cocktails and fighting police. And they’re doing it with the aid and assistance of mandated, recommended or acceptably...

Former president George W. Bush has returned to the spotlight to give moral guidance to America in these troubled times. In a statement released on Tuesday, Bush announced that he was “anguished” by the “brutal suffocation” of George Floyd and declared that “lasting peace in our communities requires truly equal justice. The rule of law ultimately depends on the fairness and legitimacy of the legal system. And achieving justice for all is the duty of all.” Bush’s declaration was greeted with...

Barack Obama has given his perfunctory speech about the Black Lives Matter protests taking place in America today, and it was every bit as full of pretty words and empty of actual substance as you’d expect from a president who spent eight years stagnating the progressive movement with empty hope narrative while advancing the same murderous oppressive agendas as his predecessors. The former president talked about changes that need to be made as though he wasn’t the most powerful politician in...

Russian hopes dashed: Whatever hopes Russian President Vladimir Putin may have had for a more workable relationship with the Trump administration have been “trumpled,” so to speak. This came through loudly and clearly in acerbic remarks by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov in an interview Friday with The National Interest. Ryabkov lamented the sad state of Russia-US relations, while pointing, not very subtly, to China as Russia’s ace in the hole. He was simply acknowledging that...

Six weeks ago, when thousands around the nation took to state capitols to protest the human rights abuses inflicted by coerced "stay-at-home orders," lockdown supporters reacted with sanctimonious outrage. Declaring the protestors to be "covidiots" who failed to appreciate the virtue and necessity of police-enforced lockdowns, news outlets and lockdown advocates on social media declared the protests would cause outbreaks of disease, and nurses declared the protests were "a slap in the face" to...

"Stay home, save lives," the politicians and media demanded. And Americans stayed home for months and lost their jobs and their mental and physical health. If you go out, they said, you will kill people by passing on the virus. But all of a sudden these same politicians have turned on a dime in the aftermath of the killing of a Minnesota man in police custody - all of a sudden they are not only encouraging but joining mass public protests. Social distancing has given way to the demands of...

The same people who convinced Americans to lock themselves inside for months for fear of a killer virus have forsaken Covid-19 to urge us all to join nationwide protests. If anyone took them seriously before, those days are over. Media, politicians and celebrities who spent the past three months lecturing Americans about the importance of staying home and keeping at least six feet away from all other humans lest they catch or spread the deadly coronavirus have suddenly pivoted on a dime –...

President Donald Trump’s executive order on social media has left more questions than answers on the ability of the government to regulate companies like Twitter. However, one thing is abundantly clear: the loser in this fight will be free speech. Indeed, the striking thing about this controversy is neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are actually advocating for free speech, just different forms of speech controls. Civil libertarians are faced with the “choice” offered by Henry Ford on...