This year’s stay-at-home orders and lockdowns imposed by governments on their populations represent a watershed moment in the history of the modern state. Before March 2020, it is unlikely that many politicians—let alone many ordinary people—thought it would be feasible or likely for government officials to force hundreds of millions of human beings to “self-isolate.” But, it turns out governments were indeed able to force a sizable portion of the population to abandon jobs, religious...

Barack Obama said at his convention you must vote Democrat even if you don’t care for the candidate as your president, out of fear for our democracy. Don, Jr. said pretty much the same a week later, just reversing the names and the politics. The messaging from all sides is one of fear. It sounds so 2020 but it as old as the modern era. America’s childhood fear was we were going to die at school when the Russians nuked America. We hid under our desks during drills, we huddled away from the...

Over the course of the past 30 years, the need to keep the schools “safe” from drugs and weapons has become a thinly disguised, profit-driven campaign to transform them into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, school resource officers, strip searches, and active shooter drills. Suddenly, under school zero tolerance policies, students were being punished with suspension, expulsion, and even...

A federal judge in Pennsylvania yesterday blew the top off of the massive authoritarian over-reach by governors throughout the country, ruling that Pennsylvania's governor and state health official violated the US Constitution in exercising what it claimed were "emergency powers" in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Will the judge's ruling begin to break down the wall of authoritarianism in the US? Also today, the state of Texas has employed shockingly inaccurate and shoddy testing and...

Our public culture has changed dramatically since the pandemic lockdowns began in March. Unprecedented interventions in individuals’ lives and curtailments of their liberties have become the “new normal,” and will remain so for the indefinite future.  The rationales have been shifting week to week. At first, we were ordered to stay home, to shelter in place, to flatten the curve and ensure that hospitals were not overwhelmed. But after six months of this, a simple slogan has taken root: We...

Once again, the whispers of phantoms masquerading as administration officials have attempted to put Donald Trump on the defensive only two months before the fall election. And in typical fashion, the roused president has gone on an immediate rhetorical offensive. Trump has doubled down on his affirmations towards the US military and the American soldier, while simultaneously confronting the class of generals who command them. “I’m not saying the military’s in love with me—the soldiers are,”...

Just when the fear starts to subside, and growing public skepticism seems to push governors into opening, something predictable happens. The entire apparatus of mass media hops on some new, super-scary headline designed to instill more Coronaphobia and extend the lockdowns yet again. It’s a cycle that never stops. It comes back again and again. A great example occurred this weekend. A poll appeared on Friday from the Kaiser Family Foundation. It showed that confidence in Anthony Fauci is...

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) latest “Update on the Budget Outlook,” this year’s $3.3 trillion federal deficit is not just three times larger than last year: it is the largest federal deficit in history. The CBO update also predicts that the federal debt will equal 104 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) next year and will reach 108 percent of GDP by 2030.The CBO update also shows that the Social Security, Medicare, and highway trust funds will all be bankrupt by...

To say that “Black Lives Matter” has been in the news of late would be the understatement of the year, if not the decade. Maybe, even the century. This phrase is on everyone’s lips, on front yard signs, placards, billboards and even, in very large letters, on the streets of not just a few cities. It is the rare newspaper that appears without commenting upon this phrase each and every day. In order to make sense of this phenomenon, let us consider a few distinctions. First, there is the plain...

The narrative is banal and so familiar: Russia is once again accused of having “poisoned” an individual trumpeted by the Western media as threatening the Russian government’s interests. The minor political activist Alexei Navalny made the headlines after a suspicious incident at the airport in Tomsk on August 20, 2020 sickened him and necessitated emergency medical assistance. Russian doctors at the hospital in Omsk fought for his life for two days and stabilized his condition. Questions...

The toll lockdowns have taken on human life and human rights has been incalculable. Increases in child abuse, suicide, and even heart attacks, all appear to be a feature of mandatory stay-at-home orders issued by politicians who now rule by decree without any legislative or democratic due process. And then, of course, there is the economic toll on employment, which will feed negative impacts into the longer term. The economic burden has fallen the most on the young and on working-class...

Here's what we were told: An August motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, helped spread COVID-19 to more than a quarter-million Americans, making it the root of about 20 percent of all new coronavirus cases in the U.S. last month. So said a new white paper from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, at least. And national news outlets ran with it. "Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was 'superspreading event' that cost public health $12.2 billion," tweeted The Hill. "The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally...

This week is the 19th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. America never recovered politically from those attacks, and government responses to the Covid pandemic are repeating many of the same follies of the War on Terror. Three days after the World Trade Center towers tumbled down, President George W. Bush promised to “rid the world of evil.” After making an outlandish promise that should have earned him derision in perpetuity, the media and the...

At first, coronavirus was sold as a very dangerous disease for everyone. Some people still believe that line, but the facts were clear months ago that for healthy, younger individuals the risk of severe illness or death from coronavirus is very low. And the risk diminishes the younger one is, with children being at nearly zero risk of death and tending to have no to minor symptoms if infected. As these facts have become more generally known, politicians and media have shifted the emphasis in...

So now the Navalny poison episode takes on a new twist with German military intelligence subsequently claiming they found traces of Novichok on a bottle of water the Russian dissident had purportedly been drinking from. Rather, it sounds more like the authors of this false-flag operation have “bottled” – meaning became unnerved by the absurdities inherent in their own narrative. Last week the German government announced that a Bundeswehr military laboratory had detected Novichok in the body...

I have previously written, as a long supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), about my concern over how the venerable group has changed under its current leadership, including a departure from its long robust defense of free speech. Recently, the ACLU has abandoned its famed neutrality and has not supported some on the right while supporting those on the left. Now, the ACLU’s Samuel Crankshaw in Kentucky has targeted Transylvania University for admitting Nick Sandmann, who was...