One of the most humiliating journalism debacles of the Trump era played out on December 8, 2017, first on CNN and then on MSNBC. The spectacle kicked off on that Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. when CNN, deploying its most melodramatic music and graphics designed to convey that a real bombshell was about to be dropped, announced that anonymous sources had provided the network with a smoking gun proving the Trump/Russia conspiracy once and for all: during the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump, Jr. had...

Amidst the escalating tensions with China, the United States should have kept the troubled relationship with Russia on an even keel. But the opposite is happening. For the first time since the presidential election in Belarus on August 9, Washington has openly sided with the protests in Minsk and dared Russia to intervene.  Berlin has simultaneously announced that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned by Novichok nerve agent. Curiously, Germans went public with the...

This week, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, has been the subject of much attention because of her on the sly visit at a salon in her hometown of San Francisco despite such being forbidden under the local coronavirus crackdown and despite Pelosi being one of the most prominent coronavirus fearmongers in America. A few months before Pelosi’s salon visit, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was similarly in the spotlight. A picture circulated in April of...

America’s universities have been taken over by the left, but the way they are reacting to the fake Covid-19 crisis gives us a chance to reconstitute higher education on sound free-market principles. In the name of “diversity,” academic standards have been gutted. Here are some examples. Emily Walton, a sociology professor at Dartmouth, teaches her students about ‘white blindness’: Everyone learns, but I find that the small handful of white students in the class usually learn the most. That’s...

In Defense of Looting is one of the most ridiculous books ever committed to print and would be laughable if the paper-thin philosophy behind it weren’t perniciously making its way into public life. For most of human history, we have agreed that nicking other people’s stuff is bad. The Bible includes “thou shalt not steal” in the Ten Commandments alongside murder, blasphemy and adultery as things you shouldn’t be getting up to. Sharia law takes such a dim view of larceny that in its strictest...

This is astonishing, even by 2020 standards. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, operating under the US Department of Health and Human Services, has asserted jurisdiction over private residential leases nationwide. It intends to curtail evictions until at least the end of the year, and in fact its new directive threatens federal criminal penalties against landlords who ignore tenant "declarations" made using CDC forms. It is unclear, to put it mildly, exactly how this jurisdiction...

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.”—Anonymous Have you noticed that the government’s answer to every problem is more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty? The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its...

The Russian President Vladimir Putin disclosed in a TV interview on August 27 that the Americans, amongst others, had fuelled the unrest in Belarus. He explained that the controversial presence of 33 Russian nationals (with military background) in Minsk in the run-up to the presidential election in Belarus on August 8, which briefly created misunderstanding between Minsk and with Moscow, was itself was a joint operation by Ukrainian and US intelligence agencies.  The Russian nationals were...

One reason for the extraordinary hostility of the foreign policy insiders’ brigade toward President Trump is that he has not wasted his time conjuring up new missions to justify NATO’s continued existence. Instead, he has promised to withdraw 12,000 US troops from Germany and, to add insult to injury, he has demanded that NATO member states increase their financial contributions toward the upkeep of the military alliance ostensibly there to “protect” them. This is sacrilege to a foreign policy...

Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on the rising concern over compelled speech on our campuses and our streets. Here is the column: “Silence is violence” has everything that you want in a slogan: Alliteration. Brevity. Simplicity. It also can be chilling for some in the academic and free-speech communities. On one level, it conveys a powerful message that people of good faith should not remain silent about great injustices. However, it can have a more menacing meaning to “prove the...

Earlier this month, while meeting with the Iraqi Prime Minister, President Trump reaffirmed his intent to remove all US troops from Iraq. “We were there and now we’re getting out. We’ll be leaving shortly,” the president told reporters at the time. Although President Obama should never have sent US troops back into Iraq in 2016, it is definitely well past time to remove them as quickly as possible.Over the weekend, the Administration announced it would be drawing down troops currently in Iraq...

I confess to a dislike of the police; any police at any level. I dislike equally local cops, state troopers, federal law enforcement from a myriad of agencies and prison guards. I’ve always said, “Give a man a badge and a gun and you’ve created a monster.” I also believe that my opinion about law enforcement in the United States is in the minority.  Most Americans like and trust the police. We’re bombarded on social media by exhortations to “Back the Blue!” We say “thank you for your service”...

If you still have any doubts about the tyranny of the federal government’s beloved “war on drugs,” perhaps the case of Juan Carlos Seresi, Vahe Andonian, and Nazareth Andonian will remove them. Back in 1991, a federal judge named William D. Keller sentenced these three men to 500 years in jail for a non-violent drug offense—i.e., laundering drug money. Yes, you read that right — 500 years! Why, that’s just plain stupid. Any lawyer that has gone to any decent law school knows that most people...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a sudden move that’s left some in the medical world baffled, reversed course on its long-standing — comparatively speaking, that is — recommendation for anyone and everyone who comes into contact with a coronavirus-positive individual to get tested, and instead, not. That makes sense. After all, Americans don’t run to the doctor’s office to get tested for influenza every time they cross paths with a person who’s got the flu. Right? But add...

Near the end of July, one of the most important recent developments in US foreign policy was quietly disclosed during a US Senate hearing. Not surprisingly, hardly anybody talked about it and most are still completely unaware that it happened. Answering questions from Senator Lindsey Graham, Secretary of State Pompeo confirmed that the State Department had awarded an American company, Delta Crescent Energy, with a contract to begin extracting oil in northeast Syria. The area is nominally...

A new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper by Andrew Atkeson, Karen Kopecky, and Tao Zha focused on countries and US states with more than 1,000 COVID deaths as of late July. In all, the study included 25 US states and 23 countries.  Based on their analysis, the authors present four “Stylized Facts” about COVID-19, which are: 1) Once a region reaches 25 total COVID deaths, within a month the growth rate in deaths per day falls to approximately zero. In other words, no...