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...

You can map the nearly 20-year journey from the 9/11 attacks to the COVID-19 pandemic by the freedoms we’ve lost along the way. The road we have been traveling has been littered with the wreckage of our once-vaunted liberties, especially those enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. The assaults on our freedoms that began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act laid the groundwork for the eradication of every vital constitutional safeguard against government overreach, corruption and...

Remember the goal of flattening the curve? Ensuring that hospitals weren’t overrun? Well, what do you call a scenario where thousands of cases result in zero hospitalizations? I’d call it the ultimate flat curve – or downright flat line. Yet rather than recognizing the detection of mild cases among college students as portents of good news, universities continue to sow panic for no good reason. If we had in place the strict eligibility threshold for COVID-19 testing that we had in March when...

Was the whole coronavirus panic set off by a faulty understanding of the difference between infection fatality rate and case fatality rate? One doctor in the UK makes a strong case that the mania was set off by a math mistake. Also today, more mainstream outlets concluding that lockdowns were a terrible mistake. SF government gyms remain open while commercial gyms driven out of business. Baseball madness, as Nationals general manager ejected from game...for no mask in his own private booth in...

Last week’s arrest of Zoe Buhler by Australian police, the video of which swept the world, should terrify every person who believes in liberal democracy. Buhler, a 28-year-old pregnant mother, was arrested at her home near Ballarat, Victoria, on Wednesday. She was handcuffed in front of her family, had her computer and phones confiscated, and was led out of her house by the police. What had she done that was deserving of such heavy-handed treatment? What had she done that made it worth...

In February, US Covid guru Anthony Fauci predicted the virus was ‘akin to a severe flu’ and would therefore kill around 0.1 percent of people. Then fatality rate predictions were somehow mixed up to make it look ten times WORSE. When you strip everything else out, the reason for lockdown comes from a single figure: one percent. This was the prediction that Covid, if left unchecked, would kill around one percent of us. You may not think that percentage is enormous, but one percent of the...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell recently announced that the Fed is abandoning “inflation targeting” where the Fed aims to maintain a price inflation rate of up to two percent. Instead, the Fed will allow inflation to remain above two percent to balance out periods of lower inflation. Powell’s announcement is not a radical shift in policy. It is an acknowledgment that the Fed is unlikely to reverse course and stop increasing the money supply anytime soon.Following the 2008 market...

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...