“For the children” is often a rallying cry for increasing government power at the expense of liberty. Maybe now it should be a rallying cry for ending the coronavirus crackdown. In the age of governments across the world forcing businesses to close and mandating that people stay at home, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres predicted Thursday, in announcing a new UN report, that hundreds of thousands of children could die as a result of a global recession this year. Plus, he...

The weeks’ long coronavirus lockdown is being exposed as, at best, a wild over-reaction. Americans are starting to protest the destruction of their economy, the loss of their jobs, and the attacks on their basic Constitutional rights. The walls of oppression built by the petty tyrants throughout the country are beginning to crack. It reminds me of the feeling that was in the air in that memorable year 1989, when the world as we knew it was turned upside down. What was so significant about 1989...

In the Soviet Union, activists were sent to state psychiatric wards. According to the state, any and all opposition to government policy was considered a form of mental illness.  Stephanie Buck writes about the treatment of the “social parasite” Joseph Brodsky.  In 1963, Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was seized and sent to a mental institution… Hospital workers pumped him with tranquilizers and repeatedly woke him during the night. He was given cold baths and wrapped in wet canvas that shrank...

We are getting sick and tired of the CNN/Cuomo Brothers inquisition and the Coviddeath Cavalcade. Their relentless, morose, partisan coverage of the coronavirus pandemic is the single greatest campaign of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, scaremongering and elitist prattle we can recall in our entire lifetime. Indeed, Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare was a Sunday School picnic compared to CovidGate. And just as there were no commies secretly subverting America 66 years ago, there is no...

Information on total deaths through March 28 shows no indication of a general surge in deaths in the United States. It's quite possible we'll see April's total mortality begin to show levels well above normal, but the weekly data we have so far show no indication of this. We now have data up through week 13 (the week ending March 28) for this year, as can be found here. As of April 15, the week 13 data is not yet quite complete, although the CDC lists that data as 93 percent complete. (bigger)...

On April 7, 2018, horrifying images of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria flooded the internet. Appalled, the media jumped on the story and resolutely pointed the finger at the regime of Assad. One week later, yesterday exactly two years ago, the United States, Britain and France launched rocket attacks in retaliation, and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in subsequent months concluded that a gas attack had indeed taken place. In the meantime, however,...

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis and mass hysteria, there’s been a peculiar pattern, you will notice if you haven’t already, of certain, new non-interventionist talking points picking up steam. The general premise of these arguments goes something like this: we are unprepared for this crisis because we’ve been spending all this money on war and imperialism. It should be spent on a proper government response to this wildfire-like spreading disease. The military should be here helping...

"Never let a crisis go to waste." Big tech is getting into bed with big government to build a massive surveillance superstructure that will monitor all of our movements - in the name of fighting coronavirus, of course. As Edward Snowden recently warned, these mechanisms of surveillance and oppression are not going to be dismantled once the virus is gone. They will remain. Watch today's Liberty Report:

“As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world,” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said in a recent interview. “Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what is being...

Across the Middle East, the coronavirus is stirring up both upheavals and more subtle changes from Tel Aviv to Riyadh, little reported and when covered little understood in the Western media. In Israel, the virus has enabled that master political magician Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pull off yet another spectacular escape as improbable as any in a James Bond or Star Wars movie to remain in power indefinitely. After matching him in three successive national elections, Blue and White...

I am not on Twitter for the same reason I am not on Facebook: I have too little free time to waste it. However, I do occasionally receive examples of some of the more ridiculous things on Twitter and Facebook from friends and acquaintances who do have more free time than I do. A case in point is a tweet by a pastor who obviously hangs on every word the mainstream media and the government have to say about the coronavirus since he believes that all churches should shut down during this...

Cash may well become a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic. As these COVID-19 lockdowns drag out, more and more individuals and businesses are going cashless (for convenience and in a so-called effort to avoid spreading coronavirus germs), engaging in online commerce or using digital forms of currency (bank cards, digital wallets, etc.). As a result, physical cash is no longer king. Yet there are other, more devious, reasons for this re-engineering of society away from physical cash: a cashless...

For the state, there is one primary imperative—to remain in power at all cost. If this imperative is to be successful, the state must impose, by stealth or deception, a system capable of monitoring all individuals who may pose an immediate or future threat to its dominance.  The COVID-19 “crisis,” produced either deliberately or by an act of nature, provides the state with a nearly airtight pretext for the imposition of further surveillance of the public, in particular political adversaries. ...

About 2.9 million people die in the United States each year from all causes. Monthly this total ranges from around 220,000 in the summertime to more than 280,000 in winter.  In recent decades, flu season has often peaked sometime from January to March, and this is a major driver in total deaths. The average daily number of deaths from December through March is over eight thousand. So far, total death data is too preliminary to know if there has been any significant increase in total deaths as...

According to a story in Politico, the White House Coronavirus Task Force is considering creating a national surveillance system to track Americans’ health information. Supporters of this initiative claim it would enable the federal government to quickly identify areas in need of additional medical supplies and other assistance because the areas are coronavirus “hot spots.”Of course, it is unlikely that this system would be limited to only tracking coronavirus patients. The government may...

To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the coronavirus would not do this development justice. In a space of just six days starting April 2, two revisions (on April 5 and 8) have utterly discredited the model produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I wrote about the IHME’s modeling at National Review on Monday, the day after the first revision — which was...