Amidst the controversy over the doctrine of qualified immunity for cops, no one is talking about the full immunity accorded to the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency within the national-security establishment that wields omnipotent power. Among the most interesting lines in the new Amazon Prime series The Last Narc is what a CIA official says to DEA investigator Hector Berrellez, who was charged with leading the investigation into the kidnapping, torture, and murder of DEA agent Enrique...

The citizens of Australia’s second most populous city are suffering under the harshest lockdown conditions of all Western democracies. Their voices need to be heard. In the last several weeks, Melbourne has introduced shockingly draconian anti-Covid measures, imposed on the metropolis of some 5 million souls. What tragedy was responsible for spurring officials to leap into action? To blame was a fractional uptick in the number of coronavirus deaths – seven to be exact, and all involving...

Twitter has demonstrated a clear, consistent bias in favor of the US government and its geopolitical interests. The social media giant has also repeatedly lied about its policies on state-backed media outlets. Twitter unveiled a new feature on August 6 that labels government-affiliated media on the platform. Users immediately pointed out the social network’s double standards: Chinese and Russian state-backed media have been designated, but not state-backed media outlets funded by Western...

“You’re a grandma killer.” “You’re not a scientist.” “You’d kill people to revive the economy.” “You should trust the experts.” “I knew you’d resort to conspiracy theories.” These phrases all have one purpose: silencing you, to control the competing narrative. The fact that they want to shame and intimidate you into compliance is evidence that your thoughts are dangerous — all the more reason to shout them from the rooftops. It is highly desirable and crucial to question motives, critique...

I was born in Iowa, raised in the mountains of Virginia, and attended Virginia Tech sporadically from 1974 to 1976 before dropping out to try my luck writing. At some point in the late 1970s, individual liberty became my highest political value and I resolved to do what I could to defend it. I had seen the federal government sabotage the currency, ravage southeast Asia with an unjust war, and tumble into disgrace with the Watergate scandal. The pratfalls of the Carter administration, following...

Doctors are human and subject to human mistakes. Even doctors with exceptional “expert” credentials are still human and like all humans fallible. That’s why patients often seek a second or even third opinion from other expert physicians BEFORE implementing a treatment program. That’s especially true if said treatment is potentially life threatening or subject to severe side effects that may be as deadly as the illness itself.  The Mayo Clinic published a study three years ago with the...

Shell-shocked is a good way to describe the mood in the US for a good part of the Spring of 2020. Most of us never thought it could happen here. I certainly did not, even though I’ve been writing about pandemic lockdown plans for 15 years. I knew the plans were on the shelf, which is egregious, but I always thought something would stop it from happening. The courts. Public opinion. Bill of Rights. Tradition. The core rowdiness of American culture. Political squeamishness. The availability of...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proposed the next multi-trillion dollar "coronavirus relief” spending bill that will support testing, tracing, treatment, isolation, and mask policies that have been part of a “national strategic plan” she has been advocating. The Trump administration is not opposing Pelosi’s plan on principle. Instead, it is haggling over the price.But, even if the strategic plan could be implemented at little or no monetary cost, it would still impose an unacceptable cost in...

Travis Gayles, Montgomery County (MD) County Health OfficerAcross the nation, politicians and bureaucrats have invoked the COVID pandemic to seize dictatorial power to ban activities they disapprove. One of the most brazen examples recently occurred in super-lefty Montgomery County (MoCo), Maryland, where local health czar Travis Gayles announced last Friday that he would impose a $5,000 fine and up to a year in prison on private school teachers that teach students in person between now and...

From the beginning of time, humans have used mythology to make sense of a chaotic natural world. Sir G.L. Gomme dubbed myths “the science of a pre-scientific age.” Folklore provided pre-scientific people a comforting sense of control over nature. To address dry spells, they deployed rain dances. Sunless stretches hindering crops prompted offerings to Helios. Then, our ancestors sat back and waited. The rains always came. The sun always reappeared, validating their “wisdom,” the illusion of...

Facebook and Twitter have taken down the US president’s claims on the insusceptibility of children to Covid-19 – a fact on which the science supports him – proving that Big Tech is increasingly acting in a nakedly political way. In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Donald Trump declared that “children are almost immune” from coronavirus. The videos posted online have been deleted, but the trimmed audio is available here from CNN, which helpfully titled it “Trump falsely says kids are...

So now we don’t have to listen to what those doctors said in front of the US Supreme Court, because it turns out that one of them has some whacky beliefs about sex with demons causing reproductive disorders. What a relief. I’m not going to pretend that the things Dr. Stella Immanuel has said don’t sound just a little crazy to me. They do. But I’ve been observing this game long enough to have a pretty good idea of how this works: Someone says something that contradicts the dominant narrative...

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While proponents of the bombings have long justified them on the basis that they shortened World War II, the fact is that they were war crimes. The only reason why President Truman and the pilots who dropped the bombs were not prosecuted as war criminals is because the United States ended up winning the war. It has long been pointed out that Japan had expressed a willingness to surrender. The only...

Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on yesterday’s hearing in the Senate, which ended abruptly with Sen. Hirono walking out after a confrontation with Sen. Cruz over his objection that the Democrats were avoiding direct criticism of Antifa. In roughly 50 hearings as a witness in Congress, that was a first for me. I have been in a hearing with a lock down but I have never been in hearing with a walk out. I was not sure if I was expected to turn off the lights after both senators left. The...

Virginia has become the first state in the nation to offer for download a contact tracing Apple and Google API app aimed — according to government — at stopping and slowing the spread of the coronavirus. And so it begins: One of modern government’s cleverest means of tracking and surveilling its people, and all for the good health of the people, to boot. COVIDWISE, as it’s called, is being pushed by the state’s Department of Health with a promise of unrivaled privacy protections and the dangly...