Jon Utley saved my life. While I hadn’t literally fallen into a well and had him pull me out, in a figurative sense that is exactly what he did. Having just spent most of the 1990s living and working abroad in Hungary, I found myself back in Washington, DC, in a well-known neoconservative think tank. It’s a long story, but much of that strange situation had to do with a combination of disorientation and lack of political contacts after so long overseas. As anyone in those DC circles would...

There are few things in this life that make me more sick to my stomach than watching Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talking. He truly is one of the evilest men I’ve ever had the displeasure of covering. Into the insanity of the over-reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak, Pompeo wasted no time ramping up sanctions on firms doing any business with Iran, one of the countries worse-hit by this virus to date. It’s a seemingly endless refrain, everyday, more sanctions on Chinese, Swiss and South African...

Last Monday, a bipartisan group of Senators and a coalition including libertarian and progressive activists thwarted a scheme to ram through the Senate legislation renewing three provisions of the USA FREEDOM Act (previously known as the USA PATRIOT Act). The bill had already been rushed through the House of Representatives, and most expected it to sail through the Senate. But, instead, Senate leadership had to settle for a 77-day extension.Senate leadership was also forced to allow...

Do we really think “it can’t happen here” in America? Could we quarantine the constitution? Are we doing it already? Panics from pandemics unleash unchecked governmental power. The very premise of popular films like V for Vendetta reveal this: a group uses a virus to seize power and create a totalitarian society. Anyone could witness this from far-off lands, watching the news about China locking people up in their own homes and then removing them screaming from those homes whenever the state...

Would you consider the shutting down of an entire national economy for a disease such as the Black Death, which between 1347-1351 killed an estimated 60 percent of the population in the areas where it spread, to be a proportionate response? What about for a virus which carries — at the very most (see below) — a mortality rate of 1.4 percent for those who contract it? Such decisions should be weighed in the balances. In the left-hand side, there is the number of people who could die from the...

Governments all over the world are using the alleged threat of a COVID-19 pandemic to shut down the world’s economy. Daniel Lacalle, an authority on energy economics, writes: “The decision to shut down air travel and close all nonessential businesses is now a reality in major global economies. The United States has banned all European flights as Italy enters a complete lockdown, Spain declares a state of emergency, and France closes all nonessential public places and businesses.” Further, he...

What happens when governments confuse worst-case scenarios with reality? They transform a health crisis into a social crisis and an economic tsunami, with consequences more severe than the virus could produce in the first place. As I write, hundreds of thousands of people across Europe and the world have already lost their jobs, in the leisure and entertainment sectors in particular. As sector after sector is impacted by global lockdowns, mass unemployment is not a possibility, it is definite....

The administration of President Donald Trump may escape the most recent conflict with Iran without war, however, a dangerous escalation is just over the horizon. And as before, the key factors driving the belligerence are not outraged Iraqi militia leaders or their allies in Iran, but Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long sought to draw the US into a military confrontation with Iran.  Throughout the fall of 2019, Netanyahu ordered...

The COVID-19 “pandemic” is primarily designed to empower the ruling elite and further its authoritarian reach. The primary tool is the innate human fear of death and this fear has been greatly magnified by the corporate propaganda media. For those able to sidestep the trap of fear-mongering, it is obvious this disease is less of a threat to mortality than the seasonal flu and tuberculosis. COVID-19’s death rate thus far is minuscule by way of comparison, although the state and its media...

Social media behemoth Facebook has just acted to censor and suppress Ron Paul's latest weekly column, "The Coronavirus Hoax," based on a hatchet job "fact check" by the notoriously biased "Politifact" organization.At issue is Dr. Paul's statement that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci's claim that the coronavirus is "ten times more deadly" than the seasonal influenza virus is “without any scientific basis." Fauci made the claim recently in testimony...

Fear is contagious: Fear is more contagious than any virus could ever be, and the media has really fed the fear factor when it comes to the coronavirus. I am by no means playing down the deadly Covid-19 coronavirus. It is a killer. Depending on the reporting nation, it appears that on average 3.4 percent of every 100 who catch the coronavirus die. Those are not good odds. Adding to the problem, the Center for Disease Control allowed the virus to spread in the United States out of an act of...

Big news Monday night. Buried amid the panic over the corona virus. Robert Mueller's prosecutors got the green light to flush down the toilet one of their major cases alleging that Russia hacked the 2016  US Presidential election -- US District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich on Monday evening granted the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case against Concord Management and Consulting. This is more than a black eye. It is an indictment and rebuke of a corrupt group of prosecutors who worked for Special...

People are understandably upset about the coronavirus epidemic, but if we’re not careful, an even greater danger lies ahead. Sinister forces in American political life are using the crisis to incite war with China and to stir up bad feelings towards the Chinese people. The Chinese people are in fact heroic. They are our friends, not our enemies. But the forces of evil want you to think otherwise. Concerning the coronavirus, the key fact to remember is that we know very little about it. The...

“Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it’s indistinguishable from the purest paranoia.”— Terrence Rafferty, New York Times What do zombies have to...

Governments love crises because when the people are fearful they are more willing to give up freedoms for promises that the government will take care of them. After 9/11, for example, Americans accepted the near-total destruction of their civil liberties in the PATRIOT Act’s hollow promises of security.It is ironic to see the same Democrats who tried to impeach President Trump last month for abuse of power demanding that the Administration grab more power and authority in the name of fighting...