The massive obituaries to Daniel Ellsberg at the weekend in both New York Times and Washington Post were proof of the status he held in the United States. Only Presidents get that size of obituary. His name was not nearly so widely known in the UK. I first met Dan on 3 May 2006 when we were giving a joint presentation at Berkeley. The large hall was full to overflowing, and to my surprise there were young students queuing outside and striving to listen on stairways through open doors. The...

I hear that the Chinese are going to add the image of Antony Blinken to the dictionary definition of “Kow Tow.” He went to Beijing, hat in hand, and received a less than warm welcome. The term, “frosty” comes to mind. Blinken and his Chinese hosts engaged in a one-sided “frank exchange of views” (i.e., a phrase used by diplomats to describe a tense, angry conversation). The Chinese delivered and Blinken ended up saying what the Chinese demanded he say — “the US does not support Taiwan...

If only the US President Joe Biden had a time machine as in the post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, he should have used that vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively backward through time all the way to 1999 when it was that the US lost the plot on European security and Russia’s perennial quest for mutual security with Europe.  At that defining moment of the post-cold war era 24 years ago, George Kennan was prophetic to warn the Bill Clinton administration...

A central feature of the Cold War racket was the anti-communist crusade. At the behest of the US national-security establishment, the entire nation became obsessed with the commies, both foreign and domestic. The Reds were coming to get us. They were everywhere. They were in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Russia, China, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, Brazil, and most everywhere else. They were in Congress, the military, the executive branch, the political system, the universities, and Hollywood. In the...

Most people agree that we are closer to nuclear war than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Some would even argue that we are closer now than we were in those fateful days, when Soviet missiles in Cuba almost triggered a nuclear war between the US and the USSR.In those days we were told that we were in a life-or-death struggle with Communism and thus could not cede a square foot of territory or the dominoes would fall one-by-one until the “Reds” ruled over us.That crisis was very...

A Harvard/Harris poll is bad news for Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department. The poll shows that 55% of Americans believe Trump’s indictment is politically motivated and 56% believe that it constitutes election interference. The poll captures the level of distrust for the Justice Department and further demonstrates what I described yesterday as the failure of Merrick Garland at the midpoint of his tenure as Attorney General. The view of the case appears to be worsening....

Governments worldwide are trying to replace cash with CBDCs, and people worldwide are starting to wake up, but we need a lot more. A CBDC is a government-run crypto-token that replaces the national currency with a tracking ledger—a list of who owns what—that lets government surveil, control, and mandate every dollar you spend.  They could prevent you from buying the wrong thing, whether raw milk or gas stoves, or self-defense. They could stop you from donating to the wrong person, as we saw...

Occam's razor is not a one-size-fits-all problem-solving principle, but it’s often times the most helpful philosophical approach to tuning out the noise and focusing on the most important facts to reconstruct what actually happened. And if we engage the Occam’s razor principle, the truth about covid hysteria appears undeniable. If we remove the convoluted narratives being spun by the pseudoscience-heavy professions that are virology, epidemiology, and “public health,” the answer is clear to...

Japanese internment camps, US, WWII.Czech President Petr Pavel just took anti-Russian xenophobia to a new level, saying this week that he's in favor of Russians living in Western countries being "monitored" by authorities, akin to what happened with Japanese people living in the United States during World War II. "All Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past because they are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war," Pavel told Radio Free...

On June 4/5 the Ukrainian military launched its long announced counteroffensive in southeast Ukraine. Ten days later there is no significant progress. This is not the outcome the war propagandists expected: [General Petreus] spoke about the situation in Ukraine to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. On the counteroffensive, he said: 'I think that this counteroffensive is going to be very impressive. 'My sense is that they will achieve combined arms effects in other words, they will successfully...

We have minimum low regard for Donald Trump, and not merely because he is a bombastic lout and world historic megalomaniac. His policies were terrible, too. The Federal budget and debt exploded on his watch; the Fed printed money recklessly even as he demanded more; and the free market was kicked hard in the pants by his immigration and trade policies, the unforgivable Covid Lockdowns and the Trump-inspired mass vaccination campaign for an untested gene therapy that he rushed to market via...

Unless you are over the age of 45 you likely do not have living memory of the Kremlin “Watching” that accompanied major Soviet holidays. The term “Kremlin Watching” refers to the practice of examining photos like the one above to assess political status in the Soviet Government by identifying the men who occupied the most prominent positions on the viewing stand above Lenin’s tomb. In this photo from 1965 you can see (from left to right) Anastas Mikoyan, Marshal of the Soviet Union Rodion...

Red State has a new piece out that is making the rounds, advancing the idea that the man who bribed the Biden Crime Family is a “Russian asset” beholden to Putin and the like. Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky, the man who is accused of bribing the Biden family to the tune of 5 to 10 million dollars, is “believed to be an asset of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) by the United States intelligence community, according to a national security source speaking to RedState on...

Some foreign policy myths are so entrenched and tenacious that no amount of evidence seems able to dislodge them. An especially prominent one in recent years is that Donald Trump was Vladimir Putin’s puppet and adopted shameful policies that appeased Moscow. The latest example of that pervasive smear was an article by Peggy Noonan in the May 18, 2023, edition of the Wall Street Journal. In that piece, Noonan manages to regurgitate nearly every stale myth about Trump being too cozy with Putin,...

Maybe you may remember Michael Rubin. He worked with Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans (OSP), a neocon pro-war outfit set-up in the Pentagon by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The OSP’s objective was to create a series of false pretenses to invade Iraq in 2003. According to Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer, the Office of Special Plans represented a “subversion of constitutional limits on...

The backlash has started. It has been slow to emerge, and is lagging that of the US, yet it has begun in earnest. It is, as Wolfgang Münchau, a former FT journalist and editor of EuroIntelligence, has observed: “a seminal shift (for Europe), with important consequences”. It is likely to reshape politics along a new fault-line: No longer the banal issues of ‘uni-party’ (pro-Establishment) politics: marginal tax rates; easy monetary ‘fixes’ and the consequent debt that would accumulate. But...