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...

The Democrats and Donald Trump reminds me of a bad horror movie, where the hapless protagonists only make the monster stronger with each attempt to eliminate it. So goes the Democrats’ endless attempts to finally rid America of the “scourge” of Donald Trump.Thanks to the Durham Report we now know they started even before Trump was elected president. Hillary Clinton’s campaign – with the full knowledge of the candidate and the sitting president, Barack Obama – cooked up a “dirty trick” to...

The Berks County District Attorney’s Office has confirmed that it is dropping charges against Damon Atkins after the preacher was arrested citing the Bible in protest of an LGBTQ Pride event in Reading, Pennsylvania. The only reason that the charges were dropped is that a third party videotaped the scene and disproved the account of the arresting officer. Ironically, Atkins was reciting 1 Corinthians 14:33 that begins “For God is not the author of confusion.” That role appears to rest with the...

One year ago, I joined the states of Missouri and Louisiana and several other co-plaintiffs to file a suit in federal court challenging what journalist Michael Shellenberger has called the censorship-industrial complex. While much of the press cooperated with the state’s censorship efforts and has ignored our court battle, we expect that it will ultimately go to the Supreme Court, setting up Missouri v. Biden to be the most important free speech case of our generation—and arguably, of the past...

US Rep. Thomas Massie speaks to a past Ron Paul Scholars Seminar.Attention Upper Division Undergrads and Grad Students!We realize that many of you are just getting the hang of summer and perhaps the last thing on your mind as it warms up is exercising your mind, but we have a great opportunity for you at the end of summer that you will want to apply for right now!The Ron Paul Institute is pleased to announce its fourth Ron Paul Scholars Seminar. The Seminar will take place on September first...

More than a year into Russia’s Special Operation, the initial burst of European excitement at western push-back on Russia has dissipated. The mood instead has turned to “existential dread, a nagging suspicion that [western] civilisation may destroy itself,” Professor Helen Thompson writes.For an instant, a euphoria had coalesced around the putative projection of the EU as a world power; as a key actor, about to compete on a world scale. Initially, events seemed to play to Europe’s conviction...

It is often said that “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” The line is attributed to Hiram W Johnson in 1929 in a debate over a dubious effort to legislatively ban war. That line is not original to Johnson but what followed should be equally notable: “this mode of propaganda whereby … people become war hungry in their patriotism and are lied into a desire to fight. We have seen it in the past; it will happen again in the future.” This week, a new story suggests that Johnson’s...

In post after post yesterday morning, the corporate war propaganda media is attempting to blame Russia for the terrorist bombing of the Nova Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power station on the Dnieper River. It is doing this by underscoring an accusation made by a documented serial liar, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his coterie of Nazi-worshipping thugs, that Russia punched holes in the dam in order to flood the battlefield.U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres shifted the blame on Russia...

The breach in the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River in war-ravaged Ukraine on Tuesday is no doubt a catastrophe of colossal proportions, a veritable ecological and human disaster that may outlive the war itself.However, the striking thing about the White House reaction to the event from John Kirby, Coordinator for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council, is that he tactfully avoided endorsingUkraine President Vladimir Zelensky’s finger-pointing at the Russians. Kirby...

The remains of an American soldier were laid to rest on Memorial Day at the Andersonville National Cemetery in Georgia after a police car with lights flashing escorted the casket to the cemetery. What made this funeral service so unique and so tragic is that Pfc. Luther Herschel Story was killed on September 1, 1950, during the Korean War.  He was just eighteen years old.Story left high school during his sophomore year and enlisted in the Army. In the summer of 1950, he deployed to Korea with...

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the first story featuring National Security Agency (NSA) contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden’s initial revelation: the role of Verizon in aiding NSA’s telephone metadata mass surveillance program.As the Guardian noted at the time, “The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall… that the US government is relying on ‘secret legal interpretations’ to claim surveillance powers...

Edward Snowden did heroic service in awakening Americans to Washington ravishing their privacy. Snowden’s “reward” is to be banished in Russia without a snowball’s chance in hell of a fair trial if he returns to America. But as he courageously declared, “I would rather be without a state than without a voice.” He explained why he leaked classified information: “I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the...

We have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.COVID-19, for example, served as the driving force behind what Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch characterized as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”In a statement attached to the...

The political and financial class breathed a sigh of relief when Congress passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. The bill suspends the debt ceiling for two years, thus avoiding the establishment’s nightmare of a government default on its debt. Rather, it allows the government to continue adding trillions of dollars of debt that will be monetized by the Federal Reserve. Of course, this default will be felt by the people in the form of an inflation tax. This inflation tax may be the worst...