PROLOGUE: THE INFORMATION WAR In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which...

Consequential Strategic Change – Upon leaving his meeting with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping said to Putin, “Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years – and we are driving this change together”. The ‘Entente’ was sealed during hours of talks over two days, and amidst a plethora of signed documents. Two powerful states have formed a duality that, in marrying a gigantic manufacturing base to the pre-eminent raw materials supplier and the advanced weaponry and diplomatic nous of Russia,...

Below is my column in Fox.com on the Trump indictment. There is a report of 34 counts against former President Donald Trump, which may be count stacking based on individual payments or documents. We will have to wait to see. In the meantime, the prosecution came about in the most overtly political way from Bragg campaigning on charging Trump to a public pressure campaign to indict from his former lead prosecutor. Here is the column: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has finally made...

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry. This is mind-control in its most sinister form. With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a spate of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more...

In a wide-ranging interview, Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-producer and co-host of the Ron Paul Liberty Report, discussed the Republican takeover of the US House of Representatives, the 2024 US presidential elections and the ‘rivalry’ between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, the many divisions in American society and the Republican Party, the corrosive effects of ‘wokeness’ on the fabric of the American Republic, the significance of...

Societies advance through the creation, expression, and evaluation of alternative ideas. Therefore, for almost a millennium, we have had universities where ideas and discoveries are born and different perspectives are debated in “marketplaces of ideas” or “learning communities.” Yet there has been a decline in rational, reasonable discourse on issues of the day on modern campuses. This has been demonstrated by numerous suppressions of speakers, including one recently—and most shockingly—at the...

In Belgrade on March 24, Serbian minister Nikola Selakovic and Russian Ambassador to Serbia Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, laid a wreath at a memorial to children killed in the illegal 1999 NATO terror bombing of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The ceremony and the anniversary of the attack went predictably unmentioned in America. On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic bloc, without UN's authorization, started bombing Yugoslavia in gross violation of the fundamental principles...

Last week saw a sharp increase in attacks on US troops occupying northeastern Syria, with a drone strike against a US base blamed on “pro-Iran” forces and a US counter-strike said to have killed at least 19 people. After the US retaliation, another strike by “pro-Iran” forces hit a number of US sites in Syria. It may be just a matter of time before there are more strikes against the 900 US troops based in Syria against Syria’s wishes. One US contractor was killed last time. Next time it could...

New emails uncovered in the ongoing Missouri v. Biden litigation reportedly show that the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts extended to Facebook to censor private communications on its WhatsApp messaging service. In recent months, the Twitter Files revealed an extensive and secret effort by the FBI and other agencies to censor citizens on social media. I testified on that effort. Democratic members oppose efforts to investigate the full scope of this effort and even denounced those...

Have you heard of the “International Rules Based Order?” Russia, according to Washington and NATO, is violating those rules (China too) and must be punished. We can’t have “rule breakers” mucking up global tranquility can we? Since 1945, the United States has pursued its global interests by building and maintaining various alliances, economic institutions, security organizations, political and liberal norms, and other tools — often collectively referred to as the international order. . . ....

An enduring mystery for three years is how Donald Trump came to be the president who shut down American society for what turned out to be a manageable respiratory virus, setting off an unspeakable crisis with waves of destructive fallout that continue to this day. Let’s review the timeline and offer some well-founded speculations about what happened. On March 9, 2020, Trump was still of the opinion that the virus could be handled by normal means.  So last year 37,000 Americans died from the...

We have been discussing a comprehensive effort by the Biden Administration to blacklist or censor citizens accused of “disinformation” or “misinformation.” This effort includes dozens of FBI agents and other agency employees who worked with social media companies to bar or suspend accounts. It also included grants to academic and third party organizations to create blacklists or pressure advertisers to withdrew support for conservative sites. Now, another such grant through the National...

China’s mediation to normalise Saudi-Iranian diplomatic ties has been widely welcomed internationally, especially in the West Asian region. A clutch of unhappy states that do not want to see China stealing a march on any front, even if it advances the cause of world peace, mutely watched.  The US led this pack of dead souls. But the US is also on the horns of a dilemma. Can it afford to be a spoiler? Saudi Arabia is not only the fountainhead of petrodollar recycling — and, therefore, a pillar...

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Berlin, December 2022. (NATO)Divide and rule is the eternal law of Empire.  Above all, don’t let other big guys get together. Keep them at each other’s throats. Half a century ago, stuck in the unwinnable Vietnam war, President Richard M. Nixon heeded Henry Kissinger’s advice to open relations with Beijing in order to deepen the split between the Soviet Union and China. But which big guys, and when? Priorities have evidently shifted. Eight years ago,...

It is easy to be distracted right now by the bread and circus politics that have dominated the news headlines lately, but don’t be distracted. Don’t be fooled, not even a little. We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst. This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls. What characterizes American government today is not so much...

I was part of Iraq 2.0, heading two embedded civilian provincial reconstruction teams (ePRTs) 2009-2010 and wrote a book critical of the program, We Meant Well, for which was I was punished into involuntary retirement by my employer the U.S. State Department. The working title for the book was originally “Lessons for Afghanistan from the Failed Reconstruction of Iraq” and was meant to explain how our nation building efforts failed to accomplish anything except setting afire rampant corruption,...