The breathless headlines about an alleged Iranian plot to kill the US Ambassador to South Africa in retaliation for the US assassination of Iranian General Soleimani captured everyone's attention over the past few days. President Trump threatened Iran with destruction if they even think about it. But behind the headlines, is there anything to this story? Or is it just another in a long line of scare stories "leaked" by anonymous "US officials" all meant to control the foreign policy narrative? Also in today's program, the bizarre UK move to encourage citizens to spy on their neighbors - soon coming to our shores? Don't miss today's Liberty Report... read on...
Barack Obama said at his convention you must vote Democrat even if you don’t care for the candidate as your president, out of fear for our democracy. Don, Jr. said pretty much the same a week later, just reversing the names and the politics. The messaging from all sides is one of fear. It sounds so 2020 but it as old as the modern era.
America’s childhood fear was we were going to die at school when the Russians nuked America. We hid under our desks during drills, we huddled away from the windows with our coats over our heads (no one explained what we’d do on warm days) and waited to die. For an elementary student raised to believe what he was taught, it was a nightmare. My third grade teacher even identified Ground Zero, the cinder parking lot next to the school, and for some reason told us it would happen in the morning. Every day at lunch I could feel the tension drain away, at least until we had the first sex ed classes in fifth grade and I learned what venereal disease was gonna do to me.
Americans were taught to be afraid even as we were the apex predator on the planet with the world’s only atomic bomb. We dutifully rewarded president after president for maintaining the most massive national security state ever known, but we never felt safe. We never saw it was all a trick, like conjuring a pandemic out of a virus which doesn’t even cause symptoms in many of its hosts and compared to most anything else, like cancer or heart attacks, has a fatality rate well below a single percent (so we count cases not fatalities to generate fear.) As with terrorism, diabetes and ladder falls harm more American lives than the Russians. read on...
Over the course of the past 30 years, the need to keep the schools “safe” from drugs and weapons has become a thinly disguised, profit-driven campaign to transform them into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, school resource officers, strip searches, and active shooter drills. read on...
A federal judge in Pennsylvania yesterday blew the top off of the massive authoritarian over-reach by governors throughout the country, ruling that Pennsylvania's governor and state health official violated the US Constitution in exercising what it claimed were "emergency powers" in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Will the judge's ruling begin to break down the wall of authoritarianism in the US? Also today, the state of Texas has employed shockingly inaccurate and shoddy testing and reporting methods, resulting in policy decisions being made without accurate information. Watch today's Liberty Report... read on...
Our public culture has changed dramatically since the pandemic lockdowns began in March. Unprecedented interventions in individuals’ lives and curtailments of their liberties have become the “new normal,” and will remain so for the indefinite future.
The rationales have been shifting week to week. At first, we were ordered to stay home, to shelter in place, to flatten the curve and ensure that hospitals were not overwhelmed. But after six months of this, a simple slogan has taken root: We must sacrifice to stop the spread, to save lives.
There is no other way, our politicians, our media, and our fellow citizens admonish. If you are a good person, you will submit, for as long as it takes. Deviate from the rules, and you are a bad, selfish person, who does not care if others die.
We have been introduced to the corona gods and they are ferocious, and make many demands. They require children to forgo school, or to attend school by staring into a screen. That is, for those whose parents or school districts can afford the screens. They can play together only if masked, faceless and muffled, six feet apart. Their cognitive development is likely to be hampered by their inability to read facial expressions, perhaps for a lifetime, but that is an unavoidable price we must pay, or so we are told. read on...
Once again, the whispers of phantoms masquerading as administration officials have attempted to put Donald Trump on the defensive only two months before the fall election. And in typical fashion, the roused president has gone on an immediate rhetorical offensive.
Trump has doubled down on his affirmations towards the US military and the American soldier, while simultaneously confronting the class of generals who command them. “I’m not saying the military’s in love with me—the soldiers are,” Trump said at a Labor Day press conference. “The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
This is a dramatic shift in perspective from the man who spent the first two years of his presidency surrounding himself with top brass like Michael Flynn, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, and James Mattis (along with almost being beguiled into nominating David Petraeus as Secretary of State). Perhaps Trump learned the hard way that the generals of the forever wars don’t measure up to the twentieth-century soldiers he adulated growing up.
For instance, when George Marshall oversaw the deployment of 8.3 million GIs across four continents in World War II, he did so with the assistance of only three other four-star generals. In retirement, Marshall refused to sit on any corporate boards, and passed on multiple lucrative book deals, lest he give the impression that he was profiting from his military record. As he told one publisher, “he had not spent his life serving the government in order to sell his life story to the Saturday Evening Post.” read on...
Last week's bombshell that President Trump told WaPo writer Bob Woodward he was trying to "downplay" the coronavirus so as to not panic the population resulted in the usual hysteria from the president's critics. Was it an incredibly reckless and dangerous approach...or did it make good sense? Plus in today's Liberty Report: New poll shows America is sick of Fauci... read on...
Just when the fear starts to subside, and growing public skepticism seems to push governors into opening, something predictable happens. The entire apparatus of mass media hops on some new, super-scary headline designed to instill more Coronaphobia and extend the lockdowns yet again.
It’s a cycle that never stops. It comes back again and again.
A great example occurred this weekend. A poll appeared on Friday from the Kaiser Family Foundation. It showed that confidence in Anthony Fauci is evaporating along with support for lockdowns and mandatory Covid vaccines.
The news barely made the headlines, and very quickly this was overshadowed by a scary new claim: restaurants will give you Covid!
It’s tailor-made for the mainstream press. The study is from the CDC, which means: credible. And the thesis is easily digestible: those who test positive for Covid are twice as likely as those who tested negative to have eaten at a restaurant. read on...
According to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) latest “Update on the Budget Outlook,” this year’s $3.3 trillion federal deficit is not just three times larger than last year: it is the largest federal deficit in history. The CBO update also predicts that the federal debt will equal 104 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) next year and will reach 108 percent of GDP by 2030. read on...
To say that “Black Lives Matter” has been in the news of late would be the understatement of the year, if not the decade. Maybe, even the century. This phrase is on everyone’s lips, on front yard signs, placards, billboards and even, in very large letters, on the streets of not just a few cities. It is the rare newspaper that appears without commenting upon this phrase each and every day.
In order to make sense of this phenomenon, let us consider a few distinctions.
First, there is the plain old ordinary declarative phrase “black lives matter.” Of course they do. Only the most hateful, despicable people would deny this; would say instead that black lives do not matter. Had this phrase been prevalent before the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in February 2012 when it became popularized, it would have been met by all men of good will with the ho hum response of, “Of course black lives matter. All lives matter, and black lives are part of all lives.” End of story. No problem here. read on...
