The general public wants to blame the United States president for the health of the U.S. economy, but there is a man behind the scenes who has much more influence over economic conditions, about whom Schoolhouse Rock never released a cartoon. Now there's a...
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Thomas Massie Leads the Republican Revolt Against Trump’s Iran War
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) lost his primary in May, but before leaving Congress he accomplished something that has eluded war powers advocates for decades. Journalist Aída Chávez summarized the moment succinctly on X: House passes Iran war powers resolution 215-208....
The Demented Origin of the War on Drugs and War on Terrorism Nexus
President Trump effectively claims that he is entitled to preemptively kill suspected drug traffickers anywhere on earth, or at least in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. military has killed hundreds of people in its attacks on suspected smugglers’ boats off the coast...
The Surveillance State Normalizes Itself
The men who wrote the Fourth Amendment had watched a government treat a population as a thing to be catalogued. They had lived under writs of assistance — general warrants that let a customs officer search any house, any ship, any person, on no suspicion at all. So...
Supreme Court Ends Federal War on Gun-Owning Potheads
Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a pretext that the feds have used to nullify the constitutional rights of more than fifty million Americans. The Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibited gun ownership by anyone who is "an unlawful user of or addicted to...
Is Mike Huckabee Putting Personal Faith Above National Duty?
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said in his keynote address to the graduating class of Yeshiva University on May 28, “I want you to know I'm not a Zionist because I'm Jewish.” It’s worth noting that Huckabee is a Southern Baptist minister from Arkansas and is...
Strategic Ambiguity (If We Must)
In recent years, critics on both sides of the aisle have taken aim at the longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan. They argue that Washington should abandon ambiguity and embrace “strategic clarity,” explicitly pledging to fight China over Taiwan....
Can Trust Exist Between the United States and Iran?
One of the biggest obstacles to peace negotiations with Iran is history. Three quarters of a century of experience with the United States has taught Iran caution, starting with the 1953 betrayal that took out the popular and democratically elected leader, Mohammad...
Radio Free Europe, the Cold War ‘Weapon’ Congress Still Funds
"Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were critically important weapons in the free world's competition with Soviet totalitarianism—and without them the Soviet bloc might even have not disintegrated." This was the assessment of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national...
The Bipartisan Roots of Trump’s War in Latin America
When a resurfaced clip of Joe Biden's 1989 speech went viral in December 2025, it created an awkward moment for Democrats attacking President Donald Trump's military campaign against alleged drug boats. In that speech, delivered as the official Democratic Party...
The Iran War’s Hidden Tax on American Households
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its May 2026 Consumer Price Index (CPI) report on June 10, confirming what many Americans already feel at the pump and in their wallets. Headline CPI rose 0.5% month-over-month and climbed to 4.2% year-over-year, the highest...
Why Did the President’s Son-In-Law Acquire A Nuclear Fortress in Albania?
The Old Right journalist Garet Garrett, writing in 1952, understood that empires do not arrive with heralds. They come instead through "quiet aggrandizements of power," accretions so gradual and so dressed in the language of necessity that the citizen scarcely notices...
Section 224 and the ‘Tunisia Test’ in Foreign Policy
Imagine Congress debating a bill to integrate Tunisia into the National Technology and Industrial Base (NTIB). Shared military supply chains, joint research, and development, linked battlefield data, and a U.S. executive agent coordinating defense-technology...
The Bulldozer Revolution: A Blueprint For American Meddling in Eastern Europe
By the summer of 2000, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević appeared firmly entrenched in power. A decade earlier, he had risen to prominence by harnessing Serbian nationalism as Yugoslavia began to fracture. Over time, he consolidated control over political...
The Surveillance State Found Its Philosopher
There is a line in the Fourth Amendment that was supposed to settle this. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue but upon probable...
Mousetrapped: Trump Takes the Bait
The mousetrap motif plays a major role in tales and literature, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet who set one to find his father’s murderer, to Agatha Cristie’s famous play, The Mousetrap, that opened in London’s West End in 1952 and is still running today 30,000 performances...
Copernicus at 500
Famed for his contributions to the hard sciences—most notably his theory of heliocentricity—the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was also an acute analyst of monetary policy. To that end, Ralph Benko has done us all a great service with this new...
‘Terror’ as Technique in American Policymaking
In a speech delivered in the autumn of 2002, as the United States moved inexorably toward war with Iraq, the late Joan Didion delivered an offhand remark that effectively summed up the flaw at the heart of the logic behind that coming war, and of the logic of a number...
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