The UN’s human rights body has accused Israel of the “crime of apartheid,” saying it has established a “regime of systematic racial oppression and discrimination” against Palestinians.
UN Human Rights Report Says Israel Guilty of ‘Apartheid’
political system
Pulling Decentralization from the Ruins of ‘Liberal Democracy’
So-called liberal democracies have characterized the West for the past century and are viewed as the pinnacle of political development. So much so that Western elites are firmly convinced that this system of governance should be spread far and wide—be it indirectly (color revolutions) or directly (economic sanctions, kinetic military actions, or nation-building expeditions). Liberal democracies are political systems in which people entrust political power to a political class that, at least on paper, is constitutionally limited when it comes to exercising political power. Further, liberal...
DC ‘Experts’ Could Kill Us All
The Biden administration appears to be blundering ever close to a war with Russia. People can condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the killing of civilians without fantasizing that the U.S. military has a magic wand to stop that war. Unfortunately, the American media and a herd of pundits is pushing for military intervention such as No-Fly Zones—as if shooting down Russian planes would not quickly spur World War III. American newspapers and television networks are broadcasting brazen propaganda that they sometimes recognize is deceptive. When did swallowing and re-tweeting bogus...
Why America Has Splintered Into Identity Groups
Many Americans are concerned about the splintering of America into identity groups and are bewildered by critical race theory, queer studies, the proliferation of genders, cancel culture, the claim that reason and logic are constructs of white culture, and the corresponding shift from classical liberalism to identity-based authoritarianism. Other Americans believe that these are passing fads that will dissipate like former fads if they are ignored, or humored, or accommodated until they run out of steam. The scholarly book below can inform the first group and disabuse the second group....
The War Over Your Mind
Attention is the new currency. This isn’t an original thought. For decades there has been competition for your mind and attention on a multitude of fronts. With the popularity of social media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle the efforts have only accelerated. The speed at which information travels today is exhausting. Information overload is a real thing, and everyone is feeling it. The other day, a young man approached me and said, “Man, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I used to have so much energy, but ever since COVID I feel so tired all the time.” At twenty-five years old, he...
A Libertarian Stance on Irredentism
Irredentism is the belief that a group of people has the right to claim land or property which it was in possession of at some point in time, either according to historical fact or myth and legend. A few examples of irredentism are Zionism, the Greater Armenia, and United Ireland movements. Irredentism has been used to justify some of the worst human rights violations in human history. These include ultra-nationalist expansionism during both World Wars, ethnic cleansing during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and the Palestinian expulsion during the 1948 war, just to name a few examples. It...
That Time I Swiped the U.S. Tariff Code
"Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy,” as Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned in 1967. As a journalist, I have battled federal agencies for decades to try to discover the sordid details of how Americans’ rights and liberties are being shafted. Most government cover-ups succeed because the game is rigged in Washington to blindfold citizens to most federal abuses and boondoggles. But sometimes I found ways to penetrate bureaucratic iron curtains. A few decades ago, trade policy was one of the hottest issues in Washington. Pat Buchanan was revving up his presidential campaign and...
How the Warfare-Welfare State (Unfortunately) Unites Americans
In case you haven’t noticed, America is “deeply divided.” At least, that’s what a seemingly nonstop stream of headlines from major media sources would have us believe. “Trump Leaves America at Its Most Divided since the Civil War,” reads one CNN headline from earlier this year. Meanwhile, in his speeches from the first few months of his presidency, President Biden frequently claimed to be trying to restore national “unity.” More recently, the debate over vaccine mandates has prompted countless op-eds on how there are now “two Americas” or that differences in vaccination rates from state...
Biden’s New Budget Busting Bill
Since the 1800s, surly Americans have derided politicians for spending tax dollars “like drunken sailors.” Until recently, that was considered a grave character fault. But Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act shows that inebriated spending is now the path to national salvation. It was a common saying in America in the 1930s that “we cannot squander our way to prosperity.” But that was before the latest “best and brightest” crop took the helm of the federal government. The Rescue Act is based on blind faith in government spending—the revival of the “Magic Bean School of Political Economy.”...
My Journey from Marxism to Liberty
In the fall of 2016, I was a left communist. As I will show below, I came to this position after a circuitous tour through numerous sects of Marxism. A year later, I had thoroughly renounced Marxism and embraced the views of free market economists and philosophers Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. How did a career world tourist of left intellectual and radical movements find a home in libertarian social and economic thought? And why did it take twenty-five years to defect? As any Marxist can tell you, ideology can blind one to the insights that might disrupt one’s political adhesions,...
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