Category: History

Lessons From the Great Covid Cover-Up

To think that we can prevent future pandemics, even as we continue to seek, catalog, and manipulate dangerous viruses, is the height of hubris. Over the last few years, public health “experts” were wrong about almost everything. If we are to avoid these kinds of catastrophes in the future, we must reform government and rein in out-of-control scientists and their enablers.

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Why the CIA No Longer Works—and How to Fix It

CIA Recruiters no longer focus on the key psychological traits critical to success in the world of spying. They look at academic degrees, existing levels of language proficiency, and increasingly at things like skin color and sexual orientation. Training has been softened and is increasingly formbook in nature. We act as if anyone can be taught to conduct espionage—as if this is no longer an arcane craft to be practiced by a select group of unique people.

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Imperialism: Lessons From History

Some suggest today that America is behaving imperialistically—we do, after all, have some 600 military bases around the world. So it is worth recalling some historical examples of imperialism to understand what the idea entails.

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American Christmas, American New Year

From Dickens to Die Hard, running through and making possible all these charming and uplifting stories that have become part of American Christmas, is the original Christmas story, which most Americans from the earliest days would have read in the King James Version—even as Linus did in the 1965 animated classic A Charlie Brown Christmas.

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The Economic Disaster of the Pandemic Response

Economics is about people making choices and institutions enabling them to thrive. Public health is about the same thing. Driving a wedge between the two, as happened in 2020, ranks among the most catastrophic public policy decisions of our lifetimes. Health and economics both require the nonnegotiable called freedom. May we never again experiment with the near abolition of freedom in the cause of mitigating disease. 

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Complications of the Ukraine War

There are reasons why the U.S. might want to project power into the Black Sea region. But we must not ignore that the politics of the region are extraordinarily complex and that the Ukraine conflict is full of paradoxes and optical illusions. And unless we learn to respect the complexity of the situation, we risk turning it into something more dangerous, both for Europeans and for ourselves.

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Inflation in the United States

What causes the price of money to fall? The answer is very simple: an increase in the supply of money relative to other goods and services. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman explained, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”

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The January 6 Insurrection Hoax

Of course, it is absolutely critical to the Democratic Party narrative that the January 6 incident be made to seem as violent and crazed as possible. Hence the comparisons to 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War. Only thus can pro-Trump Americans be excluded from “our democracy” by being branded as “domestic extremists” if not, indeed, “domestic terrorists.”

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Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It

No longer simply an academic matter, critical race theory has become a tool of political power. To borrow a phrase from the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, it is fast achieving “cultural hegemony” in America’s public institutions. More and more, it is driving the vast machinery of the state and society. If we want to succeed in opposing it, we must address it politically at every level.

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Orwell’s 1984 and Today

We can see today the totalitarian impulse among powerful forces in our politics and culture. We can see it in the rise and imposition of doublethink, and we can see it in the increasing attempt to rewrite our history.

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Mystic Chords of Memory: Learning From the American Story

The American story, still young, is the greatest story ever written by human hands and minds. It is endlessly interesting and instructive and will continue as long as there are Americans. The most important stories are those about what it is that makes America beautiful, good, and therefore worthy of love. In this light, we can see what might make America better and more beautiful.

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