The 70 Seconds that Shook the World
On March 16, 2020, following a long weekend of negotiations and deals about the coronavirus, Donald Trump, Deborah Birx, and…
The Pandemic Response Unleashed Two Kinds of Nationalism
Sunetra Gupta became my whisperer early in the pandemic due to her comprehensive understanding of the relationship between society and…
When Did Trump Change His Mind about Lockdowns?
All sources we have so far testify that Trump greenlighted nationwide lockdowns the weekend of March 14-15, 2020, under the…
The Choice Is Liberty or Lockdown
Two years after the first edition, the second edition of Liberty or Lockdown is now in print, just as the…
The Market Still Loves You
This book – The Market Loves You, now it is second edition – was written in the Before Times. Looking back through…
It Ends as it Began: As a Political Ploy
The current US president finally said it during a 60 Minutes interview: “The pandemic is over.” Though obviously true by…
Governor Andrew Cuomo: From Hero to Goofball in One Seasonal Virus
Oh joy, another book by a hero of lockdowns! This time it is from Andrew Cuomo, who rode the disease-panic…
The Story of Jared Kushner and His Ventilators
You know the phrase self-aware? It does not apply to Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law. He somehow winnowed his…
A World on Fire
Every day, news reporters, traders, and workers of all sorts the world over wake to do their work as they…
Judge Orders Fauci to Cough It Up
A lawsuit against the federal government – Anthony Fauci in particular – from the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana has…
Frankenstein Was the Foreshadowing
Two years before lockdowns, the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein, about which a wonderful movie…
The Return of Carl Schmitt and His Scheme for Regime Longevity
The message and optics of Joe Biden’s address from September 1, 2022, were startling in our supposedly enlightened times. In…
Cold War Nostalgia Explained
The death of Mikhail Gorbachev this week unleashed a wave of nostalgia for simpler and better times. That’s odd, isn’t…
US Life Expectancy Down Three Years in Two Years
Jared Kushner had not yet read the news most likely. He was just telling an interviewer that he is working…
Social Distancing Was Supposed to Be Forever
By April 2020, two months into the lockdowns, eminent Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben had put his finger on a point…
Moderna and Pfizer: Cat Fight!
The legend is that patents are a just reward for new inventions. The reality is that they are government grants…
Jared Kushner and the Mystery of the First US Lockdown
The possibility of US lockdowns – never attempted on this scale in the history of pandemics – was already in…
How Could We Have Been So Naive about Big Tech?
The 1998 movie Enemy of the State starring Gene Hackman and Will Smith seemed like fiction at the time. Why…
How To Tame a Bureaucracy? Get Rid of It
Any serious effort to end the crisis must deal with the problem of the administrative state and the bureaucratic power…
The CDC Failed, So Spin It Off and Make It More Powerful?
The failure of the CDC to manage Covid-19 was baked in from the first moments of its response. A government…
A Deeper Dive Into the CDC Reversal
It was a good but bizarre day when the CDC finally reversed itself fundamentally on its messaging for two-and-a-half years.…
Did Lockdowns Turn Americans Into Lazy Bums?
It looks as if we can add another line to the long list of lockdown harms. Sloth. This explains so…
Freedom Itself Is Gravely in Peril
The FBI has raided Donald Trump’s home in Florida and opened a private safe, hanging around for hours looking for…
Just How Healthy Are These Labor Markets?
The news of the falling unemployment and the rise in total payrolls in July 2022 came as a welcome relief…
Besties: Twitter, Facebook, Google, CDC, NIH, WHO
Many of us with a libertarian frame of mind presume as a matter of theory that the interests of business…
The Lockdowns Kicked Off this Depression
If you were on vacation last week, good for you. You missed one of Congress’s greatest-ever scams. They just approved…
The Day Anthony Fauci Wrecked American Freedom
Fears of a virus from China had been rising for two months in the spring of 2020. The White House…
Dictatorship Chic
In the trajectory laid out by F.A. Hayek in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, dictatorship is the end…
Mozart, Mediocrity, and the Administrative State
The 1984 movie Amadeus is a great achievement in its genre because it actually puts the creative process of the…
Articles of Inquiry: The Role of Media
The media, both traditional and social media, had an outsized role during the pandemic in pushing the US government’s Covid…