Last weekend several hundred of us gathered in Washington, DC, at the Ron Paul Institute conference to again proclaim our dedication to the cause of liberty and our opposition to constant US government assaults on that liberty. Our collaborators included old friends like Judge Andrew Napolitano, who explained that the Bill of Rights was not... Read More

House Speaker Mike Johnson betrayed liberty and the Constitution by making a full-court press to get a “clean” reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Act through the House. Section 702 authorizes warrantless surveillance of foreign citizens. When the FISA Act was passed, surveillance state boosters promised that 702 warrantless surveillances would... Read More

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin recently claimed the 15 percent corporate minimum tax contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, which should be called the Inflation Creation Act, is not a tax increase. Instead, he claimed, the bill simply closes a loophole that allows corporations to avoid paying all the taxes they owe. Despite what Senator... Read More

If people who torture animals are psychopaths, then what are government officials who use taxpayer dollars to fund animal torture? Many are asking this question in the wake of revelations that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci - high priest of the COVID cult - funded medical “research”... Read More

Nothing upset the Washington Beltway elites more than when in a 2007 presidential debate I pointed out the truth about the 9/11 attacks: they attacked us because we’ve been in the Middle East, sanctioning and bombing the civilian population, for decades. The 9/11 attackers were not motivated to commit suicide terrorism on the Twin Towers... Read More

World Economic Forum Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab has proposed using the overreaction to coronavirus to launch a worldwide “Great Reset.” This Great Reset is about expanding government power and suppressing liberty worldwide. Schwab envisions an authoritarian system where big business acts as a partner with government. Big business would exercise its government-granted monopoly... Read More

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proposed the next multi-trillion dollar "coronavirus relief” spending bill that will support testing, tracing, treatment, isolation, and mask policies that have been part of a “national strategic plan” she has been advocating. The Trump administration is not opposing Pelosi’s plan on principle. Instead, it is haggling over the price. But,... Read More

In my first week in the House of Representatives in 1976, I cast one of the two votes against legislation appropriating funds for a swine flu vaccination program. A swine flu outbreak was then dominating headlines, so most in DC were frantic to “do something” about the virus. Unfortunately, the hastily developed and rushed-into-production swine... Read More

According to a story in Politico, the White House Coronavirus Task Force is considering creating a national surveillance system to track Americans’ health information. Supporters of this initiative claim it would enable the federal government to quickly identify areas in need of additional medical supplies and other assistance because the areas are coronavirus “hot spots.”... Read More

Last Monday, a bipartisan group of Senators and a coalition including libertarian and progressive activists thwarted a scheme to ram through the Senate legislation renewing three provisions of the USA FREEDOM Act (previously known as the USA PATRIOT Act). The bill had already been rushed through the House of Representatives, and most expected it to... Read More

Cato Institute Research Fellow Patrick Eddington recently filed several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to find out if the Federal Bureau of Investigation ever conducted surveillance of several organizations dealing with government policy, including my Campaign for Liberty. Based on the FBI’s response, Campaign for Liberty and other organizations, including the Cato institute and... Read More

Imagine that President Trump spent his phone call with the Ukrainian president threatening to withhold military aid unless the Ukrainian government agreed to use the money to purchase weapons from a US manufacturer. Does anyone seriously think that foreign service professionals and deep state operatives would be so shocked and offended by Trump’s request that... Read More

Attorney General William Barr recently sent a memo to law enforcement officials announcing a new federal initiative that would use techniques and tools developed in the war on terror, such as mass surveillance, to identify potential mass shooters. Those so identified would be targets of early interventions, which would include the disregarding of Second Amendment... Read More

Last week, the House of Representatives voted in favor of a Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill amendment to repeal the prohibition on the use of federal funds to create a “unique patient identifier.” Unless this prohibition, which I originally sponsored in 1998, is reinstated, the federal government will have the authority... Read More

Hard as it is to believe, airline travel recently became even more unpleasant. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees being required to work without pay for the duration of the government shutdown resulted in many TSA workers calling in sick. The outbreak of “shutdown flu” among TSA employees forced some large airports to restrict the number... Read More

One of the few positive things in the ill-named USA FREEDOM Act, enacted in 2015 after the Snowden revelations on NSA domestic spying, is that it required the Director of National Intelligence to regularly report on its domestic surveillance activities. On Friday, the latest report was released on just how much our own government is... Read More

Another terrible school shooting took place in Parkland, Florida last week and unfortunately many politicians and pundits have used the tragedy – as they often do – to push their own agenda. Many will use the tragedy to argue that Americans should be prohibited from owning guns. As if anti-gun laws would dissuade a disturbed... Read More

There was high drama last week when Rep. Devin Nunes announced at the White House that he had seen evidence that the communications of the Donald Trump campaign people, and perhaps even Trump himself, had been “incidentally collected” by the US government.If true, this means that someone authorized the monitoring of Trump campaign communications using... Read More

Three recent stories regarding three government agencies — the IRS, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) — show why we should oppose big government for practical, as well as philosophical, reasons.In recent months, many Americans have missed their flights because of longer-than-usual TSA security lines. In typical DC fashion,... Read More

It was not long after last week’s horrifying bombings in Brussels that the so-called security experts were out warning that Europeans must give up more of their liberty so government can keep them secure from terrorism. I guess people are not supposed to notice that every terrorist attack represents a major government failure and that... Read More

The FBI tells us that its demand for a back door into the iPhone is all about fighting terrorism, and that it is essential to break in just this one time to find out more about the San Bernardino attack last December. But the truth is they had long sought a way to break Apple’s... Read More

Judging by his prime-time speech last week, the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency will be marked by increased militarism abroad and authoritarianism at home. The centerpiece of the president’s speech was his demand for a new law forbidding anyone on the federal government’s terrorist watch list from purchasing a firearm. There has never been... Read More

This week the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the NSA’s metadata collection program was not authorized in US law. The PATRIOT Act, under which the program began, was too vague, the court found. But the truth is the Act was intended to be vague so that the government could interpret it in the... Read More