Having watched the great drug-war Netflix documentaries Narcos and Narcos Mexico and the excellent drug-war drama La Reina del Sur, I wasn’t too interested in watching another drug-war-related series. But when I realized that the Apple TV+ documentary “Cowboy Cartel” revolved around my hometown of Laredo, Texas, where I lived almost half my life and practiced law for 8 years, I couldn’t resist watching it.
While I can recommend Narcos and Narcos Mexico and La Reina del Sur (The English version is The Queen of the South), I can’t recommend “Cowboy Cartel,” except if you want to be reminded of what an exercise of inanity the war on drugs is — and a deadly and destructive inanity at that. Another valuable lesson from the Cowboy Cartel is that you can see how

After I saw Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, which posited that the JFK assassination was a highly sophisticated regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, I read a multitude of books along those lines. Over time, I became convinced that Stone’s thesis was correct. But my conviction was never “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is the standard of proof required for conviction in a criminal case.
Then I encountered Douglas Horne’s 5-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. Horne’s book convinced me beyond a reasonable doubt that the U.S. national-security establishment — specifically, the Pentagon and the CIA — orchestrated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Horne’s book established beyond a

The biggest mistake America has ever made since the nation’s founding was the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state. If the American people are ever going to achieve a genuinely free society, a necessary prerequisite is the dismantling of the national-security establishment and the restoration of America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.America’s national-security state is a gigantic military-intelligence entity that is divided into three major parts — the Pentagon, the CIA, and the National Security Agency (NSA). To a certain extent, the FBI can also be considered to be part of this massive apparatus. Since the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of the Cold War and

Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference.  The Lancer conference is being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. The CAPA conference is now being held online. There is also another excellent JFK conference on the same weekend sponsored by the JFK Historical Group. All three of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for all three and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at all three conferences. The registration prices are moderate and it’s a great way to support three great conferences. I will have some of my JFK books at my presentations at the Lancer conference to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you all there!

Reminder: Our online Zoom conference on open borders continues this Monday evening, November 4, with Don Boudreaux,  former president of The Foundation for Economic Education and current professor economics at George Mason University.  7 p.m.-8 p.m. Eastern Time.  Register here.
Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference, which are being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. There is also an excellent third JFK conference on the same weekend sponsored by the JFK Historical Group. All three of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for all three and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at all three conferences. The registration prices are

Those who scoff at the notion that nuclear war between the United States and Russia is an increasing possibility have an advantage in the argument. If they prove to be correct, they will be able to crow, “See, I told you worrywarts that there was nothing to be concerned about. Putin wasn’t about the start a nuclear war no matter how much we pushed, provoked, and dared him.”
On the other hand, if there is a nuclear war, those of us who warned about that increasing possibility won’t be around to exclaim, “We told you so. You should have listened to us.” Well, at the very least, we won’t be able to do it on X given the shortage of wi-fi during such a war.
What is fascinating is that the U.S. national-security establishment and its supporters are actually

In the recent criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump and Hunter Biden, prosecutors and others emphasized that “no one is above the law.”Really? No one?How about retired Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, Jr.? When he was serving as the Director of National Intelligence, he got caught lying under oath to Congress after he falsely denied that “the NSA was collecting data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”Imagine Clapper’s surprise when Edward Snowden revealed the evidence establishing that Clapper had lied. Do you see why the U.S. national-security establishment hates Snowden so much and would love to get their hands on him?So, was Clapper ever indicted, prosecuted, and convicted, like Trump and Biden? Are you kidding? Clapper was part of the U.S.

How ironic that the son of a Democrat president of the United States is having to pay the price for living in a paternalistic state that his own father ardently supports.
Hunter Biden is currently on trial in a U.S. District Court for federal gun-control violations. Waiting in the wings is another federal prosecution for income-tax violations.
It’s worth noting that what Biden did would never be considered offenses in a genuinely free society.
In the gun-control prosecution, there are three charges against Biden: (1) lying to a federally licensed gun dealer about his use of drugs; (2) lying about his drug use on a federal application to purchase a gun; and (3) possessing a gun while being a drug user.
Hunter Biden. Licensed under the Creative Commons

Three years ago, in a citizen’s initiation approved by 3/4 of voters, Oregon decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. Last month, the Oregon governor signed into law a measure that undid what the people of Oregon had decided.
The reason for this change in direction was that there were severe problems that arose with decriminalization. Two of the biggest problems were (1) Drug addiction and deaths from drug overdoses had soared; and (2) drug addicts suffered from homelessness and were congregated in public parks and other public areas; some of them were committing acts of violence.
When I read about what the Oregon legislature and governor had done, my initial reaction was: How in the world does the government undo what the citizenry

After the Pentagon, operating through NATO, succeeded in provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. official and their allies seized $300 billion in Russian assets. The seizers are now talking about giving the loot to Ukrainian officials, who would then use it to buy armaments and ammunition from U.S. “defense” contractors.
Meanwhile, the news media is reporting that central banks are purchasing gold in record amounts. Is that a coincidence or correlation?
If you were in charge of a foreign regime that was not a lackey of the U.S. government, would you keep your reserves in places where the U.S. government could seize it whenever it wanted? If you wished to retain your nation’s independence, it seems to me that you would want to keep your reserves at

The leftist website Counterpunch has published an article today entitled “Millionaires Stopped Contributing to Social Security on March 2, 2024.” The thrust of the article is that once someone reaches an income of $168,600, “they stop paying in.”
The operative terms are “contributing” and “paying in.” They reflect a misguided mindset with respect to Social Security, which is the crown jewel of American socialism. This leftist mindset and terminology have become  widespread and ingrained in the American people.
No one “contributes” or “pays into” Social Security. Social Security is nothing more than a welfare-state program. It’s no different, for example, from food stamps, a program in which the federal government gives money to people to buy food.
Where

For all of our lives, it has been the aim of most Americans to make the federal government stronger, especially with respect to the warfare state. The principal justification for an ever more powerful government is that it keeps the American people safe from the likes of terrorists, drug dealers, communists, illegal immigrants, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans, and Muslims. Moreover, it is argued, a powerful military-intelligence establishment enables the U.S. government to violently police the world and thereby earn respect and credibility from foreign regimes.
What hardly anyone notices about this big-government shibboleth is the price that is paid for it: a weak nation.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

The Biden administration and its acolytes in the U.S. mainstream press are celebrating the fact that Nicaraguan socialist dictator Daniel Ortega just released 222 political prisoners and sent them packing to the United States. In the process, however, they are only demonstrating the arbitrary, capricious, and hypocritical nature of America’s socialist system of immigration controls. 
Ortega’s political prisoners were being held in brutal conditions in Nicaraguan prisons. Their only “crime” was opposing the Ortega dictatorship. Some of them were imprisoned for having the audacity to run against the 77-year-old Ortega in the 2021 presidential election.
Ortega released his political prisoners and sent them to the United States in an attempt to garner favor with the

The aliens are coming! The aliens are coming! 
No, I’m not talking about illegal aliens — that is, those immigrants who are trying to enter the United States without official permission. I’m talking about real aliens — the scary types from outer space. You know, the ones that look like ET.
What other reasonable explanation could there be for those unidentified flying objects that the U.S. military has been shooting out of the skies over the northern United States? 
The Chinese? Nah, they’ve already lost one balloon to the U.S. military. They wouldn’t be dumb enough to send more balloons, at least not so soon. 
The Russians? Nah, they’re still too bogged down trying to conquer a portion of Ukraine. They don’t have the time or the resources to send any balloons our

Given that the debt-ceiling debate is likely to continue for a few months, examining the Constitution provides us with the reasons our nation has been plunged into this monetary morass. 
Federal officials have now run up the federal government’s debt to more than $31.5 trillion. That’s a lot of money. And it’s also a lot of interest payments. 
Too much debt is not a good thing, either for a family or a government. Even the big-spending members of Congress acknowledge this. That’s the point of establishing a maximum amount of debt that the federal government is permitted to incur — or a “debt ceiling.” The problem, of course, is that every time that limit is reached, Congress raises it, thereby enabling more debt to be piled onto the previous debt.
Nonetheless,

Given the U.S. government’s increasing financial difficulties, we can expect extremely vicious behavior on the part of federal officials to bring money into the regime. What U.S. officials are currently doing to Russian billionaires provides a clue as to what they are likely to do Americans as the federal government’s financial situation worsens.
The federal government is spending more than $1 trillion per year than it is bringing in with taxes. That means that, every year, it adds more than $1 trillion dollars to the federal debt load. There is no possibility that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA will permit Congress to significantly reduce the largess that is being flooded into their section of the federal government. There is also no possibility that

In response to the U.S. government’s weaponization of the dollar through such measures as sanctions and trade wars, China, along with Russia and other nations, are making efforts to dethrone the dollar as the world’s international reserve currency. For example, Russia and China are now using the Chinese yuan, rather than the dollar, for payment for Russian oil. Saudi Arabia is now talking about doing the same thing. 
One of the interesting aspects of this process involves gold. According to an article at Forexlive, China has purchased 62 tons of gold in the last two months. China’s gold reserves now total 2,010 tons.
An article at BNP Paribas Asset Management by Chi Lo, the company’s senior market strategist for Asia and the Pacific, speculates that China might

Immigration-control advocates are ecstatic over President Biden’s visit to El Paso. Maybe — just maybe — Biden’s trip will be what finally — finally! — brings victory in the decades-long U.S. war on immigrants.
Except that it won’t. The hope of the immigration-control advocates will be dashed once again. The decades-old immigration crisis, along with the deaths, suffering, and police state that come with it, will go on, notwithstanding Biden’s trip to the border.
But there is a positive aspect to Biden’s trip. It helps to dispel the delusion under which conservatives have suffered ever since Biden became president. That delusion is that President Biden has supposedly adopted a policy of “open borders.”
Let’s first examine what is meant by the concept of open

Yesterday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared before a joint session of Congress to plead for more billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to help Ukraine in its war with Russia. 
One particular sentence in Zelensky’s address caught my attention: “We Ukrainians will also go through our war of independence and freedom with dignity and success.” The sentence prompted an enormous applause from the members of Congress.
There is one big problem with Zelensky’s statement, however. The war between Ukraine and Russia has nothing to do with freedom. Instead, it has everything to do with NATO, the old Cold War dinosaur that ginned up the crisis that led to this highly deadly and destructive war.
Operating through NATO, the Pentagon was insistent on

As expected, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by half a point yesterday. It was a drop from the .75 point rate increases that the Fed has been implementing for the past several months. 
A big reason the Fed is going slower is the longstanding fear among Fed officials of bringing about another Great Depression by raising interest rates too high and too fast. That’s, of course, what happened in the late 1920s, when the Fed’s actions brought about the 1929 stock-market crash, which then led to the Great Depression.
Yes, I know, most everyone is taught in their public schools and state-supported universities that the Great Depression was caused by the failure of America’s free-enterprise system. But it’s a lie. And it’s been a lie ever since U.S. officials

The mainstream media is celebrating big time over a recent ruling by the Supreme Court that forces the Treasury Department to deliver President Trump’s income-tax returns to Congress. A good example is the Washington Post, which published an editorial last week praising the ruling. Since there is still the possibility that Congress will fail to disclose Trump’s ( tax returns to the public, the Post is calling on Congress and the states to enact laws that force presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns to the public. 
The Washington Post was founded in 1877. I wonder what the Post’s editorial board felt about the fact that the following presidents failed to disclose their income-tax returns: James Garfield (1880-1884), Grover Cleveland (1884-1888),

REMINDER: This is our end-of-year fundraising drive. Your support today will help us advance liberty in the year head. We could never do our work without those of you who help us out in a bigger way. If you are already an FFF donor, we hope you will renew your support with a generous end-of-year donation. If you have never donated to FFF, we hope you’ll change that situation by making a generous donation to FFF. Here is my end-of-year message seeking your support. Thank you for your consideration, your commitment to liberty, and your great support of our work.–Jacob Hornberger, president, FFF.
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One of the popular rightwing justifications for America’s socialist system of immigration controls is that there is a supposed Democratic Party conspiracy to

One of the interesting aspects of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was the allocation of $80 billion in increased funding for the Internal Revenue Service, one of the most powerful and tyrannical agencies in U.S. history. The money is intended to be used for enhanced tax enforcement, especially through the potential hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents who, to borrow a phrase from the Declaration of Independence, will be further eating out the substance of the American people.
Using soaring prices of gasoline, food, cars, and most everything else as a way to seize more money from the American people should not surprise anyone. Government officials know that most people have been schooled in public (i.e., government) schools and, therefore, have no idea that

I fully realize that when it comes to Ukraine, one is supposed to focus exclusively on Russia’s invasion and not on what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis, a crisis that has gotten us perilously close to a world-destroying nuclear war with Russia. 
Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s role in this crisis needs to be emphasized, over and over again, just as the Pentagon’s role in ginning up the Cuban Missile Crisis also needs to be emphasized, over and over again.
Yes, what I am emphasizing is the Pentagon’s role in ginning up both of these crises that have gotten us so close to nuclear war with Russia. 
At the end of the Cold War racket, there was absolutely no reason for NATO to remain in existence. Its purported mission of protecting Europe from a Soviet (i.e.,

There are five additional points that have been made about the Alex Jones case that I wish to address, four of which were expressed in emails to me and one of which was expressed in an article published today by Judge Andrew Napolitano. (See part 1 and part 2 of this series here and here.)
1. Some of Jones’s supporters say that the Connecticut trial was a “kangaroo” proceeding because the judge excluded matters that Jones wanted to tell the jury.
But it’s important to point out that a trial is not some sort of anarchist battleground. It is governed by rules of procedure and rules of evidence that have been developed over centuries of case law. Sometimes these judicial rules are codified into law by the legislative branch of the government. For example, see The

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega
New Jersey Congressman Albio Sires is complaining about financial aid that international agencies are providing Nicaragua under what he says is “the pretext of poverty reduction, disaster relief and small business support.” He points to Nicaragua’s dictatorial regime headed by socialist Daniel Ortega as the reason for his complaints. 
Sires is right to complain about foreign aid to Nicaragua, but why limit a critique of governmental aid to Nicaragua? Why not terminate all U.S. foreign aid to every international agency and every foreign regime, including regimes that do the bidding of U.S. officials? Wouldn’t the American people be better off keeping their tax monies for themselves rather than have it sent to foreign agencies and

Reminder: Our online conference “End Inflation and at the Fed,” continues this evening at 7 p.m. (Eastern time) with the third talk of our series. Our speaker will be Kevin Dowd, professor of finance and economics at Durham University, much of whose work revolves Austrian and Public Choice economics. The title of his talk is “Central Bank Digital Currencies.”
Speaker: Kevin Dowd, professor of economics and finance, Durham UniversityTime: 7 pm – 8 pm Eastern Time tonight, October 17Where: Online via Zoom.Admission: FREE.Register here and receive your Zoom link by email.
We hope you will join us for what promises to be another great talk and Q&A session on one of the critically important burning issues of our time — the Federal Reserve’s continued

As most everyone knows, Republicans have been celebrating the clownish antic of Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis for using hundreds of thousands of Florida taxpayer dollars to ship 50 immigrants from Texas and dump them in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The thuggish act, which appears to include fraudulent representations made to the immigrants, was intended to expose the hypocrisy of rich, liberal residents of Martha’s Vineyard for having sympathy for immigrants but opposing letting them live in their homes.
Perhaps Republicans would be better off, however, spending their time looking in the mirror and confronting their own acts of hypocrisy. 
A good example occurred just recently during Hurricane Ian, when Republican governors from Florida, South

NOTE: Our upcoming online Zoom conference “End Inflation and the Fed” kicks off on next Monday, October 3, at 7 p.m. Eastern Time with Richard Ebeling. Richard teaches economics at the Citadel and is co-host of FFF’s weekly Internet show, the Libertarian Angle. He is former president of The Foundation for Economic Education and former Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College. He is also the author of FFF’s book Monetary Central Planning and the State. I hope you will join us for a great talk on a critically important issue facing our country as well as a lively discussion. FREE! Register here.
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Given the protests by Iranian women that are roiling Iran, the response of the U.S. mainstream press is predictable — that the U.S. government

Right-wingers are making a big deal out of the decision by people in Martha’s Vineyard not to take into their homes the immigrants that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shipped to them a few days ago. The right-wingers are saying that feeding the immigrants and caring for them was not sufficient. The people of Martha’s Vineyard, they say, should have taken them into their homes rather than let them be taken and housed at a nearby military base. They’re saying that this reflects the hypocrisy of the left.
What the right-wingers conveniently forget, however, is that under their beloved socialist system of immigration controls, it’s a felony to harbor illegal immigrants. While the immigrants that DeSantis shipped to Martha’s Vineyard have some sort of special “parole”