Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won applause at the Libertarian National Convention by criticizing government lockdowns and deficit spending, and saying America shouldn't police the world.

It made me want to interview him. This month, I did.

He said intelligent things about America's growing debt:

"President Trump said that he was going to balance the budget and instead he (increased the debt more) than every president in United States history—$8 trillion. President Biden is on track now to beat him."

It's good to hear a candidate actually talk about our debt.

"When the debt is this large…you have to cut dramatically, and I'm going to do that," he says.

But looking at his campaign promises, I don't see it.

He promises "affordable" housing via a federal program backing 3 percent mortgages.

"Imagine that you had a rich uncle who was willing to cosign your mortgage!" gushes his campaign ad. "I'm going to make Uncle Sam that rich uncle!"

I point out that such giveaways won't reduce our debt.

"That's not a giveaway," Kennedy replies. "Every dollar that I spend as president is going to go toward building our economy."

That's big government nonsense, like his other claim: "Every million dollars we spend on child care creates 22 jobs!"

Give me a break.

When I pressed him about specific cuts, Kennedy says, "I'll cut the military in half…cut it to about $500 billion….We are not the policemen of the world."

"Stop giving any money to Ukraine?" I ask.

"Negotiate a peace," Kennedy replies. "Biden has never talked to Putin about this, and it's criminal."

He never answered whether he'd give money to Ukraine. He did answer about Israel.

"Yes, of course we should,"

"[Since] you don't want to cut this spending, what would you cut?"

"Israel spending is rather minor," he responds. "I'm going to pick the most wasteful programs, put them all in one bill, and send them to Congress with an up and down vote."

Of course, Congress would just vote it down.

Kennedy's proposed cuts would hardly slow down our path to bankruptcy. Especially since he also wants new spending that activists pretend will reduce climate change.

At a concert years ago, he smeared "crisis" skeptics like me, who believe we can adjust to climate change, screaming at the audience, "Next time you see John Stossel and [others]… these flat-earthers, these corporate toadies—lying to you. This is treason, and we need to start treating them now as traitors!"

Now, sitting with him, I ask, "You want to have me executed for treason?"

"That statement," he replies, "it's not a statement that I would make today….Climate is existential. I think it's human-caused climate change. But I don't insist other people believe that. I'm arguing for free markets and then the lowest cost providers should prevail in the marketplace….We should end all subsidies and let the market dictate."

That sounds good: "Let the market dictate."

But wait, Kennedy makes money from solar farms backed by government guaranteed loans. He "leaned on his contacts in the Obama administration to secure a $1.6 billion loan guarantee," wrote The New York Times.

"Why should you get a government subsidy?" I ask.

"If you're creating a new industry," he replies, "you're competing with the Chinese. You want the United States to own pieces of that industry."

I suppose that means his government would subsidize every industry leftists like.

Yet when a wind farm company proposed building one near his family's home, he opposed it.

"Seems hypocritical," I say.

"We're exterminating the right whale in the North Atlantic through these wind farms!" he replies.

I think he was more honest years ago, when he complained that "turbines…would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard… Nantucket….[They] will steal the stars and nighttime views."

Kennedy was once a Democrat, but now Democrats sue to keep him off ballots. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls him a "dangerous nutcase."

Kennedy complains that Reich won't debate him.

"Nobody will," he says. "They won't have me on any of their networks."

Well, obviously, I will.

I especially wanted to confront him about vaccines.

In a future column, Stossel TV will post more from our hourlong discussion.

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post RFK Jr. Pays Lip Service to the Debt While Pushing Policies That Would Increase It appeared first on Reason.com.

An astonishing discovery was made over the weekend at a Trump rally: the Kool-Aid doesn't always take.

At least this was the case with one "America first" Republican, who initially sided with Russia's Vladimir Putin, but actually listened to reason when journalist Adam Mockler explained why the United States is better off supporting Ukraine. — Read the rest

The post Shocker: MAGA man actually changes his mind at a Trump rally (video) appeared first on Boing Boing.

Britain's signals intelligence spy chief raised eyebrows this week with warnings that Russia is coordinating both cyberattacks and physical acts of sabotage against the West. There's evidence to back her claims—and the West may be returning the favor. Coming soon after FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China is targeting American infrastructure, it looks like the world is not only fracturing once again, but that the hostile blocs are engaged in covert warfare.

Rumors of War

"We are increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyberattacks as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations," Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Director Anne Keast-Butler told an audience at the United Kingdom government-sponsored CyberUK 2024 conference. "Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate, but now they are nurturing and inspiring these non-state cyber actors in some cases seemingly coordinating physical attacks against the West."

Keast-Butler, whose agency is comparable to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), also called out China, Iran, and North Korea as cybersecurity dangers. But naming Russian officials as being behind "physical attacks" raises the stakes. Sadly, her claims are well-founded.

Sabotage, Espionage, and Other Mischief

"A 20-year-old British man has been charged with masterminding an arson plot against a Ukrainian-linked target in London for the benefit of the Russian state," CBS News reported last month. That wasn't an isolated incident.

"In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent," The Economist noted May 12 in describing what it called a "shadow war" between East and West. "Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted."

The GCHQ chief's warnings coupled with reality on the ground are alarming in themselves. Worse, they come after FBI Director Christopher Wray issued similar cautions in April about China.

"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America's will to resist," Wray told the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, Tennessee.

Wray clarified that, by "infrastructure," he meant "everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology."

If that doesn't make you want to check that your pantry is stocked and that the water filter and generator are in working order, nothing will.

A Game Both Sides Can Play

Of course, in war of any sort, the implication is that both sides are involved in conflict. Western intelligence officials are loud in their warnings about foreign threats, but less open regarding just what their own operatives might be doing in Russia, China, and elsewhere. Still, there's evidence that this is hardly a one-sided war, shadowy though it may be.

In June 2022, The New York Times reported that Ukraine's defensive efforts relied heavily on "a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training." In addition to Americans, the story noted, "commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine."

American journalist and combat veteran Jack Murphy goes further, claiming the CIA, working through an allied spy service "is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex." The targets include "railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants," he adds.

And if you wonder who blew up Nord Stream 1 and 2, well, so do a lot of people. Russia was initially accused, but it didn't make a lot of sense for the country's forces to destroy pipelines that generated revenue and fed western dependence on Russian natural gas. Since then, Denmark and Sweden have closed inconclusive investigations, journalist Seymour Hersh blamed American officials, and a report by Der Spiegel and The Washington Post placed responsibility on a rogue Ukrainian military officer.

The Wider War Is Here

Taken all together, the warnings from Keast-Butler and Wray, as well as acts of sabotage and arrests of foreign agents suggest that fears of a wider war resulting from Russia's continuing invasion of Ukraine may miss the point; the war could already be here. People looking for tanks and troops are overlooking cyber intrusions, arson, bombings, and other low-level mayhem.

"Russia is definitely at war with the West," Oleksandr Danylyuk of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, told NBC News earlier this week.

Russian officials seem to embrace that understanding, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commenting in March that the invasion of Ukraine, originally referred to by the euphemism "special military operation," is now more serious. "It has become a war for us as the collective West more and more directly increases its level of involvement in the conflict," he said.

Fortunately, a shadow war of the sort around us is less destructive than open military conflict, especially when the hostilities involve nuclear-armed powers. It's far better that spies hack the email accounts of government officials, as happened in the case of a Russian cyberattack on Germany's ruling Social Democrats, than that cities burn. But civilians still must live with the consequences of combatants attempting to do each other harm—particularly when the harm is to infrastructure on which regular people rely.

So, welcome to the world of global shadow war. Try to not become collateral damage.

The post World War War III May Already Have Started—in the Shadows appeared first on Reason.com.

Just and democratic! "We are working in solidarity on the formulation of a more just and democratic multipolar world order," said Russian President Vladimir Putin of his partnership with Chinese President Xi Jinping, lying through his teeth as he arrived in Beijing for diplomatic talks.

This month, Putin was inaugurated for yet another term as president. That he chose China as his first state visit of this term, and traveled with such a massive delegation, is of some significance—as well as the fact that the visit came on the heels of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's China visit last month, in which he raised concerns over Xi's enabling of Putin's war in Ukraine.

During the meetings, Putin hyped how China is Russia's top trade partner, as well as their future collaborations "in energy and nuclear power research," per The New York Times, though he neglected "mention of a proposed natural gas pipeline to China that Moscow would like to see built."

A joint statement that emerged from the visit "spoke of concerns about what were described as U.S. efforts to violate the strategic nuclear balance, about global U.S. missile defence that threatened Russia and China, and about U.S. plans for high precision non-nuclear weapons," reported Reuters.

Putin, whose military is currently assaulting the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv from above, needs to curry even more favor with Xi to win the war he started in Ukraine and ensure he can rely on Chinese help. (Ukraine, meanwhile, is awaiting more weapons shipments from the U.S., which have been substantially delayed.)

China "claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed Moscow's contentions that Russia was provoked into attacking Ukraine by the West, and continues to supply Russia with key components that Moscow needs for its productions of weapons," reported the Associated Press.

Last year, China proposed a deal for peace, which left massive parts of Ukraine to Putin and was understandably rejected by Ukraine and pretty much all of the West. It's in China's best interest for the war to end—Russia's invasion "jolted the Chinese economy by pushing up oil, wheat and other commodity prices," and Xi has not been thrilled by the heightened threat of nuclear war—but it has played a quite unserious role in actually bringing that about.

During this visit, Putin traveled with a huge delegation that was supposed to signal all the areas of overlap and cooperation between Russia and China. In the delegation, reported the Times, was "Alexander Novak, an official overseeing oil and gas, including the development of the Power of Siberia 2 natural gas pipeline." The project would "redirect Russian gas supplies that had gone to Europe toward China instead," but Xi and Putin have not yet publicly reached a deal to make it so.

Scenes from New York: "An NYPD officer who was guarding Mayor Eric Adams' home in Brooklyn in 2022 unjustifiably shot a man who was entering his own apartment building, according to a federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday," reported Gothamist.

Apparently cops who were guarding Adams' house also arrested Tiffanie Narinesammy, a pregnant woman who lived inside the house where this all transpired. Narinesammy alleges in the suit that her rights were violated, as she was held in custody for 24 hours; she delivered a stillborn baby six weeks later, which the suit connects to the stress of the encounter.

QUICK HITS

• The Dublin–New York portal—a real-time video feed between the two cities, placed in two heavily trafficked tourist sites—had to be switched off, according to authorities, because women were getting topless and projecting their boobs across the pond. (Kind of shocked someone complained about this, actually.)
• "A onetime Citibank employee who earned a $130,000 salary working in New York stands to collect a $10 million severance award, thanks to Argentina's pro-labor laws," reported Bloomberg. "The case, which has been wending its way through the courts for more than a decade, crystallizes why Argentine President Javier Milei is vying to revamp the rules around hiring and firing, even as his country battles inflation of almost 290% a year and a deepening recession."
• First Michelin-starred taco stand: El Califa de León, in Mexico City.
• Even though it's two years away, nobody has really emerged as a decent Gavin Newsom replacement in California's gubernatorial race.
• On June 27, we'll get our first faceoff between the two major-party presidential candidates, provided neither candidate's dementia gets the best of them before then.
• Slovakia's prime minister, Robert Fico, was shot yesterday and is in critical condition.
• Anti-fearmongering:

Gays: Going to Pride
FBI: What if a terrorist k*lls you?
Gays: Is someone planning to do that?
FBI: Not that we know of but hypothetically it could happen.
???? pic.twitter.com/JGY3tor92m

— River Page (@river_is_nice) May 15, 2024

The post Tyrant Besties appeared first on Reason.com.

Russia's state TV rushed to praise Comrade Marjorie for doing Putin's dirty work on the home front, following her latest threat to block Ukraine aid.

One host gushed that the QAnon Queen "is one of a few members of Congress who is trying to look like a person in an old-fashioned sense of the word. — Read the rest

The post Kremlin crony drools over Marjorie Taylor Greene's fashion sense and heterosexuality appeared first on Boing Boing.

When GOP leaders tried pushing more Ukraine aid through the House, Moscow's loudest MAGA mouthpiece, Marjorie Taylor Greene, tossed an extremely suspect word salad demanding Kyiv roll over for Putin's oppressive ethnic policies before getting a cent.

As Politico reported, MTG's noxious amendment said: "No funding shall be made available to Ukraine unless restrictions on ethnic minorities', including Hungarians in Transcarpathia, right to use their native languages in schools are lifted." — Read the rest

The post Kremlin Krazy: Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet is straight from Putin's propaganda playbook appeared first on Boing Boing.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is dropping on March 22 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, and in advance of that, Capcom has released the game’s character creator so folks can already enjoy the age-old tradition of spending hours tinkering with their in-game appearance. As is customary with these tools, players are having…

Read more...

Taking crazy pills: Former President Donald Trump said last evening that the civil fraud verdict that will force him to pony up $355 million for inflating his net worth to banks is actually "a form of Navalny" and "a form of communism or fascism."

When asked about the Russian state's imprisonment and killing of dissident Alexei Navalny, Trump responded: "It's happening here." The indictments are "all because of the fact that I'm in politics," in his telling.

He made these comments last night during a Fox News town hall. On Truth Social, his own alternative social media platform, Trump said, "the sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country."

Alexei Navalny, who was reported dead on Friday, served as an opposition leader in a state that disallows opposition and legitimate voting. Navalny garnered a massive following—more than 6 million YouTube followers, for starters, with at least one video viewed 130 million times—by doing legitimately good journalism digging into the kleptocratic, repressive Putin regime. Navalny offered normal Russians legitimate, well-sourced explanations for why they are so poor: their leaders consistently abdicate responsibility, choosing to enrich themselves. Their leaders are content with everyday people living in squalor and dysfunction, as long as they stay comfortable.

Running for office, and cutting through the state's propaganda, made him so disfavored by the regime that he went into exile. Navalny returned to Russia in 2021 with full awareness that he would be locked up but a devout belief that he ought to continue his work domestically, displaying courage in the face of certain persecution. And sure enough, he was locked up, then sent to an even more remote prison camp called IK-3, in Kharp, which is in the Arctic Circle. His death there was reported last week, but the opposition movement will not die with him. "In killing Aleksei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul," said his widow, Yulia, "but I have another half left—and it is telling me I have no right to give up."

Trump, on the other hand, misrepresented his net worth to banks, defrauding lenders (who…still had a responsibility to do due diligence, a fact ignored in much mainstream media reporting of the case). "Trump claimed his apartment in Manhattan's Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet, nearly three times its actual size," writes Reason's Jacob Sullum. "He valued Mar-a-Lago, his golf resort in Palm Beach, based on the assumption that it could be sold for residential purposes, which the deed precluded." But "[New York Attorney General Letitia] James was not able to identify any damages to lenders or insurers," writes Sullum, and "the striking absence of any injury commensurate with the punishment lends credibility to Trump's reflexive complaint that he is the victim of a partisan vendetta."

Both things can be true, that Trump attracts politically motivated ire—which attorneys general and judges are wrong to indulge—and that he also did something wrong by inflating his net worth. But he's a far cry from Navalny—Trump enjoys self-dealing more than fact-finding and truth-telling—and the way this went down, via the court system, where Trump had the right to defend himself, is a far cry from how "justice" gets dispensed in Russia—by Putin, in penal colonies, via murders of anyone whose beliefs threaten the man in charge.

Scenes from New York: Nobody asked for this.

What are we doing as a city?? pic.twitter.com/iaEBWGPMmh

— Cynical (@CynicalNYK) February 18, 2024

QUICK HITS

• "Clinical psychologists with the Department of Veterans Affairs faced retaliation and ostracization at work after they publicly opposed a gender-inclusion policy that allows men to access women's medical spaces within the VA," reports National Review.
• RFK Jr.'s "origin story makes this like Odysseus returning to the manor, stringing the bow, this is that iconic moment," said Bret Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast. If you say so, Bret.
• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just announced a lawsuit against El Paso's Annunciation House, an NGO in charge of a shelter network for migrants, for "facilitating illegal entry to the United States, alien harboring, human smuggling, and operating a stash house." But going after charities that help migrants—whatever you think of the behavior they engaged in to get here—seems like a wrongheaded stunt.
• I do not think this is true or that there's much evidence for it:

do you want a black pill?

like… a really really black pill?

George Carlin would be pro-censorship if he were alive today b/c he didn't actually love free speech, he just fucking hated Christians

— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) February 20, 2024

• "The enormous contrast between [Alexei] Navalny's civic courage and the corruption of [Vladimir] Putin's regime will remain," writes The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum. "Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history."
• Related: People were arrested for laying flowers in memory of Navalny.

People being arrested in Moscow for laying flowers for Navalny. pic.twitter.com/8YnLpHcB0s

— Eleanor Beardsley (@ElBeardsley) February 17, 2024

• Wow:

NEW: California's Legislative Analyst's Office says the state's budget problem has grown by $15 Billion.

LAO says because of weak revenue collections so far, the state's deficit could reach $73 Billion. https://t.co/oz83vntalh

— Ashley Zavala (@ZavalaA) February 20, 2024

• We live in the stupidest simulation:

I dunno if he qualifies as a "hero" lol this ain't exactly Normandy https://t.co/C3fXsLcnkZ

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) February 21, 2024

The post A Form of Navalny appeared first on Reason.com.

Donald Trump has long praised Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, flattering the tyrant as far back as in 2007 when he told CNN's Larry King, "Look at Putin … he's doing a great job." But even more astounding, the thin-skinned Trump continues to make nice with the Russian leader even after Putin recently said he prefers "predictable" Joe Biden as U.S. — Read the rest

The post Nancy Pelosi guesses out loud why Donald Trump keeps licking Putin's boots (video) appeared first on Boing Boing.

In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward is in the driver's seat, alongside Nick Gillespie and special guests Zach Weissmueller and Eric Boehm. The editors react to the latest plot twists in Donald Trump's various legal proceedings and the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

00:41—The trials of Donald Trump in Georgia and New York

25:04—Weekly Listener Question

33:23—Sora, a new AI video tool

43:55—The death of Alexei Navalny

49:58—This week's cultural recommendations

Mentioned in this podcast:

"How a New York Judge Arrived at a Staggering 'Disgorgement' Order Against Trump," by Jacob Sullum

"Prosecutor Fani Willis Touts the Value of Cash, but What About the Rest of Us?" by J.D. Tuccille

"Trump Ordered To Pay $364 Million for Inflating His Assets in Civil Fraud Trial," by Joe Lancaster

"Alvin Bragg Is Trying To Punish Trump for Something That Is Not a Crime," by Jacob Sullum

"Alexei Navalny's Death Is a Timely Reminder of How Much Russia Sucks," by Eric Boehm

"Why Is Nike Stomping on Independent Creators?" by Kevin P. Alexander

"Bury My Sneakers at Wounded Knee," by Nick Gillespie

"Creation Myth: Does innovation require intellectual property rights?" by Douglas Clement

"A Private Libertarian City in Honduras," by Zach Weissmueller

"The Real Reasons Africa Is Poor—and Why It Matters," by Nick Gillespie

Bono's Ukraine Speech

"Justice or persecution? The Trump dilemma"

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today's sponsor:

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Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.

Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve

• Producer: Hunt Beaty

The post Goodbye, Navalny appeared first on Reason.com.