The Constitution had been ratified and was going into effect, and the next great question before the country was the spate of amendments which the Federalists had reluctantly agreed to recommend at the state conventions. Would they, as Madison and the other Federalists wanted, be quietly forgotten? The Antifederalists, particularly in Virginia and New York, would not permit that to happen and the second convention movement, led by Patrick Henry and George Mason in Virginia and proposed by the New York convention circular letter, was the Antifederal goal.

On December 30, 2025, the Italian Chamber of Deputies finally approved the 2026 budget bill drafted under Giancarlo Giorgetti, Minister of Economy and Finance in the government led by Giorgia Meloni. Now that the bill has become law, the administration is moving forward with its implementation.  

What does the Federal Reserve have in common with Venezuela and Greenland? It has been targeted by President Trump for regime change.

The Justice Department recently launched a criminal investigation into whether Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell lied to Congress about the costs of renovating the Federal Reserve’s offices.

Many believe this investigation was launched in order to support President Trump’s effort to replace Powell, who he nominated to be Fed chairman in 2017, with a Fed chairman who will accommodate President Trump’s demands for lower interest rates.

Modern libertarian political theory is usually presented as a distinctly Western inheritance—emerging from medieval natural law, sharpened by early modern liberalism, and culminating in the radical critiques of state power advanced by thinkers such as Murray Rothbard. And, while to a large extent accurate, hostility to governance, skepticism toward authority, and confidence in spontaneous social order are not uniquely Western phenomena.

When Prime Minister Mark Carney reduced tariffs on Chinese goods from a staggering 100 percent to a modest 6.1 percent this week, he performed a rare feat in modern governance: He removed a punitive tax on his own citizens and allowed prices to tell the truth. This was neither a geopolitical concession nor a diplomatic gamble; it was a clinical correction of a policy that had become economically self-destructive.

What is the difference between “hate speech” and a “hate crime”? You might think this is a trick question because the First Amendment protects free speech, including hate speech, which means that hate speech is not a crime. However, having realized that there is no easy way round the First Amendment protection of free speech, civil rights activists have resorted to depicting hate speech as “disorderly conduct” or “harassment,” in order to campaign for criminal charges to be brought against people who utter any words that, in their interpretation, amount to hate speech.

Despite the consensus narrative, what we are currently experiencing globally is not “de‑dollarization,” but a broad loss of confidence in developed economies’ fiat currencies and sovereign debt as a reserve asset for central banks and institutions. This fundamental loss of confidence in the solvency of developed economies’ sovereign issuers is boosting demand for gold. However, the latest data shows no crossover or fiat alternative substitution. The US dollar’s central role in the fiat system remains intact.

Inflation, long dormant in Japan, has taken hold. As a result, investors have been frantically sending bond yields up to levels once unthinkable.

The military buildup includes the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group. On Friday, the US Treasury slapped sanctions on nine ships suspected of carrying sanctioned Iranian oil. 

The common mindset among most Americans is that the United States could never become a totalitarian-like country — that is, one in which freedom of speech is sharply curtailed, protests and demonstrations are violently suppressed, people are kidnapped on the streets and quickly incarcerated in secret prisons without trial or due process, prisoners are tortured, no one dares to criticize what is occurring, deep fear exists within the citizenry, the powers of the president and the national-security establishment are omnipotent, elections are temporarily suspended, and people have convinced th