In our modern era, there are surely few organizations that so terrify powerful Americans as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, a central organ of the organized Jewish community. Mel Gibson had long been one of the most popular stars in Hollywood and his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ became among the... Read More

Back in 1999 I was invited to join Steve Sailer's HBD email group, where I encountered all sorts of interesting people. The participants were mostly intellectuals or journalists having sharply heterodox views about racial differences, especially those involving IQ and crime, and this was reflected in the somewhat euphemistic title, which stood for "Human Bio-Diversity."... Read More

A few years ago I somehow heard about a ferocious online dispute involving a left-leaning journalist named Mark Ames and the editors of Reason magazine, the glossy flagship publication of America's burgeoning libertarian movement. Although I was deep in my difficult programming work, curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to take a... Read More

Around 35 years ago, I was sitting in my college dorm-room closely reading the New York Times as I did each and every morning when I noticed an astonishing article about the controversial new Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Back in those long-gone days, the Gray Lady was strictly a black-and-white print publication, lacking the... Read More

I recently published a couple of long essays, and although they primarily focused on other matters, the subject of anti-Semitism was a strong secondary theme. In that regard, I mentioned my shock at discovering a dozen or more years ago that several of the most self-evidently absurd elements of anti-Semitic lunacy, which I had always... Read More

Although I always had a great interest in history, I naively believed what I read in my textbooks, and therefore regarded American history as just too bland and boring to study. By contrast, one land I found especially fascinating was China, the world's most populous country and its oldest continuous civilization, with a tangled modern... Read More

About a decade ago, I happened to be talking with an eminent academic scholar who had become known for his sharp criticism of Israeli policies in the Middle East and America's strong support for them. I mentioned that I myself had come to very similar conclusions some time before, and he asked when that had... Read More

Back in Junior High School I became an avid war-gamer, and was fascinated by the military history of the past, especially World War II, the most titanic conflict ever recorded. However, although I much enjoyed reading the detailed accounts of the battles of that war, especially on the Eastern Front that largely determined its outcome,... Read More

Although my main academic focus was theoretical physics, I always had a very strong interest in history as well, especially that of the Classical Era. Trying to extract the true pattern of events from a collection of source material that was often fragmentary, unreliable, and contradictory was a challenging intellectual exercise, testing my analytical ability.... Read More

A strong dam may hold back an immense quantity of water, but once it breaks the resulting flood may sweep aside everything in its path. I had spent nearly my entire life never doubting that a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy nor that a different lone gunman took the... Read More

About a decade ago, I got a Netflix subscription and was amazed that the Internet now provided immediate access to so many thousands of movies on my own computer screen. But after a week or two of heavy use and the creation of a long watch-list of prospective films I'd always wanted to see, my... Read More

Although I've soured on him in recent years, for the first decade and more of Paul Krugman's tenure at the New York Times I regarded him as about the only national columnist worth reading. Certainly many others felt the same way, and Krugman regularly ranked among the most influential liberal voices in the country, gaining... Read More

For many years I maintained far too many magazine subscriptions, more periodicals than I could possibly read or even skim, so most weeks they went straight into storage, with scarcely more than a glance at the cover. But every now and then, I might casually browse one of them, curious about what I had usually... Read More

A couple of years ago, I launched my Unz Review, providing a wide range of different alternative perspectives, the vast majority of them totally excluded from the mainstream media. I've also published a number of articles in my own American Pravda series, focusing on the suspicious lapses and lacunae in our media narratives. The underlying... Read More

Some years ago as I became increasingly aware of the severe dishonesty of our mainstream media on all sorts of controversial topics, I began telling a joke to a few of my friends. Suppose, I would say, that I happened to be out walking one pleasant afternoon in Palo Alto, and suddenly heard a gigantic... Read More

Over the last few decades, I doubt that any American political organization has received greater negative attention in our national news and entertainment media than the Ku Klux Klan, or KKK. For example, although white activist David Duke left that group over 35 years ago, the media still often identifies him as one of its... Read More

A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Bill Keller at The New York Times building on Manhattan. Keller was the long time editor in chief of the newspaper and Sulzberger its proprietor. We met at what must have been the 50th floor of the company headquarters, on 8th... Read More

A year or two ago, I saw the much-touted science fiction film Interstellar, and although the plot wasn't any good, one early scene was quite amusing. For various reasons, the American government of the future claimed that our Moon Landings of the late 1960s had been faked, a trick aimed at winning the Cold War... Read More

About a decade ago I'd gotten a little friendly with the late Alexander Cockburn, one of America's premier radical journalists and the founder of Counterpunch, a leading leftist webzine. With virtually all of America's mainstream media outlets endlessly cheerleading for the total insanity of our Iraq War, Counterpunch was a port in the storm, and... Read More

During the long Cold War many Russians grew sufficiently disenchanted with the lies and omissions of their own news outlets that they turned to Western radio for a glimpse of the truth. The growth of the Internet has now provided Americans with a similar opportunity to click on a foreign website and discover the important... Read More

Several years ago, my articles advocating a large hike in the minimum wage caught the attention of James Galbraith, the prominent liberal economist, and we became a little friendly. As president of Economists for Peace and Security, he invited me to speak on those issues at his DC conference in late 2013. And after the... Read More

To recast a famous philosophical conundrum, what would happen if hundreds of thousands of Americans died, but the media never reported that calamity? I spend hours each morning closely reading the print editions of my daily newspapers, and for over a decade that question has seemed real rather than merely hypothetical. The reason may be... Read More

The Best Picture winner at this year's Academy Awards was Spotlight, which seemed an excellent choice to me. That powerful ensemble performance showed a handful of daring investigative reporters at The Boston Globe taking on the political and cultural establishment of their city, breaking the story of how the Catholic Church had long shielded its... Read More

Last week America suffered the loss of Sydney Schanberg, widely regarded as one of the greatest journalists of his generation. Yet as I'd previously noted, when I read his long and glowing obituary in the New York Times, I was shocked to see that it included not a single word concerning the greatest story of... Read More

The death on Saturday of Sydney Schanberg at age 82 should sadden us not only for the loss of one of our most renowned journalists but also for what his story reveals about the nature of our national media. Syd had made his career at the New York Times for 26 years, winning a Pulitzer... Read More