A series of protests have broken out in Iran after the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, who died in hospital on 16 September, three days after she was arrested and reportedly beaten by morality police in Tehran.

Demonstrators initially gathered outside Kasra hospital in Tehran, where Amini was being treated. Human rights groups reported that security forces deployed pepper spray against protesters and that several were arrested.

A new poll looking at Americans' belief in conspiracy theories finds high levels of support for loony-tunes ideas about sex, Satan, and U.S. institutions. In addition, more than half of those surveyed believed child sex-trafficking myths.

The party of "traditional values" seems to have lost track of what they are, and has decided to go about as low as you possibly can to retake the moral high ground. To make themselves feel better, Republicans have gone far beyond the traditional accusations of loose living and government sponging to calling Democrats pedophiles as well. At first the charge of pedophilia was limited to the more fetid swamps of QAnon, but recent, more mainstream, GOP talking points are all about "groomers" — predators who make nice to their young victims before striking.

The hunt for oil to replace banned Russian imports is forcing Washington into some difficult choices. But in one case, it might also lead to a happier outcome.

When President Joe Biden announced a U.S. ban on Russian oil and other energy imports last week, he called the sanction a “powerful blow to Putin’s war machine” currently invading Ukraine. 

The Biden administration is updating the old foreign policy doctrine of realpolitik by acknowledging the reality of limits on U.S. power today. But it is trying to give the new version a decidedly moral twist.

Realpolitik, version 2021.

That may best describe the new direction President Joe Biden is taking on a pair of Asian policy challenges that have bedeviled U.S. administrations for the past two decades: Afghanistan and North Korea.

Countries that undergo a peaceful regime change from free and open to closed and less free, usually do so by accepting the gradual substitution of one set of values for another. They abandon what I call the Four Fs and begin accepting the Four Gs as their new belief system.

The Four Fs are: Freedom, Family, Free enterprise, and Faith, and these are the essential cornerstones of a free society.

When communists such as Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, or Vladimir Lenin overthrew governments in order to impose totalitarian control, they were always in the minority.

These days in the United States, in the name of “progress,” a radical leftist minority has come to largely control our academia, how we communicate online, how most of the news we see on television and read in newspapers is reported, and even how we are governed. Much of this is because of influence from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) behind the scenes.

There was a time when the Republican Party had the moral high ground. Founded in the 1850s on the principle of restoring the nation’s governing ideals, it stood for equality for Black Americans. For their part, the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow. Later, when the GOP was hijacked by the robber barons, Theodore Roosevelt and other progressives fought to return the party to its founding principle. Even as late as the 1960s, a moral impulse led Republican lawmakers, without whom the bill would have failed, to support the Civil Rights Act.