Patrick Lawrence: Anything Anything Anything To Avoid Debating R.F.K. Jr.
Our corporate newspapers and broadcasters went into attack mode as soon as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced, in mid–April, he would seek the Democratic Party’s nomination to run for president next year. But it does not seem to have been…
Patrick Lawrence: The ‘Disinformation Industry’ Lands in Court
What kind of a week was last week in the theater of war wherein battles rage over illegal censorship, illegal attacks on freedom of speech, illegal government infringements on our constitutional rights, and, amid it all, the complicity of our…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A Yellen in the China Shop
Janet Yellen did an excellent job during her just-completed four-day visit to Beijing, we are now able to read in the corporate press. The Treasury secretary managed not to break any more China in the China shop. This counts as…
Patrick Lawrence: We Need to Talk About Nahel
What is it about France these days? La republique seems to be ever on the brink of exploding over one or another social question. Twice in the past four months the French have erupted in protests and all too often rioting. In…
Patrick Lawrence: Russian (Melo)drama
After a few hours of high drama in southwestern Russia last Saturday, featuring a paramilitary leader, 4,000 to 6,000 followers, and a small column of trucks and other military vehicles driving north toward Moscow, let us keep our heads when…
Patrick Lawrence: Ellsberg and ‘The Process of My Awakening’
Of all the fine things written and said about Daniel Ellsberg since his death June 16, there is a thread running through them we ought not miss, a story Ellsberg himself told better than anyone else. It is a story…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Breaking Bread with Authoritarians
In his way, India’s prime minister is as bad as some of the old Latin American dictators who got plenty of American support but never an evening meal — and certainly no cardamon-flavored strawberry shortcake for dessert. “For the first…
Patrick Lawrence: US Still Nowhere with the Chinese
The bitter truth is that the leaders of Biden’s foreign policy are too paralyzed by the ideology of American primacy to come up with a single, solitary new thought as to how to address other great powers as we enter…
Patrick Lawrence: Why Can’t Blinken and Sullivan Get China Right?
The Biden admin’s continuation of Trump-era policies with China have not boded well thus far. It is two years now since Antony “Guardrails” Blinken and Jake Sullivan flew to Anchorage and in a matter of two days made a perfect…
The US Press, Spooks & the Church Committee
Nineteen fifty-three was a peculiar year for The Washington Post to question the C.I.A.’s drift into activist intrigues, writes Patrick Lawrence in this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Journalists and Their Shadows. On Jan. 9, 1953, The Washington Post published an editorial we can read all…