The RPI Challenge

President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to shrink and reform the CIA and much of the US intelligence community, which he has claimed has become very politicized. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) recently warned Trump about crossing the CIA, stating that, “You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Will Trump try to really take on the destructive policies and actions of the CIA, or will he focus on re-arranging the deck chairs and putting his own people in positions of power? Our take in today’s Liberty Report:

In November the Washington Post printed an article accusing some 200 independent media organizations of being “fake news” sites doing the bidding of the Kremlin. Their evidence? They had none, so very soon they were forced to walk back the story. On Friday they breathlessly reported that the Russians had hacked our energy grid, but it soon turned out they didn’t bother to actually contact the company they reported hacked. It wasn’t hacked. They had to walk back the story. Yes their credibility is shot, but they still churn out a steady stream of propaganda. What to do about their disintegrating credibility? Convince the US government that they should be in charge of vetting what is is fake news versus real news. It can’t happen here? Tune in to today’s Liberty Report:

What should we expect for the New Year, 2017? In today’s year-end Liberty Report, Ron Paul looks into his crystal ball and serves up a few predictions:

Legendary Pentagon analyst and whistleblower Chuck Spinney joins today’s Liberty Report to explain the budget nightmares a President Trump will face at the Pentagon. Why do these weapons systems cost so much and perform so badly? Chuck knows…and tells.

It was a delightful anomaly in a very strange electoral year: while the world waited to see what would happen when the Electoral College met earlier this month to cast their votes for the next president, suddenly we heard that one Texas elector voted for Ron Paul for president! Political science professor Bill Greene went against the grain to vote Ron Paul and in today’s Liberty Report we caught up with Professor Greene to see what motivated him to do so. Little did we know that Professor Greene is an expert in — and eloquent defender of — the Electoral College system. More in today’s Report:

The US State Department comes out yearly with its list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” but to many people overseas it is the US government itself that is a main sponsor of terrorism overseas. The US president claims the right to attack suspected terrorists in any corner of the globe at any time. The current US president has conducted thousands of drone strikes against countries with whom we are not at war, with an estimated 90 percent of strikes not hitting the intended target. The US government ships weapons to groups in places like Syria where it knows they will end up in the hands of al-Qaeda and ISIS. So perhaps US foreign policy is not tackling terrorism, but in fact perpetuating it. More in today’s Liberty Report:

Does your vote count in the Electoral College system as crafted by our Founding Fathers? Some are saying that Hillary Clinton deserves to be president because she received the majority of popular votes in last month’s presidential election. Is it unfair that getting the most votes does not count? In today’s Liberty Report, Ron Paul explains why we have the electoral system and how states might modify the system to better reflect the will of the people:

As the liberation of Aleppo has destroyed the mainstream media’s narrative, with on-the-ground interviews from east Aleppo residents showing that they were in fact being held captive for four years by an al-Qaeda linked terrorist organization. The mainstream fake news purveyors are in a panic. While virtually none of them are actually on the ground in Syria, they have been strangely uniform in their “reporting.” Why is that? Because they all use the same tainted sources — US funded “NGOs” like the “White Helmets.” What’s the truth in Aleppo? Today’s Liberty Report features one of the very few western journalists brave enough to spend time there. Her well-documented findings expose the lies of the interventionists and their enabling friends in the mainstream media. Today’s Liberty Report is joined live from Syria by Vanessa Beeley:

How hard is it going to be to cut military spending? After president-elect Donald Trump Tweeted that the F-35 was too costly, its manufacturer, Lockheed-Martin, lost $4 billion in value. The military-industrial complex is going to do whatever it takes to prevent such losses in the future. Will Trump cut taxes and increase spending? That will lead to massive debt and possibly “stagflation,” which hurts the working and middle class the worst. Tune in to today’s Liberty Report for more:

On one hand we have the Washington Post reporting that the CIA has determined that the Russians have hacked the US election to put Donald Trump in the White House. The evidence is secret, but the CIA and the Post wouldn’t lie, would they? Then we have global warmongering Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-NC) demanding that the US take action against Russia in retaliation for the “hack” that was reported by the Washington Post based on a secret briefing by the CIA. On the other hand we have Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whose organization published the leaked DNC documents, saying that the Russians were not behind it. Whistleblower Ed Snowden has said that the NSA most certainly knows the identity of the DNC leakers/hackers. So who do we believe – Assange and Snowden or McCain and Graham? More in today’s Liberty Report:

As head of the US Southern Command, Gen. John Kelly was in charge of the US military involvement in the drug war in Central and South America. He blames the liberalization of marijuana in some US states for the ongoing failure of the drug war, even though the drug war has drug on for decades and marijuana decriminalization is a very recent phenomenon. Will the general take his military approach to the drug war to his domestic position as the next Secretary of Homeland Security? We look at the general and his views in today’s Liberty Report:

NATO’s desperate search for a purpose after the fall of the Soviet Union has left a swath of destruction through places like Libya, which it “liberated” nearly six years ago. Now NATO wants to take in tiny Montenegro, a corrupt, poor, Balkan statelet with a total of 2,000 troops. The reason? To further provoke Russia and to open the door to more NATO expansion perhaps to Georgia, Moldova, and even Ukraine. This week the US Senate will vote on Montenegro’s NATO membership. Will president-elect Trump ask them to hold off on this ill-advised move? We discuss in today’s Liberty Report: