The RPI Challenge

Despite my support for Elon Musk’s continuing efforts to reduce censorship and restore free speech protections on Twitter, I have been critical of some of his moves from his use of polls on restoring certain posters to the suspensions of media figures this week. However, this morning, I was struck by the European Union (EU) rushing into the controversy to threaten, again, sanctions against Musk. The EU is apparently aghast that Twitter could suspend media even temporarily after ignoring the...

New material Musk released over the weekend confirms the very worst. The banal boys and girls previously ensconced in Twitter’s top echelons were not only having a jolly time attempting to steer the nation’s news narrative; these executives were actually meeting weekly with FBI, Homeland Security and national intelligence officials to discuss “disinformation” they wanted removed from the site, including the notorious suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. That’s just one step removed...

The New York Times has just discovered that some Americans are no longer wearing masks. Welcome to life in the mainstream-media bubble. The Times sent its reporters last week across Los Angeles County to assess the state of Covid precautions. Los Angeles is at the epicentre of a national movement among blue-state health officials and their press allies to scare the public back into Covid submissiveness. The director of Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health, Barbara Ferrer, has...

It looks like things are about to get a lot more serious in Ukraine. NEW: The US is poised to send Patriot air and missile defense batteries to Ukraine pending final approval from President Joe Biden https://t.co/yNTO1vXLOt — Bloomberg (@business) December 13, 2022 This provocative move is a direct and deliberate violation of a primary Russian red line. Russia has warned it will not tolerate USG and NATO offensive missiles on its border in Ukraine. It considers any such move a threat to its...

You’d better watch out—you’d better not pout—you’d better not cry—‘cos I’m telling you why: this Christmas, it’s the Surveillance State that’s making a list and checking it twice, and it won’t matter whether you’ve been bad or good. You’ll be on this list whether you like it or not. Mass surveillance is the Deep State’s version of a “gift” that keeps on giving…back to the Deep State. Consider just a small sampling of the tools being used to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff...

Among realists who don't accept the Kiew siegt an allen Fronten! narrative it is widely assumed that Russia will soon begin, perhaps in dramatic and decisive fashion, a winter offensive. This would come just as Kiev is hitting "empty" on all key manpower and materiel indicators, exacerbated by the Zelensky regime’s continued insistence on squandering them on strategically meaningless attacks on hardened Russian positions. The assumption of a bold Russian shift to the offensive may not be...

Given Ukraine’s surprisingly effective counteroffensive against Russian forces in the autumn of 2022, there has been an increasing focus among Western officials and their media allies about Russia’s probable response to an overall Ukrainian triumph in the war. There has been far less discussion about how the United States and its European partners will respond if military fortunes change and NATO’s proxy faces definitive defeat. However, such a discussion is essential to avoid making a serious...

On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde from her job at Twitter where she was general counsel and the head of legal, policy, and trust. It became quickly obvious to him and others on his team that it was she who drove the censorship policy within the company, including that which blocked all information about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election and otherwise shut down critics of government Covid policy.  Her termination from Twitter did not leave her unemployed and...

I have previously written of my pride as an alumnus of The University of Chicago in how the school has led the fight for free speech in higher education. It is also ranked as the number one free speech school in the country. The “Chicago statement” has become the rallying point for schools resisting the anti-free speech movement sweeping over our university and college campuses. Now both the University of Oklahoma and entire University of Texas system have joined almost 100 schools in signing...

The biggest story of the past decade is not the covid pandemic, the January 6th protests, the war in Ukraine, the BLM riots, or even the stagflationary crisis in the US. Behind these major events is another story, one that connects them all together in a disturbing way. Even more important than the effects of geopolitical and economic chaos is the effect of mass censorship; without the free exchange of information and debate the public remains ignorant. And if the public remains ignorant,...

Nouriel Roubini, a former advisor to the International Monetary Fund and member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, was one of the few “mainstream” economists to predict the collapse of the housing bubble. Now Roubini is warning that the staggering amounts of debt held by individuals, businesses, and the government will soon lead to the “mother of all economic crises.”Roubini properly blames the creation of a debt-based economy on the near-or-at-zero interest rate and...

Below is a slightly augmented version of my column in the Hill on the latest release of the Twitter files, confirming long-denied use of shadow banning and other techniques to suppress conservative and dissenting viewpoints. Here is the column: “We don’t make exceptions for jokes or satire.” That line from a third tranche of company documents released by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, captures the social media giant’s censorship culture. Its humorless, officious tenor is all too common with...

Noam Chomsky once wrote that the astronomical cost of the Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, estimated into trillions of dollars, is a major victory for Osama bin Laden, whose announced goal was to bankrupt America by drawing it into a trap.  The Ukraine war too was planned as a trap for Russia. No one other than the the Bill Clinton administration’s point person for Russia, Strobe Talbot tweeted early this year when Russia’s special military operations began congratulating President...

When the Pentagon used NATO to provoke Russia into invading Ukraine, it had to know that one of the great benefits to such an invasion would be that it would enrich US weapons manufacturers, who, of course, are an important, integral, and loyal part of America’s national-security state form of governmental structure.  And sure enough, those weapons manufacturers now have a lot to be grateful for. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal:  The world’s biggest arms makers are scaling...

If there is one point on which there should be no disagreement, it is this: for anyone to advocate terminating or suspending the Constitution is tantamount to a declaration of war against the founding principles of our representative government and the rule of law. Then again, one could well make the case that the Constitution has already been terminated after years on life support, given the extent to which the safeguards enshrined in the Bill of Rights—adopted 231 years ago as a means of...