The RPI Challenge

Things are falling apart. How much longer we can sustain the fiction that we live in a constitutional republic, I cannot say, but anarchy is being loosed upon the nation. We are witnessing the unraveling of the American dream one injustice at a time. Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the American people wake up a little more to the grim realization that they have become captives in a prison of...

Now that we can talk to our friends and neighbors about it, the reality is sinking in. What our public-health experts and politicians did to this country was egregious. Inspired by the totalitarian lockdowns in Wuhan, China, and urged to replicate that policy by the World Health Organization in a report that Fauci’s National Institutes of Health approved, all constitutional rights were thrown out. The churches were shut. The schools were closed, in some places for as long as two years, thus...

Photo: Nebojsa Malic“The first parliamentarian summit of the International Crimea Platform showed the world Europe ALMOST entirely united against Russian aggression,” the US embassy in Belgrade posted on Twitter last week, accompanied by a map showing all of the continent in blue – with Belarus, Serbia and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad in grey. No doubt the embassy thought this would bring home the “isolation” of Serbia. Not the first time, however, the Imperial legation had...

Prussian Major General Carl von Clausewitz famously drew on his own experience in the Napoleonic Wars to examine war as a political phenomenon. In his 1832 book “On War” he provided a frequently quoted pithy summary of war versus peace, writing in terms of politico-military strategy that “War is a mere continuation of politics by other means.” In other words, war-making is a tool provided to statesmen to achieve a nation’s political objectives when all else fails. One can reject the ultimate...

We have been discussing the rising support for censorship on the left in the last few years. Silencing opposing views has become an article of faith for many on the left, including leading Democratic leaders from President Joe Biden to former President Barack Obama. What is most distressing is how many journalists and writers have joined the call for censorship. However, even with this growing movement, the letter of hundreds of “literary figures” this week to Penguin Random House is chilling....

Sixty years ago today (October 28) the US and Russia stepped back from the brink of nuclear war by making a deal. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would yield to President John F. Kennedy’s demand that Soviet missiles be removed from Cuba; Kennedy pledged not to invade. There is an instructive analogy with Ukraine today. Soviet documents that were revealed after the USSR imploded show how this all went down – and how we all would have "gone down," literally, were it not for the statesmanlike...

Many experts expect public anger over inflation to enable Republicans to regain a majority in the US House of Representatives and maybe the Senate in next week’s midterm elections. However, even if every close Senate race broke in Republicans’ favor, and the new Republican majority was determined to pass a pro-liberty agenda, there still would not be the votes to override President Biden’s vetoes, or Chuck Schumer’s filibusters. Pro-liberty legislation cutting spending, or protecting our...

Thursday night I wrote a column on the challenges faced by Elon Musk in taking over Twitter and suggested steps to “hit the ground running.” One of those obvious steps discussed in earlier columns was to fire CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde, the primary figures responsible for creating one of the largest censorship systems in history. He did so within minutes of taking over and their removal constitutes as singular advances in the cause...

The Ukraine war has intensified the old energy conflict between Russia and the US. The ultimate result of this struggle is uncertain but US main allies, i.e., Europe, are not expected to perform well. Fossil fuels (coal, crude oil and natural gas) are the main sources of world energy providing 80 percent of the world’s consumption. In Europe, and despite long-dated political, social and media initiatives in favour of green energy, in 2021 fossil fuels sourced 70.6 percent of total energy...

It’s not unusual, in fact is typical, for presidents to ditch campaign promises. One such promise Joe Biden made on the campaign trail was a “no first use” of nuclear weapons. That was then, this is now. “The Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy rejected limits on using nuclear weapons long championed by arms control advocates and in the past by President Joe Biden,” Bloomberg reports: Citing burgeoning threats from China and Russia, the Defense Department said in the document released...

‘Russian spy among the guest lecturers of a Budapest elite college? ’The question mark at the end of this headline above a recent article in an English-language Hungarian media outlet, Daily News Hungary, is an excellent example of the vigorous dishonesty practiced by journalists around the world, both in major national newspapers, including Dutch ones, as well as in minor media like this Hungarian one. Gideon van Meijeren caught a mendacious Dutch journalist red-handed this week but they are...

I fully realize that when it comes to Ukraine, one is supposed to focus exclusively on Russia’s invasion and not on what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis, a crisis that has gotten us perilously close to a world-destroying nuclear war with Russia.  Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s role in this crisis needs to be emphasized, over and over again, just as the Pentagon’s role in ginning up the Cuban Missile Crisis also needs to be emphasized, over and over again. Yes, what I am emphasizing is the...

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live  All is not as it seems. There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media. This is the premise of John...

As the astute author Hunter S. Thompson noted, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Weird is indisputably the condition in Great Britain, where Liz Truss, an arguably empty and talentless prime minister, is out—and was, it seemed for a moment, very nearly replaced by her vacuous predecessor, Boris Johnson. Weirdness, however, is not foreign to American politics. An indicator of just how weird Washington is becoming is the apparent interest in General (ret.) David Petraeus’s recent...

It’s been more than obvious since April 2020 that lockdowns were far too costly for individuals and society and could never earn a rational public-health defense. And the evidence was rolling in from one year later that the vaccine mandates were similarly indefensible. Both tactics had in common the enormous use of state coercion that flew in the face of every principle of civilized government. As we are constantly told, both people and government were panicked, and needlessly so. As it turns...

There is an interesting development out of a case in Louisiana where a federal judge has ruled that Dr. Anthony Fauci and White House officials must testify in a case alleging a backchannel for censorship on social media. The complaint in Schmitt v. Biden, No. 3:22-cv-1213 in the District Court for the Western District of Louisiana alleges that Facebook and Twitter coordinated their censorship programs with government officials. I have previously written about what some of us view as a...