The RPI Challenge

David French, maybe National Review’s most reliably wrong scribe, issued this gem in response to the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s residence in Florida: Given that we still haven't seen the warrant, much less the warrant application, the immediate frenzied anger at the FBI is completely unjustified. There is no constitutional, statutory, or moral foundation for the belief a former president is above the law. So, wait. /1 — David French (@DavidAFrench) August 9, 2022 If the DOJ's actions turn out...

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests....

Secret service outside Mar-a-Lago Monday[The Justice Department] must immediately explain the reason for its raid and it must be more than a search for inconsequential archives, or it will be viewed as a political tactic and undermine any future credible investigation and legitimacy of January 6 investigations. — Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo Headline from Politics Insider this morning: Feds likely obtained ‘pulverizing’ amount of evidence ahead of searching Trump's Mar-a-Lago home,...

A good friend of mine, learning of the impending visit of Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, recalled Homer’s description of Helen of Troy, “The face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the towers of Ilium.” Well, Nancy ain’t no Helen of Troy, but she might nevertheless be in the business of launching warships and burning cities due to her bizarre interpretation of her foreign policy prerogatives as Speaker. It is like watching a train wreck developing in slow...

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently addressed the Workers Youth League (AUF) summer camp in Utøya, Norway. The AUF is Norway’s largest political youth organization and is affiliated with the Norwegian Labor Party. The AUF summer camp is of course famous for being the scene of the horrific terrorist attack perpetrated by neo-Nazi Anders Breivik in 2011. Stoltenberg said little of note. Nonetheless, his speech was a remarkable demonstration of how little NATO has learned from the...

You can always tell how important narrative control is by watching the way people react when their control of the narrative is jeopardized. Empire apologists are raging at Amnesty International for pausing its aggressive facilitation of western imperialism to issue one brief criticism of the way Ukrainian forces have been endangering civilian lives with their warfare tactics against the Russian military. Amnesty is far from the first to highlight this extensively documented issue; that...

The reasoning behind the US government’s current confrontations with Russia and China is very much debated, with explanations including sheer incompetence, short-term opportunism from a Democratic Party hellbent on pursuing a destructive geopolitical agenda for its own domestic ends, a blind urge to preserve world domination driven by a diminishing role in world affairs and, from those believing in more rational responses, containment and deterrence as a systematic but flexible response. Not...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “surprise” trip to Taiwan last week should be “Exhibit A” as to why interventionism is dangerous, deadly, and dumb. Though she claimed her visit won some sort of victory for democracy over autocracy, the stopover achieved nothing of the sort. It was a pointless gesture that brought us closer to military conflict with zero benefits.As Col. Doug Macgregor said of Pelosi’s trip on a recent episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, “statesmanship involves advancing American...

For many who watched the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial, some of the most outstanding moments involved his defense counsel Yarelyn Mena. It was an extraordinary opportunity for the 29-year old graduated from CUNY (2015) and she was praised for her tough examination of Heard. It was considered the turning point of one of the most famous trials in modern history. It is something that should be a matter of great pride for the CUNY community and, not surprisingly, the website did an article on...

It is unsettling to see a democratic government like the United States beating its chest over the high-tech murder of a retired jihadist, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. The 71-year-old al-Zawahiri succeeded the assassinated Osama bin Laden as chief of the anti-US underground group, al-Qaeda. The mild-mannered, Egyptian had been a local doctor in Cairo, when the brutal secret police of US-backed dictator, Hosni Mubarak, arrested him. Though al-Zawahiri was not directly involved in the opposition, he...

Only a person who is willfully blind cannot see that the US position on the Brittney Griner case is driven not by some compassionate concern for her welfare but rather by the extreme anti-Russia animus that has afflicted US officials for more than 75 years.  Yesterday, a Russian judge sentenced Griner to 9 years in jail. This was after she pled guilty to illegally bringing a small amount of cannabis into the country, in violation of Russia’s drug laws. She faced a maximum sentence of 10...

In May, Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, held up a vote on a bill which sought to approve some $40 billion in aid for Ukraine. Paul wanted language inserted into the bill, without a vote, that would have an inspector general scrutinize the new spending. “This would be the inspector general that’s been overseeing the waste in Afghanistan,” Paul said, “and has done a great job.” While senators on both sides of the aisle bristled at Paul’s delay tactics, Christopher Tremoglie, a...

The “Public Health Experts” are at it again, and they’re singing the same tune as last year. This week, Anthony Fauci has been making the media rounds warning of a severe winter of death and illness for the unvaccinated. Once more, he has warned of a heavy toll for those who refuse experimental gene injections that have been fraudulently represented as the cure to the coronavirus. “If they don’t get vaccinated or they don’t get boosted, they’re going to get into trouble,” the career...

Most of the fact-checking organizations Facebook has partnered with to monitor and regulate information about Ukraine are directly funded by the US government, either through the US Embassy or via the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an information war as bitter as the ground fighting has erupted, and Meta (Facebook’s official name) announced it had partnered with nine organizations to help it sort fact from fiction for Ukrainian,...

We don’t know how it could have been any clearer than this warning from Chicom mouthpiece and ultra-hawk, Hu Xijin. Prior to America’s other senile leader putting herself in harms’ way by touching down in Taiwan today, Xijin let loose a volley of histrionics that left little doubt as to where Beijing stood: 'If US fighter jets escort Pelosi’s plane into Taiwan, it is invasion,' Hu Xijin of Global Times wrote on Twitter. 'The [Chinese military] has the right to forcibly dispel Pelosi’s plane...