The RPI Challenge

It was the culminating event of a four-day trip planned at the last minute for the purpose of rallying Europe to the cause of standing up to Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine. Speaking before a large and enthusiastic crowd in the Polish capital of Warsaw, US President Joe Biden concluded his remarks by going off-script. After condemning what he called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin’s “brutality” in Ukraine, Biden uttered nine words that, in a blink of an eye, made moot whatever...

Readers of Murray Rothbard's articles and speeches on war collectivism will immediately recognize the progressive pietist fervor surrounding today's progressive war jingoism: everywhere is Ukraine! The atavistic need to analogize today's situation to 1938, with Vladimir Putin as Adolf Hitler and war skeptics as Neville Chamberlain at Munich, is proof of this. The lessons of 1914, where a series of tragic blunders turned a regional conflict into a conflagration across Europe, are far more...

The Syrian war was the first fully observed conflict on social-media and the ability to connect directly with Syrians real time as they were experiencing the crisis was unprecedented. This created a unique opportunity to get unfiltered information directly from all sides of the conflict to gain insights and understanding. The results have helped shake off the control by conventional news media over foreign events reporting and analysis. While this has created some chaos, valuable lessons have...

The semi-official United States government plus media lie machine knows that constructing a plausible reason to bomb the crap out of someone all depends on where you begin your narrative. If you keep starting your accusations at a point where the target has done something bad, all you have to do is repeat yourself over and over again to drown out any alternative backstory that surfaces. And if you really want to demolish all contrary views, all you have to do is liken the targeted foreign...

In the now month-long mainstream media coverage of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, much attention has been paid to the actions of the ‘Ukrainian Resistance’. In a manner not dissimilar to its coverage of the ‘Syrian rebels’ a decade ago, a romanticised image of ‘Ukrainian freedom fighters’ fighting bravely against a militarily superior Russian foe has been widespread amongst corporate outlets, alongside their fawning over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his calls for...

It’s hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet. A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict...

Previewing President Biden’s trip to Europe last week, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that, “the president is traveling to Europe to make sure we stay united.”That sure didn’t go as planned. This may have been the most disastrous – and dangerous – Presidential overseas trip ever.The US and its NATO allies have repeatedly proclaimed that “protecting Ukraine’s democracy” has never been about threatening Russia. Holding out NATO membership and sending billions of dollars in...

Over the past month, the mainstream media has focused on the Russian military intervention in Ukraine which launched in response to the eight year long war on the breakaway pro-Russian Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Numerous attempts had been made by Moscow to resolve the situation peacefully – specifically, calls for Kiev to implement its side of the Minsk Agreements giving the breakaway republics some autonomy while remaining under Ukrainian rule- but these attempts had all been rebuffed...

Economic, social and political dangers abound. That’s because Washington and its subservient mainstream media are delirious with war fever like at no time in the last seven decades. The resulting reckless pursuit of an unhinged Sanctions War against Russia poses a dire threat to the global economy and domestic prosperity and does so for no good reason of homeland security whatsoever. With respect to the latter, the sheer facts are overwhelming. So we repeat them with an added total for the...

In the 2005 film, Cinderella Man, James J. Braddock’s fight with contender Art Lasky reaches a turning point when Lasky hits Braddock with his best punch. Braddock’s mouthpiece flies out and he is staggered, but he doesn’t go down. He recovers, smiles at Lasky, and goes on to win the fight. A romanticized portrayal to be sure, taken to an even more ridiculous extreme in the climactic bout between Rocky Balboa and Clubber Lang in Rocky III, but it does beg a very relevant question for the US...

With Washington and its NATO allies forced to watch from the sidelines as Russia’s military advances across Eastern Ukraine and encircles Kiev, US and British officials have resorted to a troubling tactic that could trigger a massive escalation. Following similar claims by his Secretary of State and ambassador the United Nations, US President Joseph Biden has declared that Russia will pay a “severe price” if it uses chemical weapons in Ukraine. The warnings emanating from the Biden...

Just because Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the new Fauci, it doesn’t mean COVID is over. In fact, cases are surging in many European countries, and U.K. seniors are now experiencing record numbers. “Covid infections surge to record high for over-70s in UK” was the title of a Financial Times article from Friday. But how can there be record infections precisely after nearly every senior was vaccinated and 90% were boosted, even though many already have had prior infection? Or are the record...

Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine commenced on February 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated the image of a plucky little army standing up to the Russian Goliath. To bolster the perception of Ukrainian military mettle, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries. The campaign includes language guides, key messages, and hundreds of propaganda posters, some of which contain fascist imagery and...

My harvest of impressions from the past 48 hours of monitoring Russian political talk shows and news bulletins of Russian state television is filled to the brim with both highly interesting and at times frightening and off-putting developments.  The most momentous is perhaps what I just saw 15 minutes ago on the latest edition of Время покажет (Time Will Tell), a talk show I know from the inside having twice been a panelist there in 2016-2017. The program opened with mention of the forthcoming...

American journalists have a long, ignoble history of being willing conduits for pro-war propaganda. Usually, that behavior is in service to a military crusade that Washington has launched or wants to initiate. At times, though, such a betrayal of journalistic integrity occurs on behalf of a foreign country that both US political leaders and news media elites have adopted as a favorite cause. We are currently witnessing the latter phenomenon with respect to news coverage of the Russia-Ukraine...