The RPI Challenge

Foreign policy hawks in the United States habitually equate a noncommunist Russia with the totalitarian Soviet Union. An especially graphic example is a recent article in 19FortyFive by Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. The title, "Russia Was a Rogue State Long before Ukraine and Georgia," accurately conveys the extent of Rubin’s Russophobia. Predictably, he blames Moscow entirely for the 2008 Georgia war, even though a European Union...

According to numbers released by the US government, consumer prices have increased by 7.5 percent in the past year, the steepest increase since 1982. The actual price increases are even worse than the government numbers suggest, given that the “official” statistics are manipulated to understate the real rate of price increases. According to John Williams of ShadowStats, prices have actually increased by around 15 percent over the past year.The fact that prices remain at historically high...

Well you'll be shocked to learn that, while the Ukraine invasion we've been told for weeks was happening any day now still has not occurred, the US and UK have declared that Russia attacked Ukraine in an invisible and unverifiable way for which the evidence is secret. "The White House blamed Russia on Friday for this week’s cyberattacks targeting Ukraine’s defense ministry and major banks and warned of the potential for more significant disruptions in the days ahead," AP reports. "Anne...

On President’s Day weekend, let us commemorate the record of the best president in US history: John Tyler. A random poll of Americans would draw mostly puzzled looks at the name, but according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow Ivan Eland, in his 2009 ranking of the presidents, Recarving Rushmore, this 10th US president has the strongest record upholding Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty. On the prosperity front, Tyler vetoed both the attempt to revive the national bank, and a bill to raise...

Amid soaring tensions with Russia, the United States is spending a fortune on foreign interference campaigns in Ukraine. Washington’s regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has spent $22.4 million on operations inside the country since 2014, when democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown and replaced by a successor government handpicked by the US Those operations included propping up and training pro-Western political parties, funding pliant...

It has become something of a habit in both the American and Canadian media to insist that the Canadian trucker protest against vaccine mandates is an "illegal protest." They are "illegal border protests," one American news affiliate proclaims. Canada's National Post dutifully refers to the protests in its headlines as illegal acts. The term "illegal" has been used a multitude of times by Liberal Party politicians in the House of Commons. The premier of Ontario—one of Canada's most hysterical...

After the US Supreme Court last month froze the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for large private employers, some companies — including Boeing, General Electric and Starbucks — dropped plans to implement the mandate. Others, based on guidance issued in 2020 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, left the mandates in place. Most of the large employers that opted to mandate COVID vaccines for their employees, even though the Supreme Court ruled they didn’t have to, have...

Is it better to win a war without firing a shot, or rather, convince people that you stopped a “war” that never had a chance of actually starting?  With poll numbers continuing to tank, and midterm elections right around the corner, the Biden Administration desperately needs a win. It appears they’re enacting a bold strategy that involves first manifesting a crisis and then proceeding to take credit for solving the non-existent crisis they created. For weeks, the White House has been telling...

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”— George Orwell The US government, which speaks in a language of force, is afraid of its citizenry. What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority. All of us are in danger. In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,”...

In the 15-minute time span before the joint session of Congress convened at 1:00 p.m. on January 6, 2021, two incidents that set the stage for the day’s ensuing chaos happened simultaneously. First, a man named Ryan Samsel, after taking some sort of direction from Ray Epps, overran a thin line of police and metal racks in what would be the first official breach of Capitol grounds around 12:50 p.m. (Samsel was charged and has been incarcerated for more than a year; Epps faces no charges.)...

“The primordial interest of the United States, over which for centuries we have fought wars– the First, the Second and Cold Wars– has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united there, they’re the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn’t happen.” -George Friedman, STRATFOR CEO at The Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs The Ukrainian crisis has nothing to do with Ukraine. It’s about Germany and, in particular, a pipeline that connects Germany to...

Fifteen years ago, writers schooled in computer science began to imagine various totalitarian schemes for pandemic control. Experienced public health officials in 2006 warned that this would lead to disaster. Donald Henderson, for example, went through the whole list of possible restrictions, shooting them down one by one.  Still, a decade and a half later, governments all over the world tried lockdowns anyway. And sure enough, since April of 2020, scholars have observed that these lockdown...

Over the weekend we heard that the US is evacuating its embassy in Kiev for fear of a Russian invasion. We also heard that Russia is evacuating its embassy in Kiev for fear of a US-backed provocation in eastern Ukraine that may lead to a Russian military response.We are in “uncharted territory” the media tells us. Yes, that is true. But it is uncharted because no one had ever imagined in the past that the US government would be so foolish to risk a thermonuclear war over the borders of a...