The RPI Challenge

Once upon a time in America, parents breathed a sigh of relief when their kids went back to school after a summer’s hiatus, content in the knowledge that for a good portion of the day their kids would be gainfully occupied, out of harm’s way and out of trouble. Those were the good old days, before the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a whole new level of Nanny State authoritarianism to our daily lives, locking down communities, forcing kids out of the schoolroom and into virtual classrooms,...

Does our government believe Africans are not human beings? On Sunday, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared, "We've been seeing health misinformation as a problem for years, but the speed, scale and sophistication with which it is spreading and impacting our health is really unprecedented." Perhaps the surgeon general should look in the mirror and lecture the FDA for dissuading people from taking lifesaving ivermectin. Over the weekend, the FDA tweeted out a message warning that ivermectin is...

Did anyone expect the US war in Afghanistan to end cleanly? If so, you bought the lies all along and the cold water now is hitting sharp. While the actual ending is particularly harsh and clearly spliced together from old clips of Saigon 1975, those are simply details. Who should we blame for losing Afghanistan? Why blame anyone? Why blame Biden? He played his part as a senator and vice president keeping the war going, but his role today is just being the last guy in a long line of people to...

This month marks fifty years since President Richard Nixon closed the “gold window” that had allowed foreign governments to exchange US dollars for gold. Nixon’s action severed the last link between the dollar and gold, transforming the dollar into pure fiat currency.Since the “Nixon shock” of 1971, the dollar’s value — and the average American’s living standard — has continuously declined, while income inequality and the size, scope, and cost of government have risen.Since the beginning of...

US Customs and Border Patrol announced its officers at a port in Alaska recently seized thousands of fake COVID-19 vaccination cards that came from China. The seizure opens the door for government to go forward with the technological tracking of US citizens. How so? It strengthens the arguments of pro-vaccine passport types who say Americans must be vaccinated, or else risk infecting the innocent; that Americans must prove vaccination as conditions of associating freely in public and...

After the Taliban captured Kabul far faster than anyone in Washington forecast, secretary of state Tony Blinken went on Sunday morning talk shows and announced that the US mission in Afghanistan had been “successful.” Unfortunately, there will be plenty of robotic civil servants and political appointees who recite that deranged verdict in the coming years. There is no reason to expect the twenty-year US debacle in Afghanistan to humble Washington policymakers. Korean War fiascos were swept...

Many Democratic leaders, including - most notably - Nancy Pelosi refuse to let go of the notion that the Jan. 6 "attack" on the Capitol was a terror attack on par with 9/11 or the Pulse nightclub shootings. Why? Because, they claim, the whole seige was planned and perpetrated by shadowy militia groups like the Oath Keepers, working in concert with Republican lawmakers. Dems also blame President Trump for instigating the incident (the supposed reason behind Twitter and Facebook banning his...

The government has a history of shamelessly exploiting national emergencies for its own nefarious purposes. Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, civil unrest, economic instability, pandemics, natural disasters: the government has been taking advantage of such crises for years now in order to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace. This COVID-19 pandemic is no different. Yet be warned: we will all lose if this pandemic becomes a showdown between COVID-19 vaccine...

In early July, Ron Paul penned a column titled “It’s Saigon In Afghanistan,” invoking the imagery of the fall of Saigon in 1975, when US military helicopters scrambled to evacuate personnel from the roof of the US embassy. But Paul suggested that maybe the situation in Afghanistan was “perhaps not as dramatic” as the situation in Saigon forty-six years ago. But that was six weeks ago. Now, it looks like the end of the US’s war in Afghanistan may be in many ways every bit as chaotic as the US...

Joe Biden’s speech following the Afghanistan debacle made for compelling television for one main reason: here is a government official – the man who holds the office once called the “leader of the free world” – recognizing the limits of government. No matter how long the US stayed, no matter how many troops the US deploys, no matter how much blood and treasure are expanded on this war, the US could not accomplish its ends. “How many more lives, American lives, is it worth? How many endless...

Macron was billed as the “moderate candidate” in the 2017 French presidential election but there’s nothing moderate about this authoritarian who has transformed France into a police state under the guise of countering a virus. A few weeks ago, I was in the picturesque Suffolk coastal resort of Southwold. There is a large mural of the novelist George Orwell – who once lived there – at the entrance of the renovated pier. It couldn’t have been a more appropriate moment to be reminded of the...

Former President Trump, President Biden and their partisans are rushing to blame each other for the debacle unfolding now in Afghanistan. The “National Unity Government” and its military and police forces have completely evaporated in the face of the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the entire country in the last few weeks. This culminated in President Ashraf Ghani’s fleeing the capital of Kabul on Sunday as the Taliban walked right in and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar seemed to have assumed power....

This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away. The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to...

If one were to go only on what one reads or sees in the media, one would think it’s the spring of 2020 all over again. The headlines are filled with stories of overcrowded hospitals, overwhelmed medical personnel, and predictions of people dying in parking lots waiting for medical care. The news articles generally quote a staffer of some kind at various hospitals and then leave it at that. It’s difficult to know what to make of these stories. After all, we heard very much the same thing during...