The RPI Challenge

The trouble with leading a great power is that, from time to time, the president is obliged to act like the leader of a great power. If ever there was a time for sound presidential leadership, it’s now. With no appreciation for the endlessly renewable force of national self-preservation that animates Moscow’s maneuvers in Ukraine, President Biden’s insulting remarks and hostile sanctions have plunged the United States into a deeper, more dangerous confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, a region...

Many Americans saw former policeman Derek Chauvin’s conviction on all counts last week as affirming the principle that no one is above the law. Many others were concerned that the jury was scared that anything less than a full conviction would result in riots, and even violence against themselves and their families.Was the jury’s verdict influenced by politicians and media figures who were calling for the jury to deliver the “right” verdict? Attempts to intimidate juries are just as offensive...

Last year, I testified in the Senate on Antifa and the growing anti-free speech movement in the United States. I specifically disagreed with the statement of House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler that Antifa (and its involvement in violent protests) is a “myth.” What was most striking about that hearing was the refusal of Democratic members to condemn Antifa’s activities or recognize the scope of anarchist violence even as riots raged in Portland, Oregon and other cities. Indeed, Sen....

LONDON — Last week, MintPress exposed how the supposedly independent investigative collective Bellingcat is, in fact, funded by a CIA cutout organization and filled with former spies and state intelligence operatives. However, one part of the story that has remained untold until now is Bellingcat’s close ties to the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, an institution with deep links to the British security state and one that trains a large number of British, American and...

A fascinating exchange played out in the UK’s House of Lords on June 2, 2020. Neil Ferguson, the physicist at Imperial College London who created the main epidemiology model behind the lockdowns, faced his first serious questioning about the predictive performance of his work. Ferguson predicted catastrophic death tolls back on March 16, 2020 unless governments around the world adopted his preferred suite of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to ward off the pandemic. Most countries...

Early last month, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced he would end the state’s mask mandate and allow most businesses to function at 100 percent capacity. The response from the corporate media and the Left was predictable. California governor Gavin Newsom declared the move “absolutely reckless.” Beto O’Rourke called the GOP a “cult of death.” Joe Biden called the move “Neanderthal thinking.” Keith Olbermann insisted, “Texas has decided to join the side of the virus” and suggested Texans...

Sgt. William Kelly, the second highest-ranking official in the Norfolk Police Department’s internal affairs division, has been fired for making an anonymous donation to the defense fund for Kyle Rittenhouse. The donation (revealed after a security breach of the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was accompanied by a note saying that Rittenhouse did “nothing wrong.” Despite the obvious attack on free speech and associational rights, there has been little concern raised in the media or by...

Interventionists are saying that US forces need to stay in Afghanistan because otherwise that country will, once again, become a “haven” for anti-American terrorists. They still just don’t get it. It never ceases to amaze me how blind and obtuse interventionists can be. Anti-American terrorism is not like the flu or like Covid-19. It doesn’t just spread around the world like an infection or a virus. Moreover, the 9/11 attacks didn’t occur because the terrorists hated America for its “freedom...

Who’s to blame for normalizing one-man rule? If there is one thing the American system of government was designed to prevent, it is the tyranny that results when a single person, like a king, has the power to both write and enforce the law. So, what explains the fact that Nevada has now entered a second year of one-man rule, with Governor Sisolak continuing to wield the powers of both the legislative and executive branches simultaneously, in plain violation of the Nevada Constitution? The...

It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol. So The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick's skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died — and,...

Last week President Biden announced a “full” US withdrawal from Afghanistan – the longest war in US history – by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the United States. While this announcement is to be welcomed, the delayed US withdrawal may result in Americans and Afghans dying needlessly for good PR optics back home. We all remember how many Americans died after President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” stunt in Iraq.The war has been a disaster from day one. So why wait to end it?The...

In his last book “War with Russia?” my friend and colleague Steve Cohen wrote about the flagrant censorship of news being carried on by The New York Times in support of its Russia-bashing editorial policies. Said Cohen, the newspaper’s century old slogan of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” has been turned into “All the News that Fits” when it comes to coverage of Russia. But the problem goes far deeper than the professional malpractice of one leading newspaper in America. The censorship of...

Hours after Sen. Maxine Waters (D-CA) urged protesters to "get more confrontational," a Minnesota National Guard and Minneapolis police team were targeted in a Saturday morning drive-by shooting, according to a press release by the National Guard. The incident happened at approximately 4:19 a.m. local time when a light colored SUV drove by and unloaded. Fortunately for the officers, only minor injuries were sustained - with two National Guardsmen suffering minor cuts from shattered glass. They...

Anthony Fauci, now in his second presidential administration as chief coronavirus fearmonger and coronavirus crackdown champion, offered in a Sunday interview some explanation for his continuing promotion of draconian government restrictions and pressure for everyone to take experimental vaccines, all in the name of countering coronavirus that does not pose a significant risk of major health problems or death for most people. Freedom just seems not to make sense, suggests the United States...

The mainstream media didn’t find it incongruous that the US walked back a claim that Russia placed bounties on US troops in Afghanistan on the same day it sanctioned Russia on the basis of another set of evidence-free accusations. The CIA now only has “low-to-moderate confidence” that Russia paid the Taliban to kill American servicemen in Afghanistan, it was reported on Thursday. On the same day, the Biden administration announced a new raft of sanctions against Russia as punishment for its...