The RPI Challenge

Last week President Biden addressed the nation on the first anniversary of the coronavirus being declared a “pandemic.” It was a disturbing speech, warning us that the “hopeful spring” will only emerge “from a dark winter” if all Americans “stick with the rules.”Whose rules? His rules.The message from the president was clear: he will only allow us to have some of our freedoms back if we do exactly as he tells us. It was the language of extortion, of a bank robber who demands you do what he...

In the 12 months since states first started ordering citizens to stay at home under the pretext of Covid, we’ve come a long way. Particularly in our understanding of how illiberal our politicians can be and how supine we are. One year ago, at noon on Tuesday, March 17, France went into total lockdown for the first time. Until then, Covid-19 was something of which we were faintly aware – background noise in our daily lives that was mostly relegated to Wuhan, China. But we all had that one...

We know what keeps America safe at night — rough men on the walls stand ready to visit violence on those who would do us harm, duh. But what about Canada? Or say, Cambodia or Bolivia? This is by way of trying to figure out why Joe Biden bombed Syria and derailed the resumption of the Iran nuclear accord, and why he has called off, delayed, or stalled further withdrawals from the places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria along the bloody trail of the old Global War of Terror. Canada (along with...

While the number of fatalities attributed to Covid-19 is carefully tracked by governments, few people have recognized how pandemic-spurred crackdowns have devastated democracy around the world. Emergency proclamations have entitled presidents and other government officials to seize vast new powers previously forbidden to them. Government bureaucrats became a new priesthood that could sanctify unlimited sacrifices merely by invoking dubious statistical extrapolations of future perils. In...

For people who still have fears about the threat of a violent takeover of the federal government, a ruling by Washington, D.C., federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth has gone a long way to relieve such fears. In a decision denying bail to one of the January 6 protestors, Jacob Anthony Chansley, who is often referred to as the “QAnon Shaman,” Lamberth no doubt succeeded in calming the fears of Washington lawmakers and members of the mainstream press who remain convinced that there was a serious...

I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow’s Izmailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I have Izvestia’s celebration of Gagarin’s flight, a Pravda account of a 1938 show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek with Trotsky on the cover that someone must have taken a risk to keep. These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces of history. Not so...

Despite a full year's worth of science and data showing that kids in school are not at risk at all from this virus and that they are not meaningful vectors of spread, even the reddest of states are making them the last to get a reprieve from the mask fascism, rather than the first. This is likely the most radical policy ever implemented in our lifetimes. The muted response from most established conservative officials and organizations is shocking. Yesterday, many conservatives celebrated yet...

An especially dangerous threat to liberty occurs when members of the press collude with government agencies instead of monitoring and exposing the abuses of those agencies. Unfortunately, collusion is an all-too-common pattern in press coverage of the national security state’s activities. The American people then receive official propaganda disguised as honest reporting and analysis. The degree of collaboration frequently has reached stunning levels. During the early decades of the Cold War,...

Tyrants don’t like people who speak truth to power. Indeed, the American Police State has shown itself to be particularly intolerant of free speech activities that challenge its authority, stand up to its power grabs, and force it to operate according to the rules of the Constitution. Cue the rise of protest laws, the police state’s go-to methods for muzzling discontent. These protest laws, some of which appear to encourage violence against peaceful protesters by providing immunity to...

The Covid-19 pandemic has been catastrophic and devastating for those who have succumbed to it. The important issue for us societally and globally is that the risk group is defined and we know much better in March 2021 how to target and manage a response. March 2021 is not February 2020. Moreover, the benefits of the governmental actions – lockdowns – have been overly overstated and inflated while the harms have been devastating. Those include harms to our children, the poorer children and...

The Joseph Biden administration has named Richard Nephew as its Deputy Iran Envoy. As the former Principal Deputy Coordinator of Sanctions Policy for Barack Obama’s State Department, Nephew took personal credit for depriving Iranians of food, sabotaging their automobile industry and driving up unemployment rates. He has described the destruction of Iran’s economy as “a tremendous success,” and lamented during a visit to Russia that food was still plentiful in the country’s capital despite...

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 2021 will be the second year in a row in which the federal debt exceeds Gross Domestic Product (GDP). CBO also projected that this year’s federal deficit will be 2.3 trillion dollars, which is 900 billion dollars less than last year. However, CBO’s projections do not include the 1.9 trillion dollars “stimulus” bill Congress is likely to pass.The CBO’s report was largely ignored by Congress and the media. One reason the report did not get the...

If you want to know why waste and conflicts of interests are so prevalent in the United States, you need to look no further than the recent report of he Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) on the so-called G222 program. I wrote about this program in 2013 but we now have the result of the criminal investigation. Under the program, the United States Air Force spent $549 million to buy 20 Italian-made cargo planes for the Afghan government. They were found to be...

Twice in the last six weeks, warnings were issued about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6. And both times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove utterly baseless. First we had the hysteria over the violence we were told was likely to occur at numerous state capitols on Inauguration Day. “Law enforcement and state officials are on high alert for potentially violent protests...

Venezuelan non-president, Juan Guaido, is back in headlines after the new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called him to discuss America's favorite talking points: “a return to democracy” via “free and fair elections.” I'm sure the irony will not be lost on those who question the legitimacy of the US election that saw Biden take power. Anyway, you would have to have been offline or in a coma for the past couple of years to not be aware of some key facts about ‘interim president’ Guaido and...

Some people are criticizing President Biden for the recent US air strikes in Syria as well as his refusal to sanction Saudi dictator Mohammed bin Salman, the man who US officials have concluded orchestrated the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, it’s possible that Biden made those decisions. But there is another possibility, one much more likely, one that unfortunately all too many Americans are loath to consider: that it was the US national-security establishment,...