The RPI Challenge

My family and I were about to sit down for lunch on Easter Sunday when I received an extremely disturbing call from a constituent. The caller said, “I wanted you to know that my wife is hanging on to her life and I’m afraid she’s going to die soon.” I could hear total desperation in the man’s voice. “She’s living off a bag of IV fluid a day at this point. The doctor won’t operate on my wife due to the governor’s orders.” The great Milton Friedman once said that “the government solution to a...

Don’t pity this year’s crop of graduates because this COVID-19 pandemic caused them to miss out on the antics of their senior year and the pomp and circumstance of graduation. Pity them because they have spent their entire lives in a state of emergency. They were born in the wake of the 9/11 attacks; raised without any expectation of privacy in a technologically-driven, mass surveillance state; educated in schools that teach conformity and compliance; saddled with a debt-ridden economy on the...

Note: This was first published as a letter to RPI Subscribers. Subscribe for free here.The numbers are sickening and impossible to ignore. Throughout the United States the Coronavirus "pandemic" looks more and more like a war on the elderly and sick than a mysterious new virus that was so dangerous and unknown that the entire country (with notable exceptions - South Dakota for example) had to be completely locked down tighter than Guantanamo Bay.Nationwide, 42 percent of the Covid-19 death...

In the saga of the virus and the lockdown, the wisdom of the crowds, that is the wisdom of each of us, was thwarted by bad data, perhaps intentionally bad. On the other hand, the ersatz wisdom of the collective bureaucracy in federal, state and local health agencies was based on crafted data. In the end data didn’t matter, as the bureaucracies were more concerned with their natural territorial imperative, which is to rule and control. The most frightening aspect of the coronavirus-19...

The US assassination of Qassem Soleimani in January touched off a new wave of disinformation about the top Iranian major general, with Trump administration allies branding him a global terrorist while painting Iran as the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism. Much of the propaganda about Soleimani related to his alleged responsibility for the killing of American troops in Iraq, along with Iran’s role in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. But a second theme in the disinformation campaign, which has...

From the Lake of the Ozarks to the Texas Gulf Coast, Americans spent Memorial Day weekend in defiance of the forced "lockdown" orders of the politicians. Dr. Birx was furious over people refusing to wear masks at the beach. Other local tyrants screamed and threatened. The people are ignoring them. Deliverance from this coronavirus-induced government tyranny is not coming about because politicians have seen the error of their ways. It is coming about because the people are finally waking up....

Media pundits and politicians are now in the habit of claiming it was the pandemic itself that has caused unemployment to skyrocket and economic growth to plummet. The claim is that sick and dying workers, fearful consumers, and disrupted supply chains would cause economic chaos. Some have even claimed that economic shutdowns actually help the economy, because it is claimed allowing the spread of the disease will itself destroy employment and economic growth.1 Leaving aside the fact there's no...

One of the few good things to come out of the government-mandated shutdown is that many parents have started homeschooling their children. Many of these parents are likely to continue homeschooling after the government schools reopen.Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did its part to encourage homeschooling when it unveiled “guidelines” for schools to follow when they reopen. Among the CDC’s guidelines are that schools put tape on the hallways, directing children...

The world has been turned upside down with draconian government orders to “flatten the curve” with what is called Social Distancing. Schools have been closed for months, businesses have been involuntarily shut down and travel restrictions have idled 90 percent of the airlines. The net result is over 36 million American’s are unemployed and the number is rising. Now we learn the whole social distancing lockdown that has paralyzed the nation comes from a very surprising source. A May 2nd article...

Most people are more likely to wind up six feet under because of almost anything else under the sun other than COVID-19. The CDC just came out with a report that should be earth-shattering to the narrative of the political class, yet it will go into the thick pile of vital data and information about the virus that is not getting out to the public. For the first time, the CDC has attempted to offer a real estimate of the overall death rate for COVID-19, and under its most likely scenario, the...

Countries across the world have been in lockdown for months in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The costs of the policy are enormous – in terms of life, liberty and the economy. But is it worth it to save lives? Yoram Lass was once the director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Health. Lass is a staunch critic of the lockdown policy adopted in his native Israel and around the world. He has described our response to Covid-19 as a form of hysteria. spiked caught up with him to find out more....

Last week the Wisconsin Supreme Court became the first among the highest state courts in America to void much of a state government’s coronavirus crackdown. With legal challenges being pursued in response to liberty suppression through the expanding of government power across America in the name of countering coronavirus, expect other states’ top courts soon to be considering the legality of state and local crackdowns as well. A declaration earlier this month by four of the nine justices of...

In the weeks before the 2016 presidential election, the most powerful former leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency did everything they could to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump. President Obama’s former acting CIA chief Michael Morrell published a full-throated endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed “Putin ha[s] recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation,” while George W. Bush’s post-9/11 CIA and NSA Chief, Gen. Michael Hayden,...

Ohio's COVID-19 lockdown is illegal, a state judge ruled today, because it exceeds the powers granted by the statute under which it was imposed. Responding to a May 8 lawsuit filed by the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law on behalf of 35 gyms, Lake County Court of Common Pleas Judge Eugene Lucci enjoined Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton from penalizing the plaintiffs or similar businesses for violating the lockdown, provided "they operate in compliance with all applicable safety...

Politically-dictated lockdowns and prohibitions have recently destroyed tens of millions of American jobs. Politicians have effectively claimed a right to inflict unlimited economic damage in pursuit of zero COVID-19 contagion. The perverse incentives driving the policy have multiplied the harm far beyond the original peril. Almost 40% of households earning less than $40,000 per year have someone who lost their job in recent months, according to the Federal Reserve. The Disaster Distress...

Stay home, stay away from strangers, shut down the schools and for God’s sake, whatever happens, do not touch plastic or stainless steel. That was COVID-19, April. Now? A few hop, skip and jump days later? Oops. Oopsies. Oppose-daisies. “Coronavirus ‘does not spread easily’ by touching surfaces or objects, CDC now says,” one USA Today headline read. How embarrassing. Or, if you’re a small business owner or one of the 33 million, err, 35 million, err 36 million put out of work by government’s...