The RPI Challenge

Hysteria about China has been kicked into high gear by the political/media class who are responsible for manufacturing support for the cold war escalations which will be necessary to prevent the US from being surpassed on the world stage as a unipolar superpower. Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro has aired a fire-and-brimstone monologue on China that looks like a fictional news clip from some kind of film noir-style movie adaptation of a really ham-fisted dystopian graphic novel. It really needs to be...

From California to New Jersey, Americans are protesting in the streets. They are demanding an end to house arrest orders given by government officials over a virus outbreak that even according to the latest US government numbers will claim fewer lives than the seasonal flu outbreak of 2017-2018.Across the US, millions of businesses have been shut down by “executive order” and the unemployment rate has skyrocketed to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Americans, who have seen their...

The accumulating death toll from Covid-19 can be seen minute-by-minute on cable news channels. But there’s another death toll few seem to care much about: the number of poverty-related deaths being set in motion by deliberately plunging millions of Americans into poverty and despair.  In the first three weeks since governors began shutting down commerce in their states, 17 million Americans filed for unemployment, and according to one survey, one quarter of Americans have lost their jobs or...

“For the children” is often a rallying cry for increasing government power at the expense of liberty. Maybe now it should be a rallying cry for ending the coronavirus crackdown. In the age of governments across the world forcing businesses to close and mandating that people stay at home, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres predicted Thursday, in announcing a new UN report, that hundreds of thousands of children could die as a result of a global recession this year. Plus, he...

The weeks’ long coronavirus lockdown is being exposed as, at best, a wild over-reaction. Americans are starting to protest the destruction of their economy, the loss of their jobs, and the attacks on their basic Constitutional rights. The walls of oppression built by the petty tyrants throughout the country are beginning to crack. It reminds me of the feeling that was in the air in that memorable year 1989, when the world as we knew it was turned upside down. What was so significant about 1989...

We are getting sick and tired of the CNN/Cuomo Brothers inquisition and the Coviddeath Cavalcade. Their relentless, morose, partisan coverage of the coronavirus pandemic is the single greatest campaign of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, scaremongering and elitist prattle we can recall in our entire lifetime. Indeed, Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare was a Sunday School picnic compared to CovidGate. And just as there were no commies secretly subverting America 66 years ago, there is no...

In the Soviet Union, activists were sent to state psychiatric wards. According to the state, any and all opposition to government policy was considered a form of mental illness.  Stephanie Buck writes about the treatment of the “social parasite” Joseph Brodsky.  In 1963, Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was seized and sent to a mental institution… Hospital workers pumped him with tranquilizers and repeatedly woke him during the night. He was given cold baths and wrapped in wet canvas that shrank...

Information on total deaths through March 28 shows no indication of a general surge in deaths in the United States. It's quite possible we'll see April's total mortality begin to show levels well above normal, but the weekly data we have so far show no indication of this. We now have data up through week 13 (the week ending March 28) for this year, as can be found here. As of April 15, the week 13 data is not yet quite complete, although the CDC lists that data as 93 percent complete. (bigger)...

On April 7, 2018, horrifying images of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria flooded the internet. Appalled, the media jumped on the story and resolutely pointed the finger at the regime of Assad. One week later, yesterday exactly two years ago, the United States, Britain and France launched rocket attacks in retaliation, and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in subsequent months concluded that a gas attack had indeed taken place. In the meantime, however,...

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis and mass hysteria, there’s been a peculiar pattern, you will notice if you haven’t already, of certain, new non-interventionist talking points picking up steam. The general premise of these arguments goes something like this: we are unprepared for this crisis because we’ve been spending all this money on war and imperialism. It should be spent on a proper government response to this wildfire-like spreading disease. The military should be here helping...

Across the Middle East, the coronavirus is stirring up both upheavals and more subtle changes from Tel Aviv to Riyadh, little reported and when covered little understood in the Western media. In Israel, the virus has enabled that master political magician Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pull off yet another spectacular escape as improbable as any in a James Bond or Star Wars movie to remain in power indefinitely. After matching him in three successive national elections, Blue and White...

“As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world,” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said in a recent interview. “Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what is being...

"Never let a crisis go to waste." Big tech is getting into bed with big government to build a massive surveillance superstructure that will monitor all of our movements - in the name of fighting coronavirus, of course. As Edward Snowden recently warned, these mechanisms of surveillance and oppression are not going to be dismantled once the virus is gone. They will remain. Watch today's Liberty Report:

Cash may well become a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic. As these COVID-19 lockdowns drag out, more and more individuals and businesses are going cashless (for convenience and in a so-called effort to avoid spreading coronavirus germs), engaging in online commerce or using digital forms of currency (bank cards, digital wallets, etc.). As a result, physical cash is no longer king. Yet there are other, more devious, reasons for this re-engineering of society away from physical cash: a cashless...

I am not on Twitter for the same reason I am not on Facebook: I have too little free time to waste it. However, I do occasionally receive examples of some of the more ridiculous things on Twitter and Facebook from friends and acquaintances who do have more free time than I do. A case in point is a tweet by a pastor who obviously hangs on every word the mainstream media and the government have to say about the coronavirus since he believes that all churches should shut down during this...

For the state, there is one primary imperative—to remain in power at all cost. If this imperative is to be successful, the state must impose, by stealth or deception, a system capable of monitoring all individuals who may pose an immediate or future threat to its dominance.  The COVID-19 “crisis,” produced either deliberately or by an act of nature, provides the state with a nearly airtight pretext for the imposition of further surveillance of the public, in particular political adversaries. ...