The RPI Challenge

Another presidential election year is upon us, and the intelligence agencies are hard at work stoking fears of Russian meddling. This time it looks like the Russians do not only like the incumbent president but also favor who appears to be the Democratic front-runner, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. On Thursday, The New York Times ran a story titled, "Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump." The story says that on February 13th US lawmakers from the House were briefed...

One thing we’ve learned from the Trump Presidency is that the “deep state” is not just some crazy conspiracy theory. For the past three years we’ve seen that deep state launch plot after plot to overturn the election.It all started with former CIA director John Brennan’s phony “Intelligence Assessment” of Russian involvement in the 2016 election. It was claimed that all 17 US intelligence agencies agreed that Putin put Trump in office, but we found out later that the report was cooked up by a...

“Yesterday, upon a stair “I met a man who wasn’t there “He wasn’t there again today “I wish, I wish he’d go away.” -Hughes Mearns This year, the Democratic Party caucus-goers of Midwest, prosperous Iowa and the voters of hard-scrabble, post-industrial, impoverished Granite State New Hampshire 1,342 miles (2,160 kilometers) away agreed on a historic decision: They put the fantasy of a wonderful, First-Ever Lady President of the United States behind them and significantly tilted towards...

Sometimes I wonder how super-smart people can be so obtuse when it comes to the drug war. A recent example of this phenomenon is Ioan Grillo, a contributing editor for the New York Times. Grillo is the author of two books on the drug war: El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, which was translated into five languages and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and his new book Gangster Warlords. Clearly, Ioan Grillo is a super-smart person. The problem is that he, like so many...

Today, the long-time friend and Trump campaign consultant Roger Stone was sentenced to 40 months in a federal prison for multiple charges relating to his Congressional testimony and Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued Stone’s sentence after his lawyers had first requested that he receive no prison time. After the sentence was handed down, Stone refrained from making a personal statement to the court. Normally, one might refrain from criticizing a judge...

On Tuesday, February 18, President Trump with excellent judgment commuted the 14 year prison sentence of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, aka “Blago.” “We have commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich,” Trump said. “He’ll be able to go back home with his family after serving eight years in jail. That was a tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence in my opinion. And in the opinion of many others.” The President thus brought to an end a disgraceful episode in American politics. After...

I remember when censorship in America was a limited phemonenon. It applied during war time—“loose lips sink ships.” It applied to pornography. It applied to curse words on the public airwaves and in movies. It applied to violence in movies. There could be violence, but not the level that has become common. Today censorship is ubiquitous. It is everywhere. In the United States censorship is both imposed from above and flows from the bottom up. Censorship is imposed from above by, for example,...

When Twitter first implemented its “hide replies” function last year I published an article warning that it could be used by establishment narrative managers to marginalize dissident voices and diminish the relatively egalitarian nature of the platform. When I wrote it I was imagining the function being used by overt manipulators like cable TV pundits and Washington Post columnists, and think tank operatives like Neera Tanden who vocally supported the implementation of the function. What I...

The first week in February was memorable for the failed impeachment of President Donald Trump, the “re-elect me” State of the Union address and the marketing of a new line of underwear by Kim Kardashian. Given all of the excitement, it was easy to miss a special State Department press briefing by Ambassador James Jeffreyheld on February 5th regarding the current situation in Syria. Jeffrey is the United States Special Representative for Syria Engagement and the Special Envoy for the Global...

I have written for years on the effort of European countries to expand their crackdown on free speech globally through restrictions on social media and Internet speech. It appears that Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has relented in what may prove the death knell for free speech in the West. Zuckerberg seems to relent in asking governments for regulations stipulating what speech will be permitted on Facebook and other platforms. It is the ultimate victory of France, Germany, and...

Right now, America has only a pathetic five divisions of the military: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. We desperately need a sixth. And what could be more fitting for our President than fulfilling this need with a brand new spanking Space Force. Thank goodness Mr. Trump has now called this new initiative into being. The case for the Space Force is overwhelming. Consider the following. The Martians may attack at any moment. Do we have to wait for an actual invasion of the...

The Trump administration has released its official statement to Congress justifying its drone assassination of Iran’s top military official Qassem Soleimani last month. Surprising exactly zero people, the formal notification makes no mention whatsoever of any imminent threat posed by Soleimani, a direct contradiction of this administration’s previous claims defending the assassination. “The Trump administration has been accused of lying after the publication of a new report that undermined its...

Those hoping the non-interventionist cause would be given some real muscle if a couple of oligarchs who've made fortunes from global interventionism team up and pump millions into Washington think tanks will be sorely disappointed by the train wreck that is the Koch/Soros alliance. The result thus far has not been a tectonic shift in favor of a new direction, with new faces and new ideas, but rather an opportunity for these same old Washington think tanks, now flush with even more money, to...

The White House released a memo on Friday to Congress justifying the assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. Despite earlier claims from the administration of Soleimani and his Quds Force planning imminent attacks on US personnel in the region, the memo uses past actions as the justification for the killing. The memo says President Trump ordered the assassination on January 2nd “in response to an escalating series of attacks in preceding months by Iran and Iran-backed militias...

Admittedly the news cycle in the United States seldom runs longer than twenty-four hours, but that should not serve as an excuse when a major story that contradicts what the Trump Administration has been claiming appears and suddenly dies. The public that actually follows the news might recall a little more than one month ago the United States assassinated a senior Iranian official named Qassem Soleimani. Openly killing someone in the government of a country with which one is not at war is, to...