The RPI Challenge

We have previously discussed how speech codes and regulations are changing the way students are viewing free speech. There is now a steady message for students from elementary school to college that speech must be regulated and that even people can be punished for not just hate speech but the ill-defined category of “microaggressive” speech. Past polls showed that one-third of students believed that violence is justified in dealing with some exercises of speech. Now a survey of college...

President Donald Trump’s national security team has been leaking “intelligence” about Iranian threats for a week now in an attempt to justify escalating tensions, including moving American air attack assets to the Persian Gulf. But a closer look suggests that National Security Advisor John Bolton and other senior officials are trying to pull off an intelligence deception comparable to the fraudulent pretense for war in Iraq. There’s also credible evidence that Israel could be playing a key...

Notwithstanding the fact that their Special Counsel Robert Mueller, after a long detailed investigation, found no evidence that President Trump illegally conspired with Russian officials in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Democrats are still hell bent on impeaching Trump. The problem with their position, however, is that they want to impeach him for invalid reasons, reasons that do not amount to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard set forth in the Constitution. For one...

A common trick of big-government loving politicians is to give legislation names so appealing that it seems no reasonable person could oppose it. The truth is, the more unobjectionable the title, the more objectionable the content. Two well-known examples are the “PATRIOT Act” and the “Access to Affordable and Quality Care Act.”Another great example is the Violence Against Women Act. Passed in 1994, the Violence Against Women Act provides federal grants to, and imposes federal mandates on,...

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has begun responding to queries by the press about a leaked document which contradicts official OPCW findings on an alleged chemical weapons attack last year in Douma, Syria. The prepared statement they’ve been using in response to these queries confirms the authenticity of the document. To recap, a few days ago the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM) published a document signed by a man named Ian Henderson, whose...

On Tuesday Russia's President Putin again rejected US claims that his country interfered in the 2016 elections in the United States. Additional statements by Foreign Minister Lavrov provide that there is more information available about alleged Russian cyber issue during the election. He pointed to exchanges between the Russian and US governments that Russia wants published but which the US is withholding. On Tuesday May 14 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Sochi to meet with Russia's...

Soaring tensions of the past nearly two weeks paving the way for a potential direct military clash in the Persian Gulf between the US and Iran could be de-escalating as rapidly as they began as the president attempts to reign in hawks in his own administration, per a new report in FT: President Donald Trump said he hoped the US would not go to war with Iran, cooling tensions at the end of a week in which worries spiked over the risk of conflict between the US and the Islamic republic. As he...

Self-delusion and denial with regards to Iran's alleged status as the leading sponsor of international terrorism are rampant in Washington and among the punditry. It is crazy, it is dishonest and it is wrong. This is not my opinion. I can do math. I can count. If Iran was actually continuing to act like it did 30 years ago, when it was a major sponsor of terrorism, then we would be able to point to those attacks. Here are the statistics for 2018. Do not take my word for it. Count them...

Given US National-Security Advisor John Bolton’s war-provoking antics with Iran, I’m getting that déjà vu feeling with how President George W. Bush and his team of interventionists took the US to war with Iraq. Of course, the first question that naturally arises is: Who’s the real acting president, Donald Trump or John Bolton? The Washington Post reports that Trump is lamenting that Bolton wants to get him “into a war.” So, who’s in charge — Bolton or Trump? The second question that arises is...

An awkward public exchange unfolded between the US military and its closest allied military coalition force during a Pentagon press conference on Tuesday wherein a top British commander in charge of anti-ISIS coalition forces rebuked White House claims on the heightened Iran threat. “No – there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria,” British Army Maj. Gen. Christopher Ghika, a deputy head of the US-led coalition, asserted confidently in a videolink briefing...

"The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The framers would be appalled.”—Herman Schwartz, The Nation We’ve all been there before. You’re driving along and you see a pair of flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. Whether or not you’ve done anything...

In his Fourth of July address to Congress in 1821, US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams stated that if America were ever to abandon its founding foreign policy of non-interventionism, she would inevitably become the world’s “dictatress” and begin behaving accordingly. No can can deny that Adams’ prediction has come true. America has truly become the world’s dictatress — an arrogant, ruthless, brutal dictatress that brooks no dissent from anyone in the world. Now, I use the term “America”...

Last week the New York Times published some of President Trump’s 1980s and 1990s tax returns information. The information detailed President Trump’s financial difficulties during that time. While you would not know it from reading some media reports, this is old news. In fact, President Trump openly discussed his financial difficulties on his popular reality television show.What should be of great concern is the possibility that the person who leaked the returns — who the paper says has legal...

It seems for the State Department lately it's all Iran and Venezuela all the time, or perhaps there's just an aversion to real diplomatic work. After snubbing Germany's Merkel last week to make an unplanned stop in Iraq to pressure leaders there into resisting cooperation with Iran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday scrapped a scheduled trip to Moscow, diverting his plane for a surprise visit to Brussels to presumably crash an EU meeting exploring ways of salvaging the Iran nuclear...

Is it possible Senator Tom Cotton ghostwrites fairy tales on his days off from Congress? Cotton and his neocon buddies are pretty good at making things up. For instance: Europe must not give in to Tehran’s nuclear blackmail as the ayatollahs threaten to renew their rush toward the bomb. UK, Germany, & France ought to walk away from their financial backchannels w/ Iran & join us in imposing maximum pressure on the regime. https://t.co/3IqHudWJnV — Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) May 8, 2019...