The RPI Challenge

A recent video opinion piece published by The New York Times intended to drum up support for US involvement in Venezuela failed to disclose the author's ties to the opposition government, leading to criticism from progressives of the paper's coverage. Joanna Hausmann, a comedian who posts highly viewed articles on Venezuela on YouTube, delivered a five minute, thirteen second opinion piece at the Times Monday in which she claims that the country's leader, President Nicolas Maduro, is a...

Venezuela is home to the largest oil deposits in the world, which makes the political stakes involved much higher than they would be otherwise. Enter Juan Guaidó, Washington’s puppet leader in Caracas, who will be attempting to rally the country against legitimate (i.e., democratically elected by the people) President Nicolas Maduro next month. Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó has announced that April 6 will kick off a nationwide "tactical actions" as part of the so-called Operation...

How do you know when a person is positively dead? Well, check for a pulse. Walter Russell Mead checked the pulse of the Atlantic Alliance in a recent op-ed and concluded that NATO is dying. But Mead is wrong. NATO is simply a zombie periodically reanimated through various methods, usually voodoo magic. Yet, reanimation has its limits. Even Zombies eventually die. With Georgia, a small state in the Caucasus Mountains that is wedged in between Russia, Turkey and Iran, lobbying hard to become...

This week President Trump admitted what the Washington policy establishment of both parties would rather be kept quiet. Asked why he intervened to block a new round of sanctions on North Korea, he told the media that he believes the people of North Korea have suffered enough. "They are suffering greatly in North Korea…And I just didn't think additional sanctions at this time were necessary,” he said.The foreign policy establishment in Washington, whether they are neocons, “humanitarian...

Trump and the Russians has created an army of “Mueller Truthers,” demanding additional investigations. But Republicans are also demanding to know more, specifically how the FBI came to look into collusion, and what that tells us about the tension between America’s political and intelligence worlds. In Rudy Giuliani’s words “Why did this ever start in the first place?” The primordial ooze for all things Russia began in spring 2016 when the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee,...

Not since the witchcraft hysteria of the Middle Ages have we seen such a display of human idiocy, credulity and absurdist behavior. I refer, of course, to the two-year witch hunt directed against President Donald Trump which hopefully just concluded last week – provided that the Hillaryites, Democratic dopes and secret staters who fueled this mania don’t manage to keep the pot boiling. This column has said from Day 1 that claims Trump was somehow a Russian agent were absurd in the extreme. So...

Juan Guaidó, the self-proclaimed “interim president of Venezuela” who is supported by the United States government, recently announced coming “tactical actions” that will be taken by his supporters starting April 6 as part of “Operation Freedom,” an alleged grassroots effort to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. That operation, according to Guaidó, will be led by “Freedom and Aid Committees” that in turn create “freedom cells” throughout the country — “cells” that will spring to...

It is now apparent with the release of the Mueller investigation findings, that the great storm that has embattled the US government and establishment since 2016 over supposed Russia-Trump collusion during the US elections, originates not from a genuine tangible source, but a constant stream of rhetoric driven by partisan corporate media. One certainty though is the Western narrative of Russia as a "malign influence" will not go away. While America’s liberal establishment continues to rage at...

Even though we now know there is zero evidence Donald Trump colluded with the Russians, neocon talking heads are still babbling about the discredited conspiracy theory and working it into facile monologues. For instance, Samatha Vinograd, a “national security” analyst at Propaganda One, CNN. Ms. Vinograd is a former Obama NSC member and a former senior advisor to the president, a David E. Rockefeller Fellow at the Trilateral Commission, a Millennium Fellow at the Atlantic Council where the...

The Trump administration seems to have found their man in National Assembly leader and self-appointed president of Venezuela Juan Guaidó. Guaidó has been extremely attentive to US interests, promising to allow US oil companies to increase their activity in Venezuela. He has also pledged mass privatizations and harsh rounds of austerity, as FAIR contributor Ben Norton reported (Mint Press News, 1/24/19). Having met with and secured the support of the Trump administration before he acted, the...

President Donald Trump and his White House team may have been cleared of collusion with the Kremlin in the 2016 presidential election. That startling conclusion by Special Counsel Robert Mueller after nearly two years of investigation, might be viewed by some as giving Trump freedom to now get on with normalizing relations with Moscow. Don’t bet on it. Mueller’s report, and US attorney general William Barr’s appraisal of it, only partially vindicate Trump’s long-held claims that the whole...

Governments that pride themselves on being either democratic or republican in nature claim that they are empowered by the will of the people, but the sad reality is that most regimes come to power based on promises that they have no intention of honoring after the election is over. In the United States we have seen President Donald Trump quite plausibly enjoy a margin of victory that was due to his pledges to end America’s involvement in senseless Middle Eastern wars and to mend relations with...

A media themelet is Trump fired then-FBI director James Comey because Comey would not let Michael Flynn off the hook. Flynn was caught in a perjury trap, lying about a legally-allowed meeting he held with the Russian ambassador. The FBI had the meet under surveillance and knew Flynn was not telling the truth later in an interview. Comey’s firing also forms a core tenet of the “obstruction truther” movement. We know a lot more about what was going on then now than we did then. Time for some...

A Spanish judge released new information about a raid on the embassy of North Korea in Spain. The leader of the raid was a shady US 'activist' who earlier reports from Spain associated with the CIA. On March 13 the Spanish newspaper El Pais Spain reported that Spanish authorities identified two CIA related persons who took part in a raid of the North Korean embassy in Madrid. The raid happened on February 22, a few days before the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi, and seemed designed to influence...

Now that the giant Mueller Nothingburger (with a side of crow-flavored fries, per Jim Kunstler) has been officially delivered unto the mainstream media’s wailing and gnashing of teeth, the essence of the matter should be obvious: To wit, the RussiaGate Collusion story was always way above the pay grade of the legal sleuths and gunslingers who wasted $25 million on it – and notwithstanding 2,800 subpoenas, 500 witnesses, 40 FBI agents and 21 lawyers. This prosecutorial blitzkrieg had no chance...