The RPI Challenge

(This presentation was prepared for the Sept. 1st. Ron Paul Institute's Ron Paul Scholars Seminar)I am accustomed to opening the New York Times and The Washington Post to find laundry list articles relating to what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has reportedly been up to. That many of the evidence free allegations are implausible or even quite contrary to known facts about international political developments does not seem to matter as using the initials CIA appears to be enough to make...

So, the Berlin State Prosecutor has launched another criminal investigation of me. Apparently, I’m being charged with reporting on the original investigation of me that the Berlin State Prosecutor launched in June. What happened is, the prosecutor visited my blog and read a column I published in July, The Criminalization of Dissent (Revisited), which included screenshots of the alleged “hate-crime” Tweets that the original criminal investigation is based on, and that resulted in the Order of...

In a recent piece for the Washington Post, Ramesh Ponnuru wrote that “the public is not going to accept restrictive coronavirus mitigation measures again, regardless of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or other public health authorities say.” Ponnuru adds his speculation that “we’re not going to return to social distancing or shut down schools.” Bad news for government, but great news for the US. If there’s an upside to the lockdowns that never, ever made sense...

During a speech at the EU Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism. His comments, initially flagged by journalist Thomas Fazi, read as follows: The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was...

The July military coup in the west African country of Niger has once again brought attention to the fact that the US government runs a global military empire that serves Washington’s special interests, and not the national interest.Before the coup made news headlines, most Americans - including many serving in Congress - had no idea the US government maintains more than 1,000 troops stationed on several US bases in Niger. But it’s even worse than that. A recent report in The Intercept suggests...

Years before emerging as Kiev’s top private weapons trafficker, ex-legislator Serhiy Pashinsky played a key role in the 2014 US-backed coup which toppled Ukraine’s democratically-elected president and set the stage for a devastating civil war. Though the notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian parliamentarian was condemned by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “criminal” as recently as 2019, a lengthy exposéby the New York Times has now identified Pashinsky as the Ukrainian government’s “biggest...

This week, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., sentenced Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, to 22 years in jail for the crime of “sedition” arising out of the January 6 protests at the Capitol. It wasn’t the first time that the judge, Timothy Kelly, meted out a high jail sentence for the sedition offense. Last week, he handed out an 18-year sentence to Ethan Nordean, one of Tarrio’s co-defendants. Last May, another D.C. federal judge, Amit P. Mehta, sentenced leader of the...

Laws to ban disinformation and misinformation are being introduced across the West, with the partial exception being the US, which has the First Amendment so the techniques to censor have had to be more clandestine.In Europe, the UK, and Australia, where free speech is not as overtly protected, governments have legislated directly. The EU Commission is now applying the ‘Digital Services Act’ (DSA), a thinly disguised censorship law.In Australia the government is seeking to provide the...

The Musk vs ADL (and the censorship industrial complex) battle escalated further this morning with the X/Twitter owner highlighting a new article from Newsweek saying that "ADL Has Lost Its Way": Good article https://t.co/8cRi66IQvR — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 6, 2023 "The ADL taught me that nastygrams from Jew haters were just the price we pay for liberty, worthy of being filed and forgotten," writes Ron Coleman in the op-ed. "This is not Weimar Germany; it is America. We have a First...

A version of this presentation was given to the Ron Paul Institute's Scholars Seminar on Sept. 1st in Washington, DC.Today it’s hard for anyone under the age of 50 to appreciate how genuine and pervasive was fear of a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War between the US- and Soviet-led blocs.Books, movies, and TV both reflected and stoked popular anxiety about the possible “end of civilization as we know it.” The heyday for this was in the 1950s and 1960s, with books like The Long...

Is Covid-19 back for real this time? Is the “Eris” variant the real deal. These kind of questions keep coming up again and again, and it’s all by design.“The goal is an endless war, not a successful war” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange once said of the long Afghanistan war.That comment perfectly captures the cycle of Covid hysteria, too.In order to answer this question, it’s important to reach an understandable framework for how we define Covid and reach a premise to build upon.What is this...

August 23rd was a big news day all over the world. The western media’s focus on the events of that day was solidly on the unproven claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the sabotage or shooting down of an executive jet that killed his former associate Yevgeny Prigozhin. In reality, however, there was a far more important story that was coming out of South Africa. In fact, Putin had a far more important job to do on that day due to his desire to make progress in stripping the...

As I have noted on multiple occasions, I pledge allegiance to no political party on the face of the earth. None speak for me. I am a devout monarchist.That said, I will watch the 2024 US presidential campaign with great interest. It may very well be the last one we see with the United States in its present form.One thing is increasingly clear: despite his apparent popularity with a substantial plurality of the American electorate, the powers-that-be in the empire will do “whatever it takes” to...

In his famous anti-Vietnam War speech, the late senator from South Dakota George McGovern told fellow Congressional leaders, "This chamber reeks of blood." On Saturday, journalist Max Blumenthal opened a hard-hitting talk at the Ron Paul Institute's "Which Way America...?" conference in D.C. by quoting those words, but applied them to the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.Blumenthal said that in Ukraine, Washington continues "wasting the lives and bodies of over 150,000 men, and that's...

Donald Trump’s legal troubles, the possibility that Joe Biden will face an impeachment inquiry, and other stories related to the upcoming presidential election, caused the American media to miss a story of potentially greater significance. This was the decision of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), who formed their alliance to challenge US political and economic dominance, to induct six new countries into their group: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and...

The following retired Generals are popping up on cable news channels to offer their “sage” analysis on the war in Ukraine and they all share one thing in common — they are wrong to a staggering degree. I am shocked by their inability to objectively analyze the situation. Instead, they repeat the same propaganda memes — Russian troops are poorly led; Russian troops are conscripts and poorly trained; Russian troops have lousy morale; the Russian Army is brittle and will break under pressure; and...