The RPI Challenge

Led by Representative Paul Gosar, a handful of Republican members of Congress launched a protest against 41 nominal “national emergency” declarations, many of which are decades old.  Rep. Gosar has argued the National Emergencies Act is “tyrannical,” granting 148 separate powers to the executive branch.  This July 18, the House voted down five resolutions to terminate national emergency powers which date back as far as 2003. The countries affected by the five resolutions include Congo, Yemen,...

Below is my column in the New York Post on one of the most damaging moments in yesterday’s hearing on the IRS whistleblowers alleging special treatment for Hunter Biden in their criminal investigation. What was most remarkable was not just the content but the cause of the incriminating statement. Rep. Dan Goldman’s friendly fire incident produced Dresden-level damage for the Biden defense. Here is the column: One of the most basic lessons that we teach law students is that you should “never...

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions. Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list. If we don’t nip this in the bud, and soon, this will become yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the First and Fourth...

To answer the question in my title you need only look at two numbers — 1) Ukraine’s rank in terms of natural resources and 2) the size of Ukraine’s Army in February 2022. Since the end of World War II the West has viewed Ukraine as a critical piece on the global chess board for attacking and defeating Russia. The joint CIA/MI-6 effort to destabilize the Soviet Union, which started in 1947 with the provision of funds, weapons and training to Stefan Bandera’s organization, was crushed by the...

Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the...

Quite some time ago, I wrote about the major winter/spring offensive which the Russians appeared to be preparing, according to satellite imagery and other indicators, with a massive build-up of forces in the north and south. But nothing much materialized from that. Even after mobilization and training, most of those troops have not yet been put into front-line action. I've been wondering what is really going on with this ''stalemate'' in Ukraine with the Russian and Ukrainian militaries. It's...

I've been waiting for the hubbub to die down since the NATO conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 11-12 July 2023, waiting for someone — anyone — to point out the obvious reason for why the Ukraine's cocaine-sniffing mascot-president Zelensky, having been lionized only a year ago, has suddenly fallen into disfavor with this organization. Yes, the Ukraine might still some day be invited to start the long and arduous process of joining NATO, but only after some undefined number of NATO members...

Before the COVID lockdowns, social media companies had started contracting with new third-parties organizations called fact-checkers to assist in “content creation.” Getting a pass meant the post or story was amplified but getting dinged for inaccuracy meant that the post would be throttled or deleted. For a while we believed it but certain revelations changed that. We came to realize that the posts labeled false were typically contrary to regime narratives. And a close look at the supposed...

As a rule, US war reporting since Vietnam has been mostly mainstream media cheerleading the mission rather than digging beyond government war propaganda. After all, it was images of American boys coming home in body bags shown on the six o’clock news across America that finally galvanized mainstream opposition to that war.The Pentagon learned its lesson by the first Gulf War, and it severely restricted up-close media coverage. Only “trusted” journalists were able to report from the front...

(Note: This is taken from an exclusive article for RPI Subscribers. Subscribe for free here.)The 2023 NATO Summit at Vilnius, Lithuania, is now but a memory. If I could characterize the summit in just two words, I would say, "reality bites." And it bites both ways. On the one hand the US and its NATO allies came face to face with the reality that endless promises of "unlimited" military aid to Ukraine to defeat Russia would not achieve that goal. Five weeks of the much-anticipated Ukrainian...

The hypothesis that the Anglo-Saxon axis is pivotal to the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is only partly true. Germany is actually Ukraine’s second largest arms supplier, after the United States. Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged a new arms package worth 700 million euros, including additional tanks, munitions and Patriot air defence systems at the Nato summit in Vilnius, putting Berlin, as he said, at the very forefront of military support for Ukraine.  German Defence Minister Boris...

We have previously discussed how activism in the media and corporations has triggered increasing public backlash. Social agendas have undermined trust and profits, but the pressure to pursue those goals remains high regardless of their cost. The same appears to be true for higher education. Universities and colleges have been criticized for purging their ranks of conservative or dissenting faculty while creating environments of political orthodoxy and viewpoint intolerance. A Gallup poll shows...

The New York Times has been churning out an amazing number of hit pieces on Robert F Kennedy Jr lately.  On Tuesday the Times published an audio essay titled “Why I Regret Debating Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” by opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo. Manjoo debated Kennedy in 2006 about the legitimacy of George W Bush’s 2004 win against John Kerry, believing that Kennedy’s skepticism of the election results was dangerous. “Disputing elections is just not good for democracy,” Manjoo says, joining the rest...

Yesterday’s hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray was another maddening experience of faux contrition and the open evasion. Wray apologized for violations that have already been established by courts or Congress (often over the best efforts of the FBI). However, on ample public evidence of new violations, Wray continued to use his favorite testimonial trilogy to block any questions: expressing (1) lack of knowledge, (2) ongoing investigation, and (3) promises of later answers or...

We’re all being targeted now. We’re all guilty until proven innocent now. And thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s spy network of fusion centers, we are all now sitting ducks, just waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state. Although these precrime programs are popping up all across the country, in small towns and big cities, they are not...

Not surprisingly, right-wingers are celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision to declare affirmative-action policies at American universities to be unconstitutional. In the process, conservatives fail to recognize that they are, at the same time, celebrating the further destruction of American liberty and private-property rights. After all, why shouldn’t a private university, like Harvard, be free to establish any policy it wants for admitting students? It’s their university, isn’t it? Why...