The RPI Challenge

For 27 seconds on Tuesday night, Fox News posted a chyiron beneath a video of President Biden: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” That sparked a media uproar over what was portrayed as the biggest breach of decorum since the 1865 assassination of President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater. The Washington Post howled that Fox News “shocks with ‘wannabe dictator’ graphic.” A Daily Beast columnist shrieked that the chyron “spreads dangerous lies.”...

Dementia Joe does it again. Less than 24 hours after Secretary of State Blinken genuflected before the Chinese, assuring them that the United States really, really, really is sincere in supporting the One China policy and eschews calling for Taiwan’s independence, Biden opened his yap and called Xi Jinping a dictator. While this garnered applause from the American financial donors, it destroyed Blinken’s credibility with the Chinese and confirmed their worst suspicions about US intentions....

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, we are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed. Case in point: the FBI. The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from...

I hear that the Chinese are going to add the image of Antony Blinken to the dictionary definition of “Kow Tow.” He went to Beijing, hat in hand, and received a less than warm welcome. The term, “frosty” comes to mind. Blinken and his Chinese hosts engaged in a one-sided “frank exchange of views” (i.e., a phrase used by diplomats to describe a tense, angry conversation). The Chinese delivered and Blinken ended up saying what the Chinese demanded he say — “the US does not support Taiwan...

The massive obituaries to Daniel Ellsberg at the weekend in both New York Times and Washington Post were proof of the status he held in the United States. Only Presidents get that size of obituary. His name was not nearly so widely known in the UK. I first met Dan on 3 May 2006 when we were giving a joint presentation at Berkeley. The large hall was full to overflowing, and to my surprise there were young students queuing outside and striving to listen on stairways through open doors. The...

A central feature of the Cold War racket was the anti-communist crusade. At the behest of the US national-security establishment, the entire nation became obsessed with the commies, both foreign and domestic. The Reds were coming to get us. They were everywhere. They were in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Russia, China, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, Brazil, and most everywhere else. They were in Congress, the military, the executive branch, the political system, the universities, and Hollywood. In the...

If only the US President Joe Biden had a time machine as in the post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, he should have used that vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively backward through time all the way to 1999 when it was that the US lost the plot on European security and Russia’s perennial quest for mutual security with Europe.  At that defining moment of the post-cold war era 24 years ago, George Kennan was prophetic to warn the Bill Clinton administration...

Most people agree that we are closer to nuclear war than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Some would even argue that we are closer now than we were in those fateful days, when Soviet missiles in Cuba almost triggered a nuclear war between the US and the USSR.In those days we were told that we were in a life-or-death struggle with Communism and thus could not cede a square foot of territory or the dominoes would fall one-by-one until the “Reds” ruled over us.That crisis was very...

Governments worldwide are trying to replace cash with CBDCs, and people worldwide are starting to wake up, but we need a lot more. A CBDC is a government-run crypto-token that replaces the national currency with a tracking ledger—a list of who owns what—that lets government surveil, control, and mandate every dollar you spend.  They could prevent you from buying the wrong thing, whether raw milk or gas stoves, or self-defense. They could stop you from donating to the wrong person, as we saw...

A Harvard/Harris poll is bad news for Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department. The poll shows that 55% of Americans believe Trump’s indictment is politically motivated and 56% believe that it constitutes election interference. The poll captures the level of distrust for the Justice Department and further demonstrates what I described yesterday as the failure of Merrick Garland at the midpoint of his tenure as Attorney General. The view of the case appears to be worsening....

On June 4/5 the Ukrainian military launched its long announced counteroffensive in southeast Ukraine. Ten days later there is no significant progress. This is not the outcome the war propagandists expected: [General Petreus] spoke about the situation in Ukraine to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. On the counteroffensive, he said: 'I think that this counteroffensive is going to be very impressive. 'My sense is that they will achieve combined arms effects in other words, they will successfully...

Japanese internment camps, US, WWII.Czech President Petr Pavel just took anti-Russian xenophobia to a new level, saying this week that he's in favor of Russians living in Western countries being "monitored" by authorities, akin to what happened with Japanese people living in the United States during World War II. "All Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past because they are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war," Pavel told Radio Free...

Occam's razor is not a one-size-fits-all problem-solving principle, but it’s often times the most helpful philosophical approach to tuning out the noise and focusing on the most important facts to reconstruct what actually happened. And if we engage the Occam’s razor principle, the truth about covid hysteria appears undeniable. If we remove the convoluted narratives being spun by the pseudoscience-heavy professions that are virology, epidemiology, and “public health,” the answer is clear to...

We have minimum low regard for Donald Trump, and not merely because he is a bombastic lout and world historic megalomaniac. His policies were terrible, too. The Federal budget and debt exploded on his watch; the Fed printed money recklessly even as he demanded more; and the free market was kicked hard in the pants by his immigration and trade policies, the unforgivable Covid Lockdowns and the Trump-inspired mass vaccination campaign for an untested gene therapy that he rushed to market via...

Unless you are over the age of 45 you likely do not have living memory of the Kremlin “Watching” that accompanied major Soviet holidays. The term “Kremlin Watching” refers to the practice of examining photos like the one above to assess political status in the Soviet Government by identifying the men who occupied the most prominent positions on the viewing stand above Lenin’s tomb. In this photo from 1965 you can see (from left to right) Anastas Mikoyan, Marshal of the Soviet Union Rodion...

Some foreign policy myths are so entrenched and tenacious that no amount of evidence seems able to dislodge them. An especially prominent one in recent years is that Donald Trump was Vladimir Putin’s puppet and adopted shameful policies that appeased Moscow. The latest example of that pervasive smear was an article by Peggy Noonan in the May 18, 2023, edition of the Wall Street Journal. In that piece, Noonan manages to regurgitate nearly every stale myth about Trump being too cozy with Putin,...