The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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A Bonfire of the Vanities

Wednesday July 19, 2023

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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 special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.
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The Incredible Shrinking NATO

Monday July 17, 2023

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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 decide that it has done enough to comply with "NATO standards" (I'll explain what those are later) and various other vague things. Keeping in mind that back on 20 September 2018 the Ukrainian parliament approved amendments to the constitution that would make the accession of the country to NATO and the EU a central goal and the main foreign policy objective, such a turn of events is most embarrassing for the mascot president and his backers and handlers.

Oh, the vicissitudes of fortune! Lots of analysis and commentators offered ready explanations for this turn of events. Yet not a single one of them saw it fit to dig just the tiniest bit and discover the glaringly obvious reason for this momentous shift. Perhaps all of them, for a variety of reasons, loathe to admit the reality of what NATO is, what it does, and why the Ukraine is suddenly a threat rather than a boon to its core mission. You may want to read all of that commentary at your leisure — if you have trouble falling asleep. The official NATO Summit Communiqué, fantastically verbose and filled with irrelevancies, makes for particularly somniferous reading.

So, what did the Ukraine do to fall into such disfavor? Perhaps it did something that jeopardized NATO's core mission? That seems like a good guess. But then what is NATO's core mission?
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The Fact-Check Racket Finally Unravels

Monday July 17, 2023

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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 refutation revealed that many points were very much in dispute. The companies developed a talent for seeming to reveal something false that was actually still debatable and interesting to consider. In most cases, what was declared false was still under consideration.

As time went on, the attempts to censor became more brazen and obvious. Then the Twitter files and other FOIAs generated proof of what many suspected all along. These entities were funded either directly or indirectly by government or by other dark-money sources as quid pro quos for other relationships they had cultivated with interested parties.

In other words, they were not some independent, science-based entities at all but rather hit squads with a hard political agenda. What was actually happening here was a form of censorship laundering. Government wants to censor but cannot so it turns to the social-media company to do the dirty work. To make this hand-in-glove racket less obvious, the companies would outsource to a fact-checking organization, making the lines of control even more blurry.
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Biden is Calling Up Military Reserves…Are Your Kids Next?

Monday July 17, 2023

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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.
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Germany Creates Equity in Western Ukraine

Saturday July 15, 2023

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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 Pistorius stressed, “By doing this, we’re making a significant contribution to strengthening Ukraine’s staying power.” However, the pantomime playing out may have multiple motives. 

Fundamentally, Germany’s motivation is traceable to the crushing defeat by the Red Army and has little to do with Ukraine as such. The Ukraine crisis has provided the context for accelerating Germany’s militarisation. Meanwhile, revanchist feelings are rearing their head and there is a “bipartisan consensus” between Germany’s leading centrist parties — CDU, SPD and Green Party — in this regard. 

In an interview in the weekend, the CDU’s leading foreign and defence expert Roderich Kiesewetter (an ex-colonel who headed the Association of Reservists of the Bundeswehr from 2011 to 2016) suggested that if conditions warrant in the Ukraine situation, the Nato should consider to “cut off Kaliningrad from the Russian supply lines. We see how Putin reacts when he is under pressure.” Berlin is still smarting under the surrender of the ancient Prussian city of Königsberg in April 1945.
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Gallup: Public Confidence in Higher Education Plunges

Saturday July 15, 2023

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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 result of years of erosion in viewpoint tolerance with only 36 percent of polled Americans saying that they have confidence in the country’s colleges and universities. That is a sharp decline from 2018 when almost half trusted our colleges and universities.

Not surprisingly, the greatest drop was among Republicans who face increasingly hostile environments on campuses and cancel campaigns for conservative or libertarian speakers. Republicans with either a “great deal” or “quite a lot of confidence” in higher education dropped from 37 percent to 19 percent. The poll suggests a growing view of colleges and universities as hostile environments for those with conservative, libertarian, and dissenting views.

At the same time, many are simply rejecting higher education as an option due to a mix of high costs and lower relevancy for them personally. The view of campuses as places of indoctrination also likely plays a role in that trend. Few conservatives relish the idea of paying high tuition to have their children spend four years with unrelenting attacks on their views and values while limiting their own speech opportunities.
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The Worst 2024 Election Interference Won't Come From Russia Or China

Thursday July 13, 2023

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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.
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My Wray or the Hard Wray: New Twitter Files Contradict FBI Director’s Testimony

Thursday July 13, 2023

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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 briefings.

He did, however, hold forth in detail after Rep. Eric Swalwell asked him about FBI Family Day. Despite the near total lack of substance, Wray did make one surprising denial. He insisted that the FBI does not engage in censorship efforts, focuses only on “foreign disinformation,” and does not pressure companies to censor others. Those denials are not only directly contradicted by the recent opinion of a federal court and the Twitter Files, but a new release from the Twitter Files and journalist Matt Taibbi.

Wray said that “…The FBI is not in the business of moderating content, or causing any social media company to suppress or censor.” He then added that these companies are not under any pressure in making their own decisions whether the censor people or groups flagged by the FBI.

The statement is obviously false. The FBI maintained a large operation of agents actively seeking the censorship of thousands, as discussed in my prior testimony.
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Why Shouldn’t a University Be Free to Adopt Affirmative Action?

Wednesday July 12, 2023

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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 should the Supreme Court wield the power to dictate to a privately owned institution what it can and cannot do? 

We can all agree that we don’t want a state entity to discriminate on the basis of race, color, creed, national origin, or sexual proclivity. But in a genuinely free society, private individuals should be free to exercise the fundamental, God-given right of freedom of association and to run their businesses the way they want.

Thus, if a privately owned university wants to give preference to certain racial groups, it should be free to do so. Sure, people might disagree with that decision but that doesn’t mean that the government should wield the authority to interfere. If people disagree with a certain policy set forth by a university, they can go elsewhere. Consumers can also protest, ostracize, or publicly condemn a university with whose policies they disagree. The university is free to modify its policy in response to consumer sentiments or instead continue maintaining it. That’s how things work in a genuinely free society.
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