GOV/MIL Leftists Call For New "Secret Police" Force To Spy On Trump Supporters (AN ABSOLUTELY MUST-READ THREAD)

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Pelosi: Panel Needed ‘to Examine and Report Upon the Facts, Causes and Security Relating to the Terrorist Mob Attack’
By CNSNews.com Staff | February 3, 2021 | 2:48pm EST

A fence was erected around the U.S. Capitol after the Jan. 6, 2021 riot there. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

A fence was erected around the U.S. Capitol after the Jan. 6, 2021 riot there. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) said in a “Dear Colleague” letter that she sent to other Democratic members of the House of Representatives on Tuesday that she believes Congress “will need to establish a 9/11-type Commission to examine and report upon the facts, causes and security relating to the terrorist mob attack on January 6.

“The insurrectionist attack on January 6 was not only an attack on the Capitol, but was a traumatic assault targeting Members,” Pelosi told her colleagues.

“During this challenging time, it is imperative that we take all steps to ensure the safety, security, health and well-being of our Congressional community,” she said.

“Given the serious and ongoing security threats facing Members and the Congress, it is clear that there is a need for an emergency supplemental funding bill to meet institutional security needs,” Pelosi said.

“It is also clear that we will need to establish a 9/11-type Commission to examine and report upon the facts, causes and security relating to the terrorist mob attack on January 6,” Pelosi said.

Here is the fill text of the letter Speaker Pelosi sent to her House Democratic colleagues on Feb. 2:
"Dear Democratic Colleague,
"This letter is about you. It is about your safety as you serve in Congress, your safety in your district and your safety when traveling to and from Washington. Your safety is the charge that I gave Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who is leading an immediate and collaborative security review to protect the safety of Members, the Capitol Complex and our Democracy.
"Last Thursday, I had a preliminary briefing with General Honoré. Respected experts are reviewing the current security posture of the Capitol and House Office Buildings in light of both the January 6 attack and the threat immediately following the Inauguration, according to concerning intelligence reports. This report covers command and control, operational readiness, interagency cooperation, security infrastructure and the morale and readiness of institutional staff. The General’s review will run through at least March 5 and updates will be forthcoming.
"The insurrectionist attack on January 6 was not only an attack on the Capitol, but was a traumatic assault targeting Members. Earlier, I asked Members to write their impressions of the day and now am further establishing an opportunity for Members to tape their recollections through a video, especially those who were in the Chamber. It may be difficult for Members to share their stories, but it is important to facilitate an accurate personal record and for the healing process for our Congress and indeed, Country. If you are interested in participating in a video session to memorialize your experiences on January 6th, please contact Will.McCullough@mail.house.gov in my office to schedule a taping session in the Capitol.
"I once again urge you to take advantage of the trauma and resilience resources provided by the Office of Employee Assistance. Members have told me that they have found these resources to be beneficial. During this challenging time, it is imperative that we take all steps to ensure the safety, security, health and well-being of our Congressional community. I also encourage you to consult the letter from the Sergeant at Arms regarding security measures.
A"t this time, to ensure Member security, the Sergeant at Arms (SAA) and U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) are partnering with the Transportation Security Administration, Federal Air Marshal Service and Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority to increase security for Members while traveling to and from Washington. Among other steps, USCP will be stationed at BWI, IAD, DCA and Union Station to provide extra security on days with increased Member travel. Additionally, the SAA encourages all Members and staff to report suspicious activity to local law enforcement authorities and to the U.S. Capitol Police Threats Division.
"Given the serious and ongoing security threats facing Members and the Congress, it is clear that there is a need for an emergency supplemental funding bill to meet institutional security needs. It is also clear that we will need to establish a 9/11-type Commission to examine and report upon the facts, causes and security relating to the terrorist mob attack on January 6.
"The security of the U.S. Capitol Complex and all who serve and work in it is of the highest priority. Protecting the Capitol, which is the heart of our Democracy, is essential to upholding our Constitutional duty to serve those whom we are privileged to represent. It is also essential for honoring the service and sacrifice of the Capitol Police, who demonstrated extraordinary valor in saving lives during the insurrection against the Capitol.
"Solemnly, tonight, Officer Brian Sicknick, who lost his life following the attack on January 6, will return to the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to lie in honor. Members can pay their respects starting 7 a.m. tomorrow, before the Congressional tribute and his internment at Arlington National Cemetery. Officer Sicknick’s sacrifice, and the heroism of the Capitol Police force that day, bring honor to our Constitution and our Democracy.
"Thank you for your patriotism, courage and leadership."
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

COLUMNS
Your Job From Now on Is to Stay Silent and Follow Orders
BY PHILIP CARL SALZMAN FEB 03, 2021 5:16 PM ET

cancel-5355845_1280-730x0.jpg
(Pixabay)
Attention all of you to the right of Fidel Castro, you 74 million Trump-voter insurgents and domestic terrorists: Silence! Your false information, fake news, and conspiracy theories are now officially designated “hate speech.” For the good of the country, you must be silenced; if you speak, you must be punished.

MSNBC is recommending government drone strikes on you, so you had better be quiet.

Big Tech and the Mainstream Media newspapers, tv networks, and cable channels are working for your country by suppressing your “far-right” misinformation and conspiracy theories. And it is working for you by not allowing your hate speech to see the light of day or screen, and thereby protecting you from incriminating yourself. Otherwise, measures would have to be taken against you. Social justice mobs, I mean “people’s juries,” might have to show up at your home or place of work in order to peacefully demonstrate through breaking windows, spray-painting slogans, throwing Molotov cocktails, or otherwise burning the place down, and/or looting where appropriate. Online campaigns would have to be mobilized to berate your wife and children, scare your employer into firing you, and label you as, you know, a “racist,” “white nationalist,” and “male supremacist,” as well as a “transphobe” and “Islamophobe.”

“Free speech” is the irresponsible policy of dead white slave owners, so no good can come from it. That so-called “First Amendment” that “far-rightists” and “free-speech absolutists” keep mentioning is a dead letter, thank goodness. We, the woke enlightened, know that wrong speech is violence and must be suppressed, by violence if necessary. Woke university students have become experts at meeting “speech violence” with physical violence, showing those “white nationalist” Republicans, classic liberals, and libertarians that their “speech violence” won’t be tolerated.

Do not dare to say anything unflattering about the Democrat Party or Democrat candidates. Now that Big Tech, Big Media, Big Finance, and Big Education all have unified with the Democrat National Committee, any words contrary to their interests are forbidden. The dastardly reporters exposing the dirty deeds of the Biden crime family violated these injunctions, as did those citizens who tried to share the information, and had to be silenced by Big Tech and ignored by Big Media. The Deep State pitched in through a letter from fifty high-level retired security officers, proclaiming that the news about Biden influence-peddling was just Russian disinformation. This ignored the fact that federal investigations of Biden family members were in process. So voters never got to hear the ugly detail about billions flowing from America’s greatest adversary into Biden pockets, and Biden was (perhaps) elected.

Nor can anything unflattering be said about the Democrat Party militia of Black Lives Matter and antifa. We must appreciate their “peaceful protests” for racial justice that featured rioting, looting, arson, attacks on police, assault, and murder. Never under any circumstances say “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter,” for these are racist statements and you are exposing yourselves as extremists. “Inclusion,” famous among the three principles of justice, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” means only “black lives matter.” What does not matter is that most blacks who lose their lives through violence lose them to black criminals, and it is racist hate speech to mention black-on-black crime. It is racist to object to defunding the police, although most black Americans do not want to defund the police and want to avoid the consequent spike in violence.

Saying that whites are privileged, racist, and fragile, that whiteness is a corrupting influence that leads to politeness, promptness, diligence, and postponement of gratification, that the entire society is characterized by “systemic racism” in which whites oppress and exploit blacks, and that “white lives do not matter” is not hate speech, but the “true” findings of critical racism, I mean critical race theory. But saying that you prefer “color-blind” recruitment for universities and jobs is racist hate speech, as is advocating merit rather than race-based recruitment and reward. Only white supremacists want color-blind and merit-based treatment.

Do not mention those sexist terms “mother and father,” “sister and brother,” and “son and daughter,” because recognizing differences means sexist discrimination.

Nancy Pelosi changed House Rules to exclude these “sexist” terms, to “cancel” American kinship terminology, and to deny differences between males and females. So mind your tongue! Never mind that males and females are genetically, physiologically, neurologically, and psychologically different, the Democrat “party of science” denies the best known biological human difference.

Continuing in the denial of science, President Biden has made a royal proclamation claiming that men can be women and that women can be men, and that they must, by law, be treated as such! The Democrats have joined the non-binary sex crowd, demanding that the 0.00001% of sexual anomalies be regarded as definitive of sex, and that everyone must bow to the tiny minority of people who imagine themselves to be the sex other than that that their genetics dictate. So you had better call people by whatever label they imagine themselves to be, and only use the pronouns that they demand, otherwise it will be a fine or jail time for you. If you object to boys who say they are girls dominating female sports, do not say so out loud, or be prepared to be banned from social media and probably fired for “transphobic” hate speech.

Happily, not all assertions about sex are hate speech. Saying that men are “toxic” and that “the future is female” is not hate speech, but justified progressive feminism. In contrast, saying that we should not let boys be left behind and that men should have equal opportunity as women is hate speech and violence against women, and would be punished severely, with maximal cancellation.

Above all, any assertion that America is good is hate speech. Referring to the “American dream” or “the land of opportunity,” or “the home of the free and the brave” is, among any other positive reference, outlawed. The University of Colorado’s “Inclusive Language Guide” urges that “America” and “American” no longer be used because “this erases other cultures and depicts the United States as the dominant American country.” It would perhaps be more inclusive to call the U.S. “Northern Mexico” or “Southern Canada.” What is clear is that referring to “America” is hate speech for which you will be canceled.

The Guide has many other helpful suggestions: Of course, do not say “he or she,” because “these terms imply that gender is binary (i.e. either man or woman) and does not acknowledge that people may identify anywhere along the gender spectrum and/or their biological sex may not match their gender identity.”

“Hispanic” is also out, because “It is problematic because of its origins in colonialization” among other things. Rather, use “Latinx, Latine, Latino” instead, although according to Wikipedia “A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that … The preferred term both among Hispanics who have heard the term [Latinx] and among those who haven’t was Hispanic, garnering 50% and 64% respectively.[2] Latino was second in preference with 31% and 29% respectively.[2] Only 3% self identified as Latinx in that survey.”

“Illegal alien/immigrant” is also rejected on the specious grounds that “saying that a person is “illegal” dehumanizes them and implies that they are a “criminal,” while it in fact simply indicates legal status. The Guide suggests “immigrant,” erasing the difference between legal and illegal immigration, or “undocumented,” implying that they have lost their papers somewhere. Perhaps the Guide would prefer to refer to them as “proto-citizens” or “true Americans,” oops, I mean “true Northern Mexicans.” “Male/female” is rejected, because “we very rarely need to identify or know a person’s biological sex and more often are referring to gender.” Preferred terms are “Gender Non-Binary / Gender Non-Conforming.”

Universities, which used to be centers of research, reason, and diversity of thought, are now the worst offenders in banning speech and suppressing diversity of opinion. Speech codes are common in universities, and speech is policed by “diversity and inclusion” officers who ensure than no one says the wrong things, or else! For those who offend, re-education courses are required.

Freestanding re-education camps are not as yet in use, but given the enthusiasm with which our leaders are emulating Communist China, they may not be long coming.

As the consolidation advances of a unified elite of government, big tech, big media, big finance, and big education, and American democracy transforms into American fascism, the calls for censorship and the silencing of critics abound.

Through the control of information, division into opposing sex, race, and geographic classes, the suppression of opposition, and changes in the rules, the unified elite aims to change the two-party system into a one-party system.

Divide and conquer has always been a favored strategy of despotic oligarchies.

Your job from now on is to stay silent and follow orders. Welcome to the brave new North Mexico/South Canada world.






SHOW COMMENTS
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Mark Steyn: ‘Today Free Speech Is Openly Mocked As Some Kind Of Right-Wing Fetish’
Mark Steyn

Fox News
DAVID KRAYDENOTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF
February 03, 202111:14 PM ET

Conservative author and pundit Mark Steyn said Wednesday that the enemies of free speech are gaining influence around the western world and have “openly mocked” First Amendment rights.

“Today free speech is openly mocked as some kind of the right-wing fetish,” Steyn told Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” “On the other side, they regard an ever-expanding range of topics as there being a correct view. And once that view has been established, there is no need for the further discussion on it.”

Video on website 3:02 min

Steyn said a wide range of topics like climate change Islamic extremism, same-sex marriage or transgender participation in women’s sports are now subject to a “settled view and once we’ve settled it we no longer need to debate it.”

“The problem is there are an ever-expanding range of issues that are added to that list.”

Steyn, who has battled government attempts to muzzle “hate speech” in Canada, said the trend to censor has expanded to the United States, the U.K., Australia and Europe. He noted the “malign alliance” between governments and Big Tech.

“We are moving into a literally Orwellian world,” he said, noting that “experts” close to President Joe Biden have reportedly suggested he establish a federal “reality control” agency with a “reality czar” in control.

“These people are so unself-aware and frankly so illiterate that they don’t even realize these are tired ideas they are lifting from a 70-year-old indictment of the totalitarian state,” Steyn said in reference to George Orwell’s novel “1984.”
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 29: U.S. President Joe Biden walks to the White House residence upon exiting Marine One on January 29, 2021 in Washington, DC. President Biden traveled to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to visit with wounded service members. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

President Joe Biden walks to the White House residence upon exiting Marine One on Jan. 29, 2021 in Washington, DC. President Biden traveled to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to visit with wounded service members. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

He said the word “disinformation” has become whatever the government decides it is. “What’s the information you are dissing? It’s official information. Ministry of information information.” Steyn insisted that journalists are not only increasingly accepting of censorship but actively encouraging it.

CNN’s “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter on Sunday defended Big Tech’s “harm reduction model” for regulating communication and said it was not an infringement upon free speech.

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attacked the “Big Tech cartel” Tuesday with a law that would impose fines of up to $100,000 for social media gains that deplatform a political leader.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Left-Wing Dark Money Groups Unite to Undo Trump’s Judicial Legacy
  • 119985222_2580905828888938_3180434515541648183_o-736x324.png
    Facebook
Joe Schoffstall - FEBRUARY 3, 2021 4:05 PM
Progressives are mobilizing to undo President Donald Trump's judicial legacy through a new dark money initiative.

The effort, called Unrig the Courts, is spearheaded by a coalition of eight left-wing groups: Demand Justice, Take Back the Courts, People's Parity Project, 51 for 51, Demos Action, Indivisible, Just Democracy Coalition, and Stand Up America. The coalition will push to add seats to the Supreme Court, impose term limits on its justices, expand the lower courts, and create "improved ethics and transparency requirements."

Demand Justice, led by former Hillary Clinton aide Brian Fallon, is perhaps the best-known member in the coalition. Fallon's group is a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a dark money fiscal sponsor managed by D.C.-based consulting firm Arabella Advisors, whose funds raked in $715 million for liberal groups and causes in 2019.

The coalition hopes to build popular support for the overhauls as it lobbies Biden and Congress. The public largely opposes adding seats to the bench, but Biden, who said he is "not a fan" of court packing, is moving to create a bipartisan commission to study judicial reforms.

Trump rankled liberal activists by appointing 226 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices, during his four years in office. Fifty-four of those judges were appointed to the federal appeals bench—just one shy of the 55 President Barack Obama appointed over his eight years in office.

"As you know, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell basically did nothing else for the last four years besides transform the federal judiciary into an arm of the Republican Party," Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director of democracy policy at Indivisible, told the Washington Free Beacon. "Most reasonable people agree that's bad, which is why we founded the Unrig the Courts coalition with our partners."

None of the other groups responded to requests for comment on their roles in the new coalition.

Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, said the coalition is "a coordinated effort by left-wing dark money groups to convert the Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for their radical policy agendas."

Severino's group has been publicly targeted by Democratic leadership, including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.). After the network sponsored a $1.1 million ad campaign calling on Biden to release a list of potential judicial nominees, Democratic senators demanded that it release a list of donors who made more than $10,000 in contributions.

"The American public deserves to know who is funding these attacks, and whether the same individuals are financing litigation before the Court that will ultimately be decided by the Justices and judges they helped to confirm," read a letter from the senators at the time.

But the senators who attacked the network were themselves benefiting from dark money groups like Demand Justice. While Demand Justice does not publicly identify its donors, the Free Beacon found that the group received millions from George Soros around the time of its inception. Fallon appeared at a secretive gathering of the Democracy Alliance donor network, which was cofounded by Soros, to pitch the group in 2018.

Other liberal dark money groups, such as the Alliance for Justice, said at the time that they would work to create a list of judges whom the next Democratic president could nominate to federal courts.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Longest-Serving Woman In Congress Says She Feels Increasingly Alienated In Democratic Party

WEDNESDAY, FEB 03, 2021 - 22:30
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

The longest-serving woman in Congress, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), told The Hill in a recent interview that she struggles with a growing sense of alienation within the Democratic party as she fights for the interests of her largely working-class Midwest constituents while the Democrat party is increasingly dominated by representatives from wealthy, often coastal districts.
“They just can’t understand,” Kaptur told the outlet, referring to the difficulty some of her Democrat colleagues have in relating to the concerns of blue-collar constituents like hers.
“They can’t understand a family that sticks together because that’s what they have. Their loved ones are what they have, their little town, their home, as humble as it is—that’s what they have,” she added.
Kaptur told the outlet that she worries that the voices of congressional Democrats who represent wealthy districts are increasingly drowning out those who represent heartland districts.
“It’s been very hard for regions like mine, which have had great economic attrition, to get fair standing, in my opinion,” Kaptur said, adding that, as a Democrat who represents a working-class district, she feels like a minority within her party.
In the interview, Kaptur touched on congressional district data, which showed that 19 out 20 of the nation’s wealthiest districts are represented by Democrats.
“Several of my colleagues who are in the top ranks have said to me, ‘You know, we don’t understand your part of the country.’ And they’re very genuine,” Kaptur said.
“You can’t understand what you haven’t been a part of.”
The idea that Democrats are losing touch with their blue-collar roots and are increasingly turning into the party of the elites while Republicans are on track to becoming a multiethnic working-class coalition was an oft-repeated theme in the wake of the 2020 election.


In his first remarks following the November election, in which the GOP defied expectations and made gains in the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House Minority Leader, declared, “This election cycle has made one thing clear: The Republican Party is now the party of the American worker.”

The 2020 election results, in general, reinforced the view that the Republican party is poised to become a multiethnic coalition of working-class voters. In the presidential race, for instance, former President Donald Trump won the largest share of non-white voters, a traditionally Democrat demographic, of any Republican since 1960.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) commented on the fact that Trump won Zapata County, in Texas, by a margin of 52–47 percent in 2020, while he lost that same county to Hilary Clinton in 2016 by a margin of 65–32 percent.

“#Florida & the Rio Grande Valley showed the future of the GOP: A party built on a multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition of working AMERICANS,” Rubio wrote in a tweet.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

What We are Witnessing is an American Version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution

American-Flag-48x48.jpeg

Published
February 4, 2021
By
Michael Schmidt

In August 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China to reassert ideological purity and purge what he saw was a growing embrace of bourgeois values and a diminishing revolutionary spirit. The goal was to rid the Chinese population of the “Four Olds”. Those consisted of old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. It was meant to be a cleansing, if you will, and a transforming of an old China into an ideologically pure nation worthy to continue in Mao’s vision. Now, fifty-five years later, we are witnessing an American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

This neo-Marxist “Cultural Revolution” in America hasn’t happened overnight. It has been a steady and systematic assault on God, American values, American historical icons, and our Constitution. It has accelerated over the past year and it will continue to gain momentum given that Democrats are in control.

This revolution was in its infancy during the late 1960’s. Many of the radical leftists from groups like the Weather Underground, with the likes of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, didn’t just fade away. They morphed into the fabric of American society and culture. Over the course of the last several decades these radicals deeply embedded themselves in the American educational systems, mainstream media, and government bureaucracy to undermine the American way of life.

Ideas have consequences. When these neo-Marxist ideas are indoctrinated in the youth over a generation or two and not allowed to be challenged by opposing views you build an army of young radicals. Our public schools and universities have been fertile breeding grounds for teachers and professors to fill the minds of American youths with Marxist ideologies. By using political correctness as a hammer and deeming any dissenting views as “hate speech” the left has attempted to neuter American conservative thought.

The outgrowth of that indoctrination has been seen over the last couple of years.

With numerous statues of American historical icons throughout our republic being desecrated, vandalized, or destroyed by groups like BLM and Antifa, groups that are filled with Marxists by the way, we have seen this radical attempt to erase America’s history. Trying to rid the population of old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas.

The 1619 Project is another way these neo-Marxists have attempted to rewrite American history and destroy the foundation and principles of 1776. The 1619 Project intends to “reframe the country’s history” by crossing out 1776 as America’s founding date and substituting 1619, the year 20 or so African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia. It’s another attempt at undermining and destroying the basic tenets of America.

Anyone who has been alive the last few decades has also seen a distinct move away from God and moral relativism has become the prevailing theme in our nation. There is no right or wrong. No absolutes. This hasn’t been an accident either. The neo-Marxists need total submission and service to the state. A one-party state. The Democratic Party. As John Adams put it, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other”. You cannot have a properly functioning American republic with a population that has abandoned God and morality.

As Karl Marx stated, “A people without a heritage are easily persuaded”. By rewriting our past and devaluing our founding fathers and our bedrock values and principles these neo-Marxists are attempting to cut the ties that bind us. They are following in the footsteps of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Making every attempt to cleanse America and transform our republic into their totalitarian Marxist regime. They are well on their way with Joe Biden now in the White House.

In George Orwell’s classic work, “1984”, this excerpt stands out and should provide a chilling conclusion to this article.

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—the lie passed into history and became truth. ’Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ’controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Progressives Cry 'Insurrection' and 'Treason'
But who is really threatening our survival as a free people?
Thu Feb 4, 2021
Don Feder

feder.jpg

“You’re a traitor,” the left bellows. “It’s an insurrection." But don’t sweat it. Progressives merely want to demonize their opponents, crush free speech, stage witch hunts, and destroy as many lives as possible in the process.

The left is on a roll. It has practical control of both houses of Congress as well as the presidency, with Joe Biden pirouetting to a lively tune played by Bernie, AOC and Kamala, as Big Tech and Big Media cheer from the sidelines. So why not censorship, shaming and ostracism?

The House that Pelosi built impeached Donald Trump again, this time after he left office, essentially for words he spoke – saying he won the 2020 election and urging his supporters to fight certification of the electoral vote.

Oh, that and January 6, when an “insurrectionist mob breached the Capitol building, vandalizing federal property and taking selfies on the floor of the Senate,” PBS hyperventilated. Insurrection, like an attempt to overthrow the government -- by protestors taking selfies?

Apparently, that’s all it takes to overthrow a government with 1.3 million active-duty military personnel armed with nuclear missiles, stealth fighters, battleships, tanks and all the rest.

It’s said that some of the “insurrectionists” inside the Capitol came from a Trump rally on the Ellipse that had a festive atmosphere, with children playing ball while parents cheered speeches. “Allons enfants de la Patrei, let’s storm the Bastille!

And, while we’re at it, let’s bring the kids along. Afterward, we can take them to a puppet show and get ice cream.”

The cries of treason and demands for censorship are too loud to ignore. A group of self-styled publishing professionals (mostly hack writers and mailroom clerks) have signed an open letter demanding that publishers shun books by former Trump administration officials. The manifesto was originally titled “No Book Deals for Traitors.”

A Washington Post opinion writer had nice things to say about the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, by which the Federalists tried to suppress the speech of their opponents in time for the election of 1800.

Those urging boycotts of conservative media outlets and de-platforming once were content with calling us bitter-clingers and incorrigibles. Now the Post’s media columnist demands that advertisers “walk away from FOX News,” because of its “role in the 400,000 lives lost to the pandemic and (watch out, here it comes) the disastrous attack of January 6.”

All the left has to do is level an accusation, use the magic words “January 6” or “insurrection” and any one of us can find ourselves accused of treason.

Of course, when urban centers went up in flames throughout the spring and summer (property damage estimated between $1 billion and $2 billion), when cops were murdered, when rioters tried to storm federal buildings and when so-called autonomous zones were being set up, there was not a word of protest from the guardians of constitutional government.

Then candidate Biden insisted Antifa wasn’t really an organization but just an idea. He’s yet to say anything at all about Black Lives Matter, just nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, in perhaps the ultimate irony. And now he’s singing its refrain, when he bloviates about America’s “deep racial inequalities.”

Remember Antifa’s chant: “No borders. No wall. No USA at all.” What do you suppose that was about? A call for reform?

Nancy Pelosi, who says “the enemy is within the House of Representatives” (she means Republican Reps), doesn’t care how many people lost their livelihoods when their businesses burned to the ground (or how many died when cities slashed police budgets in response to rioters’ demands), but should someone put their feet on her sacred desk – and it’s a threat to the very foundations of the republic.

The same people who told us that refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance was patriotic are now telling us that complaining about election fraud is treason.

Progressives define treason not as an attempt to change the nature of our government (Obama said he wanted to “fundamentally transform America”) by mob action or elite subversion. They don’t mean Jane Fonda’s 1972 trip to Hanoi, where she provided aid and comfort to an enemy that had killed more than 50,000 Americans. They don’t mean the president’s son taking gobs of money from the Chinese Communists (with 10% set aside for the big guy), the principal threat to our security for the rest of this century.

Nope. When they say treason, they mean opposition to their ideology: abortion that blends into infanticide, boys in girls’ bathrooms, white-coat fascism, the destruction of domestic energy production in the name of global warming and open borders.

Traitors would include the Keystone pipeline worker who bemoans the loss of a high-paying job, those who fail to pay homage at the shrine of Anthony Fauci, and bigots who adhere to Judeo-Christian values.

By conducting cultural purges, staging Congressional show trials, and trying to regulate speech, progressives are the real threat our existence as a free people.
Coming soon, the House Committee on Un-Pelosi Activities.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Critical Race Theory is How Democrats Plan to Win Elections

And that’s where a new Republican civil rights movement must rise.
Thu Feb 4, 2021
Daniel Greenfield

054b3f62-c27d-4f23-a806-bd084647e448.jpeg

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Liberal critics of critical race theory often act as if it’s a mysterious cult that emerged out of nowhere, while its conservative critics tie it to a history of academic Marxism. That’s true, but doesn’t explain why it has suddenly become so pervasively established in our culture.

Politics can be downstream of culture, but political culture is downstream of politics.

The resurrection of black nationalism and critical race theory are two faces of the same electoral strategy by a political movement now inextricably tied to black voters and white elites.

When Obama beat Hillary, he didn’t just transform America, he shed the last vestiges of the Democrat working class white vote and recreated the party as a coalition of urban elites, immigrants, and minority voters on the model of Tony Blair’s Labour Party in the UK. This “neo-liberalism”, as lefties like to call it, found its own Corbyn in the form of Bernie Sanders who put on a show of attacking the white urban elites who dominate a former working class party.

Democrats use critical race theory to deter leftist insurgencies and police the middle class.

The Obama strategy traded the working class white vote for increased black and minority turnout. Since Hispanic voters are much less politically reliable than white voters, the Democrat electoral strategy narrowed down to maximizing black voter turnout. When black voter turnout faltered, as it did in 2016, the Democrats took a beating. But in 2020, black voters made Biden the nominee over Bernie even though he was backed by a majority of white and Hispanic Dems.

Then they handed Democrats control of the Senate.

Obama had initially portrayed his candidacy in MLK terms as ushering in a new post-racial era of national harmony. Then, once in office, he pivoted to the old black nationalism of his mentor, Jeremiah Wright, using his office as a platform for falsely accusing America of racism.

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, under the guiding hand of the Obama administration, touched off race riots around election years to generate black voter turnout. Midterm elections usually bring out more white than black voters. The race riots were meant to change that by compensating for Tea Party populism with a new black nationalist movement.

The race riots manufactured a national racial crisis to boost voter turnout by making black people feel threatened and to silence the middle class and white lefties threatened by the steady flow of jobs out of the country, and the concentration of power in a leftist oligarchy.

Working class concerns about open borders and immigration had been dropped by the Democrats even before they officially dropped the working class vote. Bill Clinton, Blair’s political peer, bluntly told working class Democrats that the jobs were not coming back, and that they needed to send their children to college, change their culture, and join the new elite.

But college was no longer a reliable ladder into a shrinking middle class. A generation had been told that they needed “computer literacy” to function in a new economy, but by the time “learn to code” became a taunt, the tech industry was offshoring and importing cheap immigrant labor.

By the end of Obama’s time in office, the American software engineer was on the same pathway as the American factory worker, tasked with training his foreign replacement before being fired.

The new economy was heavily administrative. It would cheerfully offshore manufacturing and engineering jobs, but not the diversity specialists and managers serving as political commissars. White male jobs that depended on skill and reliability became endangered, while jobs in which fitting in at an office was more important than traditional work skills became more reliable bets.

Critical race theory became the damoclean sword hanging over the heads of the suburban middle class. Like Orwell’s 1984, the members of this ‘middle party’ were bludgeoned with a campaign of political terror so that they wouldn’t have time to think about the system they were administering. The political enunchization of the administrative middle class had the same function in Orwell’s fictional dystopia and in the entirely real dystopias across the country.

The new elites are unconcerned with the proles laboring over the actual product, but deeply worry about the political reliability of the administrative class that is their means of control. They don’t care what the workers believe because they earn too little and there’s little leverage over them, but they are obsessed with maintaining their power through the administrative class.

Critical race theory had its moment at the perfect time to offer sinecures to its own organizer class who were being embedded into every workplace in the country. But it also warned the suburban middle class to avoid being seduced by President Trump’s economic populism. The political interrogations of the struggle sessions suppressed any questions about the country.

It also shut down the leftist insurgency. When Bernie Sanders first ran against Hillary, he rejected identity politics and open borders. After a campaign of harassment by black nationalist activists with puppet strings going back to the Democrat establishment, Sanders became an even bigger enthusiast of racial tribalism and illegal migration than Hillary had ever been.

That cut him off from the working class white vote and cost him any shot at the White House.

The future of his movement was outsourced to the identity politics populism of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Squad for whom racial tribalism comes ahead of economic populism.

Intersectionality prioritizes racial Marxism over economic Marxism. Elements of the Left have rebelled against the political correctness and cancel culture of racial Marxism, but in a political culture where AOC is the face of the populist Left and Bernie gets to appear in memes, the audience for the non-racial Marxism of the alumni of The Intercept is limited to conservatives.

Meanwhile, critical race theory is doing what it’s supposed to do by polarizing America along tribal racial lines and along class lines among white people. White suburban moms attend book clubs discussing White Fragility and other critical race theory texts as a form of networking. Having the right politics is crucial to your career in a variety of fields. Not all of the signs asserting that in this house the inhabitants believe in science, love, and black nationalism, are voluntary statements of belief. They’re people flying the new post-American tribal flag to fit in.

Black turnout has been crucial in some races, but it hasn’t made up for Democrat losses. It’s why Democrats took such a beating in local races once again in 2020.

Mark Zuckerberg and the Democrat donor class can throw a fortune at only some races. And without the massive infusions of cash, the Democrats are more likely to lose locally in much of the country.

Democrats weaponized critical race theory to play on the insecurities of a shaky suburban middle class. While manufacturing workers may fear that their jobs are about to be sent to China, suburban middle class office workers have come to fear being stigmatized for violating the confusing and incomprehensible dogma of the new antiracism.

The 2020 election pitted economic fears based on globalism against economic fears based on political correctness among the white middle class. And while President Trump won the white middle class, enough of those suburban moms reading White Fragility voted their new creed.

The secret of brainwashing is that the best way to feign belief in something is to believe it.

Republicans had won over working class whites by taking on China’s economic warfare, open borders migration, and offshoring jobs. But the critiques of political indoctrination and cancel culture were largely limited to rhetoric.

President Trump’s executive order trying to root out critical race theory from federal workplaces and federal contractors was mostly ignored.

An Obama judge blocked it and Biden reversed it, while calling for “unity and healing”.

Republicans have failed to reckon with critical race theory, not just as a set of ideas to rail against, but as an electoral reality. The Obama administration had understood that there would be a price to pay for jettisoning the white working class and replaced it with a new coalition. That new coalition depended on capturing the Republican suburban white base through political indoctrination and repression crowdsourced not just through social media, but workplaces.

The last two elections showed off the emergence of a new coalition between white elites and minorities which uses critical race theory as a ladder offering admission to the middle class.

Affirmative action and cancel culture are the twin doors governing access to the middle class.

Republican populism championed farmers, engineers and workers threatened by globalism, but it’s also going to have to take on the cause of a suburban middle class threatened by forces much closer to home, not with mere rhetoric, but with real policies and real consequences.

This is the new civil rights movement.

When black people were discriminated against, Republicans and some Democrats built a massive legal machine that brought almost every establishment in the country under the shadow of federal law. Much of the country is now being discriminated against, repressed, and threatened by a political system more national and even more overwhelming than segregation.

If Republicans rise to that fight, because it’s the right thing to do, they will also strike at the electoral axis of the new Democrat coalition with a new civil rights movement.

The Democrats haven’t built this weapon of political terror because they just felt like it. Nor did they decide to do all this because of something an academic once wrote in a book. It’s not a random ideology, but a sophisticated strategy for winning elections and controlling the country.

When President Trump took on immigration, he connected with millions of people who felt cut off and fueled a new Republican wave. But he didn’t do it just with talk, but with action. He promised to build a wall, to ban terror travel, and to implement specific policies and and results.

That’s what a new civil rights movement needs to connect with millions more who feel cut off.

Republicans took on open borders. That battle isn’t over. But if they don’t take on critical race theory, the Democrats will use their new coalition to turn America into Europe: a nation of sullen former workers in the Rust Belt, and frightened middle class urban workers, just trying to fit in, while remaining subservient to an expert class fighting ideological crises as the nation is destroyed.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Lawrence Sellin: A Government Separated from the People Cannot Stand

By Joe Hoft
Published February 4, 2021 at 1:00pm
460 Comments
iStock-184776807-600x240.jpg

Guest post by Lawrence Sellin (originally published in 2013)

In his 1952 book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Israeli historian J. L. Talmon described a political system in which lawfully elected representatives rule a nation state whose citizens, although granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of government.

The federal government has become such a system, an entity unto itself operating outside of Constitutional constraints and unaccountable to the American people.

The United States is now controlled by a Democratic and Republican ruling class that transcends government and sees itself as distinct from the rest of society and as the only element that may act on its behalf. The ruling class considers those who resist it as having no moral or intellectual right, and, only reluctantly, any civil right to do so.

Power rests, not with the citizens, but with a relatively small group of politicians and financiers, who enhance their personal wealth and privilege by looting the country through a self-serving legislative process. They maintain their authority by adjusting the levers of government and using the establishment media to manipulate public perception and opinion.

Barack Obama, a coffeehouse communist, leads a dishonest and lawless cabal of far-left ideologues, whose goal is to promote socialist policies that can only be implemented at the expense of personal liberty.

Republican leaders neither contest that view nor oppose their Democrat counterparts because they do not want to challenge the ruling class, they want to join it. The GOP leadership has gradually solidified its choice to no longer represent what had been its constituency, but to adopt the identity of junior partners in the ruling class.

There is now a sharp division between the bipartisan ruling class and the rest of the American populace, who are considered retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly controlled by the dictates of central authority.

When blatant and outrageous lies are no longer sufficient to soothe the electorate into complacency, such a government must begin to curtail freedom and oppress the people in order to remain in power.

The present political environment, that is, the separation between the rulers and the ruled, bears comparison to the events leading up to the American Revolution.

On January 10, 1776, nearly six months before the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine published the forty-eight page pamphlet Common Sense, which openly presented arguments supporting the freedom of the American colonies from oppressive British rule.

According to Paine, a society arises because individuals living alone in nature find shared benefit by living together rather than remaining isolated. In an ideal society, where each individual acts in a morally just fashion toward every other individual in the society, there is no need for laws and government. Only when moral virtue is inadequate to restrain human evil, do laws become necessary; and only when a society becomes too large to operate by collective agreement and as individual enforcers of those laws do governments become necessary.

In such circumstances, the balance between society and government will determine the balance between individual liberty and functionality of the society.

In complex societies, in the absence of laws and government, chaos will prevail.

When laws become too numerous and government too large, individual liberty suffers.

The efficiency and effectiveness of government are directly dependent upon the trustworthiness of government officials as representatives and executors of the views and desires of the people.

In other words, whenever the interests of government officials divert from or are in conflict with those of the people, tyranny ensues.

The attributes that best describe how America is now governed are executive overreach, legislative complicity, judicial partisanship, and journalistic acquiescence.

The erosion of the Constitution and the theft of our Constitutional rights have been occurring incrementally and quietly over a long period of time. With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, those efforts have accelerated.

In contrast to what Thomas Paine wrote in The Rights of Man (1791), the Obama “utopian” model sees individual rights as privileges, not endowed by God, but granted via political charter, and, thereby, legally revocable to ensure the “good order” of society. It is a collectivist philosophy that directly conflicts with the principles outlined in the Constitution, where government is a construct of and accountable to its citizens, as Paine noted:

“The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”

The Obama nightmare could be ended at any time simply by telling the truth.

To do so, however, would expose the rampant corruption of our political and media elite, reveal their complicity in Obama’s violations of Constitution, uncover their willful ignorance of his alleged felonies and confirm their participation in the greatest election fraud and Constitutional crisis in American history.

Both the Democrat and Republican parties know that exposing Obama would reveal their dereliction of duty, their complicity in undermining the Constitution, and their continuous flouting of the rule of law. They know that the truth would topple the corrupt status quo and terminate their exclusive grip on political power, allowing the American people to regain control of their government. The political and media elite will do anything to prevent that.

The status quo is no longer defensible. Unless there is a significant reversal soon, it is only a matter of time that a catastrophe will be upon us, which may well lead to national collapse and fragmentation.

The ruling elites of a now hopelessly corrupt political system are just one major blunder away from another 1776.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.
 

vector7

Dot Collector
Tucker Carlson reveals that Bank of America was flagging the purchasing history of its customers and sending it to the federal government in order to find out if they were involved in the Capitol riot.

The feds later interrogated a customer who was cleared of wrongdoing.

RT 6min
View: https://twitter.com/BluebirdKeny/status/1357508002144747520


View: https://twitter.com/ZalmiU/status/1352413896934641664
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Bank of America Secretly Flagged Purchase History of Customers and Sent the Data to Feds After Capitol Riot

By Cristina Laila
Published February 4, 2021 at 7:50pm
IMG_8357.jpg

Fox News host Tucker Carlson Thursday night revealed Bank of America searched through customer data and provided the data to the feds after the Capitol riot.

Bank of America gave data and information to the feds at the request of the US government, without the knowledge or consent of the customers.

Advertisement - story continues below

One innocent Bank of America customer was actually interrogated by the feds and ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing.

How is this even legal?

Bank of America scanned through customer records to flag the following:
  • Were they in DC between January 5 and January 6
  • Purchased a hotel stay or AirBnB in DC, Virginia or Maryland after January 6
  • Any purchase of weapons between January 7 and their upcoming suspected stay in DC area around Inauguration Day
  • Airline related purchases since January 6
One innocent man was actually interrogated by the feds all because of his purchase history.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1357499101097517056
8:12 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Deep State Thinks
Trump Supporters Are
the New Al-Qaeda


Healthy democracies don’t label the opposition "terrorists" and eliminate basic civil liberties.
By Paul Bradford
February 4, 2021

The Washington Examiner, an ostensibly “conservative” publication, published an article this week demanding we treat right-wing “extremists” like al-Qaeda.

In the article, former Homeland Security official Kevin Carroll argued we must do five things to protect our nation from this menace. The first is to “bring the heaviest felony charges possible on as many participants in the [Capitol] insurrection.” “We ruthlessly hunted down foreign terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and must do the same to their domestic equivalents,” Carroll writes.

This assumes that a few hundred demonstrators illegally entering the Capitol and taking selfies is equivalent to the 9/11 attacks.

The second act is to make all law enforcement and firemen sign loyalty oaths that commit them to “not to engage in acts to overthrow the government.”

Failure to uphold this oath will result in federal prosecution and departments that fail to implement such measures could be stripped of federal funds.

The third act is to “ban extremist chatter through government censorship or private de-platforming, use radical chat rooms as honeypots, as FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces have done with violent, radicalized Islamists since 2001.”

The fourth measure calls for the abolition of militias.

The final proposal would “add domestic terrorism as a predicate to the material support for terrorism statute, including its civil liability provisions.”

“We defeated al-Qaeda and can do the same to the fascist thugs who attacked our democracy last month. But only if we take similar hard measures against the enemy within,” Carroll concludes his article.

The type of system Carroll proposes would strip potentially millions of Americans of their rights and enlarge our already bloated security apparatus. And for what purpose? To ensure that Trump supporters never protest again?

Carroll never clearly defines who he wants this massive security state to target.

He offers hints, such as his mention of militia members, but there’s not much else to go on. Leaders clearly defined the enemy in the War on Terror as radical Islam; in Carroll’s estimation, the enemy today is just unspecified domestic terrorists.

The implication, of course, is that Trump supporters and ordinary conservatives who may have a problem with the government are the problem. America is supposed to be a free country where you’re allowed to not like your government.

According to Carroll and authoritarian liberals, you’re not allowed to think that anymore. In this dystopian regime, you would be banned from the internet and possibly face jail time for these beliefs, which happen to be protected by the First Amendment.

Sadly, Carroll isn’t alone in his zeal to wage war on his fellow Americans. The Capitol riots spurred numerous calls for new laws and efforts to counter domestic terrorism. Influential people, not random trolls on Twitter, have described average Trump supporters as terrorists and the former president as the new Osama bin Laden. Elizabeth Neumann, who served Trump as the assistant secretary of homeland security, says her old boss “was that spiritual leader [for Capitol protesters] that bin Laden was for al-Qaeda. He was that face, and that spokesperson, that rallied the troops.”

And it’s not just empty rhetoric either; it results in the serious disregard of our civil liberties. Multiple Capitol protesters have been denied bail primarily due to their political beliefs, not their actions.

Dana Kurtbek, a 54-year-old woman who attended Trump’s peaceful rally on January 6, was flagged by facial recognition technology as a Capitol rioter. This error has resulted in multiple stops at the airport and a visit to her home from FBI agents. The FBI agents reportedly said they received anonymous tips saying Kurtbek was a woman in a CNN video of the riot. Luckily, Trump supporter was able to prove that it was not her in the picture.

“I had been flagged by my government as a potential domestic terrorist simply because I attended a rally in support of the president,” Kurtbek told The Post Millennial. “Our rights as American citizens have been removed and the government is using this incident to intimidate those with differing views into compliance.”

She added: “We have been referred to as traitors, un-American, racists, homophobic, ignorant, brainwashed, and now domestic terrorists by the same people who proudly display ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ placards in their front yards.”

This is life now for Trump supporters. They can’t speak on social media, they can’t assemble to support their man, and they can’t even fly without extra screening.

They’re the deep state’s number one enemy, and few in power want to question that standing.

Trump’s impeachment is not just a threat to the former president—it’s an indictment of all 75 million of his voters. The deep dtate and liberal elites want to convict Trump and possibly jail him, but that’s not enough for them. They want to make examples of Trump and his supporters to browbeat millions into getting in line. Trump supporters must accept the 2020 election as the freest and fairest in human history. They must apologize for their white privilege and only support nice Republicans like Mitt Romney, who does what he’s told. The Trump masses must conform to the dictates of technocrat-guided “democracy.” Any deviation may mark them as domestic terrorists.

Liberal elites claim these radical steps are all needed to “safeguard democracy.”

In reality, these measures mock the very idea that we live in a democracy.

Healthy democracies don’t label the opposition terrorists and eliminate basic civil liberties.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Tiny Group of Never-Trumpers Is Running an Ad Next Week on FOX News Attacking Trump Supporters

By Joe Hoft
Published February 5, 2021 at 7:10am
Cheney-Kinzinger.jpg

Another group of Never Trumpers are out for blood.


The ‘Republican Accountability Project’, a group of misfit Never Trumpers who also have no interest in the heart of American and the massive base that voted for President Trump, like their Democrat partners in crime, are after Americans who voted for and supported President Trump.
Advertisement - story continues below

AOL reported:
A conservative group is calling out members of the Republican Party by name for promoting “lies, violence and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” in a scathing new ad that will air on Fox News during “Hannity” in Washington, D.C. next week.

The spot from the Republican Accountability Project ― part of Defending Democracy Together, a never-Trump conservative group ― praises the members of the party who turned on former President Donald Trump after the violent insurrection carried out by his supporters in the Capitol on Jan. 6.
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1357117992564326400
.56 min

These silly people believe Joe Biden received more than 80 million votes and beat President Trump’s record setting number of votes in the 2020 election. President Trump received more than 74 million legitimate votes, 5 million more than Obama’s record of 69 million in 2008. It was the most votes for a sitting President by almost 10 million.

Trump-vs-Biden.jpg

But those who hate the President for Making America Great Again are out for blood. They want the millions of Americans who legitimately voted for the President to be punished. Of course they are just a tiny group of misfits who no one cares about or listens to.

Americans don’t like traitors, cheaters or liars.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

No, We Shouldn’t Launch A ‘War On Terror’ Against Trump Voters
Except to those seeking an excuse to turn the national security apparatus on American citizens, the Capitol riot was not equivalent to the horror of 9/11.


Nathanael Blake

By Nathanael Blake
FEBRUARY 4, 2021

The occupation of West Virginia is going to be a sight to see.

Following the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, some pundits and members of the national security state have been demanding a new war on terror. This time, however, the targets will be Americans. To take a representative example, Kevin Carroll writes in the Washington Examiner, “We ruthlessly hunted down foreign terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and must do the same to their domestic equivalents.”

But the Capitol riot was not equivalent to the horror of 9/11, except to those eager for an excuse to unleash the national security apparatus on their fellow Americans.

Those who broke into the Capitol and attacked the police guarding it were largely a disorganized rabble, sprinkled with a few instigators who planned for violence. Their behavior was deluded and wicked, but it was not the equivalent of al-Qaida bringing down the Twin Towers, blowing a hole in the Pentagon, and murdering nearly 3,000 Americans. Frankly, it’s nothing short of grotesque to pretend the situations are equivalent.

Furthermore, even if the situations were similar, launching a War on Terror 2.0 against American citizens would be unnecessary. Law enforcement has been diligently tracking down and arresting those who participated in the rioting.

Washington D.C. has been occupied by thousands of National Guard troops and a multitude of physical security barriers have been erected. Donald Trump has been impeached (again), left the White House as scheduled, and will soon be on trial in the Senate, to potentially be banned from ever returning to office. Thankfully, the predicted follow-up violence has not occurred.

In short, the problem is being solved. But solved problems don’t expand budgets, increase power and provide opportunities to punish one’s enemies.

Those require a continued threat of insurgency, sedition, and terrorism. Thus, Carroll concludes, “We defeated al Qaeda and can do the same to the fascist thugs who attacked our democracy last month. But only if we take similar hard measures against the enemy within.”

Setting aside the dubious claim that al-Qaida is defeated (rather than merely diminished), it is would be tyrannical insanity to bring the aggressive, Constitution-bereft, oft-blundering tactics of the War on Terror to American soil. Yet that is the logical conclusion of Carroll’s argument — invading West Virginia, waterboarding good old boys in Alabama, and drone-striking weddings in Oklahoma.

Carroll is unwilling, at least in print, to draw out the obvious conclusions of his calls for launching a new, domestic war on terror. Indeed, there is a striking gap between his apocalyptic rhetoric about the supposed threat and his actual proposals to address it.

He mostly pushes for expansions of the national security apparatus into American life and local government. For instance, he suggests the government “make fire and police departments that receive federal grants have their members sign commitments not to engage in acts to overthrow the government. Prosecute any who subsequently violate their oaths.”

This is superfluous, insofar as it is already illegal to try to overthrow the government. The purpose of such a proposal is not to stop or punish domestic terrorists but to further subsume state and local authorities into the national security state.

If Carroll is serious about ferreting out threats to the constitutional order, he could start with himself. He urges the government to “use the supremacy of federal law to ban ‘militias’ beyond the National Guard” even though the federal government is constitutionally prohibited from doing so. Carroll does not seem to have taken his oath to “support and defend” the Constitution very seriously.

Indeed, he and those who share his views do not respect the Constitution. As far as they are concerned, enumerated powers and the Bill of Rights are obstacles to be overcome, not limits to be observed. Spying on Americans, and then lying about it to Congress, is routine for them.

As for democratic government, they enthusiastically subvert efforts by elected officials to direct our nation’s foreign policy. Toward the end of Trump’s presidency, for instance, they openly bragged about lying to the president in order to keep troops in Syria.

They don’t believe in democracy or the rule of law, they believe in their power.

The permanent security state that has been setting American policy in Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen and Syria and all the rest have already wrested huge amounts of control from the elected branches of government. Giving more power, especially over American citizens, to such people is a greater threat to our constitutional government than the idiot rioters who attacked the Capitol.

If the War on Terror 2.0 gets to the “arming the moderates on the ground” stage, however, please ignore these criticisms and put me down as one of the “moderates.” I promise to make good use of the pallets of cash and guns.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Exclusive – Adviser: Trump Considers Launching His Own Social Media Platform
247
ARLINGTON, VA - JANUARY 17: (AFP OUT) U.S. President Donald J. Trump speaks during a Missile Defense Review announcement on January 17, 2019 at the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia. Trump pushed for a more aggressive missle defense system to counter threats from North Korea, Russia and China. (Photo by Martin …
Martin H. Simon - Pool/Getty Images
MATTHEW BOYLE6 Feb 2021Washington, DC1,013

Jason Miller, a senior adviser to former President Donald Trump, revealed on Saturday that the former president is considering launching his own social media platform in the not-too-distant future.

The news, which comes after Trump was banned permanently from Twitter and indefinitely from Facebook, came during Miller’s appearance on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel.

“I would expect that we will see the president reemerge on social media,” Miller said when asked what Trump plans to do next. “Whether that’s joining an existing platform or creating his new platform, there are a number of different options and a number of different meetings that they’ve been having on that front. Nothing is imminent on that.”

Asked about what a Trump social network—called something like “Trumper” or something similar—would look like, Miller was circumspect but said the former president is considering both joining existing new platforms or launching his own competitor to the tech giants in Silicon Valley.

“All options are on the table,” Miller said. “A number of things are being discussed. Stay tuned there because you know he’s going to be back on social media. We’re just kind of figuring out which avenue makes the most sense.”

As of mid-January before Democrat President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg told NBC News that the social network has “no plans” to lift Trump’s indefinite ban anytime soon.

Twitter, meanwhile, has made its ban of the former president’s account permanent. “I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter,“ Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote in a thread explaining his company’s move, adding, ”I believe this was the right decision for Twitter.”

Potential existing alternatives that Trump could join include Parler, who the then-president’s campaign officials reportedly met with last summer to discuss Trump joining the platform, or Gab, another platform that has successfully battled blacklisting by Silicon Valley and financial institutions. If Trump seeks to build his own platform, that would be a massive undertaking and require lots of investment and technological infrastructure. But with his personality and supporters—75 million Americans voted for him in 2020, the most votes a sitting president has ever gotten in history—fueling it, it could end up being successful.

Trump has long battled big tech, and told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview in the Oval Office in August last year that “100 percent” the big tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, are trying to control information that Americans see. “Do you have a doubt?” Trump said when asked if they are trying to control the information flow to the public.

“The tech companies are very dishonest about that and about free speech,” Trump told Breitbart News. “It could be a big problem for them at the appropriate time.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

'See Something, Say Something Online Act' Punishes Big Tech for Not Snitching

ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN | 2.2.2021 9:30 AM

dpaphotostwo472250

(Chris Melzer/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom)

A new bill revitalizes the war on terror's favorite slogan in service of forcing tech companies to turn over more user data to the government. The "See Something, Say Something Online Act," introduced by Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) and co-sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas), is the latest attack on the federal communications law known as Section 230 as well as freedom of speech and online privacy.

The legislation says any interactive computer service provider—that means social media giants, small blogs, podcast hosting services, app stores, consumer review platforms, independent political forums, crowdfunding and Patreon-style sites, dating apps, newsletter services, and much more—will lose Section 230 protections if they fail to report any known user activity that might be deemed "suspicious."
"Suspicious" content is defined as any post, private message, comment, tag, transaction, or "any other user-generated content or transmission" that government officials later determine "commits, facilitates, incites, promotes, or otherwise assists the commission of a major crime." Major crimes are defined as anything involving violence, domestic, or international terrorism, or a "serious drug offense."

For each suspicious post, services must submit a Suspicious Transmission Activity Report (STAR) within 30 days, providing the user's name, location, and other identifying information, as well as any relevant metadata.

Those submitting the user surveillance reports would henceforth be barred from talking about or even acknowledging the existence of them. STARs would also be exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The bill, which comes amid renewed calls to stamp out domestic terrorism after the Capitol riot, is impressive in managing to be both completely invasive and utterly unconcerned with even appearing to be about protection, since the remedy—report within 30 days—would hardly help stop the commission of crimes. If we were talking about the Capitol riot, for instance, companies who still hadn't reported posts about it would be OK.
The bill would set up a massive new system of intense user monitoring and reporting that would lead to more perfectly innocent people getting booted from internet platforms. It would provide the government with a new tool to punish disfavored tech companies, and it would enlist all digital service providers to be cops in the failed post-9/11 war on terror and the drug war.

The bill states that some posts facilitating crimes require a STAR to be filed immediately, though it's vague about what these are (any "suspicious transmission that requires immediate attention" requires being reported immediately). The first example it provides is "an active sale or solicitation of sale of drugs."

A new federal agency would handle the suspicious activity reports—which could also be submitted by any individual, not just tech companies.

An easy, anonymous, online way for people to flag each other's social media accounts for the Department of Justice—what could go wrong? (Insert all the eye rolls here.)

Anyone with experience on social media now knows how hyperbolic people can be in describing threatening behavior, how gleeful folks can be in snitching on those they deem unenlightened, and how easy it can be for trolls, abusers, and other ne'er-do-wells to weaponize reporting systems against disliked individuals or marginalized groups. The See Something, Say Something Online Act would put this on steroids—all while ensuring such a glut of reports, including many that are frivolous, politically motivated, or otherwise disingenuous, that federal agents would still be searching for needles in haystacks.

Worse than simply overloading the system, it would make federal agents investigate all sorts of ordinary Americans for harmless comments. It also seems likely to make finding actual terrorists and violent criminals even more difficult.

________________________


1612654046069.png

Rest of document on website
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create governments
February 3, 2021

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments.

Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state’s economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday.

The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services.

The measure to further economic development with the “alternative form of local government” has not yet been introduced in the Legislature.

Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of the State address delivered Jan. 19. The plan would bring in new businesses at the forefront of “groundbreaking technologies” without the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that previously helped Nevada attract companies like Tesla Inc.

Sisolak named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a “smart city” in an area east of Reno after the legislation has passed.

The draft proposal said the traditional local government model is “inadequate alone” to provide the resources to make Nevada a leader in attracting and retaining businesses and fostering economic development in emerging technologies and industries.

The Governor’s Office of Economic Development would oversee applications for the zones, which would be limited to companies working in specific business areas including blockchain, autonomous technology, the Internet of Things, robotics, artificial intelligence, wireless, biometrics and renewable resource technology.

Zone requirements would include applicants owning at least 78 square miles (202 square kilometers) of undeveloped, uninhabited land within a single county but separate from any city, town or tax increment area. Companies would have at least $250 million and plans to invest an additional $1 billion in their zones over 10 years.

The zones would initially operate with the oversight of their location counties, but would eventually take over county duties and become independent governmental bodies.

The zones would have three-member supervisor boards with the same powers as county commissioners. The businesses would maintain significant control over board membership.

The governor’s economic development office did not respond to questions about the zones Wednesday.

__________________________________

[COMMENT: Sounds a bit like the old "company towns." I believe it violates the "republican guarantee" clause of the U.S. Constitution:

ARTICLE IV
Section 4
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."

(A republican government is one in which the people govern through elections. This sounds more like an oligarchy.)

Palatine

adjective
(of an individual) possessing royal prerogatives in a territory
of, belonging to, characteristic of, or relating to a count palatine, county palatine, palatinate, or palatine of or relating to a palace
noun
feudal history the lord of a palatinate
 
Last edited:

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Bill would allow tech companies to create local governments

Updated February 4, 2021 - 8:23 pm
CARSON CITY — If you’ve got enough money, acres upon acres of undeveloped land and an “innovative technology,” you soon could form a new local government in Nevada.

When Gov. Steve Sisolak last month announced his plan to launch Innovation Zones in Nevada to jump-start the state’s economy by attracting new tech companies, the details of how those zones would operate proved scarce.

According to a draft of the proposed legislation, obtained by the Review-Journal but not yet introduced in the Legislature, Innovation Zones would allow tech companies like Blockchains, LLC to effectively form separate local governments in Nevada, governments that would carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts and provide government services, to name a few duties.

Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of the State address as his plan to bring in new companies that are at the forefront of “groundbreaking technologies,” all without the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that had previously helped Nevada bring companies like Tesla to the state.

During his speech last month, Sisolak specifically named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a “smart city” in the area east of Reno that would run entirely on blockchain technology, once the legislation passes.

The draft, which could change before it’s unveiled as a formal bill, provides the first look into the details behind the concept.

Local governments ‘inadequate’

The draft language of the proposal says that the traditional local government model is “inadequate alone to provide the flexibility and resources conducive to making the State a leader in attracting and retaining new forms and types of businesses and fostering economic development in emerging technologies and innovative industries.”

It adds that this “alternative form of local government” is needed to aid economic development within the state.

The Governor’s Office of Economic Development would handle the applications for the Innovation Zones. Those zones would be limited to specific “innovative technology,” which includes blockchain, autonomous technology, the internet of things, robotics, artificial intelligence, wireless technology, biometrics and renewable resource technology.

A spokeswoman for Sisolak’s office said in a statement Wednesday that the governor “looks forward to rolling out more information on Innovation Zones and other items from his State of the State speech in the future.”

“The Governor’s Office has not submitted a bill draft request related to this initiative so we will not be commenting on any language at this time,” the statement said.

GOED did not respond to questions about the zones Wednesday.

The zones would initially operate within the local county where they are located but would eventually be able to take over the duties of those counties and become an independent governmental body.

The zones would have a three-member board of supervisors that would carry the same powers as a board of county commissioners. And the company or firm applying for the zone would have significant say over who would sit on that board.

The apparent economic benefit, besides the potential to lure more tech businesses to the state, would be an “industry-specific tax that will be imposed upon the innovative technology or activity related to the innovative technology,” within the zone.

Requirements: Land, money

The draft proposal lays out the requirements for the zone, including the applicant owning 50,000 acres of undeveloped land, all within a single county but separate of any city, town or tax increment area. And the area would have to be uninhabited. The company would also need to have $250 million, and a plan to invest an additional $1 billion over 10 years into the zone.

The zone would be required to report to the Legislature during the biennial session to detail its capital investments, physical progress on developing infrastructure, an estimate of the number of people employed in the zone and the economic impact from the zone itself.

In 2018, Blockchains, LLC, the tech firm owned by lawyer and cryptocurrency millionaire Jeffrey Berns, purchased roughly 67,000 acres — about the same size as the city of Henderson — of undeveloped, uninhabited land in Storey County at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center for $170 million.

Since then, the firm has given heavily to political candidates and PACs.

Blockchains, LLC gave $50,000 to a Home Means Nevada PAC, which managed Sisolak’s transition into office, in January 2019, according to campaign finance records. The company also donated $10,000 to Sisolak’s campaign in the 2018 election cycle. Sisolak’s opponent, Republican Adam Laxalt, also received $10,000 from the firm that year.

Berns himself gave $50,000 to the state Democratic Party in 2019, and various donations ranging between $1,000 and $5,000 to various state lawmakers from both parties.

Blockchains, LLC did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
‘Jury still out’

Storey County Commissioner Lance Gilman, one of the industrial center’s developers, said that the Blockchains Innovation Zone is “going to have an impact on Storey County, and the jury is still out on whether that will be positive or negative.”

Gilman said that the county is staying open-minded about the idea, but there needs to be some sort of incentive to compensate for ceding the land to the zone itself.

“We’re going to want to know that Storey County gets the benefit of the bargain,” he said.

Gilman said that if that isn’t the case, and the negative consequences outweigh the positives for Storey County, then he doubts the legislation would move forward.

Senate Minority Leader James Settelmeyer, R-Minden, whose district includes Storey County, echoed Gilman’s thoughts when reached by phone Wednesday evening, saying that it could be “fantastic” for the state and especially Northern Nevada. But he said he’s concerned that it leaves Storey County high and dry.

“The legislation seems to be rather one-sided, that the Innovation Zones get to make determinations and the county has to go along with them,” Settelmeyer said.

Settelmeyer added that he was “not impressed” about finding out the details of a bill that would affect part of his district “so far into the process.”

“It is disrespectful,” he said.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

North Dakota Republicans Move to Wrest Control from Biden, Place Power Back with the Constitution

By Jack Davis
Published February 6, 2021 at 11:28am

As the federal government in 1798 teetered dangerously close to what James Madison considered a vast misuse of its powers under the Constitution, he authored the Virginia Resolution.

The resolution affirmed that “in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.”

More than 220 years later, North Dakota legislators — alarmed by the deluge of executive decrees from the Biden White House — are considering legislation to push back against the flood.

House Bill 1282, introduced recently by Republican state Rep. Sebastian Ertelt, creates what legislators are calling a committee on nullification.

“Upon receipt of federal legislation, regulation, or an executive order, for consideration and process, the committee shall recommend whether to nullify in its entirety a specific federal law, regulation, or executive order. In making its recommendation, the committee shall consider whether the legislation, regulation, or executive order is outside the scope of the powers delegated to the federal government in the Constitution of the United States,” the bill reads.

“The committee may review all existing federal statutes, regulations, and executive orders enacted before the effective date of this section for the purpose of determining constitutionality and shall recommend whether to nullify in its entirety a specific federal statute, regulation, or executive order,” the bill .said

If passed, the State Legislature ostensibly would decide if the edict becomes the law in North Dakota.

“If the legislative assembly approves the concurrent resolution by a simple majority to nullify a federal statute, regulation, or executive order based on constitutionality, the state and the citizens of the state may not recognize or be obligated to abide by the federal law or executive order,” the bill reads.

A companion piece of legislation, House Bill 1164, takes aims at presidential executive orders.

“The legislative management may review any executive order issued by the president of the United States which has not been affirmed by a vote of the Congress of the United States and signed into law as prescribed by the Constitution of the United States and recommend to the attorney general and the governor that the executive order be further reviewed,” the bill said.

“Upon recommendation from the legislative management, the attorney general shall review the executive order to determine the constitutionality of the order and whether the state should seek an exemption from the application of the order or seek to have the order declared to be an unconstitutional exercise of legislative authority by the president,” the bill reads.

Republican state Rep. Matthew Ruby, one of the sponsors of the bill, said ruling by executive order is a disease that must be cured.

“I would’ve supported it whether it was Trump or Bush or Obama — any of them. I really think there’s a huge difference between going through Congress and getting something passed compared to, you didn’t get your way so you’re putting it in as an executive order,” he said, according to KXNET.com.

In commenting on the bills, Daniel Horowitz wrote in The Blaze that “the Biden regime continues to rule by executive fiat, often promulgating unconstitutional orders infringing upon civil rights.”

He characterized the legislation as “the key to thwarting a wholesale slide into national despotism and ensuring that there are some places for Americans to go and enjoy the blessings of liberty. “

“The question is whether leaders in those legislative chambers as well as Gov. Doug Burgum will pick up the mantle, not to mention Republicans in other states,” Horowitz wrote.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Sebastian Gorka: Democrats Working on Amendment for NSA, CIA to Target Americans as Terrorists
5,547
Sebastian Gorka (Mark WIlson / Getty)
Mark WIlson / Getty
ROBERT KRAYCHIK5 Feb 20211,550

The Biden administration is working with congressional committees to allow intelligence agencies to “target” American citizens as terrorists, Sebastian Gorka, host of the America First radio show, warned on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Gorka stated, “I was informed yesterday by a private citizen that the Biden administration — and this comes on top of what Austin is doing with the military — but the Biden administration is working with the Senate and House intelligence committees to make amendments to an executive order from the 1980s — it’s called 12333 — to permit the NSA and the CIA to target U.S. citizens as domestic terror threats.”

Executive Order 12333, titled “United States Intelligence Activities,” lays out parameters for government surveillance of both U.S. citizens and aliens at home and abroad.

LISTEN:
https://soundcloud.com/breitbart%2Fdr-sebastian-gorka-february-4-2021 View: https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/dr-sebastian-gorka-february-4-2021
26:37 min

Democrats and their news media allies amplified their characterizations of political opponents as domestic terror threats in recent weeks.

Gorka addressed Democrat plans to politically screen military and law enforcement to ensure compliance with leftism.

“This is their attempt to criminalize being a conservative,” Gorka determined. “When [Lloyd Austin] was in his Senate hearing for confirmation, he said, and I quote directly, that we have ‘enemies‘ in the armed forces of America. The word ‘enemy’ is what you use for somebody you’re going to destroy, you’re going to shoot, you’re going to blow up. He’s talking about enemies in the Army, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, the Navy, the Coast Guard. That’s the person who’s in charge of the DOD right now.”

Gorka noted that Democrats and the broader left have no intention of pursuing Black Lives Matter of Antifa persons as “enemies” or “extremists.”

Gorka remarked, “What they’re doing on Capitol Hill, right now, in closed session, they’re trying to expand — legally — the warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens by the NSA and the CIA to target Trump supporters as a made-up threat to America.”

Marlow replied, “They’re trying to expand the definition of violence, and they’ve been doing this for a long time. They’ve been trying to expand it so that any right-wing thought is considered incitement and any left-wing violence is considered legitimate protest.”

The FBI is already targeting former President Donald Trump’s supporters, Gorka shared.

Gorka remarked, “This is not a theory. This is happening right now. … I am having reported to me by the most reliable sources that women [and] mothers are having the FBI knock on their doors because they were at the march on January 6, not inside Congress, not inside the building, not walking through the velvet ropes to Nancy [Pelosi’s] podium, but simply at the Trump rally. The FBI had tracked them down using the mobile phone positioning data of these individuals.”

“They want to label you as a domestic threat so that anybody who disagrees with the left will be targeted as a terrorist,” concluded Gorka.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Collapse Of Red Vs. Blue

SUNDAY, FEB 07, 2021 - 9:10
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,

Are you ever confused when Republicans vote for more welfare spending?
Do you wonder why America’s wars always seem to start under Democrats?
During the aftermath of the Presidential election did it anger you that long-serving Republicans refused to take President Trump’s complaints about the election seriously?

Did their final betrayal of him hit you like a punch to the solar plexus, knocking all the wind out of your chest?


I can honestly say none of this surprised me at all. I know, bully for me, right?

Well, no, actually. It makes me sad to have been right for all these years.

I’ve seen the pantomime in D.C. as both sides hand off control to each other every few years but always ‘govern’ with the same over-riding purpose; to build an unassailable wall of power between the political elite and the people they rule.

This is true because there is no divide between the two parties in D.C. The GOP and the DNC are, in the great words of libertarian commentator Tom Woods, “Two wings of the same bird of prey.”

And one of the very best things that has come about from this election cycle, where clear and pervasive voter fraud occurred, is that so many more people have come to that same conclusion.

If you are one of them, believe me, it gets easier to accept every day.
I hear from well-meaning, thoughtful conservatives all the time. They are good, decent people and they are regularly so disappointed by the Republicans who campaign on the correct rhetoric but get into office and give into the pork spending, the assaults on our culture and never stand up to the Democrats’ insane ravings about race and inequality.

It’s because they are part of The Club folks…
..and The Club exists for their benefit, not yours.


Team Red and Team Blue are constructs. They are false opposites.

Yes, there are members who are more aligned with one philosophy than the other. AOC is definitely a crazy commie and Rand Paul a mostly principled libertarian, but they aren’t the party leadership.

Well, in AOC’s case, not yet.

The rank-and-file Republicans are either too weak, too compromised or just plain in it for themselves to do anything but put up token resistance on the Road To Serfdom described by F.A. Hayek more than seventy years ago.

The leadership, however, of both parties are perfectly aligned and only pretend to fight in public. This is why Mitch McConnell makes the “mistakes” he makes.
In fact, it’s why Mitch McConnell is still in a leadership position in the GOP, to ensure that no major policy program is curtailed.

And we’ve known this implicitly for years. The GOP was the false and controlled opposition to the Democrats who set the agenda the people who stand behind them wanted them to set.

In the post-COVID world, we can see their plan very clearly and it is a frightening one.

The slow realization that we don’t really control Washington lay dormant until awakened by Ron Paul back in 2008. It led to the Trump revolution in 2016.

A lot of people understood that there was something terribly wrong in Washington but, like Trump, didn’t realize just how bad things were.

There was a certain naivete in both the Bernie Bros on the left and the MAGA Dudes on the right. They both yearned for an America that gave them a fair shake, that didn’t pile burdens and guilt on them for being white or middle class or, worse, heterosexual.

I’ve talked to plenty of liberals who aren’t godless, gun-hating tyrants. They are just as appalled by what’s happening as the conservatives are.

Both groups believed that the system of America still, at its core, worked in their favor. That if they just picked a champion and made their voices loud enough the pols in D.C. would have to listen to them.

The Bernie Bros were disenfranchised in 2016 and, likely, in 2020 as well. And the MAGA Dudes just learned the same lesson on a much grander scale.

And that was my fervent hope for the 2020 election. Because The Club in D.C. told us how they were going to steal the election. They told us Trump would be ‘fumigated’ from the White House, in the words of Nancy Pelosi.

The only way to beat that would be a landslide of such immense proportions that it would force the cheating out into the open, exposing the lies.

That’s exactly what happened. Anyone with any shred of intellectual integrity or a basic understanding of math knows this. And yet, they stole the election anyway.

And this, to me, has created the perfect moment of transition for America.

Because this has now collapsed the false dyad of Red vs. Blue in the minds of millions. A country that has never been more divided is also now strangely united in their contempt for not only our government but also the media which openly supports its most brazen lies.

There are still plenty of people on the left side of the political spectrum who think that their “winning” this election will bring them everything they ever wanted.

They think, if the screeching on Twitter is to be believed, that a complete repudiation of Trumpism will usher in a new golden age of enlightened embracing of trannies, and the final dispersal of the vestiges of community and family in America.

And in the short run they may be completely right.

By the same token, however, the collapse of Red vs. Blue means the wholesale rejection of the GOP by tens of millions of Trump supporters.

That destroys the myth they are the only viable opposition to the insanity of the Democrats.

Seventy-five million Trump voters were just cured of their Stockholm Syndrome to their GOP captors.

This was a necessary illusion which needed to be dispelled and could only be torn down with the GOP’s betrayal of Trump when the country’s future was on the line.

It paves the way for a new American political landscape, one bereft of the false hope of a GOP savior at the next election. The GOP only ever acted as the relief valve for the anguish and frustration of two generations of nominally conservative Americans to pour their money into and in doing so feed The Club even more power.

Trump brought the party Hispanics and Black people in record numbers. He appealed to their better angels and desire for an honest job and a stable community to raise their families in.

The Democrats will hold a sham impeachment trial with the Republicans’ consent to reinforce their dominance over the people — the Deplorables, MAGA Dudes and Bernie Bros who made the mistake of thinking they had hope of getting off their reservation.

For better or worse Trump blew apart the lie that Republicans stood for freedom and the Democrats for socialism. They both just believe in power, theirs.

Now that Red Vs. Blue has collapsed it’s revealed the far more sinister and dangerous reality that America is now the land of Us vs. Them.

And that is a fight Politics-As-Usual cannot settle.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Democrats Unveil Bill That Would Limit Section 230 Protections
Democrats Big Tech Section 230 Amy Klobuchar Mazie Hirono Mark Warner Getty

(Photo by Stefani Reynolds - Pool/Getty Images)

Daily Caller News Foundation logo

COLBY MCCOYCONTRIBUTOR
February 05, 20212:10 PM ET

Democrats have unveiled a bill that would limit Section 230 liability shields for social media companies, Reuters reported.

The SAFE Tech Act, proposed by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Mazie Hirono and Mark Warner, aims to hold social media companies accountable such as Alphabet Inc’s Google, Twitter and Facebook for “enabling cyber-stalking, targeted harassment, and discrimination on their platforms,” according to a statement, Reuters reported.

Section 230 was first enacted in 1996 as part of a law called the Communications Decency Act, which was devised to provide immunity to social media platforms by making them not liable for content posted to their platforms. Also, Section 230 gives social media full control to moderate content on their platforms as they see fit without any form of federal oversight.

Republicans have made previous efforts to amend Section 230 while former President Trump sought to have it abolished altogether, the Daily Caller reported.

On Jan. 9, Ted Cruz tweeted that “Big Tech’s PURGE, censorship & abuse of power is absurd & profoundly dangerous,” further echoing sentiments held by Republicans over social media censorship.
1612721980687.png

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah took a stab at amending Section 230 in December 2020, introducing the Promoting Responsibility Over Moderation In the Social Media Environment Act, or PROMISE Act, which would require social media companies to disclose their content moderation policies and bars specific types of content from being removed, the Daily Caller reported.

The Democrats’ SAFE Tech Act would take a different approach to Big Tech by removing protections for paid content and ads as well as ensuring social media platforms do not impair civil rights laws and wrongful-death actions, Reuters reported.

“We need to be asking more from big tech companies, not less,” Klobuchar said in a statement, Reuters reported. “Holding these platforms accountable for ads and content that can lead to real-world harm is critical, and this legislation will do just that.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Jason Miller says Trump might launch his own social media network called ‘Trumper’…
Posted by Kane on February 7, 2021 10:25 am



Jason Miller, a senior adviser to former President Donald Trump, revealed on Saturday that the former president is considering launching his own social media platform in the not-too-distant future.

The news, which comes after Trump was banned permanently from Twitter and indefinitely from Facebook, came during Miller’s appearance on Breitbart News Saturday.

“I would expect that we will see the president reemerge on social media,” Miller said when asked what Trump plans to do next. “Whether that’s joining an existing platform or creating his new platform, there are a number of different options and a number of different meetings that they’ve been having on that front. Nothing is imminent on that.”

Asked about what a Trump social network—called something like “Trumper” or something similar—would look like, Miller was circumspect but said the former president is considering both joining existing new platforms or launching his own competitor to the tech giants in Silicon Valley.

“All options are on the table. A number of things are being discussed. Stay tuned there because you know he’s going to be back on social media. We’re just kind of figuring out which avenue makes the most sense.”

As of mid-January before Democrat President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told NBC News that the social network has “no plans” to lift Trump’s ban anytime soon.

SOURCE — BREITBART
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

These Interesting Times
From a torrent of executive orders to federal law enforcement agents acting like East Germans, the satirists are having a hard time keeping up.

By Roger Kimball
RogerKimball-160x160.jpg

February 6, 2021

Iam told the exhortation “May you live in interesting times” is not really an old Chinese curse. But it might as well be. If you’ve noticed a new spring in Xi Jinping’s step lately, it’s because he sees all the slots coming up roses for China. Europe’s cozying up nicely. And the ascension of his preferred candidate, Joe Biden, to the U.S. presidency has him rubbing his hands together in glee. It is, as Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) noted, a dangerous eventuality.

There’s a lot to be said about China’s rampant expansion. It seems to be the one country really to have prospered through—or maybe because of—the Wuhan Flu, a term Joe Biden doesn’t want us to use. But that’s where the virus started and it wouldn’t do to call Ebola “Ebola,” a tributary of the Congo River, and not name this impressive Chinese export after the city that’s home to the level-4 military biological research lab where it escaped or, just possibly, was pushed.
But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about were these interesting times we are living in.

A lot has changed in just a couple of months. The Wuhan Flu, or, rather, our heavy-handed response to it, is part of that story. As I have observed on multiple occasions, the panic and hysteria over this new respiratory virus, carefully and assiduously fanned by the Big Nurse health industry, aided and abetted by politicians and bureaucrats drunk with power, should someday provide a new chapter for Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The chief irony about the entire episode is that the petty tyrants screaming at people to wear masks—or two or three masks—and to quiver under their beds alone at home, do so while invoking “science,” as if the “science were settled” about how best to deal with this new cold virus that is highly contagious but deadly to a tiny portion of the population. And just try pointing out contrary evidence that challenges the Narrative and bang!instant cancellation.

But I still digress. Joe Biden may have woken up in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because The Swamp rigged the election for him (even Time magazine admits that now), he may be in a sad state of cognitive decline, but he is surrounded by people who are panting eagerly to install the woke, politically correct oligarchy that they had to shelve in 2016 when Donald Trump unaccountably won the presidency. Hillary Clinton would have done a lot of what is being done now in Sleepy Joe’s name had she managed to do then what Biden’s handlers, with the conspicuous help of the media, social and the other sort, not to mention an increasingly woke corporate America, did this time around. We would have had the climate hysteria, the obeisance to China, the attack on the American energy industry, the erosion of America’s southern border, and various other globalist, America-last policies.

But I wonder whether it would have all been quite so sinister. As I write, Dear Leader Biden has emitted nearly 50 executive orders. Only a few weeks into his tenure, in other words, he has demonstrated that he is prepared to rule by diktat, a mode of governance appropriate to a dictator, not the leader of a constitutional republic.

As Julie Kelly and others have shown, his FBI is operating like the East German Stasi in the bad old days, ferreting out political dissent, encouraging friends and neighbors to disclose wrongthink, criminalizing political differences. Where will it end? The Babylon Bee, the delicious satirical web site, is having a hard time keeping up. When I heard New York Times had called on Biden to appoint a “reality czar” and in effect criminalize “misinformation”—i.e., differences of opinion—I thought at first it must be the Bee not our former paper of record. But no.

Nor was it satire that the Justice Department had arrested a 31-year-old chap who, back in 2016, had pseudonymously mounted a pro-Trump Twitter campaign advising people to vote for Hillary by text. (Now that we have widespread mail-in voting, who knows? Maybe voting by text will be next—so long, that is, as you vote for the right—by which I mean, the leftmost—candidate.)

Everywhere one turns, Donald Trump, the most astonishingly successful president in my lifetime, is being demonized, canceled, turned into a nonperson. He won some 74 to 75 million votes, but the swamp has pronounced a damnatio memoriae upon him and his entire circle. Some commentators have said he should be denied Secret Service protection and just this weekend Dear Leader Biden suggested that he be excluded from the intelligence briefings accorded to former presidents because of Trump’s “erratic behavior.” He might, quoth the DLB, “slip and say something.”

The great 19th-century Russian journalist Alexander Herzen captured a lot about our situation in “Omnia Mea Mecum Porto,” an 1850 essay from his book From the Other Shore. The most famous part of the essay was catapulted to celebrity by the novelist Martin Amis. “The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul,” Herzen wrote. “But what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of the other much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.”

I rather doubt that for anyone not part of the nomenklatura there is much to “gladden rather than trouble the soul” about what is happening now. But the idea that the passing of the old order—the order, that is to say, of a democratic republic answerable to the people and committed to the principles of individual liberty and limited government—will involve a long night and much chaos is patent for anyone with eyes to see
.
Even more prescient was Herzen’s observation about the persistence of certain old forms of social life under the new dispensation. The structures, the names are the same; their meaning has changed utterly. “At first sight,” Herzen notes, “there is much that is still normal; things run smoothly, judges judge, the churches are open, the stock exchange hums with activity, armies manoeuvre, palaces blaze with light, but the soul of life has fled, everyone is uneasy at heart, death is at our elbow, and, in reality, nothing goes well. In reality, there is no church, no army, no government, no judiciary. Everything has become the police.”

I wish he were mistaken.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Our Nation Looks More Like the CCP Than the USA
by Jared Dyson
February 7, 2021

China, Tucker Carlson, USA, America, Freedom, Golden Shield Project,

Charlotte, NC — Near the end of the week, Tucker Carlson shared with everyone his exclusive findings of how Bank of America was targeting anyone that could have been in DC for the Capitol riots. In his report, Carlson shared that the banking giant had specifically targeted a profile of individuals without that person’s knowledge and provided that information to federal law enforcement.

Yes, one of the largest financial institutions in the country acted as an intelligence agency, collecting data on Americans without their knowledge and willingly provided it to federal law enforcement. It could be the largest willful invasion of privacy by a corporation in US history.

While Bank of America took silent action and tried to hide it, many others did not. Ahead of the day, many companies decided to refuse to do business with anyone in and around DC because of the planned rally. It was an effort to keep Trump supporters away but also highlights the bigger concern here.

Carlson shared an article from The New York Times that described how encrypted messaging apps were a potential concern for misinformation and should probably be stopped to prevent criminals from using them. In other words, the big advocacy is that no one deserves any privacy anymore.

That is certainly what the Democrats were advocating for after the chaos at the Capitol. They specifically asked hotel and car rental chains to help identify those who may have participated in the riots.

You better believe they already obtained the names of passengers on all airline flights in and out of DC during that time too.

Now a lot of people will jump on this and say that this is a major issue for conservatives. I’m certainly not denying that fact. It is a direct attack on conservatives.

It’s more than just an attack on conservatives, however. This is a major issue that should be of concern for any American.

This goes beyond any collection of phone records, which became a big issue under the Obama administration in 2015. That was logging phone calls and interactions of Americans without their knowledge and was conducted by the NSA. This is the direct monitoring of American financial transactions and whereabouts by private companies, at the encouragement of the federal government.

Perhaps you cannot see the issue, but this is exactly what happens in communism.

In 2018, The Atlantic ran a story that described just these types of events in China. It described how you were monitored by private businesses and the government and were rated based on your trustworthiness. That “citizen score” would allow you to receive perks. That is, if you were a more compliant citizen.

If you bucked the system, well that could land you in trouble. It could prevent you from travel, shopping, social media, or more. That sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it?

This is not solely Democrats that are pushing forward with this mission, but many Republicans are supporting it too. Freedoms that we once enjoyed are slowly being stripped away in the favor of “public health” and “safety.”

Democrats will do nothing to stop the movement toward this massive government surveillance program. It would not surprise me that they do not enact something similar to the Golden Shield Project from China as described above. They have no desire to maintain freedom after all.

So sure, while it’s specifically targeting conservatives right now, it should be a concern for all Americans. Are we simply willing to give up our freedoms in favor of our government acting like communists? That simply cannot be the case.

Freedom in the United States is too fragile at this moment. While today we may make the argument that we are fighting for conservative values, we are actually fighting for all Americans.

I think we all realize that our freedom is only going to come under more attacks in the Biden Administration. Perhaps it is just one executive order away from being eliminated altogether.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Senator Marco Rubio Introduces Bill to Suspend Gun Rights of Anyone Who Has Ever Been "Investigated" for Domestic Terrorism

ERIC STRIKER • FEBRUARY 7, 2021


Republican lawmaker Marco Rubio has reintroduced legislation that seeks to suspend the Second Amendment rights of any person who has been investigated for “terrorism” related offenses within 10 years of attempting a gun purchase.

The Senate bill, named the Terror Intelligence Improvement Act, was reentered last week in hopes of exploiting the hysteria surrounding the January 6th Capitol protests. The law intends to violate the civil liberties of American citizens who are not charged or convicted of a crime if somebody is deemed politically dangerous.

If passed, the law will grant the FBI and DNI the authority to draw up lists of US citizens arbitrarily labeled “domestic terrorists” and flag them during background checks. Those placed on the new watch list could be registered based solely on suspicion, even if an investigation fails to find evidence of criminal or “terrorist” wrongdoing. Federal courts that have examined the FBI’s various “terrorist watch lists” uncovered that the Bureau regularly places law-abiding citizens on them because they don’t like who they are or their political views.

While Rubio’s bill does provide optional redress for those targeted to obtain counsel and fight their designation, it would require individuals not charged or convicted of a crime to have to spend enormous amounts of money and time and gamble on getting a judge that upholds the Constitution just so they can exercise their gun rights.

As ongoing challenges to comparatively weaker state red flag law abuses show, challenging such decisions or even figuring out how they’re made is like pulling teeth.

The mixed record attorneys have had in combating the excesses of the Patriot Act since 2001 show that this mitigation option will largely be ignored by judges and those listed. While Muslim victims of federal surveillance and harassment power can sometimes count on the ACLU and others to defend their rights, said groups make it a point to refuse service to ordinary white people who have their civil liberties trampled.

The law’s threshold for being put on the list is low. Under Rubio’s legislation, being “investigated” for “domestic terrorism” — a vaguely interpreted offense mainly defined by partisan journalists and NGOs — which potentially millions of non-leftist Americans could be subjected to today, would nullify your ability to purchase a firearm.

Reporting done by Tucker Carlson Tonight recently revealed that the FBI collected the bank records of hundreds of people who traveled or made purchases in Washington DC on 1/6 without a warrant. A hotel worker who had attended the Trump rally near the Capitol but did not enter the building was investigated by the FBI, even though they had no probable cause to do so. The FBI would have the authority to put the aforementioned on this new list, without any meaningful checks and balances.

Rubio’s brazen attack on the Second Amendment is a testament to the organizational decline of the National Rifle Association. In 2015, Senator Rubio, who at the time had Presidential ambitions, led the fight against Senate Democrats when they tried to pass an almost identical bill.

Today, Rubio somehow maintains an A+ rating on the NRA’s website despite being a leading advocate for federal red flag laws and now. political blacklists that will disproportionately harm his own voters.

Laws like the Terror Intelligence Improvement Act are clogging up the Congressional agenda. Support for a dirty war against millions of red state Americans is bipartisan.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Supreme Court to determine if police can enter a house and take guns without obtaining a warrant
Posted by: Scott A. Davis|February 7, 2021 |CategoriesFeatured, Must Reads
Share:
WASHINGTON, DC – In a case that could have wide-ranging effects on policing in America, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments next month to decide if police can make warrantless searches of a private residence under the “community caretaking” doctrine.

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects citizens from warrantless searches as one of America’s basic rights.

Before a police officer or other government official can enter a private home, they must show a judge probable cause that an item is present and that a crime has been committed.

If the judge finds there is sufficient probable cause, a search warrant is issued.
There are widely-accepted exceptions, called “exigent circumstance,” for emergency situations.

These exigent circumstances involved protection of life and evidence. If an officer sees suspects destroying evidence through a window, he can enter the home to stop the destruction.

Also, if an officer sees someone having a heart attack, the officer can enter the home to render aid.

Other than these exigent circumstances, the courts have also defined a “community caretaking” doctrine to the Fourth Amendment when it comes to policing.

In the Supreme Court case of Cady v. Dombrowski, the court held that under certain circumstances, the police may search a motor vehicle without first obtaining a warrant if they are engaged in a “community caretaking” function, meaning a duty wholly divorced from the investigation of a crime or the enforcement of criminal laws.

The Supreme Court said the “community protection” exception did not violate the Fourth Amendment because:

“(Police perform) community custody functions, totally separate from detection, investigation or acquisition. evidence relating to the violation of a criminal law.”

The “community caretaking” doctrine was not limited by the court to emergency situations like exigent circumstances are. If the officer has “reasonable” cause to believe there is a danger to the community, a warrantless search is permissible.

The Constitutional Accountability Center pointed out that the ruling in Cady v. Dombrowski has been widely interpreted by lower courts to allow room for the application of the exception in a private home:

“The Court made clear, however, that the exception applied only to motor vehicles and did not extend to people’s homes. Despite the clear line drawn by the Court, numerous lower courts have extended the community caretaking exception to allow warrantless entries into, and seizures from, people’s homes.”

In the case of Caniglia v. Strom, the Supreme Court is considering whether the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement should extend to the home. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments next month.

The case involves Cranston, Rhode Island residents Mr. and Mrs. Caniglia. The couple was arguing inside their residence, and the husband put an unloaded handgun on the kitchen table and told his wife, “shoot me now and finish this.”

The wife called the police, and when they arrived, the police convinced the husband to go to the hospital by ambulance for a crisis evaluation. The wife then told police that her husband kept two guns in the home.

Police conducted a warrantless search of the home.

The wife’s consent was invalid because the officers falsely told her that the husband had already consented to the seizure of the guns. Police located and seized both firearms.

The officers had told the wife that her husband could pick up the firearms at the police station. However, when Mr. Caniglia tried to pick up the weapons, he was told it was department policy not to return weapons without a court order.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against the Cranston Police Department, challenging the seizure of the firearms without a warrant and the department’s policy against returning weapons without a court order.

The federal district court agreed the department policy was unconstitutional but ruled the warrantless search and seizure was lawful under the “community caretaking” exception. The Federal Court of Appeals upheld the ruling.

In siding with police, the Federal Court of Appeals said:

“At its core, the doctrine of community protection is designed to give police the flexibility to take appropriate action when unforeseen circumstances present a transient risk that requires immediate attention.

“Understanding the main object of the doctrine leads inexorably to the conclusion that it should not be limited to the context of the motor vehicle. Threats to individual and community safety are not limited to highways.”


Mr. Canigilia hired Attorney Shay Dvoretzy of the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom as private counsel and brought the case to the Supreme Court. The court agreed to hear the case to decide whether the ‘community caretaking” exception can be applied to the warrantless search of a person’s home.

The ACLU of Rhode Island filed a “friend of the court” brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in the case, saying:

“It (The court case) raises significant issues concerning the scope of Fourth Amendment protections and police warrantless searches of the home.”

Their brief also argued that an unfavorable ruling by the court would give police too much authority:

“give police free rein to enter the home without probable cause or a warrant, whenever they think it is ‘reasonable’ to do so.”

The ACLU argued in the brief that there were only two acceptable exceptions to the Fourth Amendment protection from warrantless searches:

“(The Supreme Court) has held that warrantless home entry is constitutional in just two narrow settings: consent of an occupant or exigent circumstances.

“The [lower] courts have taken a doctrine developed for the reduced expectation of privacy associated with impounded vehicles, and applied it to the home, the apex of privacy, without justification.”


In a brief filed by the respondents, Attorney Marc DeSisto wrote:

“Courts routinely allow officers to enter a residence without a warrant if the circumstances are dire and the officers’ actions are both limited and based on sound police procedure.

“Even the few decisions that have declined the application of the community caretaking doctrine to private property recognize that police officers can—and should—respond to urgent situations in the home involving the potential for violence or injury without being required to obtain a warrant.”


The brief said that the argument is especially true if there are no criminal consequences to the search:

“Numerous courts have allowed warrantless entry to keep the peace, some under the name of ‘community caretaking’ and several employing the ‘exigent circumstances’ or ‘emergency aid’ exceptions. Neither of the latter two exceptions precisely fit the unique circumstances of this case, but it is the legal theory, and not the nomenclature, that must carry the day.”

The brief said that there is no good reason to limit the “community caretaking” standard to automobiles because the issue was not whether the firearm in Cady was in a vehicle, but that the firearm was in an accessible location where it could pose an imminent danger. The brief wrote:

“While recognizing the difference between an automobile and a home, this Court did not limit Cady to automobile searches. Rather, it simply applied the community caretaking concept to the facts before it. The Fourth Amendment does not prohibit law enforcement officers from diffusing a volatile situation in a home to protect the residents or others.”

The respondents ended their brief by saying the lower court’s ruling did not give police unrestrained authority to conduct warrantless searches but gave them the ability to save lives:

“The First Circuit did not give law enforcement carte blanche to search a home for contraband or weapons. Rather, the First Circuit established clear, constitutionally sound guidelines for law enforcement given the unique facts of this case, where no criminal charges were brought and where a focused search and seizure ensured that a dangerous situation had been averted.”

The Supreme Court has scheduled case arguments for March 24, 2021. Law Enforcement Today will follow the case and provide updates as the court case develops.

[COMMENT: Eyes on the Court to see if it will protect and defend our individual rights from government abuse, or whether a new inscription must be placed across the lintel - "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."]
 
Last edited:

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Heartlanders vent as the hits keep coming
Flyover folk seethe with every new revelation of duplicity.
by Liberty Nation
February 7, 2021

Heartlanders vent as the hits keep coming


Article by Sarah Cowgill originally published at Liberty Nation.

Because the anger of middle Americans had yet to reach the point of no return Joe Biden doubled down on his ridiculous decrees by executive order. A national leftist publication admits to a coup between politicians and corporations to overthrow President Trump. One alt-left progressive cried wolf one too many times. This week, heartlanders reached a boiling point.

No One Can Say China Virus, Damnit!

Sitting at a record number of executive decrees — 28 executive orders, four substantive proclamations, ten presidential memoranda, and two letters rejoining both the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization, Mr. Biden snuck in another gem. No federal documents or employees can say “China Virus.” Yes, it is an earthshattering edict designed to make people embrace Asians instead of blaming them for COVID-19. Unlike the Spanish Flu or the Swine Flu, the alphabet influenzas aren’t xenophobic. So why would Americans blame China for the lingering pandemic?

Scientific American has a theory:
“Such new strains produced by reassortment are often seen initially in China and Southeast Asia because people, birds, and pigs live in close, often crowded conditions.”
Well, the wet market and an undercooked bat didn’t help either. Of course, no heartlander is going to comply with this specific demand from the Biden administration. “He sure is making the world a better place,” says William Myers of Beaver Falls, PA. And Liz Hubbell from the Land of Enchantment (New Mexico) offered, “China FREAKING Virus,” somewhat repeatedly.

One of America’s most treasured presidents, Ronald Reagan, and his intrepid transition team had a motto as they advanced on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: “When in doubt, undo.” Perhaps Mr. Biden is taking Reagan’s notion a wee bit too far while sharpie scrawling stack upon stack of executive edicts and rubbing half of the electorate the wrong way.

The Fix WAS In
Typical of a boastful winner, laying claim to orchestrating a victory involving the American voter’s absolute hoodwinking, one national publication decided it was time to tell folks how 2020 was stolen. Time Magazine lauds the efforts in a full-blown and detailed analysis:
“For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President.”
The piece is full of names and alliances that should frighten Americans into waking up – the arrogance of what is written is beyond the pale. They call what has been done “fortifying” democracy. Fly over folks are enraged. In Lakeland, WI, Tony Jordan claimed: “So it was all rigged, and Trump was right. We live in a banana republic.” And patriot Jennifer Jacobs McCarthy advises, “When corruption is so deeply ingrained that the corrupt have no problem admitting it publicly, knowing that nothing will happen to them.”
The gall of co-conspirators against this country’s people is appalling: The fate of the union is less secure today than ever, and the danger is within this nation’s borders.

This Girl Seems To Fib A Lot
The mouthy gal from Queens is on the keyboard tips of social media voyeurs’ fingers once again. This time, as in every time, for making up stories to get press coverage. Twitter trolls are dubbing her “Alexandria Ocasio Smollett” and hashtagging “AOC Lied.” This time the attacks are linked to her tearful accounts of being under siege during the breaching of the Capitol — When she wasn’t remotely on the same block for fear of being exposed to thousands of Trump supporters. She then had the audacity – after news coverage was stalling – to come up with: “You Almost Had Me Murdered,” blaming Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) for the capitol skirmish.

No one but her Kool-aid kid friends bought her schtick. Robyn Flinchum, North Carolina, advised the ever-censuring legislature: “Accusing a Senator of attempted murder when she wasn’t even there, she should be fired on the spot.” Arizonan Shawn Mascarenas went a tad further:
“She politicized a tragic event to perpetuate racism and got caught! How often does she lie about stuff like this and not get caught? The people she influences, based on her lies, create division. She needs to be held accountable for trying to push a narrative of racial insurrection now that she has been outed.”
But the left is in power, a cabal of interests snuck behind America’s back and basically derailed with impunity the will of the people, and until 2022, patriots and conservatives should perhaps hold their ground and not be “all in this together” with the left under these circumstances.
 

Lone_Hawk

Resident Spook

'See Something, Say Something Online Act' Punishes Big Tech for Not Snitching

ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN | 2.2.2021 9:30 AM

dpaphotostwo472250

(Chris Melzer/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom)

A new bill revitalizes the war on terror's favorite slogan in service of forcing tech companies to turn over more user data to the government. The "See Something, Say Something Online Act," introduced by Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) and co-sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas), is the latest attack on the federal communications law known as Section 230 as well as freedom of speech and online privacy.

The legislation says any interactive computer service provider—that means social media giants, small blogs, podcast hosting services, app stores, consumer review platforms, independent political forums, crowdfunding and Patreon-style sites, dating apps, newsletter services, and much more—will lose Section 230 protections if they fail to report any known user activity that might be deemed "suspicious."
"Suspicious" content is defined as any post, private message, comment, tag, transaction, or "any other user-generated content or transmission" that government officials later determine "commits, facilitates, incites, promotes, or otherwise assists the commission of a major crime." Major crimes are defined as anything involving violence, domestic, or international terrorism, or a "serious drug offense."

For each suspicious post, services must submit a Suspicious Transmission Activity Report (STAR) within 30 days, providing the user's name, location, and other identifying information, as well as any relevant metadata.

Those submitting the user surveillance reports would henceforth be barred from talking about or even acknowledging the existence of them. STARs would also be exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The bill, which comes amid renewed calls to stamp out domestic terrorism after the Capitol riot, is impressive in managing to be both completely invasive and utterly unconcerned with even appearing to be about protection, since the remedy—report within 30 days—would hardly help stop the commission of crimes. If we were talking about the Capitol riot, for instance, companies who still hadn't reported posts about it would be OK.
The bill would set up a massive new system of intense user monitoring and reporting that would lead to more perfectly innocent people getting booted from internet platforms. It would provide the government with a new tool to punish disfavored tech companies, and it would enlist all digital service providers to be cops in the failed post-9/11 war on terror and the drug war.

The bill states that some posts facilitating crimes require a STAR to be filed immediately, though it's vague about what these are (any "suspicious transmission that requires immediate attention" requires being reported immediately). The first example it provides is "an active sale or solicitation of sale of drugs."

A new federal agency would handle the suspicious activity reports—which could also be submitted by any individual, not just tech companies.

An easy, anonymous, online way for people to flag each other's social media accounts for the Department of Justice—what could go wrong? (Insert all the eye rolls here.)

Anyone with experience on social media now knows how hyperbolic people can be in describing threatening behavior, how gleeful folks can be in snitching on those they deem unenlightened, and how easy it can be for trolls, abusers, and other ne'er-do-wells to weaponize reporting systems against disliked individuals or marginalized groups. The See Something, Say Something Online Act would put this on steroids—all while ensuring such a glut of reports, including many that are frivolous, politically motivated, or otherwise disingenuous, that federal agents would still be searching for needles in haystacks.

Worse than simply overloading the system, it would make federal agents investigate all sorts of ordinary Americans for harmless comments. It also seems likely to make finding actual terrorists and violent criminals even more difficult.

________________________


View attachment 250682

Rest of document on website

@Dennis Olson , ya'll better start filling out STAR reports, or would it help for all of us to just self report?
 

Lone_Hawk

Resident Spook
Marsh,

Thank you for your efforts in posting all of these. We have go to Crazyville in just a couple of weeks...
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Guest Post by Mathematician Bobby Piton: Tech Giants Are Gaining Too Much Power

By Jim Hoft
Published February 8, 2021 at 12:35pm
Guest post by mathematician and financial planner Bobby Piton

Since 2001, when China entered the WTO, three months to the day after September 11th, the United States has accumulated trade deficits of over $10 trillion. $5 trillion is owed to China and $1 trillion is owed to Mexico.

Under this arrangement, the total debt of the United States has skyrocketed by over $13 trillion. Without this arrangement, we would have maintained a similar debt ratio of the economic activity seen in pre-9/11 2001.

We the People should AUDIT these trade and budgetary figures to be sure the goods & services represented in these debts did, in fact, change hands, the proper revenue/income recognition took place, and that the proper taxes have been paid. There is a very strong possibility that this issued debt did not have a corresponding benefit to the American people.

Since the 2008-2009 housing crisis, there has been about 25 companies that have gone from being worth less than $500 billion (half a trillion) to over $10 trillion dollar (or 20-fold!) in 12 years. What do all these companies have in common? They might be engaging in some of the following activities that Wall Street Firms are prohibited from partaking in:

  • Insider Trading – Knowing something the public does not know before the information is publicly disclosed and trading on it to profit at the expense of the public (Example; zombie Wall Street). These firms might be capturing non-public information from people using their search engines and “trading” on these searches to the detriment of the American Public.
  • Behaving as both an Agent/Principal. Issuing (raised the money for a company or other institutions) securities and were paid 4-7% of the amount raised and then sold these same securities to your clients and receive a commission. This is outlawed in the finance industry. (These similar activities might not be outlawed in the Big Tech space.)
  • These companies may or may not be collecting personal information about their clients and using it unfairly to undermine the very companies using their platforms. Imagine if you went to Vegas and played poker and the dealer was able to see all your cards in real time while you were playing and dealt cards to the other players based on what you held. Would you really still want to play Texas Hold ‘Em?
These companies sell your personal information to the highest bidder (Example: Who has figured out how to manipulate you most effectively.) These financial companies pay tech companies to gather psychological facts about their clients.

Supposedly they have mapped over 5,000 characteristics about most individuals and quite possibly know you better than you know yourself. This is worse than the NSA spying on you because at least with the NSA, they work to protect Americans and are sworn to adhere to the fourth amendment. The merger of Big Money and Big Tech are obsessed with using psychological data to enslave Americans to take on unnecessary debt to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t even know or might not even like.

We have been entrapped by psychographically-charged predatory lending on a national scale (A sort of debt diplomacy). Corrupt politicians and ideologically-obsessed government employees have sold out the average American to get their cut of these ill-gotten gains. Is this why Twitter, Google, Facebook (all occasionally funded by We the People’s intelligence apparatus) does not care if they trounce all over the US Constitution? The United States Constitution defines how We the People agree to be governed. These corrupt politicians possess both the weakest minds our society has ever created and obnoxious personalities typically reserved for a Jerry Springer show. This same ineptness is why We the People are being treated like farm animals. Implied mask mandates are being forced to breathe in our own bacteria, inhibiting up to 20-30% of the oxygen flow to our brains, and possibly damaging our lungs as well. Why haven’t we heard any studies about this potential damage to our bodies?

General Flynn, American Patriots, Trust Seekers, and thousands of other conservative accounts and sites (including myself) have been censored by unholy alliance of the oligarchs found in both Big Money and Big Tech.

Gateway Pundit was recently banned from Twitter after building a base of over 375,000 followers. I know from firsthand experience built a base of 130,000 and had 3,300,000 million impressions a day. Gateway Pundit had three times as many followers as me, so you can imagine how many people are being denied their ability to read their unique viewpoint. All this spells a breakdown of our key ingredient of a prosperous society, trust. These psychopaths that loaded us with debt ( I think we should haircut all debt of every person/institution that has its holdings in offshore trusts) to make up for the trillions stolen from the American Public. All these trillions which corporations made through the violations of our constitutional rights simply be taken back by freezing all equity markets to determine what is fair compensation to the American Public which funded this companies. (Keep in mind during WWI the markets closed for 6 months). Google, Facebook, Apple, and any other companies who used Intellectual Property that was paid for by US Taxpayers should be properly deluded, and every share should be journaled into a US Sovereign wealth fund for the benefit of the American People.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Ben Carson launching new think tank to reconcile divided Americans around 'cornerstone values'

In the hope of helping Americans to reconcile around the nation's "cornerstone values and principles," the former Hud secretary has launched a new think tank, the American Cornerstone Institute.

By Natalia Mittelstadt
Updated: February 8, 2021 - 9:53am

America's polarized society is like a married couple on the brink of divorce, Dr. Ben Carson believes.

"It's like a marriage, you know, people, they love each other," Carson said in an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. "They can't stand to be away from each other. But what about before they get divorced? They stopped talking, and next thing you know, their spouse is the devil incarnate ... and that's what's happened to us as a society, and we got to start talking to each other. "

The former Trump administration HUD secretary hasn't abandoned hope for national reconciliation — if only we can remember the ideals that brought us together in the first place and start talking to each other again.

"[We got to start talking to each other, said Carson. "We can work this out. We are not each other's enemies."

In the hope of helping Americans to reconcile around the nation's "cornerstone values and principles," Carson has launched a new think tank, the American Cornerstone Institute.

The nation needs to recover "things like our faith, things like liberty, things like community, things like life, foundational pillars," Carson said, "and watching those things melt away in our society is not something that I could do ... we can't just idly sit by and let that happen. There are common-sense principles that need to be applied to the problems that we are facing right now. And if we allow common sense and decency to once again reign supreme in our country, we will see the fruits of that very, very quickly."

For Carson, the divide in American society begins with the education system — a reality that has been exposed as never before as a result of the distance learning to which school systems across the country have resorted over the past year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through the window into public education that digital, at-home learning has afforded to parents, "we've been able to look into some of those classrooms, and see the kind of propaganda that's being put forth," Carson said. "It starts at a very young age."

And it starts with the wholesale revision of the story American schools tell students about their nation's history.

"[W]hen you destroy the real history, you destroy people's identity," said Carson.

"And when you destroy their identity, you destroy the basis of their belief system. And this is what we're finding ourselves in the midst of right now. We've got to change that."

The opening needed to begin that change, Carson suggests, lies in the decentralization and diversification of educational alternatives made possible by remote learning methods.

"One of the things that will help, ironically, is the fact that people can do distance learning now," said Carson. "And they can form groups. And they don't necessarily have to be stuck in a system where you just have people who are interested in propaganda and not in educating people. So we're going to find a way to utilize that, obviously, to our advantage."
 
Last edited:

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Our Animal Farm

The Left’s 1960s dream is America’s 2021 nightmare.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Vth441YH_400x400-160x160.jpeg

February 7, 2021

George Orwell published Animal Farm in August 1945, in the closing weeks of the Pacific War. Even then, most naïve supporters of the wartime Soviet-British-American alliance were no longer in denial about the contours of Moscow’s impending postwar communist aggression.

The short, allegorical novel’s human-like farm animals replay the transition of supposedly 1917 revolutionary Bolsheviks into cynical 1930s Stalinists. Thereby, they remind us that leftist totalitarianism inevitably becomes far worse than the supposed parasitical capitalists they once toppled.

Orwell saw that the desire for power stamps out all ideological pretenses. It creates an untouchable ruling clique central to all totalitarian movements. Beware, he warns, of the powerful who claim to help the helpless.

Something so far less violent, but no less bizarre and disturbing, now characterizes the American New New Left. It is completing its final Animal Farm metamorphosis as it finishes its long march through our cultural, economic, and social institutions. Leftists may talk of revolutionary transformation, but their agenda is to help friends, punish enemies, and to keep and expand power.

First, remember the 1960s and 1970s agendas of the once impotent, young, and supposedly idealistic leftist revolutionaries.

We were lectured 60 years ago that “free speech” preserves were needed on university campuses to be immune from all reactionary administrative censorship. Transparency and “truth” were the revolution’s brands.

The First Amendment was said by them to be sacred, even as the “free speech movement” transitioned to the “filthy speech movement.” Leftists sued to mainstream nudity in film. They wanted easy access to pornography. They mainstreamed crude profanity. The supposed right-wingers were repressed. They were the “control freaks” who sought to stop the further “liberation” of the common culture.

GettyImages-542382727-1030x556.jpg
Ullstein bild via Getty Images

In those days, the ACLU still defined the right of free expression as protecting the odious, whether the unhinged Nazis, the pathetic old-Left Communists, or nihilistic Weather Underground terrorists.

“Censorship” was a dirty word. It purportedly involved the religious bigots and medieval minds that in vain had tried to cancel ideological and cultural mavericks and geniuses from Lenny Bruce to Dalton Trumbo. “Banned in Boston” was a sign of cretinism. Only drunken “paranoids” like Joe McCarthy resorted to “blacklists.”

We were reminded that the inferior nuts tried to cancel the brilliant careers of their betters whom they disliked, or feared.

The Right supposedly had sunk into fluoride and “precious bodily fluid” paranoias, and “Who lost China?” conspiracy theories. Conservatives, the radicals lectured us, masked the poverty of their thinking by “red-baiting.” They talked as if “commies” and “insurrectionists” were around every corner—in hopes of militarizing the country, and using police and troops to intimidate the “people.”

Snooping, surveillance, wiretaps—all that and more was awful—the purported work of nutty J. Edgar Hoover. His flat-topped, wing-tipped “G-men” usually outnumbered Black Panthers, Weathermen, and SDS members at secret strategy sessions.

Hollywood went wild in the 1960s and 1970s by warning us about “them.”

Endless movies detailed the solo efforts of heroes, who were watched and threatened by the “government,” working hand in glove, of course, with either corporations or the “rich.” In films like “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Conversation,” or “Blowup,” we were warned of the nefarious powers of surveillance.

Fearing Russia was the mark of a conspiracist nut. In films like “The Russians are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” we were reminded that the paranoia about the Soviets was as deadly as the Soviets themselves, who were pleasant enough, not much different from us.

Students in the 1960s high schools were spoon-fed Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Brave New World, and other dystopian novels. Orwell and Huxley warned them of the dangers of a super-spy apparat, a one-party state that reorders a docile subservient population, and the combination of “science” with thought control—the sort of stuff that Nixon or Goldwater was no doubt plotting.

So better to be an individualist, the Left preached, a rebel at war with all orthodoxy and conformity, a “Rebel Without a Cause,” Holden Caulfield, or one of the good renegades in “The Wild Ones.” We were to worship James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Steve McQueen because they were “free,” “didn’t give a s—t,” and demolished “the Man’s” silly imposed “rules and regulations.” “Easy Rider” was the 1960’s bible.

On campus, professors began to drop F-bombs in class. They dressed like students, tore down hierarchies between student and teacher (“Just call me Mike”). Once staid academics now invited edgy campus speakers to blast America. In melodramatic fashion, they considered themselves perennially teaching from the barricades.

We were told that they were the frontline speakers of truth to power. These were the nonconformists who had defeated loyalty oaths. After all, they dated their students and joined radicals to storm the college president’s office. They preached a “do your thing” credo of letting professors pretty much say whatever they wished.

Reporters were either iconoclastic Gonzos or shoe-leather investigators on the scent of deep state overreach. They were obsessed with wrongdoing at the CIA and FBI. Politicians, of course, weren’t to be trusted—given the corporations who pulled their puppet strings.

The enemy of America, we were told, was the “big guys,” especially the international conglomerates like ITT with global reach. The corporationists refined the arts of the cartel, trust, and monopoly. “Small is beautiful” was the antithetical mantra.

Radical sons of the Left crusaded against “dirty money” and “the plutocratic rich” with their “concentration of wealth”—as if the Rockefellers or the Gettys posed existential threats to America by their abilities to insert huge amounts of cash to warp elections or to buy officials.

Generals were caricatured as caudillos, cigar choppers with shades, showy ribbons and bronze on their chests, and oversized hats and epaulets. We were warned they threatened us with a militarized police state.

The “revolving door” was a mortal sin, as the tentacles of the Pentagon octopus now squeezed out public money for bombs, rockets, and jets to fight needless wars. About every three weeks Ike’s farewell warning about the “military-industrial complex” was trotted out by liberal columnists to remind us of felonious corruption.

Civil and women’s rights were the twin pillars of the 1960s radicals. From Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X, the themes were for “white America” to live up to the ideals of their Constitution, to finally realize the “promises of the Declaration of Independence” and to treat people on the basis of the “content of their character” and not on “the color of their skin.” The problem was never 1776 or 1787, but those who had not yet fully met the Founders’ exceptional ideals.

A “color-blind society” was a ’60s sobriquet. Women strove to ensure girls had the same rights as boys, from leadership roles to sports.

The point of the 1960s, again we were taught, was to tear down the rules, the traditions and customs, the hierarchies of the old guys. The targets were supposedly the uptight, short-hair, square-tie, adult generation who grew up in the Depression, won World War II, and were fighting to defeat Cold War Soviet Union.

The good guys, the students, and the activists, if they only had power, were going to break up corporations, shame (or “eat”) the rich, and bring in young, hip politicians. Reformers like the younger Kennedy brothers, the John Kerry war hero-resisters, the Bay Area Dianne Feinsteins, and the hip Nancy Pelosis would disrupt the “status quo” of politics.

They would all push hard for assimilation and integration of the races, and the equality of the sexes in pursuit of universal equality of opportunity. The mantra of the 1960s and 1970s was “opportunity,” Remember the 1964 federal EEOC—the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

GettyImages-542877373-1030x556.jpg
Ullstein bild via Getty ImagesOur Nightmare, 2021

Fast forward a half-century. What did these now-late septuagenarians give America?

Yes, the downtrodden pigs, the exploited horses, and the victimized sheep finally did expel Farmer Jones from America’s Animal Farm.

But in his place, as Orwell predicted, revolutionary pigs began walking on two feet and absorbed all the levers of American cultural influence and power: the media, the bureaucracies, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, publishing, the academy, K-12 education, professional sports, and entertainment. And to them all, the revolutionaries added their past coarseness and 1960s-era by-any-means-necessary absolutism.

We are now finally witnessing the logical fruition of their radical utopia: Censorship, electronic surveillance, internal spying, monopolies, cartels, conspiracy theories, weaponization of the intelligence agencies, pouring billions of dollars into campaigns, changing voting laws by fiat, a woke revolutionary military, book banning, bleeding the First Amendment, canceling careers, blacklisting, separate-but-equal racial segregation and separatism.

Conspiracies? Now they brag of them in Time. Read their hubristic confessionals in “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”

Once upon a Time, radicals used to talk of a “secret history” in terms of the Pentagon Papers, or a “shadow campaign” in detailing Hollywood blacklisting. They are exactly what they once despised, with one key qualifier: Sixties crudity and venom are central to their metamorphosis.

Our left-wing American revolutionary cycle from the barricades to the boardroom was pretty quick—in the manner that the ideology of the Battleship Potemkin soon led to Stalin’s show trials, or Mao’s “long march” logically resulted in the Cultural Revolution. The credo, again, is that the noble ends of forced “equity” require any means necessary to achieve them.

The Left censors books in our schools, whether To Kill a Mockingbird or Tom Sawyer. It is the Left who organizes efforts to shout down campus speakers or even allows them to be roughed up.

The Left demands not free-speech areas anymore, but no-speech “safe spaces” and “theme houses”—euphemisms for racially segregated, “separate-but-equal” zones. “Microaggressions” are tantamount to thought crimes. The mere way we look, smile, or blink can indict us as counterrevolutionaries. Stalin’s Trotskyization of all incorrect names, statues, and commemoratives is the Left’s ideal, as they seek to relabel Old America in one fell swoop. No one is spared from the new racists, not Honest Abe, not Tom Jefferson, not you, not me.

For “teach-ins,” we now have indoctrination sessions. But the handlers are no longer long-haired 1960’s dreamy, sloppy, and incoherent mentors. They are disciplined, no-nonsense brain-washers.

The Left’s Russia is our new old bogeyman. Putin is the new “We will bury you” Khrushchev.

The Left spun conspiracy theories about computer pings in Trump Tower, and nefarious meetings of Trump’s campaign officials colluding with Russian agents.

CNN and MSNBC tell us that the whole plot was laid out in a bought dossier—as the fantasies of Christopher Steele’s canonical hired hit piece became the Left’s version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

No longer were we told that our toothpaste and water were making us sterile. Instead, the Duke Lacrosse team was emblematic of the return of epidemic 1930s-style racial rape. The Virginia frat boys routinely roughed up and had their way with girls. The racist Covington kids, on the National Mall no less, mocked and insulted a noble indigenous combat veteran. And Jussie Smollett fought off racist thugs while managing to hold his sandwich and cell phone, as he stumbled home with a racist rope around his neck, stained with iconic bleach. “Hands up, don’t shoot” should have been true, even if it wasn’t.

Assimilation and integration are not our goals. Instead, we are to ferret out “cultural appropriation” and the odious culture of “white supremacy” and “unearned privilege.” “All men are created equal. But some are more equal than others” is now posted on the electric barn wall.

Deprogramming 74 million “whites” and “Republicans” is the advice on the pages of the progressive Washington Post. Don’t like an idea? Then wash clean the polluted minds of those who embraced it.

The new and improved ACLU’s job is to encourage the suppression of conservative free speech. ACLU trains its handlers not to protect unfettered speech, but to spot “hate speech.”

To advocate burning or destroying a book is not some nightmare from Fahrenheit 451, but a woke way to “stop the hate.”

A new Orwellian phrase is “free speech is not free reach”—as leftists become the intellectual inheritors of the racists of the open-housing fights of the 1950s and 1960. The old racist boilerplate of apartment owners and realtors was “You can live anywhere you want, just not here.” The new hate mantra of Silicon Valley cartels is, “You can tweet or socially post anywhere you like—if you can manage to find a place.”

Surveillance and spying are now good. How else to ferret out “right-wingers,” “white supremacists,” and “insurrectionists”?

So the FBI and CIA have transmogrified into heroic agencies run by stalwart social activist fighters like John Brennan, the old Gus Hall supporter, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe. They cut to the quick to achieve social justice, without the messy give and take of Congress, or that albatross, the relic Constitution.

What a wonderful world they have created: Eavesdropping on the national security advisor, forging FISA documents, spying on American citizens, aiding one presidential candidate by surveilling another.

Finally, they can use their skills and surveillance to investigate and hound the “right” enemies, for the “right” causes.” The CIA and FBI always secretly wished to be beloved by the Left. Now they are deified.

And the military elite?

Militarization is now beautiful. The U.S. Army may become our People’s Revolutionary Army as generals sniff out counterrevolutionaries hidden deeply in their ranks. Maybe a cleansing purge or two is necessary, in the Soviet fashion.

Barb-wiring the capitol and stocking it with camouflaged troops send the message that the military is, at last, woke and in control of America’s central nervous system. Corporate profiteering for retired generals and admirals is a necessary amplifier of their critical work. How else to have the resources to spot new Mussolinis, Nazi tactics, Auschwitz caging, and the al-Qaeda-like terrorists among us?

Bank of America helps to find out which enemy of the people bought which coffee where. The financial heroes are not hip basement day traders taking down hedge funds by boomeranging them their own manipulative tactics, but Wall Street hedge fund traders, the holy wall between sober investment and Trumpian barbarians at the gate.

Could we have ever stopped the hate without the help of billions of dollars from Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros? Why break up monopolies and cartels when their profits pour into progressive wokeness? Only their warping of communication and knowledge retrieval correctly guides Americans to the “right” conclusions. Jeff Bezos’ net worth alone is as much as the combined GDP of Idaho and Alaska. But then again, we are to think he is far more valuable than two states full of bitter clingers, dregs, and deplorables.

The media? It is a Ministry of Truth. Informers and readers beg the Great Leader to let drop his favorite flavor of ice cream or the details of the Oval Office makeover. There is no need for censorship: the media are the censors. Whatever sinister idea a paranoid politician has for muzzling journalists, reporters themselves have already trumped it. Pravda is their model. Who can be disinterested when there is a war to be fought for diversity and equity, against climate change and white supremacy?

The revolutionary animals are now running the farm in a way that would be nightmarish even to Farmer Jones.

They won. They are now one with—but also far, far worse than—what they rebelled against.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows

The NYT's Taylor Lorenz falsely accuses a tech investor of using a slur after spending months trying to infiltrate and monitor a new app that allows free conversation.



New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz and Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen

A new and rapidly growing journalistic “beat” has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis of journalism.

I’ve written before about one particularly toxic strain of this authoritarian “reporting.” Teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN’s “media reporters” (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC’s “disinformation space unit” (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their “journalism” to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention). These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world’s loudest media companies when they do not.

Just as the NSA is obsessed with ensuring there be no place on earth where humans can communicate free of their spying eyes and ears, these journalistic hall monitors cannot abide the idea that there can be any place on the internet where people are free to speak in ways they do not approve. Like some creepy informant for a state security apparatus, they spend their days trolling the depths of chat rooms and 4Chan bulletin boards and sub-Reddit threads and private communications apps to find anyone — influential or obscure — who is saying something they believe should be forbidden, and then use the corporate megaphones they did not build and could not have built but have been handed in order to silence and destroy anyone who dissents from the orthodoxies of their corporate managers or challenges their information hegemony.

Oliver Darcy has built his CNN career by sitting around with Brian Stelter petulantly pointing to people breaking the rules on social media and demanding tech executives make the rule-breakers disappear. The little crew of tattletale millennials assembled by NBC — who refer to their twerpy work with the self-glorifying title of “working in the disinformation space”: as intrepid and hazardous as exposing corruption by repressive regimes or reporting from war zones — spend their dreary days scrolling through 4Chan boards to expose the offensive memes and bad words used by transgressive adolescents; they then pat themselves on the back for confronting dangerous power centers, even when it is nothing more trivial and bullying than doxxing the identities of powerless, obscure citizens.


But the worst of this triumvirate is the NYT’s tech reporters, due to influence and reach if no other reason. When Silicon Valley monopolies, publicly pressured by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other lawmakers, united to remove Parler from the internet, the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?” One reporter “confess[ed] that I am worried about Telegram. Other than private messaging, people love to use Telegram for group chats — up to 200,000 people can meet inside a Telegram chat room. That seems problematic.”

These examples of journalism being abused to demand censorship of spaces they cannot control are too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. And they are not confined to those three outlets. That far more robust censorship is urgently needed is now a virtual consensus in mainstream corporate journalism: it’s an animating cause for them.

"Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principles of journalism," complained Ultimate Establishment Journalism Maven Steve Coll, the Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a Staff Writer at The New Yorker. A New Yorker and Vox contributor who runs a major journalistic listserv appropriately called “Study Hall,” Kyle Chayka, has already begun shaming Substack for hosting writers he regards as unacceptable (Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss). A recent Guardian article warned that podcasts was one remaining area still insufficiently policed. ProPublica on Sunday did the same about Apple, and last month one of its reporters appeared on MSNBC to demand that Apple censor its podcast content as aggressively as Google’s YouTube now censors its video content.

Thus do we have the unimaginably warped dynamic in which U.S. journalists are not the defenders of free speech values but the primary crusaders to destroy them. They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous “disinformation.” And they do it from petty vindictiveness: they clearly get aroused — find otherwise-elusive purpose — by destroying people’s reputations and lives, no matter how powerless. Whatever the motive, corporate media employees whose company title is “journalist” are the primary activists against a free and open internet and the core values of free thought.
The profound pathologies driving all of this were on full display on Saturday night as the result of a reckless and self-humiliating smear campaign by one of The New York Times’ star tech reporters, Taylor Lorenz. She falsely and very publicly accused Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen of having used the “slur” word “retarded” during a discussion about the Reddit/GameStop uprising.

Lorenz lied. Andreessen never used that word. And rather than apologize and retract it, she justified her mistake by claiming it was a “male voice” that sounded like his, then locked her Twitter account as though she — rather than the person she falsely maligned — was the victim.

But the details of what happened are revealing. The discussion which Lorenz falsely described took place on a relatively new audio app called “Clubhouse,” an invitation-only platform intended to allow for private, free-ranging group conversations. It has become popular among Silicon Valley executives and various media personalities (I was invited onto the app a few months ago but never attended or participated in any discussions). But as CNBC noted this week, “as the app has grown, people of more diverse backgrounds have begun to join,” and it “has carved out a niche among Black users, who have innovated new ways for using it.” Its free-speech ethos has also made it increasingly popular in China as a means of avoiding repressive online constraints.

These private chats have often been infiltrated by journalists, sometimes by invitation and other times by deceit. These journalists attempt to monitor the discussions and then publish summaries. Often, the “reporting” consists of out-of-context statements designed to make the participants look bigoted, insensitive, or otherwise guilty of bad behavior. In other words, journalists, desperate for content, have flagged Clubhouse as a new frontier for their slimy work as voluntary hall monitors and speech police.

Fulfilling her ignoble duties there, Lorenz announced on Twitter that Andreessen had said a bad word. During the discussion of the “Reddit Revolution,” she claimed, he used the word “retarded.” She then upped her tattling game by not only including this allegation but also the names and photos of those who were in the room at the time — thus exposing those who were guilty of the crime of failing to object to Andreessen’s Bad Word:


Numerous Clubhouse participants, including Kmele Foster, immediately documented that Lorenz had lied. The moderator of the discussion, Nait Jones, said that “Marc never used that word.” What actually happened was that Felicia Horowitz, a different participant in the discussion, had “explained that the Redditors call themselves ‘retard revolution’” and that was the only mention of that word.

Rather than apologizing and retracting, Lorenz thanked Jones for “clarifying,” and then emphasized how hurtful it is to use that word. She deleted the original tweet without comment, and then — with the smear fully realized — locked her account.



Besides the fact that a New York Times reporter recklessly tried to destroy someone’s reputation, what is wrong with this episode? Everything.

The participants in Clubhouse have tried to block these tattletale reporters from eavesdropping on their private conversations precisely because they see themselves as Stasi agents whose function is to report people for expressing prohibited ideas even in private conservations. As Jones pointedly noted, “this is why people block” journalists: “because of this horseshit dishonesty.”

One reporter, Jessica Lessin, recently complained she was blocked by Andreessen from his Clubhouse discussions — as if she has the divine right to monitor people’s communications. And Lorenz herself has been obsessed with monitoring Clubhouse discussions in general and Andreessen in particular for months, mocking him just last week when she obtained a fake credential to enter:


Just take a second to ponder how infantile and despotic, in equal parts, all of this is. This NYT reporter used her platform to virtually jump out of her desk to run to the teacher and exclaim: he used the r word! This is what she tried for months to accomplish: to catch people in private communications using words that are prohibited or ideas that are banned to tell on them to the public. That she got it all wrong is arguably the least humiliating and pathetic aspect of all of this.

Beyond all this, what if he had used the word “retarded”? What would it mean? If someone uses that term maliciously, as a slur against others to mock their intellect, it is certainly reasonable to condemn that. Used with that intent and in that context, it is unnecessarily hurtful for people who suffer diseases of cognitive impairment.

But that is not remotely what happened here. Anyone who spent any time at all on the sub-Reddit thread of r/WallStreetBets knows that “retards” was the single most common term used by those who short-squeezed the hedge funds invested in the collapse of GameStop. It is virtually impossible to discuss the ethos of that subculture without using that term. This was one of their most popular battlecries:
“We can stay retarded longer than you can stay solvent.”
And the use of that term in the sub-Reddit was not just ubiquitous but fascinating: layered with multiple levels of irony and self-deprecation.

Sociologists could, and should, study how that term was deployed by those Redditors and what role it played in forming the community that enabled them to strike a blow against these hedge funds. It reflected their self-perceived place at the bottom of social hierarchies, expressed the irony that they as unsophisticated investors were defeating self-perceived financial wizards, and marked their culture and community as transgressive. Did some use it with malice? Maybe. But there was vast complexity to it.

To declare any discussion of that term off-limits — as Lorenz tried to do — is deeply anti-intellectual. To pretend that there is no difference in the use of that term by the Redditors and its discussion in Clubhouse on the one hand, and its malicious deployment as an insult to the cognitively disabled on the other, is dishonest in the extreme. To publicly tattle on adults who utter the term without any minimal attempt to understand or convey context and intent is malicious, disgusting and sociopathic.

(Long article. See website for rest of article.) The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Patriotic Service Members Must Quietly Resist Pentagon’s ‘Woke Stand-Down’…Your Day Will Come

by CD Media StaffFebruary 5, 20211822492
SHARE12
Service Members Must Quietly Resist Pentagon's 'Woke Stand...Your Day Will Come

Please Follow us on Gab, Parler, Minds, Telegram

What is happening in the American armed forces has nothing to do with patriotism, love of country, or even White supremacism or domestic terror.

It has to do with power and control for the Chinese Communist Party over the U.S. national security apparatus, by the CCP’s globalist enablers in the West.

What a prize – control of the greatest armed force in the world, ever known to man, comparable to the Roman legions of old, a dominant military force.

Now that dominant force is being turned to the service of evil.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered a “stand down” of the entire US military over the next 60 days in order for commanders to address “extremism” in its ranks, reported the New York Post.

Austin issued the order following a meeting about the issue with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, as well as service civilian leaders and service chiefs.

“It’s got to be a leadership issue down to the lowest levels, small unit leadership all the way up to him. So if you consider it a leadership issue, then maybe there will be some potential solutions there to allow us greater visibility,” press secretary John Kirby said, referencing his boss’ comments during the meeting.


Here’s a news flash for the illegitimate Secretary of Defense and his enabler General Milley — white supremacy and ‘right-wing’ domestic terror is not a problem in the U.S. military.

The problem we have today is a Marxist infiltration that is attempting to takeover from within. This is what is pushing the ‘critical race theory’ against alleged racism that doesn’t exist, except against white soldiers from military leadership.

If you want to focus on the threats we face during this stand-down, then focus on reality.

You can start by looking in the mirror.

This narrative you are spinning, that white soldiers, who love this country and have served her well, are a threat to the nation to which they swore a hallowed oath… to borrow a phrase your movement stole from Hitler…is a ‘big lie’.

Patriotic American military personnel need to weather the current storm…you will be needed in the future to rebuild what Austin and Milley are destroying as they violate their oath to America.

Our Marxist friends have been hiding for years. You should do the same. Bide your time. Play the game. Until you can rebuild our national security from the ground up in the future.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden Quietly Revokes Trump’s Ban On Chinese Communist Propaganda In Schools
biden
President Biden quietly revoked a Trump-era policy that compelled primary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions to disclose their relationships with Chinese Communist Party-funded Confucius Institutes.

The policy – “Establishing Requirement for Student and Exchange Visitor Program Certified Schools to Disclose Agreements with Confucius Institutes and Classrooms” – was proposed on December 31st, 2020.

“The rule would require colleges and K-12 schools that are certified to have foreign exchange programs to disclose any contracts, partnerships, or financial transactions from Confucius Institutes or Classrooms (the Confucius Institute offshoot for primary and secondary schools),” Axios noted.

And the Trump administration’s proposals were well-warranted: the well-funded, controversial operations disguise themselves as language and culture initiative despite being replete with “undisclosed ties to Chinese institutions, and conflicted loyalties,” Chinese state propaganda, and intellectual property theft, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

Records from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, however, reveal that Biden nixed the policy on January 26 – less than a week into his White House tenure.

“A spokesperson for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed that the policy was rescinded,” Campus Reform noted.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Fundamental Change: 52 Executive Orders and Actions Already Put into Place by Joe Biden
6,586
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 20: U.S. President Joe Biden prepares to sign a series of executive orders at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office just hours after his inauguration on January 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. Biden became the 46th president of the United States earlier today during the …
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
JOEL B. POLLAK8 Feb 20212,707

President Joe Biden campaigned on promises to govern by “consensus.” He devoted his Inaugural Address to “unity.” Yet he has issued more executive orders and actions in the first three weeks of his presidency than any president in U.S. history. As the Democrats prepare for the circus side show of impeachment focusing on the past, it’s interesting to look at what he’s already done to change the future.

Jan. 20
1. Memorandum: Regulatory review –
This executive action froze many of President Donald Trump’s pending regulatory changes, including a regulation to lower the cost of insulin and epinephrine, which the pharmaceutical industry had opposed.
2. Announcement: COVID-19 proposal – President Biden introduced his controversial $1.9 trillion plan for coronavirus relief, though over $1 trillion of funding from previous proposals approved under President Trump had not yet been spent,
3. Executive Action: Rejoining Paris Climate Agreement – President Biden announced that the U.S. was returning to the agreement, even though the treaty is unfair to the U.S, and the U.S. had lowered emissions after Trump withdrew.
4. Executive Order: ‘Equity’ as Policy Goal – Each federal agency must “assess whether, and to what extent, its programs and policies perpetuate systemic barriers to opportunities and benefits for people of color and other underserved groups.”
5. Executive Order: Ending Trump Travel Bans – The Biden administration referred to the Trump travel bans on terror-prone countries as “discriminatory,” suggesting that they were motivated by anti-Muslim and anti-African prejudice.
6. Executive Order: Federal Mask Mandate – President Biden required everyone to wear masks “in Federal buildings and on Federal lands” — an order that he and his family promptly violated that evening during Inaugural celebrations.
7. Executive Order: Organizing New COVID Response – President Biden reorganized existing coronavirus response within the White House, creating the position of “Coordinator of the COVID-19 Response and Counselor to the President.”
8. Executive Action: Staying in World Health Organization – President Biden wrote to the United Nations to declare that the U.S. would not be leaving the WHO, despite concerns about China’s dominance and WHO’s failure on COVID.
9. Executive Order: Revoking Trump Immigration Policies – President Biden revoked President Trump’s interior immigration enforcement policy, including an executive order in which Trump had taken on “sanctuary” cities and states.
10. Executive Order: Revoking Trump Regulatory Reforms – President Biden revoked several of President Trump’s executive orders that had been aimed at reducing the number of regulations and streamlining existing federal regulations.
11. Executive Order: Including Illegal Aliens in Census – President Biden directed the Census to count the population of each state “without regard to whether its residents are in lawful immigration status” in redrawing congressional districts.
12. Executive Order: Revoking the Keystone XL Pipeline – President Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. He also issued a moratorium on oil and gas leasing in ANWR and other federal lands as part of a regulatory review.
13. Executive Order: Imposing Transgender Agenda on Women’s Sports – The president declared: “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.”
14. Executive Action: Memorandum Promoting More Regulations – The Biden administration called for regulatory review to “ensure that regulatory review serves as a tool to affirmatively promote regulations” rather than discourage them.
15. Executive Order: Ethics Pledge Restricting Lobbying – Though senior members of the administration were deeply involved in lobbying, the pledge restricted administration staff from lobbying for a period of time after they leave.
16. Executive Order: Ending Border Wall Construction – President Biden declared: “It shall be the policy of my Administration that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall.”
17. Executive Action: Pausing Student Loan Payments – President Biden continued a pause on student loan repayments that President Trump enacted during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as shutdowns kept people from working.
18. Executive Action: Memorandum Deferring Deportation for Liberians – President Biden allowed Liberians who fled civil war in their country to stay in the U.S., though the war ended long ago. President Trump had also extended this status.
19. Executive Action: Memorandum Preserving DACA – President Biden reversed President Trump’s policy, which had declared Obama’s unilateral Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals to be a usurpation of Congress’s legislative power.
Jan. 21
20. Executive Order: Mask-wearing on Domestic Transportation –
President Biden expanded the mask mandate to forms of domestic transportation that cross state lines, including commercial air travel (where it was mandatory anyway).
21. Executive Order: Plan for More Coronavirus Therapies – In what was largely a reprise of existing policy under President Trump, President Biden ordered the federal government to investigate the best options for treating coronavirus.
22. Executive Order: ‘Data-driven Response’ to COVID – President Biden directed federal agencies to gather data on coronavirus, which they were doing already, but now led by the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator.
23. Executive Action: Memorandum on Federal Funding to National Guard for COVID – President Biden directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse 100% of the cost to states of using the National Guard in COVID.
24. Executive Order: Supplies for Fighting COVID Through Defense Production Act – President Biden ordered the federal government to review existing medical stockpiles and fill in the gaps by using the Defense Production Act.
25. Executive Order: Requiring ‘Equity’ in Coronavirus Relief and Response – President Biden created the “COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force” to make sure that coronavirus relief and intervention helped promote the goal of “equity.”
26. Executive Order: Creating Conditions for Schools to Reopen – President Biden declared his policy was ” to help create the conditions for safe, in-person learning as quickly as possible,” though schools in many major cities remain closed.
27. Executive Order: Promoting COVID Safety in the Workplace – President Biden directed the Secretary of Labor to ” use Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) enforcement to promote COVID safety in the workplace.
28. Executive Action: Memorandum to Strengthen Global Response to Pandemic – President Biden declared the U.S. would work with international partners and institutions on COVID, revoking sanctions against rogue regimes if necessary.


Part 1of 2
 
Top