Category: Rights

Dangerous, Threatening Rhetoric is the Tactic of Tyrants

Only tyrants threaten the use of force against their own people. On Wednesday, President Biden remarked,  “If you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

This is reminiscent of California’s infamous Chinese-spy-bedding Congressman, Eric Swalwell’s threats via Twitter back in 2018, when he said about a hypothetical war against gun owners, “And it would be a short war my friend. The government has nukes….”

Both references to nuclear weapons is designed to do one thing: to intimidate America’s  armed populace.

 

Drilling down, the core question is why do these politicians distrust the people with the arms the Constitution guarantees their right to keep and bear? What are they doing, or planning, that makes civilian disarmament a priority? If civilian gun ownership isn’t a threat, why are lawful gun owners constantly conflated with criminals, scapegoated for crimes they didn’t commit, and their rights under incessant, incremental attack?

The reason is the power of an armed civilian populace is not to be underestimated, and they know it.

All men have the potential to be tyrants. As Aristotle warned . . .

The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another — and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men — three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless.

Wednesday’s speech was a prime example of attempts to humiliate, foment mistrust, and lay the foundation for plans to render popular action ineffective, just as Aristotle described. Biden’s ham-handed remarks about the government’s arsenal of F15s and nuclear weapons were intended to mock and humiliate anyone who believes she is free citizen, not a subject. Anyone who believes her life if worth defending against those who wish her harm. Anyone who subscribes to the historic values enshrined in our Constitution.

The second tactic was intimidation, the use of divisive language, stoking fear and mistrust amongst our fellow citizens by scapegoating gun owners. He all but blamed us for higher crime rates rather than looking at other, more politically inconvenient factors such as defunding, demonizing, and demoralizing police forces throughout the nation.

Biden tried to stoke fear of modern sporting rifles, of which there are about 20 million in common use in the United States. Attempting to ban them over arbitrary, mostly cosmetic features defies all logic. If it wasn’t so clearly tyrannical, it would almost be humorous.

Finally, Aristotle recognized that tyrants desire to render their subjects incapable of acting. In Biden’s case, through civilian disarmament. How would one actually accomplish this? Enter Biden’s ATF Director nominee and current gun control lobbyist, David Chipman. The man refused to identify what constitutes and “assault weapon” because he knows it will be far more convenient to let that definition be whatever the tyrants want or need it to be.

In the end, Biden’s speech was embarrassing and his empty threats pathetic. America’s gun owners will not be intimidated. If gun-grabbing politicians didn’t fear the people, they wouldn’t spend so much time, energy, resources, and linguistic wrangling attacking Second Amendment rights.

We rest easy knowing our constitutional foundations, and the pre-existing rights codified therein, have brought us to this. Not to disappoint the President, but we know that the Supreme Court has already ruled that we have an individual right to possess arms in common use. That’s a feature, not a bug as this very moment was thoughtfully crafted and designed by the Framers. Our duty and responsibility is to uphold the Constitution.

 

F-15S & NUCLEAR WEAPONS: BIDEN SHRUGS OFF 2A IN GUN CONTROL SPEECH

Just over a week before the country’s Independence Day celebrations, President Biden delivered a speech on gun control in which he ridiculed the meaning, feasibility, and intent of the Second Amendment.

In an event meant to be the kickoff for another round of anti-gun legislation and executive actions for an Administration just 155 days in the White House, Biden tried to frame the Constitutional gun rights argument to justify his proposed efforts.

“The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn’t buy a cannon,” he said.

While the first part, about the Amendment “limiting the type of people,” is somewhat true– for example, the gun rights of enslaved and in some cases even freed blacks were often denied in the Southern States from the earliest days of the Constitution despite the Second Amendment– Biden fails the fact check on cannon ownership. As we have covered before, anyone with the desire and extra cash could acquire their own battery of fully functional cannon without any government paperwork or permission until 1968. 

With that being said, modern breechloading artillery is still available in the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave,” provided it is registered with the federal government and properly taxed. Still, legacy artillery systems such as muzzleloading black powder field guns, do not require tax stamps.

Biden also went further into the woods against what the Second Amendment protects, arguing the enumerated right had something to do with hunting, although many in the gun rights community point out that Washington didn’t cross the Delaware to get to a duck blind.

“No one needs to have a weapon that can fire over 30, 40, 50, even up to 100 rounds unless you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests or something,” he said, although magazine capacity restrictions have only been adopted in nine states– and have been recently found to be Constitutionally suspect by a federal court. Further, industry data suggests consumers in the U.S. own at least 230 million detachable magazines, with about half of those able to hold more than 10 cartridges, the traditional threshold for a “large-capacity magazine” in restricted states.

Then, Biden seemed to paint the Second Amendment’s potential check against tyranny, a concept that dates to the days of Constitutional framer James Madison, as ludicrous in the days of modern warfare, notwithstanding the realities of multi-domain modern insurgency.

“Those who say the blood of lib- — ‘the blood of patriots,’ you know, and all the stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons,” he said.

The quote Biden ramblingly alluded to, drawn a 1787 letter from Founding Father Thomas Jefferson– author of The Declaration of Independence and later third U.S. President– to William Smith, John Adams’ secretary, can be argued to be directly related to the right to keep and bear arms and was penned at the time of Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts.

We have had 13 states independent 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.

It is not the first time that Biden trotted out the Jeffersonian quote in relation to his view on gun policy. In February 2020, while on the campaign trail for the Democratic nomination for President, he argued at a town hall event in New Hampshire that, “Those who say ‘the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots’ — a great line, well, guess what: The fact is, if you’re going to take on the government you need an F-15 with Hellfire Missiles. There is no way an AK-47 is going to take care of you.”

BLUF:
The cold civil war is being fought in civic meetings. The battles are local and the battle maps cover streets rather than continents, but it is a conflict driven by the impetus of revolutions and civil wars in which one people, as Jefferson wrote, seeks to part ways with another, not to rule over them, but to be free of their thievery, their abuses, and their tyrannical rule

The Small Secessions of the New Civil War: Neighborhoods secede from cities, cities from counties, and counties from states.

That a battle over Atlanta would play nearly as pivotal a role in the country’s second civil war as it did in the first might have surprised few historians. What might have surprised them is that the battle would involve civic meetings rather than bullets. There are plenty of bullets in Buckhead, a part of Atlanta coping with runaway crime under the pro-crime rule of Mayor Keisha Bottoms, and those bullets have inspired local residents to secede and form their own police force.

Buckhead is not the first part of Atlanta to try and secede. Sandy Springs had already successfully seceded from Atlanta and a number of cities in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, have tried to break away to form Milton County. These efforts to escape the blight and corruption of Atlanta aren’t new, but Buckhead’s fight to escape Atlanta’s pro-crime government has captured the imagination of millions of Americans from one coast of the country to the other.

The cold civil war is being shaped not by national, but local secessions like the one in Buckhead as neighborhoods try to secede from cities, cities from counties, and counties from states in a powerful struggle by conservative and centrist communities to define their own way of life.

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Yes, Gun Control Did Help Facilitate The Holocaust

The Holocaust is one of the most horrible events in human history. It became the benchmark by which we compare atrocities, and for good reason. Millions of Jews slaughtered. Millions more put through some of the worst abuses a person can visit upon another. It was awful in so many ways.

However, we on the gun right side have pointed out over and over again that if the Jews had been able to have guns, the Holocaust may never have happened.

Unsurprisingly, some people disagree.

But the freshman congresswoman is hardly the only figure in the nation to have manipulated the Holocaust. The National Rifle Association, or at least its modern leaders led by its now embattled CEO, Wayne LaPierre, have long searched for “proof” that gun control is nothing more than a slippery slope to genocide. And in recent years, the NRA has manipulated the Holocaust to claim they finally found it, funding research that has allegedly discovered a new link between gun control and the Holocaust that generations of scholars have yet to find.

In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League said “Nazi Analogies Have No Place In Gun Control Debate” after a half dozen commentators including Sean Hannity and Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News out of the blue all raised the matter of gun control and the Holocaust.

“If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and the ammunition that the Nazis did, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust,” claimed Napolitano.

It’s as if they were all laying the groundwork for the book, “Gun Control in The Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the State,’” published later that year by the Independent Institute, a small think-tank in Oakland. Research for this book was partly funded by the NRA. Its author, Stephen P. Halbrook, is the nation’s best-known pro-gun lawyer. Several years before, during the watershed gun rights case Heller vs. District of Columbia that established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep arms, Halbrook filed a successful amicus brief on behalf of 250 members of the House of Representatives, 55 senators, and the president of the Senate, then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

Halbrook’s thesis about gun control and the Holocaust is novel at best. Most Holocaust scholars, like Alan E. Steinweis, director of holocaust studies at the University of Vermont, say that the idea that gun control was a factor in the Holocaust is “simply a nonissue.” But Halbrook claims that prior gun control laws during the Weimer Republic, or Germany’s democratic years before Hitler took power, were used to seize firearms from Jews, enough to have helped enable the Holocaust.

Never mind the weak evidence, the NRA’s house organ crowed about the book’s supposed breakthrough.

The problem with this line of “reasoning” is that they’re demanding pro-gun voices provide proof for something that wasn’t allowed to happen.

Did the Weimar Republic ban guns? Yes.

Were the Jews in Nazi Germany armed? No.

As such, were they able to offer armed resistance when herded into concentration camps? Also, no.

No one is saying that the Weimar Republic actively sought to empower those that followed them to commit genocide against the Jewish people. No one is claiming that things proceeded along a set plan all built around the idea of exterminating not just the Jews but also homosexuals and gypsies.

To make that claim, you’d need a great deal of evidence and that evidence likely doesn’t exist.

However, there’s ample reason to suggest that the Nazis could capitalize on the existing laws and take advantage of a disarmed population. In fact, no one disputes the fact they were disarmed and while some claim the Holocaust didn’t happen, I don’t really care about their opinions on much of anything.

Now, let’s also be clear that we can’t be certain that an armed population would have prevented the Holocaust. Even in the modern United States where guns outnumber people, a lot of folks are unarmed by choice. That would likely have been true right up until the Nazis decided to put the Jews in concentration camps. How many would have been able to fight back?

Frankly, we’ll never know.

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Dumb, Disarmed and Diseased
Dumb, Disarmed and Diseased

Have you noticed how the elite is bent on creating the perfect serf? From ensuring we are unarmed to pushing pot – yeah, America needs more of a drug that makes people lazier and less interesting – to hyping the pandemic, everything the ruling caste has been doing lately seems focused on turning us into drones. And far too many people are just letting it happen.

And now the US government will be pimping BLM to foreigners. Great. How could that go wrong? Our nonpartisan government is now fully partisan – weren’t norms important just a few months ago?

Building The Perfect Serf

With a hat-tip to Aaron, whose tweet alerted me to the painfully dumb meme of the commie gov of Pennsylvania, the campaign to change Americans from proud, industrious citizens into submissive, dependent subjects is going full-throttle. The governor, recently rebuked by the citizens who voted away his dictatorial flu powers in a welcome bit of push-back, decried the fact people can buy guns from each other without his permission but can’t have dope without a medical ID card – I guess requiring ID for getting high is as onerous as it is for voting. So, in his optimal universe, people can’t get arms to protect themselves unless he thinks it’s okay and grants them a dispensation to do so, but it should be open season at the dope dispensary. And, of course, they have to be masked while doing it, at least until they wrap their lips around the bong.

Being able to defend yourself: Bad.

Being stoned on a couch watching Scooby-Doo: Good.

Being masked all the time: Better.

Guns allow people to break the monopoly on force held by the government, creating a limit to what the government can do. No wonder liberals hate that. This right gives people the impression that the consent of the governed matters. Bunch of wicked “insurrectionists” they are, daring to think they should possess some sort of ultimate veto power over their betters!

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leftist tyrants gotta tyrant.

Biden Supports Suppressing Online “Misinformation” Press Secretary Says

President Joe Biden supports efforts to crack down on “misinformation” on Big Tech platforms, the White House said.

“The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19, vaccinations, and elections. And we’ve seen that over the past several months, broadly speaking. I’m not placing any blame on any individual or group; we’ve seen it from a number of sources,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in Washington……..

Senator Klobuchar Says Facebook’s Trump Ban Doesn’t Go Far Enough

The recent decision by the Oversight Board to uphold Facebook’s decision to indefinitely suspend President Trump reignited calls for antitrust laws against Big Tech companies. But Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who is leading a team that could reshape the country’s antitrust laws, says the ban was not punishment enough.

In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Klobuchar called her political opponent the “ultimate conveyor of misinformation,” adding he should be permanently banned from social media platforms…….

BLUF:
Compared to nearly the entire rest of the world, people in the United States have retained the ability to choose to be legally armed or unarmed. Most people in the USA want to keep the option. Nearly all the rest of the world does not have it.

The Case for More Guns, Learn to Think Like The Sheep Who Chose to Be Unarmed

U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- People in the gun culture often express amazement about people who want them disarmed. They ascribe the desire to hostility and malice. It may be true for a minority of those who actively wish for a disarmed population.  A significant number, likely a majority, have made a voluntary decision to be unarmed.

It is important to know your opponent and to understand their motives.

Three years ago, this correspondent wrote an essay on how to understand people who want a disarmed population. It was popular but did not appear on AmmoLand News at that time.

I have updated the essay for current conditions.

There Is An Easy Way To Understand People Who Wish You To Be Unarmed.

It takes a little discipline. You may have a little mental discomfort, but it is not particularly difficult.  For the ability to understand the other side, assume you have deliberately chosen to be unarmed.

Choosing to be armed is more difficult. It requires action. It requires training. It requires an investment in money and time. You think about unpleasant realities and plan for unpleasant possibilities. You devote time and money to be armed. A higher level of responsibility is required.

Once you internalize the decision to be unarmed, arguments on the other side become understandable. The voluntarily unarmed people we are attempting to understand are those who have moved from the decision to be unarmed, to the policy statement “guns are bad”.

Guns are Bad
Guns are Bad

Armed people have a power advantage over unarmed people. People do not want others to have a power advantage over them. It makes them uncomfortable. To prevent this, the voluntarily unarmed often want everyone else to be unarmed.

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Saul Cornell has always been a elitist political hack when it comes to gun control.

Preamble he says?

He’s trying to make people believe ‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state’ somehow overrides ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed‘ and thus only the military & the national guard – the elistist/anti-civil rights, wanna-be gun controller’s current definition of ‘militia’ – have a right to have guns.

Of course common English sentence diagraming, taught in grade school, confirms he’s lying.

But – again – Preamble he says?

Well, I’ve got one for him. One that I think he believes he can evade through general ignorance due to the lack of civics education:

PREAMBLE TO THE BILL OF RIGHTS

“THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its (the Constitution’s) powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.”

Bold & parenthesis are mine.

That preamble clearly states that the amendments are to declare certain things that are restricted from the government exerting its powers on them. The Bill of Rights is a list of restrictions on government, not the people, and Mr Saul Cornell knows this.

Cornell: Originalism Means Gorsuch and Barrett Should Rule in Favor of Strict Gun Control

In another of Heller’s odd intellectual moves, Scalia read the Second Amendment backwards, and in the process effectively erased the text’s preamble. To justify this unusual reading strategy, an interpretive approach that Stevens reminded his colleagues on the bench had never been done in the court’s history, Scalia cited legal treatises written decades after the adoption of the Second Amendment. Once again, to obtain his preferred result Scalia rummaged among sources written a half a century after the adoption of the Second Amendment to find evidence of the text’s original meaning.

Such a move only makes sense if one believes that nothing significant happened in American legal history between the adoption of the Second Amendment and the Civil War, a view most historians would find bizarre and erroneous. Curiously, Justice Scalia did not turn to a legal source more readily available that was written at the same time as the Second Amendment. John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and co-author of The Federalist, had ruled on this issue in 1790s.

Jay wrote: “A preamble cannot annul enacting clauses; but when it evinces the intention of the legislature and the design of the act, it enables us, in cases of two constructions, to adopt the one most consonant to their intention and design.”

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U. OF PENNSYLVANIA CAPITULATES; APPROVES HUNTING, ARCHERY, AND SHOOTING CLUB.

PHILADELPHIA, April 29, 2021 — After more than a year in limbo, the University of Pennsylvania’s Hunting, Archery, and Shooting Club is officially a recognized student group.

Under pressure from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and with help from FIRE Legal Network attorney Patricia Hamill, the university relented this week and processed the group’s registration.

On March 17, FIRE called on Penn to stop engaging in viewpoint discrimination and promptly recognize the club.

“We are pleased that Penn finally hit the mark,” said FIRE Senior Program Officer Zach Greenberg. “However, the approval is long overdue. It should not take a year for a university to make good on its promises to uphold students’ rights.”

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High court halts Calif. virus rules limiting home worship

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is telling California that it can’t enforce coronavirus-related restrictions that have limited home-based religious worship including Bible studies and prayer meetings.

The order from the court late Friday is the latest in a recent string of cases in which the high court has barred officials from enforcing some coronavirus-related restrictions applying to religious gatherings.

Five conservative justices agreed that California restrictions that apply to in-home religious gatherings should be lifted for now, while the court’s three liberals and Chief Justice John Roberts would not have done so.

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This is an alternate tactic the gun grabbers have been trying for decades. Getting their econutz shills to sue to ban lead bullets and shot.

Judge Affirms Hunters Can Use Traditional Ammo in NRA Case

On April 1st, a federal judge in Arizona sided with NRA-ILA and Safari Club International and held that hunters’ use of traditional ammo does not violate federal environmental law.

The case dates back to 2012, when a group sued the U.S. Forest Service. The group alleged that by allowing hunters to hunt with traditional lead ammo in the 1.6-million-acre Kaibab National Forest—which is authorized by Arizona state law—the Forest Service was violating the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. That Act was originally passed in 1976, to address the increasing amount of municipal and industrial waste that was being disposed of at the time. But over time, it has been used to attack gun owners and shooting ranges.

On April 1st, the judge held that the Forest Service is not disposing any waste by allowing hunters to hunt in accordance with state laws. But the case had even bigger implications. The Plaintiff was asking the court to order the Forest Service regulate hunting. But the states own the wildlife, even while it is on federal lands. “Each national forest,” the judge said, “is required to cooperate with state wildlife agencies to allow hunting in ‘accordance with the requirements of State laws.”’ A ruling to the contrary would have given the federal government the authority to enter a field of regulation that belongs to the states on lands where hunting takes place. Those implications would be huge because 640-million acres (about twenty-eight percent of the country) is owned and managed by the federal government. Thankfully, the judge sided with NRA-ILA and Safari Club.

NRA-ILA will continue to protect the rights of hunters everywhere to use commonly owned and affordable ammunition to hunt and enjoy public lands.

The case is called Center for Biological Diversity v. United States Forest Service. The National Shooting Sports Foundation also intervened as a defendant in the case.

The Growing Desperation (And Dangerousness) Of The Gun Control Movement

Gun control activists are growing increasingly frustrated with the fact that even with Democrats in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, their agenda is still in doubt on Capitol Hill. A new piece at POLITICO highlights the palpable sense of desperation starting to emanate from anti-gun organizations like Everytown for Gun Safety and its affiliate Moms Demand Action, where activists know that their window of opportunity to put new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms is closing. The razor-thin Democratic majority in the House and Senate could very well disappear after the 2022 midterms, and activists

For the gun reform movement — a centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s agenda for at least a quarter century — the question this week has become, if not now, when?

… It’s a pivotal moment for gun politics. The history of midterm elections suggests Democrats are at risk of losing the House next year, shrinking their window for legislative victories.

“The time is definitely now,” said Peter Ambler, executive director of the gun-control group Giffords. “We can’t wait.”

There’s a muddled message coming from the anti-gun advocates. On the one hand, they say that now is the time, knowing that they’re likely to lose ground in next year’s elections, but they’re still trying to spin their movement as one that’s growing in popularity across the country.

Tom Sullivan, a Colorado state lawmaker who sought elected office after his son, Alex, was killed in the Aurora theater shooting in 2012, said the climate surrounding gun legislation has “obviously” shifted — as evidenced by his own election and those of other survivors of victims of gun violence, including Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia, whose teenage son was shot to death in 2012. Gun control was a winning issue for Democrats in some congressional swing districts nationally in the midterm elections in 2018.

“We can run on this issue, and we can win elections on this issue,” Sullivan said. “Quite obviously, the tone has changed.”

At the federal level, Democrats and gun control activists lost ground in the House, and were it not for the absolute sh*tshow in the Georgia Senate runoffs, Republicans would still be in control of the U.S. Senate. The gun control movement didn’t receive a mandate in the 2020 elections, but they have to act like they did because they know that they’re likely to be in an even worse position after the midterms.

In that sense, the gun control groups are right that this is the best position for the movement in decades, but that doesn’t mean that they’re still in a great position to get what they want. As long as it still takes 60 votes to pass most legislation through the Senate, the prospects for new gun control laws is murky at best. That’s why you’ll be seeing more calls from gun control groups to nuke the filibuster in the coming days and weeks.

The gun control debate has put more pressure on Democrats to abandon the legislative filibuster in the Senate, broadening the range of constituencies lobbying for the change. Lonnie Phillips, whose daughter was killed in Aurora and who now advocates on behalf of survivors of gun violence, said, “The best thing that can happen right now — the one thing I would give everything up for — is get rid of the filibuster so we can pass some laws.”

If the filibuster goes away, the least of our worries will be the passage of gun control bills like H.R. 8 and H.R. 1446. At that point, Democrats would try to ram through Biden’s gun ban and a host of new infringements on our Second Amendment rights, while also passing legislation like H.R. 1 that’s designed to ensure a permanent Democratic majority in Congress. One party rule is completely antithetical to the very idea of the United States, and it would be nothing less than a legislative coup. I’m not worried about my Second Amendment rights if the filibuster were to disappear. I’m worried about the future of the nation itself.

So 3 television networks, a couple of national news magazines, and a handful of newspapers per big city? amirite?

A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views On The First Amendment.

When Columbia law professor Timothy Wu was appointed by Joe Biden to the National Economic Council a few weeks back, the press hailed it as great news for progressives. The author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age is known as a staunch advocate of antitrust enforcement, and Biden’s choice of him, along with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, was widely seen as a signal that the new administration was assembling what Wired called an “antitrust all-star team.”

“Big Tech critic Tim Wu joins Biden administration to work on competition policy,” boomed CNBC, while Marketwatch added, “Anti-Big Tech crusader reportedly poised to join Biden White House.” Chicago law professor Eric Posner’s piece for Project Syndicate was titled “Antitrust is Back in America.” Posner noted Wu’s appointment comes as Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced regulatory legislation that ostensibly targets companies like Facebook and Google, which a House committee last year concluded have accrued “monopoly power.”

Wu’s appointment may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced the concept of “net neutrality” and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster — is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential September, 2017 article called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era. He outlined the same ideas in a 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival speech:

Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview, is confusing. He calls himself a “devotee” of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that “these old opinions are so great, it’s like watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.”

If you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:

— The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attention rare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this “cheap speech” era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of “flooding” the Internet with pro-government propaganda.

— As a result, those who place faith in the First Amendment to solve speech dilemmas should “admit defeat” and imagine new solutions for repelling foreign propaganda, fake news, and other problems. “In some cases,” Wu writes, “this could mean that the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control.” What might that look like? He writes, without irony: “I think the elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.”

— More ominously, Wu suggests that in modern times, the government may be more of a bystander to a problem in which private platforms play the largest roles. Therefore, a potential solution (emphasis mine) “boils down to asking whether these platforms should adopt (or be forced to adopt) norms and policies traditionally associated with twentieth-century journalism.”

That last line is what should make speech advocates worry.

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Feinstein’s biannual regurgitation:

To regulate assault weapons, to ensure that the right to keep and bear arms is not unlimited, and for other purposes.

 

When the name of your bill directly contradicts the wording of the constitution you’ve probably made a mistake somewhere.

Let’s use this same description for any other bill dealing with any right, especially an enumerated right.

“To regulate raids, to ensure that the right against unreasonable search and seizure is not unlimited, and for other purposes.”

“To regulate detentions, to ensure the right against cruel and unusual punishment is not unlimited, and for other purposes.”

Plug in any other right and it sounds insane but there are people that view the description of this bill as a positive. That should be hair raising to anyone that knows history and appreciates their rights.

In the Declaration of Independence, it is written that it is a self evident truth that the creator endowed mankind with – among others – the right to life. Abortion can be argued therefore as a secular civil rights, as well as a religious issue, and as I believe that life begins at conception, that life has human rights that mere inconvenience can not supersede.

Arkansas Governor Signs Additional Restrictions on Abortion Into Law

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson (R-AR) signed a bill restricting abortions, SB6, into law on Tuesday. The law prohibits women from obtaining abortions in Arkansas, with one exception for the life of the mother.

Exceptions for rape or incest are not written into the bill, which Hutchinson said that he would have preferred in the final version of the legislation. He hopes the law will compel the Supreme Court to review the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion on the federal level.

“SB6 is a pro-life bill that prohibits abortion in all cases except to save the life of the mother in a medical emergency. It does not include exceptions for rape and incest,” Hutchinson said on Tuesday “I will sign SB6 because of overwhelming legislative support and my sincere and long-held pro-life convictions. SB6 is in contradiction of binding precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court, but it is the intent of the legislation to set the stage for the Supreme Court overturning current case law. I would have preferred the legislation to include the exceptions for rape and incest, which has been my consistent view, and such exceptions would increase the chances for a review by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

 The new law will go into effect by the upcoming summer, upon the legislature adjourning. Other states have implemented similar abortion restrictions in hopes of the Supreme Court taking up an abortion case and reconsidering the landmark Roe decision.

Another Anti-Gun Extremist Promoted for Biden’s Cabinet

President Biden’s nominee to serve as United States Secretary of the Interior, U.S. Representative Deb Haaland (D-NM), is yet another cog Biden hopes to fit into his administration’s anti-gun machine. Perhaps it would be more newsworthy if we only reported on Biden nominees that don’t support gutting the Second Amendment, but then we might have nothing to say.

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Isn’t it interesting how no 2nd amendment advocate claims this about the 1st amendment?

BLUF:
The Second Amendment is not in conflict with the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, or any of our other rights protected by the Constitution, and our rights don’t have to be exercised one at a time. We don’t give up our Fourth Amendment rights when we peaceably assemble, so why should we lose our Second Amendment rights when we gather in support or opposition to a piece of legislation or governmental action?

Well, the obvious answer is that we shouldn’t have to give up our Second Amendment rights in order to exercise our right of free speech, public assembly, and private worship. Unfortunately, that’s the world that gun control activists want, and it’s one reason why you’re seeing the rise of Second Amendment sanctuaries around the country; a grassroots response to the creeping authoritarianism of gun control.

New Anti-Gun Argument: 2A Getting In The Way Of Other Rights

The Second Amendment has long been treated as a second-class right by gun control activists and even some unarmed Americans who simply aren’t as concerned about protecting a right that they’re not currently exercising. Unfortunately for those opposed to the right to keep and bear arms, 2020 was a banner year for new gun owners with an estimated 8.5-million Americans purchasing a firearm for the very first time.

As you can imagine, gun control activists are not happy about these developments, and their opposition to exercise of our Second Amendment rights is leading some down a dangerous road; arguing that we must restrict the right to keep and bear arms in order to protect other civil rights.

Law professors Joseph Blocher of Duke and Reva Seigel of Yale make that case in a new piece at The Atlantic, proclaiming that we need more gun control laws to protect “citizens’ equal freedoms to speak, assemble, worship, and vote without fear.”

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The Government Censors Are Here.

Congressional Democrats are demanding to know what communications giants such as Comcast and AT&T are going to do about “the spread of dangerous misinformation.” How quickly this country is descending into an authoritarian regime where the government controls speech and the flow of information.

Ahead of a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing Wednesday, California Democratic Reps. Anna G. Eshoo and Jerry McNerney wrote a letter to Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox, Altice, Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Hulu. According to the New York Times, which says it has reviewed the correspondence, the pair is not pleased that “the cable, satellite and over-the-top companies that disseminate these media outlets” – likely referring to Fox News, One America News Network, and Newsmax – “have done nothing in response to the misinformation aired by these outlets.”

The hearing was called to focus on “disinformation and extremism in the media.” In practice it’s a stage for peacock strutting, spin, and projection (a diversionary tactic Democrats are well-practiced in) with the ultimate goal of gaining full control of the flow of information.

The Democrats telegraphed their intentions when Eshoo and McNerney assumed the role of prosecutors to ask the companies what steps they took “prior to, on and following the Nov. 3, 2020, elections and the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks to monitor, respond to and reduce the spread of disinformation, including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels your company disseminates to millions of Americans?”

Eshoo and McNerney further exposed their repressive intentions when they asked the companies if they are “planning to continue carrying Fox News, OANN and Newsmax” on their platforms “both now and beyond the renewal date?” and “if so, why?”

Is this not chilling? The Democrats care nothing about misinformation and disinformation, nor freedom of speech. Their objective is to use the Jan. 6 Capitol trespass-and-vandalize ruckus, as well as legitimate questions about the 2020 election, to shut down the speech of their political opponents. They lust for raw political and social power, to rule, not govern under constitutional limits, forever. It is that simple.

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