The White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention has become a significant threat to our guns and our civil rights.
When the office was unveiled in September 2023, President Joe Biden said it would, “centralize, accelerate, and intensify our work to save more lives more quickly. That’s what it was designed to do. It will drive and coordinate a government and nationwide effort to reduce gun violence.”
The office wields tremendous power but operates in secrecy, without oversight. It has no website. Its budget has never been made public. Its staffing levels are not known. Only three actual members have ever been identified — the director and two deputy directors. All three are radical anti-gun zealots. One has a long association with former President Barack Obama.
Neither Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris, who oversees the office — at least officially — has ever clearly articulated what the office is supposed to do, other than “reduce gun violence” and “build on historic actions taken by President Biden to end gun violence.”
Biden’s “historic actions” are well known and include calls for red flag laws; universal background checks, which would open the door to firearm registration; banning popular semi-automatic firearms and standard capacity magazines; revoking licenses of gun dealers for minor clerical errors; and pushing Congress to pass laws that would force gun owners to comply with firearm storage regulations, which would likely be followed by mandatory home inspections to insure compliance.
Using open-source and other data, the Second Amendment Foundation examined the office’s key personnel, budget and operations. The findings reveal a Star Chamber of sorts, designed to come up with ways to chip away at the Second Amendment and then push them out to the states, without any scrutiny from Congress, the courts or the public.
“For the first time in the history of the United States a president has created an office within the White House solely to find ways to circumvent and violate the Constitution,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “And do not forget that taxpayer dollars are supporting this abomination. We are paying the Biden-Harris administration to violate our civil rights.”
Police in Dolton, Illinois could soon be walking their beat instead of cruising the streets of the Chicago suburb after a bank moved to repossess much of the police department’s fleet of vehicles for non-payment. According to KS StateBank, the village is behind on its payments to the tune of $76,000, and the bank has been unable to reach anyone at City Hall who could rectify the problem.
Burt Odelson, the legislative counsel for the Village of Dolton Board of Trustees, says the board authorized the payments last May, and he and others are pinning the blame for the snafu on Dolton’s anti-gun mayor Tiffany Henyard.
As questions over unpaid bills have come to light in recent months, WGN Investigates previously uncovered exorbitant spending on lavish trips and experiences by Henyard, which included a trip to Las Vegas that cost more than $12,000 and fell in the same month the loan payment on the village vehicles was due.
… Village of Dolton trustees have gone head-to-head with Henyard at village meetings, calling for transparency, so residents know where taxpayer dollars are going.
“The residents of Dolton deserve to know how the money is being spent,” trustee Brittney Norwood told WGN-TV Thursday.
The board of trustees is in charge of overseeing finances, but some said Henyard has restricted them from access to village financial records, leaving them mostly in the dark. On top of that, several trustees told WGN News Thursday they recently heard from several vendors who claimed they were hired by the mayor for work and never paid for their services. The village is in millions in debt, and did not approve of those expenses, Norwood told WGN.
There’ve been questions about Henyard’s spending for years now. Back in 2021, Second Amendment advocate John Boch detailed that the mayor of the village was doling out hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for a team of officers to serve as her personal security detail, even as she was calling on lawmakers to pass more gun control laws that would make it harder for Dolton residents to protect themselves. The three officers, which accounted for almost 1/10th of the entire police force, cost taxpayers about $100,000 a year each, even though they were tasked almost exclusively with shadowing the small-town mayor.
To put that into perspective, that’s the same number of bodyguards that protect Birmingham, Alabama’s mayor but that city has almost ten times the population of Dolton.
At the same time, Mayor Henyard’s armed personal security detail affords her far more protection than the residents of her city enjoy. One of her first acts after taking office involved organizing an “anti-violence” march. She was joined at that march by anti-gun activist and accused pedophile Father Michael Pfleger.
Henyard was actually recalled by residents in 2022, but the recall election was ruled invalid by state courts and she’s remained in office ever since. With the next mayoral election not scheduled until 2025, there’s no telling how much of a financial hole the village will find itself between now and next November, but it sounds like it’s a distinct possibility that the Dolton Police Department is going to be crippled by the repossession of much of its fleet. I’m guessing that Henyard will ensure that there’s still money to pay for her team of bodyguards or hire convicted child sex offenders for positions that require them to enter residents’ homes, but everyone else who lives in the village is going to be impacted by the financial mismanagement at City Hall.
It’s pretty clear given her anti-gun activism that Henyard doesn’t want those folks to be able to protect themselves with a firearm, and based on the complaints from the trustees and their attorneys it might not be long before Dolton PD isn’t in a position to serve and protect the community at large either. What are they supposed to do to keep themselves and their families safe? I guess the obvious answer is “run for mayor”, since it sounds like Henyard is the one person in Dolton who’s guaranteed to be protected by armed individuals who are still legally allowed to purchase and possess so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines for the mayor’s defense.
Soon to be followed by demand for book titles owned and what religion is practiced……..
For years, California Democrats have been hostile to gun owners. California Democrats frequently attempt to erode Second Amendment rights in the state.
A bill in the Democrat-controlled California State Assembly that was introduced on February 16th, would force homeowners and renters to disclose information about firearms they own. Assembly member Mike Gipson, and State Senator Catherine Blakespear are the two leading California Democrat lawmakers pushing this legislation.
Section 2086 will be an addition to the Insurance Code pertaining to AB-3067.
The questions include information as to the number of firearms in the home, the method of storage, and how many firearms are stored in vehicles on the property. The questions include whether or not the firearms are in locked containers or not.
A bill has been filed in California that would require homeowner's and renter's insurance companies to ask how many guns people own and to report that information to the state: https://t.co/giLP0e6DKIpic.twitter.com/XsKgKtCdKX
It was a “The Pigs are Flying” moment after The Washington Post, the newspaper that has never found a gun control policy it did not fawn over, took up a gun control claim the Biden administration loves to repeat and determined it to be false.
To be clear, Glenn Kessler’s The Fact Checker couldn’t bring itself to award any Pinocchios – not one – to the false claim, but its thorough breakdown and analysis of the claim left nothing misunderstood. Saying that “Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children” is patently “Not True.”
We won’t hold our collective breaths for The White House to issue a formal statement acknowledging their repeated lie. Instead, we’re assuming President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, White House officials and gun control activists will simply continue repeating the false claim. And notwithstanding The Washington Post’s fact checking, this lie will likely continue to be uncritically reported as “fact” by the mainstream media.
Still, having The Washington Post take up the claim and acknowledge it is false should be deserving of at least a little praise.
Favorite False Claim
President Biden has repeated the claim often as he pushes again and again for more gun control. He began his campaign for the presidency in 2019 by calling firearm manufacturers “the enemy.” He now uses the “firearms are the leading cause of death for children” to push ever more restrictions on the Second Amendment while saying little to nothing about holding violent criminals accountable, let alone calling out soft-on-crime prosecutors who let those same criminals back out on the streets to commit more crimes.
Vice President Harris recited the false claim in two recent events in North Carolina and in Washington, D.C. The White House used the false claim as a lede in a recent press release announcing new White House unilateral gun control executive actions.
There’s no telling how often it has been repeated by U.S. Senators, Members of the House of Representatives, governors and any number of other local elected officials and gun control activists pushing the claim as a reason why more gun control is needed.
Consumer spending fell sharply in January, presenting a potential early danger sign for the economy, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.
Advance retail sales declined 0.8% for the month following a downwardly revised 0.4% gain in December, according to the Census Bureau. A decrease had been expected: Economists surveyed by Dow Jones were looking for a drop of 0.3%, in part to make up for seasonal distortions that probably boosted December’s number.
However, the pullback was considerably more than anticipated. Even excluding autos, sales dropped 0.6%, well below the estimate for a 0.2% gain.
The sales report is adjusted for seasonal factors but not for inflation, so the release showed spending lagging the pace of price increases. On a year-over-year basis, sales were up just 0.6%.
Headline inflation rose 0.3% in January and 0.4% when excluding food and energy prices, the Labor Department reported Tuesday. On a year-over-year basis, the two readings were 3.1% and 3.9%, respectively.
Co-authored by Natasha Bertrand, the gargantuan exposé claimed a mysterious “binder” of “highly classified information related to Russian election interference” went “missing” in the chaotic waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency in January 2021, raising concerns that some of America’s most “closely guarded national security secrets… could be exposed.”
CNN and its intelligence sources meant “exposure” in a bad way. Sources have told Public and Racket, however, that the secrets officials worry might be “exposed” are ones that would implicate them in widespread abuses of intelligence authority dating back to the 2015-2016 election season.
“I would call [the binder] Trump’s insurance policy,” said someone knowledgeable about the case. “He was very concerned about having it and taking it with him because it was the road map” of Russiagate.
Transgressions range from Justice Department surveillance of domestic political targets without probable cause to the improper unmasking of a pre-election conversation between a Trump official and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to WMD-style manipulation of intelligence for public reports on alleged Russian “influence activities.”
The CNN report claimed intelligence officials were concerned about the disclosure of “sources and methods that informed the U.S. government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election.”
They should be concerned. The story of how a team “hand-picked” by CIA Director John Brennan relied on “cooked intelligence” to craft that January 6th, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment is the subject of tomorrow’s story, the last in this three-part series.
Corruption, not tradecraft, is what officials are desperate to keep secret.
The ”missing binder” story has several variants. Sources offer differing answers on the question of whether anything of consequence is missing. They give mixed accounts of Trump’s frantic last efforts to declassify Russia-related material.
But nearly everyone Public and Racket spoke to agreed that the tale obscured a broader and more important story.
Dating back to the release of the so-called “Nunes memo” in 2018 exposing the corruption of the FISA application process, senior intelligence officials, including Trump’s CIA Director, Gina Haspel, have repeatedly blocked attempts to declassify information about the Trump-Russia investigation.
They had good reason to obstruct the release of these documents.
Special Counsel Robert Hur is preparing to be grilled by House lawmakers over his recent damning report that highlighted serious concerns with Democrat President Joe Biden’s age and mental fitness.
As Slay News reported, Hur last week released his report on his investigations into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
While the conclusion of the report was already controversial, it was Hur’s rationale for not pursuing charges against Biden that caused the biggest stir.
Hur noted in his report that Biden struggled with basic questions during interviews, specifically regarding key elements of his own life.
According to the report, Biden couldn’t remember what year he left the vice presidential office or even when his son Beau died.
The special counsel concluded that a jury wouldn’t convict Biden once they realize he’s an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
The report compounds voters’ long-held concerns about the president’s age and obvious mental decline.
Hur’s testimony, expected to land in early March, would likely be before the House Judiciary Committee, Axios reported Thursday.
On Thursday, special counsel David Weiss charged a former FBI informant who claimed President Biden was bribed by Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma. The indictment claims the informant lied about Biden’s alleged role in the business dealings.
Alexander Smirnov, 43, was arrested on Thursday at the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, per CNN.
Smirnov has been accused in the indictment that his story to the FBI “was a fabrication, an amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred but at a later date than he claimed and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on the Defendant’s services and products, not for discussing bribes to [Joe Biden] when he was in office.”
The informant, who has now been identified as Smirnov, provided testimony to House Republicans and their investigation into the Biden family’s alleged illegal foreign business dealings. He claimed that Burisma executives paid President Biden and his son Hunter Biden $5 million each to have a Ukrainian prosecutor fired who had been investigating Burisma at the time.
The informant claimed that the bribery occurred while Biden was vice president serving under Barack Obama.
The indictment states, “In truth and fact, the Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016, in other words, when [Joe Biden] had no ability to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office.”
“In short, the Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against [Joe Biden], the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against [Joe Biden] and his candidacy,” it continues.
Following the deadly Iran-backed attack on American troops in Jordan on January 28, President Biden and his Pentagon brass pledged a “multi-tier” response for the brazen assault that killed three U.S. service members.
The retributive strikes saw at least one senior leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah — one of the handful of Iran-backed terrorist organizations that have been coordinating scores of attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East since October — in Baghdad, but there was a notable lack of punishment for the source of all the chaos in the region: the regime in Tehran. It appears that was by Biden’s design.
Instead of acting swiftly and decisively, however, the administration telegraphed its considerations and likely targets for days on end. Waiting until after the fallen heroes had returned to the United States for a dignified transfer in Dover, Delaware, the Biden administration finally began launching strikes in the region.
According toreporting from the Financial Times, “Iran pulled senior commanders of its Revolutionary Guard out of Syria days before the US launched strikes against Iranian-linked targets in the Arab state to prevent the elite force suffering further casualties.” Conveniently, the IRGC “officers had left Syria by the time Washington launched air strikes five days” after Biden promised to launch a response to the attack that killed U.S. troops.
Reminding that the Biden administration said it “directly targeted Revolutionary Guard facilities in Syria,” that means the agents of Tehran operating in support of Iran’s terror proxies were able to get away, thanks to Biden’s delays and ample warnings.
As Joe Truzman, senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), noted, Iran saving its officers’ hide was “exactly what the Biden administration intended” to happen.
Exactly what the Biden administration intended when it telegraphed it was going to strike following the drone attack that killed three American troops in Jordan. https://t.co/hvmiTwnKVC
Even worse — and proving that Biden’s strikes in response to the killing of U.S. Army Sgts. Kennedy Sanders, William Rivers, and Breonna Moffett won’t prevent future attacks on American troops — is this nugget, also reported by the Financial Times.
Iranian officials, calling the decision to withdraw IRGC commanders merely a “change in tactics,” received notice from the U.S. “through indirect channels that it did not seek a conflict with Iran.”
That is, after Iranian patronage to terrorist organizations saw more than 170 attacks launched at U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan and took the lives of three American service members, the U.S. told Tehran we didn’t seek a conflict.
That also means, as an “Iranian analyst affiliated to the Islamic regime” told the Financial Times, “[o]nce there is relative calm, these forces will return to Syria.” And Tehran’s support of terrorist proxies in the region will resume at full strength.
FLASHBACK: Joe Biden previously said “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings”
Today it’s reported that Biden met with the chairman of the Chinese energy firm Hunter sought to create a joint venture with at the Four Seasons.pic.twitter.com/mTsD5XItMI
In the latest video that the White House doesn’t want you to see, Presidentish Joe Biden is seen Monday walking it off after banging his head on the doorway of his Marine One personal transport helicopter.
It isn’t a big deal, I swear, and it’s been my job for more than 20 years now to gleefully mock the foibles and pitfalls of the rich and powerful. That goes double for figures like Biden, who grew rich without ever having created any goods or provided any valuable services in the private sector and who grew powerful despite a political career defined by lies, gaffes, and cheap demagoguery than any accomplishments.
So let’s watch the clip anyway before we get to the good stuff.
That’s not even gonna leave a mark. “Why then,” I can hear you ask through the magic of internet-enhanced telepathy, “are we watching a video of the president lightly bonking his skull on the door of Marine One?”
The first reason is because it fits the narrative of Biden being old and increasingly clumsy. It seems like Biden hadn’t even been in office for two months [Steve, Biden hadn’t been in office for even two months —editor] when he tripped up the stairs of Air Force One not once but three times in one, ah, trip.
A bon voyage, that was not.
Since then, Biden has fallen repeatedly, he wanders around looking lost after delivering remarks (usually poorly), and he tries to shake hands with people who aren’t there.
The second reason is so schadenfreudelicious that it’s smothered in a red wine cream sauce lightly seasoned with two dashes of evil laughter.
Unlike the alleged President of the United States being unable to peg the death of his eldest son to within a range of years, you and I probably remember last week pretty clearly — or at least the highlights.
One of those highlights — if that’s the correct word — was the release of the just-alluded-to report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. Special Counsel Robert K. Hur found, in part, that it was pointless to try and prosecute Biden because a jury would be too sympathetic to convict a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The report was so damning that the White House decided that changing Hur’s narrative was worth the risk of putting Biden out in front of reporters, where he proceeded to present himself as an angry, elderly man with a poor memory.
Narrative un-reset, the White House decided to go to Twitter and lean hard on Dark Biden memes. They even got Biden to sign up for a TikTok account — despite the well-known security risks — because TikTok is where all the young hepcats hang out these days.
Some improvement, eh?
Every time the White House tries to change the narrative that Biden is an increasingly senescent elderly man with a growing temper, he goes out and does something that makes him look like an increasingly senescent elderly man with a growing temper. Because that’s what he is.
Age gets to all of us if we’re lucky enough to live that long. But only 45 men have ever served as President, none have been as old as Joe Biden, and the only one who was more frail was Woodrow Wilson — after Wilson suffered a completely debilitating stroke.
I spend my workdays wondering if that’s more sad than frightening or the other way around.
The “Cabal” who bragged about rigging the 2020 election stuck us with an incapable president at a time of crisis. Examples need to be made.
The bloom is off the Biden presidency.
In 2020, we were told that he would bring about a return to normalcy. Bring America respect abroad. Calm down our “chaotic” domestic political scene. And make government respectable again.
How’s he doing? Well, let’s review some headlines from this weekend’s New York Times, normally a reliable booster of Democratic presidents, good, bad, or indifferent.
“The Challenges of an Aging President.”
“Mr. President, Ditch the Stealth About Health.”
“The Question Is Not If Biden Should Step Aside. It’s How.”
This isn’t news to Americans, of course. As an ABC News poll, also out this weekend, illustrated, an overwhelming majority of Americans think that Biden is too old for another term.
The bloom is off the Biden presidency.
(This is an official White House photo. It’s supposed to make Biden look good. It’s the best they can do now.)
Last week’s Special Counsel report over Biden’s mishandling of classified documents basically found the same thing. While the Special Counsel recommended that Biden not be prosecuted for what seemed like clear violations of the law governing secret papers, the reason for his recommendation was that Biden is too old and out of it to be put on trial.
Biden didn’t help himself when he turned down the traditional Super Bowl interview, presumably – as James Carville helpfully pointed out – because that would have called attention to his inability to string two sentences together coherently. Carville called it a “sign” that Biden’s own administration doesn’t have confidence in him.
And Hillary Clinton even twisted the knife, calling Biden’s age a “legitimate issue.”
Joe Biden is incapable of assuring voters he can handle another presidential term, his team has ‘no plan’ on how to deal with his senile behavior, and he should simply ‘not be running for re-election,’ according to New York Times authors.
Anxieties from the liberal Times’ Editorial Board and opinion writers show how worried they are that ailing Biden may not be able to beat ‘bad man’ Donald Trump this year.
The back-to-back opinion pieces knifing the elderly president, 81, over the weekend comes after a Justice Department report ripped into his handling of classified documents and portrayed him as a forgetful old man.
The 388-page report by Special Counsel Robert Hur confirmed he would not be charged – but it said that was because a jury would probably conclude he had ‘diminished faculties’ and was a ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’
Biden’s lack of enthusiasm on the campaign trail, coupled with his doddering public appearances and ‘crotchety grandpa’ attitude, are huge concerns during this ‘dark time’ in his presidential tenure, according to the left-leaning broadsheet paper.
‘He needs to do more to show the public that he is fully capable of holding office until age 86,’ the Times board stated on Sunday.
The back-to-back opinion pieces knifing the elderly president, 81, comes after a Justice Department report into his handling of classified documents was released
OMAHA, Neb. — Nebraska’s largest city won’t be able to enforce its ban on guns on all public property, including parks and sidewalks, while a lawsuit challenging that restriction moves forward.
Douglas County District Judge LeAnne Srb issued a preliminary injunction Friday blocking that ban, but she refused to put Omaha’s restrictions on “ghost guns” and bump stocks on hold.
The Liberty Justice Center filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Nebraska Firearms Owners Association arguing that the city restrictions violate a new state law passed last year that allows people to carry concealed guns across the state without a permit and without the need to complete a gun safety course. A similar lawsuit challenging gun restrictions in Lincoln remains pending.
“We are thrilled with the court’s decision to grant this injunction and uphold Nebraskans’ rights against executive overreach,” said Jacob Huebert, president of the Liberty Justice Center. “Under Nebraska law, local governments do not have the authority to regulate firearms — the right to bear arms is protected across the state.”
Just before gun owners filed these lawsuits, Nebraska Attorney General Michael Hilgers published an opinion stating that state law preempts executive orders from the mayors restricting guns.
Omaha City Attorney Matt Kuhse said “while it is unfortunate that the court enjoined the city’s ability to protect our public spaces, we will abide by this order.” But the city will continue to fight the lawsuit.
“The President’s job—and if someone sufficiently vain and stupid enough is picked he won’t realize this—is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it.”—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
My phone buzzed early in the evening. A message from one of my paid subscribers telling me about an impending press conference by one of my least favorite subspecies of humanity: a politician. She requested that I watch the conference and give my take on the potential historical significance of the event and/or share some history that might inform her understanding of the event.
This is not my idea of a “good time.” I would literally rather explain the evolution of torture techniques during the Spanish Inquisition—that, at least, would have a flavor of the lurid to leaven the horror on display.
Nevertheless, I allowed myself to be convinced. I need to keep my paid supporters happy (and yes, if you’re a paid supporter, I will pay attention to your requests for topics—I may not always fulfill them the next day, but they will go into the hopper. I’m an honest intellectual whore: I know how to sing for my supper). Besides, the event in question turned out to be a lot more important than I was hoping it would be. So here we go.
The Immediate Context
To get us all on the same page, here’s the skinny:
During his years as Vice President, Joe Biden appropriated a bunch of classified documents, some of which wound up in file boxes in his garage. On the face of it, this seems an even more egregious a violation of the official documents handling laws than did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server (a matter on which the DOJ declined prosecution) and former President Donald Trump’s stockpiling of maybe-declassified-then-reclassified-but-maybe-not documents in his part-time residence at Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida (for which he is currently being prosecuted).
Tucked among the pages were an implied justification for declining to prosecute (the administration cooperated with the investigation, and without obstruction charges in the mix the rest becomes harder to prosecute) and a startling explicit justification: President Biden, the most powerful man on the planet, is incompetent to stand trial.
Relevant excerpt from the prosecutor’s report
Another relevant excerpt
Biden held a press conference in response:
It did not go well.
You can watch it for yourself here:
Even as Biden declared himself competent and his memory sound, he forgot the name of the church from which his son’s memorial rosary was procured, he mixed up the President of Egypt with the President of Mexico, he inadvertently (if subtly) changed American foreign policy with regards to the current war between Israel and Hamas, he seemed unsure for a fleeting moment whether his dead son was, in fact, dead [3m11s], and he claimed responsibility for the crimes of which the special prosecutor had just declined prosecution (even while denying they took place and dissembling about their nature).
In my lifetime so far, I have seen seven Presidents. If I were to evaluate them by competence (Note: This is NOT a comment on the policies or politics of any of these men), I’d characterize them thusly:
Two of them were pretty-okay (Reagan and Bush 1), one was not politically astute (Carter), and then there was the parade of the most incompetent, self-involved, and corrupt dip shits ever to occupy the Oval Office, each one worse than the last (Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, and Trump—the first two of these were, at least, capable of holding productive conversations with other people in government, despite their inability to be consistently interested in the actual prosecution of their own avowed policy agendas).
Even if he hadn’t done so before, Biden revealed in this press conference that he is, hands down, the least-fit occupant of the Oval Office in the history of the Republic (which, in light of his four immediate predecessors, is a hell of an accomplishment).
What Happens Now?
In a “normal” world—which is to say, the artificial world my generation was taught about in our high school history classes, which is far from normal—Joe Biden would be removed from office tomorrow, on 25th Amendment grounds, by his own party. The party itself would not lose power, as they still control congress and would still control the White House, and they would head into the November Election from a position of moral strength: “We care so much about the country that we will remove this good man who isn’t up to the job anymore.”
Failing that, he would be impeached by his own party.
And, failing that, he would be locked out of a brokered Democratic Convention and not allowed to run for a second term.
"Of course we're going to keep stealing your money through inflation — you're too feckless & cowardly to fight back … And otherwise we'd have to cut govt spending" https://t.co/fwPKVYdIiY
A few weeks ago, Ohio congressman and Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan’s office released a letter to Noah Bishoff, the former director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, an arm of the Treasury Department. Jordan’s team was asking Bishoff for answers about why FinCEN had “distributed slides, prepared by a financial institution,” detailing how other private companies might use MCC transaction codes to “detect customers whose transactions may reflect ‘potential active shooters.’” The slide suggested the “financial company” was sorting for terms like “Trump” and “MAGA,” and watching for purchases of small arms and sporting goods, or purchases in places like pawn shops or Cabela’s, to identify financial threats.
Jordan’s letter to Bishoff went on:
According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of “extremism” indicators that include “transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,” or “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.”
During the Twitter Files, we searched for snapshots of the company’s denylist algorithms, i.e. whatever rules the platform was using to deamplify or remove users. We knew they had them, because they were alluded to often in documents (a report on the denylist is_Russian, which included Jill Stein and Julian Assange, was one example). However, we never found anything like the snapshot Jordan’s team just published:
The highlighted portion shows how algorithmic analysis works in financial surveillance. First compile a list of naughty behaviors, in the form of MCC codes for guns, sporting goods, and pawn shops. Then, create rules: $2,500 worth of transactions in the forbidden codes, or a number showing that more than 50% of the customer’s transactions are the wrong kind, might trigger a response. The Committee wasn’t able to specify what the responses were in this instance, but from previous experience covering anti-money-laundering (AML) techniques at banks like HSBC, a good guess would be generation of something like Suspcious Activity Reports, which can lead to a customer being debanked.
If Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already shown a tendency toward wide-scale monitoring of speech and the use of subtle levers to apply pressure on attitudes, financial companies can use records of transactions to penetrate individual behaviors far more deeply. Especially if enhanced by AI, a financial history can give almost any institution an immediate, unpleasantly accurate outline of anyone’s life, habits, and secrets. Worse, they can couple that picture with a powerful disciplinary lever, in the form of the threat of closed accounts or reduced access to payment services or credit. Jordan’s slide is a picture of the birth of the political credit score.
There’s more coming on this, and other articles forthcoming (readers who’ve noticed it’s been quiet around here will soon find out why). While the world falls to pieces over Tucker, Putin, and Ukraine, don’t overlook this horror movie. If banks and the Treasury are playing the same domestic spy game that Twitter and Facebook have been playing with the FBI, tales like the frozen finances of protesting Canadian truckers won’t be novelties for long. As is the case with speech, where huge populations have learned to internalize censorship rules almost overnight, we may soon have to learn the hard way that even though some behaviors aren’t illegal, they can still be punished with great effectiveness, in a Terminator-like world where computers won’t miss anything that moves.
What a crazy time we live in! See you from the Nevada caucus, and watch this space for other news soon.
South Dakota governor Kristi Noem said President Joe Biden is not running the White House, but someone else is governing the country as she raised concerns over the border crisis that is “an extreme remaking of America.”
During an interview on Fox News on Feb. 4, when asked by host Maria Bartiromo why President Biden is providing free housing and health care to illegal immigrants, Ms. Noem said, “He’s weak. Somebody’s running the White House. I don’t believe it’s Joe Biden. He’s never been this extreme. This is an extreme remaking of America.”
“It is a socialist-communist agenda. I think that they’ve so infiltrated the Democrat party that it’s no longer the Democrat Party of 20 years ago; it’s now a socialist party that does not want a strong America,” she added.
Ms. Noem is one of over a dozen GOP governors who have visited Texas to show their support for Gov. Greg Abbott in his fight with the Biden administration over the influx of illegal immigrants crossing the border in Eagle Pass.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) estimated throughout the 2023 fiscal year, 2.4 million people illegally crossed the border, up from 2.3 million the previous year. In contrast, between Oct. 1, 2019, to Sept. 30, 2020, before President Biden took office, there were only 458,000 encounters with illegal immigrants by border patrol agents.
In the interview, South Dakota’s governor criticized the Biden administration for the border crisis. “We see the president undermining our country by allowing this invasion at the southern border, and it’s destabilizing our country,” she said.
