Category: Enemies Foreign and Domestic

Well, that didn’t take them long, did it?
And the Supreme Court again displays its cowardice concerning the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Second Circuit’s Second Opinion on NY Carry Laws Same As the First

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has issued its second opinion in the multiple challenges to New York’s post-Bruen carry restrictions, but the court ended up making no changes to its initial ruling that was issued almost a year ago.

Instead of granting cert to Antonyuk v. James and hearing the appeal themselves, the justices on the Supreme Court granted cert but vacated the Second Circuit’s first ruling and remanded the case back to the appellate court after SCOTUS released its decision in Rahimi back in June. If the justices were hoping that Rahimi would guide the Second Circuit in a different direction they, like Second Amendment advocates, must be disappointed by today’s ruling.

Essentially, the only portions of New York’s post-Bruen laws the Second Circuit takes issue with are the requirement that concealed carry applicants disclose their social media accounts to licensing authorities and the state’s “vampire rule”, which prohibits concealed carry on all private property in the state unless signage specifically allowing concealed carry is conspicuously posted.

Virtually all of the other “sensitive places” defined by the deceptively named Concealed Carry Improvement Act were upheld by the Second Circuit on Thursday, including houses of worship, public parks and zoos, public transportation, establishments where alcohol is served, theaters, conferences, business centers, and “gatherings of individuals to collectively express their constitutional rights to protest or assemble.”

As Chuck Michel said, the entire decision is more than 200 pages long, so while you can read it in its entirety here, we’ll be focusing on just a couple of aspects of today’s decision in this post.

Just like the Second Circuit’s original ruling in Antonyuk, the panel makes a few staggering leaps of faith that aren’t supported by what the Supreme Court has said about the right to keep and bear arms. The Court has held, for instance, that modern gun control statutes must fit within the national tradition of gun ownership, and doubted “that just three colonial regulations could suffice” to prove a national tradition of restricting concealed carry to those that have demonstrated a justifiable need.

But the Second Circuit says that even if there are no “distinctly similar historical regulation[s]” to point to in defense of a current gun law, that may not matter.

Legislatures past and present have not generally legislated to their constitutional limits. Reasoning from historical silence is thus risky; it is not necessarily the case that, if no positive legislation from a particular time or place is in the record, it must be because the legislators then or there deemed such a regulation inconsistent with the right to bear arms.

No, but it definitely proves that those legislators didn’t create certain laws restricting the rights of lawful gun owners in response to concerns about violent crime or public safety, and that is telling… or at least it should be. The Supreme Court’s “text, history, and tradition” test is relatively straightforward, but it’s been squarely rejected by the Second Circuit in favor of a more “nuanced” approach that, conveniently enough, allowed the panel to conclude that even where there are no historical analogues in place, modern restrictions on the right to carry are permissible.

The Second Circuit also continues to place a lot of reliance on gun laws that were in place around 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, not just 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified. In theory, that makes some sense, given that the Fourteenth Amendment was meant in part to prevent states from intruding on those freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But in the aftermath of the Civil War, many states, particularly in the former Confederacy, instituted laws that were designed to stop freedmen from exercising their right to keep and bear arms. In some case those laws were facially about depriving former slaves and freedmen from possessing or carrying a gun, but others were couched in racially-neutral terms but were enforced primarily or solely against groups.

The Second Circuit’s decision upholding most of New York’s newest restrictions on the right to carry relies largely on rewriting the Bruen test and an over-dependence on a handful of mid-19th century statutes. Again, even the absence of any historical analogues is no barrier for the Second Circuit, which is utterly ridiculous.

Antonyuk and the other related cases have yet to go to trial on the merits. So far, all of the legal wrangling has been about preliminary injunctions issued by the district courts, and the Second Circuit has now remanded these cases back to the lowest level of the federal judiciary to start the process all over again. Given the hostility the Second Circuit has historically displayed towards the Second Amendment (it originally upheld New York’s “may issue” law, for instance), today’s decision isn’t exactly surprising. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating for those New Yorkers who’ve seen their right to carry become even more limited in scope and practice in the two years since the Supreme Court declared that right is just as fundamentally important as the right to keep a gun in the home.

Here’s Why GOP Lawmakers Aren’t Surprised by That Treasonous Leak to Iran

Republican lawmakers who have been warning about an Iranian influence campaign, specifically targeted at Democrats on Capitol Hill and Democratic presidential administrations, aren’t surprised about the latest top secret intelligence leak out of the Pentagon. The leak, which was exposed over the weekend, shows someone with a top secret security clearance gave Iran U.S. intelligence about Israel’s attack plans inside the country.

More on the influence campaign from Semafor:

In the spring of 2014, senior Iranian Foreign Ministry officials initiated a quiet effort to bolster Tehran’s image and positions on global security issues — particularly its nuclear program — by building ties with a network of influential overseas academics and researchers. They called it the Iran Experts Initiative.

The scope and scale of the IEI project has emerged in a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails reported for the first time by Semafor and Iran International. The officials, working under the moderate President Hassan Rouhani, congratulated themselves on the impact of the initiative.

At least two of the people on the Foreign Ministry’s list were, or became, top aides to Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy on Iran, who was placed on leave this June following the suspension of his security clearance. A third was hired by the think tank Malley ran just as he left for the State Department.

An investigation into who leaked the information is being conducted by the FBI, but the pace is unsatisfactory.

“There’s an absolute lack of urgency. This is very, very serious. It doesn’t get more serious than this, particularly, as I said, when Israel is fighting for its very existence and conducting important operations every single day. The fact that this classified information was leaked not only does it really hurt our credibility with our allies around the world in terms of intelligence sharing, but it also, I’m concerned about the lack of urgency from this Administration,” Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik said during an interview with Fox News Monday. “This should never happen again. There needs to be taken immediate criminal action, referrals to the Department of Justice, and this person who broke the law by leaking classified information, they should be in prison.”

There is a suspect, however.

Shades of Commie East Germany and its STASI
The “monkey wrench” is for lots of tips on the demoncraps.

Michigan And Hawaii Launch Tip Lines To Encourage Anonymous Snitching On Gun Owners

Michigan and Hawaii, both Democrat-led states, have launched taxpayer-funded tip lines for individuals looking to report perceived firearms violations anonymously. While these dumpster fire states claim the lines are aimed at lawbreakers, Second Amendment groups are reasonably skeptical, as they should be, because such a system can easily be abused. Let’s face it, we know that the weaponization of this service against law-abiding gun owners is exactly what they are intended for.

On Thursday, October 10, Hawaii’s Democrat Governor Josh Green announced the state’s Department of Law Enforcement had established a confidential “Gun Tip Line for people to make anonymous reports of illegal gun ownership and gun crimes,” where tipsters can either call, text or drop a dime via the DLE’s website or a downloadable app where they can submit photographs and videos to back up their report.

The governor’s office went even further during the brown shirt recruiting exercise saying, “People reporting tips are encouraged to leave detailed information including the names of those in possession of illegal guns or committing gun crimes, a location where those people may be found and a description of the guns.” Sure, what could go wrong when hiring unpaid, untrained, overzealous, anti-Second Amendment sycophants typically knowing very little about firearms to play the role of a detective, spying on and recording their neighbors?

Meanwhile, Gretchen “Lockdown” Whitmer, known for hosting the most oppressive COVID lockdowns in America while still having more deaths per capita than any neighboring Midwestern states, signed House Bill 5503, a measure passed off as an education funding bill that allocates $1 million in School Aid Funding to support an anonymous tip line for students to report firearms thought to be “improperly stored.”

The bill goes on to mandate that Michigan’s Department of Education develop materials concerning improper storage of firearms, including tip line usage, and distribute those materials to school districts across the state. The Gestapo may not pay you for your work, but you will receive free training, whether you want it or not.

As the NRA-ILA points out, language regarding the tip line was added to the bill as an amendment that was then swiftly passed by the Democrat-controlled legislature.

“The expedited pace and the silencing of opposition when the bill came up for a floor vote underscores the reality that this was a political move and another attack on gun owners,” says the NRA.

These tiplines will ultimately create a situation that will lead to wasted resources, unwarranted confrontations with law enforcement and what could amount to unconstitutional searches of homes, businesses and other private property based on vendettas and other nefarious agendas. Not only does this negatively impact the community’s relationship with authorities, but those who abuse the tip lines will undoubtedly drive wedges within communities as well, drawing lines at a time when we need to be working together to strengthen and solidify those connections.

Saying the quiet part, out loud

Islamic Scholar Lets Slip the Truth: ‘If Preserving Life Had Priority, There Would Be No Jihad.’

After 9/11, we were inundated with the claims that by this time have become near-universal assumptions: Islam is peace. Jihadis are just a tiny minority of extremists. Jihad means a spiritual struggle and is willfully or ignorantly misinterpreted among jihadis.

Yet an Islamic scholar has just offered a succinct and telling enunciation of Islamic values that differs sharply from these claims. Is he an ignorant, racist, bigoted “Islamophobe” whose views can be easily dismissed? Hardly. He is an internationally respected Muslim Brotherhood leader whose words should be carefully pondered in Washington, but they won’t be.

The Kuwaiti Islamic scholar Tareq al-Suwaidan, who has been named among the 500 Most Influential Muslims for the last three years, recently enunciated a vision of Islamic values that differs markedly from what we have been told again and again in the West: “Preserving life is not the only objective of the shari’a – these include the preserving of religion, life, lineage, intellect, and property. These are the main objectives of the shari’a.”

That all sounds reasonable enough, but then al-Suwaidan added, “Which one of these objectives has higher priority? It is preserving religion, not preserving life. This is why there is a thing called ‘Jihad.’ If preserving life had the priority, there would be no Jihad – we would abolish it. Preserving religion takes priority over preserving life.” Thus peace, which would preserve life, is not the ultimate goal; Islamization is.

In line with this, al-Suwaidan found Hamas’ massacre of 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, to be positively inspiring: “By Allah,” he said, “what happened during the Al-Aqsa Flood should be taught in the most prestigious colleges.” The Al-Aqsa Flood is the name that Hamas gave to its Oct. 7 massacre. “The planning,” al-Suwaidan continued, “was unbelievable. People who are experts in planning know that what happened could only succeed with divine intervention and profound and extraordinary planning.”

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Our utility company (city owned and operated) has already changed out all meters to ‘smart’ ones that can show usage of whatever commodity down to the hour. I suspect in home devices are next on the agenda, but as our utilities are very locally controlled, I think if such shenanigans are attempted, the populace will have a definite say about it.

BLUF
Environmentalists don’t believe there is such a thing as clean or green energy either. Their goal is to reduce energy usage by replacing reliable energy systems with unreliable ones, and inexpensive ones with expensive ones, as a way of ‘Cloward-Pivening’ the energy grid to force energy rationing and the eventual reduction of the human population

The Government is Coming for Your Thermostat

It’s the middle of a summer heat wave and temperatures are rising. Suddenly your air conditioning turns off. It’s not a blackout or a brownout: it’s the new government plan.

Mass government subsidies for inefficient and expensive ‘green energy’ wind turbines and solar panels combined with bans on efficient and cheap oil, coal and gas, have made energy grids unreliable and costly. States that have aimed for widespread use of green energy like California and Texas are suffering blackouts and brownouts at growing rates.

Instead of building reliable energy resources, federal and state governments, along with monopolistic energy companies, are making up for green energy with energy rationing.

Or ‘smart rationing’.

Virtual power plants were a green energy buzzword that promised to harness local battery capacity to distribute energy to the grid, but the diminishing promise of solar panels and the power hunger of electric cars has poured cold water on the idea that the ‘green’ battery devices and useless solar panels will ever reliably give more to the grid than they take from it.

Virtual power plants, like all things virtual, have come to mean power that isn’t really there. Instead virtual power plants have become another euphemism for rationing power.

Unable to get meaningful savings from so-called battery ‘distributed energy resources’, virtual power plants now mean using smart thermostats to seize control over homeowner power usage with bureaucrats or AI software deciding how much power people should be using and turning off their heat or air conditioning. Government agencies and monopolistic utilities insist on calling this ‘efficiency’ rather than what it actually is which is rationing customer power usage.

State utilities have taken to bribing consumers with discounts on skyrocket energy rates and ‘free’ smart thermostats like Google Nest in order to induce them to turn over control of their thermostats. Once they give up control, they may be allowed only limited manual overrides a month to be able to turn on the heat or air in even the most miserable weather.

Families facing summer heat and winter cold find that they’re not just wrestling with each other for control of the thermostat but with their utility company, its software and the government mandates that are out to force them to use less energy even as energy prices climb higher.

A recent Department of Energy report revealed the ambitious scope of the ‘virtual power plant’ strategy while emphasizing the rationing aspect of ‘smart thermostats’ and ‘smart water heaters’ which “can be controlled remotely” in ways that are “typically imperceptible to the owner.”

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BLUF
Hezbollah is crying out for peace because it does not have the upper hand. It is calling for a ceasefire because it is weak, and needs time to gather its strength

Hezbollah Wants a Ceasefire Now. Here’s Why Israel Shouldn’t Give Them One.

Ceasefire now? As much as Kamala Harris wants one and would capitalize upon one if it did materialize, the answer must be a firm no.

After exploding pagers and a series of carefully targeted Israeli airstrikes have completely decimated Hezbollah’s senior leadership, the jihad terror organization now wants a ceasefire with Israel. This will come as music to the ears of the Biden-Harris regime, which would like nothing better than an October peace agreement between Israel and one of the major players that are arrayed against it.

The Harris campaign could wave this agreement in the air every time someone pointed out that the world during the Trump years was a much more peaceful place than it is now, and use it going into the election as evidence of Kamala Harris’ superior negotiating skills. But for a number of important reasons, Israel should resist all pressure from Washington.

So far, the pressure for the moment is coming not from Washington, but from Hezbollah itself. CNN reported Tuesday that Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassem, who is the highest-ranking official in the organization at the moment (after Israel took out longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several of his designated or potential successors) said, “We support the political efforts led by (Parliament Speaker Nabih) Berri under the banner of achieving a ceasefire. Once the ceasefire is firmly established and diplomacy can reach it, all other details will be discussed and decisions will be made collaboratively.”

Ceasefire! Diplomacy! Qassem knows how to push all the right buttons to get the U.S. State Department, the European Union, and the United Nations on his side, and even to shower billions upon his straitened organization. Kamala Harris has already sent $157 million to Lebanon, which means to Hezbollah.

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wretchardthecat

The key to renewal is repentance, the acknowledgement of error. Yet that acceptance is almost impossible to those who grew up on the belief they are better than everyone else, who have justified their power over others upon that undoubted superiority.

The normal person learns more from failure than success. But the already perfect man lacks the capacity to learn anything from defeat other than to conclude that someone failed him.

Usually it is we the public who have failed them. Taxes will increase and regulations redoubled until everyone is doing his fair share. Notice that the concept that they actually work for us has completely disappeared in the shuffle.

The trope that Communists make subordinates report while standing on a trap door over a shark tank is a joke, but only just.

“You know the penalty for failure. Comrade”

Kamala Harris’s Long-Running Disinformation Campaign on Guns.

Kamala Harris is the most anti-gun candidate who has ever been as close as she is to becoming president. And she has been less than forthcoming on her specific views on firearms and the Second Amendment. It doesn’t help that she has avoided any meaningful interaction from the media where she can be pressed to explain her positions. What few appearances she has made have been absolute disasters, even though they have all been with compliant Harris supporters who have handled the candidate with kid gloves.

Without any clearly explained positions coming from Harris for her current campaign, we can only rely on her history of firearm-related statements and the few vague comments she or her campaign surrogates have made as she seeks to usurp the job currently held by Joe Biden.

To be perfectly honest, when it comes to firearms and the Second Amendment, Kamala Harris is running a campaign of disinformation, obfuscation, and lies; a campaign supported by compliant “journalists” and sham organizations manufactured to help obliterate our rights as gun owners.

While Harris has tried to claim she supports the Second Amendment, she has yet to demonstrate that with either words or deeds over a career where she has drawn paychecks from only one employer: Taxpayers.

We’ve noted several times that, as a candidate for president during the 2020 election cycle, Harris stated that she didn’t want to just ban semi-automatic firearms, but also wanted to confiscate those firearms already owned by law-abiding citizens. She is now trying to hide from that past. She wants gun owners to now believe confiscation is no longer part of her plan, but we simply do not believe her.

Sadly, although not surprisingly, many members of the media are more than happy to give Harris cover on her new claim that she does not want to confiscate firearms. The ironically misnamed website FactCheck.org tried to give her cover, claiming NRA “misleadingly claims that Harris will ‘ban law-abiding citizens from owning’ guns and ‘seize your legally owned guns.’ Her proposal would not ban all guns or seize any guns.”

But NRA has not said Harris wants to “ban all guns.” She very well may, but what we have said, and what Harris has said, is she wants to ban what she calls “assault weapons.” These are guns—and some of the most popular guns sold in America—so, yes, she wants to ban law-abiding citizens from owning these guns, as well as others.

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Biden’s agency bosses say Americans have ‘too much freedom’
The ‘swamp’ thinks you have it too good.

In an unusual look at federal agency managers, most believe Americans have too much freedom, and they back President Joe Biden‘s efforts to impose 

The bosses of federal agencies were asked in a new Napolitan Institute survey about the “individual freedom” Americans have, and 51% said they have “somewhat” to “far too much freedom.”

But just 16% of voters agreed and 57% believe the government has too much control over their lives.

Democratic “swamp” managers felt the country has too much freedom at the highest levels in the survey, at 68%. Among Republican federal agency chiefs, just 33% agreed.

But the partisan bureaucrats were more in agreement when it came to choosing who is best at deciding if new regulations are needed, found the polling outfit headed by Scott Rasmussen.

Said the analysis shared with Secrets on Friday, “Fifty-four percent (54%) of government managers say that if, after carefully researching an important issue, they determine that a regulation is needed, yet voters overwhelmingly oppose it, they should follow their research and issue the regulation anyway. This includes 49% of Republican government managers and 60% of Democrats,” it said.

Unlike Democrats and Republicans in America, and even on Capitol Hill, partisans that work in the swamp generally think like the other, according to Napolitan’s latest poll of America’s 1% elitists.

“On many topics, there is a disturbing level of bi-partisan agreement among federal government managers. Fifty-three percent (53%) of Republican government managers and 48% of Democrats believe the federal government should be allowed to censor speech that is posted on social media platforms. Forty-three percent (43%) of ‘Elites’ and just 16% of voters share this view. Seventy-four percent of Republican government managers and 79% of Democrats favor banning private ownership of guns. This view is shared by 77% of ‘Elites,’ but just 36% of voters,” said the analysis.

In his polling of elites, Rasmussen has found a stunning gap with Middle Americans, which could be a danger sign considering the outsize effect of elites, especially in the media.

Rasmussen said, “The ‘Elite’ 1% wield a tremendous amount of institutional power but are wildly out of touch with the nation they want to rule. Over the years they have built institutions and mechanisms of regulatory power that are immune to the checks and balances of elections. Worse still, these same ‘Elites’ own, operate, and control a large majority of media outlets, blocking out the true voice of the American people and broadcasting their own out of touch viewpoints.”

House Oversight Committee Subpoenas White House, ATF Over Chicago’s Glock Lawsuit

House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-OH) has issued congressional subpoenas to White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention Director Stefanie Feldman and ATF Director Steve Dettelbach seeking information about any role the office and agency had in Chicago’s lawsuit against gunmaker Glock.

Comer initially requested Dettelbach and Feldman provide the committee with any pertinent communication between the White House/ATF and Glock back in June, but according to the congressman the Biden administration hasn’t turned over a single document. In fact, in his letter informing Feldman of the subpoena, Comer says Deputy Counsel to the President Rachel F. Cotton responded to the Oversight Committee in early July with a letter that “did not even reference the Committee’s request for documents.” Instead, Comer says Cotton “impugned the motives of the Committee,” stating “[t]he House Majority . . . [is] doing the gun lobby’s bidding by launching a baseless political attack on the Biden Administration under the guise of an ‘investigation.’”

If that were the case, it would be easy enough for the White House and ATF to disprove the claims of collusion by whistleblowers. So why is the White House stonewalling the inquiry into communications between the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, ATF, and Glock officials? As Comer reminded Dettelbach in his subpoena request:

The Committee has learned that on December 20, 2023, the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention met privately with representatives from Glock, during which the Administration requested that Glock change their pistol designs so that it would be harder to illegally modify Glock pistols to shoot continuously with a single trigger pull.

On March 19, 2024, the City of Chicago filed suit in state court against Glock. Everytown Law, the litigation arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, is listed as counsel for the plaintiff. The day the suit was filed, John Feinblatt, President of Everytown for Gun Safety, posted on his X account “Today Everytown Law + the City of Chicago announced a historic lawsuit against Glock Inc. to hold them accountable for the unconscionable decision to continue selling its easily modified pistols even though it could fix the problem.”

Later in the post, Mr. Feinblatt said “[f]ederal Officials recently contacted Glock to discuss implementing new ways to modify Glock pistols to make it harder for Glock switches to be installed. Rather than help, Glock falsely insisted there is nothing they can do.”

Because the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention’s meeting with Glock was private, Mr. Feinblatt appears to have had insider information regarding your office’s meeting with Glock, which raises questions about whether your office colluded with Everytown for Gun Safety to initiate their lawsuit against Glock.

Chicago is seeking a court-ordered ban on the sale of Glock pistols to city residents “and Illinois gun stores that serve the Chicago market”, while Joe Biden recently used an executive order to set up an Emerging Firearms Threats Task Force that’s supposed to issue a report and an interagency plan to deal with machine gun conversion devices, which are already illegal under federal law.

Retired ATF Deputy Assistant Director Pete Forcelli previously told Bearing Arms that the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention had pushed Dettelbach to have the ATF reclassify Glocks as machine guns under the NFA, but Dettelbach has so far resisted the move. Chicago’s lawsuit, along with the task force established by Biden, seem designed to give the ATF another push towards reclassifying some of the most popular handguns on the market as machine guns after the November elections have taken place.

My guess is that the White House and ATF will stonewall Comer’s subpoena just as they ignored his initial request for information. But if Kamala Harris wins election next month, don’t be surprised if the candidate who says she’s not taking anyone’s guns away suddenly decides that its time to make the sale of Glocks (and perhaps all other striker-fired pistols as well) off-limits to the civilian market; essentially imposing a ban on the sale of commonly-owned semi-automatic handguns through ATF regulation.