Category: Enemies Foreign and Domestic

Can you say: “Replacement Migration“?
I thought you could

Biden Admin Has Allowed 5 Million Illegal Aliens Into the Nation — Outpacing Yearly U.S. Births

The immigration crisis has worsened as a result of President Joe Biden’s reckless open border policies and incompetence to do anything about it.

Under the Biden Administration, more than five million illegal migrants have crossed into the United States— outpacing the nation’s annual birth rate.

Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) is blaming Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for releasing at least 85 percent of illegal aliens into the U.S. without vetting them due to the administration’s Catch and Release program. Most of these immigrants will be given work permits— taking away vital work opportunities for American citizens.

“All told, DHS numbers indicate that well over three million inadmissible aliens have been released into our country on Secretary Mayorkas’s watch. Factor in the 1.8 million known gotaways, and that’s roughly the population of the state of South Carolina,” Green said, suggesting that Mayorkas has allowed more illegal migrants into the nation from 2021 through 2023 than the number of babies born annually in the U.S.— which is fewer than four million.

“In Fiscal Year 2013, according to [the] DHS’s own numbers, the Obama administration detained 82 percent of illegal aliens from the moment they were encountered until their case was decided, and another nine percent were held for at least some portion of that time,” Green continued. “In Secretary Mayorkas’ first year on the job, that 82 percent number dropped to just ten percent. Illegal aliens not detained at all jumped from nine percent in FY 2013 to 64 percent in FY 2021.”

Green’s comments come as billionaire Elon Musk issued a warning to New York City residents after students were forced to attend remote classes as their school was used to house illegal migrants.

In a tweet, Musk warned Americans that illegal aliens will soon come for American homes as schools, shelters, and hotel rooms become overwhelmed.

“This is what happens when you run out of hotel rooms. Soon, cities will run out of schools to vacate. Then they will come for your homes,” Musk wrote.

The former Twitter CEO was responding to a LibsofTikTok account post featuring a video that showed illegal migrants exiting a yellow school bus to James Madison High School in Brooklyn.

Earlier this week, Mayorkas visited the U.S-Mexico border, calling on the Biden Administration to approve billions of dollars in supplemental funding to transport illegal aliens over the southern border.

He even went as far as claiming the DHS is enforcing the law despite millions of border crossers coming into the U.S. daily.

“Some have accused [the] DHS of not enforcing our nation’s laws. This could not be further from the truth,” Mayorkas said.

Everytown Bogus Research

Quote of the Day

One of the signals this is bogus research is the way Everytown graded Washington State, where the Citizens Committee is headquartered. Washington is position ninth on the list, and is described as ‘making progress.’ The state has adopted increasingly restrictive gun laws in recent years, and the number of homicides has more than doubled since 2014, according to FBI data and statistics from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. Seattle just set a new homicide record in 2023. If that’s what Everytown calls ‘making progress,’ we would be better off going back to living in caves.

The only conclusion one can draw is that Everytown is far more interested in restricting the rights of honest citizens than it is in reducing violent crime or taking violent criminals off the street.

Alan Gottlieb
CCRKBA Chairman
January 5, 2024
CCRKBA SAYS EVERYTOWN CLAIM THAT STRICT GUN LAWS SAVE LIVES IS BOGUS | Citizens Committee For The Right To Keep And Bear Arms

This claim is assessed as True.

The big tell in almost antigun organizations claims is when they refer to “Gun Violence” statistics and completely ignore criminal violence committed by thugs using other types of weapons and unarmed violence..

“Gun violence” includes justified shootings in self defense by police and/or private citizens, and people who committed or attempted suicide with a gun. And, most importantly, it ignores sky high violence rates against people unable to defend themselves by exercising their specific enumerate right to keep and bear arms.

One could ask, as I have done many times, if the shift was intentional or negligent. I have never received a straight answer. This tells me it is intentional.

These people are deliberate liars. Respond and prepare appropriately.

It’s good to always keep informed about what your enemies are doing and planning. Quite inventive propaganda to smear the political ‘right’ and push for gun control, when most ‘mass shooters’ are either members of street gangs involved in the illicit drug trade, or mentally ill leftist and now ‘trans’ loners.

BLUF
Bruce Hoffman is senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council of Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University.
Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and DeSales University.
Together, they are the authors of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America (Columbia Univ. Press).

How Far-Right Terrorists Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave the Bomb

On Sept. 16, 1920, a horse-drawn wagon slowly made its way down New York City’s Wall Street. It came to a stop at the Financial District’s busiest corner, just opposite the J. P. Morgan bank headquarters. And exploded. Thirty people were killed and nearly 150 others wounded. For most of the ensuing century, bombing was the preferred terrorist tactic in the United States. During one 18-month stretch between 1971 and 1972, there were an astonishing 2,500 bombings. Many were committed by radical left-wing groups such as the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the New World Liberation Front. Others were orchestrated by such diverse actors as Puerto Rican independistas, Croatian separatists, anti-Castro Cubans, and a militant Jewish organization.

Today, however, the terrorists’ preferred tactic is the mass shooting. As we argue in our new book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, assault-style rifles have replaced explosives. And the perpetrators come mostly from the far right. Eschewing the time-intensive preparations involved in the careful construction and placement of explosive devices — as seen in Oklahoma City in 1995 and at the Atlanta Olympics the following year — domestic terrorists now prefer shooting, a far simpler tactic that is facilitated by the Second Amendment and entails simply opening fire on a group of ordinary citizens going about their daily lives.

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BLUF
There is a lot more corruption than I have space for here, but I do sense the worm turning.  We’ve had enough time to assess the damage the left has done, and we abhor it.  We will rise up.

The Corruption of Everything

As we survey the American landscape, we cannot help but notice that just about everything has been corrupted by the left.

The justice system has been corrupted by partisan politics to the point where Republicans and conservatives are persecuted and prosecuted at a level far higher than anyone else.  We on the right can reliably depend on being prosecuted for “misgendering,” contributing to conservative causes, being a Christian or a Jew, speaking out against the barbaric transing of children, defending ourselves with a firearm, and not being a Democrat.  We can depend upon getting arrested for protesting peacefully as the corrupt “Justice” Department singles us out for jail, bankruptcy, or keeping us off election ballots, while really destructive rioters go free.

Medical research has been corrupted by the deliberate downgrading of meritorious research that just so happens to be at odds with the latest leftist perversion du jour.  For example, there are research grants for hamster fights.

Elections have been corrupted.  Mail-in ballots, demonstrated to be extremely susceptible to fraudulent inflation of Democrat votes, are ready for the next fraud.  Dead people vote; people vote multiple times; non-residents vote in other states; and phony ballots are printed and signed with the same handwriting, then run through counting machines multiple times.  Computer problems pop up so as to skew the vote.

Education has been corrupted.  Universities do not teach students how to get a job, be prosperous, and succeed.  Instead, they teach antisemitism, anti-white racism in the guise of “systemic racism” and “anti-racism,” identity politics, and sexual deviancy.  Everything on the left is about cultural identity matters: Are you gay?  Are you black?  Are you trans?  Are you non-binary?  Are you a Jew-hater?  A Christian?  It seems as though the left has an aversion to other people being happy, and so leftists tear everything apart in their insecurities and unwarranted anger and envy.  They are despicable people.

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2023 HAS EXPOSED THE MORAL DEPRAVITY OF THE RADICAL LEFT

Tom Slater
Editor
30th December 2023

What does it mean to be radical, left-wing, progressive? Well, in 2023, it meant making excuses for a genocidal anti-Semitism, refusing to believe evidence of mass rape and naysaying about the terroristic murder of infants. This was the year the ‘right side of history’ brigade exploded their phoney moral superiority for good.

When Hamas sent men on paragliders, motorbikes and in jeeps into southern Israel on 7 October – murdering, raping, mutilating and kidnapping as many Jews as they could find – I thought those on the anti-Israel left would be forced to reassess. Forced to rethink their years of Hamas apologism – their thinly veiled support for these Jew-hating maniacs, who they have long whitewashed as a ‘legitimate resistance movement’ in Palestine.

After all, that dark day these supposed leftists were – or rather should have been – confronted by the barbaric consequences of their own luxury beliefs. They were shown, beyond doubt, that Hamas’s genocidal founding charter was not just talk – that Hamas was not in fact ‘dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and long-term peace and social justice in the whole region’, as one Jeremy Corbyn once put it.

But they didn’t reassess. Many leftists openly celebrated the pogrom, hailing it as a ‘day of celebration’. The Socialist Worker called on its nine readers to ‘rejoice’. Many initially giddy tweets were deleted, as the more savvy left-wingers settled in to blaming Israel for being attacked and refusing to believe women were raped. It was victim-blaming on a geopolitical scale; atrocity denial for the Twitterring, TikToking age.

These supposed anti-racists happily provided cover for the world’s oldest bigotry. Many openly engaged in it themselves. Meanwhile, these supposed anti-fascists turned a blind eye as ‘pro-Palestine’ protests turned our streets into an open sewer of Jew hatred. Genocidal slogans were chanted. Swastikas were brandished. Hate crime soared. And they just didn’t care.

The unholy alliance between radical leftists and radical Islamists isn’t new, of course. Over recent decades, the left has come to confuse anti-imperialism with anti-Westernism. Failed Western revolutionaries began to outsource radical agency to Islamists – turning these Jew-hating, misogynistic, gay-bashing theocrats into ‘freedom fighters’, locked in some grand conflict between the West and the rebellious global Other.

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MAYBE PUTTING THE ENEMIES OF CIVILIZATION IN CHARGE OF EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN WAS A BAD MOVE

SHOCKING POLL: 30% of Gen Z thinks Osama bin Laden’s ideas were a ‘force for good’.

Campus Reform
December 28, 2023, 9:30 am ET

One in five Generation Z Americans have a positive view of Osama bin Laden and one in three think his ideas were a “force for good.”

Those shocking numbers come from a new survey of 18-to-29-year-olds that gauged perceptions of the al-Qaeda terrorism leader who masterminded the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.

This survey and the anti-American sentiments it reveals appear to be an extension of the TikTok trend earlier this year in which young Americans praised bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” which the terrorist wrote to justify blowing up the Twin Towers.

Campus Reform covered the disturbing social media trend and has been reporting for years that higher education indoctrinates students with anti-American rhetoric. Examples of the latter include professors denigrating American history and bashing the celebration of holidays including July 4.

Campus Reform has also been covering the fallout of this indoctrination.

For example, in 2014, a University of Wyoming student wrote an opinion piece arguing that Americans needed to “get over” 9/11.  In 2021, an annual North Dakota State University survey found that 57% of liberal-identifying students considered themselves unpatriotic.

Widespread campus anti-Americanism has also fueled anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activism at universities, which has resulted in physical attacks on Jewish students.

In November, Campus Reform Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano spoke with CUNY Law Professor Jeffrey Lax about how the anti-Americanism exacerbates Jew-hatred on college campuses as part of a larger attempt to dismantle Western civilization.

Watch the full interview here.

The Biden Administration Hasn’t Just Abandoned You, It’s Actively Trying to Subject You to Invasion

BLUF
It’s too bad none of the scores of journalism contests out there yet offers a fake news category. If one did, the 14 stories chosen by the Trace would be award winners.

The ‘most memorable gun violence journalism of 2023,’ according to the Trace
If there was a Pulitzer category for gaslighting, the stories chosen by the Trace would all be serious contenders.

The Trace, the propaganda arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s antigun empire, recently published their picks for “The Most Memorable Gun Violence Journalism of 2023.”

If there was a Pulitzer Prize category for gaslighting or agitprop, the 14 stories highlighted by the Trace would all be serious contenders.

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Analysis: A New Twist on the ‘Dangerous and Unusual’ Standard for Gun Bans

A Massachusetts federal judge upheld the commonwealth’s ban on AR-15s and similar rifles this week. His rationale for doing so relied on an idiosyncratic understanding of the rifle’s purported lethality and defensive utility.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV denied a motion for preliminary injunction against Massachusetts’ ban on “assault weapons” and ammunition magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds. He did so by putting a new twist on an old argument. He determined that modern laws banning AR-15s fit within the country’s historical tradition of regulating “dangerous and unusual” weapons.

“The banned weapons are ‘dangerous,’ because they are unreasonably dangerous for ordinary purposes of self-defense due to their extreme lethality and high potential for collateral harm,” Saylor, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in Capen v. Campbell, “and they are ‘unusual,’ because it would be unusual for an ordinary citizen to carry such a weapon on his person on the street for self-defense, or to use it in the home to confront invaders or to protect against personal violence.”

While Saylor is certainly not the first to uphold a hardware ban since the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, his analytical framework for doing so stands out among the rest for its emphasis on the “dangerous and unusual” standard and his understanding of how AR-15s fit in.

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2024—the Year of our Reckoning
Will we meet the challenges or ensure the ongoing decline?

We should remember the now modern proverb of Nixon-era economic advisor Herb Stein to the effect that what cannot go on (without destroying the nation), simply will not go on.

In some sense, the country for recent years has been cruising on the fumes from prior and likely better wiser generations and institutions. In 2024, the tab for our current apathy, toxic politics, and incompetence will come due.

So next year we will likely see the climax to a number of current dangerous ideas, events, and forces, which finally will either overwhelm us or be addressed and remedied. We live in a Neronian age but can recover if we first understand how we got here and the nature of the suicide we are committing.

In 2023, it became clear, to even the most loyal supporters of the Biden administration, that the U.S. has simply lost or indeed forfeited American deterrence abroad. Our enemies do not fear us; our friends do not trust us; and neutrals do not care either way.

After the 2021 Kabul debacle, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 2023 brazen Chinese spy balloon’s uncontested trajectory over the United States, the recent Hamas invasion of Israel, the serial Iranian-fueled terrorist attacks on U.S. installations in the Middle East, and the terrorist Houthis’ veritable absorption of the Red Sea, many of America’s opportunistic enemies drew conclusions and adopted strategies that would have been previously unthinkable.

Either adversaries will be so emboldened to start regional wars—an impotent Iran now brags it will block the entire Mediterranean—or a United States will be shocked into action and have to deter Iran, the Houthis, and Islamic terrorism, while dealing with an opportunistic China eager to annex Taiwan, and Russia determined to finish off Ukraine.

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GIBBON, GUNS AND GOVERNMENT

In the course of writing Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon encountered Mohammed, who pursued the Jews with “implacable hatred” to the end of his life. The historian also called out Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogoth king who invaded Italy in 488 AD and “condescended to disarm the unwarlike natives of Italy, interdicting all weapons of offence, and excepting only a small knife for domestic use.” Call it an early display of the totalitarian mindset.

Wherever they hold sway, modern totalitarians disarm the people of firearms and ammunition. For details, see Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming Jews and “Enemies of the State,” by Stephen Halbrook. Hitler’s National Socialists used the registration records of the Weimar Republic to identify and disarm gun owners.

As Halbrook shows in Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, the Nazis confiscated all firearms, even antique hunting rifles. That left the people vulnerable to wholesale slaughter. On June 10, 1944, four days after D-Day, troops of the 4th SS Panzer Regiment surrounded the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in central France. The attackers killed 245 women and 207 children, including six below the age of six months.

The 196 men killed included seven Jewish refugees from other parts of France. Of the 648 people murdered in the village, only 50 could be identified. The Nazis locked the women and children in the village church, shot indiscriminately, and set the victims on fire. The rest of the village was then looted and set ablaze.

As the late P.J. O’Rourke explained, this is what happens when those with all the power have all the guns. And to paraphrase inspector Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale) in The Day of the Jackal, be in no doubt that this is what the Biden Junta wants.

At every mass shooting, the default government response is to blame guns and make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms. This does not apply, however, to Muslim jihadists like “Soldier of Allah” Maj. Nidal Hasan. At Ford Hood in 2009 Hasan gunned down 13 unarmed American soldiers, including Pvt. Francheska Velez, who was pregnant. Hasan wounded more than 30 others, including Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, who took seven bullets from the jihadist.

According to the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, this was “workplace violence,” not terrorism or even “gun violence,” and the mass murderer Hasan got better medical treatment than his victims. In 2014, Lunsford sought to explain his plight to the president, who declined to meet with him. The composite character did not proclaim Islamic terrorist attacks in 2015 at San Bernardino (14 dead) and Orlando in 2016, (49 dead) as cases of “gun violence.”

Of all the various forms of government in the world, wrote Gibbon, “an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.” The buffoonish Biden channels Obama, but the Delaware Democrat shapes up worse. On September 1, 2022, backdropped in red light with Marines at the ready, Biden targeted those who want the nation to be great as the primary threat to America. Biden’s FBI openly follows suit and in August the FBI killed Craig Robertson, a 75-year-old woodworker, for threats he had allegedly posted online.

Recall the Ruby Ridge siege of 1992, when the FBI deployed massive military force against a single family, and FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot dead Vicki Weaver as she held her infant daughter. That case prompted Senate hearings, but so far nothing on Robertson. Biden’s FBI shoots first and avoids questions later, so an escalation of deadly violence is not out of the question. Christmas 2023 may well be joyous, but 2024 shapes up as the year of living dangerously.

The Great Legal War Over Your Freedom

Since the U.S. Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022, the lower courts have been either trying to apply, or to resist, its directive to decide the validity of restrictions on the basis of the text of the Second Amendment and historical analogues from the time of the Founding. According to the ruling, an activity is presumed to be protected if it involves keeping and bearing arms by the people. The burden is then on the government to find historical precedents to show that a restriction is part of the nation’s history and tradition.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals applied Bruen to the federal ban on gun possession by a person subject to a domestic violence restraining order (DVRO) and found it to violate the Second Amendment. State DVROs are often issued with little pretense of an adversary hearing or are mutually agreed upon in divorces without knowledge that it evokes a federal gun ban.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, U.S. v. Rahimi, and a barrage of amicus briefs have been filed on both sides. Mr. Rahimi faces several state charges involving actual violence, dwarfing the federal possession charge. The amicus brief of the National Rifle Association put it this way: “Rahimi should not only lose his Second Amendment liberties, but he should also lose all of his liberties—if the allegations against him are ultimately proven true with sufficient due process. But constitutional safeguards cannot be set aside to obtain those ends.”

Consider the supposed historical analogues cited by Biden’s Justice Department and its amici—discriminatory laws disarming Catholics, slaves and “tramps”; confiscation of arms by oppressive British monarchs and by our own patriots in the American Revolution (there was a war going on, after all); and wholly irrelevant laws against gun sales to children and intoxicated persons. The Court heard oral arguments in the case on Nov. 7, 2023.

The Third Circuit, in Range v. Merrick Garland, held the federal ban on gun possession by felons to be unconstitutional as applied to a person convicted of a minor, non-violent offense.  Again, no laws in the Founding era disarmed persons who were not dangerous. The government is asking the Supreme Court to hear that case after it decides Rahimi.

When it decided Bruen, the Supreme Court directed the Fourth Circuit to reconsider its upholding of Maryland’s “assault weapon” ban in Bianchi v. Frosh. That court had held that ordinary AR-15 semi-automatic rifles are not really different from machineguns and are “weapons of war most useful in military service,” even though no military force in the world issues them as service rifles.

The Fourth Circuit got right on it, holding its oral argument on Dec. 6, 2022. A year later, crickets. Still no decision. Is it really so hard to apply Bruen’s simple tests, or would the court not like the result?

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Massachusetts Assault Weapon Ban Ruled Constitutional by Judge

Massachusetts’ law prohibiting the possession and sale of some semiautomatic weapons commonly used in mass shootings is acceptable under a recent change to Second Amendment precedent from the US Supreme Court, a federal judge said Thursday.

The National Association for Gun Rights asked the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts to prevent the state from being able to enforce its law, claiming the weapons are protected under the Second Amendment because they were in common use at the time the Second Amendment was adopted.

The banned weapons “are unreasonably dangerous for ordinary purposes of self-defense due to their extreme lethality and high potential for collateral harm,” Chief Judge Dennis Saylor wrote in an order denying the gun rights group’s request to halt enforcement of the law.

This IS NOT the Bruen Standard.

The US Supreme Court held last year in New York State Rifles & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen that state governments must prove a regulation would have been consistent with the nation’s historical regulation of firearms.

Saylor’s decision helps build the jurisprudence for the types of state regulations that remain acceptable under the Second Amendment post-Bruen as many states grapple with challenges to their weapon laws. States like Illinois, California, and Connecticut have also been allowed to move forward enforcing their assault weapon bans.

“The relevant history affirms the principle that in 1791, as now, there was a tradition of regulating ‘dangerous and unusual’ weapons—specifically, those that are not reasonably necessary for self-defense,” the order said, and the current restrictions “pose a minimal burden on the right to self-defense and are comparably justified to historical regulation.”

THIS, is not the Bruen Standard either!

Saylor was not convinced that assault weapons are commonly used for self-defense, finding them “generally unsuitable” for that purpose because of their weight, size, and firepower.

“The features of modern assault weapons—particularly the AR-15’s radical increases in muzzle velocity, range, accuracy, and functionality—along with the types of injuries they can inflict are so different from colonial firearms that the two are not reasonably comparable,” the order said.

The case is Capen v. Campbell, D. Mass., No. 1:22-cv-11431, order 12/21/23.

Civilizational Jenga
Bit by bit, our ruling class is eliminating our societal safety margins

Politics makes me sad sometimes.

Oh, not just because politicians are doing dumb things.  Not even because politicians are corrupt.  Politicians have always been dumb and corrupt, as any study of history will demonstrate.

And it doesn’t matter if they hold office by election, inheritance, or swords distributed by strange women lying in ponds.  Stupidity and corruption are human characteristics, and politicians are very, very human.  (Though recent history is such that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords look better as the basis for a system of government . . . .)

Sometimes their stupidity and corruption make me angry, and sometimes they make me laugh.  But, given my low expectations, it takes a special kind of stupidity and corruption to actually make me sad.

What makes me sad now is the ongoing game of Civilizational Jenga that our ruling class is playing.  One by one, they’re withdrawing the supports of civil society, in a process that will inevitably lead to a collapse.  They’re taking what was a very robust society, and consuming all the safety margins, bit by bit.

What really makes me sad is that while some of the people involved – let’s call them “the morons” for convenience’s sake – are doing this out of shortsightedness, cupidity, or sheer partisan bloodthirstiness, I’m increasingly convinced that there’s a contingent at the top that knows exactly what it’s doing, and is fine with it.

Roger Kimball gets at it in a recent piece:

“This is the same old trick,” Trump said when he got the news that the Colorado Supreme Court voted 4-3 to keep him off the primary ballot for the 2024 presidential election.

Oops. Sorry. I got my papers mixed up. That was actually Abraham Lincoln in 1860 when he got the news that some Southern states had voted to keep him off the ballot. Eventually 10 states did so.

So here we are again. It’s a bit like that Army Major in the Vietnam war who explained that they had to destroy a village in order to save it. Just so, the virtuous people of Colorado have decided that in order to save democracy they need to destroy it.

In fact, what they have just voted to preserve is not democracy but “Our Democracy™.” Here’s the difference. In a democracy, people get to vote for the candidate they prefer. In “Our Democracy™,” only approved candidates get to compete.

Donald Trump is the opposite of an approved candidate. The untrammeled hermeneutical ingenuity of the American legal profession had be let loose against Trump. As I write, he faces huge legal battle in four states. . . .

Trump is guilty not because of anything he has done but because of who he is. He is an enemy, not of the state, exactly, but of the state of mind that constitutes “Our Democracy™.” When he unexpectedly won the presidency in 2016, the beautiful people, beginning with his opponent Hillary Clinton, couldn’t believe it. They denounced the election as fraudulent. “Our Democracy™,” you see,  means “rule by Democrats.”

Now they are warning that, should Trump be reelected, he would be a “dictator,” a new Hitler, etc. He would weaponise the Department of Justice against his enemies, they claim, and use the FBI to harass his opponents. Stay tuned for the seminar on what the Freudians call “projection”: it meets this afternoon in a democratic redoubt near you.

In a more civilized version of America – one that existed just a few decades ago – the notion of waging this sort of unrestricted lawfare against a leading presidential candidate, much less a former president – would have been considered ridiculous, and had it been taken seriously, would have been seen as enormously risky.

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Biden Administration Urges Supreme Court To Overturn Injunction on Federal Agencies Influencing Tech Censorship
Biden wants the Supreme Court to support its censorship efforts.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently affirmed an injunction against federal agencies to stop the current White House from colluding with Big Tech’s social media.

And now, the Biden Administration is going to the US Supreme Court in a last-ditch attempt to reverse this decision.

The big picture effect – or at least, the intended meaning – of the Fifth Circuit ruling was to stop the government from working with Big Tech in censoring online content.

There’s little surprise that this doesn’t sit well with that government, which now hopes that the federal appellate court’s decision can be overturned.

The White House says the ruling is banning its “good” work done alongside social media to combat “misinformation”; instead of admitting its actions to amount to collusion with Big Tech – which has been amply documented now, not least by the Twitter Files – the government insists its actions are serving the public, and its “ability” to discuss relevant issues.

We obtained a copy of the petition for you here.

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is back again here – to say that what those now in power in the US (a message amplified by legacy media) did ahead of the 2020 presidential election, as well as subsequently regarding the pandemic “misinformation” – which is now fairly widely accepted to be censorship (“moderation”) – is what Murthy still calls, justified.

By what, though? Because the appellate court’s ruling looked into the government’s “persuasive actions” (and no, you’re not reading a line from a gangster movie script, where “coercion” is spelled as, “urging”, etc.).

In any case, the appellate court found these actions were in fact coercive and unconstitutional.

Well, Murthy believes the court got it all wrong. The Fifth Circuit is accused of “improperly applying new and unprecedented” remedies. (No – he was not talking about the Covid vaccine(s). The reference was to the court’s allegedly flawed “legal theories”).

Murthy and other administration representatives are telling the Supreme Court that what the Fifth Circuit found to be unconstitutional, was actually “lawful persuasive governmental actions.”

The “grand” argument here is that, historically, US governments have been using free speech as a vehicle to promote their policies. And so – why would this case of “urging” Big Tech be any different?

“The Biden administration’s urging of social media platforms to enforce their content moderation policies to combat misinformation and disinformation is no different,” the government said.

Putting the enemies of civilization in charge of educating our kids may have been a mistake. You think I exaggerate?

“I’ll take ‘Totally Lacking Due Process” for $500, Alex

On Trump and Colorado

By now most readers will have heard that Donald Trump was disqualified from the ballot in the state of Colorado, by the Colorado State Supreme Court, for what amounts to a criminal offense neither proven nor charged. Fifth Amendment, Schmifth Amendment, apparently.

This is a major escalation of the lawfare phenomenon that’s zoomed from simmer to boil in the seven short years since Trump was first elected in 2016. The glee of #Resistance dolts like Robert Reich and Dean Obeidallah at this decision shows that this was a move dreamed up at the very center of the bubble-within-a-bubble-within-a-bubble that is the blob of the modern Democratic Party. Racket readers, I had a piece planned for later on a quasi-related subject, but I’ll try to get it out in the day or so now.

 

Every institution has been corrupted, but they get upset if you call them corrupt.

‘Liberty and Justice For All’ – A Tattered Cliche?

One set of laws for Donald Trump and his supporters, and another set for the harassers.

Throughout history, the tyrannical abuse of governmental power has been a fearsome thing to behold. Wise men instituted laws in an effort to tame that abuse. The Constitution of the United States, for example, was framed in large part as a prophylactic against the coercive power of the state. The Framers witnessed the “long train of abuses and usurpations” perpetrated by the British crown and resolved to respond. The Constitution dealt with many other things, to be sure, but concern about tyrannical abuse of power by the government and its minions is patent from the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence straight through the Constitution and its Amendments. The idea was that we Americans would live in a polity governed by “laws, not men.” That is to say, laws would be legitimately formulated, clearly defined, and administered impartially, so far as was humanly possible. How are we doing on that score?

Not so well.

The terms “administrative state” and “deep state” entered parlance only about seven years ago. The realities those phrases name long predate their currency, but Donald Trump was the lens through which worry about those legitimacy-devouring, essentially tyrannical phenomena crystallized. During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s chief strategist Steven Bannon raised eyebrows when he said that “deconstructing the administrative state” was a high priority. In the event, Trump’s success on that task was only a patchwork affair, but he did make an effort.

What prompts these thoughts is the spectacle, partly risible, partly terrifying, of the federal government’s ongoing vendetta against a single individual it cannot countenance. That individual, of course, is Donald Trump. And while the focus of its vendetta is against Trump the man—or, more precisely, Trump the presidential candidate—its animus has spilled over to embrace anyone tainted by association with the Trump phenomenon. Into this category fall the hundreds of people who had the misfortune to visit the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Opinions differ about the state of popular sentiment when it comes to the current disposition of the United States government. I have by degrees joined the camp that has grave doubts about its legitimacy. I do not, for example, believe that the hallowed ideal of “liberty and justice for all” is these days much more than a tattered cliché, a pious nostrum without substance.

One of the great poster children for this erosion of public support—and, consequently, of political legitimacy—is the FBI. At a time when its operations are so patently partisan, it is hard to maintain confidence in its beneficence. Consider the news about Charles McGonigal, former head of Counterintelligence for the FBI, boss of  FBI love bird Peter “Mr. Insurance Policy” Strzok, and vigorous investigator of the Trump Russia Collusion hoax. Wouldn’t you know it: the chap who went after George Papadopoulos and others in Trump’s circle was just fined and sentenced to four years in prison for—wait for it—colluding with Russia.

You might argue that McGonigal’s comeuppance shows that “the system works,” that the FBI can effectively police itself, etc. I would counter that it is yet another reminder that the deep-state, anti-Trump forces operate primarily by what the Freudians call projection, by being guilty of what they accuse others of. There is a hilarious video collage making the rounds of various pundits and politicians warning that the world, or at least our democratic republic, will come to a sudden and ignominious end if, heaven forfend, Donald Trump should be elected again in 2024. Trump will assassinate generals, you see, shoot visitors to the White House, suspend the Constitution, and kill democracy. It is an inadvertently amusing compilation but also a deeply depressing one since it underscores the sad and debilitating effects of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Trump represents a threat to democracy, ergo he must be prevented from running “by any means necessary,” otherwise so many people might vote for that he would win. That’s the logic. Odd isn’t it? Person X wins in a free and open election. But you don’t like the person. So you declare the election “undemocratic.”

It is here that we must distinguish between “democracy,” which is what would be upheld if Trump were allowed to run, and “Our Democracy™,” that strange, oligarchical confect that can be maintained only by suppressing common, or garden variety democracy.

It is in this context, I believe that we must understand the unhinged legal campaigns unleashed against Trump in four separate jurisdictions.

I say “legal campaigns,” but really they are partisan political assaults masquerading under cover of legal procedures.

That is, they look like legal procedures from the outside; they employ all the paraphernalia of legal procedures. There are courts, lawyers, subpoena, judges.  But  the German Judge Roland Freisler (1893-1945) employed all that machinery, too. He presided over trials.  But he always got the results he wanted.

And this brings me to the activities of Special Counsel Jack Smith, the anti-Trump fanatic and DOJ pit bull who has been charged with taking Trump down in Washington, D.C., where Trump is accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election by “obstructing an official proceeding,” etc., and in Florida, where he is accused of illegally possessing classified documents.

Smith understands that by far his best chance of getting Trump is in Washington—not, I hasten to add, because he has much of a case there but because he has an Obama-appointed anti-Trump judge Tanya Chutkan and a Democratic jury pool that can be counted on to convict Trump on anything he accused of. Andy McCarthy has published a thoroughgoing anatomy of the the legal niceties of the case. He is no friend to Trump, deprecates what he calls his “loathsome behavior,” but does say that he thinks Trump is “being denied due process.” He further acknowledges that the effort to use Section 1512(c) of the federal penal law against Trump will be a “tough case” that is likely to signal “trouble for Smith.”

It’s the opposite in Florida, where the judge is a Trump-appointed jurist and the jury pool is likely to be sympathetic to Trump. In my view, Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago is no different from Biden’s possession of classified documents in his garage behind his Corvette. Rather, Trump’s case was less egregious than Biden’s. For one thing, Biden was never president.  He had many more documents, in many more, less secure places. And remember: all modern presidents seem to have possession of classified documents after they leave office, but not all former presidents are Donald Trump.

Trump’s lawyers have appealed the Washington case and, in response, Smith has asked the Supreme Court to bypass the usual appeal process and take the case on an expedited schedule. Why? Because the Washington trial was set to begin on March 4, a day before “Super Tuesday,” at which Trump is likely to seal the GOP nomination. Smith hoped that an early trial would harm Trump with voters. So far, legal attacks agains Trump have had the opposite effect, increasing his standing in the polls. That is because voters understand that the legal challenges are legal in name only. At bottom, they are instances of bare-knuckle political warfare.

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial whose slug got to the nub of the issue. “The special counsel,” it read, “tries to drag the Justices into his political timetable for the Jan. 6 trial of Donald Trump.” That’s it exactly. Smith wants the Court to decide now, today, so he can pursue his vendetta against Trump on the time table the election calendar has set. Most observers believe that the Court will be more circumspect. The writers of that editorial caution that “The wiser decision would have been to lay out the facts of what the special counsel found and let the voters decide. They chose to prosecute, and the damage has begun to unfold.”

I was talking to a friend about about Smith’s case. He responded “It sounds like the judiciary/prosecution is corruptly trying to interfere with an official proceeding, i.e., the election.” That’s pretty much what I think, too, though I don’t expect Jack Smith to be charged for the tort. Remember, there is one law for Donald Trump and his supporters. They can be harassed, prosecuted, and jailed. There is another law for the nomenklatura that does the harassing, prosecuting, and jailing.

Christian Nationalism

We’re being told that we should be afraid of this:

And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain, and when he was set down, his disciples came unto him. And opening his mouth, he taught them, saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.

Blesses are the peacemakers: for they shall be called children of God.
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake: Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets that were before you.

     [Matthew 5:1-12]

And this:

And behold one came and said to him: Good master, what good shall I do that I may have life everlasting?

Who said to him: Why asketh thou me concerning good? One is good, God. But if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
He said to him: Which? And Jesus said: Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness. Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

     [Matthew 19:16-19]

And this:

But the Pharisees hearing that he had silenced the Sadducees, came together: And one of them, a doctor of the law, asking him, tempting him: Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law?
Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets.

     [Matthew 22:34-40]

But we’re not supposed to be afraid of this:

“Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for Holy Warriors! These are hundreds of other psalms and Hadiths urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.” — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

“The minarets are our bayonets; the domes are our helmets. Mosques are our barracks, the believers are soldiers. This holy army guards my religion. Almighty Our journey is our destiny, the end is martyrdom.” — Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister of Turkey

Those who believe fight in the way of Allah, and those who disbelieve fight in the way of the Shaitan. Fight therefore against the friends of the Shaitan; surely the strategy of the Shaitan is weak. [Koran, Sura 4:76]

“I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them.” [Koran, Sura 8:12]

“But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem…” [Koran, Sura 9:5]

“Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, of the people of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” [Koran, Sura 9:29]

“O Prophet! Struggle against the unbelievers and hypocrites and be harsh with them.” [Koran, Sura 9:73]

Puzzling, eh?

***

It’s becoming rare that my boiler gets lit over anything, these days. I’ve said too much…written too much. But among my remaining hot buttons, this one may be the hottest: people who promote contempt toward Christianity and malice toward Christians. From the way they whine and rave, you’d think we had our hands in their pockets, if not down their pants.

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