Category: Enemies Foreign and Domestic

It’s a wonder they’re so arrogant they openly publish this. They’re the ‘real’ sedition and insurrectionists

Time to Go After Supreme Court

As the stories of “justices” Roberts, Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas appear every day in the paper, it appears there is some hesitancy on attacking the legitimacy of the Court.  That needs to end.  It is obvious that the Court will not be working for political rights, human rights, fair elections, or anything else for decades in the future.  It is also obvious that they are just another branch of an oligarchic government.

Some highlights of the Roberts Court.

Citizens United — Yes, people with more money than they know what to do with should be allowed to use their money to influence elections.  It was put forward as a free speech case, and money was equated with speech.  As a constitutional originalist, my copy does not include a mention of money, and money was widely used during the adoption of the constitution.

Shelby — Essentially, the Voting Rights Act was eliminated based on the Court saying it was no longer necessary.  Amendment XV simply says the Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.  No where does it mention the Court, and why with this explicit direction, does the court substitute its judgment for Congress’s.

Gun Cases -Heller — The Court is moving for unrestricted gun access.  Now guns are described as appropriate means of self defense.  However, my Constitution only describes well regulated militias, and the Court avoids the need or participation in militias as part of gun rights.

Obamacare case — The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law.  However, they greatly constrained Medicaid expansion, and the case they heard was so zany it should not have been heard.

Gerrymandering — The Court has essentially said gerrymandering is fine, no matter what.  We are now picking legislators and Congressmen based on an election in 2010 which gave Republicans the opportunity to gerrymander for the next ten years, and based on them still being in office based on that gerrymander, they did it again in 2020.

Harding — The Court has shown a willingness to accept the legislative doctrine, which would essentially allow these gerrymandered legislators the opportunity to pick the President.

Dobbs — Just based on the change in the Court based on some finagling by McConnell, and nominations by an impeached President, the Court essentially stripped a basic right from a majority of the population.

Impreachment 1 — The Constitution directs the Chief Justice to preside over impeachments of the President.  Roberts did not do this.  Since the Senate could not pass a resolution allowing the calling of witnessed, there were no witnesses.  Essentially,  defense counsel with the support of Republican senators prevented witnesses from appearing.  Doesn’t presiding mean presiding, not showing up and sitting like a potted plant while members did crossword puzzles and left the room.

For those of us with fond memories of the Warren Court, those days are long gone.  We are not looking at a Court who is working for us!

It is time for members of the Congress and Administration to challenge their legitimacy.  They are not going to do anything for us, and we need to work to undermine that branch and that Court.

1) Cut their money!

2) Challenge their decisions, and if appropriate and useful, ignore them.

3) Investigate the Court and publicize it to the nines.  Why do we learn of their corruption from Pro Publica.  Senate Judiciary should be all over them.

There is no reason to respect the Court or its members.

Senator Schumer’s Letter to Chief Judge Godbey (NDTX)
If you don’t do what I want, “Congress will consider more prescriptive requirements.

On Thursday, Senator Charles Schumer, the Majority Leader, sent a letter to the presiding officer of a federal court. No, it was not Chief Justice Roberts. Senator Durbin has that task locked down. Rather, Schumer sent the letter to Chief Judge Godbey of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

The theme, if you couldn’t guess, concerns case assignment in single-judge divisions in Amarillo, Wichita Falls, and Lubbock. (I’ve written about this topic at some length here and here.)

Schumer charged:

Even though the Northern District has twelve active judges and another four senior judges who still hear cases, your orders provide that civil cases filed in many divisions are always assigned to a single judge, or to one of just a few.

Cases filed in the Amarillo Division are always assigned to Judge Kacsmaryk; cases filed in the Wichita Falls Division are always assigned to Judge O’Connor; and cases filed in the Abeline, Lubbock, and San Angelo Divisions are split between just two judges. As a result of your recent assignment orders, plaintiffs in your district can now effectively choose the judge who will hear their cases.

Schumer issued an ultimatum: the court should “randomly” assign cases filed in “rural divisions,” or else.

The Northern District of Texas could, and should, adopt a similar rule for all civil cases. Currently, a federal statute allows each district court to decide for itself how to assign cases.

This gives courts the flexibility to address individual circumstances in their districts and among their judges. But if that flexibility continues to allow litigants to hand-pick their preferred judges and effectively guarantee their preferred outcomes, Congress will consider more prescriptive requirements.

It has come to this. The Senate Majority leader, who has no chance of actually passing court reform legislation, is issuing empty ultimatums to a federal judge. Anyone who can count to sixty knows such “prescriptive requirements” are dead on arrival. And certainly Schumer knows that as well. But Schumer’s intent, like that of Durbin, is not to actually engage in good-faith discussions with the judiciary. Rather the goal, as always, is to undermine the authority of judges he disagrees with.

To quote Justice Alito:

It “undermines confidence in the government,” Justice Alito says. “It’s one thing to say the court is wrong; it’s another thing to say it’s an illegitimate institution. You could say the same thing about Congress and the president. . . . When you say that they’re illegitimate, any of the three branches of government, you’re really striking at something that’s essential to self-government.”

There have been no actual allegations that judges assigned to the Amarillo or Wichita Falls divisions have engaged in any judicial misconduct. (And no, authorship of a law review article that a judge did not actually write does not actually matter.) These judges have not been mandamused or reassigned by the court of appeals.

None of the progressive judges on the Fifth Circuit have, in dissent, charged these judges with malfeasance. And no bar complaints have been filed against the Texas Attorney General or other plaintiffs who have filed in these forums. DOJ has filed motions to transfer cases in these divisions. And, those motions have been denied. In doing so, these courts have rejected the premise of Schumer’s letter: that single-judge divisions undermine public confidence in the judiciary.

Senator Schumer is, in effect, seeking reconsideration of what Judges Tipton, Kacsmaryk, and others have already ruled. The chief judge of a federal district cannot sit in judgment of another district judge in his district. That job belongs to the court of appeals alone.

I am well aware that in 2016, Judge Godbey’s predecessor reassigned 15% of cases from the Wichita Falls division to herself. That was a controversial decision at the time, and one that was never fully justified. And Judge Godbey reversed that decision in 2022. I think it quite problematic for a single judge to take it upon herself to address what are, in effect, substantive grievances with a district court’s rulings.

From a pragmatic perspective, I am truly skeptical that all of the judges in Dallas would be willing to pick up a random share of cases in Amarillo or Lubbock. And no, as Senator Schumer suggests, remote hearings would not be an adequate substitute for actual parties in those communities.

The bigger problem, of course, is that Schumer has now boxed in Judge Godbey. If the Judge takes the sort of action that Schumer demanded, then he will be seen as caving to legislative pressure. If he ignores Schumer, he will be seen as enabling “judge shopping.” And law professors on Twitter will beat their drums.

My recommendation? Do nothing now. DOJ filed motions to transfer, which were denied. Those motions will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit. If the Fifth Circuit affirms those motions, then Judge Godbey will have definitive ground to maintain the status quo. Acting now would be premature, and frankly, would weaken the separation of powers and judicial independence.

Biden Administration Paves Way for Confucius Institute Affiliate Schools to Receive Federal Funding

The Defense Department in late March announced that it would grant waivers to allow schools to host chapters of the Confucius Institute, a Chinese Communist Party-backed program that Beijing uses to peddle influence and steal intellectual property from American universities. The department’s waiver program is a response to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which barred American colleges and universities from receiving federal dollars if they maintain Confucius Institute chapters.

Lawmakers say the Defense Department is subverting federal law.

“The Chinese Communist Party is subverting U.S. institutions and Joe Biden is sabotaging legislation to stop them,” Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Select Committee on China, told the Washington Free Beacon. Banks added that the Biden administration has essentially “greenlit China’s espionage and malign influence operations on college campuses.”

The workaround comes amid warnings from the intelligence community that American colleges are a “soft target” for Chinese spies. China has opened at least 100 Confucius Institutes in the United States since 2008, with China pouring more than $158 million into them. The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have repeatedly warned that these outposts are “ultimately beholden to the Chinese government” and pose an espionage risk.

Continue reading “”

People can lie all they want. I’m not disarming, and I’ll call such liars, a liar to their faces.

Lies Aimed at Disarming You

Lies come in many shapes and sizes. Some are simple exaggerations. Some are absurd falsehoods. Unfortunately, we tend to believe a bald lie if it is expressed with enough emotion. That outrage also keeps viewers watching and clicking so the press is often more interested in outrage than in the truth. A lie doesn’t become the truth if it is repeated, but the lie may help politicians get re-elected if it is repeated by enough likely voters. We need to call out every lie we see even if that means calling “respected elected officials” liars. Congressman Jamaal Brown, you lie. Representative Jimmy Gomez, you lie. You lie because you say you want to save lives, yet you pretend that more gun-control laws will actually protect our kids. That is a lie and I’ll prove it right now.

Why would politicians hide the truth behind their emotional outbursts? The simple answer is that politicians lie to get what they want. They want press coverage and campaign contributions. Democrat Congressman Jimmy Gomez of California said that Republicans should resign from office if they are not going to pass more gun-control legislation. Democrat Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York yelled at reporters that “Republicans won’t do sh-t when it comes to gun violence.” Implied is the lie that gun-control laws actually save lives, and that anyone who won’t pass more gun-control laws is either corrupt or heartless. Both claims are a lie. Maybe if their Democrat controlled cities weren’t so corrupt then there would be fewer young men shooting at each other on the streets of the congressman’s districts. I think gun control is a distraction from their many failures.

Gun-control costs lives and endangers our children in school. Before you can believe that you need to know that armed defense by ordinary citizens is common. We use a firearm to stop death or great bodily injury about 2.8 million times a year. That is over 4600 times a day. In addition, ordinary citizens with a gun prevented several million more crimes than that. Your armed neighbors probably stopped tens of thousands of murders. Armed citizens probably stopped over a hundred-thousand sexual assaults. These armed good guys stopped an immense about of harm. That is good, but our virtue doesn’t stop there.

We started to train and arm volunteer school staff a decade ago after the mass-murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. We have accumulated several thousand man-years of experience with these armed volunteers. You might have missed that their efforts worked in the best possible way: their mere presence prevented attacks at their school. Let me underline that for you.

We have never had a mass-murder at a school that had a program of trained and armed school staff.

Perspective is everything when we want to understand the truth. Only one-criminal-out-of-six uses a firearm in the commission of a violent crime. Criminals use firearms about a quarter-million times each year and they violate our “gun-control” laws millions of times each year. That means that gun control is a failure. In contrast, we defend ourselves with a firearm about 2.8 million times every year. Mass murderers take about 600 lives a year. We protected hundreds of thousands of our children with armed school volunteers. If you haven’t heard it before then I’m telling you now, armed defense is much more common than the criminal use of a firearm.

Gun-control politicians say their laws disarm criminals. In fact, their 23-thousand gun-control regulations disarm far more honest citizens than criminals. Mass murderers deliberately attack us in gun-free zones where we are disarmed by law.

Politicians and the news media don’t tell us everything we need to know to make a reasoned decision. It is deadly public policy to solve a small problem by creating a larger one. We can’t save hundreds of lives by sacrificing tens-of-thousands. If we really want to save lives, then we’d repeal our gun-control laws rather than passing more of them. That won’t work for gun-control politicians who need to shout in public to get reelected. If gun-control advocates really wanted to save lives, then they would stop lying.

How many more innocent lives should we sacrifice on the altar of gun-control?

I’m giving you facts, but facts don’t matter to gun-control ideologues. For them, the ideal of gun-control is an end in itself rather than an instrumental means to save lives. Mass murders are simply an excuse to disarm more honest citizens.

I am not running for office, but I am trying to influence your opinion. Lies matter when we want to deceive. Facts matter when we want to save lives. Time and again, Democrats and Socialists in the USA have said that only Democrats care about children, and everyone else doesn’t care if kids die. I’m calling that a lie. Lives matter to me and they matter to you.

It is uncomfortable to call someone a liar but it gets easier with practice. I did it this time. I’m asking you to do it the next time you hear them lie about us.

Enemies, foreign….and domestic

Kinzinger: Gun Owners Should Help Dismantle the Second Amendment

By Lee Williams

SAF Investigative Journalism Project

OPINION: Adam Kinzinger is an angry and frustrated little fella.

For those who don’t remember the former Illinois Congressman, he served on the Jan. 6 House committee alongside Liz Cheney where he read from prepared scripts and cried a lot, was censured by the RNC and forced to leave Congress in disgrace, and then, of course, ended up with a job at CNN.

Today, Kinzinger has become a man without a country, of sorts. Republicans still despise him and Democrats could care less what he does, since his usefulness is at an end.

Kinzinger, who’s only 45, is struggling for relevancy, trying to find an audience that will listen to his angry rants. His memoir, “Renegade: My Life in Faith, the Military, and Defending America from Trump’s Attack on Democracy” is scheduled to be released Oct. 17, and will likely not exactly fly off the shelves.

In the meantime, the self-described renegade is trying to get back into the public eye by any means possible, and what better way to attract attention than by bashing the Second Amendment.

Last week, Kinzinger spoke at an event in Chicago that was organized by the Joyce Foundation, a private foundation with more than $1 billion in assets that is decidedly anti-gun. Barack Obama once served on their board. The event was hosted by David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief campaign strategist. Tim Heaphy, who served as the chief counsel for the Jan. 6 committee, was the other featured speaker.

“Second Amendment people should be on the front line of gun control,” Kinzinger told the left-leaning crowd.

The Chicago Tribune loved the idea, and wrote in an editorial that “those who want to see sensible regulations on gun ownership, such as background checks, age restrictions and red flag laws, should see ‘Second Amendment people’ as potential experts and allies. They know guns better than those who merely despise them.”

Sensible regulations? Experts and allies? As if …

To be clear, Kinzinger’s suggestion – that gun owners should help infringe upon the Second Amendment – may be the single dumbest idea we’ve heard since December 15, 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified.

Granted, we do have far more expertise than the gun-ban industry – we can articulate the difference between a semi-auto AR and a select-fire “assault rifle” – but why the hell would we use this expertise to aid those who want to deprive us of the right to own weapons of our choice?

It would be like asking newspaper editors or television producers to help weaken the First Amendment, or asking lawyers for a quick way to overcome their clients’ self-incrimination protections. Like most of what Kinzinger and his gun-banning friends suggest, it makes no sense.

The only thing you can surmise about Kinzinger’s idea is that it is nothing new. The former Congressman strongly opposes our Second Amendment rights.

In May 2022, after the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, Kinzinger told CNN he would support a federal ban on “assault weapons,” which, of course, he could not define.

“Look, I have opposed a ban, you know, fairly recently. I think I’m open to a ban now,” Kinzinger told CNN. “It’s going to depend on what it looks like because there’s a lot of nuances on what constitutes, you know, certain things.” He added that he would also support additional licensing and training requirements for potential AR purchasers.

That same month, Kinzinger told ABC News that raising the minimum age to purchase a firearm to 21 was a “no brainer,” and he claimed he was a “strong defender of the Second Amendment.”

“And one of the things I believe that for some reason is a very rare thing is that as a person that appreciates and believes in the Second Amendment, we have to be the ones putting forward reasonable solutions to gun violence,” Kinzinger claimed.

Kinzinger is right in one respect; It is rare for someone who supports the Second Amendment to put forward ideas to weaken it. In fact, it’s not only rare, it’s incredibly stupid – about what you’d expect from a laughingstock of a former Congressman with plenty of time on his hands.

SloJoe doesn’t think children belong to their parents, but to the state. Expect this clip to go nation wide next year during campaign season.
And those sunglasses again. Speed (amphetamines) cause the eyes to dilate and make open sunlight painful. Every time you see him wearing the shades, it’s because they’ve had to drug him up just to get him moving.

Yes. This is the continuing gambit. That something isn’t ‘covered’ by the 2nd since it’s not an ‘arm’.

Federal judge declares “large capacity” magazines not protected by the Second Amendment

A U.S. District Judge in Washington, D.C. has declined to grant an injunction against the city’s ban on “large capacity” magazines, ruling that while magazines in general are “arms” protected by the Second Amendment, LCMs fall outside of the scope of the amendment because they’re a “poor fit” for self-defense purposes.

The challenge to the District’s magazine ban, known as Hanson v. D.C., involves four legal gun owners from D.C. who all say that they would possess and carry “large capacity” magazines in their firearms if they weren’t banned by law. The District’s prohibition comes complete with a potential three-year prison sentence, though it’s unclear how often that sentence is handed down in practice, especially with D.C. prosecutors routinely deciding to decline charges in many illegal gun possession cases.

Even though the D.C. Attorney General’s office is taking a mostly hands-off approach to illegal gun (and magazine) possession, the ban remains on the books and was defended in court by D.C. officials, who maintain that magazines aren’t “arms” at all, but accessories that aren’t protected by the Second Amendment. U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, an Obama appointee, rejected that argument in his opinion, but agreed with the District on its fallback argument that LCM’s are most suitable for military purposes and are not used in self-defense because “because incidents where a civilian actually expends more than ten bullets in self-defense are “vanishingly rare.” From the opinion (citations omitted):

Heller specifically contemplated that “weapons that are most useful in military service” fall outside of Second Amendment protection.

Plaintiffs counter that “the Supreme Court’s precedents do not withhold protection from arms merely because they are useful in militia service.” Pls.’ Reply at 15. That may be true, but it is beside the point. Heller established that weapons that are “most useful in military service” are excluded from Second Amendment protection. “Most” is a superlative. A weapon may have some useful purposes in both civilian and military contexts, but if it is most useful in military service, it is not protected by the Second Amendment.

I’ve gotta say, that’s giving a lot of weight to Scalia’s phrase about “weapons that are most useful in military service”, especially since Contreras contradicted himself by pointing to the benefits of LCM’s for civilian law enforcement.

Continue reading “”

The Left continues to whitewash its crazy, violent, and authoritarian history.

About a week before Jeff Sharlet’s new book , The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, was published in March, a new video was uploaded on YouTube. It was a short documentary from 1983 of when Harry Belafonte, an iconic American singer and actor, visited East Germany to perform in a concert promoting communism . The “World Peace Concert” was run by East Germany’s communist youth organization. Belafonte gave his blessings to the Soviet-sponsored campaign promoting unilateral Western disarmament.

The Belafonte concert is barely mentioned in The Undertow, a collection of essays and reporting by Sharlet, an award-winning journalist who teaches at Dartmouth College. Indeed, little of the Left’s history of flirting with authoritarianism is mentioned at all. Instead, The Undertow argues that a bunch of crazy right-wingers, including militia groups, are bent on conflict with the Left. They want a second civil war, Sharlet claims, and those who stand up to oppose them are American leftists, portrayed as Christlike figures of light and wisdom.

While announcing the Right has a strong and growing MAGA force that is armed and dangerous and itching for battle, Sharlet smothers any proof that the Left is violent and crazy. His book, which opens with a long and loving profile of Belafonte, fails to mention the singer’s hardcore leftism.

Not even Belafonte tried to airbrush his beliefs. In his memoir, Belafonte wrote: “I remained not just liberal but an unabashed lefty. I was still drawn to idealistic left-wing leaders … who seemed to embody the true ideals of socialism .”

Belafonte was friends with the communist singer Paul Robeson. He praised Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, writing that the latter has “a strong grasp of Latin American history and of the fine distinctions in law between Venezuela and its neighbors.” Belafonte called former President George W. Bush “the greatest tyrant, the greatest terrorist in the world.” He was a Marxist — pure and simple.

None of this is reported in The Undertow. Instead, Belafonte is portrayed by Sharlet simply as an inspirational civil rights leader — “a radiant man” who was friends with Martin Luther King Jr. and who remains a political visionary. Sharlet’s book is pure agitprop. It condemns conservatives and treats even the most violent and despicable leftists as, quite literally, messianic. In his essay about Occupy Wall Street, for example, the 2011 leftist street protests that resulted in stinky unbathed bodies and reports of sexual assault, Sharlet claims he felt like Jesus Christ — well, sort of: “I feel like one of five hundred title Christs, if by Christ you allow me to refer not to divinity itself but to one of its more wholly human representations, Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph Piss Christ.”

Say what? Piss Christ is a notorious piece of garbage “art” that was created when Serrano placed a crucifix in a jar of his urine. To Sharlet, this is the icon worth emulating: “Appreciating what happened at Liberty Park [in New York’s Occupy Wall Street] requires a mental shift akin to the one necessary to see Piss Christ — an image of a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s own golden urine — as not blasphemous but a strange breed of beautiful. I don’t mean ideologically beautiful, some baroque idea one admires for the complexity of its inversions. I mean gorgeous. Breathtaking, breath-giving, at the same time.”

This may be the clearest distillation of modern leftism ever committed to paper. It has the religious piety that surrounds liberalism’s self-regard but maintains its “woke” street cred by attaching itself to blasphemous “art.” We are like Jesus, but it’s the Jesus who hates Jesus. It’s perfect in its performative incoherence.

Sharlet’s main essay, “The Undertow,” takes on the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Central to the story is Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was killed by a police officer on that day. Here is Sharlet’s description: “Babbitt, shot for her trouble, was a fool who pursued her own death.” She was also, he claims, made into a symbol by the Right: “Ashli Babbitt was processed, made productive, almost immediately after her death, transformed right away into yet another flag, like a new tarot card in the deck of fascism.”

“A fool who pursued her own death.” What cold, despicable words. You can both think the Jan. 6 riot was an ill-advised disaster and question why Babbitt was shot and killed. But Sharlet, just like Belafonte and the communists he entertained and bankrolled, wants a world in which asking such questions gets you tossed into prison.

America’s Censorship Regime Goes on Trial
Missouri v. Biden will test the government’s ability to suppress speech in the name of fighting ‘misinformation’

Ernest Ramirez, a car-wash technician in a small, south Texas town, led a simple but fulfilling life with his son, Ernesto Junior. Junior was a “wonderful child, full of smiles.” Ramirez had raised his son alone; he’d never known his own father and sought to provide Junior with the paternal love he had missed. A talented baseball player, Junior dreamed of playing professionally. The two lived paycheck to paycheck but were happy because, as Ramirez put it, they had each other.

Then, on April 19, 2021, 16-year-old Junior—who had no previous health problems—received the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Five days later, the young athlete collapsed while running. By the time the elder Ramirez arrived at the hospital, having been told he could not ride in the ambulance with his son, Junior was dead.

According to the autopsy report, the cause of Junior’s death was an “enlarged heart.” Upon receiving the news, Ramirez lost all desire to go on living. But after the initial shock subsided, Ramirez decided to travel and speak about Junior’s fate, in hopes that he could help other families avoid similar tragedies.

That plan proved more difficult than Ramirez anticipated. In September 2021, GoFundMe removed an account he had opened to raise money for a trip to the nation’s capital to share his son’s story. “The content of your fundraiser falls under our ‘Prohibited Conduct’ section,” the company’s email explained. Ramirez lost the donations he had thus far received. Two months later, Twitter took down a photograph Ramirez had posted depicting him standing beside Junior’s open casket, along with the caption “My good byes to my Baby Boy” followed by three brokenheart emojis. Even a father’s simple expression of grief was apparently forbidden by the social media platform’s government-supported censorship regime.

Around that time, Ramirez met Brianne Dressen, a 40-year-old woman who had volunteered for the AstraZeneca vaccine trials and suffered a severe adverse reaction diagnosed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as “post-vaccine neuropathy.” Her varied and acute symptoms at times required use of a wheelchair and drastically curtailed her ability to participate in her young children’s lives.

For a time after her diagnosis, Dressen fell into a severe depression. However, during the spring of 2021, she discovered online support groups for vaccine-injured individuals and their family members. Connecting to others who understood her plight greatly improved her outlook on life, and she began serving as an administrator of several of the groups.

But in July 2021, less than 24 hours after Dressen participated in a press conference with U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Facebook shut down one support group’s account. Though participants had merely discussed their often-harrowing personal experiences and shared medical treatments that they found helpful, Facebook claimed they were spreading harmful “misinformation” that warranted the group’s removal.

The cascade of shutdowns of support groups and accounts belonging to the vaccine injured on Facebook and other social media platforms continues to this day. Ramirez, Dressen, and others learned that when their accounts weren’t suspended or removed, they were shadow-banned—meaning that the platforms’ algorithms buried their posts so that they were rarely, if ever, viewable, even to like-minded individuals facing similar health problems. In Dressen’s words: “The constant threat of having our groups shut down and our connections pulled apart left me and many other members and leaders frozen, unable to communicate and connect with those who needed our help the most. We spent more time managing the chaos of the censorship algorithms that continued to evolve, than we did actually helping people through the trauma of their injuries.”

The obstacles encountered by Ramirez, Dressen, and thousands of other individuals with similar experiences and opinions were in no way coincidental or accidental. Nor were they the result of a series of errors in judgment made by low-level employees of social media platforms. Rather, they were the products of concerted efforts at the highest levels of the American government to ensure that individuals with opposing viewpoints could not be heard, contrary to the guarantees made to every American citizen in the Bill of Rights. One purpose of these unconstitutional actions to violate the rights of American citizens was political gain.

As COVID-19 inoculations became widely available to the American public, the Biden White House came to view vaccine hesitancy as a significant political problem. Beginning in spring 2021, the administration explicitly and publicly blamed social media platforms for vaccine refusal: By failing to censor “misinformation” about the vaccines, the president infamously alleged, tech companies were effectively “killing people.” The president’s incendiary accusation was accompanied by threats of regulatory or other legal action (should the companies refuse to comply) from various high-ranking members of the administration, including former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Psaki boasted that government officials were in regular touch with social media platforms, telling them what and in some cases even whom to censor.

Continue reading “”

Biden White House Directly Coordinated With FBI to Set Up Trump Raid According to New Docs

There are new revelations coming to light about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s unprecedented raid against former President Donald Trump prior to the 2022 midterm elections.

As reported by America First Legal, a judicial watchdog, “records obtained from our investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Mar-a-Lago raid further confirm that the FBI obtained access to these records through a ‘special access request’ from the Biden White House on behalf of the DOJ.”

The details, themselves, are shocking, as AFL noted in its press release:

On August 8, 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted an unprecedented raid of Mar-a-Lago on the ground that potentially classified records existed there. According to press reports, Biden Administration aides were “stunned” to hear of this development.

However, new NARA records obtained through America First Legal’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Mar-a-Lago raid further confirmed that the FBI obtained access to these records through a “special access request” from the Biden White House on behalf of the Department of Justice (DOJ).

It appears that the Biden White House and DOJ coordinated to obtain the Trump records and perhaps create a pretext for the law enforcement raid by way of a “special access request.” 

Continue reading “”

Tennessee House Expels Two Democrats Who Led Floor Protest Against Guns.

Tennessee House Republicans made good on their threat to expel two of three Democrats who interrupted the legislative session after making their way to the front of the chamber and using a bullhorn to lead anti-gun chants with the gallery.

It was an unprecedented violation of House rules that Republicans say needed to be punished with the most severe penalty possible to discourage other members from following suit.

Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were ousted on a party-line vote while a third member, Rep. Gloria Johnson, survived her expulsion vote. Both Pearson and Jones are black while Johnson is white, allowing Democrats to claim that racism was the reason for the members being kicked out. Johnson wasn’t expelled because she wasn’t using a bullhorn when leading chants with the gallery.

Ironically, the two Democrats are likely to be back at work next week. Under Tennessee law, county commissioners will appoint temporary replacements until a special election can be held and are likely to be named. Both expelled legislators are eligible to run in the special election as well.

Associated Press:

Thousands of people flocked to the Capitol to support Jones, Pearson and Johnson on Thursday, cheering and chanting outside the House chamber loudly enough to drown out the proceedings.

The trio held hands as they walked onto the floor and Pearson raised a fist during the Pledge of Allegiance.

Offered a chance to defend himself before the vote, Jones said the GOP responded to the shooting with a different kind of attack.

“We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy,” he said.

Does anyone believe that if given the opportunity in the future, Democrats won’t continue to disrupt democratic proceedings on the House floor? It’s simple; all you need are a couple of hundred rabid, leather-lunged supporters to cram the galleries and a bullhorn. The prospect of protests without end bringing the people’s business to a standstill because a minority disagrees with a decision of the majority is enough to apply the harshest sentence possible on the guilty.

There are ways to protest and express your disagreement with the majority that don’t involve disrupting the decorum of the chamber or interrupting the business of the House. Jones and Pearson chose to turn the House into gun control theater. What other punishment would have been appropriate?

In Washington, President Joe Biden also was critical of the expulsions, calling them “shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent.”

“Rather than debating the merits of the issue (of gun control), these Republican lawmakers have chosen to punish, silence, and expel duly-elected representatives of the people of Tennessee,” Biden said in a statement.

Pearson and Jones had no intention of “debating” anyone. They were screaming into a bullhorn in order to silence any opposition to their own protest. And there was no gun control bill before the House to debate so what is the old man talking about?

What Biden and the Democrats fail to mention is that there are two sides to the gun control issue and the other side has perfectly legitimate concerns about giving the government too much power in the matter of Second Amendment rights.

Jones and Pearson will be welcomed back as heroes when they return. No doubt they’ll try to pull the same stunt again. And when they do, the rights of the opposition will once again fall victim to the theatrical tactics of the left.

Our French Revolution
America now has three potential futures and two are bad.

We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary.

The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020.

It was absorbed by hard-left ideologues. They were bent on radically altering, or hijacking, existing institutions to force radical, equality-of-result agendas that otherwise do not earn majority support.

The American people want affordable power and fuel and energy autonomy. They do not want a Green New Deal that results in dependence on the Middle East.

They want fiscal sobriety, not a permanent stagflationary economy marked by bank failures, soaring interest rates, crony capitalism, and subsidies for those who choose not to work.

They know no country can exist without a border, much less while offering blank checks to foreign cartels that kill 100,000 Americans yearly.

They demand realist deterrence abroad, not the current woke military whose erosion is spelling the end American credibility and global stability.

Racialists are eerily embracing discredited Neo-Confederate notions of racial chauvinism, discrimination, segregation, and the old-one-drop rule of racial obsession. They are turning America toward a Balkanized war-of-all-against-all.

To implement such an unpopular program, the new Left must radically alter our institutions.

So the “Democrats” periodically threaten to pack the courts, end the filibuster, destroy the Electoral College, and override the states’ prerogatives to establish balloting laws.

They deny the committee assignments of the House minority leader. They engage in stunts like tearing up the State of the Union address on national television. With impunity they mob the homes of Supreme Court justices to leverage their decisions.

This revolution is run by elites and is a top-down operation.

Continue reading “”

At the Threshold or Turning Point.

Reflecting on the breathtaking and unprecedented enormity of Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Donald Trump, a friend wrote me to say it reminded her of Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came.”

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

“Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.”

“Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

How apposite those lines seem to our situation, all the more now that the Eastern District of New York has convicted Douglass Mackey of a felony for posting a satirical meme making fun of Hillary Clinton.

That episode, as I have said elsewhere, is yet more evidence that the United States has become a banana republic, a corrupt and despotic polity wherein the ruling party criminalizes dissent, and cows and intimidates anyone insufficiently obeisant to the dominant ideology.

Take note of that word “felony.”

Mackey now faces up to 10 years in prison for posting an image on social media suggesting that Hillary Clinton supporters avoid the long lines at the polls and vote by texting “Hillary” to a certain number.

It was a funny idea and one that no one, not even Democratic voters, could have taken seriously.

But the heavy hand of the Democratic machine came down hard on Mackey, accusing him of fomenting a “plot to disenfranchise black and women voters.”

The fact that Mackey was charged with, let alone convicted of, a felony is an outrage.

Tucker Carlson called it “the most shocking attack on freedom of speech in this country in our lifetime.”

Just as shocking is the “disparate impact” in the Democratic application of this coercive power of the state.

A performance artist called Kristina Wong posted a similar tweet, only hers supported Hillary: “Hey Trump supporters,” she tweeted, “skip poll lines and text in your vote.”

What happened to her? Nothing.

At times like this, a good memory is imperative.

It’s seldom, the philosopher David Hume wrote, that freedom is lost all at once.

Usually, it’s a gradual process, a little bit chipped away here, some taken-for-granted liberties forgotten about there.

Eventually, the world we used to inhabit becomes unrecognizable.

Looking back, we can identify some signposts.

Continue reading “”

The Parable of the Drowning Man: Communist Version.

We were having an interesting discussion on my FB wall about free will because I made the observation that even God left Man free will, whereas Man would definitely not and it segued into some comments about Christianity. If you read my previous Pretending to Sleep posts about coming to America, I wrote a little bit about my relationship with religion, particularly organized religion (i.e. I am not a fan or a practitioner). Nevertheless, I do have an appreciation for the Great Clockmaker (as my friend Justin dubbed it) and my religious friends with whom I apparently have more in common than not (weird, I admit).

There is a Christian story involving a flood, called the “Parable of the Drowning Man.”

The parable of the drowning man, also known as Two Boats and a Helicopter, is a short story, often told as a joke, most often about a devoutly Christian man, frequently a minister, who refuses several rescue attempts in the face of approaching floodwaters, each time telling the would-be rescuers that God will save him. After turning down the last, he drowns in the flood. After his death, the man meets God and asks why he did not intervene. God responds that he sent all the would-be rescuers to the man’s aid on the expectation he would accept the help.—Wikipedia

The version I was taught is a little different. Now, do keep in mind that I’m paraphrasing, not quoting, and that there are probably variations of this, as there often are (Ivan and the Goat comes to mind for example):

A boyar (large landowner) and a peasant escape a sudden flood and somehow end up in a tree. The flood sweeps everything away, so it’s just the two of them. The boyar filled his pockets with gold; the peasant with bread.

Time passes and the boyar offers the peasant some of his gold in exchange for the bread, at which point the peasant speaks truth-to-power and lectures the boyar on his choices (something which happens only in parables and revisionist fantasies).

Weak with hunger, the boyar falls out of the tree and drowns. Sustained by the bread, the peasant survives and when the flood waters recede, he gets down, pilfers the drowned boyar’s pockets for the gold and takes it with him to give to his village to rebuild a new, fairer, equal society or some such BS.

Like all parables, it has a message: in this case, death to the boyars. Or perhaps, “don’t worry, in the end, fate (clears throat: some undefinable power in the Universe) will take care of evildoers.”

The message is not “wealth is bad” because it is wealth that is used to build the new communist society. Now, we could argue ad infinitum about whom the gold actually belonged to (yawn; I’m not gonna convince you and you’re not gonna convince me so let’s just skip ahead to “let’s agree to disagree”) in the first place.

The ethics of what people would do in a life-or-death situation like this aside (hint: you don’t know what you’ll actually do until you have to, no matter how much you’d like to think of yourself as virtuous), what’s really interesting about this parable is how clearly it announces the intentions of communism—only when the bad people are dead will the downtrodden be able to build paradise.

So don’t say that you’ve not been warned, especially if the 100 million deaths in the 20th century alone are just not proof enough for you. “It’ll be different this time. We (the ones we’ve been waiting for, the right people) will be in charge.” Sure, sure.

And please don’t miss the irony of the actual economics that are implied here which is to say that the assumption is that that gold would actually end up doing good in the hands of people who ended up with it, especially the modern version of those people. There’s a reason that the Pareto Principle (power law distribution) is an actual thing that manifests again and again. Just like there’s a reason that collective farms lead to shortages, starvation, and slave labor (the actual result of communism). Somehow (shocker!) it’s always that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” who are in charge when these things “happen.”

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”—Margaret Thatcher

Thatcher was absolutely right and I don’t see her being disproven now or ever. The only error in that statement was the use of the word “socialism.”

Remember, it’s not like they’re not telling you what their intent is.

The goal of socialism is communism—Vladimir Lenin

You’re just not willing to listen.

Missouri bill to ban federal “red flag” laws, funding killed by Republican senator

JEFFERSON CITY — A Missouri bill that would ban federal funds and programs from being used in the state to enforce “red flag” gunmeasures was killed by a committee Wednesday.

Republican Sen. Bill Eigel of Weldon Spring filed the legislation, Senate Bill 10, in response to a recent plan from the U.S. Department of Justice to distribute dollars to states to administer “red flag” laws and other crisis intervention programs related to gun violence.

But the legislation failed to pass out of committee after a Republican joined Democrats in voting it down, citing a school shooting in Nashville this week that killed three students and three adults.

Sen. Lincoln Hough, a Springfield Republican, joined the two Democrats on the committee to vote against the legislation. Three other Republicans — Sens. Rick Brattin, Rusty Black and Mike Bernskoetter — voted in favor of the bill, but did not reach the majority of votes required. The fourth Republican on the committee, Sen. Mike Cierpiot, did not vote.

“I think it’s a little disheartening, quite frankly, to even be having this sort of conversation given what happened two days in Nashville,” Hough said prior to the vote. “But I’m more than happy to go ahead and have a vote right now.”

Bernskoetter, the chairman of the committee, responded that “I told (Eigle) I would have a vote on it and I’m having a vote on it.”

Eigel has said the legislation “builds on” a 2021 law that nullified federal gun statutes in Missouri, which is currently facing litigation and has been decried by members of law enforcement.

“The federal government, the Biden administration, is trying very hard to try to use federal dollars to be sent into the state of Missouri to incentivize the creation of these red flag databases,” he said at a hearing in February.

In a Twitter post Wednesday after the vote, Eigel alleged that Hough and Cierpiot had “coordinated and vote to derail” the bill, calling it a “dark day for supporters of (the Second Amendment).”

Wednesday’s vote marks the second consecutive session Hough has joined with Democrats in committee to vote down legislation relating to guns. He and another Republican voted with Democrats last year to kill legislation that would have expanded legal immunity for those who shoot and kill someone in self-defense. That bill was dubbed the “Make Murder Legal Act” by an association of county prosecutors.

Karine Jean-Pierre Responds to Question About Gun Confiscation With an Alarming Answer

When faced with a relatively easy question about President Joe Biden’s position on gun confiscation policies, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t give a straight answer.

Invoking repeatedly failed candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke’s 2019 presidential debate promise that “hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” a reporter asked Jean-Pierre, “Does the president support not just banning the sale and manufacture of semi-automatic weapons but further than that, confiscation?”

It’s a straightforward question: Does President Biden think legally owned firearms should be confiscated by the federal government? But Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say “yes” or “no” in what should be an easy answer.

Instead, Jean-Pierre ignored the question and retreated to the usual Democrat talking points about “weapons of war” that “should not be on the streets across the country in our communities, they should not be in schools, they should not be in grocery stores, they should not be in churches — that’s what the president believes.”

Jean-Pierre went on to claim Biden “has done more than any other president the first two years” to address what Democrats say is a crisis of “weapons of war” in America. “Now it’s time for Congress to do the work,” Jean-Pierre said. “And he’s happy to sign, once that happens, he’s happy to sign that legislation that says, ‘ok we’re going to remove assault weapons, we’re going to have an assault weapons ban.'”

Even though Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say whether Biden supports gun confiscation for “assault weapons,” President Biden’s record on the subject is not a winning one, nor is Democrats’ obsession with eradicating “assault weapons” — a purposefully non-specific term usually paired with other buzzwords such as “military style” — a policy goal that’s been shown to limit instances of violence in which the perpetrator uses a firearm.

As we at Townhall have repeatedly noted, Biden’s frequent claim that the “assault weapons” ban he worked on as a U.S. senator was effective just doesn’t pass muster. Biden and his administration’s claim that it’s possible to get the specter of “assault weapons” off America’s streets is one this administration employs frequently while attempting to take advantage of tragedies. “But according to data provided by the Department of Justice, the ban cannot be credited with reducing violence or mass shootings,” Katie noted after Biden repeated the claim last May. Here’s what the DOJ found:

A 2004 Department of Justice funded study from the University of Pennsylvania Center of Criminology concluded the ban cannot be credited with a decrease in violence carried out with firearms. The report is titled “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003.”

“We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence, based on indicators like the percentage of gun crimes resulting in death or the share of gunfire incidents resulting in injury,” the summary of the report on the study’s findings states. “The ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs [assault weapons] were used in no more than 8% of gun crimes even before the ban.”

If banning “assault weapons” didn’t reduce gun violence, nor reduce the lethality of gun violence, then passing a new ban or going as far as confiscating such firearms — something Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t rule out this week — won’t make a difference either and will only further infringe on the rights of Americans.

USA Today Op-ed doesn’t think your rights matter

I’ve long argued that the Second Amendment is the insurance policy the Founding Fathers took out to protect the rest of the Bill of Rights. You can’t take away someone’s right to free speech, to freely assemble, and your freedom of religion without first taking away their ability to resist. Otherwise, someone’s going to fight you.

But in the wake of a mass shooting, we start to get a glimpse of who some people are.

As Ben Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

For one USA Today writer, he’s clearly and firmly in that camp.

Three children and three adults are dead, gunned down in a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tenn., by a human being who had no business possessing an AR-style rifle, an AR-style pistol and another handgun.

“But, but, but … the Second Amendment,” some will scream, like a myopic, zombified Greek chorus.

Hang your Second Amendment. It’s Monday in America, there has been yet another school shooting. Children are dead. The students who weren’t shot are forever changed by the trauma, and plenty more people across the country will be killed by gunfire in the days to come because, as I wrote a few words earlier, it’s Monday in America, and we have a whole damn week to go.

And at this point, it really doesn’t matter what else the writer has to say. He’s already made it clear that your Second Amendment rights are completely and totally irrelevant to him.

He’s also made it clear he’s not open for discussion about literally anything else that could potentially reduce mass shootings. Why? Because your rights don’t matter.

This is troubling in the Land of the Free.

See, one of the hallmarks of the United States is that we are a free land, that we value freedom. That freedom is protected in part by the fact that we have an armed populace that can react to any and all acts of tyranny.

We haven’t exactly used it, but mostly because the vast majority of us figure we can fight back without needed to expend ammunition.

Thankfully.

But we can’t “hang” our Second Amendment rights just because something bad happens. If we do that, we can then start hanging the rest of our rights when someone decides they need to go away.

Frankly, when you’re starting position is that my rights are completely and totally irrelevant, there is no discourse. There’s absolutely no reason to engage with you because there’s absolutely no chance of you being the least bit rational.

Do you want my rights? It’s not surprising. We’ve long known that gun control advocates ultimately want to gut the Second Amendment to the point that it’s little more than a trophy hanging on the wall.

The problem, however, is that it’s easy to say “hang your Second Amendment.” It’s a lot harder to do anything about it. Why? Because there’s an insurance policy in the Bill of Rights, and there are millions of Americans ready to act because of it.