What are we living with in America?
The Security State on steroids, More on Mar-a-Lago raid, Will the GOP serve us well if they win Congress, Clips of strange stuff in the regular news.
Don’t worry……Twitter will save you from stinky election misinformation.
That’s correct. Twitter has rolled out its heroic effort to keep creepy bad guys from telling you things that bad guys and racist Trump supporters say.
Let’s just call it what it is. Propagandist misinformation propagated by social media. Twitter’s and Facebook’s “disinformation” squelching efforts are nothing more than Newspeak being imposed on behalf of the government by means of private platforms.
The Modern Security State has been building for some time now.
You probably think the weaponization of the federal government against Americans and politicians who threaten their power (e.g. Donald Trump, et. al.) has been happening since that fateful escalator ride in Trump Tower in 2016. It goes much further back than that. In fact, let’s just blame it on FDR. So much of what we face as a country began with FDR.
You probably haven’t heard of a guy named William J. “Wild Bill” Donavan unless you’re a huge WWII history buff. Wild Bill was the first director of OSS—the predecessor to the CIA. Bill had a communism problem. I don’t claim he was so much an ideological communist and more someone who, as we like to say, enjoyed power a bit too much.
Wild Bill was a lot like Fidel Castro’s son, Justin Trudeau.
But I digress.
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The Patriot Act is one of the most dangerous attacks on the Bill of Rights we’ve ever known in America. John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts and Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage and Sedition Acts were responses to war which sought to criminally punish Americans who opposed government policy when war seemed imminent. Those policies either went away or in the case of the Espionage Act (which interestingly plays a role in the recent raid on Mar-a-Lago….more to come on that) linger only written law. The Patriot Act has built an entire police state infrastructure which is regularly violating the rights of Americans. Here are a few examples of how that ahs played out.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was invented to consolidate the efforts of clandestine agencies. This was unnecessary since all the 9-11 perpetrators were known in advance but no agency decided to act upon the evidence. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent.
That ineptitude of our domestic and international covert agencies meant someone else had to be blamed for the attack. And low and behold the problem was our airport security systems run by the Airlines until November of 2001 when the feds took over under the auspices of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Never mind that the 9-11 as the perpetrators when going through security had nothing on them that would indicate what they were about to do (though airport officials had reported them casing the security lines at Logan Airport months earlier). Ignore also the fact that TSA agents have often stolen property from passengers or that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) reportedly recruited TSA agents to steal from passengers. You’re safer now because your government says you are. Shut up and take it!
And don’t forget that form Reagan National Security Advisor Adm. John Poindexter was calling for a massive computer intelligence gathering system which eventually served to the NSA’s domestic spying operation eventually revealed by Edward Snowden with the the help of Glenn Greenwald.
Now that’s just everything leading up to the Bush Administration. Your freedoms have been attacked relentlessly since.
The Patriot Act as been regularly renewed and expanded since. (Again, this is the system by which the federal government keeps every scintilla of your electronic activity forever!). Here are a few things it does which we haven’t mentioned yet.
It allows the NSA and other government agencies to gather “bulk metadata information” on you: from your phone, computer, internet service you connect to, etc., etc. We found out from Edward Snowden’s revelations this is far more than metadata.
It requires financial institutions to give information on your bank account without probable cause or a warrant if it has any suspicion whatsoever. No due process. No probable cause must be proved before a judge.
It allows the FBI to put together National Security Letters (NSLs) authorizing them to gather information largely without due process and only under suspicion.
The FBI is authorized to obtain “Sneak and Peak” warrants. These allow the FBI to raid your home or businesses without your knowledge nor any requirement to inform you of the raid.
I could go on for some time on the Patriot Act. Suffice it to say your 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendment rights (and often 8th Amendment rights) are nearly abolished by the Patriot Act.
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More on what we are all talking about this week.
Donald Trump, it turns out, is just like every other man. I know that’s hard to believe. He has weaknesses. He’s a human being like we all are.
He’s something else too. The guy is more clean from criminal activity than any President in my lifetime (circa 1965 - present). That includes Ronald Reagan who I agree was a man of stellar personal character which far surpasses Donald Trump. But the Iran/Contra affair was a pretty big scandal. That was on him (All due respect to Oliver North).
Yet here we are again with another government-created scandal designed to take Trump down. As with every other faked story over the last six years (can anyone say, “Russia, Russia, Russia!”), a pretext was created to make Trump look like a criminal merely for revenge and political gain. And the outcome will be just the same.
How do I know the outcome will be the same, you ask? Because if Donald Trump had truly committed a crime you can bet it would be played out in full view every day, all day, stuffed up your nose after washing you mouth out with soap to make certain the point was clearly received. But the goods aren’t there. And DOJ is resisting a release of the affidavits behind the warrant. Check out this interview between Andrew Klavan and Andy McCarthy. McCarthy (no Trump advocate I would say) lays out a strong case for DOJ shenanigans.
I spent eight years in Washington. My tenure there was during the time when this mess just began to ramp up after the Tea Party embarrassed Democrat Congressmen all over the country in 2009 and 2010. It was during the time that the GOP establishment—scared of their eminent loss of control over the party castigated Tea Party congressmen. Official Washington hates that Americans have the power to turn them upside down and throw them in the trash. The Democrats are the worst. But there are plenty of Republican-oriented DC types who aren’t going to easily show their hand until Republican candidates give them the House and Senate back. (Yes, I know the Senate is quite a bit more sketchy at the moment—but this week changed that scenario more than we yet see).
As much of a bad boy Donald Trump can be (personally), his public character far outshines the vast majority of people in DC. This amazes me because, though I always had some regard for his professional activity, I despised his personal character as a young man. And going into the 2016 GOP primary season, I was at first convinced that would translate into political corruption as well. But I’ve come to a much different conclusion.
Let’s not forget, the GOP should be duty-bound to fix the problem, not extend it.
Millennials and Gen Z-ers aren’t as steeped in the Lord of the Rings trilogy as Boomers and Gen Xers are. It’s a shame really. The crappy fantasy stuff coming out today is useless garbage. J.R.R. Tolkien’s work is wonderful and memorable because he drew upon themes and moral lessons that are transcendent, timeless, and therefore built into the fabric of humanity. Much of Jordan Peterson’s success as a speaker and author is because he taps into this in an honest and useful way.
The main lesson of the Lord of the Rings saga is that evil exists and human nature is such that mankind is prone to succumb to it unless some set of principles beyond their individual interests guides them. Even more, it took a certain group in Tolkien’s fantasy world—the Hobbits of the Shire—set apart from the regular effects of evil to have the will to go through a tortuous journey to Mordor to destroy the simulacrum of evil itself. Along the way, the Hobbits’ similarly flawed nature was itself revealed. But that they abhorred evil and wanted to defend the Shire from it gave them the impetus to press on at great cost.
What I have just described in my long-winded manner is Washington, DC (Mordor) and the rest of the country (The Shire). Mordor has some important outposts: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago.
The GOP has historically failed to realize how they have historically failed to capitalize on big wins at the ballot box. Now after 1994 they did a pretty good job for a couple years. The Contract with America was actually a great 100-day success. And the political climate and the GOP forced Bill Clinton to reduce government.
But after 2010, John Boehner and his gang attacked Tea Party congressmen and the House Freedom Caucus. Paul Ryan totally undermined Donald Trump’s efforts as well.
I hope Kevin McCarthy breaks the mold and listens to the base. But the track record is pretty bad.
Some quick headlines
Some are saying we need to abolish the FBI as a way to fix the corruption. I don’t know about that. But I am tired of “ex-officials” of the FBI who found nothing in Hillary Clinton’s email server but seem to think Trump is the big bad criminal.
Why not. Our current Attorney General Merrick Garland approved the warrant on a former President’s home but couldn’t bring himself to recommend a warrant for the Unabomber.
And the FBI looks more and more embarrassing and a big old nothing-burger every day after the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
Alex Berenson is on his way to exposing Twitter as the propaganda arm of the Biden administration.
The IRS will become larger than the Pentagon , the State Department, and the Border Patrol combined: The Washington Free Beacon.
Janet Yellen—a failure as Treasury Secretary AND Federal Reserve Chairman—put out a head fake saying $80 billion to fund 87,000 new IRS agents shouldn’t be used to increase audits. She is in charge of the IRS as Treasury Secretary. But I’m not holding out a bit of hope she is serious about this.
Moshin Hamid’s “The Last White Man” is a racist screed. The so-called anti-racist movement is racist.
Oh, and the AP “fact check” covering up numerous memes on Facebook is a farce. You can read it here……..and laugh…….because a credible analysis proves the “fact check” false.
As a former Capitol Hill staffer myself, I know how helpful or outright destructive staffers can be. For example, these staffers are working hard to kill the economy over “Climate Change.”
……..oh….and don’t forget the staffer who faked being an FBI agent.
In the meantime, we’re severely neglecting STEM studies in school while we teach our kids how to have sex, who to have sex with, and why little white kids are racist, China is overtaking us in scientific research.
And the World Economic Forum (WEF) doesn’t only want to eliminate ownership worldwide (“you will own nothing and be happy”), they also want to use AI to monitor everything you say.