The Censorship Complex — whereby Big Tech censorship is induced by the government, media, and media-rating businesses — threatens the future of free speech in this country. To understand how and why, Americans need to talk about speech — and the government’s motive to deceive the public.
To frame this discussion, consider these hypotheticals:
Two American soldiers training Ukraine soldiers in Poland cross into the war zone, ambushing and killing five Russian soldiers. Unbeknownst to the American soldiers, a Ukrainian soldier filmed the incident and provides the footage to an independent journalist who authors an article on Substack, providing a link to the video.
Russia uses its intelligence service and “bots” to flood social media with claims that the Ukrainians are misusing 90 percent of American tax dollars. In truth, “only” 40 percent of American tax dollars are being wasted or corruptly usurped — a fact that an independent journalist learns when a government source leaks a Department of Defense report detailing the misappropriation of the funds sent to Ukraine.
A third of Americans disagree with the continued funding of the war in Ukraine and organically prompt #NoMoreMoola to trend. After this organic hashtag trend begins, Russian operatives amplify the hashtag while the Russian-run state media outlet, Russia Today, reports on the hashtag trend.
Following the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, the communist Chinese government uses social media to create the false narrative that 10 specifically named financial institutions are bordering on collapsing. In reality, only Bank A1 is financially troubled, but a bank run on any of the 10 banks would cause those banks to collapse too.
In each of these scenarios — and countless others — the government has an incentive to deceive the country. Americans need to recognize this reality to understand the danger posed by the voluntary censorship of speech.
Our government will always seek to quash certain true stories and seed certain false stories: sometimes to protect human life, sometimes to protect our national defense or the economy or public health, sometimes to obtain the upper hand against a foreign adversary, and sometimes to protect the self-interests of its leaders, preferred policy perspectives, and political and personal friends.
Since the founding, America’s free press provided a check on a government seeking to bury the truth, peddle a lie, or promote its leaders’ self-interest. At times, the legacy press may have buried a story or delayed its reporting to protect national security interests, but historically those examples were few and far between.
Even after the left-leaning slant of legacy media outlets took hold and “journalists” became more open to burying (or spinning) stories to protect their favored politicians or policies, new media provided a stronger check and a way for Americans to learn the truth. The rise of social media, citizen journalists, Substack, and blogs added further roadblocks to both government abuse and biased and false reporting.
Donald Trump’s rise, his successful use of social media, and new media’s refusal to join the crusade against Trump caused a fatal case of Stockholm Syndrome, with Big Tech and legacy media outlets welcoming government requests for censorship. With support from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations and academic institutions, a Censorship Complex emerged, embracing the government’s definition of “truth” and seeking to silence any who challenged it, whether it be new media or individual Americans — even experts.
The search for truth suffered as a result, and Americans were deprived of valuable information necessary for self-governance.
We know this because notwithstanding the massive efforts to silence speech, a ragtag group of muckrakers persisted and exposed several official dictates as lies: The Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation, Covid very well may have escaped from a Wuhan lab, and Trump did not collude with Putin.
But if the Censorship Complex succeeds and silences the few journalists and outlets still willing to challenge the government, Americans will no longer have the means to learn the truth.
Consider again the above hypotheticals. In each of those scenarios, the government — or at least some in the government — has an incentive to bury the truth. In each, it could frame the truth as a foreign disinformation campaign and offer Americans a countervailing lie as the truth.
A populace voluntarily acquiescing in the censorship of speech because it is purportedly foreign misinformation or disinformation will soon face a government that lies, protected by complicit media outlets that repeat those lies as truth, social media websites that ban or censor reporting that challenges the official government narrative, hosting services that deplatform dissenting media outlets, advertisers that starve journalists of compensation, and search engines that hide the results of disfavored viewpoints.
The window is quickly closing on free speech in America, so before it is locked and the curtain thrown shut, we must talk about speech. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, in which the government should alert reporters and media outlets to supposed foreign disinformation and how. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, under which Big Tech should censor speech.
Americans need to have this discussion now — before the Censorship Complex makes it impossible to do so.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The call for reparations attracts more supporters every day. Even Disney has joined the cause, weaving the issue of monetary payments to the descendants of slaves into a storyline on the “The Proud Family” series on the company’s streaming service. But what generated the most controversy was one episode in which the show’s protagonists perform a song entitled “Slaves Built This Country” after they discover the founder of their town was a slaveholder.
Setting their frustrations over racial injustice and hardship to music, the cartoon children sing that slaves “made your families rich from the southern plantation, to the northern bankers, to the New England ship owners, the Founding Fathers, former presidents, current senators.” Catchy though the song may be, the children leave out one prominent beneficiary of slavery, one in the best position to provide the reparations called for: the Democratic Party.
One may argue for or against reparations on many different grounds. At its heart, supporters for reparations say that freed slaves never received any kind of compensation for their hardship from their owners. Thus, the descendants of slaveowners owe financial restitution to the descendants of their slaves, which would alleviate income inequality and atone for slavery, America’s “original sin.” Opponents of reparations argue one group of people, who did not commit the original wrong, should not be forced to make restitution to a group who indirectly received the wrong. From this angle, reparations seem more like “legal plunder,” a term coined by the French economist Frédéric Bastiat. Such an act “takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.”
But if the supporters of reparations are right and that some restitution must be made, it becomes obvious who should do it: the Democratic Party. Indeed, it is an objective fact that the Democratic Party is intimately tied to slavery and segregation. The Democratic Party was founded by Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, himself a slaveowner, and Martin Van Buren, a New Yorker who owned at least one slave and exploited enslaved labor. More importantly, Van Buren’s plan gained the support of southern politicians for his policies in exchange for his support of the “peculiar institution” of plantation slavery. Such politicians became so numerous they had a name: doughfaces, since their characters lacked all substance.
This pattern continued through the end of the Civil War and the early 20th century. After the Civil War, Democratic politicians in the southern U.S. supported segregationist policies that brutally infringed upon the rights and dignity of African-Americans.
As a result of this history, the Democratic Party should provide reparations, not the descendants of one class deemed politically expendable. Still, you may say, “that was the Democratic Party of the mid-19th century. So much has changed since then that the current officeholders and politicians could not possibly bear any blame for what their forebears did.” This is true, but it is also true of the American people.
Today, the American people are not directly responsible for slavery, segregation, Indian removal (also Van Buren), and a host of other injustices for which prominent Democrats ask for reparations. Moreover, the American people are being forced to pay for more spending programs, up to and including reparations. How is it any fairer to ask the American people to accept another raise in their taxes to fix a problem the progenitors of the Democratic Party started? Shouldn’t that be at least acknowledged?
They acknowledge institutionalized racism, but they entirely ignore the fact that they were the ones who institutionalized it. The Democratic Party, as a private institution, is in the best position to provide reparations for the evils of slavery and segregation they did so much to perpetuate. If the Democratic Party admitted its wrongdoing and offered financial compensation to the descendants of slaves, it would immediately remove reparations as a possible unwise and unreasonable expansion of government. Moreover, the Democratic Party, with its expansive network of donors and connections that includes local community and civic leaders, could far more effectively handle the distribution of reparations itself.
If the Democratic Party really wants to move the country past the legacies of slavery and segregation, it should acknowledge its role in promoting them. If there are any groups in the U.S. that should provide material assistance to black Americans to make amends for the injustices committed against them, it should be the institutions that committed those injustices. The Democrats, the self-proclaimed “party of the people,” and not the people of the United States themselves, should bear that cultural and financial responsibility.
Winston Brady is the Director of Curriculum and Thales Press at Thales Academy, a network of classical schools with campuses in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and South Carolina. A graduate of the College of William & Mary, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Winston writes on the intersection of history, politics, and culture, as seen through the lens of classical wisdom and virtue. He lives in Wake Forest with his wife Rachel of ten years and his three boys, Hunter, Jack, and Samuel, all of whom will one day learn Latin.
While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.
While the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s coverage of the Global Disinformation Index have revealed an expansive Censorship Complex that seeks to silence Americans for money, politics, ideology, and power, much still needs to be unraveled.
A search of government contracts and grants for the eight fiscal years from 2016 through today for the keywords “misinformation” or “disinformation” reveals 538 federal government grants and 36 contracts were awarded to a wide range of academic institutions and non-governmental organizations.
Mapping out the connections among the various award recipients, the government, and the pro-censorship left will require more work. But this simple snapshot confirms taxpayers’ money is funding the expansion of the Censorship Complex, as the prior eight fiscal years, from 2008 to 2015, reveal the federal government awarded only two federal contracts and seven federal grants for “disinformation” or “misinformation” research.
Likewise, an initial investigation into the nonprofits and academic institutions mentioned in the “Twitter Files” reveals government grants, donations from other liberal nonprofits, and money from leftist billionaires funded the expansion of the Censorship Complex. Research also shows the non-governmental organizations pushing the disinformation narrative are uniformly directed and run by former government employees, left-wing media types, and left-leaning or anti-Trump individuals.
Alliance Securing Democracy
Of the think tanks identified in Twitter communications, Alliance Securing Democracy (ASD) might be the most notorious thanks to Matt Taibbi’s exposé on ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard.
Devised by former FBI agent Clint Watts and launched in August of 2017, Hamilton 68 proclaimed its digital dashboard an aid to “help ordinary people, journalists, and other analysts identify Russian messaging themes and detect active disinformation or attack campaigns as soon as they begin.” Based on some 644 accounts that Hamilton 68 claimed it had “selected for their relationship to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns,” ASD maintained its dashboard allowed users to track online Russian influence.
The problem is, as Taibbi wrote: “The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham.”
Apparently unbeknownst to ASD, Twitter had reverse-engineered how Hamilton 68 supposedly tracked online Russian influence and found “No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.” The entire methodology was flawed.
Yet ASD played a key role in the push to censor speech as supposed “disinformation,” with the dashboard serving as “the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years” by “virtually every major news organization.” In addition to the media spreading disinformation about disinformation, Watts testified before Congress, telling senators that the Hamilton 68 dashboard provided the means for the U.S. government “to have an understanding of what Russia is doing in social media.”
Watts further revealed in his testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, that he “tried to provide to the U.S. government directly through multiple agencies” the Hamilton 68 information, telling the lawmakers they should “want to equip our intelligence agencies, our law enforcement agencies, and the Department of Defense with just an understanding … of what Russian active measures are doing around the world.”
Whether any of those “multiple agencies” relied on the inaccurate information included on the Hamilton 68 dashboard is unclear.
Members of the House and Senate did rely on Hamilton 68, however. As I reported earlier this month: “Rep. Adam Schiff and Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, and Sheldon Whitehouse, among others, not only pushed the unfounded claims that Russian bots were behind the trending hashtags, but they also demanded that Twitter and other tech companies investigate and stop such supposed interference.” Democrats pushed this false narrative even when Twitter executives warned staffers that the Russian-interference story didn’t stand.
In addition to Watts, the ASD advisory council includes a cornucopia of former government bigwigs from Democrat administrations: Michael McFaul, a former ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration; Michael Morell, former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama; John Podesta, former chair of Hillary for America and an official in the Clinton and Obama White Houses; and Jake Sullivan, former deputy chief of staff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key adviser for both Clinton and Obama during their general elections.
Laura Thornton, who previously worked at the National Democratic Institute, a nonprofit loosely affiliated with the Democrat Party, currently oversees ASD. And Rachael Dean Wilson serves as the managing director for ASD. Wilson previously worked for the late Sen. John McCain for six years, serving as his communications director and adviser to his 2016 re-election campaign.
German Marshall Fund
According to its website, ASD is a project of the German Marshall Fund, which “is heavily funded by the American, German, and Swedish governments.” The fund has also received grants from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The ASD likewise receives financing from left-leaning foundations, such as the Craigslist founder’s Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
The Election Integrity Partnership
Another prominent organization the “Twitter Files” revealed as pushing for censorship — including multiple censorship requests flowing through that group to the tech giant — is the Election Integrity Partnership, which is run out of Stanford’s Internet Observatory.
Stanford’s Internet Observatory launched on June 6, 2019, to “focus on the misuse of social media,” and within two years, the project grew from an initial team of three to a full-time team of 10 assisted by some 76 student research assistants. In 2020, Stanford announced the creation of the Election Integrity Partnership, which “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
As a private institution, Stanford University is not funded directly with tax dollars, but it receives millions in government grants. Private grants also flow into the California university and directly fund the Election Integrity Partnership, including money from the same foundations that funded the nonprofit behind Hamilton 68, such as money from the Craigslist and eBay founders.
Atlantic Council Project
Further research on the other members of the Election Integrity Partnership reveals the Atlantic Council receives donations and federal grants, including from Facebook, Google, and the U.S. Department of State. And as will be shown shortly, the Atlantic Council is also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.
Graphika
Another member of the Election Integrity Partnership, Graphika, describes itself as a “network analysis company that examines how ideas and influence spread online.” Graphika’s chief innovation officer, Camille Francois “leads the company’s work to detect and mitigate disinformation, media manipulation and harassment.” Francois was previously the principal researcher at Google’s Jigsaw unit.
According to CNBC, one of Francois’ first projects at Graphika was a “secretive” assignment for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Working with a team of researchers from Oxford University, Graphika analyzed data provided by social media firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee to assess Russia’s exploitation of “the tools and platform of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to impact U.S. users” and influence elections.
As a private organization, Graphika’s funding details remain obscure, but in congressional testimony, Dr. Vlad Barash he “oversee[s] our work with DARPA and with our colleagues from leading academic institutions on developing and applying cutting edge methods and algorithms for detecting the manipulation of 21st Century networked communications.”
According to government data, Graphika — also known as Octant Data, LLC and Morningside Analytics — received numerous Department of Defense contracts. Additionally, Graphika received a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.”
Graphika received a second nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping.” The organization had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.
The Center for Internet Security
The “Twitter Files” also made mention of the Center for Internet Security. In 2018, that nonprofit launched the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), which “it claims supports the cybersecurity needs of election offices.” As part of those efforts, the Center for Internet Security crafted a one-page document for election officials, with directions for reporting misinformation or disinformation to the EI-ISAC. The federal U.S. Elections Commission would link to the CIS flyer on its government webpage.
The CIS flyer directed election workers to submit supposed “misinformation or disinformation” to the EI-ISAC, stating it would then “forward it to our partners at The Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).” CISA would then “submit it to the relevant social media platform(s) for review,” including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, TikTok, Nextdoor, and Snapchat.
CIS further said it would share reports of misinformation or disinformation with the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University. And from the “Twitter Files,” we see examples of the Election Integrity Partnership providing the Twitter team CIS’s reports of misinformation or disinformation, prompting the censorship of speech.
The Center for Internet Security is heavily funded by government grants. According to Influence Watch, the nonprofit “provides cyber-security consulting services to local, state, and federal governments,” and has been awarded $115 million in federal grants by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense since 2010. It has received $3.6 million in cybersecurity contracts from numerous federal agencies, according to its webpage, and a $290,000 grant from the eBay founder’s left-leaning Democracy Fund.
The president and CEO of the Center for Internet Security is another former high-level government adviser, John Gilligan. Gilligan “previously served in senior advisory positions in intelligence and security for the United States Airforce, Department of Energy, and White House Cyber Security Commission under the Obama administration.”
Clemson University
Other emails released as part of the “Twitter Files” reveal Clemson University’s role in the push for censorship at Twitter. And as was the case with Hamilton 68’s dashboard, Twitter’s team had concerns about Clemson’s disinformation research.
In one email, Twitter noted that Clemson’s center had asked the tech company to review its “findings regarding the latest list of accounts.” Internal communications show the Twitter team noting that while they saw “some inauthentic behaviors,” they “were unable to attribute the accounts to the IRA,” the Russian “troll” farm.
After noting that Twitter had already shared information with Clemson researchers, the tech giant’s head of safety, Yoel Roth, sent another email. “There is nothing new we’ll learn here, analytically,” Roth said. “We’re not going to attribute these accounts to Russia … absent some solid technical intel (which Clemson have not ever been able to provide).”
Defending Democracy Together
Clemson’s research was used by another group joining the “disinformation” trend, Defending Democracy Together (DDT). In 2018, DDT launched the RussiaTweets.com project to supposedly provide “the evidence of Russian interference in American politics.”
This evidence, according to DDT, came from a list of tweets “compiled and published by Professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren,” which purportedly all came from the Russian troll factory, Internet Research Agency (IRA). Both Linvill and Warren hail from Clemson University, raising the question of whether it was the list they provided to Defending Democracy Together that Twitter executives “were unable to attribute” to the IRA.
Defending Democracy Together was founded in 2018, and its leadership consists of Never Trumpers, William “Bill” Kristol, Mona Charen, and Charlie Sykes, as well as DDT’s co-founder and director Sarah Longwell, who has promoted advertisements “to advocate against the policies of the Trump administration and to weaken public support for the Trump presidency.”
Funding for DDT, according to Influence Watch, includes money from left-wing mega-donor and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar through Democracy Fund Voice and from the Hopewell Fund, which is “part of a $600 million network of left-wing funding nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors in Washington, D.C.” Additionally, OpenSecretsreported that DDT was “the biggest ‘dark money’ spender of 2020,” with DDT spending “$15.4 million in ‘dark money’ during the 2020 election cycle on supporting presidential candidate Joe Biden and opposing former President Donald Trump for reelection.”
The University of Buffalo, Lehigh University, and Northeastern University are likewise involved in the disinformation project, with a Clemson News release revealing that faculty at those universities, along with researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, launched a project titled “Disinformation Range to Improve User Awareness and Resilience to Online Disinformation.” The government, through a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is supporting those efforts.
The Aspen Institute
The Aspen Institute is also entwined in the Censorship Complex, having hosted in the fall of 2020 “a series of off-the-record briefings to help prepare every major US newsroom and tech platform for potential hack-and-leak operations and a contested post-election environment.” One of the briefings involved a tabletop exercise facilitated by Aspen’s Garrett Graff that posed a hack-and-leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden.
Twitter’s Yoel Roth attended that event just two weeks before the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. And soon after that story broke, Graff and his Aspen Institute colleague Vivian Schiller took to Twitter to frame the story as “crap” and “nonsense.” Schiller’s former jobs include CEO at NPR, head of news at Twitter, general manager at The New York Times, and chief digital officer at NBC News.
Soon after Graff and Schiller pushed the Hunter Biden story as misinformation, Twitter blocked the Post’s story and froze the conservative outlet’s account, even though internal communications revealed the Post had not violated Twitter’s terms of service. Despite its extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference, Twitter didn’t ask the bureau if the scandal was Russian disinformation. Instead, Twitter representatives testified to Congress that the company “relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.”
After the Post broke the Biden family pay-to-play scandal, several left-leaning “journalists” spent the day speaking of “misinformation,” while uniformly ignoring the substance of the story. One must wonder how many of those so-called journalists had attended Aspen’s training session.
Since then, Aspen has expanded its focus on disinformation and misinformation, launching a “Commission on Information Disorder” to develop what the institute calls “actionable public-private responses to the disinformation crisis.”
The Global Disinformation Index
Another nonprofit, the Global Disinformation Index, has already begun pushing an “actionable response to the disinformation crisis,” by pressuring advertisers to dump news outlets based on GDI’s view of their “disinformation risk.” However, as the Washington Examiner revealed in Gabe Kaminsky’s investigative series, the GDI’s December 2022 report, prepared in partnership with the University of Texas-Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab, brands only conservative outlets as the top “riskiest.” Conversely, the “least risky” outlets all lean left, other than The Wall Street Journal, and are also the same outlets that got the most significant news stories of the last decade wrong.
Like the “disinformation” nonprofits named in the “Twitter Files,” GDI has received federal grants and is connected to other left-leaning nonprofits and individuals seeking to censor speech. Its advisers likewise hew left, such as “journalist” Anne Applebaum, who said Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings were not interesting, and Finn Heinrich of the leftist George Soros’ Open Society group.
The composition of GDI’s “advisory panel” is also noteworthy because the same individuals guiding GDI’s mission to starve conservative sites of advertising dollars are connected to three of the organizations behind the Election Integrity Partnership’s push for censorship at Twitter. That fact would be difficult to discover today, though, as GDI scrubbed its “advisory panel” section of its homepage after the blacklist scandal broke.
According to the archived GDI homepage, advisory panel members include Ben Nimmo, the global lead at Meta; Franziska Roesner, a University of Washington professor; and Camille Francois of Niantic. Nimmo was a founding member of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and a senior fellow for that lab. He was also “the first director of investigations at Graphika.” Francois also serves as the chair of Graphika’s advisory board and is identified on Graphika’s webpage as its chief innovation officer. Roesner is a faculty member at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Together then, three of the four organizations that partnered with Stanford to run the Election Integrity Partnership, which pushed Twitter to censor speech in advance of the 2020 election, were also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.
Global Engagement Center
A strong connection also exists between GDI and the U.S. government through an arm of the State Department, the Global Engagement Center, which has also made several appearances in the “Twitter Files.”
The Global Engagement Center, which proclaims itself “a data-driven body leading U.S. interagency efforts in proactively addressing foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine U.S. interests using disinformation and propaganda,” awarded the Global Disinformation Index a $100,000 grant as part of the U.S-Paris Tech Challenge. The State Department sponsored that “Tech Challenge” in “collaboration” with, among others, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Park Advisors, and Disinfo Cloud. According to a State Department spokesman, the Global Engagement Center began funding Disinfo Cloud in 2018 and also awarded approximately $300,000 to Park Advisors to manage Disinfo Coud to fight “disinformation, terrorism, violent extremism, hate speech.”
The “Twitter Files” revealed that, in addition to funding private organizations pushing for censorship, the State Department’s Global Disinformation Center attempted to insert itself into Twitter’s review and censorship process. When those efforts failed, the Global Disinformation Center pressed its unsupported claims of disinformation to the media.
Additional research is needed to understand the full scope of the Global Engagement Center’s role in the Censorship Complex, but what little is known now suggests the State Department provides load-bearing support for the project. A recent report from the Foundation for Freedom Online also exposes the National Science Foundation as a key funder in “the science of censorship.”
While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Unlike the military-industrial complex, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you on every topic.
The Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a “Disinformation Board,” but a more insidious “Censorship Complex” already exists and is growing at an alarming speed.
This Censorship Complex is bigger than banned Twitter accounts or Democrats’ propensity for groupthink. Its funding and collaboration implicate the government, academia, tech giants, nonprofits, politicians, social media, and the legacy press. Under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, these groups seek to silence speech that threatens the far-left’s ability to control the conversation — and thus the country and the world.
Americans grasped a thread of this reality with the release of the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s reporting on the Global Disinformation Index, which revealed the coordinated censorship of speech by government officials, nonprofits, and the media. Yet Americans have no idea of the breadth and depth of the “Censorship Complex” — and how much it threatens the fabric of this country.
In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned against the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” via the new sweeping military-industrial complex. Its “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [was] felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.” Replace “military-industrial” with “censorship,” and you arrive at the reality Americans face today.
Origins of the Censorship Complex
Even with the rise of independent news outlets, until about 2016 the left-leaning corporate media controlled the flow of information. Then Donald Trump entered the political arena and used social media to speak directly to Americans. Despite the Russia hoax and the media’s all-out assault, Trump won, proving the strategic use of social media could prevail against a unified corporate press. The left was terrified.
Of course, Democrats and the media couldn’t admit their previous control over information converted to electoral victories and that for their own self-preservation, they needed to suppress other voices. So instead, the left began pushing the narrative that “disinformation” — including Russian disinformation — from alternative news outlets and social media companies handed Trump the election.
The New York Times first pushed the “disinformation” narrative using the “fake news” moniker after the 2016 election. “The proliferation of fake and hyperpartisan news that has flooded into Americans’ laptops and living rooms has prompted a national soul-searching, with liberals across the country asking how a nation of millions could be marching to such a suspect drumbeat. Fake news, and the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news, is creating confusion,” the Times wrote, bemoaning the public’s reliance on Facebook.
“Narrowly defined, ‘fake news’ means a made-up story with an intention to deceive, often geared toward getting clicks. But the issue has become a political battering ram, with the left accusing the right of trafficking in disinformation, and the right accusing the left of tarring conservatives as a way to try to censor websites,” the Times wrote, feigning objectivity. But its conclusion? “Fake and hyperpartisan news from the right has been more conspicuous than from the left.”
Two days later, Hillary Clinton repeated the narrative-building phrase, condemning what she called “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year.” But then, as if to remind Democrats and the legacy press that he had wrestled control of the narrative from them, Trump branded left-wing outlets “fake news” — and just like that, the catchphrase belonged to him.
Disinformation Is Scarier if It’s Russian
That didn’t deter the left in its mission to destroy alternative channels of communication, however. The media abandoned its “fake news” framing for the “disinformation” buzzword. “Misinformation” and “mal-information” were soon added to the vernacular, with the Department of Homeland Security even defining the terms.
But silencing conservatives would require more than merely labeling their speech as disinformation, so the various elements of the Censorship Complex deployed what they called “the added element of Russian meddling” in the 2016 election, with Clinton amplifying this message and blaming the spread of social media misinformation for her loss.
Priming the public to connect “disinformation” with Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 election allowed the Censorship Complex to frame demands for censorship as patriotic: a fight against foreign influence to save democracy!
The Censorship Complex Expands
The Censorship Complex’s push to silence speech under the guise of preventing disinformation and election interference hit its stride in 2017, when FBI Director Christopher Wray launched the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) purportedly “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States.”
The “most widely reported” foreign influence operations these days, Wray said, “are attempts by adversaries — hoping to reach a wide swath of Americans covertly from outside the United States — to use false personas and fabricated stories on social media platforms to discredit U.S. individuals and institutions.” Wray’s statement perfectly echoed the claims Clinton and Democrats had peddled ad nauseam in the press, and it foreshadowed how the Censorship Complex would soon mature.
The launch of the FITF in 2017 brought together numerous representatives from the deep state. The FBI’s Counterintelligence, Cyber, Criminal, and Counterterrorism Divisions worked closely with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and other intelligence agencies, as well as “state and local enforcement partners and election officials.”
Significantly, the FITF viewed “strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing,” as crucial to combatting foreign disinformation. That perspective led to the FBI’s hand-in-glove relationship with Twitter, which included monthly and then weekly meetings with the tech giant, some of which CIA representatives attended. This symbiotic relationship also led to the censorship of important — and true — political speech, such as the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, which exposed the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandal right before a critical presidential election.
State Department Renovates Its Wing
In 2011, by executive order, the Department of State established the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications to support government agencies’ communications “targeted against violent extremism and terrorist organizations.” While renamed the Global Engagement Center in 2016, the center’s counterterrorism mission remained largely unchanged. But then at the end of that year, Congress expanded the Global Engagement Center’s authority, directing it “to address other foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation activities.” And with language straight out of the Russia hoax playbook, the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 further refined the Global Engagement Center’s mission:
The purpose of the Center shall be to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States and United States allies and partner nations.
Together, the State Department and the many intelligence agencies behind the FITF worked not just with Twitter but with the array of tech giants, such as Google and Facebook, pushing for censorship of supposed mis-, dis-, and mal-information. But the deep state was not alone. The “disinformation” contagion also reached the Hill, nonprofits, think tanks, and academic institutions with both politics and a desire to suckle at the federal teat driving a frenzied expansion of the project. Together these groups pushed for even more silencing of their opponents, and the Censorship Complex boomed.
The danger Eisenhower warned the country of in 1961 is mild in comparison to the threat of the Censorship Complex. Unlike the military-industrial complex that reached only one function of the federal government, the Censorship Complex affects all aspects of governance, controlling the information available to you and your fellow Americans on every topic.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Governors and other state officials don’t have to stand idly by as the Biden administration plots a federal takeover of elections. That’s the message being sent by the heads of two good government groups in a new memo to state officials.
“The Biden administration wants to use federal government resources for political, get-out-the-vote purposes, and it’s up to strong leaders in state and local government to stop them,” wrote Russ Vought of the Center for Renewing America and Tarren Bragdon of the Foundation for Government Accountability. “We strongly urge those in positions of power to stop President Biden’s power grab and act soon.”
Biden issued an executive order on March 7, 2021, directing all 600 federal agencies to submit a plan to the White House to increase voter registration and turnout. Many agencies subsequently developed a plan to turn federal facilities, particularly those that deliver federal benefits, into voter registration agencies.
For example, Housing and Urban Development is trying to turn assisted housing centers into get-out-the-vote hubs. Health and Human Services is doing the same with its public health centers. Even as labor problems are out of control, the Department of Labor is turning its American Job Centers into voter registration agencies.
The agencies are allowed to work with voting groups approved by left-wing partisans in the White House, reminiscent of the Zuckerbucks plot to destabilize the 2020 election by running get-out-the-vote operations in the Democrat areas of swing states.
It’s a “backdoor approach that’s designed to ensure Democratic victories at the polls in 2022 and beyond,” Vought and Bragdon wrote.
The two recommend that state officials take action to prevent Biden’s plot. Since the National Voting Rights Act provides states the authority to designate voter registration agencies beyond those already required by federal law, the federal government cannot designate additional agencies without a change to federal law enacted by Congress.
So when federal agencies send “guidance” memorandums to state agencies about turning federal benefit centers into voter registration agencies, Vought and Bragdon recommend state officials contact those agencies and “order them not to implement that guidance because it is illegal at worst and unethical and partisan at best.”
Further, they remind states that they can issue a gubernatorial executive order or the legislature can pass a law or resolution prohibiting state agencies from applying to become voter registration agencies.
“With increasing brazenness, President Biden is taking advantage of a loyal federal bureaucracy to wield the power and influence of the federal government to influence elections by increasing Democratic voter registration and turnout,” write Bragdon and Vought. They say the actions are particularly troubling given recent lawsuits filed by the Department of Justice against conservative efforts to fortify election integrity and make it more difficult to cheat.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com
The same people who relentlessly insisted that Big Tech’s censorship campaign was totally fine are now screaming that a potential buyout of Twitter by Elon Musk poses a certified Threat to Democracy. But we’ve heard this absurd routine before, and it’s not really democracy they’re worried about. The Big Tech, big media, and big government cabal just whine about democracy being under siege when their own power conglomerate is threatened.
“I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything goes,” fretted The Washington Post’s Max Boot last week, after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO offered to buy the entirety of Twitter stock. “For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”
Former New York Magazine writer Jesse Singal had the very intelligent take that even the possibility of Musk buying out Twitter was “America’s very first 9/11,” while Salon’s Matthew Rozsa blared that “Elon Musk’s attempted takeover of Twitter is a threat to the free world.”
The idea of losing some power to silence opposing viewpoints on social media is terrifying to these people — so terrifying that in their panic they don’t even realize they’ve admitted their own gluttony for control.
But this isn’t the first time the group of people in media, tech platforms, and politics who want to control what you think have seen pushback on their vise grip and gone ballistic. And a “threat to democracy” is their favorite label with which to smear anything that challenges their power.
The most obvious example is the systematic campaign to convince the country that a five-hour riot at the U.S. Capitol — which, contrary to media lies, did not cause the deaths of five people — was as bad as or worse than the terror attacks of 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War. You don’t have to defend the Jan. 6, 2021 riot to recognize that America’s own justice system indicates it was neither an “insurrection” nor a “terrorist attack,” despite the hysteria of the corporate press.
But that’s not the only instance. Just think back to when The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin cried “Democracy is hanging by a thread” when an elected majority in the U.S. Senate, including West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, determined not to pass President Joe Biden’s Build Back Bankrupt plan. For Rubin and others, actual democracy at work was just too much of a threat to … democracy.
Meanwhile, The Atlantic has called the entire Republican Party “a grave threat to American democracy,” with similar smears from Business Insider and the Chicago Sun-Times.
When concerned parents showed up to school board meetings to protest racist and radical sex ideology in their kids’ classrooms, they were labeled not just a threat to democracy but domestic terrorists, in a smear campaign that was revealed to be orchestrated by President Joe Biden’s own Department of Education.
New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz worried that the U.S. Supreme Court was too conservative, threatening that “the consequences for … popular democracy could be dire.”
Vox, among others, has declared that the constitutionally prescribed Electoral College “poses a … long-term threat to American democracy.” It has also claimed the constitutionally prescribed half of our bicameral legislature known as the U.S. Senate poses an even greater one.
And of course, nearly everyone on the left whined that questions about the rigging of the 2020 election were existential threats to democracy, after they spent years deriding President Donald Trump’s 2016 win as “illegitimate.”
It’s more than obvious by now that these people don’t truly want democracy or freedom, but power. When their control — over what laws are passed, who wins elections, what’s taught to kids in schools, or what you’re allowed to say on social media — is challenged, including by actual democratic processes like fair elections, free speech, or the will of a congressional majority, they’ll rush to call the challenger an enemy of democracy itself.
Just like Dr. Anthony Fauci equating himself with Science, these members of the ruling class want you to believe that an attack on their power is an attack on our entire political order. If they succeed in that, they can insulate themselves from all critique and silence the opposition, either via the power of cancel culture and self-censorship, or by simply locking the accounts of their critics.
But their propensity to fall back on that sham defense every time their rule is threatened has revealed just how desperate they are for control, and just how ridiculous they are willing to sound to maintain it. If they felt confident they could maintain power without smearing every opponent as the next big threat to the free world, there would be no need for such distracting theatrics. Instead, they’re so fragile that making any chink in their armor will get you labeled as America’s (next) “first 9/11.”
Next time you hear cries that something is a “threat to our very democracy itself, even graver than all the other, formerly-gravest threats to democracy,” it should be your first clue that that thing, good or bad, is making the censorship class quake in their silk slippers. Your second thought should be to expect them to exploit the “democracy” fearmongering for even more control — and your third thought should be to keep that the heck from happening.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
Mike Rowe on Tuesday criticized Canadian government officials for their response to Freedom Convoy truckers amid a national protest over COVID-19 vaccine mandates. For weeks, thousands of demonstrators have camped in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, and blocked border crossings with the U.S. in protest of the mandate and other coronavirus restrictions placed on truckers crossing the border.
In response to what the Canadian government deemed an “unlawful assembly,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, a measure that grants authorities sweeping power to restrict travel, disperse crowds, arrest demonstrators, and freeze their bank accounts, among other actions considered necessary to stop assembly. Over the weekend, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson even suggested selling off dozens of vehicles seized during the Freedom Convoy protests to cover the city’s costs incurred during the demonstrations.
During an interview with BlazeTV host Glenn Beck on Tuesday, Rowe pointed out how quickly the situation has changed now that some truckers find themselves on the bad end of state directives. Truckers, once considered essential to the economy during the pandemic, have in short order become enemies of the state, the “Dirty Jobs” star suggested.
As Canadian officials debate auctioning off the Freedom Convoy protesters' trucks, @mikeroweworks gives me his take: "Truckers were the very definition of essentiality. Within the course of 2 weeks, they literally went from heroes to villains." pic.twitter.com/zV3bEJOspI
“You know what strikes me about all of this?” Rowe asked, adding, “And maybe this is somewhat of a silver lining [because] I kind of feel like we’re about to close the loop.”
“When this started, truckers were right on the leading edge of heroes. They were the very definition of essentiality,” he said. “[But] in the course of two weeks, they literally went from hero to villain.”
That’s how fast things can change in today’s chaotic socio-political climate.
Beck noted that protesters have yet to be convicted of crimes or even appear in court. Nevertheless, the government is floating an auctioning off of property. The Canadian government responded quickly and harshly to continued protests in Ottawa over the weekend.
Police descended on the crowds, arresting at least 191 protesters and towing at least 76 vehicles since Friday. In one scene caught on video, police are seen charging on horseback into a crowd of demonstrators and knocking down at least two people, including an elderly woman on a mobility scooter.
One trucker recounted to Fox News host Tucker Carlson the moment that police repeatedly struck him while he was on the ground, complying to orders.
“They drag me in, they lie me down on my belly, and I don’t — I don’t recall how many were on top of me … I felt like I was beaten, but I took it like a man,” the trucker recalled.
“They broke my body a little bit, but not my spirit,” he added.
Why do Muslim politicians push identity politics? Watch our video narrative by Clarion’s National Correspondent Shireen Qudosi.
Qudosi argues that Muslims have a choice — between old school Islam, which many of their parents fled, and the opportunities offered in America. Which will it be?
Eric Holder’s Justice Department threatened Fox News Reporter James Rosen as a co-conspirator under the espionage act. Except Holder never really intended to charge Rosen. It was all a pretext to spy on his phone calls and emails to find out who in the government was leaking information to him.
The Obama administration also spied on the phone records of Associated Press journalists.
This week Joy Behar, of all people, outed James Clapper for spying on the Trump campaign. Clapper claimed Trump should be happy about this because his agent was really spying on Russians.
Looks like Michael Cohen could afford to pay Stormy Daniels $130,000. Though, based on past behavior, I wonder if he first tried to sell her access to the president for a future “encounter.”
Swamp Fox
According to The Hill he tried to hit up the Qatari government for a cool million in exchange for access. Also on Cohen’s client access list were Novartis and ATT.
Someone working in a Hawaiian state agency pushed the wrong button. The wrong button pusher set off 38 minutes of panic. Here’s what happened according to NBC:
At 8:07 a.m., cellphones across the archipelago pinged with the following all-caps warning: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
The button pusher wasn’t named or fired but was temporarily reassigned.
Taylor Force was an American army veteran who was killed by a Palestinian terrorist while on a university trip in Israel.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee has just approved a bill called the Taylor Force Actwhich would strip U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority until it changes its policies on supporting terrorism.
What Is the Taylor Force Act?
Taylor Force was a U.S. veteran killed by a Palestinian terrorist while on a university trip in Israel. An officer who had served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Force was stabbed in Tel Aviv in March 2016. His killer was shot and killed at the scene.
The Palestinian Authority is paying a salary to the family of the terrorist who killed Force, as it does to the families of all terrorists killed in action by Israeli forces. Terrorists who are not killed or who are imprisoned receive salaries directly. The longer they are in prison the more money is awarded. Palestinian leaders have long defended these payouts.
“It is the right of all of theprisoners and martyrs who have struggled and sacrificed for Palestine to receive their full salaries from the PA,” Hassan Abd Rabbo, spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Commission of Prisoners and Released Prisoners’ Affairs has said.
Such payouts make up a significant portion of the Palestinian Authority budget. In 2017, the Palestinian Authority took in an estimated $693 millionfrom international donors, but allocated nearly $345 to pay terrorists and their families.
According to the official congressional website, the Taylor Force Act will halt U.S. payments to the Palestinian Authority until that body:
is taking steps to end acts of violence against U.S. and Israeli citizens perpetrated by individuals under its jurisdictional control, such as the March 2016 attack that killed former Army officer Taylor Force;
is publicly condemning such acts of violence and is investigating, or cooperating in investigations of, such acts; and
has terminated payments for acts of terrorism against U.S. and Israeli citizens to any individual who has been convicted and imprisoned for such acts, to any individual who died committing such acts, and to family members of such an individual.
Although the Palestinian Authority is technically a secular nationalist organization in direct opposition to radical Islam, Palestinian leaders have long used Islamist rhetoric to incite the population to carry out acts of terror against Israel. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2015 slammed Jewish access to the Temple Mount saying, “Al-Aksa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet. We won’t allow them to do so and we will do whatever we can to defend Jerusalem.”
Who Supports the Bill?
The bill enjoys bipartisan support despite being drafted by Republicans. The Senate bill was sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham. Democrats were persuaded to support the bill after concerns that the U.S. would continue to provide direct humanitarian aid, such as paying for water, were addressed. It is predicted to pass and become law.
“With this legislation, we are forcing the PA to choose between U.S. assistance and these morally reprehensible policies, and I am pleased to see this measure move forward in both chambers with so much support,” committee chairman Ed Royce (R-California).
The bill is also supported by a network of pro-Israel think tanks and political organizations.
The House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee passed the bill unanimously on Wednesday. The bill will now come before the House of Representatives for a floor vote. Parallel legislation has been introduced in the Senate and will have to pass both houses to become law. The Senate’s version of the Taylor Force Act passed the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee in August.
The Taylor Force Act passed the committee alongside two other bills targeting Palestinian terrorism. One, the Hamas Human Shields Prevention Act, will impose sanctions on Hamas for its use of human shields. The other, the Palestinian International Terrorism Support Prevention Act, imposes sanctions on foreign persons, agencies and governments that assist Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or any of their affiliates.
Remember the Keystone XL Pipeline project? Remember what a cause célèbre it was for both the left and right? What the heck ever happened to it? Have you wondered that?
Well, in short it was killed pretty much for good, or at least the foreseeable future – both here in the USSA and now in Canada. As you are no doubt aware, it was Obama who, with the left in the federal and various state legislatures – and with some help from Choo-choo Warren Buffet who owns most of the rail cars now hauling crude down south, vetoed the pipeline. And don’t forget all the gobs of leftist activist money thrown at killing the project.
You may also recall that Canada threatened to build their own pipeline to their west coast and ship the oil to Asia if the U.S. did not acquiesce. That was when the “conservatives” ran Canada. But with the election of lefty socialist (like there’s another kind) Justin Trudeau in Canada, the entire XL project, above and below the border, was pronounced dead.
And that was the end of any talk of long distance oil pipelines. Or is it?
There is another long distance oil pipeline which will span 1,172 miles – from North Dakota’s famous Bakken and Three Forks oil production zones all the way to Pakota, Illinois. The 30 inch pipeline will be capable of transporting an average of 450,000 barrels of crude per day, but have a capacity of 570,000 barrels – possibly more. With this pipeline, the oil will be available to the Midwest, East Coast and Gulf Coast.
This is way it is supposed work – domestically produced crude, shipped throughout the United States for domestic consumption. No foreign entanglements whatsoever – not even friendly.
I know – you’re waiting for a shoe to drop – right? Well, so far there have been no shoes. On July 27, just two ago the Indian Country Media Network reported that “Despite the strong opposition of several tribes, the Army Corps of Engineers has approved nearly all permits to build the Dakota Access Pipeline project. Construction has already begun in all four states along its path.”
May I digress for just a moment? Why is it that we whiteys must call American Indians “Indigenous Peoples,” but their own media outlet can be the “Indian Country network?” I guess it’s the same reason blacks can call each other the “n” word, but we would be jailed for it. Oh well.
This time, the Injuns seem to be the only ones making a fuss (not quite) – claiming that a pipeline break could contaminate entire water supplies, destroy land and create public health hazards for reservations – but a train derailment, which are a lot more common, would never.
The only other organization to raise hell over it is of course Think Progress – the ultra-ultra left advocacy organization. If it has anything to do with actual progress, you can bet they will be firmly against it.
Their big beef, other than a pipeline which transports dirty oil and not rainbows and Unicorn farts, is that the feds are virtually shut out of the process. Other than the Army Corps of Engineers permitting process, the pipeline runs almost entirely through State and private land, so there is not much Obama can do – which is probably why we haven’t heard much about it.
Also there is the presidential election, coupled with almost daily terrorist updates worldwide – and the Olympics. These “hot” topics are sucking virtually all the oxygen out of other news.
Then there is the investment being made – all the equipment, pipes, machinery, etc. All cost loads of money, which means an uptick in those manufacturing sectors – none of which the left can tout because of the source. And of course there are all the jobs, which again cannot be discussed by the left.
The Dakota Access Pipeline is a $3.7 billion investment and will create (actually has already begun) anywhere from 8,000 to 12,000 jobs for area residents – maybe more. All trades are needed – from welders to mechanics, electricians, pipefitters, heavy equipment operators and others within the heavy construction industry. Then is the boon to the hospitality industries such as hotels, motels, restaurants, etc. along the route – none of which the press will report on.
Finally there is the increased tax revenue for the four states involved – North and South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. The pipeline will generate an estimated $50 million annually in property taxes and nearly $74 million in sales taxes to these states.
So hooray for real progress and the relatively quiet production of a much needed domestic pipeline. It’s about time I get a chance to report some good news.
Many ethnic groups in America have representation in local, state and the federal government, but thanks to Justice Hugo Black, religion isn’t afforded the same benefit.
One can be a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and be a Christian, Hindu, Muslim, etc. For example, the Congressional Black Caucus is said to address the concerns of all black Americans, regardless of religion. (They don’t really, but this is just to make a point). Yet due to the mythical separation of church and state, religious organizations are not allowed a seat at the government table – until now.
Once again, like a broken record, there is one “religion” that is extended privileges historically afforded to only secular groups. And of course this is Islam, or what the left has come to call it – the Muslim community – as if Muslim is now an ethnicity.
Thanks to the tireless work by the radicals of the Muslim Brotherhood, “Illinois could become the first state with a law on the books that gives Muslims a formal voice in government.”The state law would mandate that a 21 member Council “advise the governor and General Assembly on issues affecting Muslim Americans and immigrants.”
It will be the State’s only religious advisory board. There will be no Christian or Jewish Advisory Council – only Islam will be represented.
This strategy, and believe you me, it is a strategy, is textbook Muslim Brotherhood “Civilization Jihad” – gain seats of power in state and federal government. But this is even better than just a seat of power which can be taken away. The creation of this permanent Muslim Council will become state law. Just when you thought politicians couldn’t get any dumber, they pass a law mandating a permanent Islamist Advisory Council.
It’s ingenious and the current crop of know-nothing hack politicians at the Illinois statehouse are all in. The only thing standing in the way of this becoming law is the governor’s signature.
One of the brainiacs, “Democrat Senator Jacqueline Collins, cosponsor of the legislation, thinks the Muslim Council will essentially separate the radical elements of Islam from the more moderate elements.”She said: “We need to encourage our Muslim Americans to be civically engaged and participate. If you don’t participate, the fringe elements establish the policy.”Funny – I bet she has never said that regarding the fringe elements of Christianity.
Strangely enough, all the usual suspects, the “radical fringe elements,”are supporting the legislation, including Brotherhood front groups CAIR and ISNA. In 2011, under former Governor, Democrat Pat Quinn, both CAIR and ISNA successfully infiltrated the governor’s “temporary Muslim American Council.”
Hopefully, Republican Governor Bruce Rauner is wise to the Brotherhood scheme and will refuse to sign the bill into law.
But if he does, Illinois can expect the same type of nonsense already streaming through the federal government. One of the first things they can expect is the whitewashing of all terms that correctly describe Islamism. The Council will suggest that terms such as jihad, Sharia, umma, etc. be scrubbed from any official state documents and disallow politicians from speaking such terms. Just watch – it’s already happening at Homeland Security.
I hope the governor can withstand the pressure and veto this very bad piece of crap – I mean legislation. I’m not sure I hold out much hope – not in a state like Illinois and not if he seeks council from Brotherhood operatives posing as “Republican advisors” the way George W. Bush did.
Ours is not to wonder why – ours is just to do or get fined. Okay – that’s not exactly accurate, unless you are one of the 600 left to oppose the lefts new civil right – the rights of transgenders or “gender-non-conforming people.” For all these years close minded conservatives have been under the misconception that a person’s sex is synonymous with their gender. Silly backwoods bumpkins. It’s time we were dragged from the dark ages to the 21st century were all gender is fluid.
And just to make sure we comply – federal, state and city governments will force us into the proper genderless state of mind.
President Obama recently decreed that all public schools adhere to his new genderless bathroom policy or risk losing their federal education allocations. But he can’t just do that! Of course he can. Other pharaohs before him have made decrees – why not him. So let it be written – so let it be done.
Not to be outdone by Pharaoh Obama, the Communist Politburo of New York City, headed by Comrade Bill de Blasio has upped the ante.
Forget about the public sector. That’s no challenge. Progressives in the public sector are already of the same mind – like the Borg. The real challenge is demanding the private sector conform to ridiculous government demands. It’s much more satisfying to roll over the private sector and force them into compliance.
So Comrade de Blasio directed the NYC Commission on Human Rights to draft legal guidelines which “mandate that anyone who provides jobs or housing must use individuals’ preferred gender pronouns.”
“Employers and landlords who intentionally and consistently ignore using pronouns such as ‘ze/hir’ to refer to transgender workers and tenants who request them – may be subject to fines as high as $250,000.”
Okay – so what the heck are ze/hir? Well, the New York Post was good enough to provide a brief explanation. “Examples of less prominent pronouns that some transgender people may choose, according to the city, are: ‘ze,’ which is the third person singular, such as he and she: and ‘hir,’ which is the third person plural, similar to they”
Hold on there. I thought that transgendering (which is impossible) is the transforming of a male into a female or vice versa. So if a dude wants to be a girl, wouldn’t he/she/it want to be called a he or she?
Don’t be silly. The point of this social exercise is to muddy the waters of normalcy and tradition as much is possible. If “ze” ever becomes part of the normal American lexicon, it will have to then be usurped by some other more absurd gender fluid pronoun.
The Gothamist.com insists that the New York Post is overemphasizing the potential $250,000 fine. They explain that fines would only be imposed on those “who maliciously discriminate against transgender or gender-nonconforming individuals by misgendering them would be ‘determined based on the severity of the violation, a history of previous violations, knowledge of the NYC human rights law and the violating company’s size.”
Oh – now I get it. It’s not just about transgender rights.It’s also a shakedown scheme. Did you catch the end of the last quote – depending on “the violating company’s size?”Needless to say, the larger the company, the more cash can be extorted from them – of course knowing full well that most companies will pay the paltry $250,000 fine to avoid any leftist wrath.
Still, to the true believers, this is about some new human right. The city has simply found a way to combine the two. However, if they really want to capitalize on those, they should find themselves a transgender Al Sharpton who can approach companies for a preemptive shakedown.
The American left, through the tutelage of the Obama administration is determined to completely upend traditional society and it appears things couldn’t be going better. At this pace, we won’t recognize the country in 10 years – maybe less.
Perhaps conservatives should all move to Texas and secede while we still have the chance to move about freely.
The Los Angeles City Council — no collection of constitutional scholars they — on Tuesday unanimously adopted an ordinance that requires any privately owned handgun to be kept at home, either locked or dismantled so that it does not function. Councilman Paul Krekorian was behind the vote. Krekorian also recently pushed through an ordinance requiring all clips of more than 10-round capacity to be destroyed.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Krekorian as saying, “It’s unacceptable to live in a country where it’s more dangerous to be a preschooler than to be a police officer — and we can do something about that today.”
The Times neglected to mention what country Krekorian thinks he’s living in.
Cuz that’s definitely a country you wanna stay away from.
Perhaps I’m just not enlightened, but I’m a bit confused what exactly Krekorian imagines is going on in Los Angeles homes.
I’m getting flashes of scenes involving toddlers out strolling the neighborhood, caps on askew, gold chains hanging from their necks, the theme from “The Sopranos” playing over their iPhones, when some punk from a rival block rolls up on his trike, hauls out a nine and goes to town.
It’s like a scene out of the comic strip “Boondocks.”
Does Krekorian think that toddlers just spend all their time looking for Dad’s gun, then shooting their friends with it? Or is it that Krekorian foresees a day when the U.N. has banned meat animals and roving burger gangs hunt down the last meat available — little Timmy?
That Krekorian is afraid of guns is assumed, but you would probably be correct to suspect that what he’s really afraid of is the people who elected him to office being able to defend themselves not against criminals but the government.
And the L.A. City Council might have reason to fear that, having invited illegal aliens of all stripes to rest their weary heads within their sanctuary city limits. So, people who are by definition criminals, who often bring crime with them or engage in crime once they get here, are OK. But people wanting to defend themselves against crime, that’s bad.
Councilman Mitch Englander pitched in with Krekorian, saying, “This is less about gun control and simply more about controlling your gun. It’s really that simple.”
And then, to paraphrase the film “Idiocracy,” government will un-Nazi the world, forever.
President Ronald Reagan famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
In 2003, 30 percent of Americans polled thought that the government posed an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.
In 2015, nearly half (49 percent) of Americans polled said that the government poses an immediate threat to their rights and freedoms.
65 percent of Republicans recognize this threat from the government.
Gallup’s polling shows that many Americans realize that, for far too long, the government has shown up to help, as Reagan warned, and made our lives miserable and less free in the process. Gallup also asked how the government poses an immediate threat to those who say it does. Their answers are not surprising to those of us who have argued for years against ever-growing government that continually shrinks our Constitutional freedoms.
Nineteen percent said too many laws and too big of government.
15 percent cited the violation of freedoms and civil liberties.
12 percent said gun control and concerns about the infringement of the Second Amendment for law-abiding citizens without having any effect on the criminals who would violate any laws passed just as they violate the laws currently on the books.
10 percent cited too much involvement in people’s private lives, probably recognizing how increasing regulations make us less free and less prosperous.
Other concerns involved taking away foundational First Amendment freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of religion, government surveillance, over-taxation and overregulation, too much spending, and so much more.
This survey is not an outlier.
Americans are also more concerned about their religious freedom in the U.S. today than in previous years. And this concern is growing across the board. According to research conducted by Barna Group,
41 percent of adults today express concern over religious freedom, compared to 33 percent of adults surveyed in 2012.
“Among Millennials, there’s been a nine percentage point increase in those who say that religious freedom is worse today than it was 10 years ago (25 percent to 34 percent); the increase is even more marked among Gen-Xers (29 percent to 42 percent) and Boomers (38 percent to 46 percent).”
No matter how old they are, no matter the political party, and no matter what their views on numerous issues are, one thing is resounding clear: Americans feel less free today and they feel that it’s the government’s fault.
And they’re exactly right.
Our Supreme Court rules that laws do not mean what they say they mean while inventing constitutional rights whole cloth out of thin air, disregarding the democratic process and community debate that strengthens our nation’s character and charter.
Congress fails to lead and fails to cast a vision. Just this past weekend, freshman Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) took to Twitter to deconstruct and dismantle the conventional wisdom and media framework of what really matters. Disregarding the petty small ball of those trying to hold on to power, Sasse refocused the conversation on what really matters: a big vision of the future of American exceptionalism that fights for people and not merely against bad government projected by a winsome warrior that celebrates earned success and empowers our friends and neighbors to live full lives of opportunity.
The Obama administration continues to rule by unconstitutional executive fiathere at home while failing to lead abroad. This is why a majority of Republicans fear our government is endangering our freedoms – because it is. This is why half of Republicans polled currently prefer presidential candidates with no political experience – because we don’t just want another politician who will say one thing and do another.
And this is why the convention of states is so important. Our Founding Fathers gave us an emergency provision to reclaim our government and protect our fundamental freedoms. The time to act is now, before it’s too late.
Thank your lucky stars that the former Supreme Allied Commander For Europe and one-time U.S. Presidential candidate Wesley Clark never made it to the highest office in the land. Because if he had, there is a distinct possibility that he would have used our military to take the so-called domestic war on terror to a level not seen since World War II.
Clark shows his true colors and justifies why Americans should be rounded up and interned if they disagree with government policies. As you watch the following video keep in mind that there are thousands of people just like him, many with dreams of one day becoming powerful politicians and high level government bureaucrats.
In World War II, if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put them in a camp. They were prisoners of war.
So, if these people are radicalized, and they don’t support the United States, and they’re disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine that’s their right. It’s our right and our obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.
I think we’re going to have to increasingly get tough on this.
Kurt Nimmo of Infowars notes that the difference between World War II and now is that we actually declared war against a uniformed enemy, whereas in the war on terror, the government arbitrarily picks and chooses who to classify as a potential threat to the United States:
Clark is, in essence, advocating a life sentence for people who have not committed a crime but merely engaged in speech — often reprehensible, yet constitutionally protected — the government considers radical and in opposition to its foreign policy.
Within the context of this interview Clark is talking specifically about Islamic religious extremism. But it is important to keep in mind that terrorism in America has been redefined to mean whatever people like Wesley Clark think it should mean.
No matter what topic the training session concerns, every DHS sponsored course I have attended over the past few years never fails to branch off into warnings about potential domestic terrorists in the community. While this may sound like a valid officer and community safety issue, you may be disturbed to learn how our Federal government describes a typical domestic terrorist.
Scores of seemingly innocuous activities are now red flags for the federal government. If you home school your child, discuss big government policies in a negative light, or simply declare the U.S. Constitution as the law of the land, you are a threat. A federal prosecutor who recently prosecuted a man for selling gold and silver coins as an alternative to the U.S. dollar said the man was engaging in a conspiracy against the United States and treated the case as domestic terrorism.
Congressman Rand Paul has previously warned that even people who store food in their closets or keep extra ammunition are now suspected of terrorism.
Given the broad definitions purposely included within laws such as The Patriot Act, millions of Americans could be identified as threats to national security and subsequently imprisoned without cause, should people like Wesley Clark have their way. And perhaps that is exactly where all of this is going.
As we’ve noted previously, the Jade Helm 15 military exercises taking place over the next couple of months across the United States include training for the rounding up of dissidents and subversives. There is a significant amount of evidence and insider information indicative of a scenario that includes Gestapo-style tactics like secret arrests, interrogations, and detentions. In fact, a Texas Ranger recently dropped a bombshell and said that train cars with shackles were part of this summer’s military training. Obviously, this training isn’t designed for foreign threats in rural areas of the Middle East.
Perhaps Wesley Clark is already privy to the plan and it is now being seeded into the minds of millions of sheeple who will be convinced of the need to round up dissident Americans, should the right crisis strike. And be assured that, just like the German people under the Nazis, the majority will not question their patriotic duty to turn in suspected enemies of the state when told to do so
Universal human rights are determined by government restraint. In what areas of human life should the government not be involved? What areas of life must the government not regulate, not restrain, not limit, not oversee, not implement, not subsidize, not legalize or make illegal?Interestingly, the first five words of the Bill of Rights state what Congresscannot do:“Congress shall make no law… .” Even more telling– the first ten amendments, with perhaps The Sixth as the exception, all define what the government cannot do:
First: “Shall make no law … prohibiting … abridging,
Second: “Shall not be infringed”
Third: “No soldier shall … without the consent …”
Fourth: “Shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue …”
Fifth: “No person shall be held … nor shall any person be subject …”
Seventh: “Shall be preserved … No fact … shall be otherwise reexamined …”
Eighth: “Shall not be required … Nor excessive … imposed, nor … punishments inflicted”
Ninth: “shall not be construed to deny or disparage”
Tenth: “Not delegated … nor prohibited.”
The third, fifth, eighth, and tenth amendments don’t state “rights;” they state what authority the government does not have.In effect, limits on government are universal human rights. The Constitution outlines specific areas of human life that are off-limits to government. This suggests that there are certain aspects of human life which are fundamentally free.
The Constitution did not outline rights or prohibitions defined by a government that could later redefine them. It outlined rules to be followed by a self-ruling people in addition to separating and balancing political authority among judiciary, legislative, and executive branches.
Despite the limits the Founders enumerated in the Constitution, their limits are still limited in their ability to constrain government overreach. Matters of conscience, especially as they relate to the First Amendment, dictate certain situations when citizens decide to not follow and/or disobey unjust laws. Interestingly, dissent in the form of collective actions of conscience (refusing to pay taxes, boycotting specific products, and armed resistance) among approximately one third of American colonists who fought for independence.
The Constitution was the result of a point in time that the Founding Fathers and Framers identified of a line they could not cross. They could not comply in good conscience– it would be immoral to comply– with the laws of a corrupt and tyrannical government. Christians joined them, citing New Testament directives, identifying that they also must only “obey God rather than men.”
They recognized they could not selectively disobey certain laws because the government itself could not be obeyed. They needed a new government. Rebellion and resistance were required because the ruling authorities had rebelled against God. The government had not only violated basic principles of justice but also had squandered God-given human rights, rendering itself illegitimate.
Thomas Jefferson asserted:
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long Established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, Accordingly, all experience [has] shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
“But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evidences a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
Jefferson also said, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”
The Shall Nots were imperative to the Founders– they wanted to ensure that if Congress violated them the people had just cause to rebel.
It’s astounding to review the requirements to be legally married in America. Even more astounding is the reality that Americans, and especially Christians, comply with them. Worse still— Christians continue to demand that the government regulate a predominantly Christian practice. (Monogamous heterosexual marriage is a unique New Testament Christian concept. Nearly all non-Christian faiths advocate polygamy and pedophilia as part of acceptable social marriage norms.)
America’s oligarchic-republican-democratic government currently requires citizens to receive government permission to be legally married—similar to requiring the Chinese to receive government permission to legally have a child.
Imagine living in a country where couples are legally required to give birth to only one child. In order to even have a child, couples are required to apply for a birth permit before starting a pregnancy. After the government legally grants permission to have one child the mother is required to be sterilized or use an IUD. Imagine living in a country where government officials chart women’s menstrual cycles and women are required to undergo monthly pelvic exams to prevent pregnancies. And the government requires that all “unauthorized” pregnancies be aborted and one or both spouses be sterilized.
For the majority of non-wealthy people, a second pregnancy and any pregnancy without a birth permit, is called “out-of-plan” and is illegal. Illegal “out-of-plan” children are sent to government facilities.
These practices are not imaginary. They are enforced in 21st centuryCommunist China. Today, nearly two-thirds of all Chinese couples (approximately 900 million people, or the equivalent to three times the size of the U.S. population) must comply with China’s One Child Policy, which is regulated and enforced by 300,000 officials.
To be legally married in America applicants must pay for a license and receive the government’s permission to marry—if they successfully prove:
Their identity and that they are not closely blood related to their intended spouse (some states required blood tests, including sickle cell tests),
Their age (they must be at least 18 years old or “at least the age of consent”),
Their mental state (they must prove they have sufficient mental capacity to understand the act of marriage), and
They are not married to anyone else.
Depending on the state, if applicants present a certificate proving they attended the state’s “approved marriage education class” the state fee is waived and only the county fee payment is required.
After purchasing the marriage license applicants must select an authorized officiateto perform the ceremony, and depending on the state, can marry after adheringto a certain waiting period from the date of the license’s approvalprior to its expiration date.
After the marriage is officiated, the government requiresthat information be submitted on the license and returned to the same county clerk’s office within a specified time period.
To clarify, Christians have been submitting to a government that requires them to:
Apply to the government to receive permission to be married.
Pay the government to consider their application.
Comply with and prove numerous criteria to receive government approval.
Only use a government approved officiant.
Be married within the government’s specified time period.
Record their information on a government approved license and submit it to the government within the government’s specified timeframe.
To suggest that marriage in America is a union between God and husband and wife is false. Marriage in America is a union between Uncle Sam and husband and wife. Marriage in America is determined by the government. The government grants permission and regulates whether or not, to whom, when, and how anyone can marry. In America, a license legalizes marriage, not anything else.
Why are Christians demanding that the government grant them permission to marry? If marriage is a solemn oath among two people and God why are Christians paying the government for a license?
By complying with the government’s regulation of marriage Christians have only participated in and advocated for the government’s redefinition of it.
Monogamous heterosexual marriage between one man and one woman—including celibacy of singles and faithfulness to one’s spouse— is solely a radical New Testament concept. As numerous historical records indicate, the culturally accepted norm even during Apostle Paul’s day among Romans and Greeks was procreational sex between one husband and one wife. Recreational sex for married men who actively engaged in sex with young boys, prostitutes, and slaves—was the norm.
Likewise, Islamic and pagan societies practiced polygamy, pedophilia, child sacrifices, child marriages, and marriages with slaves. Even Old Testament Israelite sexuality was largely polygamous. Abraham bore the entire Semitic race: Jews from Sarah; Muslims from Hagar. Jacob’s two wives (Leah and Rachel) and two servants (Bilhah and Zilpah) bore him twelve sons. David and Solomon had many wives and concubines.
It was not until the 16th century, largely because of the Protestant Reformation, that marriage became a government institution. It never had been previously—only churches and synagogues recorded and regulated birth, marriage, sex, and death.
The question is: why are American Christians, five centuries later, still so deceived and confused by advocating marriage as a regulated government institution? Do they not realize that in doing so, they are actually validating the government’s authority to regulate childbirth and family structure? Applying for a license to receive the government’s permission to marry is no different than applying for a license to receive the government’s permission to have a child.
American policies may slightly differ, but they largely replicate, those of Communist China.
The Obama administration was accused Wednesday of giving terrorists an incentive to kidnap as it unveiled a hostage policy overhaul allowing families of U.S. hostages to pay ransom — and allowing the U.S. government to help families communicate with captors. “This doesn’t fix anything,”Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a leading critic of the administration’s hostage policy, told Fox News. “The money that we’re going to be paying ISIS is going to be used to buy arms and to buy equipment to fight Americans and to fight the Iraqis.”
But the White House said the changes are being unveiled with the families and victims in mind. “We’re not going to abandon you. We’re going to stand by you,”Obama said of hostages’ families, speaking at the White House on Wednesday. The policy review was formally released shortly before noon, and includes a host of changes beyond the clarifications on ransom discussions — notably, the creation of a new bureaucratic structurefor handling hostage cases. The White House plans to establish a Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell responsible for coordinating the recovery of hostages; a Hostage Response Group responsible for coordinating hostage policies; and the position of “special presidential envoy for hostage affairs.” Obama said this is being done to sync up various efforts, citing past coordination problems.
This framework is also being met with mixed reviews, but much of the attention is on the newly clarified policies for communicating with terrorists. The White House sought the policy review last fall after the deaths of Americans held hostage by Islamic State militants. The families of some of those killed complained about their dealings with the administration, saying they were threatened with criminal prosecution if they pursued paying ransom in exchange for their loved ones’ release.
In response, the administration made clear Wednesday that officials will no longer threaten hostages’ families with prosecution for dealing with and paying ransoms to terrorist captors. The Justice Department said in a written statement: “The department does not intend to add to families’ pain in such cases by suggesting that they could face criminal prosecution.” There is not expected to be any formal change to the law. However, the administration made clear that the Justice Department has never prosecuted anyone for paying ransom and that will continue to be the case. The White House said in a statement that the government still takes a “no concessions” approach, and it continues to be U.S. policy to “deny hostage-takers the benefits of ransom.”But the same statement says this policy does not “preclude engaging in communications with hostage-takers.”
The White House made clear the U.S. government may, then, help facilitate communications with terrorists on behalf of the families. The directive said the U.S. “may assist private efforts” to communicate with hostage-takers, and may even “itself communicate with hostage-takers” to try to rescue hostages. White House counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco said the U.S. government, though, would not specifically facilitate ransom payments.
The announcements still amount to a shift in the U.S. approach to hostages. It was considered a major break from past practice last year when the Obama administration traded five Taliban leaders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The latest policy changes could open the door to more deals, even if they are only struck with families of hostages.
Critics worry they could also encourage more kidnappings, while effectively aiding the enemy.
“The concern that I have is that by lifting that long-held principle [of not paying ransoms], you could be endangering more Americans here and overseas,” House Speaker John Boehner said. “You’re going to have to have the government now facilitating payments from the families here to the terrorists there while at the same time we have troops on the ground … fighting the same people that we’re paying money to,” Hunter said Wednesday. “You’re worth more captured now than you would be otherwise.” Former House intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers also voiced concern on a local talk radio station Tuesday evening that this would encourage more hostage-taking and ransom demands.
Obama, though, stressed Wednesday that the U.S. government itself would not be paying ransoms.
Four Americans have been killed by the Islamic State since last summer:journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller. After the release of gruesome videos showing the beheadings of some hostages, Obama approved an airstrike campaign against the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria.
The families’ anguish has been deepened by the fact that European governments routinely pay ransom for hostages and win their release. The U.S. says its prohibitions against the government and private individuals making any concessions to terrorist demands are aimed both at preventing more kidnappings and blocking more income for terror groups. However, the Obama administration did negotiate with the Taliban last year to win the release of Bergdahl. White House officials say those negotiations were permissible because Obama sees a special responsibility to leave no American service member behind on the battlefield.
Elaine Weinstein, whose husband Warren Weinstein was accidentally killed by a U.S. drone strike in April while being held hostage by Al Qaeda, argued Tuesday against the government making such distinctions between U.S. citizens. “The people who take American citizens working abroad as hostages do not discriminate based on their job or employer, and neither should our government,”Weinstein said in a statement.
The White House invited the families of 82 Americans held hostage since 2001 to participate in the review, and 24 agreed to do so. The National Counterterrorism Center, which oversaw the review, also consulted with hostage experts from the U.S. and other countries. As part of the review’s findings, the White House announced the creation of a hostage recovery “fusion cell” that will coordinate the multiple government agencies involved in such issues. The new office aims to address family frustrations about getting contradictory information from different agencies by creating a single point of contact.
The administration is not acquiescing to the requests of some families to house the fusion cell in the White House’s National Security Council. Instead, the office will be at the FBI, and the director will be affiliated with the FBI. The cell will include representatives from the State Department, Treasury Department, CIA and other key agencies.
Obama also announced the creation of a State Department special envoy post that will head the administration’s dealings with foreign governments on hostage matters.
Fox News’ James Rosen and Doug McKelway and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” – Abraham Lincoln
A free society has a shelf-life of a few hundred years before it crumbles into a bloody mess. It all depends on the situations that bring about the downfall of the society, but regardless, there is a finite amount of time a free society has before it’s over. I think America’s experiment is coming to a close.
Now, I don’t believe this will happen in the next several years, but I do believe that in the next thirty to fifty years, we will fall. At the epicenter of this destruction will be religion versus secularism.
During an interview with CBN, Marco Rubio put it perfectly:
“If you think about it, we are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech. Because today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage, you are labeled a homophobe and a hater…
After they are done going after individuals, the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church is hate speech, and there’s a real and present danger.”
Rubio hits the nail on the head. At the moment, it’s not religions themselves that are under attack, but their practitioners. Faith is background noise. But at a certain point, the secularists will continue to walk upstream, locating the source of all the “hate.” First, churches will lose their 501(c)(3) tax exempt status, because the government must not be in the business of promoting hate speech. Then the secularists will demand that the government get involved in churches themselves, examining what’s going on inside.
Hillary Clinton has already said, during a recent speech:
“Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will…And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed…”
Clinton was referring to “women’s reproductive health,” which is the buzzphrase for tearing little arms off and draining tiny heads. That’s how it will go down. In the interest of “the greater good,” the government will first pressure religions to change their “deep-seated” beliefs to accommodate women’s reproductive health, and same-sex marriage, and whatever comes next, and eventually, churches will be forced to accommodate or be punished. It’ll begin with fines, and go from there. Probation, prison, torture, death.
You may laugh, but look at what has happened in just the last ten years. Churches have been under attack in Texas, when preachers were asked for the content of their sermons by the Mayor of Houston, and participatory businesses in the wedding industry have been forced to accommodate something they believe is immoral or get sued out of existence.
At the current point, we have the power and resources to fight back. Religious freedom laws, like the one passed in Indiana, and the ability of Christians across the country to contribute to a crowd-funding effort to keep a threatened business afloat give us the slight edge—but that will change.
Politics is downstream of culture, and at the moment, we are downstream of a cultural revolution–one which labels faith values as hate speech. It’s only a matter of time before that cultural revolution flows downstream to the political realms, and Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc, will be forced to choose a side: their faith, or their government. The choosing will tear this county apart.
People of faith will become pariahs, bibles will be banished, and we will no longer be allowed to practice our faith. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech will be litigated away, bit by bit. This will all happen under the guise of good, otherwise, it wouldn’t occur.
As Huxley said: “Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.”One cannot achieve success in any endeavor like the crushing of faith without doing so under the guise of good intentions. One cannot destroy good with simple evil, it must be dressed as further good.
The worst part is that it will happen so slowly that American idiots won’t notice. We humans are so distracted by ourselves; we’re like Narcissus looking in the water, unable to take his eyes off his own beauty. We can’t take our eyes off ourselves. As we continue to gaze into our own beautiful reflection, the world around us will crumble. When we finally look up, everything around us will have changed, and we will no longer be considered beautiful, but absolutely hideous. That’s how this will happen.
In the end, we will either be secularists, and thus protected, or we will be faithful, and thus persecuted. The choice is coming. Ask the owners of “Sweet Cakes by Melissa,” or Google Tony Miano, who was arrested in London for his “hate speech.”
Christians need to wake up. If we don’t, we will be complicit in our own downfall. The clock is ticking, and the stream is moving.
It’s never been a secret that the Democrat agenda has been quietly driven by the philosophies of Karl Marx and every radical socialist who ever lit a fuse against the United States. With a long line of public figures who have idolized or modeled themselves after Alinsky, Mao, Lenin or Castro, the Democratic Party has been home to the despicably anti-American and their foolishly misguided followers.
Anybody who paid any attention to the party’s politics and had a modicum of historical knowledge could spot the connections. But leftists being leftists, the DP leadership has always tried to pretend otherwise because their hold on many of the low-information voters is all based on perceptions. Which is what makes it remarkable that theProgressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality, a document put together by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, so clearly patterns itself afterCommunist Party and Socialist Party doctrine.
Even more remarkable is that de Blasio and others are trying to make this the official Democratic Party platform for the 2016 presidential election. The Democrats are calling the Progressive Agenda their “Contract With America,” which is as frightening as it is insulting.
Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” was a stroke of political brilliance that helped pull together congressional conservatives to pass important legislation and help America get back on track.
The Progressive Agenda is aimed at turning us into something just shy of the Soviet Union.
All the hallmarks are there:
hike the minimum wage (c’mon, if it’s such a great idea, why not make it $100 per hour, guys?);
national paid family and sick leave;
pass laws to make it easier to force workers to unionize;
“immigration reform” to organize illegals;
refinance student debt;
expanding state brainwashing with mandatory pre-kindergarten, after-school and child-care programs;
increasing taxes on “the rich”; etc.
De Blasio, who calls President Obama “too conservative” to lead a Progressive economic policy, said last week at the agenda’s rollout, “It’s time to take that energy and crystallize it into an agenda that will make a difference. We’ll be calling on leaders and candidates to address these issues, to stiffen their backbones, to be clear and to champion these progressive policies.”
Democrat officials had a variety of silly metaphors about cavalry and “meat on the bones”to use in praise of de Blasio’s manifesto. The most interesting remark, however, came from Rep. Charles Rangel, who talked about “revolution.”
Buzzword alert.
The Revolution, of course, was the crucible in which the United States was formed. But there’s a world of difference between the way the Founding Fathers meant it and the way modern Regressives mean it.
The Founders meant to take back something that never belonged to the King in the first place: our independence.
Regressives mean to assert everyone’s dependence on government and take things from the public treasury that never have belonged to them. **Please see related historical record regarding this point**
To facilitate the fattening of their own purses, Progressive leaders will begin by taking away your rights. If you don’t believe that, then you are dangerously naive. Look at history. That’s always how “progressive revolutions” begin.
It’s already started here. Obama was the warmup act. Now we’ve got closet socialist Hillary, open socialist Bernie and B-string socialist Fauxcahontas (aka Elizabeth Warren), all eyeing the Oval Office. And leftists hope their Communist Manifesto, er, Progressive Agenda will pave the way.
Lurking in the background, supporting de Blasio’s agenda, is Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party and founder of the New Party. The openly socialist New Party, Chicago branch, once claimed a young Barack Obama as a member, something his flying monkeys have denied for years. De Blasio was executive director of the New Party’s New York branch.
The basis of his plan was a report by Nobel prize-winning Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, who also held “teach-ins” at Occupy Wall Street. Stiglitz has accepted funding from billionaireGeorge Soros, the ex-Nazi employee who helped fund Obama’s career and who has hosted fundraisers for Elizabeth Warren and donated to Hillary Clinton’s PAC. Stiglitz also sits on the boards of several Soros organizations, including one whose aim is to remake the global economy.
You start to see how the pieces fit together? Who says there aren’t any real-life conspiracies to destroy America? Oh, right, mostly the people involved in them.
**Related Historical Context**
Not Yours To Give
Davy Crockett on The Role Of Government
from: The Life of Colonel David Crockett
compiled by: Edward S. Elis (1884)
“Money with [Congressmen] is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it.”
Introductory note by Peter Kershaw:
Davy Crockett served four terms in the U.S. Congress from 1827-1835. In 1835 he joined the Whig Party and ran a failed attempt for the Presidency. Immediately thereafter he departed his native Tennessee for Texas to secure the independence of the “Texicans.” He lost his life at the battle of the Alamo and forever secured his legendary status in history as “king of the wild frontier.” The following story was recounted to Edward Elis by an unnamed Congressman who had served with Colonel Crockett in the U.S. House of Representatives.
…Crockett was then the lion of Washington. I was a great admirer of his character, and, having several friends who were intimate with him, I found no difficulty in making his acquaintance. I was fascinated with him, and he seemed to take a fancy to me. I was one day in the lobby of the House of Representatives when a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. It seemed to be that everybody favored it. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose. Everybody expected, of course, that he was going to make a speech in support of the bill. He commenced:
“Mr. Speaker — I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House; but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into argument to prove that Congress has no power under the Constitution to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money.’
“Mr. Speaker, I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.” He took his seat. Nobody replied.
The bill was put upon its passage, and instead of passing unanimously, as was generally supposed, and as no doubt it would, but for that speech, it received but a few votes and was lost. Like many others, I desired the passage of the bill, and felt outraged at its defeat. I determined that I would persuade my friend Crockett to move for a reconsideration the next day. Previous engagements preventing me from seeing Crockett that night, I went early to his room the next morning and found him franking letters, a large pile of which lay upon his table. I broke in upon him rather abruptly, by asking him what the devil had possessed him to make that speech and defeat that bill yesterday. Without turning his head or looking up from his work, he replied: “I will answer your question. But thereby hangs a tale, and one of considerable length, to which you will have to listen.” I listened, and this is the tale which I heard: “Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some other members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown. It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into the hack and drove over as fast as we could. When we got there, I went to work, and I never worked as hard in my life as I did there for several hours. But, in spite of all that could be done, many houses were burned and many families made houseless, and, besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many women and children suffering, I felt that something ought to be done for them, and everybody else seemed to feel the same way.’
“The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business and rushed it through as soon as it could be done. I said everybody felt as I did. That was not quite so; for, though they perhaps sympathized as deeply with the sufferers as I did, there were a few of the members who did not think we had the right to indulge our sympathy or excite our charity at the expense of anybody but ourselves. They opposed the bill, and upon its passage demanded the yeas and nays. The yeas and nays were recorded, and my name appeared on the journals in favor of the bill.’“The next summer, when it began to be time to think about election, I concluded I would take a scout around among the boys of my district. I had no opposition there, but, as the election was some time off, I did not know what might turn up, and I thought it was best to let the boys know that I had not forgot them, and that going to Congress had not made me too proud to go to see them. “So I put a couple of shirts and a few twists of tobacco into my saddlebags, and put out. I had been out about a week and had found things going very smoothly, when, riding one day in a part of my district in which I was more of a stranger than any other, I saw a man in a field plowing and coming toward the road. I gauged my gait so that we should meet as he came to the fence.’
“As he came up I spoke to the man. He replied politely, but, as I thought, rather coldly, and was about turning his horse for another furrow when I said to him: ‘Don’t be in such a hurry my friend; I want to have a little talk with you, and get better acquainted.’ He replied: “‘I am very busy, and have but little time to talk, but if it does not take too long, I will listen to what you have to say.’
“I began: ‘Well, friend, I am one of those fortunate beings called candidates, and . . . .’
“‘ Yes, I know you; you are Colonel Crockett. I have seen you once before, and voted for you the last time you were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine. I shall not vote for you again.’
“This was a sockdolager (decisive argument: a decisive blow or argument)…. I begged him to tell me what was the matter.’
“‘Well, Colonel, it is hardly worthwhile to waste time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended, but you gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me. But I beg your pardon for expressing it that way. I did not intend to avail myself of the privilege of the constituent to speak plainly to a candidate for the purpose of insulting or wounding you. I intend by it only to say that your understanding of the Constitution is very different from mine; and I will say to you what, but for my rudeness, I should not have said, that I believe you to be honest. … But an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is.’
“‘I admit the truth of all you say, but there must be some mistake about it, for I do not remember that I gave any vote last winter upon any constitutional question.’
“‘No, Colonel, there’s no mistake. Though I live here in the backwoods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say that last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some sufferers by a fire in Georgetown. Is that true?’
“‘Certainly it is, and I thought that was the last vote which anybody in the world would have found fault with.’
“‘Well, Colonel, where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity?’“Here was another sockdolager; for, when I began to think about it, I could not remember a thing in the Constitution that authorized it. I found I must take another tack, so I said: “‘Well, my friend; I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing Treasury; and, I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just as I did.’
“‘It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing to do with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be intrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he.‘
“‘If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other.’
“‘No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose.There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the sufferers by contributing each one week’s pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of wealthy men in Washington, who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life. The congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditably; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from the necessity of giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution.’“I have given you,” continued Crockett, “an imperfect account of what he said. Long before he was through, I was convinced that I had done wrong. He wound up by saying:’
“‘So you see, Colonel, you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people. I have no doubt you acted honestly, but that does not make it any better, except as far as you are personally concerned, and you see that I cannot vote for you.’
“I tell you I felt streaked. I saw if I should have opposition, and this man should go to talking, he would set others to talking, and in this district I was a gone fawn-skin. I could not answer him, and the fact is, I was so fully convinced that he was right, I did not want to. But I must satisfy him, and I said to him:’
“‘Well, my friend, you hit the nail upon the head when you said I had not sense enough to understand the Constitution. I intended to be guided by it, and thought I had studied it fully. I have heard many speeches in Congress, but what you have said here at your plow has got more hard, sound sense in it than all the fine speeches I have ever heard. If I had ever taken the view of it that you have, I would have put my head into the fire before I would have given that vote; and if you will forgive me and vote for me again, if I ever vote for another unconstitutional law I wish I may be shot.’“The farmer laughingly replied: ‘Yes, Colonel, you have sworn to that once before, but I will trust you again upon one condition. You say that you are convinced that your vote was wrong. Your acknowledgment of it will do more good than defeating you for it. If, as you go around the district, you will tell people about this vote, and that you are satisfied it was wrong, I will not only vote for you, but will do what I can to keep down opposition, and, perhaps, I may exert some little influence in that way.’
“‘If I don’t,’ said I, ‘I wish I may be shot; and to convince you that I am in earnest in what I say I will come back this way in a week or ten days, and if you will get a gathering of the people, I will make a speech to them. Get up a barbecue, and I will pay for it.’
“‘No, Colonel, we are not rich people in this section, but we have plenty of provisions to contribute for a barbecue, and some to spare for those who have none. The push of crops will be over in a few days, and we can then afford a day for a barbecue. This is Thursday; I will see to getting it up on Saturday seek. Come to my house on Friday, and we will go together, and I promise you a very respectable crowd to see and hear you.’
“‘Well, I will be here. But one thing more before I say good-bye. I must know your name.’
“‘My name is Bunce.’
“‘Not Horatio Bunce?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Well, Mr. Bunce, I never saw you before, though you say you have seen me, but I know you very well. I am glad I have met you, and very proud that I may hope to have you for my friend. You must let me shake your hand before I go.’
“We shook hands and parted that day in gentlemanly friendship and amity.’“It was one of the luckiest hits of my life that I met that man. He mingled but little with the public, but was widely known for his remarkable intelligence, incorruptible integrity, and, for a heart brimful and running over with kindness and benevolence, which showed themselves not only in words but in acts. He was the oracle of the whole country around him, and his fame extended far beyond the circle of his immediate acquaintance. Though I had never met him before, I had heard much of him, and but for this meeting it is very likely I should have had opposition, and had been beaten. One thing is very certain, no man could now stand up in that district under such a vote.’
“At the appointed time I was at his house, having told our conversation to every crowd I had met, and to every man I stayed all night with. In fact I found that it gave the people an interest and a confidence in me stronger than I had ever seen manifest before.’
“Though I was considerably fatigued when I reached the home of Mr. Bunce, and under ordinary circumstances should have gone early to bed, I kept him up until midnight, talking about the principles and affairs of government, and got more real, true knowledge of them than I had got all my life before.’
“I have told you Mr. Bunce converted me politically. He came nearer converting me religiously than I had ever been before. He did not make a very good Christian of me, as you know; but he has wrought upon my feelings a reverence for its purifying and elevating power such as I had never felt before.’
“I have known and seen much of him since, for I respect him — no, that is not the word — I reverence and love him more than any living man, and I go to see him two or three times every year; and I will you sir, if everyone who professes to be a Christian lived and acted and enjoyed it as he does, the religion of Christ would take the world by storm.’“But to return to my story. The next morning we went to the barbecue, and, to my surprise, found about a thousand me there. I met a good many whom I had not known before, and they and my friend introduced me around until I had got pretty well acquainted — at least, they all knew me.’
“In due time notice was given that I would speak to them. They gathered up around a stand that had been erected. I opened my speech by saying: “‘Fellow-citizens — I present myself before you today feeling like a new man. My eyes have lately been opened to truths which ignorance or prejudice, or both, had heretofore hidden from my view. I feel that I can today offer you the ability to render you more valuable service than I have ever been able to render before. I am here today more for the purpose of acknowledging my error than to seek your votes. That I should make this acknowledgment is due to myself as well as to you. Whether you will vote for me is a matter for your consideration only.’
“I went on to tell them about the fire and my vote for the appropriation as I have told it to you, and then told them why I was satisfied it was wrong. I closed by saying: “‘And now, fellow-citizens, it remains only for me to tell you that most of the speech you have listened to with so much interest was simply a repetition of the arguments by which your neighbor, Mr. Bunce, convinced me of my error.’
“‘It is the best speech I ever made in my life, but my friend Horatio Bunce is entitled to the credit of it. And now I hope he is satisfied with his convert and that he will get up here and tell you so.’
“He came upon the stand and said: “‘Fellow-citizens — It affords me great pleasure to comply with the request of Colonel Crockett. I have always considered him a thoroughly honest man, and I am satisfied that he will faithfully perform all that he has promised you today.’
“He went down, and there went up from the crowd such a shout for Davy Crockett as his name never called forth before.’
“I am not much given to tears, but I was taken with a choking then and felt some big drops rolling down my cheeks. And I tell you now that the remembrance of those few words spoken by such a man, and the honest, hearty shout they produced, is worth more to me than all the honors I have received and all the reputation I have ever made, or ever shall make, as a member of Congress.’“Now, sir,’ concluded Crockett, “you know why I made that speech yesterday. I have had several thousand copies of it printed, and was directing them to my constituents when you came in.’
“There is one thing now to which I will call your attention. You remember that I proposed to give a weeks’ pay. There are in that House many very wealthy men — men who think nothing of spending a week’s pay, or a dozen of them, for a dinner or a wine party when they have something to accomplish by it. Some of those same men made beautiful speeches upon the debt of gratitude which the country owed the deceased — a debt which could not be paid by money — and the insignificance and worthlessness of money, particularly so insignificant a sum as $10,000, when weighed against the honor of the nation.’
“Yet not one of those Congressmen responded to my proposition. Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people.But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it.”
In a previous article I discussed the biblical principle of Christian resistance as it relates to the upcoming Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. As was pointed out in that article, there are examples in the Bible of God’s people resisting direct commands by civil officials based on a very specific set of higher law principles.
Christian apologist Francis A. Schaeffer wrote, “Let us not forget why the Christians were killed. They werenotkilled because they worshipped Jesus… Nobody cared who worshipped whom as long as the worshipper did not disrupt the unity of the state, centered in the formal worship of Caesar. The reason Christians were killed was because they were rebels”1 and placed the God of the Bible over the claim that the State and its Caesars were gods. The proof?: “they all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus”(Acts 17:7).
This is an old story that has a modern history. King James of the King James Bible wanted a translation that countered the notes in the 1559 Geneva Bible, the Bible of the Puritans and Pilgrims. “For example, the margin notes for Daniel 6:22 imply that the commands of kings are to be disobeyed if they conflict with the law of God: ‘For he [Daniel] disobeyed the king’s wicked commandment in order to obey God, and so he did no injury to the king, who ought to command nothing by which God would be dishonored.’”2
“Embarkation of the Pilgrims.”
Alister McGrath comments:
“Notice also how the Genevan notes regularly use the word ‘tyrant’ to refer to kings; the King James Bible never uses this word—a fact noted with approval as much as relief by many royalists at this point.”3
It’s no wonder that King James “authorized a fresh translation of the Bible to undermine the republican implications of the Geneva Bible.”4
Because of its no exception tone, Romans 13 is seen as prohibiting all resistance to the law of the State: “Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities. . . (v. 1). The apostle lists no exceptions. Peter makes a similar statement: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right” (1 Peter 2:13-14). Again, no exceptions. This is the same Peter who declared, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29; cf. 4:19-20). How do we reconcile the apparent contradiction?
Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766) states the following in his 1750 sermon “Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers”:
“Thus, upon a careful review of the apostle’s reasoning in this passage, it appears that his arguments to enforce submission, are of such a nature, as to conclude only in favor of submission to such rulers as he himself describes; i.e., such as rule for the good of society, which is the only end of their institution. Common tyrants, and public oppressors, are not entitled to obedience from their subjects, by virtue of anything here laid down by the inspired apostle.”There are a number of places in Scripture where one verse speaks in absolute terms and other verses offer exceptions. This is not unusual. If I tell my grandchildren to go outside and play until dinner is ready, I have spoken in absolute terms. They are not to come into the house until they are called. No exceptions are given. What if it rains? What if a large dog enters the yard? Can they enter the house without violating my absolute and no exception command?
They would not be violating my “no exception” command because there are unspoken exceptions. They are assumed to be operating without them having to be repeated each time a new command is given. They have been told on previous occasions to “come in when it’s raining” and “do not get near stray dogs that wander into the yard.”
The Bible operates in the same manner. In one place Jesus says, “All those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matt. 26:52). Does this include the civil magistrate? What about the person who strikes an assailant in self-defense? Is this not an exception to Jesus’ “no exception” statement? Since the Bible already discusses self-defense (Ex. 22:2-3; Deut. 19:21) and the role of the civil magistrate (e.g., Gen. 9:6), there is no need to repeat the exceptions since Jesus’ hearers knew He has anarchy and revolution in mind (e.g., Lev. 19:18), not the just use of the sword. Romans 13:4 explains that it is the duty of the civil magistrate to use the sword in certain specified cases. Is this a contradiction? No.
So then, when we read passages like Romans 13:1 and 1 Peter 2:13-14, we must not neglect the rest of the Bible that is equally authoritative and more fully explains and qualifies these passages.
“Many general statements of Scripture must be open to admitting exceptions even those qualifications are not immediately spelled out. Why are so many generalizations stated without qualification?Because the exact conditions restricting their applicability are not known, or because the “accidental” or providential circumstances that render them inapplicable occur so seldom as to be practically negligible, or because such qualification has already been stipulated in another inscripturated context.”5
In summary, we must recognize that as the State becomes more tyrannical and non-Christian in its social and political policies, conflicts between church and State will multiply. That conflict may make it necessary for Christians to say no to statist laws that will force them to violate the laws of God.
There is an additional reason why Christians must understand the limits of civil jurisdiction and the limits of resistance. Because of a desire to see the current corruption in our own nation reversed, some Christians may take it upon themselves to bring about change by revolutionary means. This is an unbiblical agenda to pursue. There is no warrant in Scripture for a revolutionary spirit.
How Christians go about resisting is a question that needs to be answered in exacting detail. The fact that we have lesser magistrates – state governments, governors, and state constitutions – that can serve as legitimate governing authorities as a means to rebuff civil and judicial tyranny is a viable governing avenue for Christians to take.
“…it is growing more and more evident that “sharing the gospel” and “getting involved in politics” are not just loosely intertwined, but soldered together.”
– Anne Reed
Several years ago, I began to grow weary of the common belief that Christians should not be involved in politics or take any interest in civil government. Many have fallen into this category of thinking because of a secular view of separation of church and state. David Barton of WallBuilders clearly dispels this myth.
To form their argument, many stress God’s sovereignty, clarifying that political leaders are in position because God ordained it. And, well, we should just submit and stay out of it. Some say that we should not be involved with politics because it’s corrupt. That is exactly the reason why we should be there…to take light into the darkness! Maybe our government is so corrupt precisely because we have stayed out of it! Maybe we have been very poor stewards of God’s blessings.
Why would He be in control of every area of life and send us into every corner no matter how dark (prisons, human trafficking situations, sick-filled hospitals, dangerous neighborhoods, the sidewalks of abortion facilities, etc.) and yet not ordain His children to participate in the government He has put in place? And in America, that doesn’t necessarily mean we are required to serve in a political office to be involved.
Was God not sovereign when the Constitution was written giving authority to the people? The Declaration of Independence clearly identifies God as the giver of our rights, and places the responsibility of government on the governed (that would be us):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness – that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to those ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying it’s foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.
Some believe we need to get off our “high horse” as President Obama recently put it. We absolutely need to humble ourselves, repent and pray! And, we must engage in the culture war that is essentially a fight (not of flesh and blood) to uphold God’s name in our nation. I know that as I’ve become more and more aware of the realities of our day, I’ve also become increasingly aware of my own part as I ignored or slothfully watched the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob painfully dishonored in countless ways. For this, I am ashamed.
When we turn from our old attitudes of indifference and complacency, evidence is seen through our obedience to God and His Word, regardless of what others may think of us or what names they may call us. That is not a pride thing – that is a faithful thing.
And sometimes accusations and attacks come from inside the camp. Those are more painful. Even so, we should produce fruit that is worthy of repentance. He makes us salt and light – not a dim light or flavorless salt! What use are those?
When Jesus left key instructions for His disciples, He knew they would doubt what He was about to say:
When they saw Him, they worshipedHim; butsome were doubtful.And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying,“All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.Go therefore andmake disciples ofall the nations,baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo,I am with youalways, even tothe end of the age. (Matthew 28:17-20 NASB)”
Why do we doubt the authority of Christ? It feels safe when we sit in soft chairs in our comfortably heated and cooled sanctuaries to worship. We can easily sit there in a state of doubt. But to take ourselves into the places of uncertainty is altogether different. We may risk the loss of friends, comforts, and even safety. If we believe Jesus is who He says He is and that He really is with us, wewill go and make disciples of all nations, including this one! That means we are to preach the whole gospel – a message that is increasingly offensive.
In light of many currents dragging away our freedoms, it is growing more and more evident that “sharing the gospel” and “getting involved in politics” are not just loosely intertwined, but soldered together.This has proven true by recent lawsuits forcing Christians to get involved in political and legal battles by simply holding true to their Godly convictions.
Aaron and Melissa Klein, the owners of Sweet Cakes By Melissa in Oregon have been required to pay $135,000 to compensate a lesbian couple for emotional suffering after they declined to make a cake for their same-sex wedding.
First, let me say this: I’m planning a wedding currently. I ordered the cake just a few days ago. If the baker had told me she couldn’t bake the cake because she didn’t agree with heterosexual marriage, or for whatever reason, I would not have suffered emotionally. I’m not that fragile. I would have called another bakery – simple as that.
But aside from that, homosexual activists were not satisfied with the win or monetary gain unless it destroyed the Klein family financially. When a GoFundMe account was set up, 81% ($109,000) of their $135,000 fine was secured in less than eight hours. GoFundMe acquiesced to pressure and closed the account.
Although we are obviously not experiencing the degree of persecution that other nations endure (sometimes to death), the fire is on the wire (as in the featured photo). And we can no longer hide behind our fears and excuses.
Will God give us a way out? Is it too late for us to return to Godly behavior in our nation? Proverbs 29:2 says, “When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, But when a wicked man rules, people groan (NASB).”
A Pew research poll conducted in September 2014 presents a somewhat hopeful picture. When asked whether churches and other houses of worship should express their views on day-to-day social and political issues, 49% said yes, and 48% said they should keep out of political matters. This is up from 2010, when 52% wanted churches to keep out of politics, while only 43% wanted churches to express their political views.
In reality, our true hope is found in Jesus Christ our Lord. His Kingdom cannot be destroyed.And we are told in Matthew 10:28: “Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell (NASB).”So, regardless, we win. But, I personally long to see a faithful Church stand true to God; that He may be glorified, worshipped and honored.
Government and mega-corporations work hand in hand.
by Jon Rappoport | Infowars.com | June 17, 2014
Let me clarify that. Slavery to the corporate State. Government and mega-corporations work hand in hand.
The incurably naïve believe the State is beneficent. The government is kind. The government knows what to do. The government will solve
Click on image to see movie trailer and more
society’s ills if we let it.
Of course, the government, in the form of NSA, is spying on everybody all the time—but you see, that’s not really the government. It’s a rogue element.
Sure it is. And rainbows will appear at any moment and the people of Earth will experience a galactic frequency that eradicates all impulses toward conflict.
To put it another way, people see what they want to see.
“Ahem, when I say ‘government,’ I don’t mean the CIA or the Pentagon or the FDA or the President’s national security team, or fraudulent federal scientists, or the whole lot of venal people in Congress, or corrupt prosecutors and judges or invasive bureaucrats or paper-pushing money-sucking desk jockeys.”
Of course not. Government is an idea in the mind of God.
And when you think about it, the NSA watches over us to make sure we stay on the path of righteousness. It’s absurd to be suspicious of the State. The authors of the Constitution, who tried to limit central authority, were a bunch of paranoids.
We need more government, not less.
Here are quotes from George Orwell. In case there is any doubt, he is describing aspects of the State:
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life.”(The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941)
“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.” (Notes on Nationalism, 1945)
“A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then, again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revaluation of prominent historical figures.”(The Prevention of Literature, 1946)
“But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.”(1984, chapter 4)
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” (1984, chapter 5)
But you see, these are all old Orwell remarks. Now we have a different kind of State. It’s…government. Yes. The State isn’t government. Aha. The State exists in places other than America. In America, we have government. Yes, that’s right. Two different animals. One is repressive, and the other is earnest. (More rainbows for the sentimentalists.)
Here are quotes about the State from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World:
“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!” (Chapter 2)
“Every one belongs to every one else.” (Chapter 3)
“Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable.”(Chapter 3)
“Everyone works for every one else.” (Chapter 5)
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” “I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.” He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.” “I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated. (Chapter 6)
But again, Huxley’s remarks are about the aspirations and victories of the State, which doesn’t exist in America. Never has.
In America, we have a fluid and flexible government, which tries to respond to the people’s needs. Of course. Just ask Elizabeth Warren or Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George W Bush, or the ghost of Richard Nixon. Ask the heads of Goldman Sachs, Monsanto, Dow, DuPont. Google, Facebook, Microsoft.
There are “repressive States” in Europe, Asia, and Africa, but that is a foreign phenomenon.
Rebelling against the State? Not here. Here we merge with the government and help it and encourage it. Besides, we’ve recently learned—and this is a revelation—that rebelling is very likely a terrorist act. Well, that settles that.
We’re all in this together. Even if the “we” and the “this” and the “together” seem to require some further clarification, rest assured it will be forthcoming. At the right time.
The government understands time (and also space). It arranges them. Someone has to.
The government is not the State, the government is not the State.
In every society throughout human history the following relationship has held true: as government grows, human freedom and happiness shrinks. Best selling author, Dennis Prager puts it this way: “The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.” This has been true in Europe for decades and is becoming ever more so in the United States. But it’s not the kind of nation, the Founding Fathers had in mind. Can we get back to the principles of liberty and individual responsibility? It’s a big challenge. But first we have to recognize the problem.
When, exactly, did every ridiculous little aspect of our lives become a “political” issue?
I can’t be the only one who remembers a time when the government didn’t care if I wore a bike helmet, or ate a bag of chips. In fact, we had a lot of latitude before political activism came and spoiled the fun.
There was a time when you could order a chicken dinner, without it being a political statement, or when pro sports were just interested in how well you played the game.
There was a time when a lemonade stand could be a kid’s first business venture, without some bureaucratic rules-lawyer killing that dream with zoning laws.
Maybe you can remember when a scout’s biggest worry was poison ivy, not political indoctrination. That was back before boy scouts (Canada) became co-ed and girl scouts (USA) supported Planned Parenthood.
Do you remember a time when useful products weren’t outlawed on the basis of contested health studies — BPA, for instance?
Do you remember a time when we weren’t drowning in fine print and waivers? A time when people could tell a joke — even an off-colour one — without offending someone? Did people just have a better sense of humor back then? Were they less uptight?
Have we really come to a place where a 26 year old gold medallist with a wife and kid has an “alternative lifestyle”?
It wasn’t that long ago when some feared religious people holding government positions, because it was alleged that they “wanted to control everything”. The worry was that they would “cram the Bible down our throats”, and curtail everyone’s freedoms. They would meddle in people’s lives where they had no business doing so.
People obviously believed the hype. Those with known religious convictions (unless decidedly “liberal”) were increasingly edged out of influential positions.
Whatever the underlying causes, the paradigm shift has taken place, and people hostile to the earlier conservative and/or religious convictions have taken the reigns.
What was that accusation, again? Oh, yes. “If you let those crazy Christians into government, they’ll create a Theocracy!”
This alleged Theocracy would be a Bad Thing, as the story goes, because they would insist on controlling every detail of your personal life. They would (gasp!) moralize, and finger-wag! Imagine the horror!
In one sphere of society after another, agents hostile to traditional values have used tried-and-true tactics to gain an upper hand.
What were their strategies? Surely you’ve seen them in action:
Don’t try to win the argument, it’s better to just discredit the person you’re arguing with, and win by default… Emotional appeal, sarcasm, and innuendo are always better than honest debate… Have a TV panel of three guests dog-pile on one token conservative, so their view seems foolish and minority… Shout them down… Call them fascists… Claim religious convictions invalidate their argument… Play the victim card! Don’t worry about “playing fair”… Tactics don’t matter so long as you win.
But then came the bait-and-switch. Our “liberators” started to dictate things — lots of things. The meddling and scheming they had long accused others of became their primary means of remaking the world in their image.
Every time these guys raise an issue, they dress it in political clothing. Why? Because political problems will always require a political solution.
Observe: In 1969, Canadian sodomy laws were stuck down on the grounds that (and I quote) “There’s no place for the State in the bedrooms of the nation.” Since nobody was actually enforcing those laws anyway, that seemed a reasonable response. Fast forward 40 some-odd years, to when foreign policy is being decided based on American opinion of ANOTHERnation’s domestic policies concerning what may or may not happen in the bedrooms of THOSEnations.
See what just happened? See how quickly we went from “don’t force your values on me” to demanding that other countries comply to values they do not hold? Just a little bit hypocritical, hmmm? Their own buzzword for such action is “Imperialistic”.
It isn’t just sex, either. Every issue is potentially political. From food labeling and health care to leisure pursuits, education, and it extends over a whole range of various products and services. It goes right down to our supposed freedom of speech, whether on the sports field (NFL) or even what language your company’s Facebook page can be written in.
Once an issue is made political, you have adequate pretext for two things.
First, you can shut down most opposition with the convenient — albeit inaccurate — “separation of Church and State” mantra. (This allows the next step to proceed unopposed.)
Next, they claim that this “political” issue will require a political solution.
(Everything is political for these guys. Politics IS their religion, and it’s a religion that will tolerate no rivals.)
This means legislation, control, bigger government, and ultimately, forced compliance for their version of the Utopian Dream.
Curiously, however, this Utopia is always “just over that next hill”. You know, it’s the hill where their next rival is making a stand.
There will always be a scapegoat. There will always be a victim. It’s part of the formula they use. Then, once the dust settles, there will always, ALWAYS, be that much more power concentrated in the hands of those who crave it most.
You know those freedoms conservatives and Christians keep defending?
You don’t really need those, they’ll only slow down the “progress”.
Wes Walker is a Christian husband and father of three, bringing the Clash Attitude to Canada’s Capital. When not writing submissions for Clash, he is involved in Church, his children’s school, and is pursuing interests in Theology, History, and Philosophy.
Follow on twitter: @Republicanuck
“The power to tax involves the power to destroy,” Chief Justice John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819.
Here’s what Obama’s advisors are telling him about the way to confiscate guns: Tax them.
They are advising him to tax guns, ammunition, magazines, and licenses and then attach draconian remedies for failure to register and pay the taxes. Set the taxes low the first year, then increase them gradually to the point where a person owning an AR 15, three magazines and a box of ammo would owe $5,000 a year in taxes.
If a gun owner doesn’t pay, the small print at the end of the tax law would subject him to jail and confiscation of everything he owns.
Why use this approach? Because people ignore gradual change and taxes can be imposed as a gradual change. It’s only when two things happen simultaneously that revolution occurs. First, the ideals underlying the society must be undermined. That has already happened. And second, there must be a spark that ignites revolt. Since traditions and ideals of the country have already been compromised, it would be unwise to create any sparks.
Taxes ignite no sparks. Getting a tax bill is a non-event. The hapless taxpayer grinds his teeth and gets out his checkbook. He’s in a bad mood for a month. There is nothing to rally around. No one has been killed or invaded, at least at the point where the tax has been imposed.
Under this taxing approach you increase taxes to the point no one can pay them, then send a tax bill to the gun owners you know about (in Pennsylvania, that’s pretty much everyone who owns a gun), and you wait for someone not to pay. When a preferred target doesn’t pay, you send the storm troopers to his house, find his guns, and arrest him. You take the offender’s guns and his house and put him in jail for twenty years. Then you publicize the arrest and declare a period of amnesty for other weekend rebels and watch the guns flow in.
At that point, the country will have been effectively disarmed.
After the taxes are imposed and offending gun owners are picked off one at a time, wives will implore their husbands not to risk the family home, all their savings and the husband’s own freedom. And they will point to the examples of imprisoned and bankrupted gun owners that have already been held up to public view.
Norman Thomas described America’s descent into socialism very much in the way I have described America’s descent into gun confiscation:
“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without every knowing how it happened.”*
That’s the smart way to do it, Barack. Get us a little farther down the road to socialism, then quietly tax guns, and finally, take them all.
*Source cited quote from “The Liberal Mind,” pg, 27 by Lyle H. Rossiter
New Pope Francis I is an ardent opponent of same-sex marriage, in coincidence with traditional Catholic belief. In 2010, he wrote, “Let’s not be naïve, we’re not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”
The media remains aghast at the fact that Francis I is a Catholic. They should get used to it.
1.6 Billion Rounds Of Ammo For Homeland Security? It’s Time For A National Conversation
Armored Personnel Carriers in Baghdad. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Denver Post, on February 15th, ran an Associated Press article entitled Homeland Security aims to buy 1.6b rounds of ammo, so far to little notice. It confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security has issued an open purchase order for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. As reported elsewhere, some of this purchase order is for hollow-point rounds, forbidden by international law for use in war, along with a frightening amount specialized for snipers. Also reported elsewhere, at the height of the Iraq War the Army was expending less than 6 million rounds a month. Therefore 1.6 billion rounds would be enough to sustain a hot war for 20+ years. In America.
Add to this perplexing outré purchase of ammo, DHS now is showing off its acquisition of heavily armored personnel carriers, repatriated from the Iraqi and Afghani theaters of operation. As observed by “paramilblogger” Ken Jorgustin last September:
[T]he Department of Homeland Security is apparently taking delivery (apparently through the Marine Corps Systems Command, Quantico VA, via the manufacturer – Navistar Defense LLC) of an undetermined number of the recently retrofitted 2,717 ‘Mine Resistant Protected’ MaxxPro MRAP vehicles for service on the streets of the United States.”
These MRAP’s ARE BEING SEEN ON U.S. STREETS all across America by verified observers with photos, videos, and descriptions.”
Regardless of the exact number of MRAP’s being delivered to DHS (and evidently some to POLICE via DHS, as has been observed), why would they need such over-the-top vehicles on U.S. streets to withstand IEDs, mine blasts, and 50 caliber hits to bullet-proof glass? In a war zone… yes, definitely. Let’s protect our men and women. On the streets of America… ?”…
“They all have gun ports… Gun Ports? In the theater of war, yes. On the streets of America…?
Seriously, why would DHS need such a vehicle on our streets?”
Why indeed? It is utterly inconceivable that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is planning a coup d’etat against President Obama, and the Congress, to install herself as Supreme Ruler of the United States of America. There, however, are real signs that the Department bureaucrats are running amok. About 20 years ago this columnist worked, for two years, in the U.S. Department of Energy’s general counsel’s office in its procurement and finance division. And is wise to the ways. The answer to “why would DHS need such a vehicle?” almost certainly is this: it’s a cool toy and these (reportedly) million dollar toys are being recycled, without much of a impact on the DHS budget. So… why not?
Why, indeed, should the federal government not be deploying armored personnel carriers and stockpiling enough ammo for a 20-year war in the homeland? Because it’s wrong in every way. President Obama has an opportunity, now, to live up to some of his rhetoric by helping the federal government set a noble example in a matter very close to his heart (and that of his Progressive base), one not inimical to the Bill of Rights: gun control. The federal government can (for a nice change) begin practicing what it preaches by controlling itself.
Remember the Sequester? The president is claiming its budget cuts will inconvenience travelers by squeezing essential services provided by the (opulently armed and stylishly uniformed) DHS. Quality ammunition is not cheap. (Of course, news reports that DHS is about to spend $50 million on new uniforms suggests a certain cavalier attitude toward government frugality.)
Spending money this way is beyond absurd well into perverse. According to the AP story a DHS spokesperson justifies this acquisition to “help the government get a low price for a big purchase.” Peggy Dixon, spokeswoman for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center: “The training center and others like it run by the Homeland Security Department use as many as 15 million rounds every year, mostly on shooting ranges and in training exercises.”
At 15 million rounds (which, in itself, is pretty extraordinary and sounds more like fun target-shooting-at-taxpayer-expense than a sensible training exercise) … that’s a stockpile that would last DHS over a century. To claim that it’s to “get a low price” for a ridiculously wasteful amount is an argument that could only fool a career civil servant.
Meanwhile, Senator Diane Feinstein, with the support of President Obama, is attempting to ban 100 capacity magazine clips. Doing a little apples-to-oranges comparison, here, 1.6 billion rounds is … 16 million times more objectionable.
Mr. Obama has a long history of disdain toward gun ownership. According to Prof. John Lott, in Debacle, a book he co-authored with iconic conservative strategist Grover Norquist,
“When I was first introduced to Obama (when both worked at the University of ChicagoLaw School, where Lott was famous for his analysis of firearms possession), he said, ‘Oh, you’re the gun guy.’
I responded: ‘Yes, I guess so.’
’I don’t believe that people should own guns,’ Obama replied.
I then replied that it might be fun to have lunch and talk about that statement some time.
He simply grimaced and turned away. …
Unlike other liberal academics who usually enjoyed discussing opposing ideas, Obama showed disdain.”
Mr. Obama? Where’s the disdain now? Cancelling, or at minimum, drastically scaling back — by 90% or even 99%, the DHS order for ammo, and its receipt and deployment of armored personnel carriers, would be a “fourfer.”
The federal government would set an example of restraint in the matter of weaponry.
It would reduce the deficit without squeezing essential services.
It would do both in a way that was palatable to liberals and conservatives, slightly depolarizing America.
It would somewhat defuse, by the government making itself less armed-to-the-teeth, the anxiety of those who mistrust the benevolence of the federales.
If Obama doesn’t show any leadership on this matter it’s an opportunity for Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, to summon Secretary Napolitano over for a little national conversation. Madame Secretary? Buying 1.6 billion rounds of ammo and deploying armored personnel carriers runs contrary, in every way, to what “homeland security” really means. Discuss.
I am a gun. I have challenged the waves and crossed a vast, unforgiving sea. I have landed on these shores. I am held by the pilgrim, the pioneer, and the trail blazer. I have brought civilization to a barren wilderness.
I am a gun. I have fed the early settlers. I have protected their cabins. I have flamed in the cause of liberty. I have brought down tyrants. I have given birth to a brave and noble land of freedom.
I am a gun. I have ended slavery. I have tamed the West. I have established law and order. I have crossed a continent.
I am a gun. I am fallen into the dirt wherever brave warriors die. I rest beside their bodies. I am stained with their blood. I am covered by their battle helmets. Planted with my bayonet in the soil, I stand as a battlefield cross, a simple but poignant memorial for their sacrifice.
I am a gun. I returned across that vast, unforgiving sea. I have won two World Wars. I have flown over war-torn skies. I have jumped from planes, parachuting into danger.
I am a gun. I have stormed the beaches, the jungles, the volcanic sands, and the frozen land. I have won great victories and signed peace treaties. I have returned to our shores for ticker tape parades and sometimes with no welcome at all.
I am a gun. I started out as a rather primitive weapon, only firing one shot before I must be reloaded. But as the times changed and as man progressed, so did I.
I am a gun. I can be used for both good and evil. I can take a life. I can be used to save them.
I am a gun. I can inflict great hardship and suffering upon many in my path. I can also be used by good men to stop the actions of evil ones. I can end the bloodshed and restore peace.
I am a gun. I can put meat on a family’s table. I can protect your household from harm by intruders. I can provide a means of recreation.
I am a gun. If left untouched upon the table or nightstand, I can harm no one.
I am a gun. I cannot drive to an elementary school, a crowded shopping mall, or a Hollywood movie premiere.
I am a gun. My eye cannot see but where I am pointed. I have no motive. I have no soul. I have no compassion. I hold no malice.
I am a gun. I cast no vote. I hold no political allegiance. I embrace no party. I employ no political agenda. I practice no faith.
I am a gun. When only the military or the police may own me, then I will always be used to inflict great numbers of deaths upon their citizens.
I am a gun. Hitler used me to drive millions of Jews into cattle cars like livestock, transporting them to the gas chambers for their deaths. Stalin, Mao, and other notorious butchers of humanity used me to maintain their evil and twisted lust for power.
I am a gun. Those who seek to remove me from the hands of a free people are brothers to those who commit great acts of genocide.
I am a gun. I can be used to stop the forces of evil. I can be used for evil itself.
I am a gun. Those who use me to harm others can only be stopped by those who wisely employ me in their defeat.
I am a gun. Samuel Colt understood that I could even the odds against those of overwhelming strength or superior numbers. I have made it possible for the meek to overcome the mighty.
I am a gun. When you mention the names of Wyatt Earp, Bill Hickok, Alvin York, Audie Murphy, and Chris Kyle, it brings me to mind. Their mastery of me made them famous.
I am a gun. I have been praised and cursed. I have been both destroyed and treasured. I have been proudly passed down from father to son.
I am a gun. I am only as good or as bad as the ones who possess me.
I am a gun. I am the defender of liberty. I am the guarantor of free speech. I am a friend of the free. I am the missing element of the enslaved.
I am a gun. My purposes and my destiny are in your hands alone.
If you were wondering how President Obama and Democrats plan to settle-up with all their foreign campaign contributors look no further than the 2013 State of the Union address. On February 12, in front of the entire world, the “food stamp” President announced that the U.S., the European Union, and our Pacific Trade Partners are negotiating a comprehensive global partnership to combine and implement both the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TAP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
If you thought the first four years of Obama were alarming, wait until this global integration of cunning international law becomes a reality in America. Mind you, it is right around the corner, just ask our new Secretary of State John Kerry.
The TAP and TPP billed as a brilliant Obama plan to create American jobs and a stunning 0.4% GDP growth rate (projected) by designing a free trade zone combining North America, the European Union, and Pacific Rim economies, is a dangerous agreement blending European/Asian legal and economic models with U.S. domestic policy initiatives for:
Food safety, health, consumer and environmental standards
Product Standards for chemicals, autos, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and emissions
Establishment of new rules governing supply chains, local content, state-owned enterprises, trade facilitation, energy, raw materials, data privacy, labor and the environment, competition, and small-to-medium-size enterprises
Obama is now spearheading the “integration” and “harmonizing” of Global administrative regulations and U.S. domestic law that will forever change American businesses operation and regulation. An Obama led assimilation of these so-called trade partnerships into American domestic policy will change everything we understand about energy, healthcare, agriculture, finance and foreign government investment in our nation and the United States WILL become unrecognizable.
The President who has proudly overseen our “jobless economic recovery” is now making plans that guarantee further increases in private sector unemployment through outsourcing, the death of homegrown entrepreneurship by increased foreign government purchase of U.S. based businesses and the adoption of less expensive and eugenics based global healthcare models in America. For those Americans who fear U.S. transformation into a European style Democracy, I have some sobering news for you. Obama’s second term agenda is now making that a reality in America.
For years, Obama’s appointees (Czars) to enigmatic government advisory boards have been developing broad foreign trade policy agendas and domestic policy initiatives without Congressional oversight or public knowledge. Although some members of Congress attempted to bring these czar led operations to the attention of the American public the liberal dominated Obama enamored news media, the supporters of U.S. transition to a European style Democracy, handily re-shaped the issue to one of fair global trade policy and as always used the race card to silence all critics.
Recently, given the evolving Dominican prostitution scandal, I did a little investigative research regarding accused sexual deviant Sen. Robert Menendez (D.). Many of the bills he has authored, as none of them were relevant to economic growth or jobs creation, baffled me. However, Sen. Menendez, Chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seems to have a fondness for penning and supporting legislation designed to reduce or eliminate tariffs and trade restrictions for Asian made chemicals, food preservatives, and pharmaceutical products imported to the U.S. I still have not found Sen. Menendez foreign campaign funding sources. Probably because most of them own U.S based businesses, but my investigation made one thing abundantly clear to me, liberal politicians have no plans to the save American economy or American jobs.
Obama and Democrats are too busy paying back their foreign campaign benefactors and their U.S. Treasury customers to give America’s fiscal health any honest consideration. Keeping America’s government dependent Democrat supporters fat and happy is the only liberal priority. After all, liberals are going to need their foreign friends money to get Hillary elected in 2016 and continue their radical efforts “to fundamentally change America” to accept the coming Global liberal renaissance.
Do not fall asleep on this one America. If you think your businesses, unemployment, and the U.S. economy are suffering now, Obama’s coming mandates for foreign business investment and European style environmental regulations will make the last four years feel like a walk in the park. The truth of Presidential State of the Union addresses can always be found between the lines.
Written By Constitutional Attorney Michael Connelly, J.D.
How would you feel if you received a letter from the U.S. Government informing you that because of a physical or mental condition that the government says you have it is proposing to rule that you are incompetent to handle your own financial affairs? Suppose that letter also stated that the government is going to appoint a stranger to handle your affairs for you at your expense? That would certainly be scary enough but it gets worse.
What if that letter also stated: “A determination of incompetency will prohibit you from purchasing, possessing, receiving, or transporting a firearm or ammunition. If you knowingly violate any of these prohibitions, you may be fined, imprisoned, or both pursuant to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, Pub.L.No. 103-159, as implemented at 18, United States Code 924(a)(2).”?
That makes is sound like something right from a documentary on a tyrannical dictatorship somewhere in the world. Yet, as I write this I have a copy of such a letter right in front of me. It is being sent by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of America’s heroes. In my capacity as Executive Director of the United States Justice Foundation (USJF) I have been contacted by some of these veterans and the stories I am getting are appalling.
The letter provides no specifics on the reasons for the proposed finding of incompetency; just that is based on a determination by someone in the VA. In every state in the United States no one can be declared incompetent to administer their own affairs without due process of law and that usually requires a judicial hearing with evidence being offered to prove to a judge that the person is indeed incompetent. This is a requirement of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that states that no person shall “… be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law…”.
Obviously, the Department of Veterans Affairs can’t be bothered by such impediments as the Constitution, particularly since they are clearly pushing to fulfill one of Obama’s main goals, the disarming of the American people. Janet Napolitano has already warned law enforcement that some of the most dangerous among us are America’s heroes, our veterans, and now according to this letter from the VA they can be prohibited from buying or even possessing a firearm because of a physical or mental disability.
Think about it, the men and women who have laid their lives on the line to defend us and our Constitution are now having their own Constitutional rights denied. There are no clear criteria for the VA to declare a veteran incompetent. It can be the loss of a limb in combat, a head injury, a diagnosis of PTSD, or even a soldier just telling someone at the VA that he or she is depressed over the loss of a buddy in combat. In none of these situations has the person been found to be a danger to themselves or others. If that was the case than all of the Americans who have suffered from PTSD following the loss of a loved one or from being in a car accident would also have to be disqualified from owning firearms. It would also mean that everyone who has ever been depressed for any reason should be disarmed. In fact, many of the veterans being deprived of their rights have no idea why it is happening.
The answer seems to be it is simply because they are veterans. At the USJF we intend to find the truth by filing a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Veterans Affairs to force them to disclose the criteria they are using to place veterans on the background check list that keeps them from exercising their Second Amendment rights. Then we will take whatever legal steps are necessary to protect our American warriors.
The reality is that Obama will not get all of the gun control measures he wants through Congress, and they wouldn’t be enough for him anyway. He wants a totally disarmed America so there will be no resistance to his plans to rob us of our nation. That means we have to ask who will be next. If you are receiving a Social Security check will you get one of these letters? Will the government declare that you are incompetent because of your age and therefore banned from firearm ownership. It certainly fits in with the philosophy and plans of the Obama administration. It is also certain that our military veterans don’t deserve this and neither do any other Americans.
The State of the Union Address last night needed to be preceeded with the following warning; “Caution. You are about to hear from our far Left President who specializes in symbolism over substance. Do not expect any details, facts or provable statements. Expect to be overwhelmed with emotionalism for lack of genuine ideas.”
That is exactly what we got. President Obama delivered a speech full of nice ideas, but short on how to pay for them. Lots of blame assigned to the Republicans, and heavy on emotionalism (“They deserve a vote”). All in all I was not surprised at the content of the speech.
In order to know that we are all reading the same sheet of music, let’s make sure we all understand some of the “SYMBOLISMS” the President used, which is consistent with everyone else on the far Left;
“Balanced Approach”: $10 dollars in tax for every $1 we spend.
“Compromise with the Republicans”: They need to agree with 100% of everything we say, want and desire. Any exceptions and thee become horrible monsters who want to take food away from poor children, make everyone drink dirt water, return to the days of slavery, make women go into dark alleys to have abortions by coat hangers and generally destroy America as we know it. In summary, ay disagreement with the Left is equal to being Terrorist.
“Investment”: SPEND, SPEND, SPEND what we do not have. Continue to borrow money until we are in ruin so President Obama, can become Chancellor Obama under Marshall Law so he can disarm Americans, throw out the Constitution and create a new nation in his image and ideals of Collectivism/Socialism.
“Fair Income Reform”: Redistribution of wealth.
Comprehensive Immigration Reform”: Let in all people who will vote Democrat and restrict all others. Notice they never address the people who have come here LEGALLY, and obeyed al our laws to become AMERICAN citizens.
“GUN CONTROL”: Means, “Citizen Control”. Every time any government disarms the citizenry, executes total control over their lives. The Second Amendment has only one foundational meaning; An armed citizenry is a protection from the rise of tyranny. Having the same or equal weapons to the military means, the citizens can truly maintain a fight for freedom.
The rest is more of the same.
“The Tree of Freedom has to often be watered with the blood of Patriots in order to keep it alive and growing.” I’m ready, how about you?
What has to be understood about guns is it doesn’t matter what polls say or what crime statistics show. If it did matter and it was up to the public, we wouldn’t need an amendment in place to protect gun rights.
The Second Amendment guarantees civilians their right to own and carry guns used by the military. That is the meaning and that is the purpose.
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” – Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1791
“Well regulated” means competent and properly functional. If it were written today it would probably read “well trained and equipped.” “Militia” means a fighting force made of civilians who are not professional soldiers.
“Necessary” means today what it meant back then: not an option, but essential. “Security of a free state” means Americans across the country living under the experiment of self-governance. “The right of the people” means the same thing throughout the writings of the documents that formed our country when “rights” and “the people” are used. Rights are unalienable and given by nature or nature’s creator and “the people” are people within the borders of the United States. “Shall not be infringed” means exactly what it says.
Because a trained militia is a requirement of a self-governing nation and because a militia is a military force made up of the country’s civilians, weapons used by our military, law-enforcement, and foreign military are exactly what the Second Amendment protects. That means semi-automatic rifles and pistols with detachable magazines that carry 30 rounds of ammunition.
Make the argument that civilians should no longer have this type of access to arms used by the military and have that discussion. Squirm around and furrow your brow while looking down your nose at all of America telling us that modern society no longer has the need for … blah, blah, etc. But know that getting rid of the Second Amendment means two things: we are truly no longer a “free state,” with the self-governing experiment being over — and it means repealing and/or replacing the Second Amendment. Not violating it as the California legislature does and as President Obama suggests.
Fortunately, public opinion and crime statistics both favor the side of the Second Amendment. But as you debate the subject, be well-versed in the real purpose of the Second Amendment; to ensure that civilians have access to military arms that they can own and carry. Just in case public opinion is swayed by emotion or the misinformation from media or interests groups, there is an amendment protecting that right. It is no more a right to take away a civilian’s ability to own an AR style rifle via state law or presidential decree than it is to take away a woman’s right to vote, or an African American’s freedom, or everyone’s right to worship in the way they see fit.
It is time to stop pussyfooting around. It is time to stop talking about “reasonable restrictions” and “common sense gun laws,” which are both simply code words for “gun ban.” It is time to stop talking about home defense, hunting, and shooting sports.
It is time to start pointing out the Constitution and law. I can easily see in Article 5 what it takes to amend the Constitution. Now show me where in Article 2 the executive branch has that same ability.
Image: Looking west from 5th Ave at WWI memorial for the en:7th New York Militia Regiment (US 107th) at 67th St;a uthor: Jim.henderson; Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
Michael Schwartz is a gun rights activist and the head of the Second Amendment Caucus of the Republican Party of San Diego County.
Thomas Jefferson, along with some others of the Founders, is credited with saying, “Resistance to Tyrants is obedience to God.” (It may have been an oft-repeated motto, much like our modern “They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.”)
Jefferson’s statement is Biblically correct. I’ve expended a lot of time and effort to prove that, as have others before me. I want to approach it from a different angle today.
Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God. That’s true as stated, but it is also true in its opposite, parallel form, like this:
Submission to tyrants is rebellion to God.
It’s not rocket science, as they say, but there is enough bad teaching out there that we really do need to say it plainly. If resistance is obedience, then submission is wicked. In fact, I propose this: To submit to a tyrant as if he is a lawful ruler is anti-Christian.
Historically speaking, there is no honorable precedent among the great, Christian heroes for failing to oppose a tyrant. And, at a fundamental level, to cower before a tyrant is to violate the consistent Biblical model, from cover to cover, from Genesis to the maps. Today, I want to show you that failure to resist tyranny represents a galling lack of Christian love. Submission to tyrants is un-Christlike, precisely because it is unloving.
How so? Well, the Bible tells us that we are supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:31, for instance.) It also gives us the duty of coming to the defense of those who are unjustly oppressed (as in Isaiah 1:17.) So, if a government in rebellion toward God is oppressing your neighbors, and you refuse to stand up for them or to oppose that tyranny in any way, does that sound like obedience or disobedience to you?
Go ahead. You can say it out loud. We all know the answer anyway.
Deitrich Bonhoeffer, the WW2 era preacher and martyr, who did, in fact, seal his testimony with his own blood, put it succinctly in a few famous lines. He wrote:
Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.
Bonhoeffer’s colleague was a pastor named Neimoller, who had a rather more passive, let’s-all-get-along view toward their particular tyrant. He wound up paying for it. He penned the famous lines:
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
Some in our day would tell us that texts like Romans 13:1-7 teach us that we should obey as far as we can, and only resist when the government commands us to sin. Let’s be clear: That is a fair statement of our duties toward lawful government. But when we use that as a thumb-rule for action in the face of tyranny, it becomes the cloak of cowardice. It becomes Neimoller’s failed strategy of silence. A modern patriot, for whom I have a great fondness, admittedly, put it this way:
There is something conveniently self-centered about this proposed strategy. “Wait to resist until I personally am ordered to sin.” While you wait for the moment the government tells you to renounce Christ, your neighbors and fellow citizens are being trampled by the unrestrained, unjust use of power.
Today, as I write this, I read the report of a farmer who began serving a 30 day jail sentence for the crime of collecting rainwater that had fallen on his own land. And something close to 3,000 babies will be dismembered in the womb or burned to death in a salt solution today, with the government’s sanction and the assistance of taxpayer money. As the Scripture says, “Like a roaring lion or a charging bear is a wicked rulerover a poor people.” (Proverbs 28:15) But, hey, as long as you personally haven’t yet been commanded to blaspheme God, I guess we can all breathe easy.
As William Wilberforce said, “A private faith that does not act in the face of oppression is no faith at all.” [Source]
In another place, the Bible says this: “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” (1 Timothy 5:8)
We rightly see that as having something to do with monetarily providing for our family. Surely, it does include that. But what about providing other basic necessities of life, besides food and shelter, for what the founding fathers called “our posterity?” Specifically, what about the necessity of liberty? I know that sounds corny in our day, because nobody cherishes their freedom like the founders did.
Christian men in America routinely plop onto their couches in front of horrible programming on television, or worse, with a video game console, and ignore the steady encroachment of tyranny in their land. As long as they personally are comfortable, and can play their stupid, emasculating first-person shooters for hours on end, well, life is good and what else could matter? And their vile laziness and quest for personal peace winds up passing on to their own children a world in which the flame of freedom grows inexorably colder. How is that providing for your household? Somebody tell me.
How can that be loving? How can it be Christian? It can’t be. It’s time we remembered that courage is a Christian virtue, just as surely as piety is; and, conversely, that the Bible condemns cowards to be exiled from God’s city. (Revelation 21:7-9)
On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security, along with a SWAT team and Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputies raided the home of Robert Adams in Albuquerque, New Mexico and, according to a federal search warrant affidavit the raid seized nearly 1,500 firearms from the man’s home and business. However, no charges have been filed against him, despite the fact that court documents reveal that agents had been watching Adams for years.
By Wednesday afternoon dozens of rifles were hauled out of the house, bagged as evidence and laid out on the lawn.
According to search warrants that were filed on Thursday Homeland Security Investigations confiscated nearly 900 firearms from Adams’ home, 548 handguns and 317 rifles. They also seized 599 pistols and revolvers from his office.
Neighbors say that he was a firearms collector and some indicated that he was also a licensed gun seller. No confirmation of that has been forthcoming.
While having been watched for years and no charges filed as they seized Adam’s firearms, Federal investigators are saying that they are investigating him for gun smuggling, tax evasion, violating importation laws.
Court documents reveal federal agents were watching Adams for years and that some documentation was missing “to determine to whom Adams [was] selling or exporting his firearms.”
The guns were also not properly marked possibly to make the guns more valuable and to avoid paying high import taxes, investigators alleged.
However, a bigger concern is that no markings on the guns and missing documents mean the guns are not traceable by law enforcement.
The search warrant also said Adams was investigated in Canada for keeping about 80 illegal guns in a storage unit. U.S. agents worked with Canadian police on that case.
Kurt Nimmo points out, “New Mexico does not regulate or specifically restrict the possession of firearms. Owners are not required to register or license firearms with the state.
“No law shall abridge the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms for security and defense, for lawful hunting and recreational use and for other lawful purposes, but nothing herein shall be held to permit the carrying of concealed weapons. No municipality or county shall regulate, in any way, an incident of the right to keep and bear arms,” Article 2, Section 6 of the state constitution reads.
“Gun collectors are protected under the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986,” Nimmo writes. “The law states that a firearms dealer is defined as a person who is selling guns for profit or livelihood. Unlicensed individuals are allowed to sell firearms from their private collection without performing a background check on the buyer.”
Something seriously smells here. How can you be investigated for years, yet upon serving a search warrant you don’t put forth any charges against a man when you confiscate nearly 1,500 firearms? I wish they had taken this kind of approach to the Obama Justice Department’s gunwalking program that trafficked nearly 2,500 firearms across the border into Mexico that has left hundreds dead. No one is claiming that the firearms that Adams had were used in any crime!
So much for the Obama administration’s claims that they aren’t against gun collectors. Sports shooters and hunters, you’re up next.
To understand leftism, the most dynamic religion of the last hundred years, you have to understand how the left thinks. The 2013 inaugural address of President Barack Obama provides one such opportunity.
–“What makes us exceptional — what makes us American — is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'”
What American does not resonate to a president reaffirming this magnificent statement from our Declaration of Independence?
But here’s the intellectual sleight of hand: “What makes us exceptional — what makes us American” is indeed the belief that rights come from God.
But this seminal idea is not mentioned again in the entire inaugural address. This was most unfortunate. An inaugural address that would concentrate on the decreasing significance of God in American life — one of the left’s proudest accomplishments — would address what may well be the single most important development in the last half-century of American life.
–“We learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.”
If there is one word that most excites progressives, it is “new.” (“Old” turns the left off: Judeo-Christian religions and the Constitution are two such examples.) The fact is that Americans did not make “themselves anew” after the Civil War. What they did was finally affirm what was old — the Founders’ belief that “all men are created equal.”
So why did the president say this? Because what he and the left want to do is to make America anew — by making it a left-wing country.
–“Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce, schools and colleges to train our workers.”
The president used the word “together” four times in his speech. In no instance, did it make sense. What he meant each time is government. In the mind of the left, together and government are one.
Moreover, the point is meaningless. We determined that “a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce”? Isn’t that utterly self-evident? Isn’t it as meaningless as saying that “together, we determined that jets are faster than propeller planes?
–“Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.”
Again, “together” — meaning the government.
And, again, this is an intellectual sleight of hand in order to make his case for more government. The free market “only thrives” when individuals have the freedom to take risks. Too large a government and too many rules choke the free market. Look at Europe and every other society with too many rules governing the marketplace.
This is pure leftism: Individual freedom will be preserved by an ever-expanding state.
The whole American experiment in individual freedom has been predicated on as small a government as possible.
–“No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need … or build the roads and networks and research labs …
Who, pray tell, has ever said that a single person can train all teachers, build the roads, etc.? The point he is making, once again, is that only the government can do all these things.
–“The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative, they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”
This is either a non-sequitur or a falsehood. Huge government programs do not increase risk taking, and, yes, they often do make “a nation of takers.” Again, look at Europe. If such programs encouraged entrepreneurial risk-taking, European countries would have the most such risk-takers in the Western world. Instead, Europe has indeed become a continent of takers.
–“We will respond to the threat of climate change … Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.”
“The overwhelming judgment of science.” Just as the left has changed global warming to “climate change,” the president has now changed scientists to “science.” To differ with the environmentalist left on the sources of whatever global warming there is, or whether to impede the economic growth of the Western democracies in the name of reducing carbon emissions is now to deny “science” itself, not merely to differ with some scientists.
Moreover, all three claims of the president are false.
As the Danish environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg, who believes that there is global warming and that that it is caused primarily by carbon emissions, wrote about the president’s claims:
On fires: “Analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased globally by 15 percent” (italics in original).
On drought: “The world has not seen a general increase in drought. A study published in Nature in November shows globally that ‘there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.'”
On storms: “Hurricane activity is at a low not encountered since the 1970s. The U.S. is currently experiencing the longest absence of severe landfall hurricanes in over a century.”
–“That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.”
Finally God is mentioned — on behalf of solar panels and windmills! The god of the left is the god of environmentalism.
–“We the people still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”
The president’s favorite American — the Straw Man. Who exactly believes in “perpetual war?” Perhaps the president confuses perpetual strength with perpetual war.
Had he not been a leftist, he could have said: “We the people still believe that enduring security and lasting peace require perpetual American strength.”
–“But we are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war.”
Whatever peace we have won has been won as a result of war and/or being militarily prepared for war. But acknowledging that would mean abandoning leftist doctrine.
–“We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully — not because we are na?ve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear.”
“Not because we are na?ve?” The entire sentence is an ode to the left’s naivet? regarding evil.
–“Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.”
The president didn’t say what would create more security in children than anything else — a father in their lives. Why didn’t he? Because the left doesn’t talk about the need for fathers. Such talk is deemed sexist, anti-women, anti-single mothers and anti-same-sex marriage.
But the left does talk utopian. In what universe are children “always safe from harm?” The answer is in the utopian imagination of the left, which then passes law after law and uproots centuries of values in order to create their utopia.
–“Being true to our founding documents … does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way.”
That’s more left-wing ideology: Liberty means what you want it mean. As does marriage, art, family, truth and good and evil.
–“We cannot … substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.”
No conservative could agree more with that. They are, after all, two of the most prominent features of left-wing political life.
–“Let us … carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.”
The president began his address citing Creator-given rights, but never mentioned either the Creator or Creator-given rights in what followed. So, too, he ended his address with a call to freedom that had nothing to do with anything he said preceding it. The address was about climate change, same-sex marriage, equal pay for women, and mostly, expanding the power of the state – not freedom.
The speech was not inspiring. But it did have one important value: It illuminated how the left thinks.
Mere hours after Breitbart News published an excerpt from an interview with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in which he speculated that President Barack Obama would “prefer a different kind of constitution,” one with a Bill of Rights based on the South African model, former Obama administration regulatory czar Cass Sunstein published an op-ed making a similar argument: that the president wants a “second Bill of Rights” alongside the existing one.
Sunstein located the source of Obama’s inspiration in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address, rather than the South African constitution–though the American academics whose writings inspired South Africa’s ambitious Bill of Rights could well have taken Roosevelt’s proposals as their foundation.
Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights–not a list of constitutional amendments, but policy goals–was as follows:
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
Sunstein points out Roosevelt was not a socialist–and yet many of the “rights” he proposed were inspired by socialist policies. The Soviet constitution of 1936, too, included the right to work, among other guarantees.
In addition, Sunstein argues that Obama has made progress on least one of these rights: the right to health care, through the highly controversial Obamacare–whose costs will begin to be felt this year in earnest.
The analogy is not perfect: one “right” on which Roosevelt would not have agreed with Obama, for example, is the “right” of public sector workers to bargain collectively and to strike, which Roosevelt opposed.
Regardless, both conservatives and liberals may agree: Obama is aiming at achieving a new set of socioeconomic rights, whether through law or through policy. It is the dream of progressives and liberals for the better part of a century–a dream that has resisted the reality that these “rights” are not justiciable; that they degrade the value of other, fundamental, rights; and they create more policy problems than they solve.
Some of you aren’t old enough to remember this – but those of you do may have forgotten about it. I remember it vividly. At the time it was laughed off as impossible. Looks like he knew what he was talking about.
DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN HE APPEARED AT THE U.N. AND BANGED HIS SHOE ON THE TABLE? THIS WAS HIS ENTIRE QUOTE AT THAT TIME.
SECOND
ARGUMENT TWO: THE SHOTGUN
You’re sound asleep when you hear a thump outside your bedroom door.Half-awake, and nearly paralyzed with fear, you hear muffled whispers. At least two people have broken into your house and are moving your way. With your heart pumping, you reach down beside your bed and pick up your shotgun.
You rack a shell into the chamber, then inch toward the door and open it…
In the darkness, you make out two shadows. One holds something that looks like a crowbar. When the intruder brandishes it as if to strike, you raise the shotgun and fire. The blast knocks both thugs to the floor. One writhes and screams while the second man crawls to the front door and lurches outside.
As you pick up the telephone to call police, you know you’re in trouble. In your country, most guns were outlawed yearsbefore, and the few that are privately owned are so stringently regulated as to make them useless.. Yours was never registered..
Police arrive and inform you that the second burglar has died. They arrest you for First Degree Murder and Illegal Possession of a Firearm. When you talk to your attorney, he tellsyou not to worry: authorities will probably plea the case down to manslaughter. “What kind of sentence will I get?” you ask. “Only ten-to-twelve years,” he replies, as if that’s nothing. “Behave yourself, and you’ll be out in seven.”
The next day, the shooting is the lead story in the local newspaper. Somehow, you’re portrayed as an eccentric vigilante while the two men you shot are represented as choirboys. Their friends and relatives can’t findan unkind word to say about them..
Buried deep down in the article, authorities acknowledge that both “victims” have been arrested numerous times. But the next day’s headline says it all: “Lovable Rogue Son Didn’t Deserve to Die.” The thieves have been transformed from career criminals into Robin Hood-type pranksters..
As the days wear on, the story takes wings. The national media picks it up, then the international media. the surviving burglarhas become a folk hero.
Your attorney says the thief is preparingto sue you, and he’ll probably win. The media publishes reports that your home has been burglarized several times in the past and that you’ve been critical of local police for their lack of effort in apprehending the suspects. After the last break-in, you told your neighbor that you would be prepared next time. The District Attorney uses this to allege that you were lying in wait for the burglars.
A few months later, you go to trial. The charges haven’t been reduced, as your lawyer had so confidently predicted. When you take the stand, your anger at the injustice of it all works against you.. Prosecutors paint a picture of you as a mean, vengeful man.
It doesn’t take long for the jury to convict you of all charges. The judge sentences you to life in prison.
This case really happened. On August 22, 1999, Tony Martin of Emneth, Norfolk, England, killed one burglar and wounded a second. In April, 2000, he wasconvictedand is now serving a life term..
How did it become a crime to defend one’s own life in the once great British Empire ? It started with the Pistols Act of 1903. This seemingly reasonable law forbade selling pistols to minors or felons and established that handgun sales were to be made only to those who had a license. The Firearms Act of 1920 expanded licensing to include not only handguns but all firearms except shotguns..
Later laws passed in 1953 and 1967 outlawed the carrying of any weapon by private citizens and mandated the registration of all shotguns. Momentum for total handgun confiscation began in earnest after the Hungerford mass shooting in 1987. Michael Ryan, a mentally disturbed man with a Kalashnikov rifle, walked down the street shooting everyone he saw. When the smoke cleared, 17 people were dead.
The British public, already de-sensitized by eighty years of “gun control”, demanded even tougher restrictions. (The seizure of all privately owned handguns was the objective even though Ryan used a rifle.)
Nine years later, at Dunblane, Scotland,
Thomas Hamilton used a semi-automatic weapon to murder 16 children and a teacher at a public school. For many years, the media had portrayed all gun owners as mentally unstable, or worse, criminals. Now the press had a real kook with which to beat up law-abiding gun owners. Day after day, week after week, the media gave up all pretense of objectivity and demanded a total ban on all handguns.
The Dunblane Inquiry, a few months later, sealed the fate of the few sidearm’s still owned by private citizens. During the years in which the British government incrementally took away most gun rights, The notion that a citizen had the right to armed self-defense came to be seen as vigilantism. Authorities refused to grant gun licenses to people who were threatened, claiming that self-defense was no longer considered a reason to own a gun. Citizens who shot burglars or robbers or rapists were charged while the real criminals were released.
Indeed, after the Martin shooting, a police spokesman was quoted as saying,
“We cannot have people take the law into their own hands.” All of TonyMartin’s neighbors had been robbed numerous times, and several elderly people were severely injured in beatings by young thugs who had no fear of the consequences. Martin himself, a collector of antiques, had seen most of his collection trashed or stolen by burglars.
When the Dunblane Inquiry ended, citizens who owned handguns were given three months to turn them over to local authorities. Being good British subjects, most people obeyed the law. The few who didn’t were visited by police and threatened with ten-year prison sentences if they didn’t comply.
Police later bragged that they’d taken nearly 200,000 handguns from private citizens.
How did the authorities know who had handguns? The guns had been registered and licensed. Kind of like cars. Sound familiar?
WAKE UP AMERICA;THIS IS WHY OUR FOUNDING FATHERS PUT THE SECOND AMENDMENT IN OUR CONSTITUTION. “…It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds..” –Samuel Adams
ARGUMENT THREE: A BLACK LADY SPEAKS OUT ON THE 2ND AMENDMENT.
This is a good video clip on guns by a Black woman. Also this is what you get when you research the 2nd AMENDMENT.
The rhetoric of the Right and Left has clouded the basics of the Second Amendment. The emotional hysteria by the Left has further enhanced their determination to disarm citizens so they can begin more of their socialist controls. Those on the Right are making assertions that cannot be supported with fact and all sides have misrepresented various details of crime and guns.
Let us see if we can clear the fog and look at this issue without the emotions, accusations and mischaracterizations of the political and media establishments. I will use the actual Constitution and Bill of Rights, along with the actual historical facts of the formation of the Bill of Rights.
The call for a bill of rights had been the anti-Federalists’ most powerful weapon. Attacking the proposed Constitution for its vagueness and lack of specific protection against tyranny, Patrick Henry asked the Virginia convention, “What can avail your specious, imaginary balances, your rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances.” The anti-Federalists, demanding a more concise, unequivocal Constitution, one that laid out for all to see the right of the people and limitations of the power of government, claimed that the brevity of the document only revealed its inferior nature. Richard Henry Lee despaired at the lack of provisions to protect “those essential rights of mankind without which liberty cannot exist.” Trading the old government for the new without such a bill of rights, Lee argued, would be trading Scylla for Charybdis.
A bill of rights had been barely mentioned in the Philadelphia convention, most delegates holding that the fundamental rights of individuals had been secured in the state constitutions. James Wilson maintained that a bill of rights was superfluous because all power not expressly delegated to thenew government was reserved to the people. It was clear, however, that in this argument the anti-Federalists held the upper hand. Even Thomas Jefferson, generally in favor of the new government, wrote to Madison that a bill of rights was “what the people are entitled to against every government on earth.”
By the fall of 1788 Madison had been convinced that not only was a bill of rights necessary to ensure acceptance of the Constitution but that it would have positive effects. He wrote, on October 17, that such “fundamental maxims of free Government” would be “a good ground for an appeal to the sense of community” against potential oppression and would “counteract the impulses of interest and passion.”
Madison’s support of the bill of rights was of critical significance. One of the new representatives from Virginia to the First Federal Congress, as established by the new Constitution, he worked tirelessly to persuade the House to enact amendments. Defusing the anti-Federalists’ objections to the Constitution, Madison was able to shepherd through 17 amendments in the early months of the Congress, a list that was later trimmed to 12 in the Senate. On October 2, 1789, President Washington sent to each of the states a copy of the 12 amendments adopted by the Congress in September. By December 15, 1791, three-fourths of the states had ratified the 10 amendments now so familiar to Americans as the “Bill of Rights.”
Benjamin Franklin told a French correspondent in 1788 that the formation of the new government had been like a game of dice, with many players of diverse prejudices and interests unable to make any uncontested moves. Madison wrote to Jefferson that the welding of these clashing interests was “a task more difficult than can be well conceived by those who were not concerned in the execution of it.” When the delegates left Philadelphia after the convention, few, if any, were convinced that the Constitution they had approved outlined the ideal form of government for the country. But late in his life James Madison scrawled out another letter, one never addressed. In it he declared that no government can be perfect, and “that which is the least imperfect is therefore the best government.”
During the debates on the adoption of the Constitution, its opponents repeatedly charged that the Constitution as drafted would open the way to tyranny by the central government. Fresh in their minds was the memory of the British violation of civil rights before and during the Revolution. They demanded a “bill of rights” that would spell out the immunities of individual citizens. Several state conventions in their formal ratification of the Constitution asked for such amendments; others ratified the Constitution with the understanding that the amendments would be offered.
On September 25, 1789, the First Congress of the United States therefore proposed to the state legislatures 12 amendments to the Constitution that met arguments most frequently advanced against it. The first two proposed amendments, which concerned the number of constituents for each Representative and the compensation of Congressmen, were not ratified. Articles 3 to 12, however, ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures, constitute the first 10 amendments of the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights.
The Preamble to The Bill of Rights
Congress of the United States
begun and held at the City of New-York, on
Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.
THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.
RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.
ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.
Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
A lot of reading, however, your advantage is having no one telling you what it says. You are an intelligent person and understand it for yourself.
The creation of the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting, or the formation of a militia. It does not address the right of an individual to defend themselves, although it covers that in part. The real foundation is protecting the citizens of the United States of America against a tyrannical government controlling every aspect of their lives. It removes the ability to restrict the munitions needed for such a resistance (how much a clip can hold – in order to protect yourself you need the same capacity of your ammo clip to hold the same of those attacking you; federal, criminal, and now terrorist). It simply says, “…the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” This was the concern of those (Federalist) that wanted assurance that they would be able to protect themselves against a government taking over their lives.
Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt (FDR) introduced Socialism into our country. The political Left has seized upon that and throughout the last 100 years has made every effort to more us into a complete European style Socialist country. The primary step to seize control is to disarm the citizenry. Once disarmed, they cannot resist the domination of the government because they have no ability to resist. Disarming tax paying citizens puts them at the mercy of those that have no regard for life and property, or the pride of working for a living. 100% of the time when you disarm citizens’ crime increases dramatically.
All you have to do is look at our present Federal Government conduct. We have a President who studied Marxist/Socialist/Collectivist governments in all his schooling, and argued for the same. He has surrounded himself with people who have confessed being Socialist in their ideology. His misuse of Presidential Executive Orders further proves his conviction of being a KING, not a LIMITED PRESIDENT as outlined in our Constitution.
He and the Entire political Left are determined to disarm America although they know they will never be able to disarm the criminal element in our society. I have shared with you the experiences of Australia and England. They want their firearms back. They are warning America against what they are experiencing. When you hear the rhetoric of the Left in coming days remember the warnings of the citizens of Australia and England.
Whenever you meet force with force, you have a better percentage of survival. Education and training is critical and must be enforced with regard to owning any form of firearms. We must also have laws that deal with helping, and securing, those that are mentally challenged. The entertainment industry must take responsibility for what they glorify in film and video entertainment. We need to revive respect for life and liberty and the moral fiber that built this great nation.
Anger and shrill debate is never the answer. Restoring the peace and the original intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights should be our only resolve. Anyone want to join me?
Indefinite Military Detention Of US Citizens To Be Signed Into Law By Obama
We’ve been trying to keep you aware of what has been taking place with the talks concerning the 2103 version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We’ve covered the Fenistein amendment, which effectively did nothing, except to empower Congrees to authroize the military at their whim to violate people’s 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendment rights. But now the talks are all done and the legislation is headed for Barack Obama’s desk to be signed into law soon, just as it was nearly one year ago today, including provision to use the military to indefinitely detain US citizens.
Previously, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) voted for the Feinstein amendment to the NDAA. But then there came the hashing out of language in the bill and Paul blasted Senator John McCain (R-AZ) for stripping away the amendment.
“We had protection in this bill. We passed an amendment that specifically said if you were an American citizen or here legally in the country, you would get a trial by jury,” Paul said. “It’s been removed because they want the ability to hold American citizens without trial in our country. This is so fundamentally wrong and goes against everything we stand for as a country that it can’t go unnoticed.”
The problem with Paul’s assertion is that there was no protection for anyone, whether they are a citizen of the US, a permanent resident or a visitor. Rights that are supposed to be protected under the Constitution be damned! Neither the NDAA, nor the amendment proposed protected one person who is on American Soil.
Once again the Left is promoting the same trap that has devastated the United States and conservatives. I am absolutely stunned that any conservative would fall for it again, but appears the Republicans are on the way down. The Left will have more ammunition to hurl at the Right, continue to march toward bankruptcy, so the Left can claim Marshall law, throw out the Constitution and install a Marxist/Collectivism/Socialist government.
What am I referring too; The deal the Left is proposing again to raise taxes now with the promise to lower spending later on next year.
History: During Reagan’s second term the Left came to him with the same proposal. It went public with the proposal. He went ahead and signed the tax increase, WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT HAD THE PROMISE FROM THE LEFT TO REDUCE SPENDING IN THE NEXT CONGRESSIONAL SESSION. REALITY? THE SPENDING CUTS NEVER HAPPENED AND TO THIS DAY THE LEFT USES THAT AS A WEAPON AGAINST THE RIGHT BE SAYING, “Well remember, President Reagan raised taxes.
The DELIBERATEdeceptionwas used again with he next Republican President, George H.W. Bush. After his pledge to not raise taxes (“Read my lips, no new taxes“), in a deliberate move to discredit the President and to overcome his immense popularity over the Gulf War success, the Left presented the same proposal; Sign this bill to raise taxes and we will give you a bill in the next Congressional session to cut spending. President H.W. Bush fell for it and it cost him reelection and gave us President Bill Clinton.
Now they are going for it again. Why aren’t the Republicans screaming this over every microphone shoved in their face? Why aren’t they exposing the deliberate, calculated deception of the Left? Why are they being so nice about this? I am disgusted with them all. None of them are truly interested in representing the WORKING people of the United States.
Our recourse? Nothing really other than to continue to speak out and write letters. We do have the mid terms coming up and if the Republicans cave in again, we can kiss the Congress goodbye and then the Left will have unfettered power to rush us into a Constitutional Convention where what we have enjoyed for over 200 years will go away, and that without firing a single shot.
How about you? Will you keep up the fight? Are the freedoms granted by the Constitution worth fighting for? Well?
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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July 29, 2016, 
path.”
This strategy, and believe you me,
But if he does, Illinois can expect the same type of nonsense already streaming through the federal government. One of the first things they can expect is the whitewashing of all terms that correctly describe Islamism. The Council will suggest that terms such as jihad, Sharia, umma, etc. be scrubbed from any official state documents and disallow politicians from speaking such terms. Just watch – it’s already happening at Homeland Security.
Thank your lucky stars that the former Supreme Allied Commander For Europe and one-time U.S. Presidential candidate Wesley Clark never made it to the highest office in the land. Because if he had, there is a distinct possibility that he would have used our military to take the so-called domestic 
Anne Reed, Posted: Thursday, April 30, 2015
I am a gun. I have challenged the waves and crossed a vast, unforgiving sea. I have landed on these shores. I am held by the pilgrim, the pioneer, and the trail blazer. I have brought civilization to a barren wilderness.
R.G. Yoho is a writer and author of six books.
by Michael Schwartz
What Did You Say? 
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