How Can America Fight Antifa?

 
Article by Dennis Santiago in "RedState":

America’s cities are vulnerable and unprepared. We are now entering the second week into discovering that nefarious forces are on the attack. At this point, authorities are coping. They have not quite figured out how to deal with the threat. So far, we continue to look at this as a law enforcement incident-by-incident response problem combined with nightly curfews, only to be followed by another round of permitted demonstrations, that starts the cycle anew. It isn’t working. In fact, its playing right into the hands of these self-identified revolutionaries. Quite honestly, we are being naïve to the reality that what we are facing is an asymmetric warfare strategy problem.

Using nearly identical tactics across multiple cities coast-to-coast, they have taken advantage of a catalyst event to launch their plan; one they have likely been working on since events on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. The catalysts were similar, a controversial incident sure to trigger a divided emotional response by Americans. This time, their technique is both aggressive and effective. The question for America is how do we neutralize it? How do we get things back to the point that ordinary life can get return to normal?

Anarchy in the Information Age

If you have been a student of the rise of Antifa, you’ll know that the origins of the imported paid hooligan approach to executing mayhem on the periphery of a cover protest first came on the scene in Ferguson, Missouri. It was a more clumsy and transparent operation then. Imagery from the time, much of it carefully scrubbed from the internet since then, was revealing. I remember they even had printed posters with those QR codes you point a cell phone camera at the automatically opens a website. The QR codes at Ferguson opened the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States (RCP US). They even had selfies of white organizers posing with black people they’d put Russian commissar hats with the red hammer and sickle for the photo ops.

This will sound eerily familiar. It was discovered then that a significant number of protesters were from outside the community, brought in on tour buses paid for by a shadowy financial network. Eventually, local residents came to resent these outsiders.

Ferguson was ultimately a dead end. Despite efforts to expand it nationally, it faded from the scene instead of becoming the revolution its organizers hoped for, much like the way the Occupy Wall Street movement fizzled. But it laid the seeds for starting up a learning curve that we are living through now. The organizers went back to the drawing board and started two initiatives.

First, build sleeper cells of cadres around the country using a disaggregated organization model that, despite being characterized by the government and media as having no titular leadership, built the a very real, central committee command, control and intelligence structure using the powerful tools of internet social media and the dark net. Much like the amorphous efforts of Al Qaeda and ISIS, the organizers used many of the same techniques to draw in layers of operatives and supporters into a web awaiting their call to action.

At the same time, Antifa experimented with what techniques worked, and what did not, in testbed locations such as Portland, Oregon. Additional experiments were also conducted in other cities. The occasional blocking of roads to test the tenacity of police response were tried on the one hand and mayhem at the periphery techniques were experimented with at convenient political confrontation points repeatedly.

A Vulnerable America

In terms of susceptibility and vulnerability, American cities were wide open for exploitation. They discovered that liberal governments were the most easily manipulated into lackluster responsiveness to maintaining public order. They perfected the orbiting of otherwise peaceful protests with peripheral mayhem done in just enough amount to boost media attention to the national news cycle; but not trigger local authorities to clamp down hard.

It is a brilliant work up of a force element design. The take advantage of social wedges ploy is kind of the IED of the American landscape if you think about it from a weaponization standpoint. IED’s were the brainchild of now deceased Iranian mastermind Qasem Soleimani, major general in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and commander of the extraterritorial Quds Force who’s actions cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the Middle East over the better part of two decades.

The timing of the attack is both strategic and desperate. The United States was coming out of a self-imposed shutdown owing to the novel coronavirus and poised to re-open with the possibility of a very real summer bounce to the economy as pent up demand to get back on the curve the US was on immediately prior to initiating quarantine began to assert itself.

If you were a revolutionary theorist with dreams of changing or even cratering the American nation, the calculus was clear. If you miss this chance, the next opportunity to try it again probably won’t come for a very long time. Therefore, target your forces and signal “launch commit”. We are living through that decision.

Asymmetric Warfare Does Work

Anyone who has been watching events unfold has clearly seen that there are highly organized groups operating at the periphery of planned and announced demonstration locations.

Television news helicopters have shown the logistics of groups approaching like mobile strike teams to destroy and loot retail commercial establishments often panning their cameras to show police a block or two away guarding a peaceful demonstration.

In military parlance, this is a classic variation of fire and maneuver. You use one element of your force to fix the enemy in position so that the other element can skirmish at will with little resistance. And then, just like special forces, you pull out prior to superior forces being able to muster and engage you.

You do this again and again degrading what you must believe is a brittle and corrupt system that will break down before you run out for money to pay your troops. That is a hell of an assumption to make about a $16 trillion GDP economic engine that is also presently the home of the oldest continuous standing form of government on planet Earth. If you are wrong, your adversary recognized the threat, adapts, renders your strategy too costly to continue, and starts to hunt you down like a pack of dogs. Game on.

It does help if your battle element forces have no relationship to the community that they are destroying. Paid mercenaries are the tool of choice for such jobs. That indeed appears to be the case in the early stages of this latest episode of destruction in our cities. The busing in of troops is now standard fare.

A number of mayors of American cities have gone on the air announcing that a significant percentage, if not the majorities, of people arrested for looting are not from the local area. I keep asking the same question I did in 2014. Who’s paying for these buses and why haven’t we frozen those bank accounts?

Note that all that needs to be done is start a chain reaction. One thing about looting, once it starts, mob mentality takes over and there are plenty of people who will get drawn into the melee. Human nature is sadly very predictable.

This is not just about attacking affluent areas. Perpetrators seeking to breakdown social order just as willingly target working class areas. A quick search of the internet will reveal many areas being bravely and desperately defended by residents against outsiders, often with no help from the police.

The core ethos of this weaponized protest design is to ensure that peripheral mayhem accompanies peaceful activity just out of reach of the police. It makes them law enforcement look incompetent and makes the public feel vulnerable. There is a word for this, terrorism. The pattern so clear that it prompted US President Donald J trump to declare Antifa an official terrorist organization.

Credible Deterrence

What we lack at the present time is a solid means to create what strategists call “credible deterrence” to dissuade antifa from bringing destruction into what should be a peaceful freedom of expression process.

We ordinary Americans, regardless of our political views, want a free society able to constructively discuss and debate our issues without having to worry about shadowy forces seeking to exploit our political debate to undermine the stability of our country.

It is critical and legitimate for the United States, as a country and as a society, to dissuade such persons from acting against the interests of our constructive expression.

Predators, which is what they are, are guided by the most core principle of predation, which is that they will not do anything that will cause them irreparable harm. What we must do is create the conditions where their actions will result in irreparable harm to their cause. And I do not mean to individuals, I mean to their agenda.

In this case, they hope to spark a popular revolution that will result in the downfall of the American system of government. They depend on having a cadre of activists who can operate in the shadows with little risk that they will be found or exposed to the scrutiny of the government, and by the People.

The bottom line is that they need masks to hide behind to feel safe enough to do what they do. Therefore, the national mission is to deny them the opacity upon which they depend.

A threat that depends on anonymity has an asymmetric vulnerability that is wide open to counterattack.

It is up to us to attack that weak link. It will not happen by following their playbook. We must change the rules of the game.

Exploit Antifa’s Design Weaknesses

All weapon designs have flaws. Antifa’s carefully curated design to take advantage of the slow inertia that is the nature of American response to emergencies. But this advantage degrades rapidly, once contact with a clear-thinking adversary is initiated. The risk calculus question really is if, or when, the defender will learn to adapt.

In this case there are certain things that form boundaries to the Antifa strategy.

1. Location is not a secret. The demonstrations are being organized on the open internet and within networks of activist cells. It is necessary to assemble the masses of people to draw the police in, fix their location, deployment, and focus. Some of what they spread is deliberate false information. But to hold legal demonstrations to initiate the strategy, cities must issue permits for assemblies filed by organizations for the locations, time and date of planned events. And then there are illegal events such as blocking roadways that are designed to draw law enforcement resources to a fixing point.
2. The Order of Battle is known. We have observed during this episode that mayhem forces do exist and do attempt to exploit these events. Their patterns of operation are diffuse, a characteristic of Antifa, but do include both organized flash mobs as well as smaller meandering cells of hooligans. Both techniques are well established tactics. What is also observed is that these persons tend to not be local to the area, which means they must travel to and from these locations through some form of transportation.
3. Command and Control does incorporate Risk Management. They play guessing games. Mayhem situations do not appear at all demonstration events. This implies that there is some sort of command and control process at work that selects when and where to deploy the full complement of Antifa’s methods.
4.  

It is up to use to learn to use these characteristics to exploit the fissures in their strategy to disrupt this pattern of attack.

Deny Opacity, Increase Preparedness

It is vital to recognize making at-risk locations known well ahead of events is critical to the deterrence process. Whether it is from permits to hold demonstrations or active cyber intel gathering of data from the internet, it is a disservice for cities and news organizations not to publish the known locations where these events will occur so that people and business can prepare. Alerts should particularly go to business and communities a danger zone within the “just out of police response” band around an identified demonstration location. The objective is to give people maximum time to prepare.

This is kind of warning is ideally 24 to 48 hours in advance, but it is doable even in near real-time. There is no reason why cities shouldn’t repurpose the very same systems they’ve been using for daily COVID-19 updates to disseminate this type of community information.

Cities also have public access TV channels, reverse dialing alert systems, and other forms to alert people. That is what they are there for. They can easily be more proactive with actionable information. That would be more useful than an endless series of general announcements. Consider that cities were announcing decisions park by park and down to what you can and cannot do on a beach for COVID-19. No need to be tongue tied.

This does not dissuade legitimate demonstrations. It makes the community a harder target for mayhem. It maximizes situation awareness. This creates a passive and credible change in the calculus of deterrence to the mayhem contingent. They will back off, which is what deterrence is all about. In the end, it is important for America’s communities, rich and poor, to say it’s ok to guard what’s precious to our way of life from being destroyed.

Explore Innovative Response Contingencies

But what if they don’t back off? It has been clearly demonstrated in press conference after press conference by police officials that conventional law enforcement’s ability to respond in force to organized flash looting events is marginal to ineffective. By the time they get there, they are cleaning up the mess left behind by people who have long since departed. No one should be satisfied that this is the only way we can respond. Here’s a different way to look at the problem.

Don’t escalate the use of ground forces. That is playing into Antifa’s hands. This is revolution 101. They know they are too few in numbers to take over the country. That means they need to cause the US to kill itself. And the best way to do that is to turn America into a massive police state. Then all they need do is keep ramping up the pressure to cause government forces to keep squeezing the populace until it switches sides. It is a classic playbook. We were already on the verge of doing so in many parts of the country to break COVID-19 quarantine. Same plan, different purpose.

I do agree with U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper that invoking the Insurrection Act in this instance is a bad idea. Far better to promote public teamwork and participation in the ground game. It is much better to earn the buy in of the people. Far larger numbers at much lower cost to keep an eye on things. There’s no better defense for a community than the people that live there.

For a tangible ground game disruptor, President Trump could consider taking advantage of the leverage of air forces. The US could task the emergency use of surveillance assets temporarily detached in a support role to augment overstretched police air support. These additional air resources can be tasked to maneuver into position rapidly enough to observe and identify the persons and cars of the looting flash mobs. No bureaucratic excuses please. If the news helicopters can do it and we don’t take advantage of the leverage the public has seen every day on the news, shame on us.

These air observation resources can be tasked to capture and document vehicles, persons, license plates, record evidence and, working with the full power of satellite uplink/downlinks to information fusion networks. Then the race is on to see who’s better at the game, the mob or the system. Once identified, US surveillance systems have the capability to track vehicles in real time for extended periods of time. That buys time to begin to deliver assistive information to police response task forces.

I mean its not like we do not know how to do this. Point of fact, the United States can find a single cell phone in a country in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the planet. We perfected the technology to use against similar amorphous threats in other parts of the world. I see no reason not to start a conversation about using these tools we already have, to counter, what in the end is a clumsy domestic field expedient on a shoestring budget, easily defeated by such a technology rich nation.

The deterrent value of discussing we are looking at doing such a thing would be significant. The target to disrupt is the lower and middle level operatives relying on anonymity as cover to participate in the movement. This would be ice water being poured on their parade. It would create a tangible cloud of risk; a behavior pattern changing category of risk. Who is going to want to risk the car they drive to work in their daytime disguise being tagged and coded? To those owners, I suggest the “shock and awe” that they will be unmasked, and subjected to anti-terrorism investigation, has great deterrent value. 

Furthermore, the US has invested in a world class cyberwar data fusion capability. This system can be used to further deny cover to these perpetrators. I would aggregate the data from every data source and load the plates of the suspect cars into the databases of every license plate reader camera nationwide so there will be no place to hide. And when the vehicle is stopped, don’t tell them whether it was high tech or good old gumshoe detective work that caught them, just tell them the contact tracing has started and won’t end until contract tracing unravels the amorphous network that is the loosely knit Antifa.

Then again, they can always turn themselves in to the local police station along with everything they have stolen, admit to whatever they may have destroyed, offer to make amends, and throw themselves at the mercy of the court. Ideally, before the FBI comes knocking on the door and FINCEN freezes their bank accounts.

And no, I do not have any pity for the people who’s lives will be unmasked and subjected to the full force of US anti-terror law in this process. Unlike the peaceful protesters, they are culpable for the damage they have done. They have destroyed the lives of too many good people already. The reports are out there.

The documentation of their organization is beginning to be revealed, “George Floyd unrest: How riot groups come together to loot, destroy”.
The pain of their damage is emerging, ““‘It was a war zone’: Small-business owners who lost everything in riots speak out.”
The desperate fight by good people to save their communities rages on, “Guardian Angels rumble with looters at East Village sneaker store during George Floyd protest”.

This is just one approach. I’m targeting the weakest link in the enemy’s force structure wit the objective of collapsing their network; the people that have something to lose from being exposed. There are undoubtedly other interdiction paths. But this article is about highlighting that we have a lot more we can bring to bear here than accepting an endless cycle of nightly curfews and daily riots.

Not My First Rodeo

Sadly, this is not my first time thinking about this. I was in Los Angeles in 1992. I saw neighborhoods in the middle of no man’s land mobilize and set up armed barricades to defend themselves from mayhem until order could be restored. I went to work for Rebuild LA for awhile and tried to help put the pieces back together. Then I helped LAPD start this effort at getting beyond the causes of the destruction working on this kernel of an idea at the time called community policing. For those of you who remember that time, those were old computers I donated to the cause, installed in police and sheriff’s stations running pre-internet bulletin board software to connect area lead officers to block captains. Those were desperate times. We are experiencing desperate times again. I do not like seeing so much effort invested by so many good people over so many years being burned to the ground by a bunch of misguided zealots.

The point I am making with this op-ed is that you fight an asymmetric attack with an equally creative asymmetric response. That is how we can turn a tsunami onto a ripple. Once that is done, it goes back to the question of do we grab the phone records and bank accounts of the people caught and let our tools to fight terrorism go to work? Will we even need to when it becomes apparent that this bold strategy has begun to collapse and is no longer a credible threat?

As for me, if these people wise up, call off the attack, go back into their safe spaces, and leave the rest of us alone so we can get on with our lives, that works for me too.

And with that, let the discussion ensue.

https://www.redstate.com/dennis_santiago/2020/06/03/how-can-america-fight-antifa/

During This Spate of Racial Outrage, Here Are Some Deeply Uncomfortable Facts for the Press, the Activists, and Even Ben & Jerry’s

Article by Brad Slager in "RedState":


The people telling us to have a serious talk do not want to listen to uncomfortable details.

Yesterday, social media was in full excitement when a private company issued a lengthy mission statement to address the racial strife in the country. Now, normally this type of corporate posturing on social issues is easily dismissed, such as when Playboy Magazine came out this week and announced its efforts to stamp out racism. But the activist manifesto delivered by Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream is notable in that the company expresses many of the talking points we have been lectured with over the past week, and it manages to push forward many of the myths and inaccuracies concerning the uproar.

In a screed entitled ‘’We Must Dismantle White Supremacy – Silence is not an option’’ the reliably social signaling company received all sorts of applause, delivering a mission statement that strummed the tuning fork of those who are currently outraged at our society. It is a remarkable piece of agitprop in that the company both manages to say all the right things, but manages to get so much wildly incorrect. So, while not intending to vilify the company itself, there is a need to expose many of the falsehoods in its mission statement, as those are many of the same we are hearing from activist circles.

After opening with acknowledgment of the death of George Floyd at the hands of overt police activity, the partners of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield start in with their virtue treatise.

The murder of George Floyd was the result of inhumane police brutality that is perpetuated by a culture of white supremacy. What happened to George Floyd was not the result of a bad apple; it was the predictable consequence of a racist and prejudiced system and culture that has treated Black bodies as the enemy from the beginning. What happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis is the fruit borne of toxic seeds planted on the shores of our country.

This is the language we normally see attached to the messaging of ‘’Systemic racism’’. The problem, however, is one of location. While it sounds great to attribute Floyd’s death to the racism built into the culture, what few are willing to do is analyze that culture. So why don’t we look into the system where this crime took place?
To start, you have as the city Mayor, Jacob Frey, an avowed leftist who follows a string of Democratic liberal leaders. The last time a Republican was elected to run the city was 1957. The police chief of Minneapolis is Medaria Arradondo, a black police official. The federal representative for the city, in Washington, is the famed female POC Ilhan Omar, and the top cop for the state is another POC and former head of the DNC, Attorney General Keith Ellison. Are these the leaders perpetuating the culture of white supremacy?

Just to add to the list, you have Minnesota headed by Democrat Tim Walz, the state is served by two Democrat senators, including Amy Klobuchar who spent years as an acting state attorney in a few offices, and even the sister city of Saint Paul has as its Mayor, Melvin Carter, another POC leader. These would be the people operating the ‘’racist and prejudicial system and culture’’. Looking over these names, note how few have incurred the wrath and blame over the past week, while President Trump has been pointed at as responsible.

Toxic seeds planted on the shores of our country in Jamestown in 1619, when the first enslaved men and women arrived on this continent. Floyd is the latest in a long list of names that stretches back to that time and that shore. Some of those names we know — Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Emmett Till, Martin Luther King, Jr. — most we don’t.

I need to list other names they apparently do not know.

Justine Ruszczyk Damond. The 40-year-old white woman was killed by black police officer Mohammed Noor, who was convicted of murder last year for her shooting.

Emmanuel Aranda. He is the 24-year-old black man who grabbed a 5-year-old white boy and threw him off of a third-story railing at the Mall of America. After long treatment, the boy recovered from the forty-foot drop.

Adding to this was the number of victims who, last summer, were targeted by groups of Somali residents. These are not just cherry-picked examples of inter-race violence to ‘’balance out’’ the ledger. All of these examples are from Minneapolis. If this racism is built-in, if the system is supposedly inspiring tragedies like the death of George Floyd, how is it that black on white violence is just as pervasive, if not more so?

The officers who murdered George Floyd, who stole him from those who loved him, must be brought to justice. At the same time, we must embark on the more complicated work of delivering justice for all the victims of state sponsored violence and racism.

Justice is, in fact, taking place. Officer Chauvin has already been arrested and charged with murder. US Attorney General Barr is overseeing the investigation, which is moving faster than anyone could expect. This is what makes the calls in the streets for ’justice’ perplexing. It is, in fact, happening. Where the uncomfortable aspect arrives is in this concept of alleged ‘’state-sponsored violence and racism’’.

To arrive at this conclusion, you see the avoidance of that recent case of a black officer convicted of murder. But there are curious details once you look into the metrics of the fatal shootings involving police. It has long been established by FBI statistics that in this country murders of whites by black assailants is usually twice that of whites murdering blacks. But a study of police shootings released last summer had some revealing details.

This study, out of Michigan State University indicated that regional crime rates and geographical demographics played a much larger role than expected in the deaths by police. The man behind this study, Professor Joseph Cesario, analyzed the makeup of regions, as well as the ethnicity of the police involved in the shootings and found a curious correlation.

Instead of using population, Cesario analyzed variables such as the race of the police officers, crime rates, and the racial demographics of locations where police shootings happened in 2015. From that, he derived that black and Latino victims of police killings were more likely to have been shot by black and Latino cops, and that ”might not be due to bias on the part of Black or Hispanic officers, but instead to simple overlap between officer and county demographics.”

In other words, in areas where there is a higher concentration of blacks and Latinos, there is also an increase in the number of black and Latino officers. This then takes us to an uncomfortable resolution; those who insist racism is the driving force behind police killings of black victims are assuming the race of the police shooter is almost always white. The statistics do not support their assumption. Ironically, it becomes a prejudicial assessment of police activity, made by those railing against prejudice.

Bringing up these details — acknowledging who has been in charge in Minnesota, noting the black-on-white crime therein, seeing minority cops are shooting minorities — tends to raise the ire of those outraged and calling for change. This presents a problem to one of their central demands. We hear a lot of calls to have a serious dialogue about race in this country, but they resist when these facts are brought into the dialogue. If we are to have a serious discussion about race, then it has to be an honest discussion.

https://www.redstate.com/bradslager/2020/06/03/during-this-spate-of-racial-outrage-here-are-some-deeply-uncomfortable-facts-for-the-press-the-activists-and-even-ben-jerrys/

The Truth about BLM Protesters

I just came across this on Reddit. It shines a pretty good light on what is actually happening.

When your looting backfires from r/trump

Imagine cleaning up your own neighborhood post rioting, only to have someone in your hood pull a gun on you to stop you. Mods, let folks see wtf is going on here and not in some random sub please. It's preferred for us POTUS supporters to discuss it mainly amongst ourselves. from r/trump

This is the uncut truth about what is going on, heard from someone who lives in an affected neighborhood.

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Judge Sullivan Finally Responds To Mandamus Petition In Flynn Case

Whether the D.C. Circuit will grant mandamus and direct Sullivan to dismiss the criminal charge against Flynn is unknown. But Flynn has the Constitution on his side; Sullivan has only the Resistance.

Margot Cleveland reporting for The Federalist

Judge Emmet Sullivan appeared as unofficial amicus curiae for the Resistance in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in the Michael Flynn criminal case yesterday.

Sullivan, who has presided over the Flynn case since December 2017, was ordered by the federal appellate court to respond to Flynn’s previously filed petition for a writ of mandamus. Flynn sought the writ of mandamus after federal prosecutors moved to dismiss the criminal charge the special counsel’s office had filed against him in late 2017.

Flynn originally pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to FBI agents about his December 2016 telephone conversations with the Russian ambassador. But after hiring new defense counsel, led by Sidney Powell, Flynn sought to withdraw his guilty plea.

Sullivan had yet to rule on Flynn’s motion to withdraw his guilty plea when an outside review, conducted by Missouri-based U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen, uncovered evidence previously withheld from Flynn’s defense team. That evidence established that the statements Flynn made to the FBI agents, even if false, were immaterial and thus not criminal. Accordingly, the then-acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia moved to dismiss the criminal charge.

Rather than grant that motion, however, Sullivan appointed retired federal Judge John Gleeson amicus curiae to argue against dismissing the criminal charge and also to determine whether Flynn should be held in criminal contempt of court. A few days later, Powell filed a petition for mandamus with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — an extraordinary procedure used to force a lower judge to act according to the law — arguing that Sullivan’s denial of the motion to dismiss violated the constitutional separation of powers because the executive branch holds exclusive power to decide when to prosecute cases and when to dismiss them.

While federal appellate courts routinely dispose of petitions for mandamus without additional briefing, the D.C. Circuit took the unusual tack of ordering Sullivan to respond to the petition within 10 days. Yesterday he did, through legal counsel he hired and we, as taxpayers, paid: Beth Wilkinson.

Sullivan Responds to the Petition

The 36-page response brief filed late Monday spent nearly half the space discussing the “facts” of the Flynn criminal prosecution, albeit with the narrative mirroring that sold by the left-leaning press, pundits, and politicians. The biggest tell came in the opening lines when Sullivan, through counsel, said, “[I]t is unprecedented for an Acting U.S. Attorney to contradict the solemn representations that career prosecutors made time and again.”

The longtime federal judge repeated this refrain throughout the brief, suggesting impropriety in the decision-making of the acting U.S. attorney. That it was the “career prosecutor” who withheld material exculpatory evidence from Flynn garnered nary a word. Nor did Sullivan as much as acknowledge that the decision to dismiss the charge came following an outside review and the discovery of the previously withheld evidence that eviscerated the charge against Flynn.

Sullivan also used substantial space repeating the familiar mantra that Flynn had pleaded guilty twice, but then sidestepped the overwhelming evidence indicating Flynn’s plea was involuntary and the result of ineffective assistance of counsel.

But Sullivan still found ample space to discuss “the unique facts of this case,” that he maintains “raised plausible questions about the presumption of regularity afforded to prosecutorial decisionmaking.” These so-called facts tracked much of the fake news peddled daily by the press.

Sullivan’s discussion of these “plausible questions” also makes clear he no longer seeks to be an impartial jurist but desires the role of prosecutor: He is the ultimate adversary — to both Flynn and federal prosecutors.

Sullivan Proved the Need for Mandamus

While Sullivan’s entire response is weak and screams of bias, his final point actually proves Powell’s case for mandamus. In closing, Sullivan argues the D.C. Circuit should deny Flynn’s petition for mandamus because he has yet to rule on the government’s motion to dismiss. Here, Sullivan stresses that mandamus is rare and is only appropriately granted when no other remedy is available. He then posits that, since Flynn could appeal any future denial of his motion to dismiss, there is no reason for mandamus now.

This point cannot withstand scrutiny, however, because as the brief filed yesterday by a group of U.S. senators argued, there is no longer a live “case or controversy” in the Flynn case. The senators’ amici curiae brief makes this brilliant point, overlooked by many: Sullivan is not merely violating Article II of the Constitution, which grants prosecutorial discretion solely to the executive branch. He is also violating Article III of the Constitution by attempting to rule in a case where there is no “case or controversy.”

Because both parties agreed to dismissal of the case — the federal government on one hand and Flynn on the other — there no longer remains a live dispute subject to a federal court’s jurisdiction. Article III provides that the judicial power of the United States extends only to cases and controversies.

Without a live dispute, any decision Sullivan renders (or purports to render) would consist of an improper advisory opinion. Thus, by arguing that mandamus should be denied because he has yet to rule on the motion to dismiss, Sullivan has proved the need for mandamus: to prevent him from issuing an advisory opinion.

Whether the D.C. Circuit will grant mandamus and direct Sullivan (or, more properly, another judge to whom the case is reassigned) to dismiss the criminal charge against Flynn is unknown. But Flynn has the Constitution on his side; Sullivan has only the Resistance.

by James Bovard for Intellectual Takeout

The Real Looters Are 

the Politicians

The brutal killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police spurred widespread protests which have been followed by looting in dozens of American citizens. CNN’s Don Lemon compared looters who plundered Nieman Marcus and other upscale stores to the Boston Tea Party. But far more Americans likely agreed with Quinta Caylor, a black North Carolina nurse on Twitter, who denounced the looters who “THUGGED OUT in 1 day” businesses that owners had worked long and hard to build.

There are not yet any solid estimates of the total damage from the looting and burning that has occurred in many cities across the nation. Total losses may range in the tens of millions of dollars or perhaps in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The pillaging has been especially ruinous to many small family-owned businesses, some of whom may not have insurance to cover their losses.

Many cities have responded to violent rampages by imposing curfews and other severe restrictions on movement. Many such edicts are remarkably similar to the “shelter-in-place” COVID dictates imposed by many state governments. While the city curfews are a reflexive response to rioting, the unprecedented state-wide quarantines appear to have had scant impact in curbing the contagion.

In Portland, Oregon, “rioters have broken into Portland’s main mall in downtown and began looting the Louis Vuitton. Youths ran out with designer bags. They shouted about expropriation,” as Andy Ngo tweeted. But that state suffered far more from Gov. Kate Brown’s edict that banned residents from leaving their homes except for essential work, buying food, and other narrow exemptions, and also banned all recreational travel, even though much of the state had few if any COVID cases. Almost 400,000 Oregonians have lost their jobs after Brown’s shutdown.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, looters pillaged a shoe store and many other businesses. But the damage they inflicted was not even pocket change compared to the wreckage produced by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. She prohibited anyone from leaving their home to visit family or friends. Whitmer severely restricted what stores could sell; she prohibited purchasing seeds for spring planting in stores after she decreed that a “nonessential” activity (unlike buying state lottery tickets). Though COVID infections were concentrated in the Detroit metropolitan area, Whitmer shut down the entire state – including northern counties with near-zero infections and zero fatalities, boosting unemployment to 24 percent statewide.

In Louisville, Kentucky, looters attacked the Omni Louisville Hotel and many other businesses. But that isn’t why the Bluegrass State has the nation’s highest unemployment rate – 33 percent. That is thanks to Gov. Andy Beshear’s shutdown order that paralyzed the state even though COVID’s impact in Kentucky “has not been worse than an average flu season,” according to Sen. Rand Paul.

In the District of Columbia, looters pillaged an Apple Store. “I bet this is about the [COVID] contact tracing in the latest upgrade,” quipped one wag on Twitter. But Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser has inflicted vastly more damage on the city with a lockdown order that helped destroy almost 100,000 jobs.

In Richmond, Virginia, looters pillaged many black-owned small businesses as well as torching the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Local damage is far outweighed by Gov. Ralph Northam shutting down the state economy for more than two months– including vast swaths of the Old Dominion that had few if any COVID cases, helping destroy more than half a million jobs.

In Rochester, New York, looters ransacked the Villa shoes store and many other businesses and brutally beat a female store owner seeking to defend her small business. New York City also saw widespread looting. But more than two million New Yorkers have lost their jobs since Gov. Andrew Cuomo effectively put almost 20 million people under house arrest – a drastic step that he said would be justified if it “saves just one life.” Most counties had only a smattering of COVID cases before Cuomo caused profound upheaval in the lives of vast numbers of his subjects. Also, unlike for Cuomo, there is no evidence tying the looters to 5000+ deaths in nursing homes.

In Minneapolis, looters plundered stores and restaurants in East Lake Street, a well-known haven for Black and Latino-owned businesses, as well as burning down the nation’s oldest independent science fiction bookstore. A black former firefighter was left in tears after looters ravaged the sports bar he was planning to open. Gov. Timothy Walz’s state-wide shutdown decree helped destroy almost 400,000 jobs, including that of George Floyd, who lost his gig as a bouncer after the governor’s order shut down the restaurant where he worked.

Most of the media coverage, reciting the official narrative that shutdowns were vital and justified, has ignored the human carnage of the COVID shutdowns. Almost 40 percent of households earning less than $40,000 per year have someone who lost their job in recent months, according to the Federal Reserve. Politicians destroyed much of the economy in the name of “risk reduction.” Unprecedented restrictions on personal and economic freedom were justified in part by federal Centers for Disease Control fatality forecasts that turned out to be wildly exaggerated.

Some leftists on Twitter urged the looters to go after national chain stores such as Target and avoid small family-owned businesses. Politicians issuing COVID shutdown decrees followed the opposite standard, effectively padlocking small businesses while Walmart and other large stores easily received the “essential” bureaucratic holy water and Amazon practically won the lottery. The recent riots may have destroyed hundreds of businesses. But forecasts predict that millions of businesses could be forced to close or file bankruptcy because of the pandemic disruptions.

The people who pillaged stores in recent days deserve vigorous prosecution, and the deluge of Twitter plundering-in-progress videos could make it easier to identify culprits. It remains to be seen whether mayors will have the gumption to throw the book at the thieves. But it is even less likely that the politicians and other government officials who inflicted far greater damage on the economy will ever be held liable.

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This article has been republished with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

[Image Credit: Flickr-Lorie Shaull, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Mayor de Blasio Used National Guard to Quarantine Neighborhoods During Virus – Now Refuses National Guard to Prevent Mob Violence, Looting and Arson

According to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio the National Guard are not a force for peace & security; they are a political weapon used when convenient for political purposes.

After using the National Guard to lock-down neighborhoods and block church gatherings and attendance, New York City Mayor de Blasio now refuses to use the national guard to stop widespread mob violence, looting, arson and mayhem. Oh, and law-abiding citizens within the city are almost completely blocked by regulations from owning firearms.

New York state Governor Andrew Cuomo said today he has no way to deploy the national guard into New York City without replacing Mayor Bill de Blasio:

[New York] “I’ve offered the National Guard, the mayor has said he can handle it with the NYPD,” Cuomo said Tuesday in an Albany press briefing. “My option is to displace the mayor of New York City and bring in the National Guard as the governor in a state of emergency, and basically take over.

“[Point] A, I don’t think we’re at that point. B, that would be such a chaotic situation in the midst of an already chaotic situation.” (link)

Hey, tell the kids to grab me a new flat screen tonight…

Contact Tracing: Laying the Foundation...

Fee.org

Contact Tracing: 

Laying the Foundation for Real-Time Social Tracking

The pandemic has provided an excuse for governments to justify the mass collection of geo-location data.

Sia Mohajer - June 1, 2020

Many academics, business leaders, and governments are claiming that technology is a critical part of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. By utilizing the surveillance capabilities of modern data acquisition systems, it is believed, citizens can be provided with tools that will allow them to see if they have come into contact with someone infected with the virus.

Contact-Tracing Apps

There are two proposed models for contact-tracing apps of this type. One model proposes that location data on citizens be collected and processed centrally by governments. This type of data collection has—understandably—been widely criticized by consumer and privacy rights groups, because of the unprecedented level of surveillance it would represent. Given that tech companies are already deploying this power in service to their governments—with YouTube blocking content that contradicts the WHO, for instance—these fears seem well justified.

Another proposed model is to collect and store location and contact data on citizens’ own devices. This distributed form of data collection has received widespread academic support, because it is claimed that it provides a way for contact-tracing to be performed without giving tech companies and governments access to real-time data on the movements and habits of their citizens.

This distributed data collection model, however, raises some fairly fundamental privacy concerns. Even if a legal framework is in place to protect citizens’ data—which currently isn’t—the level of awareness of digital privacy among the general public still makes these apps extremely dangerous.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the way in which contact tracing apps are designed to work, and why they should be a cause for concern.

Centralization vs. Distribution

Let’s first make the obvious point that some of the contact tracing apps that have been rolled out by governments outside the US and Europe are deeply problematic. In Israel, the government recently passed a law that allowed their security services to access location data on all citizens, and store this centrally. South Korea and China have also followed this model.

The dangers involved in allowing governments to collect this kind of data are clear, and have been pointed out by many privacy advocacy groups in the US and Europe. Nevertheless, governments in these countries are proposing that some form of contact-tracing app be implemented, not least because these governments have a very poor record of conducting contact-tracing on their own.

The proposal is that contact-tracing apps be built on a distributed model. Individual smartphones would store data about the exposure of their owners to COVID-19, it is claimed, and only use this information to communicate with other discrete devices. No data would be sent to centralized cloud storage devices, and even the tech firms who developed these apps would not have access to individual-level data on the status or movements of users.

This is the model that has recently been proposed by Apple and Google, and similar proposals have been put forward by an MIT-associated effort called PACT as well as by multiple European groups. In most proposals, Bluetooth technology would be used to alert users if they are close to another user who has been exposed to the virus.

The (Missing) Legal Framework

At first glance, apps built in this decentralized way appear to address the privacy concerns of mass data surveillance. They appear to build on policies that delegate responsibility to individual citizens, such as Sweden’s policy of individual responsibility that has performed well despite the lack of government interference in people's daily lives.

There remain, however, two major problems with even de-centralized contact-tracing apps. One is that there exists no legal framework to protect the users of these apps against unwanted surveillance. The second is that, even if this legal framework was in place, any data stored on smartphones can potentially be stolen by hackers or surveillance agencies.

Let's briefly deal with the legal implications first. In our article on the legal issues involved with contact tracing apps, we've already pointed out that the legality of this form of mass surveillance is questionable at best. Given the increasing scale of internet censorship, it's also possible that governments could use the data produced by these apps to profile, target, and surveil users.

But the problems raised by contact-tracing apps—decentralized or not—go much deeper than this. At the most fundamental level, it is far from clear that these apps would even be effective at performing their primary task. In order for such an app to be effective, citizens would have to be legally required to download and use it. Otherwise, an infected user could simply delete their app, and undermine the efficacy of the whole system. Giving governments the power to mandate that citizens use particular apps would be unprecedented, and extremely dangerous.

Privacy and Security

Even if a rigorous legal framework for contact tracing apps were to be developed, and even if this protected the privacy of individual users, contact tracing apps would still be dangerous. This is because, as many companies are now experiencing as they try to increase cybersecurity in remote working, the level of cybersecurity expertise among the general public is extremely low. This means that any data collected through contact tracing apps—even if it is stored locally—is vulnerable.

This point has long been known, and the existing legislation on data privacy recognizes it. Europe's GDPR—widely regarded as the gold standard when it comes to data privacy rights—explicitly mentions that data privacy cannot be achieved without data security. It's approach to solving this issue is simple: it mandates that companies cannot collect data they do not need. In other words, the safest way to stop data from being stolen is to never collect it in the first place.

In the context of contact tracing, the concern is that even if location and contact data is stored on individual smartphones—rather than in centralized systems—this is no guarantee that it will not be stolen, or that it cannot be accessed by law enforcement and government surveillance agencies. Research also indicates that even where users protect themselves, the tools they use to do so may end up undermining their privacy still further.

It might be countered, of course, that a huge variety of apps already collect geo-location data on users, and that the data collected by contact tracing apps is therefore no different from data already stored on smartphones. However, the crucial difference with this type of app is that it allows surveillance agencies to see who users have been in contact with. These data could then be used by law enforcement agencies to extract real-time information on the movements of individual citizens.

The Future

None of these issues are new. Privacy rights groups have been raising concerns about the legality of mass surveillance for more than a decade. What the pandemic has done, however, is provide an excuse for governments to justify the mass collection of geo-location data. As we’ve pointed out, there is currently no way in which these data can be collected whilst respecting users’ fundamental right to privacy. There is no legal process for mandating the use of contact tracing apps; even if there were, the poor security implemented on the average smartphone makes these data highly vulnerable to theft or legal extraction.

It is important that in re-building the world after the pandemic we learn the lessons of the present time. We should, of course, overturn the economic policy that has made us more vulnerable to COVID-19, but we should also take the opportunity to look again at the level of surveillance that our digital world has made possible, and to challenge this.

Ultimately, we need to make technology work for those who use it, and not as a tool for the kind of "surveillance capitalism" that is rapidly overtaking our society. And resisting contact-tracing apps is just the start of that fight.

Biden Takes a Knee – Media Ignore “Photo Op” Narrative

An interesting juxtaposition provides yet another example of how national media shape their narratives.  Yesterday President Trump visited St. John’s church in Washington DC. Democrats and national media immediately declared it a stunt, a “photo op”.

However, at the same time President Trump was visiting St. Johns’, candidate Joe Biden was visiting Bethel AME church in Wilmington, Delaware, and the media were very careful to avoid labeling this captured moment:

Joe Biden poses for photo op

Like the organized riots, looting and subsequent media political constructs, the Biden strategy is heavily scripted and not organic.  From the moment representative James Clyburn aligned his network with Barack Obama’s Chicago machine there has been a strategy at work.

Clyburn uses the old-fashioned racial playbook through the AME church network.  The AME network includes Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  Meanwhile Obama historically used the modern race-based network: the Nation of Islam and New Black Panther Party.  The NoI and NBPP are also allied with DNC Chairman Tom Perez.

Tom Perez was the head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division… which is not coincidental because the election of 2020 is the second time both networks have merged upon, and attempted to activate, the Black Lives Matter crowd.  The first time they merged was in Orlando and Miami during the 2012 “Justice for Trayvon” movement.

Black Lives Matter came out of the organization known as “The Dream Defenders”.  The defenders were the younger generational version of the civil rights AME network.

In 2012/2013 President Obama and Tom Perez were able to blend the Dream Defenders into an alignment with Farakahan, the Nation of Islam, and the New Black Panther Party.

As an outcome of a more bitter ideology, the Dream Defenders became more antagonistic and combative when they launched the rebranded version, ‘Black Lives Matter’.

The newly blended Black Lives Matter network had their first heavy visibility with the “Justice for Mike Brown” movement that destroyed Ferguson, Missouri.

After the Mike Brown pretense collapsed the BLM group moved to Baltimore to exploit the false narrative that surrounded the death of Freddie Gray.

Baltimore was then set ablaze with the leadership of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake who famously said it was important to give the riot crowd “space to destroy.”

While BLM was fulfilling their role as on-the-street activists, the parents of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown were making financial trips through the AME church network.

AME holds the faith-based role while advancing an older and more traditional generational approach toward racial grievance.  The BLM message targets a younger generation with guilt and influence to break windows and riots on behalf of ‘social justice’.   To achieve their common goal each group agreed to, or should I say: ‘learned to‘, stay in their lane.

When Jesse Jackson and/or Al Sharpton made independent moves toward the younger BLM activists they were ridiculed and dispatched.  Lessons were learned.  The older race hustlers now stick to the AME crowd where there is a generational respect.

♦ SLIGHTED – Despite Barack Obama leaning heavily on the AME network in ’07/’08, by the time you get to ’12/’13, without re-election needs, the AME was less valued.  The open preference for Obama toward the BLM team was visible.  After reelection in 2012 team Obama shifted toward expanding political influence through the Latino community.

Tom Perez and President Obama sought to assemble another race-based coalition with hopes they could merge Latinos (La Raza) with BLM.  However, all of this focus on BLM and the “dreamers” created a problem.  Without maintenance of the social network the AME connection to the Obama-controlled DNC started to fray.

Obama’s focus on a youth movement meant Democrats were taking AME support for granted.  Worse yet, the older AME activists gained nothing from the modern Obama coalition; ‘gaining nothing’ means financial benefits were diminished.

Without their traditional/customary indulgence fees the national AME leadership network, the racial patriarchs of the democrat party, were not happy.

The financial disappointment shows up in many visible ways throughout 2015 and 2016, but the most visible way was in September 2016 during the all black Baptist Convention in Kansas City Missouri. (see here)

There were 25,000 participants at the KC Convention and Hillary Clinton was scheduled to deliver the keynote address.  When it came time for her speech only around ten percent of the general session audience showed up.

It was the first visible sign the AME network leadership was not at all happy with the modern DNC party apparatus as constructed by the new Obama coalition.

The AME network felt slighted and they literally left Clinton with tens-of-thousands of empty seats at the convention.  CTH noticed but the media mostly ignored.  Those of you around at the time will remember the CTH position after this convention optic was the 2016 election looked solid for Donald Trump.

LESSON LEARNED – Fast forward to just before Super Tuesday 2020.  Bernie Sanders has momentum, and is about to become unstoppable.  Bernie was a threat to remove DNC leadership power the same way Trump removed RNC party power in 2016.  Party power is money; billions from the big club at stake.  Now we see why it was critical for Team Obama (BLM) and the AME team to unite quickly that Super-Tuesday weekend; which is exactly what they did.

While James Clyburn quickly notified the AME network, former President Barack Obama activated his control over the DNC network; and signaled to all other primary candidates they needed to drop out in a designed sequence.  The DNC Club made offers they could not refuse.  Remember, club rules.

James Clyburn delivered on his end (AME), and Obama delivered on his (DNC/BLM).  The rest is history.  However, within that history is also a realization that all the alignment means nothing if they don’t successfully activate the network.

That unified activation is exactly what is happening now in the U.S.

The BLM team has been reactivated back onto the streets to create the Alinsky inspired chaos.  Meanwhile the AME team openly embrace Joe and push heavily for his candidacy. As a result the optics of Joe Biden taking a knee are: heavily scripted, carefully planned and ironically very appropriate.

The media narrative now becomes “everyone must take a knee.”

Note: the DNC network always use three-word phrases: “Hope and Change”, “Take A Knee” etc.

Without the AME network Joe Biden doesn’t stand a chance.  For all intents and purposes James Clyburn is calling all the shots.   Clyburn will be the one to select the VP candidate.

The tone-deaf and arrogant lessons from Hillary in 2016 loom heavy as a stark reminder of just how important Clyburn is to Biden’s chances; and the AME network will not let the DNC forget it.

The message from James Clyburn to DNC Chairman Tom Perez is really simple: without me you would have been dealing with Bernie Sanders, and the DNC would be on the brink of disassembly…  so ‘take a knee.’

RELATED: Biden Lied in Church That Day