German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday rejected calls for Europe to pick sides between the U.S. and China, in a nod to the plea made by Chinese President Xi Jinping a day earlier.
While the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden is looking to group together democracies to contain China, Merkel was pointedly wary about the formation of factions.
“I would very much wish to avoid the building of blocs," Merkel told the Davos World Economic Forum. "I don’t think it would do justice to many societies if we were to say this is the United States and over there is China and we are grouping around either the one or the other. This is not my understanding of how things ought to be.”
Referring to Xi's speech at the same forum, Merkel said: "The Chinese president spoke yesterday, and he and I agree on that. We see a need for multilateralism."
"But there is one question where we are not in immediate agreement. Probably the question of what it means when you have different social models. When does interference begin and where does it end? When do you stand up for elementary values that are indivisible?" she said.
Merkel said she was "so satisfied" with the EU-China investment agreement, citing reciprocity, transparency on Chinese state subsidies, and the opening up of "more predictable access to ... state-of-the-art technology" in China.
She also called on the new U.S. administration led by Biden — with whom she spoke on phone on Monday — to find common ground with the EU on taxing digital companies.
https://www.politico.eu/article/merkel-sides-with-xi-on-avoiding-cold-war-blocs/
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/crt-is-sacrosanct-and-may-not-be-questioned.php?
Critical Race Theory is a poisonous, racist, anti-American set of doctrines, but we are all supposed to pretend we don’t understand that. Criticism of CRT is forbidden, or will be if the Left gets its way.
Take the case of Georgia, where a state representative has questions about the institutions that his constituents support with their taxes:
A Georgia lawmaker is trying to find out whether any of the state’s public universities are teaching about white privilege or oppression, part of a larger national debate over how colleges should teach about American history and race relations.
University System of Georgia Chancellor Steve Wrigley asked the system’s 26 colleges and universities on Jan. 21 to research the information after state Rep. Emory Dunahoo, a Gillsville Republican, submitted questions on the topic to Wrigley following budget hearings.
Some faculty members are bristling at the questions, saying they intrude into a professor’s academic freedom and are part of an effort by Republicans to impose their vision of history and social relations. Conservatives, though, say they’re fighting left-wing indoctrination by professors.
State legislatures have oversight responsibility over public institutions, but any time they try to exercise that responsibility, it is considered dirty pool. Representative Dunahoo’s questions are entirely reasonable:
1) Are any classes within the Georgia public school system or the University System of Georgia teaching students that possessing certain characteristics inherently designates them as either being “privileged” or “oppressed?”
2) Are any classes within the Georgia public school system or the University System of Georgia teaching students what constitutes “privilege” and “oppression?”
3) Are any classes within the Georgia public school system or the University System of Georgia teaching students who identify as white, male, heterosexual or Christian are intrinsically privileged and oppressive, which is defined as “malicious or unjust” and “wrong?”
Inquiring minds want to know! Specifically, Dunahoo says, his constituents.
“The request is an attack on higher education,” [English professor Matthew] Boedy said. “It perpetrates a pernicious agenda. I don’t know why a state representative who won his district by 40 points needs to throw red meat to his base, but this echoes national conservative discourse that has been laughed from the public square by historians and other experts.”
So I take it the answers to the representative’s questions are Yes, Yes and Yes. Actually, it is Critical Race Theory that deserves to be laughed out of the public square. Or, better, ridden out on a rail.
Liberals are free to be racist and anti-American, but it is hard to understand why taxpayers should be expected to support such evils. Certainly if Georgia’s university system were teaching that the Earth is flat, that the South won the Civil War, or that the Holocaust is a myth, no one would suggest that legislators’ interest is misplaced. But the Left fights tenaciously to protect its most important doctrines from scrutiny.
One common theme in the abject madness and tragedies of the past 12 months is that progressive ideology now permeates almost all of our major institutions—even as the majority of Americans resist the leftist agenda. Its reach resembles the manner in which the pre-Renaissance church had absorbed the economic, cultural, social, artistic, and political life of Europe, or perhaps how Islamic doctrine was the foundation for all public and private life under the Ottoman Sultanate—or even how all Russian institutions of the 1930s exuded tenets of Soviet Marxism.
To be a Silicon Valley executive, a prominent Wall Street player, the head of a prestigious publishing house, a university president, a network or PBS anchor, a major Hollywood actress, a retired general or admiral on a corporate board, or a NBA superstar requires either progressive fides or careful suppression of all political affinities.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 98 percent of Big Tech political donations went to Democrats in 2020. Censorship and deplatforming on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies is decidedly one-way. When Mark Zuckerberg and others in Silicon Valley donate $500 million to help officials “get out the vote” in particular precincts, it is not to help candidates of both parties.
Google calibrates the order of its search results with a progressive, not a conservative, bent. Grandees from the Clinton or Obama Administration find sinecures in Silicon Valley, not Republicans or conservatives.
The $4-5 trillion market-capitalized Big Tech cartels, run by self-described progressives, aimed to extinguish conservative brands like Parler. Ironically, they now apply ideological force multipliers to the very strategies and tactics of 19th-century robber-baron trusts and monopolies. Poor Jack Dorsey has never been able to explain why Twitter deplatforms and cancels conservatives for the same supposed uncouthness that leftists routinely employ.
Silicon Valley apparently does not believe in either the letter or the spirit of the First Amendment. It exercises a monopoly over the public airwaves, and resists regulations and antitrust legislation of the sort that liberals once championed to break up trusts in the late 19th and early 20th century. As payback, it assumes that Democrats don’t see Big Tech in the same manner that they claim to see Big Pharma in their rants against it.
Wall Street donated markedly in favor of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden in their respective presidential races. Whereas conservative administrations and congressional majorities are seen as natural supporters of free-market capitalism, their Democratic opponents, not long ago, were not—and thus drew special investor attention and support from Wall Street realists.
The insurrectionist GameStop stock debacle revealed how “liberals” on Wall Street reacted when a less connected group of investors sought to do what Wall Street grandees routinely do to others: ambush and swarm a vulnerable company’s stock in unison either to buy or sell it en masse and thus to profit from predictable, artificially huge fluctuations in the price.
When small investors at Reddit drove the pedestrian GameStop price up to well over a hundred times its worth, forcing big Wall Street investment companies to lose billions of dollars, progressives on Wall Street and the business media cried foul. They compared the Reddit buyers to the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6.
One subtext was: Why would nobodies dare question the mega-profit making monopolies of the Wall Street establishments? The point that neither the Reddit day-traders nor the hedge-fund connivers were necessarily healthy for investment was completely lost.
Surveys of “diverse” university faculty show overwhelming left-wing support, reified by asymmetrical contributions of 95-1 to Democratic candidates. The dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. to make race incidental to our characters no longer exists on campuses. Appearance is now essential. More ironic, class considerations are mostly ignored in favor of identity politics. “Equity” applies to race not class. The general education curricula is one-sided and mostly focused on deductive -studies courses, and in particular race/class/gender zealotry that is anti-Enlightenment in the sense that predetermined conclusions are established and selected evidence is assembled to prove them.
We are also currently witnessing the greatest assault on free speech and expression, and due process, in the last 70 years. And the challenges to the First and Fifth Amendments are centered on college campuses, where non-progressive speakers are disinvited, shouted down, and occasionally roughed up for their supposedly reactionary views—and by those who have little fear of punishment.
Students charged with “sexual harassment” or “assault” are routinely denied the right to face their accusers, cross examine witnesses, or bring in counterevidence. They usually find redress for their suspensions or expulsions only in the courts. What was thematic in the Duke Lacrosse fiasco and the University of Virginia sorority rape hoax was the absence of any real individual punishment for those who promulgated the myths.
Indeed in these cases many argued that false allegations in effect were not so important in comparison to bringing attention to supposedly systemic racism and sexism. In Jussie Smollett fashion, what did not happen at least drew attention to what could have happened and thus was valuable. It was as if those who did not commit any actual crime had still committed a thought crime.
Almost all media surveys of the last four years reflect a clear journalistic bias against conservatives in general. Harvard’s liberal Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy famously reported slanted coverage against Trump and his supporters among major television and news outlets at near astronomical rates, in some cases exhibiting over 90 percent negative bias during Trump’s first few months in office. Liberal editors can now be routinely fired or forced to retire from major progressives newspapers if they are not seen as sufficiently woke.
No major journalist or reporter has been reprimanded for promoting the fictional “Russian collusion” hoax—and certainly not in the manner the media has called for punishment, backlisting, and deplatforming for any who championed “stop the steal” protests over the November 2020 elections. The CNN Newsroom put their hands up and chanted “hands up, don’t shoot”—a myth surrounding the Michael Brown Ferguson shooting that was thoroughly refuted. Infamous now is the CNN reporter’s characterization of arsonist flames shooting up in the background of a BLM/Antifa riot as a “largely peaceful” demonstration. BLM, of course, has been nominated for a Nobel “Peace” Prize. After the summer rioting, one could better cite Tacitus’s Calgacus, “Where they make a desert, they call it peace”.
A George W. Bush or Donald Trump press conference was often a free-for-all, blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy. A Barack Obama or Joe Biden version devolves into banalities about pets, fashion, and food. The fusion media credo is why embarrass a progressive government and thus put millions and the planet itself at risk?
Andrew Cuomo’s policies of sending COVID-19 patients into rest homes led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Still, the media gave him an Emmy award for his self-inflated and bombastic press conferences, many of which were little more than unhinged rants against the Trump Administration. Anthony Fauci’s initial pronouncements about the origins of the COVID-19 virus, its risks and severity, travel bans, masks, herd immunity, vaccination rollout dates—and almost everything about the pandemic—were wildly off. Yet he was canonized by the media due to his wink-and-nod assurances that he was the medical adult in the Trump Administration room.
It would be difficult for a prominently conservative actor or actress to win an Oscar these days, or to produce a major conservative-themed film. Bankable actors/directors/producers like Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson operate as mavericks, whose films’ huge profits win them some exemption. But they came into prominence and power 30 years ago during a different age. And they will likely have no immediate successors.
Ars gratis doctrinae is the new Hollywood and it will continue until it bottoms out in financial nihilism. When such ideological spasms contort a society, the second-rate emerge most prominently as the loudest accusers of the Salem Witches—as if correct zeal can reboot careers stalled in mediocrity. Hollywood’s mediocre celebrities from Alec Baldwin to Noah Cyrus have sought attention for their careers by voicing sensational racist, homophobic, and misogynist slurs—on the correct assumption their attention-grabbing left-wing fides prevents career cancellation.
Hollywood, we learn, has been selecting some actors on the basis of lighter skin color to accommodate racist Beijing’s demands to distribute widely their films in the enormous Chinese market. Yet note well that Hollywood has recently created racial quotas for particular Oscar categories, even as it reverses its racial obsessions to punish rather than empower people of color on the prompt of Chinese paymasters.
Ditto the political warping in professional sports. Endorsements, media face time, and cultural resonance often hinge on athletes either being woke—or entirely politically somnolent. A few stars may exist as known conservatives, but again they are the rare exceptions. For most athletes, it is wisest to keep mum and either support, condone, or ignore the Black Lives Matter rituals of taking a knee, not standing for the flag, or ritually denouncing conservative politicians. Those who are offended and turn the channel can be replaced by far more new viewers in China, who appreciate such criticism directed at the proper target.
Again, what is common to all the tentacles of this progressive octopus is illiberalism. Of course, progressivism, dating back to late 19th-century advocacy for “updating” the Constitution, always smiled upon authoritarianism. It promoted the “science” of eugenics and forced race-based sterilization, and the messianic idea that enlightened elites can use the increased powers of government to manage better the personal lives of its subjects (enslaved to religious dogma or mired in ignorance), according to supposed pure reason and humanistic intent.
Many progressives professed early admiration for the supposed efficiency of Benito Mussolini’s public works programs spurred on by his Depression-era fascism, and his enlistment of a self-described expert class to implement by fiat what was necessary for “progress.”
Even contemporary progressives have voiced admiration for the communist Chinese ability to override “obstructionists” to create mass transit, high-density urban living, and solar power. Early on in the pandemic Bill Gates defended China’s conduct surrounding the COVID-19 disaster. Suggesting the virus did not originate in a “wet” market was “conspiratorial”; travel bans were “racist” and “xenophobic.” In contrast, had SARS-CoV-2 possibly escaped by accident from a Russian lab, in our hysterias we might have been on the brink of war.
So it is understandable that progressivism can end up as an enemy of the First Amendment and intellectual diversity to bulldoze impediments to needed progress. To save us, sometimes leftists must become advocates of monopolies and cartels, of censorship, or of the militarization of our capital.
The new Left sorts, rewards, and punishes people by their race. And some progressives are the most likely appeasers of a racist and authoritarian Chinese government and advocates of Trotskyizing our past through iconoclasm, erasing, renaming, and cancelling out. San Francisco’s school board recently voted to rename over 40 schools, largely due to the pressure of a few poorly educated teachers who claimed on the basis of half-baked Wikipedia research that icons such as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Washington were unfit for such recognition.
There are various explanations for unprogressive progressivism. None are necessarily mutually exclusive. Much of the latest totalitarianism is simple hula-hoop groupthink, a fad, or even a wise career move. Loud progressivism has become for some professionals, an insurance policy—or perhaps a deterrent high wall to ensure the mob bypasses one for easier prey elsewhere. Were Hunter Biden and his family grifting cartel not loud liberals and connected to Joe Biden, they all might have ended up like Jack Abramoff.
More commonly, progressivism offers the elite, the rich, and the well-connected Medieval penance, a vicarious way to alleviate their transitory guilt over privilege such as a $20,000 ice cream freezer or a carbon-spewing Gulfstream by abstract self-indictment of the very system that they have mastered so well.
Progressives also believe in natural hierarchies. They see themselves as an elite certified by their degrees, their resumes, and their correct ideologies, our version of Platonic Guardians, practitioners of the “noble lie” to do us good. In its condescending modern form, the creed is devoted to expanding the administrative state, and the expert class that runs it, and revolves in and out from its government hierarchies to privileged counterparts in the corporate and academic world.
Progressivism patronizes the poor and champions them at a distance, but despises the middle class, the traditionally hated bourgeoise without the romance of the distant impoverished or the taste and culture of the rich. The venom explains the wide array of epithets that Obama, Clinton, and Biden have so casually employed—clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, dregs, ugly folk, chumps, and so on. “Occupy Wall Street” was prepped by the media as a romance. The Tea Party was derided as Klan-like. The rioters who stormed the Capitol were rightly dubbed lawbreakers; those who besieged and torched a Minneapolis federal courthouse were romanticized or contextualized.
Abstract humanitarian progressives assume that their superior intelligence and training properly should exempt them from the bothersome ramifications of their own ideologies. They promote high taxes and mock material indulgences. But some have made a science out of tax evasion and embrace the tasteful good life and its material attractions. They prefer private schooling and Ivy League education for their offspring, while opposing charter schools for others.
There is no dichotomy in insisting on more race-based admissions and yet calling a dean or provost to help leverage a now tougher admission for one’s gifted daughter. Sometimes the liberal Hollywood celebrity effort to get offspring stamped with the proper university credentials becomes felonious. Walls are retrograde but can be tastefully integrated into a gated estate. They like static class differences and likely resent the middle class for its supposedly grasping effort to become rich—like themselves.
The working classes can always make solar panels, the billionaire John Kerry tells those thousands whom his boss had just thrown out of work by the cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline. It is as if the Yale man was back to the old days when the multimillionaire and promoter of higher taxes moved his yacht to avoid sales and excise taxes and lectured JC students, “You study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”
There is no such thing as “dark” money or the pernicious role of cash in warping politics when Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg, both through direct donations and through various PACs and foundations—channeled nearly $1 billion to left-wing candidates, activists, and political groups throughout the 2020 campaign year.
In sum, the new tribal progressivism is the career ideology foremost of the wealthy and elite—a truth that many skeptical poor and middle-class minorities are now so often pilloried for pointing out. Progressives have adopted identity politics and rejected class considerations, largely because solidarity with elite minorities of similar tastes and politics excuses them from any concrete concern for, or experience with, the middle classes of all races. The Left finally proved right in its boilerplate warning that the “plutocracy” and the “special interests” run America: “If you can’t beat them, outdo them.”
Self-righteous progressives believe they put up with and suffer on behalf of us—and thus their irrational fury and hate for the irredeemables and conservative minorities springs from being utterly unappreciated by clueless serfs who should properly worship their betters.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/a-tsunami-of-hate.php?
Our friend David Horowitz makes the case that our present political crisis is not the result of polarized views on policy, but rather is caused by the Left’s outpouring of vicious hate and determination to crush all opposition.
Everybody agrees that our country is in crisis – and agrees that it is the worst crisis since the Civil War. But at the same time, we tell ourselves a comforting tale about the source of the crisis that perpetuates the problem instead of providing a path to ending it. We say our politics are “divisive” and talk about “unity and healing” as though that would miraculously be achieved if everybody stopped … what? Disagreeing? All politics is divisive. That’s the healthy basis of our constitutional order: the freedom to disagree. To suppress disagreement, to outlaw it – as many Democrats and their Big Tech and media allies – are demanding these days, is to end democracy as we know it.
The problem is not that we disagree. We are not suffering as a nation from healthy disagreement. We are suffering from a Tsunami of Hate emanating from the Democrat Party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent from the 75 million supporters of Donald Trump. It is now official Washington dogma that to question an election result – something the congressional Democrats have done in the face of every Republican presidential victory since 2000 – is now “insurrection” and “domestic terrorism,” or the incitement thereto, and needs to be prosecuted and suppressed.
You can’t have a democracy if this is the attitude of a party that controls all three branches of government, is enabled by a corrupt and compliant media, and is determined not just to defeat, but to humiliate, destroy and expunge from the record an ex-president who is supported by a greater segment of the American electorate than any American leader before him.
There is Democrat-sponsored legislation pending that would prevent any public building or artifact, even a “bench” from being named after the 45th president of the United States. There is a farcical witch-trial to impeach the same villain even though he has left office and is now a private citizen. There is even Democrat talk of stripping Trump of his pension, despite the fact that he gave his entire $1.6 million salary as president to the American people – something no president before him has done. If ever there was a public lynching, short of stringing the victim from the nearest tree – and there are no lack of leftwing calls for that – the Democrats’ unrelentingly vindictive assault on the defeated Donald Trump down to the last petty detail is it.
But what is in effect a total war is not merely a war to cancel Donald Trump. If it were, it would be reprehensible enough, but not a threat to the nation itself. This demonic hate directed by the Democrat Party towards Trump is also hate for the 75 million Americans who voted for him. And there is no shortage of reminders of that. Ordinary Americans in all walks of life who happen to think that Trump’s presidency – which included record employment and record economic growth, delivered benefits for all Americans, particularly American minorities, secured America’s borders, defeated America’s terrorist enemies and led to an unprecedented reconciliation between Arab nations and the State of Israel – Americans who think this is a worthy achievement are treated as social pariahs, have their careers destroyed and (shades of the Kremlin) are regarded as mentally unfit and in need of deprogramming.
In a March 2020 interview with Axios James Clyburn – the third ranking Democrat in the House and the political figure most responsible for Biden’s primary victory – raised the specter of Hitler when speaking about Trump, calling the president a racist and likening modern-day America to Germany during the Nazi Party’s rise to power. “I used to wonder how could the people of Germany allow Hitler to exist,” said Clyburn. “But with each passing day, I’m beginning to understand how. And that’s why I’m trying to sound the alarm.”
A Tsunami of Hate – not “divisiveness” – is the root cause of our political crisis and the most existential threat we have faced since the war to end slavery.
The fact that the threat posed by the Democrats’ Tsunami of Hate is not just to Trump and his supporters, but to America itself, was evident in one of Biden’s first directives as president, declaring that a war on America’s “systemic racism” would be a priority of his administration: “The fact is systemic racism touches every facet of American life.”
This is one of the Big Lies that have become articles of faith for Democrats, and is easily refuted. The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed “systemic racism.” Here is the Wikipedia description of the law:
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub. L. 88–352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations…
If systemic racism or institutional racism were a serious problem in America – let alone touched “every facet of American life,” – as Biden says, what do you think would happen? Assume, as Biden and woke Democrats generally seem to think, that all white people are racists, there are thousands of black attorneys, attorneys general, prosecutors, judges, legislators and occupiers of the highest seats of government. If there was a scintilla of truth in this statement there would be thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lawsuits filed under the Civil Rights Act. But there are no such lawsuits. The claim that “systemic racism touches every facet of American life” is itself a racist lie, whose evident target is white people, since according to the woke, “people of color” can’t be racist.
Not surprisingly, one of Biden’s first week initiatives was a systemically racist plan to provide financial assistance to small businesses whose owners were black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American. Only whites were excluded. But Asian Americans as an ethnic group have higher incomes than white Americans. So what rationale for this policy is there but anti-white racism?
How virulent is the anti-white and anti-American racism of the Democrat Party? Consider this unhinged but also unchallenged statement by Vice President Kamala Harris defending the Black Lives Matters rioters whose “protests” caused billions in property damage, led to 25 deaths and injured 2000 police officers in the summer of 2020: “The reality is that the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human… It’s no wonder people are taking to the streets [to protest]. And I support them.”
In other words, the 44th president of the United States, the “most admired man in America” for over a decade wasn’t treated as “fully human,” or Martin Luther King – the only American with a national holiday in his honor (courtesy of President Ronald Reagan). This lunatic hatred of white America is now not only acceptable in the Democrat Party but the hateful creed of its leaders.
To be fair, there are two main areas of systemic racism in America today, but both are supported and enforced by the Democrat Party, which is why they exist. The first is the systemic racism that traps inner city children – mainly ethnic minorities – in inferior schools that for fifty years and more have failed to provide 80 percent of them with the skills that are necessary to succeed. Every year 40% of inner city children drop out of school without graduating, and 40% of those who do, are functionally illiterate. The Democrat teacher unions – the same which went on strike during the pandemic with full pay at the expense of children who could not afford to miss school – exert absolute control over these school systems and have stifled all attempts at reforms. They are unalterably opposed to every alternative to their racist policies, from charter schools to vouchers that give inner city kids the same privilege as their middle-class counterparts, to allow their parents to enroll them in schools that will teach them.
The other nationwide systemic racism is affirmative action programs which discriminate against all ethnic groups but those designated “oppressed” – a convenient leftist fiction used to justify all manner of injustice. If you’re black or Pacific Islander or Hispanic, go to the head of the line for a job, a promotion, a place at Harvard, a coveted training position to become a surgeon or other medical specialist. If you’re white or an ethnic minority whose community supports educational values and scores well on exams, like Asians, forget that place at Harvard, you’re screwed.
How racist is that? And how readily is this racism supported by a president and an administration, which like our most dedicated foreign enemies thinks America is a nation of slavers and racist oppressors, while at the same time our borders are under siege by black, brown and Asian minorities desperate to become citizens of the most tolerant, inclusive and egalitarian society on earth.
America will not be healed until the Democrat Party returns to its senses, repudiates its current racist attitudes, and stops demonizing its opponents as what Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called “enemies of the state.”
Congressman Devin Nunes and former lead HPSCI Investigator Kash Patel appear with Maria Bartiromo to discuss the light sentence handed-down by FISA Presiding Judge James Boasberg for FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.
Clinesmith plead guilty to doctoring an email to make the FISA application against Carter Page and the Trump administration appear valid. Clinesmith lied to create a fraudulent FISA application and the Judge said he had suffered enough. Nuts, all of it.
In an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, a civil-liberties legal group contends lower-court rulings in a Rhode Island case have set a dangerous precedent that allows police officers in some instances to enter the homes of citizens without a warrant and confiscate legal firearms.
The Rutherford Institute, in a friend-of-the-court brief in the case of Caniglia v. Strom, asserts the lower courts wrongly invoked the "community caretaking" exemption in the Fourth Amendment.
"This case represents a blatant attempt by law enforcement to create gaping holes in the Fourth Amendment force field that is supposed to protect homeowners and their homes against warrantless invasions by the government," said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute.
"What we do not need is yet another slippery slope argument that allows government officials to masquerade as community caretakers under the pretext of public health and safety in order to violate the Fourth Amendment at will."
In 2105, Kim Caniglia of Cranston, Rhode Island, called police for a welfare check on her husband Edward, 68, after they had argued the night before and she hadn't heard from him the next morning. Rutherford said that during the argument, Edward retrieved his unloaded handgun, slammed it on a table dramatically and told Kim, 'Why don’t you just shoot me and get me out of my misery?"
Police contacted Edward and he was mostly calm and told them he wouldn't commit suicide. He explained he made the comment out of frustration during the heat of an argument. Then, despite his response, police took him into custody and confined him in a psychiatric hospital.
"While Edward was at the hospital, police entered his home and seized his handguns, despite having promised not to do so," the institute said.
Edward Caniglia later sued the police for their warrantless entry and confiscation of his lawfully owned firearms, which he contends violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
However, the lower courts ruled in favor of the police, who claimed their seizure of the weapons was within the Fourth Amendment's "community caretaking" exception, which typically has been limited to searching vehicles during traffic stops.
If the precedent stands, the institute argued in its brief to the Supreme Court, police would be allowed to "enter a home without a warrant and seize lawfully possessed firearms."
The institute explained: "The warrantless searches and seizures to which American colonists had been subjected under English rule were among the driving forces behind enactment of the Bill of Rights in general and the Fourth Amendment in particular. Both as drafted and as applied by the court, the Fourth Amendment clearly creates a reasonable expectation of privacy in the home. The sacrosanct nature of the home is such that the circumstances under which warrantless home searches are permitted are few and far between.
"That explains why one of the few exceptions to the warrant requirement that the court has previously recognized – the so-called 'community caretaking exception – is expressly limited in scope to vehicles, where the reasonable expectation of privacy is much narrower."
However, if permitted to stand, "this application of the exception will swallow the rule."
The brief asks the Supreme Court to "not create a new exception that would permit the warrantless entry at issue here."
Further, if homes are no longer protected, then "every building or structure is threatened, no matter its location or status, as are its contents."
Rutherford noted Kim Caniglia said her concern was that she might find her husband "hanging from the rafters."
According to the rationale of police in the case, the institute argued, officers could have used that statement to justify seizing all of the rope or other cordage in the house and garage.
https://www.wnd.com/2021/01/courts-allow-police-seize-guns-home-without-warrant/
This week saw massive and inspirational direct action against the financial arm of the Globalist American Empire. Users of the r/wallstreetbets subreddit forced parasitic hedge fund speculators to the brink of insolvency by purchasing GameStock, AMC, and other short sold stocks. Amidst the righteous revolt against globalist finance, the financial freedom fighters have found an unexpected champion: millionaire media mogul Dave Portnoy, founder of the comedy and entertainment website Bartsool Sports.
On Thursday, Portnoy took to Twitter to call for the arrest of Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev and hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, after the popular retail trading app banned users from buying stocks being short sold by Cohen’s fund. He also used Twitter to engage in a back and fourth with Cohen himself:
He capped off the night with appearance on Tucker Carlson:
Portnoy’s courageous act of class treason should not come as a total shock though. Portnoy has a long history of sticking his finger in the eyes of our current elites. In the modern media atmosphere where every outlet is dominated by regime propaganda, his Barstool Sports website has been an oasis of decidedly non-woke entertainment. A 2019 profile by NBC News described the site as an example of “the persistence of traditional masculinity in sports culture”. While that may sound like a good thing to a normal person, NBC intended it as an insult.
Conservative ideology appears to be a core part of Barstool Sports — especially its portrayal of gender roles, with hypermasculine, sports-loving men and hypersexualized, submissive women. The site’s reinforcement of conservative American values is what makes its content stand out from its competitors, Marie Hardin, the dean of Penn State’s Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, said.“In many ways, Barstool has resisted some of the more progressive discourse around sports. And I think there’s a niche for that,” she said. “There’s a market there and they’re able to capture that.” [NBC News]
Dave Portnoy founded Barstool Sports in 2003 as a publication covering Boston area local events. The website has since expanded into a multimedia hub for general pop culture and sports news and is currently valued at approximately half a billion dollars.
Portnoy’s persona is in many ways similar to that of former President Trump. Like Trump, Portnoy is a successful businessman with politically incorrect views who is constantly attacked by the mainstream media for being “racist” and “vulgar”. Also like Donald Trump, Portnoy has proven hard to cancel.
In June of 2020, leftist activists tried to get Portnoy fired from his own company by circulating old videos where he made humorous comments about the appearance of unemployed quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Unlike others who have found themselves in similar positions, Portnoy shot back, “They’ve been trying to cancel me for two decades — I’m uncancellable,” he said in a Twitter video. “I’m big. You’re little. I cancel you.”
A month later, Portnoy was in the media crosshairs again, this time for having the audacity to interview the sitting President of the United States.
Some of the less masculine employees of Barstool Sports even gave interviews to the press attacking their boss for his decision to talk to Trump. Portnoy refused to apologize though, and the storm passed. To this day, he continues to maintain creative control over the company he founded almost 20 years ago.
More recently, he announced announced the creation of The Barstool Fund, a fund to help small businesses that are at risk of going under due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. From the Evansville Courier & Press:
Whether you love Barstool Sports or hate it, there’s no denying Barstool founder Dave Portnoy is putting his brand name to work lately in helping small businesses through their pandemic-related struggles.
The “Barstool Fund,” as Portnoy calls it, started as a $500,000 fund on Dec. 17 and has raised $9.6 million in just 12 days. Funds have been distributed to 42 small businesses across the country — and counting. [Courier & Press]
This video of Sieberts Clothing in Jasper, Indiana receiving relief from the Barstool Fund will warm anyone’s heart.
Following Joe Biden’s installation as president, electoral politics seems an increasingly futile effort for opponents of the Globalist American Empire. Acts of system collapsing collective action in this context seem to be a far more worthy expression of political energy than turning yet again to electoral charade and vowing for the ten thousandth time to “get em in the primary.”
No potential strategy must be left on the table though. Dave Portnoy has proven to be a consistent champion of normal, average Americans. Could he be a potential successor to Donald Trump as leader of the patriotic conservative resistance? Wallstreetbets’ financial guerilla warfare combined with Dave Portnoy’s media advocacy show us a potential path forward in these bleak times.
For an easy laugh at a party, pull out a Nokia candy-bar phone. “What is that…a phone?” “Does it actually work?” “Oh! Do you have to hit buttons three times and stuff?” “Can you get Facebook on it?” And so forth. Then, follow up with examples of the pitfalls of smartphone ‘privacy.’ Reliably observe nods of agreement and disturbed faces. Generally, people know how their lives are invasively monitored, their most intimate details packaged and sold as a commodity on markets they have little to no control over. Fatalistic shrugs of ‘what can you do’ and declarations of ‘I can’t live without my phone’ ensue.
Perhaps it is a fair trade. Detailed personal profiles are exchanged for handheld convenience along with dogged artificial intelligence analyzing what product or service will successfully secure our money — or even our loyalty. Brand loyalty is a highly-prized substance as franchise owners around the world attest. Other forms of allegiance are also highly-prized. Consider if your private personal details, even intimate psychological profiles, are instead exploited for coercion to an ideology.
Behold the technological behemoths Apple, Google and Amazon flexing their monopolistic powers fatally crippling a competitive forum for public discourse in the form of a plucky app called Parler. The leader of the most powerful nation on Earth was summarily ejected by Twitter, et al. — with no accountability and no recourse — severing communications with millions of followers. Leaders of the world express dismay at the brazen display. The corporate technological overlords claim the moral high ground.
In 2016, Apple defied federal investigators' requests for ‘back door’ access to a dead terrorist’s iPhone. Apple’s flapping flag on Public Relations Hill was roundly praised by privacy advocates and civil libertarians. Yet Apple’s flag meekly bowed to the Chinese Communist Party, denying Hong Kong protestors safety of virtual private networks, or exposing overseas Chinese citizen’s data to CCP inspection, or cutting off access to news and information beyond the Great Firewall. Apple’s obedience to Beijing is joined by none other than the sanctimonious Google and Amazon, whose hypocrisy facilitates the genocide of the Uighurs.
Politicians and partisans in the U.S. called for the social media ban of the President and the corporations finally complied. Employees of the very same corporations are joining the government, the very same employees that approve of Parler’s crippling, and that overwhelmingly financially support one political party. Some journalists perpetuate the blissful irony, praising censorship of the President but fretting over exertion of such monopolistic powers. Others pithily observe the handwriting on the wall:
“The new corporate authoritarian liberal-left monoculture is going to be absolutely ruthless — and in 12 days it is merging with the state.” Michael Tracey, 9 Jan 2020.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure for a monstrous surveillance state glows in commodified hands. Portrayed by the leftist New Republic as another tendril of the ‘military-industrial complex,’ shadowy data tracking companies such as Factual identify not only app usage patterns, but physical locations for profiling consumer behavior. They state on their website that U.S. users may ‘opt-out’ of data collection, but nevertheless they will “continue to collect, use, and transfer mobile app data for purposes other than interest-based advertising or ad delivery/reporting.” Expect commandeering of this data for political policing of compliance with the authoritarian liberal-left monoculture. Soon, even emotional responses and the technology to manipulate them will enable ensuring fervid belief in Big-Tech Benevolence.
Brace for a Ministry of Information amassing in warehouses of whirring servers detailed profiles of not just purchasing history, but locations, associations…politics. Imagine the delirious delight of, say, the East German Stasi marvelling at their targets willingly revealing their daily whereabouts and rendezvous, obviating clumsy radioactive tagging techniques. Surreptitious meetings of desperate dissidents will be naked to the Eye of the State all thanks to the insidious trade of convenience for lack of privacy. Law enforcement and the military already map cell-users’ relationships — even if the phone is not ‘smart.’
The authoritarian liberal-left monoculture has crossed the Rubicon. Behold the Progressive Praetorian Guard — all carefully vetted for loyalty — and their Potemkin Village President now seated in power, whose pitiful popularity is quietly disguised. Do not be fooled: the barbed wire and boots are a threat to those who dare dissent. The smearing of Trump supporters as ‘terrorists’ is justification for a new Secret Police, while Democrats demand wholesale purges from government, evoking the words and associations forbidden by other paranoid Parties. Merely questioning the Biden ascendance to power is ‘sedition,' ignoring the insidious hand of Big-Tech tilting the scales.
This is only the beginning as the CEO of Twitter brazenly declared to his employees as to how ‘it’ will go on far beyond the inauguration. Blacklisting and banning for the monoculture is apparently not enough. The anti-social justice Michael Recetenwald observed: “the means by which a police state is being set up is the demonization of Trump supporters and the likely use of medical passports to institute the effective equivalent of social credit scores.”
The buttons on my venerable Nokia are regrettably failing. After years of service, and several-days-long battery life, sending texts now demands insistent and frustrated pressing. Alternatives in the smartphone ecosphere provide some escape from the duopoly of iOS and Android, but rarely come to fruition. Classic Nokia designs are making a comeback, however; it seems cell-phone simplicity has a wider appeal than my amused smartphone-toting friends think. The giggles at parties still come easy, and the disturbed looks and shrugs still ensue. Cue next slaps on the shoulder and suggestions that I’m simply being paranoid.
