Friday, June 18, 2021

If Biden Wants to Paint Trump Supporters as 'Domestic Terrorists,' Ich Bin Ein Inländischer Terroristischen

In the early 1960s, Soviet-controlled East Germany was hemorrhaging people to the West, as Germans fled the Communists and the Stasi (the East German secret police). Berlin was located in East Germany but was partitioned after World War II into four sectors: a Soviet sector, and three sectors controlled by the Americans, British, and French. The blue districts in the below figure (those controlled by the Americans, the British, and the French) became “West Berlin,” while the red districts were called “East Berlin”:

SOURCE: http://western-allies-berlin.com/maps/sectors/sectors

Beginning on 12 August 1961, the Soviets built the Berlin Wall to prevent East Germans from fleeing to the western-controlled sectors of Berlin – the dotted line in the above figure consisting of barbed wire, concrete barriers, tank traps, and checkpoints. Checkpoints were crossing points between the Soviet and Allied sectors, the most famous being “Checkpoint Charlie,” which was featured in James Bond and other Cold War movies of the era:

Charlie was notable for its location on Friedrichstrasse, a historic street in the American-occupied city center. Even more important was that it was the only gateway where East Germany allowed Allied diplomats, military personnel and foreign tourists to pass into Berlin’s Soviet sector. In response, the United States, France and Britain stationed military police at Checkpoint Charlie to ensure their officials had ready access to the border.
Checkpoint Charlie played a supporting role in one of the most famous prisoner exchanges of the Cold War. The main swap took place at the nearby Glienicke Bridge, where captured American U-2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers was traded for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet who had been arrested in New York and convicted of espionage.

The construction of the Berlin Wall was just the latest Soviet attempt to intimidate the Allies during the Cold War. One of the first major confrontations precipitated the Berlin airlift:

On June 24, 1948, Soviet forces blockaded all road, rail and water routes into Berlin’s Allied-controlled areas, stifling the vital flow of food, coal and other supplies. Soviet troop numbers dwarfed those of the Allies, which had drawn down after the war, so there was little the Allies could do about it militarily.
But the Soviets couldn’t block Allied airspace, so U.S. and UK forces took to the skies to get supplies to the Allied sectors. On June 26, the U.S. launched Operation Vittles, which the U.K. later joined. It was the biggest aerial resupply mission ever embarked upon. The Allies also imposed their own counter-blockade, restricting trade with East Germany and East Berlin.

The Soviets lifted the blockade nearly a year later on 11 May 1949 after the Allies had “delivered more than 2.3 million tons of food, fuel, and supplies to West Berlin via more than 278,000 airdrops.”

On 26 June 1963, the fifteenth anniversary of the initiation of the Berlin airlift, US President John F. Kennedy made a visit to Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate at the Wall to deliver an address to the people of West Berlin, “celebrating the city as a symbol of freedom and democracy in its resistance to tyranny and oppression.” In his speech at the Wall, he included these words:

“Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was ‘Civis Romanus sum. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’ ”

This phrase electrified the world and put the Soviets on notice that he stood firmly in solidarity with the people of West Berlin. Silent colorized parts of his visit and speech are shown in this short video.

Fast forward to today. Since 20 January 2021, the Hologram’s administration has been moving inexorably to curtail the freedoms and liberties of Trump supporters and American patriots in ways that are eerily similar to the pressures exerted by the Soviets on the Allies and German people after World War II:

Just one day after the 6 January occupation of Capitol Hill by rioters, The Hologram himself declared those people to be “domestic terrorists” prior to the completion of any investigation into the matter and set the tone for the persecution that was to come:

On his very first day in office, The Hologram “directed his national security team to lead a 100-day comprehensive review of U.S. Government efforts to address domestic terrorism.”
The 6 January riot at the Capitol was labeled by the Democrat-media complex as an “armed insurrection” despite the FBI’s eventual admission that no guns were found among the protestors.
The Democrat-controlled House rushed to impeach President Trump for “inciting the 6 January insurrection” (thankfully, cooler heads prevailed in the US Senate).
DOJ and the FBI launched one of the “largest investigations in American history” to examine the events of 6 January. Some of 6 January rioters have been incarcerated in the equivalent of solitary confinement while awaiting charges and disposition of their cases. These unfortunate people are uniformly labeled as “domestic terrorists” by leftists on social media.
A purge of “white nationalists and white supremacists” is underway in the US military. The definitions are elastic.
A Stasi-like committee has been formed in DoD to “investigate” extremist infiltration of the military. Surely the new deputy inspector general for Diversity and Inclusion and Extremism in the Military (DIEM) will be objective in investigating extremism and include BLM and Antifa in their definition? I think not, given that the investigating committee is comprised of left-wing activists and anti-American extremists.
On Tuesday the White House “released a report that designates the Jan. 6 Capitol riot a ‘domestic terrorist attack’ and endorses an internet purge of ‘extremist’ content.”

That new report is the culmination of Democrat political efforts to brand Trump supporters as extremists and domestic terrorists, and this paragraph from the White House “fact sheet” (sic) tells it all (emphasis added):

The review was rooted in an expert assessment of the domestic terrorism threat provided by the intelligence and law enforcement communities. An unclassified summary of that assessment was released in March so the public could see the key findings. It found that the two most lethal elements of today’s domestic terrorism threat are (1) racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists who advocate for the superiority of the white race and (2) anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists, such as militia violent extremists.

This is nothing more than Democrat politics taken to their extreme by the equivalent of “experts” who are Stasi wannabes! Anyone objective American with a brain knows that the real domestic terrorists are Antifa and the Black Lives Matter brownshirts after watching a year’s worth of videos of destruction perpetrated by these criminals in American cities (to the tune of over $2 billion worth of damage!). Yet, not a single word is mentioned of those real domestic terrorists in that White House announcement.

If anything, the Democrats are projecting the sins of their foot soldiers in Antifa and BLM onto their political enemies (us). The Democrats’ political objective is ultimately to designate any Trump supporter as a “domestic terrorist” and then turn the force of government against them/us in order to suppress their/our political speech (and thereby preclude a return to the Oval Office by Donald J. Trump).

Here is how Tucker Carlson describes that memo and their intentions:

“Because of January 6, says the chief law enforcement officer in the United States of America and many other members of Joe Biden’s cabinet, we must now use law enforcement and military force to arrest, imprison, and otherwise crush anyone who leads opposition to Joe Biden’s government. That’s their position. They say that out loud. They did today.”

Sorry, Democrats. I stand firm with the Trump supporters who attended the 6 Jan. rally and did not enter the Capitol and were simply exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to political speech, as well as their support for President Trump. That the Democrats are doing their utmost to paint them/us all with the broad brush of being “domestic terrorists” is analogous to the Stasi condemning East Germans trying to escape to the freedoms and liberty in the West in the 1950s and 1960s as being “criminals” and “enemies of the Communist state.” I will gladly characterize myself as an “enemy of the Democrat/Communist state” that the Hologram and his minions are implementing, as well as a celebrator of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights that they hate!

And by their perverted definition of the phrase “domestic terrorist,” and in memory of JFK’s memorable speech 58 years ago this month, I will gladly state that “Ich bin ein inländischer terroristischen”!

ATF Nominee David Chipman’s Record Shows He Despises Americans And The Constitution

We are confronted with the likelihood that President Biden’s

nominee for the ATF will root his decisions in

distaste for Americans, not policies

framed by the Constitution.

by Wade Miller & Phil Reboli for The Federalist

Most federal nominees receive rote consideration in the Senate. If the president is of the same party as the Senate majority, nominees are generally easily confirmed.

Only a few nominees ever run into any procedural hurdles. The exception to this rule is, and should be, David Chipman, the current nominee for director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). To understand why, let’s do a quick recap of some pertinent data points.

Self-Defense Is Still an American Keystone

There are tens of millions of AR-15-style rifles in America, amid more than 320 million privately owned firearms. That’s one firearm per person.

Nearly 20 million Americans have a permit to conceal and carry a firearm, a 304 percent increase since 2007. This does not include the 20 constitutional carry states that do not require a permit to carry a firearm. With more firearms in circulation, violent crime has on average gone down.

Firearms are an important part of the American culture. We can use them recreationally; millions of Americans do it daily. But firearms also serve a more important function as personal protection from violent criminals, and, yes, in the extreme, government agents.

After all, the entire point of the Second Amendment is to ensure that individuals have access to private arms in case the people must, after all other recourses have been exhausted, act as a physical check on abusive foreign or domestic powers, including our own domestic government (see: 1776). For the hand-wringers who proclaim that simple rifles are no match for tanks and jets, the last time I checked, the Taliban still controls wide swaths of territory in Afghanistan after 20 years of U.S. military action there.

Clearly, rifles play an important role in our society to ensure human liberty for generations to come. The Founders of this country made sure to codify what the people at large already nearly unanimously acknowledged: the right to keep and bear arms for self-protection is an inalienable right, and no power existed nor was granted to government to infringe on these basic fundamental rights.

This Is the Problem with David Chipman

It is against this background that Chipman’s nomination has naturally become so divisive. This is not just among gun owners but all Americans who are still concerned with the rule of law and America’s foundational principles.

During Chipman’s May 26 Senate hearing on his nomination, he confirmed his radical, anti-gun agenda and revealed himself to be wholly incompetent. Not a single Republican senator left the hearing saying he or she would vote for Chipman, and many Democrat senators used their time to help him clarify his past statements about gun confiscation and his interest in arresting people before they commit crimes.

In questioning with Sen. Tom Cotton, Chipman claimed the ATF defines an assault rifle as any semi-automatic rifle capable of accepting a detachable magazine above the caliber of .22. This would include nearly every one of the 20 million AR-15s in America, and likely most rifles produced within the last 80 years. The M-1 carbine was designed in 1938, for instance.

Chipman also told Sen. Ted Cruz that he supports a total ban of the AR-15. During his exchange with Sen. John Kennedy, Chipman said he was unable to define an assault weapon. Remember, Chipman was a 22-year ATF agent who has lobbied against most citizen-owned firearms.

An Anti-Constitution Activist

When Chipman left the ATF to work for Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords Law Center campaign, he walked away from law enforcement and became a very well-paid anti-constitutional activist. The Giffords campaign, where Chipman works, is dedicated to gun confiscation and still claims “the right to possess a firearm is not based on an individual right of self-defense, but rather related to service in a militia based on the prefatory language in the Amendment.”

This is factually wrong, based on the history and text of the U.S. Constitution. At the time of the Constitution’s drafting, the Founding generation had many public conversations about gun ownership being an individual private right. This position was so unanimous, it was one of the few public positions explaining a portion of the proposed Constitution that faced no recorded opposition. The individual right to possess a firearm was also definitively affirmed in the Supreme Court’s DC v. Heller.

Are Chipman and the Giffords campaign for gun confiscation so blinded by their ideology that they won’t even recognize the plain reading and history of the Constitution as confirmed by the Supreme Court? It would seem so.

Chipman’s failures extend much further than ignoring recent Supreme Court opinions. He lobbied Congress for bills that would require direct registration and licensing for guns, which would massively expand, computerize, and weaponize the already massive ATF gun registry the government currently operates. Americans should know that over the long arc of history, the first step to a violent confiscation of firearms is registration.

Contempt for the People He’s Supposed to Serve

Most Americans have clear differences with the Biden administration’s policies on firearms. But these differences are to be expected.

Americans cannot, however, tolerate a political class that hates the people who put them in power. A political class that dehumanizes and insults the American people cannot ever make decisions that originate in ideas and policy. They will use emotion, bias, and bigotry to dominate “the other.” Americans cannot be subjected to that political class.

Chipman is clearly a member of this political class animated by contempt for the Americans they are supposed to serve. During his career as a well-paid anti-gun lobbyist, Chipman dismissed gun buyers as fearful and preparing “for end times scenarios and zombie apocalypses.”

“If you didn’t think you needed a gun prior to March of [2020], you certainly don’t need to rush out and get one now,” said Chipman. Really? Violent riots engulfed the country at the time, and continued throughout the year. Chipman lacked any sympathy for what Americans were seeing outside their front doors.

He mocked our willingness to protect our loved ones and communities: “[New gun owners] might think they are die-hard, ready-to-go, but unfortunately, they’re more like Tiger King and they’re putting themselves and their families in danger.”

When he was done impugning gun owners’ motives, he used ignorant stereotypes to insult them: “Secure that gun, locked and unloaded and hide it behind the cans of tuna and beef jerky that you have stored in a cabinet and only bring that out if the zombies start to appear.”

He knew then, and knows now, that in 2020 millions of new gun owners entered the fold. Once you include Americans that already owned a firearm, it’s clear that Chipman has an obvious distaste for tens of millions of Americans.

Contempt for Congress, Too

According to his opinion in “Legal and Lethal: 9 Products That Could Be the Next Bump Stock,” Chipman says he can ignore Congress and directly regulate firearms out of existence. So, we are confronted with the likelihood that President Biden’s nominee for the ATF will root his decisions in distaste for Americans, not policies framed by the Constitution.

As a bare minimum for consideration, a Senate nominee must be at least plausibly dedicated to impartially enforcing the laws as passed by Congress. Given Chipman’s overt animus against the very Americans he would be tasked with regulating, he has a severe conflict of interest with this job.

If confirmed, Chipman’s actions would be seen as illegitimate by tens of millions of Americans, increasing the tension between law-abiding citizens and an overreaching government. His nomination should not proceed.

A Plan to Get Divisive & Radical Theories Out of Our Schools By Donald J. Trump

a_plan_to_get_divisive__radical_theories_out_of_our_schools_145946.html

As a candidate, Joe Biden’s number one promise was to “unite” America. Yet in his first months as president, his number one priority has been to divide our country by race and gender at every turn.

There is no clearer example than the Biden administration’s new effort aimed at indoctrinating America’s schoolchildren with some of the most toxic and anti-American theories ever conceived. It is vital for Americans to understand what this initiative would do, what drives it and, most importantly, how we can stop it.

For decades, the America-blaming left has been relentlessly pushing a vision of America that casts our history, culture, traditions, and founding documents in the most negative possible light. Yet in recent years, this deeply unnatural effort has progressed from telling children that their history is evil to telling Americans that they are evil.

In classrooms across the nation, students are being subjected to a new curriculum designed to brainwash them with the ridiculous left-wing dogma known as “critical race theory.” The key fact about this twisted doctrine is that it is completely antithetical to everything that normal Americans of any color would wish to teach their children.

Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, it teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice. Far from advancing the beautiful dream of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- that our children should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” -- the left’s vile new theory preaches that judging people by the color of their skin is actually a good idea.

Teaching even one child these divisive messages would verge on psychological abuse. Indoctrinating generations of children with these extreme ideas is not just immoral -- it is a program for national suicide. Yet that is exactly what the Biden administration endorsed recently in a rule published in the Federal Register aimed at inflicting a critical race theory-inspired curriculum on American schoolchildren.

The rule explicitly cites the New York Times’ discredited “1619 Project” as a motivation. The Times has described the goal of its endeavor as the “re-education” of the American people, and the project even includes a lesson plan that encourages students to practice “erasing” parts of the Declaration of Independence. The Biden rule also directly cites a left-wing activist and leading proponent of critical race theory whose textbook states, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

This is what the Biden administration wants to teach America’s children.

The Department of Education rule stems from an executive order Biden signed on his first day in office. Biden’s order abolished the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission I created to honor America’s founding principles, and reversed an executive action I took to stop these depraved theories from being imposed upon federal employees in workforce training sessions.

Thankfully, most Americans oppose this insanity. The left has only gotten away with it until this point because not enough parents have been paying attention and speaking up. But that is quickly changing. From Loudoun County, Va., to Cupertino, Calif., parents are beginning to make their voices heard against the left-wing cultural revolution. What they need now is a plan to actually stop it.

Here are the reforms that every concerned parent in America should be demanding.

First, every state legislature should pass a ban on taxpayer dollars going to any school district or workplace that teaches critical race theory, which inherently violates existing anti-discrimination laws. Inspired by my executive order last year, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Oklahoma and other states have already taken steps to pass such laws. It needs to happen everywhere — and Congress should seek to institute a federal ban through legislation as well.

Second, each state should create its own 1776 Commission to examine the public school curriculum and ensure that students are receiving a patriotic, pro-American education — not being taught that the United States is an evil nation.

Third, parents have a right to know exactly what is being taught to their children. Last year, many parents had the chance to routinely listen in on classes for the first time because of remote learning. As students return to the classroom, states need to pass laws requiring that all lesson plans have to be made available to parents — every handout, article, and reading should be posted on an online portal that allows parents to see what their kids are being taught. Furthermore, in many places, there are rules preventing students from recording what teachers say in class. States and school boards should establish a “Right to Record.”

Fourth, parents need to organize locally — in every school district in America — to eliminate “Action Civics” and other versions of the effort to contort traditional civics education into a vehicle for political indoctrination. The left’s new argument is that our “divisions” stem from a lack of “civics education” — a problem they intend to “fix” with lots of new taxpayer money and a redefinition of “civics” in schools, just as they are trying to redefine the meaning of “infrastructure.” Right now, Congress is working on a $1 billion bill known as the Civics Secures Democracy Act. No Republican should trust the Biden administration with a billion dollars to spend on such programs. Even worse, the legislation threatens to establish a de facto national curriculum for history and civics, effectively bribing states into adopting the left’s anti-American curriculum. It is Common Core all over again -- but much more extreme. And like Common Core, parents must unite to stop this new federal power grab.

Fifth, any parent who objects to the material being taught to their child in public school should get an automatic voucher, empowering them to pick another school of their choice. The government has no right to brainwash students with controversial ideologies against their parents’ will.

Sixth, states need to take back control of their schools of education and credentialing bodies to ensure they are not churning out radicalized teachers. To be clear, the overwhelming majority of our nation’s teachers are some of the most selfless and wonderful people there are — but regrettably, many have graduated from extremely biased education schools and may not even be aware of the degree to which leftist ideology has permeated their curriculum. States should set up alternative credentialing bodies that can certify great teachers who know how to instill a sense of love for America. School districts can then make it a priority to hire teachers with these certifications, especially for English, history, and social studies roles. States could even set up their own versions of Teach for America to get passionate and patriotic young people into the classroom.

Finally, states need to break the tenure monopoly in public K-12 schools. Tenure was originally supposed to protect competent teachers from being subjected to undue political influence; it has turned into a mechanism to protect incompetent teachers who themselves wield undue political influence over our children. Educators who are alienating children from their own country should not be protected with lifelong tenure; they should be liberated to pursue a career as a political activist.

Make no mistake: The motive behind all of this left-wing lunacy is to discredit and eliminate the greatest obstacles to the fundamental transformation of America. To succeed with their extreme agenda, radicals know they must abolish our attachment to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and most of all, Americans’ very identity as a free, proud, and self-governing people. The left knows that if they can dissolve our national memory and identity, they can gain the total political control they crave.

A nation is only as strong as its spirit. For our children, we must act before it is too late.

Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States

Why Big Business Is Helping…

Why Big Business Is Helping the Regime

Ryan McMaken for Mises

Policymakers know they hold immense power to regulate and punish firms that don’t play ball. Industry leaders know this too. So it’s likely both sides will indeed end up “playing ball."

The Democrats in Congress want comprehensive regulation of social media which will ultimately allow regime regulators to decide what is and what is not “disinformation.” This has become very clear as Congress has held a series of Congressional hearings designed to pressure tech leaders into doing even more to silence critics of the regime and its preferred center-left narratives.

Back in February, for instance, Glen Greenwald reported:

For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.
House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert control over the content on these online platforms. “Industry self-regulation has failed,” they said, and therefore “we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.” In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.

(The February hearing wasn’t even the end of it. Big Tech was summoned yet again on March 25.)

Greenwald is probably right. The end game here is likely to create a permanent “partnership” between big tech in which government regulators will ultimately decide just how much these platforms will deplatform user and delete content that run afoul of the regime’s messaging.

It might strike many readers as odd that this should even be necessary. It’s already become quite clear that Big Social Media is hardly an enemy of mainstream proregime forces in Washington. Quite the opposite.

Jack Dorsey, for instance, is exactly the sort of partisan regime apparatchik one expects out of today’s Silicon Valley. For example, during October of last year, Twitter locked down the account of the New York Post, because the Post reported a story on Hunter Biden that threatened to hurt Biden’s chances for election. Over 90 percent of political donation money coming out of Facebook and Twitter goes to Democrats.

Yet, it’s important to keep in mind that this isn't going to be enough to convince politicians to pack up and decide to leave social media companies alone. The regime is unlikely to be satisfied with anything other than full state control of social media through permanent regulatory bodies that can ultimately bring the industry to heel. Regardless of the ideological leanings of the industry players involved, they're likely to see the writing on the wall. As with any regime where the regulators and legislators hold immense power—as is the case in Washington today—the regime will generally be able to win the “cooperation” of industry leaders who will end up taking a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” position.

Silicon Valley Is Ideologically Allied with the Regime. But That's Not Enough.

It’s been abundantly clear for at least a decade that ideologically speaking, Silicon Valley is as politically mainstream as it gets. The old early-2000s notion that Silicon Valley harbors secret libertarian, antiestablishment leanings has been disproven dozens of times over.

Moreover, Washington has a long history of co-opting tech “geniuses” to serve the whims of the regime. Even back in 2013 Julian Assange already saw the “ever closer union” between government agents and Silicon Valley. Assange pointed to how federal agencies were hiring Silicon Valley workers as "consultants" and saw where the "partnership" was headed. He concluded “The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism.”

But even if Silicon Valley is packed full of stooges for the NSA—as appears to be the case—this still doesn’t mean that Silicon Valley firms are willing to happily hand over their property to the federal government. After all, Silicon Valley CEOs, managers, and stockholders are all still at least partly in it for the money. All else being equal, they prefer profit to loss, and they want freedom to make decisions free of regulatory control. They probably don’t care about freedom in the abstract, but they care about it for themselves.

The Threat of Regulation Creates Support for the Regime

On the other hand, once federal policymakers and regulators start making threats, the game changes entirely. All of a sudden, it makes a lot of sense to pursue “friendly” relations with the state as a matter of self-preservation. If Washington has the ability to destroy your business—and if it has become impossible to “fly under the radar”—then it makes a lot of sense to make Washington your friend.

Under these circumstances, there’s little to be gained from blanket opposition to federal regulation, and a lot to be gained from embracing regulation while merely working to ensure that regulation benefits you and your friends.

Big Business versus Small Business

So, it should never surprise us when big business ultimately ends up siding with the regime. It would be folly not to, especially if one has the means to hire lobbyists, attorneys, and PR consultants which can help Big Business negotiate effectively with regulators. Needless to say, the outcomes of these negotiations are likely to end up helping the big players at the expense of smaller ones who aren't even present at the negotiating table.

For small firms that have little hope of influencing federal policy, it still makes sense to simply oppose federal activism altogether and hope for the best. But if your firm manages to get a seat "at the table" it's best to seize the opportunity. To quote an old saying among lobbyists: "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."

But let us not forget that even when private firms can bring immense amounts of resources to bear for purposes of influencing public policy and negotiating with bureaucrats: the regime itself ultimately holds the advantage. No private firm in the world has the resources to ignore or veto the wishes of the regime's army of regulators, prosecutors, and tax collectors. No private firm enjoys anything approaching the coercive monopoly power of the state.

But this doesn't mean those firms can't share in this power. And that's very often what happens. Faced with a "join us or be destroyed" ultimatum from federal regulators or lawmakers, most private firms choose the "join us" option. Of course, many smaller firms aren't even offered the choice.

Oligarchy & Tyranny: Behind The Aspen Institute’s Upcoming Report On Silencing Dissent

For the past six months, this liberal Dream Team has been hard at work on their big report to help the federal government work with corporations to squash news they call 'disinformation.'

posted by Christopher Bedford at The Federalist

Most people haven’t heard of the Aspen Institute. Others maybe recall some mention of their annual Aspen Ideas Festival. A few more might somewhat remember a minor political dust-up from 2020 when Michael Bloomberg, who was blowing money on a doomed bid for president at the time, had to grovel and beg forgiveness for simply stating the facts on crime at an Aspen conference five years prior.

The “festival,” which The Economist called a “mountain retreat for the liberal elite” and “a corporate Never-Never Land,” refused to release the video; it’s a safe space for the right types of people, and liberal billionaire technocrats are precisely the right type of people.

And you better believe “the right types of people” are sitting on the institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Behind the psychiatric name, the commission is a group of liberal activists, donors, journalists and tech executives, a disgraced foreign royal, and even a corporate “senior vice president of social impact,” who must be in charge of all the junior corporate vice presidents for diversity. For the past six months, this liberal Dream Team has been hard at work on their big report to help the federal government work with corporations to squash news they call “disinformation.”

So what will this “disinformation” be? A look at the commissioners hints strongly that it will be you, me, and anyone else who disagrees with Katie Couric and her left-wing friends.

Katie Couric specifically, because she sits on the commission. Once a household name for her long role on NBC’s “The Today Show,” including nine years of smiling and bantering with serial creep and accused company rapist Matt Lauer, Couric was canceled in 2013 after failing to earn ratings on her own show, and slowly drifted into obscurity.

From her landing spot, an online show with Yahoo!, Couric ran a disinformation campaign against an investigator who had exposed Planned Parenthood for selling harvested body parts from aborted babies. Couric falsely claimed the videos were doctored, and ran puff pieces on the president of the country’s largest abortion clinic. In her spare time, Couric is an abortion activist, and says her activism is inspired by her mother, whose pregnancy she clearly survived.

Couric also used her internet show to falsify documentary interviews with gun owners. In that case, the deception was so embarrassing even her friends at CNN and The New York Times called it out, while The Washington Post said it “falsely depicts gun supporters as ‘idiots'” and was “just plain wrong.” While the director took the blame and apologized, Couric defended her disinformation.

While at 64 years of age her television career is now largely relegated to trying to guest host a game show, Couric was invited on “Real Time with Bill Maher” in January, after Joe Biden had won the presidency. There, she lashed out at the half of the country who supported the conservative populist Trump administration, saying, “The question is how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump.”

Couric is joined on the commission by Kathryn Murdoch, the wife of billionaire heir James Murdoch, Rupert’s liberal son. Kathryn’s biography on the website of the company she founded claims she “started her career as a marketing and communications executive in New York and Hong Kong” before launching and selling a clothing design company. Corroborating information on her past is hard to come by, although an early 2008 mention of her in Vanity Fair might dispute her company bio, describing her as “an Oregon-born model” who met her rich husband at “a yacht party in Sydney[, Australia].”

Today, Kathryn and her husband are together among the biggest super donors in left-wing politics. In 2020 they gave “roughly $12.2 million to federal committees, ranking 25th on OpenSecrets’ list of top donors,” the donor transparency site reports. “She also donated $540,000 to the Democratic Future Forward PAC, and $300,000 to Unite the Country, a pro-Biden PAC.”

When not sitting on commissions to decide what conservatives should be permitted to say, Kathryn is a major donor to a notorious disinformation campaign. In the last election cycle, she gave $500,000 — half a million dollars — to PACRONYM, which works closely with ACRONYM, which was the lead example in an OpenSecrets expose on “Dark Money,” exploring how “networks hide political agendas behind fake news sites.”

Describing “ACRONYM” as one of the “newer group heralding the new era of pseudo-news outlets,” the report exposes it as being “behind Courier Newsroom, a network of websites emulating progressive local news outlets.” “Courier,” it continues, “has faced scrutiny for exploiting the collapse of local journalism to spread ‘hyperlocal partisan propaganda.’”

Her passion for crushing conservative “disinformation” stems from her severe dislike of scientists who doubt man-made global warming, as well as the scientists and news sites who in the first year of COVID lockdowns repeatedly warned we were being lied to. In the months since Biden became president, corporate media have come around to virtually every point dissenters made, including on the efficacy of masks, the source of the virus, the impact of novel treatments, and the failure of lockdowns.

Disgraced royal Prince Harry also sits on the commission. Just before his Aspen Institute glamour gig was announced, the duke of Sussex made news calling the First Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights “bonkers” while admitting free speech is “a huge subject and one I don’t understand.”

Rashad Robinson also made the truth commission’s cut, co-chairing Aspen’s effort from his perch as the president of Color of Change. That organization was founded by fired Obama “green jobs czar” Van Jones and a director of the left-wing activist organization MoveOn.org, and its claim to fame is intimidating conservative donors and corporations who donate to Republican and conservative causes by threatening them with public campaigns, effectively silencing opposition to Democratic initiatives.

Their commission colleagues also include Marla Blow, a “senior vice president of social impact” at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth; Democratic politician Aaron Ford; Democratic megadonor Craig Newmark, whose personal non-profit is “fully” funding the commission; Chris Krebs, who in his previous role overseeing 2020 election security infamously went above his paygrade when he called it “the most secure [election] in American history;” and Alex Stamos, a former Facebook executive who said the “problem” with tackling conservative television networks OANN and Newsmax is “that these companies have freedom of speech” and suggested that corporate cable providers should take it upon themselves to shut them down.

The 14-person commission includes one Republican, former Rep. Will Hurd. Hurd’s inclusion was characterized by American Principles Project President Terry Schilling as part of “the typical progressive playbook of ‘Let’s pretend we aren’t biased, let’s pretend we’re non-partisan, we’ll include a token Republican who’s not really conservative to say that it’s bipartisan.”

Our sterling commission’s interim report is reportedly due before June 19, but we already know what’s coming, don’t we.

The Top Domestic Violent Extremist Threat Comes From…

The Top Domestic Violent Extremist Threat Comes From …

Attorney General Merrick Garland

John Zmirak For The Stream

The National File reports:

As the Biden administration continues its persecution of political dissidents using the vast powers of the National Security apparatus, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the “top domestic violent extremist threat” comes from “those who advocate for the superiority of the white race” in a statement regarding domestic terrorism today.
Describing America’s new “National Strategy For Countering Domestic Terrorism,” Garland told the world that the Biden regime would be heightening its efforts to turn the federal government against the American people to “counter the heightened domestic terrorism threat using all available tools.”

First Demonize, Then Terrorize

When you want to persecute a political or ethnic group, it helps to demonize it first. The Natural Law, which God wrote on our hearts, rebels against open persecution of those who are clearly innocent, just because they’re weak.

So if you wish to dispossess, impoverish, imprison, or even kill members of a given group — for whatever reason — you’d better get busy manufacturing “proof” that they deserve it. That they’re carriers of some profound, contagious evil. That they stand as an imminent threat to all that is good and decent. In fact, they’re a real and present danger to public order. So the regime must crack down on them before they do harm to others.

You’ll need to whip up some genuine fear first. That’s the most useful goad in getting people to enforce what’s cruelly unjust. Convince them they have to do it out of self-preservation. Sure, outright hatred sometimes will do the job. But rarely can you get vast numbers of people to sustain that emotion unless it’s undergirded by terror. First you must use propaganda to convince them they’re in danger. Then they’ll do pretty much anything. If only to protect themselves and their families from the “threat.”

The Boilerplate Tactic of Fanatics

Here are just a few historical cases where elites whipped up that kind of fear, as a pretext to crushing groups they considered their enemies:

Intolerant Integralist Catholics convinced the Paris mob in the 16^th century that Huguenot Protestants (a tiny minority) wanted to impose Calvinism on France. That led to massacres like the most infamous one on St. Bartholomew’s Day. And a protracted civil/religious war that devastated the nation for decades.
Intolerant English Protestants in the 17^th century convinced the British rabble that Catholics (a tiny minority) wanted to impose their faith on England. This led to riots, lynchings, and legal persecution aimed at Catholics.
Radical mobs in Paris during the French Revolution targeted any foreigner, priest, or nun as an agent of royalists trying to restore the monarchy. They hustled thousands of innocents to the guillotine.
The Russian Bolsheviks whipped up their supporters to target, rob, and murder landlords, small business owners, priests, religious Jews, and members of many ethnic minorities. Soon private property had largely disappeared. Russia went from an exporter of food to a land of famines.
The Nazis convinced large numbers of Germans that Jews were intrinsically hostile to “Aryan” peoples. That they somehow both caused capitalist plutocracy and Communist revolution. So they must be stripped of citizenship, labeled with badges, exiled, imprisoned, or killed. Once the fog of war descended, the Holocaust proper could start.
The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia declared that anyone with a high school education was an enemy of the people. By the end, they were beating to death with clubs any Cambodian they found wearing eyeglasses.
The Hutu extremists in Rwanda used mass media to label their rivals, the smaller but more prosperous Tutsi tribe, as “cockroaches.” They hogged all the wealth in that country, and deserved extermination.
The Communist Chinese government labeled pious, peaceful Muslim Uyghurs “Islamists” and “terrorists.” That was the pretext for subjecting them to forced abortion, imprisoning 3 million of them in concentration camps, and stealing organs from prisoners for sale on the black market. This persecution is still going on.

“Communist-Trained” Race Hustlers and their Enablers

The American left knows its history. Its leaders have studied the practical methods of terror. Patrice Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, boastfully described herself as a “trained Marxist.” Maybe our billion-dollar corporations should have thought about that before they flooded her extremist organization with money they made from us. She now can read Karl Marx in one of her several mansions.

But now after our fraud-ridden 2020 election, the US government itself is taking the first steps toward a persecution. The target? Conservatives and Christians. The pretext? “White supremacist” attitudes.

America Rooted in Evil, Requiring a Purge

Remember the official ideology getting pumped into schoolchildren’s heads, and imposed in a purge of our military. It asserts that white Racism infuses all America’s history and culture. So the purge of our culture and media must prove ruthless and all-inclusive. What else did you think it meant when our elites tried to ban the National Anthem from sporting events? When mobs, with blue-state government connivance, burned cities and tore down the statues of our founders? When the New York Times, the Pulitzer Committee, and leftist teachers unions declared the very existence of the US a slaveowners conspiracy?

In real ways, the militant phase of the planned persecution already started. Veteran and small businessman Jake Gardner was hounded to suicide for defending himself, and his elderly father, from BLM-inspired thugs. Kyle Rittenhouse faces first-degree murder charges for resisting a mob that had already shot at him. Nick Sandmann and his fellow pro-lifers were vilified as racists by the entire media for facing down leftist protesters. Dozens of peaceful demonstrators from January 6 still rot in solitary confinement, denied bail and accused of terrorism or treason for … trespassing. This after thousands of leftist thugs saw all charges dropped for torching whole cities. Non-violent protester and US veteran Ashli Babbitt was gunned down by an officer of the Capitol Police. The Capitol Police, the Metro Police (who investigated the shooting) and Nancy Pelosi are still refusing to identify the shooter. Illegally, according to a lawsuit by the grieving Mr. Babbitt, her widower.

The Washington, D.C. Gulag

Read Julie Kelly’s report in American Greatness, “Letters from a D.C. Jail” about the thuggish behavior of guards and inhumane treatment of prisoners. She quotes one prisoner who managed to send her an email:

We are charged with every possible offense and held in the DC jail on solitary [sic] confinement and treated inhumanely. For example, a correctional officer from a different pod came to C2B screaming at us late at night on 6/1/21 because we had just sang ‘God Bless America’ [sic] from behind our locked doors like we do every night. Being as we are on lockdown 22 hours a day it’s nice to keep morale up through patriotism. When [name omitted], my next door neighbor, informed the officer that we were just singing ‘God Bless America’ the officer responded by yelling, ‘F— America!’
After the officer left the pod for several minutes he came back in through the back door with another guard, walked upstairs, and opened [name omitted]’s door to go inside with him. I believe 2 other guards came up the other stairs to stand near [his] door as well, although I could not see them. I live right next door so I listened through the vent to the officer threaten [him], ‘Shut the f— up or I will beat your ass!’ and, ‘F— you!’

Waiting for a Race Riot

Accused rapists and murderers await trial in a nearby cell block. And just as happened in Soviet gulags, street criminals get better treatment, and pose a threat to the political dissidents. As another Jan. 6 peaceful protestor told American Greatness:

The problem is . . . if the other cell block breaks in and starts a massive brawl, WE would get blamed in the media. (Many are concerned guards will allow the general population of D.C. prison to mix with January 6 detainees.) We are white. They are not. We are conservative. They are not. They can do whatever they want. We can not. If they busted in here and caused problems, we would be accused of racism, ‘continued violence,’ and ‘rioting,’ and the usual lies and slander.”

Remember that “white supremacists” lurk everywhere, as the greatest domestic terror threat. Big lies like that one let a tyrannical government of dubious legitimacy cling to power at any cost. Who are the extremists here? Who poses the real threat to Americans?

In case you’re not convinced, check out this blockbuster piece from Revolver News. It turns out that the leading “militia” style groups connected with seriously illegal actions on January 6 are … riddled with FBI informants and agents. At least 5 of the 14 people who supposedly plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer turned out to be feds. Did feds give hapless dupes the idea in the first place (via entrapment)? Only time will tell.

Revolver asks whether undercover agents either had foreknowledge of, or indeed were the instigators, of the breach of the US Capitol. In other words, will we learn that in important ways the January 6 riot was a false flag operation condoned by a Deep State eager to crack down on its critics? Would you really put it past the folks who gave us the Russian Collusion hoax?