Yes, the FBI is America's secret police

contributed by James Bovard to THE HILL

Politifact delivered a “pants on fire” slam to Fox News on Friday because one of its commentators asserted that the Federal Bureau of Investigation “has become America's secret police.” The FBI has legions of new champions nowadays among liberals and Democrats who hope that its probes will end Donald Trump’s presidency. This is a stunning reversal that may have J. Edgar Hoover spinning in his grave.

In order to boost the credibility of the FBI’s investigations of the Trump team, much of the media is whitewashing the bureau’s entire history. But the FBI has been out of control almost since its birth.

A 1924 American Civil Liberties Union report warned that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a political character.” In the 1930s, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court feared that the FBI had bugged the conference room where justices privately wrangled over landmark cases, as Tim Weiner noted in his “Enemies: A History of the FBI.” In 1945, President Harry Truman noted that “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.” And FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover compiled a list of 20,000 “potentially or actually dangerous” Americans who could be rounded up and locked away in one of the six detention camps the federal government secretly built in the 1950s. 

From 1956 through 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants, to sic the IRS on people, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, communist, white racist, antiwar, and black organizations (including Martin Luther King Jr.). These operations involved vast numbers of warrantless wiretaps and illicit break-ins and resulted in the murder of some black militants. A Senate Committee chaired by liberal Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) issued a damning report on FBI abuses of power that should be mandatory reading for anyone who believes the bureau deserves deference today.

According to Politifact, the FBI is not a “secret police agency” because “the FBI is run by laws, not by whim.” But we learned five years ago that the FBI explicitly teaches its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” No FBI official was fired or punished when that factoid leaked out because this has been the Bureau’s tacit code for eons. Similarly, an FBI academy ethics course taught new agents that subjects of FBI investigations have "forfeited their right to the truth." Are liberals so anxious to get Trump that they have swept under the rug the 2015 Washington Post bombshell about false FBI trial testimony that may have sentenced 32 innocent people to death.

Politifact absolved the bureau because “The FBI doesn’t torture or carry out extrajudicial executions.” Tell that to the Branch Davidians — 80 of whom died after the FBI assaulted their ramshackle home with tanks and pyrotechnic devices and collapsed much of the building on their heads even before fires burst out.

Politifact quotes a professor who asserts that “any use of unnecessary violence (by the FBI) would be met with the full force of the criminal law." Is that why an internal FBI report claimed that every one of the 150 shootings by FBI agents between 1993 and 2011 was faultless?

FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi gunned down Vicki Weaver in 1992 as she stood in her Idaho cabin doorway holding her baby. After I accused the FBI of a coverup in a Wall Street Journal oped, FBI chief Louis Freeh denounced me for twisting the truth. But after a confidential Justice Department report leaked out revealing the FBI’s deceits and unconstitutional rules of engagement, the feds paid a $3 million wrongful death settlement to the Weaver family. When an Idaho County sought to prosecute the FBI sniper, the Justice Department invoked the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution to torpedo the case.

Politifact asserts that “just because the FBI sometimes operates in secret does not mean that it’s a ‘secret police.’" But the FBI’s secrecy is profoundly skewing American politics. More than a year after the 2016 election, Americans still have no idea the true extent of the FBI's manipulation of the presidential campaign. Did the FBI wrongfully absolve Hillary Clinton on the email server issue? What role did the FBI have in financing or exploiting the Steele dossier? Will we ever learn the full truth?

The so-called fact checkers insists that any comparison of the FBI and KGB is “ridiculous” because the FBI is “subject to the rule of law and is democratically accountable.” But there is little or no accountability when few members of Congress have the courage to openly criticize or vigorously cross-examine FBI officials. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs admitted in 1971 that Congress was afraid of the FBI: “Our very fear of speaking out (against the FBI) ... has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny ... which is ensnaring that Constitution and Bill of Rights which we are each sworn to uphold.” The FBI is currently scorning almost every congressional attempt at oversight. Thus far, members of Congress have responded with nothing except press releases and talk show bluster.

Politifact repeatedly scoffs at the notion that the FBI is “a secret police agency such as the old KGB.” And since the FBI is not as bad as the KGB, let’s mosey along and pretend no good citizen has a right to complain. A similar standard could exonerate any American president who was not as bad as Stalin.

In the 1960s, some conservatives adorned their cars with “Support Your Local Sheriff” bumper stickers. How long until we see Priuses with “Support Your Secretive All-Powerful Federal Agents” bumper stickers? But those who forget or deny past oppression help forge new shackles for the American people.

Virginia Defeats the Scourge of Voluntary Firearms Purchases

streiff reporting for RedState

While most of us have been focused on the affront to the Second Amendment posed by preventing people on some sort of federal “no-fly” list from purchasing firearms, and the draconian “red flag” (no accident in that nomenclature, that’s for sure) laws that let basically anyone report you to the police who then seize your firearms, my home state of Virginia is going after much bigger fish. I’m talking about that population legally able to buy firearms, realizes it is incompetent to handle a firearm but lacks the impulse control necessary not to go out and buy one or more guns. We used to call them imbeciles, but I’m sure there is some sort of medical condition that covers that problem today.

Sonja Wasden’s May 30 Outlook essay, “I have a mental illness. Please don’t sell me a gun.,” highlighted one of the many ways individuals can circumvent current background check requirements and purchase a firearm when they should be disqualified from doing so. As we ease out of pandemic restrictions, there’s been an undeniable surge in gun violence across the country. Meanwhile, H.R. 8 — bipartisan legislation that would strengthen federal background check requirements — collects dust in the Senate.

Clearly, we can’t wait around for Congress to take action. States are now leading the charge with constitutional gun-safety bills: passing red-flag laws, closing background check loopholes, and preventing dangerous individuals from possessing or purchasing firearms. Another way states are working to prevent gun violence, especially suicides, is by establishing voluntary do-not-sell-firearms registries. Virginia state Sen. Scott A. Surovell’s (D-Fairfax) S.B. 436 — passed in 2020 and taking effect July 1 — allows people such as Ms. Wasden to place themselves on a list so that if they experience a mental health crisis, they’ll be unable to purchase a gun.

Just a brief comment on the above article. If you have a mental illness and know you are barred from buying a gun but have sufficient wits to circumvent a background check, adding yourself on a list to keep someone from selling you a gun when you are actively evading the process designed to keep you from buying a gun makes no sense.

Here is a video on how this magical plan works. So, naturally, it is from that wellspring of sanity, Washington State.

Why a state that legalized physician-assisted suicide is opposed to DIY suicide is something I’m not really clear on, but I suspect it involves Medicare/Medicaid funding lost if a 9mm Hydra-Shok is used rather than trademarked drugs administered by a physician.

This law is simply virtue signaling of a bizarre sort. It has no real effect. If you look at Washington State data, suicides by firearms went up AFTER the law was passed and went up again in 2020.  The law has no impact whatsoever on people who already own guns. I’d wager that the overwhelming majority of suicides who use guns already own one or have easy access to one; I have a lot of trouble visualizing a lot of people deciding to off themselves and then running out to Cabella’s, waiting for a background check to be completed and the waiting period to expire, picking up their weapon and killing themselves.

The troubling part of these laws is that you can opt yourself in, but you can only get out of the system through the mediation of a medical professional. In principle, I think whatever government screw-over that is administered to anyone who uses this program is richly deserved. My concern is that this is a backdoor for getting doctors more involved in gun ownership than they should be (they shouldn’t be at all) and builds on the CDC attempting to frame gun ownership as a public health issue. As we’ve seen with the Wuhan hysteria, once you get activists in lab coats with an “M.D.” after their name involved in public policy, nothing good happens.

Biden Domestic Terror Strategy Codifies Woke War on Wrongthink

written by Ben Weingarten in Newsweek

The Biden administration's first-of-its-kind National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism codifies a federal War on Wrongthink. In sum, the document makes clear that the imposition of Wokeism constitutes a national security imperative.

That is, the strategy uses public safety to justify leftist domination of both public policy and the public discourse, enforcing the regime's ideology at the point of a government gun.

It comes against the backdrop of the Woking of the defense, national security and intelligence apparatuses, the executive branch more broadly and society itself, whereby those who run afoul of progressivism are deemed bigoted and dangerous—and therefore liable to be purged.

And it comes amidst an all-consuming effort to pursue anyone even remotely close to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, a catalyzing event for the strategy.

That effort appears to serve as the strategy's archetype, particularly given the cohort targeted, the lengths to which the feds will pursue it and the ways in which they are straining to make their case to justify the rhetoric of insurrection.

Defendants are languishing in jail for weeks while seemingly being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, and those who get their day in court are recanting their political views forced confession-style—while innocent bystanders face ruin. This operation ought to demonstrate the hyper-political nature of the Biden administration's crafting and executing of this strategy, and therefore its immense danger.

The broader context cannot be ignored. But even within its own four corners, the strategy is full of disturbing passages, culminating in a positively chilling crescendo.

To begin, the strategy fails to clearly define who exactly it is targeting—meaning the target could be ever-moving, and forever growing—but strongly implies that the threat consists of at least the nearly half of the electorate that voted for President Donald Trump in 2020. It does so through invoking the Capitol Riot as typifying the domestic terror threat, warning of "narratives of fraud in the recent general election" that could spur forthcoming attacks and focusing on "racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists" and "anti-government or anti-authority extremists"—the kind of "extremism" the Left cynically conflates with mainstream conservatism. This is demonstrated, for example, in the casting of President Trump, his supporters and their shared views as "white supremacist," the claim that the Capitol Riot Trump purportedly incited was rooted in "white supremacism" (as Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently declared) and in arguments that electoral integrity laws are tantamount to "Jim Crow" (as President Joe Biden has asserted, and which is now buttressed by his Justice Department's actions).

The logic is as simple as it is horrifying:

The strategy also never substantiates its claims that the violent extremists to whom it refers pose such a pervasive threat to the homeland as to demand the whole-of-government, if not whole-of-society, plan laid out. It expects us to rely on a politicized Biden administration-led intelligence assessment that downplays threats from the Left while providing little to justify its conclusions. Related dubious threat bulletins ought to only augment our skepticism.

The strategy treats January 6—in spite of the collapsing narrative that it represented a murderous, armed insurrection that threatened to topple the republic—as a domestic terror attack of paramount importance, while ignoring the death and destruction inflicted by the likes of Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) during last summer's 1619 Riots. Law enforcement, it is worth noting, has demonstrated an apparent double standard in its pursuit of those committing such acts.

The document goes so far as to reclassify the few attacks from the Left that it does cite so as to avoid the "racially motivated" label. Worse, the strategy completely disregards the threat of jihadists to the homeland. How could any serious, apolitical strategy on domestic terror ignore the Islamic supremacists who have killed more Americans than any other group over the last generation?

The strategy seems to acknowledge past failings to protect civil liberties in pursuing domestic threats, but then tells us that somehow, the very national security and intelligence apparatus hyper-politicized and weaponized at the highest levels over the last four-plus years will now "do better" by working with all relevant "stakeholders."

The strategy purports, in the words of a senior administration official, to "creat[e] contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence." While nations must of course be vigilant about legitimate national security threats, surveilling those near and dear to us based on vague notions of "radicalization" never defined is the stuff of third-world banana republics.

The strategy leaves the door open for the U.S. government to collude with foreign intelligence services in pursuing Americans.

The strategy speaks of the U.S. government partnering with Big Tech and other ostensibly private actors in pursuit of the threats it purports to identify. What could possibly go wrong?

The strategy also calls for authorities "to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories," which it suggests "can provide a gateway to terrorist violence." The strategy notes that "the Department of Homeland Security and others are either currently funding and implementing or planning evidence-based digital programming, including enhancing media literacy and critical thinking skills, as a mechanism for strengthening user resilience to disinformation and misinformation online for domestic audiences."

Where the strategy believes it derives this legal authority or social legitimacy is unclear. What is clear is that such a policy is incompatible with basic freedom and republican self-governance.

It is the document's close that reveals beyond a shadow of a doubt that the strategy is about forcibly imposing the regime's ruling ideology.

In a section titled "Confront Long-Term Contributors to Domestic Terrorism," the strategy calls for combating domestic terrorism through anti-racism. "[T]ackling the threat posed by domestic terrorism over the long term," the document reads, "demands...prioritizing efforts to ensure that every component of the government has a role to play in rooting out racism and advancing equity."

Anti-racist "equity," which as the Left uses it is antithetical to real "equality," calls for overtly discriminating against individuals and removing justice's blindfold. The goal is to use policy to socially engineer the citizenry so that all outcomes are proportional to group identity. Applied Critical Race Theory, in other words, is now set to be our domestic counterterrorism strategy.

Meanwhile, as a corollary to the Biden administration mantra that everything is infrastructure, infrastructure would seem to constitute counterterror strategy. Citing financial relief measures contributing to "an equitable economic recovery that can counter the economic dislocation and even despair felt by many Americans," the strategy notes that "economic recovery and sustainable development" policies will be geared toward "alleviating over time the sentiments that some domestic terrorists deliberately use to recruit and mobilize." We need to implement progressive policies, in other words, to fight the material "root causes" of domestic terror.

Last but not least, the Biden regime calls for—what else—protecting and preserving its power and privilege. The strategy notes a broader priority: "enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms." To do so, it calls for "accelerating work to contend with an information environment that challenges healthy democratic discourse" and, again, working to "counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories" that it claims lead to terrorist violence.

Controlling the narrative is now domestic counterterrorism strategy—as is ensuring that "the institutions" remain dominant, no matter how illegitimate and unrepresentative their actions may well be.

Any backlash cannot be tolerated and must be crushed—hence the rolling effort to destroy Trump, and now this effort to silence and chill tens of millions of his supporters by treating them as actual or would-be domestic terrorists.

The terrors this document could unleash may well prove far more profound and long-lasting than the ill-defined threats it purports to counter.

 

Article by Kurt Schlichter in Townhall

Every New Republican Is the Most Evil Republican Ever

According to the Democrats, Donald Trump is literally Hitler or something, but rest assured that the next Republican to become a threat to their dominance will be Hitler2 because of course he will. Or she. Maybe it won’t be Ron DeSantis, who we will be told is Baal without the upside. Maybe the GOP will go insane, climb over my and other real conservatives’ dead bodies, and nominate pliable establishment shill-ette Nikki! Haley – and then she will promptly morph into Moloch. It’s just one of those things that simply is and cannot be denied – the sun rises in the east, Brian Stelter is a potato, and every Republican leader is a million times worse than the one who preceded him.

The corollary, liberal nostalgia for dead or exiled Republicans, is as predictable as it is tiresome. Chimpy McBu$Hitlerburton is tolerated now that he’s snuggling with the Obamas and Clintons, stabbing his loyal supporters in the back, and doing cheesy watercolors of veterans his grotesque incompetence got mutilated. All that unpleasantness about him being in on 9/11 is just a vaguely troubling memory from long ago. Some of us were actually alive when Ronald Reagan strode the earth, vanquishing America’s foes and causing mass liberal panty micturition, and we remember the slings and arrows these puny posers cast his way. But now he’s wonderful, being dead, and the Dems are getting warmed up to give Trump the same treatment. Pretty soon we’ll be hearing the victims of Ron DeSantis moaning, “I miss Donald Trump!”

Good. 

Because, for the first time in recorded history – which, I am informed by smart people with degrees in Credential Studies from approved A1-level regime conformity factories, began in 1619 – liberals are right. Whoever comes after Trump will be on a scourge kick the likes of which would make Genghis Khan smile with approval like Robert Redford in that Jeremiah Johnson meme.

It’s often been said in this space that Trump was not us normal folks’ last chance but the elite’s last chance. They treated Trump like some radical, but they misunderstood him as they misunderstand so much else. Donald Trump was less a revolutionary than an eccentric with an inability to hide his contempt for his fellow caste members. He grew up and prospered in elite society, and he enjoyed it – as his myriad amorous adventures splashed across the cover of the NY Post testified. What made him dangerous is that he didn’t participate in the framework of Mutually Assured Discretion that keeps the members of our upper crust from telling the proles just how inept, corrupt, and unaccomplished our elite truly is. They know that they are a bunch of clowns, posers pretending to be the best and the brightest, and they work together – Democrats and Republicans – to preserve that status by not spilling the beans on how their class has none. They will tear each other up individually, but to blow the whistle on the establishment as a whole is a no-no.

But not Trump. They hated him not because he embraced a few conservative ideas. They hated him not even because of those mean tweets – they like meanness. No, they hated him because he told the forbidden truth. He told the terrible secret to those unwashed people out there in Americaland who make things for a living and sweat when they work, that our elite is not only not better than the plebs but is much, much worse in every sense.

Yet, Donald Trump did not want to destroy the ruling caste. At least until the end, he still maintained residual respect for its institutions. He might have accurately labelled it the “failing New York Times,” but at some level, he still thought he could win over Maggie Haberman and get a sweet write-up. He didn’t want to burn it all down; he just wanted to slap some of the swells around.

But the follow-up GOP base leader – whoever that is – is going to wreak havoc. And it will be glorious.

Because the truth is undeniable – our ruling caste is beyond salvage. Our institutions are beyond saving. The current conflict is really them holding on, fearfully, to power that is slipping through the fingers of their soft, girlish hands. The key indicator is their norm-breaking – the norms they touted for so long about free speech, due process, and self-determination were all fine right up until the outsiders started to use them to threaten the insiders’ positions and prestige. All these attacks on free speech are really desperate attempts to do by force what they can’t do by persuasion, and they can’t do it by persuasion anymore because they so completely and manifestly suck.

When you have to try to intimidate and gag your opponents, you aren’t winning. You are losing. And it might work for a while, but in the long-term you are only putting off your inevitable ejection from power. And ticking off their enemy – us – in the process.

Oh, we’ll have our vengeance.

The next victorious Republican – one will come even if we detour back to another squish for a cycle or so – will be ruthless. He will understand that the enemy is serious about holding on to power and that means holding us by our throats. He will understand that to win means to take the fight to them, to ignore the whining and howling and to impose fair election laws, free us to carry weapons, ban the cancer that is CRT, and do all the other things Democrats fear. And he will do it without the baggage and the mean tweets that let the left shift the argument from “Conservative Policy Good” to “Orange Man Bad.”

He will not care about earning their favor. He will care about payback. He will be woke, conservative woke, and for the first time in a long time, Democrats will be right about something, for they shall fear him.

 

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/07/01/every-new-republican-is-the-most-evil-republican-ever-n2591792 

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Article by Mark Moore in the New York Post

China’s President Xi Jinping warns bullies will ‘face broken heads and bloodshed’

​Chinese President Xi Jinping warned that any country that attempts to “bully” China will “face broken heads and bloodshed” during a defiant speech Thursday marking the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party.

“​The Chinese people will absolutely not allow any foreign force to bully, oppress or enslave us and anyone who attempts to do so will face broken heads and bloodshed in front of the iron Great Wall of the 1.4 billion Chinese people,” ​Xi said at the celebration near Tiananmen Square, filled with thousands of people waving Chinese flags and singing patriotic songs.

“Without the Communist Party, there will be no new China,” ​he said to roaring applause.

Xi delivered his speech amid rising criticism over China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic that was first reported in Wuhan in December 2019 and human rights abuses connected to its treatment of the ethic minority Uyghurs who are held in forced labor camps in Xinjiang.

The US and other countries have also taken action against China, which has the world’s second-largest economy, for unfair trade practices and for stealing intellectual property. 

During the event, that included a military flyover, Xi predicted that China would soon have the world’s greatest ​fighting force.

“We will turn the people’s military into a world-class military, with even stronger capabilities and even more reliable means to safeguard the nation’s sovereignty, security and development interests,” he said.

Xi also pledged to complete “reunification” with democratically ruled Taiwan.

“Solving the Taiwan question and realizing the complete reunification of the motherland are the unswerving historical tasks of the Chinese Communist Party and the common aspiration of all Chinese people,” ​he said.

“All sons and daughters of China, including compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, must work together and move forward in solidarity, resolutely smashing any ‘Taiwan independence’ plots​,” Xi said. ​

Although Taiwan is self-ruled, China believes it is part of its territory and has vowed to take over the island nation as part of its “one China” policy.

But Taiwan slapped back after Xi’s speech, saying that although the Communist Party had realized “certain economic development,” China is still a dictatorship. 

“Its historical decision-making errors and persistent harmful actions have caused serious threats to regional security,” ​Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said in a statement. 

“Our government’s determination to firmly defend the nation’s sovereignty and Taiwan’s democracy and freedom and to maintain peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait remains unchanged​,” it continued.

 

https://nypost.com/2021/07/01/chinas-xi-warns-bullies-will-face-broken-heads-and-bloodshed/

 

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Lockdowns, Unpunished Crime, And Climate Hysteria: The Roots Of Our Three Biggest Disasters

In the end, we didn’t crush the virus, 

but we did crush a lot of ordinary people.

by Christopher Bedford for The Federalist

Did lockdowns take more lives than they saved? It’s an important question. Earlier this month, the Rand Corporation and the University of Southern California, working on behalf of the National Bureau of Economic Research, released a working paper to ascertain just that.

Most casual news consumers might not have heard about it, and that’s not surprising because here’s what they found:

We find that following the implementation of shelter-in-place policies, excess mortality increases. … We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented [shelter in place] policies earlier, and in which [shelter-in-place] policies had longer to operate, had lower excess deaths than countries/U.S. states that were slower to implement [shelter in place] policies. We also failed to observe differences in excess death trends before and after the implementation of [shelter in place] policies based on pre-[shelter in place] COVID-19 death rates.

There you have it: Following lockdowns, “excess mortality increases.”

In 2020, nearly every American in the world had to endure a month or more of shelter-in-place orders depending on where he lived. In states like New York and California, oppressive policies lasted for months after the literal lockdown ended. In Ireland and other parts of Europe, lockdowns have just tentatively begun to end. In Australia, they’re still ongoing.

Through it all, people, businesses, and communities were destroyed because some public health “experts” were dead-certain this was needed to save lives. The predictable irony is they weren’t saving lives at all — just making you miserable and poorer in return for nothing.

The past year should be a humbling experience for humanity, or at least our leaders. We were faced with a problem that didn’t come with an answer at the back of the book, and we flunked it.

Why did we fail? The answer is a vice the ancient Greeks understood well: Hubris. Our leaders believed that nature could be controlled from a government office, and that humanity could be micromanaged like a particularly large game of “SimCity.”

When the virus was still limited in scope, they demanded the borders stay open and the flights keep flying. Then they told everyone to go out and party for the Chinese New Year. In Italy, people were told to hug a Chinese person to prove they weren’t a racist.

When the virus was still far off, they dismissed measures that could stop it as unnecessary or bigoted, and somehow being proven wrong only made them more confident. Once the virus broke containment and spread everywhere, there was no talk of reasonable mitigation: Instead, we were going to stop this virus in its tracks with overwhelming force.

In the end, we didn’t crush the virus, but we did crush a lot of ordinary people.

Over our history, we’ve gotten pretty used to this kind of hubris. It’s the arrogance that believes common sense and time-tested policies can be thrown out as leaders chase utopias. It’s the arrogance that makes men think they can shape the economy and tax and spend without inflation.

It’s the arrogance that makes men think they can install a republic in countries that lack a middle class or a Western and Judeo-Christian tradition of individual liberty. It’s the arrogance that makes men think they can maintain a republic in a West that’s gutted its middle class and banished its Western, Judeo-Christian moral code.

It’s the arrogance that causes people every generation to decide they won’t be held back by dusty old wisdom and tradition, and it’s the arrogance we see playing out every day on our city’s streets, where violent crimes threaten citizens’ lives and property.

Believe it or not, 70 years ago society had mostly figured out crime. They knew to be quick, efficient, and consistent in punishing criminal acts; to never cede territory to gangs; to never let breaking the law become the norm; and to never let dangerous mobs destroy at will.

Then social reformers got ideas: They decided the system was too punitive, too biased against the poor, so they started to tinker. Few still remember, but from 1950 through the early 1970s America’s criminal justice system outside the South became one of the most lenient in the world.

According to the most recent data, Sweden and Denmark both have 68 prisoners per 100,000 people. In 1972 Massachusetts had 32 prisoners per 100,000 people. Illinois had 50. Even New York state, fresh off the race riots of 1967 and the Martin Luther King assassination riots the following year, had only 64 prisoners per 100,000 people. That same year, New York City had almost 1,700 murders, yet the state had fewer people in prison per capita than Sweden does today.

America was lenient on crime, so crime exploded. It took decades to undo the damage, and required expanding police forces and building a much larger prison system than the one reformers had wanted so badly to dismantle in the 1950s, but it worked: Crime rates fell and our cities became livable again.

Instead of studying this lesson, our leaders want to make all the same mistakes of half a century ago, and last year they gave it a trial run. We saw what happened: Shootings exploded, murders went up 20 percent or more. In spite of it all, our policy makers are only getting bolder — and no amount of failure deters them.

When our leaders set out to solve the virus, they instead wrecked our children and teenagers in school, closed sports and glued already-addicted children to screens, delayed the studies of college students, and retarded the life-skills and development of young people entering the job market. They rolled out tests for their welfare-for-everyone plans, hobbled business owners in hiring people back, and hooked a large part of a generation on massive handouts.

They used judges’ benches to take over elections and decreed ridiculous pro-fraud, anti-enforcement rules. They forced our sick and our elderly to die alone so they wouldn’t get COVID, refused our right to bury and mourn our loved ones, sent sick patients into nursing homes then barred children from holding mom’s hand while she slipped away.

They arrested church leaders, closed temple doors, and enthroned a new moral leadership under Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control. They sold their efforts as neighborly affection and caring, but did neighborhoods and communities become more caring? Or did vicious, suspicious and frightened people begin to call police and report on banned activity?

Just as with any system, there are winners and there are losers: Grandma didn’t get a funeral but the activists and Democratic politicians got to attend three for George Floyd. Worshipping God had to go virtual, but activists and rioters worshipping critical race theory and its new martyrs packed our streets, ransacked our cities, looted and burned our already struggling businesses, and killed dozens of innocent people.

Jeff Bezos and his friends got a whole lot richer and a whole lot more powerful.

As we now know, all of the tyranny and sadness and suffering and hubris brought us absolutely nothing but more tyranny, sadness, suffering, and hubris. They didn’t control disease — how could they? But if it can be believed, all that was not their craziest plan for America: Having completely failed to control disease, they’ve set their sights (and their newly enthroned scientific bureaucracy) literally higher — on the global climate.

It’s the perfect crisis, so large and global in scope that fixing it requires empowering government bureaucrats totally and perpetually — and giving them absolute mastery over the direction of our lives from the cradle to the compost heap.

President Joe Biden’s administration set about this new agenda right away when he took office, and began by trying to unilaterally halt all new oil and gas leases in America, canceling a whole sector of the U.S. economy for “climate.” They rejoined the Paris Climate Accords and are pledging to cut America’s carbon emissions 50 percent below 2005 totals by 2030 — a number their activists already claim isn’t enough to save the planet.

In The New York Times last week, Ezra Klein hosted a round table with several thinkers about what is to be done. Sci-fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson said the oil industry will have to be abolished totally and completely. Scientist Saul Griffith said that our notions of property and ownership will have to die to save the planet. Democracy itself might have to go.

In a 2019 essay for Foreign Policy, Cambridge University professor David Runciman said, “Democracy is the planet’s biggest enemy,” and suggested that an authoritarian Chinese one-party system might be the only one capable of tackling climate change. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman has pondered much the same: A one-party system with people like Friedman and Runciman in charge.

We’re told that maybe even the very idea of what it is to be human has to change for the climate. A video from 2016 that went viral last week shows bioethicist S. Matthew Liao speculating that maybe we can get humans to stop eating meat if we forcibly engineer all of them to have a meat allergy.

The famous economist Friedrich Hayek saw communism and Nazism, and he saw a connection between their schemes and so many others, including those that were obviously evil and those that seemed more benign and good-intentioned. He called it “the fatal conceit:” the idea “that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.”

It’s no different from the sin identified by the Greeks, the Christians, and the Founding Fathers. Hayek, like those before him, knew it was wrong, and he knew it was deadly. Like those who came before him, he was right — then and now.

10 Reasons The 2020 Election Was The Fairest Election Of All Time

Babylon Bee🐝

Everyone knows the 2020 election was literally the most secure and fair presidential election—like, ever. But we know there are still a few skeptics out there. Here at the Bee, our number one mission is to prevent the spread of misinformation and make sure everyone still has faith in our democracy. 

To help convince you, here is the undeniable evidence the election was fair:

1. Literally everyone says so: Duh. The 2020 election couldn't have been rigged because all the people who are cool and smart and not weird say so. Do you want to look like a weirdo? Ew.

2. Journalists were fair and balanced in assessing the qualities of moderate, kind, decent Joe Biden, and of his opponent Hitler: Thank God for the press! They really made sure to give a fair and honest assessment of the most popular and wonderful president ever and the evil orange monster who wanted to kill democracy and take away all our norms and stuff. Great job, journalists!

3. Mail-in votes were handled by USPS—the most reliable, trustworthy company on the planet: The post office almost never screws up, loses, or delays US mail. It's quite amazing, really. 

4. Vote counters in Philadelphia and Detroit spent many years practicing how to count before election night: Some of them since kindergarten! The election was truly in good hands.

5. The Democrats have never done anything wrong, ever: Not ever. 

6. Posters and barricades were held up to block people from seeing the unprecedented, blinding levels of vote counting fairness: Poll watchers showed up, but their eyeballs would have been burned out by the awe-inspiring amount of vote counting integrity. Many lives saved! 

7. Absolutely nobody was threatened behind a poolhouse by a chain-wielding Biden: Biden is a fine, upstanding man of integrity and would never do something like that.

8. New York didn't just accidentally count 138,000 ballots, a bizarrely familiar number: Science has clearly shown that voter fraud is completely impossible and would never happen here, especially in New York City where they're really good at elections. 

9. The election turned out exactly how your late great, great grandfather would have wanted: This was verified by his vote in the 2020 election.

10. The Democrat candidate won, which is perhaps the most important sign of a fair and impartial election: The evil, fascist dictator was voted out of office. Anything that was done to achieve this was fair, right?

We hope you have seen the light. Now shut up about the election you insurrectionist!

The Tyranny of the Minority Is…

 The Tyranny of the Minority Is Just as Dangerous as the Tyranny of the Majority

Michael Rectenwald for Mises.org

In a previous installment, I pointed out that in On Liberty, John Stuart Mill advocated for minority opinion to be specially “encouraged and countenanced,”1 and thus that Mill was not an absolute free market thinker where opinion is concerned. Mill suggested that minority opinion should not only be tolerated but requires special encouragement in order to gain a fair hearing. Such special encouragement would amount to the subsidization of opinion, most likely by the state. Thus, Mill did not argue for a free and fair “marketplace of ideas.”

It should be noted here that “the marketplace of ideas” is not only an analogy, where commodities are to markets what ideas are to the public square. The public square is also market in its own right, and not only metaphorically associated with the market. The expression “the marketplace of ideas” somewhat obscures rather than clarifying the situation of opinion.

Further, I argued that Mill’s advocacy for special treatment of minority opinion does not solve the problem of “social tyranny,” which Mill suggested is “more formidable than many kinds of political oppression.”2 Rather, when minority opinion is foisted on the majority through special sanctions or subsidies, “social tyranny” is actually increased rather than diminished. To the extent that a majority is unwillingly subjected to minority opinion, the majority is tyrannized.

This argument begs the question: What about the opinion of minorities? After all, the mere mention of minority opinion invokes minorities themselves. Don’t the opinions of minorities require special encouragement, special sanctions, especially when said opinions have to do with fair and equal treatment of minorities themselves? Doesn’t a free market in opinion, or an unfettered marketplace of ideas, drown out or otherwise suppress the opinions of minorities? Wouldn’t a free market in opinion thus serve to perpetuate discrimination, lack of recognition, or unfair treatment? Isn’t the state required to rectify the situation through special subsidies for opinion?

Leaving the nonremunerated voicing of opinion aside—that is, opinion expressed casually or even in public demonstrations—the question becomes whether in the actual marketplace of ideas, state subsidies are necessary for the opinions of minorities to get a fair hearing.

The question implies that state actors are specially qualified or motivated to subsidize minority opinion in order to rectify the unfair treatment of minorities—that the state is the most qualified entity for intervening in opinion to favor minorities. But it is easily demonstrated that the market provides more incentives to advocate for the fair treatment of minorities than does the state. Markets encourage legal equality among buyers and sellers. The state, meanwhile, has no monopoly on equal treatment—to say the least. Quite to the contrary, states have more incentives to discriminate against particular groups, as state prerogatives often depend on discrimination. Consider the treatment of the Japanese and Germans in America during World War II, or the treatment of Middle Easterners after 9/11. (Notice how discrimination against Middle Easterners morphed into the consternation about “Islamophobia” when the prerogatives of the state shifted from “the war on terror” under George W. Bush to the incorporation of Islamic immigrants into the electorate under Barack Obama.)

Thus, we should be quite skeptical when states impose the opinion of minorities on the majority through special programs in schools and elsewhere. Such programs likely involve “positive discrimination” against particular groups, consistent with state objectives.

In fact, discrimination is precisely what is involved in the teaching of critical race theory in schools, the military, the intelligence agencies, and in other government agencies today. Critical race theory is a minority opinion that even most blacks do not agree with. It is being foisted on the majority to establish discrimination against “whites,” in order to destroy a political contingent deemed inimical to the Democratic Party–run state. It is a means for marginalizing oppositional elements and driving others into the voting ranks of the Democratic Party by means of ideology. The state imposition of minority opinion does not serve minorities.

• 1. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books Limited, 2001), p. 45.
• 2. Mill, On Liberty, p. 9.