Politico Obtains Draft of Supreme Court Majority Opinion, Indicating Potential Reversal of Federal Abortion Law

Consider this sketchy right now.  Politico is reporting they have “obtained” a draft copy of the Supreme Court majority opinion which would reverse Roe -v- Wade federal abortion law and return the decisions on abortion law to the individual states.  {Uploaded Draft pdf Here}

While it is 98-pages, it is only a draft opinion.  The decision of the individual judges could change at any time based on their view of the severity of the outcome, wording and other inputs that would be provided. A draft opinion from internal deliberations has never, ever, been leaked before from inside the supreme court; and that alone should send warning flags to everyone.

Personally, I doubt any draft from February would be pertinent today.  This entire scenario just sounds massively sketchy.

“POLITICO received a copy of the draft opinion from a person familiar with the court’s proceedings in the Mississippi case along with other details supporting the authenticity of the document. The draft opinion runs 98 pages, including a 31-page appendix of historical state abortion laws. The document is replete with citations to previous court decisions, books and other authorities, and includes 118 footnotes. The appearances and timing of this draft are consistent with court practice.”

According to the draft, written by Justice Alito after the February oral arguments in the Dobbs -vs- Jackson’s Women’s Health case, five justices are aligned to overturn the 1973 ruling (Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett); three justices are in dissent (Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan); and Chief Justice John Robert’s position is undetermined.

[…] The document, labeled as a first draft of the majority opinion, includes a notation that it was circulated among the justices on Feb. 10. If the Alito draft is adopted, it would rule in favor of Mississippi in the closely watched case over that state’s attempt to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

A Supreme Court spokesperson declined to comment or make another representative of the court available to answer questions about the draft document. (read article)

Again, this leak is very sketchy.

Abortion on demand is the holy grail of social policy for the most extreme radical and violent leftists.  If this is a real leak from a staffer inside the Supreme Court, the explosive intent would be to railroad the final decision before it becomes public, and/or create some form of government intervention in congress.

{The Link to the pdf HERE}

Trump’s Climate Challenge to the GOP

The former president breaks new ground by grasping the political necessity of calling out climate hysteria for what it is.

by Rupert Darwall for American Greatness

Sin, punishment, redemption: as an ideology, environmentalism shares many features with organized religion. Falling after Easter this year, Earth Day, which was celebrated April 22, focuses on the sin-and-punishment parts of the trilogy. Redemption comes later, toward the end of each year, at the annual U.N. climate conferences that will save the planet.

On Earth Day this year, however, a loud dissenting voice was heard. Speaking at a Heritage Foundation event in Florida, Donald Trump attacked climate-change catastrophizing.

“One of the most urgent tasks, not only for our movement but for our country, is to decisively defeat the climate hysteria hoax,” Trump declared. Fearmongering about the climate is destroying America’s economy, weakening our society, and eviscerating the middle class, Trump argued. “It’s helping fuel runaway inflation.”

Some right-of-center politicians criticize the policy effects of climate catastrophism, such as the Green New Deal, and pivot to advocating what they see as smarter—that is, less damaging—climate policies. This is a loser’s strategy, however. If a planetary catastrophe is in the cards, it justifies the most extreme measures to avoid it. Those who question those measures are demonized for holding the planet’s survival to ransom.

Where Trump breaks new ground is grasping the political necessity of calling out climate hysteria for what it is. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner wrote in The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse, under climate alarmism, the future, as it had been under communism, once again becomes “the great category of blackmail.”

Trump understands this. “The radical Left is advancing hysterical predictions . . . and catastrophic power plays to control our entire society.” Indeed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—notionally a scientific body but now acting as the supreme fount of green ideology—says that net-zero climate policies provide the opportunity for “intentional societal transformation.” Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celcius above pre-industrial levels—a purely arbitrary target lacking any scientific or economic justification—requires “rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure . . . and industrial systems,” the IPCC says. “There is no documented historic precedent for their scale.”

Released in March, the IPCC’s latest report pushing its favored solutions to climate change highlights “the importance of fundamental changes in society.” Whatever this is, it isn’t science.

Voters won’t give up the benefits of fossil fuels for a pinprick. Societal transformation, therefore, demands that climate change be represented as an existential threat.

The practice of catastrophizing climate change goes back more than three decades to the launch of global warming on the world stage. The closing statement of the 1988 Toronto climate conference declared: “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment, whose ultimate consequences are second only to global nuclear war.”

The comparison with global nuclear war was baloney then, and 34 years on, it’s still baloney.

Trump was onto this two years ago in his speech at the Davos World Economic Forum, the one CNN slammed for Trump’s snubbing of “the Davos vision” in favor of American energy independence.

“With an abundance of American natural gas now available, our European allies no longer have to be vulnerable to unfriendly energy suppliers,” Trump said. “We urge our friends in Europe to use America’s vast supply and achieve true energy security”—advice that, in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European nations were extraordinarily unwise to have spurned.

Trump condemned the foundational tenet of environmentalism, one that has become an article of faith for the Davos set. “We must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse. They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune-tellers.” Indeed, they predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s; mass starvation in the 1970s; and an “end of oil” in the 1990s.

“These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform, and control every aspect of our lives,” Trump said.

A 2021 paper by Carnegie Mellon University researchers David Rode and Paul Fischbeck analyzes 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. Across half a century of such forecasts, little has changed: the apocalypse is always about 20 years out. Thanks to the passage of time, 61 percent of the predictions of climate catastrophe have already expired and been definitively falsified. Nonetheless, predictive failure has not dissuaded climate activists and scientists from making more of them. The researchers note that Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and Prince Charles are both serial failures as forecasters, repeatedly expressing certitude about apocalyptic climate events that didn’t happen.

If environmentalism were grounded in science and rationality, these persistent failures would lead to climate alarmism being dialed down—instead, the opposite has happened. But environmentalism isn’t about reason and evidence. It is a powerful ideology opposed to freedom and capitalism for its success in bringing hitherto undreamt levels of prosperity to the masses.

“Conservative leaders, think tanks, and intellectuals must be fearless in calling out the lunacy of what you’re seeing,” Trump told the Heritage audience. The former president is right. If conservative leaders don’t take that advice, climate alarmism will win—and America will be the loser.

X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- May 2

 

Evening. Here's tonight's news:

The New Disinformationists ~ VDH

We have seven more months before the midterms. Expect more disinformation ministries, censorious czars, and hack grandees to emerge.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

The Biden Administration feels that it must now use federal resources to attack “disinformation.” So the Department of Homeland Security recently announced the creation of a “disinformation governance board.”

The board’s executive director, Nina Jankowicz, at least has clear qualifications for the post. She previously had spread false rumors on social media that Donald Trump voters would show up at the polls in 2020 armed, and joined the mob’s chorus that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Perhaps the idea behind her hiring was “it takes one to know one.”

Although the new board’s mandate is unclear, the idea seems to be that Jankowicz and her colleagues will use the federal government’s powers to adjudicate what Americans say as either true or false—and to suppress as “disinformation” anything it doesn’t find useful.

The new war against “disinformation” follows the narratives of the “insurrection” on January 6, the “democracy dies in darkness” return of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin as a mastermind gasoline price-spiker. Such narratives are intended to distract us from the Biden disaster and the ongoing assault against constitutional freedom. 

When things turn south for the administration, Barack Obama—a sagging Netflix’s $50-million “idea man”—usually emerges from one of his three mansions in Hawaii, Martha’s Vineyard, or Kalorama to lecture clingers and deplorables on various threats they pose to the anointed. 

His sermons usually project his own transgressions. Recently, Obama went to Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to admonish us that new free speech platforms might tolerate incorrect expression that he and the Left smear as “hate speech.” 

But is not Barack Obama ill-suited to lecture anyone on disinformation? Do we remember his Obamacare version of disinformation: “You can keep your doctor; you can keep your plan”? Do we recall “shovel-ready jobs”?

Obama was caught secretly promising Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev that the United States would deal away missile defense in Eastern Europe for Vladimir Putin’s good behavior (“but it’s important for him to give me space”) during his 2012 reelection bid. Was this transparency or another example of how, but for a hot mic, “democracy dies in darkness”? Could Eastern Europeans have used such a discarded anti-missile system today?

Who employed the misinformationist Christopher Steele to slander presidential candidate Donald Trump? Was it James Comey’s FBI? Or Hillary Clinton’s campaign? Or the Democratic National Committee? Or the Perkins Coie legal firm? Or Fusion GPS? Or all combined? And which president was briefed regularly on his administration’s disinformation war against Trump?

For that matter, which media company banned any coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story? Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post? Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook? Jack Dorsey’s Twitter? 

Or all of them?

Projection is a left-wing trademark. What it accuses in others reveals what it seeks to hide within itself. So when we hear Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announcing this war on disinformation, we suspect he is our master disinformationist. Is it not his agency that is airlifting illegal aliens in the dead of night to regional airports rather than transparently, in the light of day? Is that “disinformation dies in darkness”?

What happened to the Biden Administration’s furious charges that the mounted border patrol was “whipping” innocent illegal aliens? When a federal investigation cleared the accused, did Mayorkas correct his own administration’s disinformation and apologize?

Who should we expect next to lecture the nation on the dangers of “disinformation”? A paroled and once-leftist heartthrob Michael Avanetti? Joe Biden himself on his own supposed ignorance of Hunter’s cronies? CNN and MSNBC on Hunter Biden’s “Russian disinformation” laptop? 

Will Anthony Fauci weigh in on the nonexistence of federal funding for gain-of-function research at Wuhan? Will Robert Mueller reemerge to restate yet again that he never knew anything of the Steele dossier? Will James Comey go back under oath to claim another 245 times he cannot remember? Will John Brennan lie a third time under oath before Congress, James Clapper a second time, or Andrew McCabe mislead a fourth federal investigator? 

What about those 51 former intelligence officials who convinced voters before the election that Hunter’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”? Would Nina Jankowicz rule their letter of expertise “information,” “misinformation,” or “disinformation”? 

Or perhaps we could hear warnings of organized misinformation from those blue-chip “17 Nobel Prize-winning economists” who vouched in a letter that Biden’s massive “Build Back Better” plan would not contribute to inflation that was indeed already ignited and beginning to blow up the economy?

Perhaps ex-felon and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith could serve on the disinformation board, considering his keen eye for altered federal documents that advance false narratives. Hillary Clinton would also be a good candidate given her expertise in hiring sleuths like Michael Sussman to conjure phony Alfa-Bank stories?

So what are the catalysts for this sudden assault on free speech? Why is the Left now so worried after holding all the reins of power for 15 months? Why their embarrassing new Nineteen Eighty-Four-like Ministry of Information and Truth? And again, why now?

First, the looming midterms well may see the greatest repudiation of leftwing politics in the last 100 years. Rarely do hardcore leftists gain the reins of the Senate, House, and presidency. And more rarely are the Democrats foolish enough to go full socialist and emulate failed statist regimes abroad. And yet they have now done both—and have managed to alienate much of the country. 

Rarest of all is to have both a president and vice president who are force multipliers of the disasters that ensue from their policies. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are no JFK, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama. Instead, they make Jimmy Carter seem Ciceronian in comparison. 

The one cognitively diminished, the other blindly confident in her puerile ignorance, only add to the public anger over their disastrous 15 months. Surging crime, a nonexistent border, historic inflation, sky-high energy prices, record deficits and debt, racial polarization and appeasement, war, and humiliation abroad were all self-inflicted catastrophes, the logical bitter fruit of a diseased socialist tree. So fear of not just losing in November but also losing in humiliating fashion has made the Left more desperate than usual.

Second, leftwing politics are the operational face of a much larger social and cultural revolution that has also sickened the public and alienated the majority of voters—and also is about to “circle back” on its creators.

The media, Silicon Valley, CEOs, deep state, Wall Street, academia, Hollywood, and professional sports represent a vision of the future of America that most voters do not want. The scolding faces of the rich and pampered political, corporate deep state, and celebrity progressive crowd—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, John Kerry, the Disney crowd, George Soros, Anthony Fauci or James Comey, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, LeBron James, and Colin Kaepernick—grow wearisome and bore the public. 

This erosion of our culture reflects the growing political discontent in insidious ways: the fall-off of Netflix subscribers, the utter corruption of Black Lives Matter, the humiliation of Disney, the rapid collapse of CNN+, the grassroots revolt against critical race theory and transgender tyranny. 

Third, the Democratic Party no longer exists. It is now hard-left, as sanctimonious as it is shrill. Such zealots will not discard their ideology. Rather they would prefer to embrace dogma and stay unpopular than adopt and gain public approval. 

Do not expect a suddenly closed border, an abrupt resumption of the Keystone XL Pipeline, or a tough new federal crime bill. Do anticipate more wild conspiracy theories, more Russian disinformation, and more Pravda-like ministries.

In this context, the emergence of Elon Musk as the Silicon Valley dragon slayer is emblematic of the ongoing left-wing nightmare. 

As Musk pulls up the shades at Twitter, what are leftists to say: that billionaires should not become media barons, heretofore the pillars of the progressive movement? That suppressing free speech is more popular with the public than liberating expression? That some censorship is better than others?

We have seven more months before the midterms. As the disinformationists see no way out of their self-created Armageddon, expect more disinformation ministries, censorious czars, and hack grandees to emerge from the shadows.

As good Orwellians, they will try to convince us that high gas prices are welcome; negative growth is good; borders are ossified ideas; unaffordable housing aids the economy; inflation can prove useful; a declining stock market is encouraging; crime is a mere construct in the eye of the beholder. 

Anyone who doubts all that will have a rendezvous with Nina Jankowicz. 

The Left is Laying the Foundation for an Insurmountable Advantage in the Battle of Ideas

The Left is laying the foundation for an insurmountable advantage in the battle of ideas on basic American values.

Kenin M. Spivak- The American Mind 

The Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress are infusing critical race theory (CRT), so-called anti-racist (in reality, profoundly racist) teachings, and other progressive ideologies into K-12 curricula. With forceful support from progressive states, there is a coordinated assault at all levels of our educational system to indoctrinate children and professionals in far-left anti-America rhetoric. If this effort succeeds—it is making spectacular progress—our country’s values and future are in jeopardy.

The advocates of CRT and related progressive principles have spent years planning and readying their takeover of our institutions. By dominating departments of education, accreditation agencies, university administrations, professional licensing organizations, and teacher unions, they have been able to mandate ideological training at each level of education, and then coerce compliance as a condition of employment, promotion, and appointment to governing boards.

Anyone who objects is shunned as a white supremacist, and suspended or terminated for insubordination or failure to comply with conditions of employment. The institution defends its suppression of academic freedom and free speech by pointing to its accreditation and licensing obligations, and the admission requirements of universities to which its students typically apply. While the Left may suffer an occasional setback in local elections or court, over time, this strategy will ensure the implementation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which is the immediate goal of CRT.

The success and prospects for this intricate strategy deserve respect, and fear. If conservatives and moderates do not use every lawful lever of power remaining to break the progressive chokehold, there soon will be no place to turn. Even in red states, the national accrediting and licensing requirements will do devastating damage and perpetuate a cultural civil war.

Last year, the Biden Department of Education (DOE) issued its Proposed Priorities – American History and Civics Education for a new grant program. The guidelines call for “the development of culturally responsive teaching and learning” that benefits “underserved populations” as part of “the ongoing national reckoning with systemic racism [that has] highlighted the urgency of improving racial equity throughout our society, including in our education system.”

The DOE quotes Biden’s executive order requiring “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda,” and urges incorporation of the widely discredited, anti-white and anti-America 1619 Project and “anti-racist” practices. The DOE also expresses appreciation for Ibram X. Kendi, a leading “anti-racist” who advocates discrimination against whites as the remedy for past discrimination. Grant applicants are required to “take into account systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history.”

Majority leader Mitch McConnell and 38 other Republican senators wroteto Education Secretary Miguel Cardona expressing “grave concern” about the proposed focus on “divisive, radical, and historically-dubious buzzwords and propaganda.” The DOE’s response was to re-affirm the importance of “acknowledging the legacy of systemic inequity in this country.” Despite extensive comments to its proposal, the DOE granted $1,700,000, without making any changes. Cardenas conceded only that DOE would not “dictate or recommend specific curriculum.”

Separately, the Biden administration allocated nearly $200 billion of Covid 19 relief funds to schools. Explaining how the funds should be used, the Biden Administration’s ED Covid 19 Handbook, vol. 2 links to the Abolitionist Teacher Network’s Guide for Racial Justice and urges that the precepts in that Guide be “anchor tenets in building a schoolwide system of educational opportunity.” The Guide “embod[ies] the spirit of Black Lives Mattering” and among other extreme ideas, advocates “free, antiracist therapy for White educators” and “disrupt[ing] whiteness.”

There are now at least four bills before Congress proposing to expand federal funding for “civics.”

• The Civics Secures Democracy Act (”Civics Act”) was introduced by three Democrats and two Republicans “to restore the importance placed on civics education in American classrooms with targeted federal investments to support and expand access to civics and history education” that meet the needs of the “traditionally underserved,” especially students in “rural and inner-city urban areas” and “underrepresented minorities.” The Civics Act appropriates nearly $600 billion over six years for DOE grants to schools and non-profit organizations for subjects, including “civics,” and “political thought,” and to “engage in American democratic practices as citizens and residents of the United States.” The bill defines “civics” to include the “acquisition of civic dispositions, values such as . . .tolerance and inclusion, and understanding perspectives that differ from one’s own as well as a disposition to be civically engaged.”
• The Civics Learning Act of 2021, sponsored by 51 House Democrats, appropriates $30 million to expand education about how our government operates, and the “current state of affairs,” and to foster “participat[ion] in the political process.”
• The Inspire to Serve Act, sponsored by eight Democrats and two Republicans, establishes a Council on Military, National, and Public Service, and appropriates not less than $100 billion to fund K-12 programs on “civic education and applied civics.”
• The Promoting Programming, Research, Education and Preservation in Civics and Government Act, sponsored by 17 Democrats and five Republicans authorizes the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanity to make grants for civics education.

There should be no misunderstanding that in these bills, “civics” means progressive ideology, or that “participation” and “engagement” means protests. It is pathetic that any Republican would sponsor these bills, and that 12 Republicans did not sign Leader McConnell’s letter.

The National Association of Scholars formed a Civics Alliance to oppose CRT, the bills described above, and particularly the Civics Act. Last year, an NAS open letter asked Senator Cornyn and Representative Cole to withdraw their support for the Civics Act. Instead, Cornyn fell into the trap of accepting that the words in these bills are used with their traditional meanings. He misinterpreted a Civics Act provision that the DOE is not “required” to create any particular curriculum as a prohibition against doing so, and confused the bill’s formulas for allocating the size of grants with the discretion accorded to the DOE to select the programs and institutions to be supported. For a former Texas attorney general and Texas Supreme Court justice, these errors are unfathomable.

The Civics Act sponsors responded to the pressure by making its bias less overt. NAS described the deception in a further open letter that explained the bill’s “innocuous” title and words “conceal a bait-and-switch.” NAS explained that the jargon selected for the Civics Act is “a pretext for Critical Race Theory and Action Civics—“civics education” by way of leftist activism.”

An administration with a “whole of government” equity agenda, and a DOE that venerates the 1619 Project, Ibram Kendi, and the Abolitionist Teacher Network, will certainly direct these grants to anti-white, anti-merit, anti-American, extreme progressive ideologies.

The federal government’s ability to allocate grants is just one thread of the enveloping web of progressive control of government services, as well as the funding, messaging, and execution of public and private sector recruitment, hiring, promotion, contracting, and education.

Other threads include state and local school boards that require public K-12 schools teach “anti-racist” theories, and the National Association of Independent Schools, which requires private K-12 schools to incorporate DEI and mandates that each school board trustee pledge fealty to “equity and justice” as a condition of serving on the board. Some state curricula even embed social justice in math courses in place of math. Given the strong support of both national teachers’ unions for CRT and “anti-racist” content (see here and here), any bias in the classroom only strengthens the leftist stranglehold.

California became the first state to require ethnic studies for all high school students, and the University of California (UC), the state’s most prestigious public university system, is considering requiring all high school students to pass a controversial ethnic-studies curriculum, seen by many as antisemitic, to qualify for admission. Nationwide, more than 200 bills have been introduced that would incorporate progressive civics education in K-12 schooling. CRT content is widespread in higher education.

Most college accreditation agencies require DEI in admissions and faculty recruitment, and many universities rank candidates for hiring, promotion and tenure on the vigor of their commitment to DEI. Both the American Bar Association and American Medical Association demand “anti-racist” content in professional school and continuing education, and DEI in the recruitment of graduates. Some bar associations require indoctrination in “anti-racist” doctrines for license renewals, though Florida’s Supreme Court prevented adoption of a nationwide ABA mandate.

Any American who believes that “this too shall pass” is not paying attention. My mother, who passed away a decade ago, was a proud member of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City. Never would she, or any of her colleagues, have foreseen how teacher unions, educational systems, and professional organizations have been corrupted to despise America and advance a radical agenda of hate.

MSNBC Hack Who Went to 'Fight' in Ukraine Gets Completely Exposed

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

In April, MSNBC’s intelligence “analyst” extraordinaire Malcolm Nance decided to take his LARPing to the next level by going to “fight” in Ukraine. You may recall Nance as being a rabidly anti-Trump figure throughout the last administration. Back in May of 2021, he proclaimed a coming Trump-led “terrorist and paramilitary insurgency.”

But as is true with essentially everything Nance says, he missed the mark by a mile and no such thing has materialized. Why? Because Nance is the biggest poser in media, constantly fluffing his resume and making it seem as if he were some former super-spy with immense expertise in military warfare. Nothing could be further from the truth, and he’s often beclowned himself with wild proclamations and predictions.

In regards to going to Ukraine, Nance made an appearance on Joy Reid’s ridiculous show, in which he cosplayed as an operator, ready to take the fight to the Russians. He also took to social media to put out the same vibes.

So, what’s Nance been up to? Has he been unloading on Putin’s soldiers at the front lines, which is the facade he’s tried to put up? Nah, it appears he’s not actually fighting at all. Instead, he’s hiding out in “safe houses” and talking to the press, likely of his own volition.

But he checks his equipment, so I guess that counts for something.

It’s hard to quantify the level of stolen valor and arrogance mixed up in all this. There are real people dying in Ukraine fighting the Russians. What’s going on in that country is not a game. Nance has almost certainly not even fired his weapon in anger, and it appears the most strenuous activity he’s had is doing PT every once and a while. Remember, this is a 60-something-year-old man.

But instead of just owning the fact that he’s a nobody sitting in the rear, grifting off false perceptions, his new game is to act as if the Ukrainians are acutely aware that he’s a “high-value asset.” In what way, exactly? What specific expertise does Nance hold that makes him of high value to the Ukrainian military? Is he helping them with strategy? Is he providing intelligence? I see no evidence any of that is happening. Rather, it looks like he’s sitting in a city with no on-the-ground fighting, doing media hits.

Here’s the thing. It would be fine if Nance had gone over there with body armor and a helmet, and just acted as a journalist. There’s still danger in that, and anyone willing to do it deserves respect. I would have happily said “good for you, Nance,” if that’s the path he took. He didn’t do that, though, choosing to take things to absurd levels, pretending he’s something he’s not. That should elicit mockery, not praise.

The Great American Free-Speech Panic

The great American free-speech panic

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has revealed how terrified the elites are of freedom of speech.

Tom Slater- Spiked online

Freedom of speech is the ‘dread of tyrants’. That’s how Frederick Douglass, the American abolitionist, statesman and former slave, put it in his seminal 1860 speech, ‘A Plea for Freedom of Speech in Boston’ – taking aim at a racist mob who had shut down an abolitionist meeting and the authorities that had refused to protect it. 

The battle lines in America’s free-speech wars are very different today, as of course are the stakes. ‘Slavery cannot tolerate free speech’, thundered Douglass. He saw open discussion as the means to liberation. Today, those who might consider themselves his heirs think you can censor your way to utopia. But one thing at least remains stubbornly the same: more than 160 years later, free speech still fills the American elites with dread.

What else could we conclude from the week-long meltdown over Elon Musk buying Twitter? The political and cultural elites have been gripped by panic. Human-rights groups are up in arms. Woke celebrities are threatening to flounce off the platform. All because Musk – a self-touting ‘free-speech absolutist’ – says he wants to pare back Twitter’s content-moderation policies, to ensure that Twitter functions as a freer ‘digital town square’.

The richest man in the world purchasing one of social media’s most consequential platforms is perhaps an unlikely blow for democracy. We at spiked would certainly rather the fate of free speech online didn’t rest on which billionaire happens to be in charge. But Musk’s takeover of Twitter has at least demonstrated that the rest of America’s ruling class – certainly those who run its institutions and its government – are united in terror at the prospect of people being able to hear and say what they like.

According to CNBC, members of President Biden’s inner circle, Democratic strategists and Barack Obama are worried Musk might lift the ban on Donald Trump and cause ‘misinformation’ to swirl ahead of the next election. White House press secretary Jen Psaki dodged a question about Musk this week, but did refer to the president’s ‘concerns about the power of social-media platforms, including Twitter and others, to spread misinformation’.

Here we see a neat demonstration of how the Democrats’ years-long moral panic about ‘misinformation’ maps rather neatly on to censoring their opponents. That had already been made clear with the Hunter Biden laptop scandal – the New York Post exposé that Twitter and Facebook labelled as misinformation and censored in the run-up to the 2020 election, but has since been backed up as true by other outlets. 

The human-rights establishment is similarly shaken by the prospect of more free speech on the internet. Amnesty International USA has warned Twitter’s new boss not to ‘erode enforcement of the policies and mechanisms designed to protect users’, noting the ‘disturbing persistence of hate speech on Twitter’. Among the activist set, meanwhile, Musk has been smeared as a racist whose definition of free speech is ‘allow[ing] white nationalists to target / harass people’.

The American elites, whose forebears gave the world the First Amendment, have apparently decided that similar standards cannot possibly apply on the internet. That ‘hate speech’ should be censored on social media has become common sense among so-called liberals, even though it is impossible to censor in US law. Censorship of those deemed ‘hateful’ – a now bloated category which, according to Twitter’s current policies, includes those who ‘misgender’ – has been outsourced to the private sector, and the elites are worried that Twitter under Elon Musk might no longer oblige.

Indeed, Big Tech censorship was never about a few oligarchs deciding to inflict their views on everyone else. Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO who presided over Trump’s ban and many more besides, is a sort of hippy libertarian and has wholeheartedly endorsed Musk. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg resisted the role that was being foisted upon him – as digital Minister of Truth – for years before he eventually gave in. The pressure on them to censor came from within – from the sort of Silicon Valley workers currently apoplectic about Musk’s takeover – and from without – from Democrats threatening to break up or regulate the tech giants if they didn’t clamp down on ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate’.

The American elites have come up with all kinds of convoluted reasons as to why it’s good and proper for Silicon Valley to wield its unprecedented power against those they disagree with. But those reasons keep changing in revealing ways. Before this week the argument was that Twitter can set whatever speech policies it likes because it’s a business and anyone who doesn’t like it can go elsewhere. Now they’ve suddenly changed their tune. And for all their deeply felt concern about misinformation the elites have turned a blind eye in recent years to how their war on misinformation has produced its own kind of misinformation – such as the hasty branding of the Hunter Biden story or the Covid lab-leak theory as bonkers conspiracy theories, only for it to turn out later that there was actually something to them.

This has become a vicious circle. Some of the genuinely mad movements unleashed in recent years – from QAnon to Stop the Steal to Covid anti-vax guff – are actually a demonstration of a well-worn argument against censorship. Namely, that censoring bad ideas doesn’t make them go away and can give them a glamour they do not deserve. Censorship has a way of making people think they’re on to something. Combine this with a mainstream media that now routinely prizes The Narrative over the facts – calling BLM riots ‘mostly peaceful’ and Kyle Rittenhouse a ‘white supremacist’ – and you’ve got a toxic mix. The crisis of trust in the mainstream has sent many looking for answers at the margins. And the more that do, the more censorship is meted out.

But then again this was never really about misinformation, was it? This is about America’s ruling class becoming deeply sceptical about one of America’s founding values, and deeply sceptical about their fellow citizens. So-called liberal elites simply do not believe that ordinary people can be trusted to sort truth from illusion and are now convinced that some higher power must vet their reading material for them. They believe that the answer to bad speech is not more speech, but ruthless corporate censorship. They have convinced themselves that free speech is a threat to civilisation, rather than the core of civilisation. 

And all it took was for an election not to go their way. It is striking that this philosophical turn away from free speech, which had been slowly congealing in academia for some time, suddenly went mainstream around 2016 – after a certain someone became president and the coastal elites went looking for answers as to why those voters they’d either ignored or smeared as racists had suddenly taken against them. Trump’s election was the catalyst for the explosion of censorship on social media, which before then was restrained by today’s standards. Tellingly, discussing what Musk’s Twitter might be like in terms of freedom of speech, a tech writer for the Atlantic speculates it will look ‘a lot more like Twitter did in, say, 2016. This is not a good thing!’

Whether Twitter under Elon Musk will be a good thing remains to be seen. What we do know is that he’ll have a fight on his hands, from American elites who now believe censorship is all that separates them from barbarism. It’s a nice reminder that freedom of speech remains an incredibly radical idea, that it empowers those at the bottom and rattles those at the top. It is still the dread of tyrants – even the pathetic, hysterical bunch who rule America today.

How Syria became another narco-state

 There is a drug war brewing in the Middle East, and Syria is at its center. The country has been destroyed by its eleven-year civil war, and in the ruins of what was once a prosperous country, an entirely different economy now takes shape. It’s an economy of poverty and privation, where food and energy prices are perpetually high, and supplies of basic commodities are uncertain.  

The regime of Bashar al-Assad, now unlikely to be overthrown, has become the Middle East’s biggest moocher — a rent-seeking entity that begs for “reconstruction” funds from nearby monarchies to keep its own corrupt machinery in operation.  

Wartime brings its own economic calculations. As old authority disintegrates and civil society buckles, what was once illegal and punished becomes lucrative and practical. In war, the “dark” or illegal economy soon vacuums up labor and capital. In Syria, this included the widespread manufacture and selling of illegal drugs, including hashish and, most notably, an amphetamine commonly called Captagon.  

Captagon is a cheap stimulant and has the same attractions as other recreational drugs, with some extras. It allows many in war to escape the unhappy present and the requirements of conscious participation in miserable existence.  

And on the battlefield, the drug makes fighters alert on dreary watches; it gives them false courage; it stops them from feeling the most debilitating effects of pain; and it is rumored to keep drugged soldiers fighting on after receiving ultimately un-survivable wounds.  

Captagon has obvious downsides. It is addictive and addiction does lasting physical and neurological damage; and it can kill by overdose. Its ramshackle and criminal manufacture means the quality of drugs supplied is uncertain and frequently dangerous.  

As several recent reports document, the production of this drug has changed during the course of the war. Where once, as Caroline Rose and Alexander Söderholm document in a major recent study, production was concentrated, small-scale, and in rebel areas, now the drug is manufactured in industrial quantities in government territory, with the increasingly overt approval of the regime.  

With Syria’s legitimate primary and secondary industries still in states of disarray and collapse, Captagon has become a serious export. Allying with criminal networks across the region, Syria exports Captagon in creative ways, and at an eye-popping scale.  

Foreign jurisdictions routinely seize millions of pills — sometimes hidden in crates of fruit, or run directly across borders at high speed. The Jordanian military, which this year alone has seized 16 million pills, is increasingly open on the subject of its growing war with the smugglers. It advertises its new policy: shooting to kill on sight.  

The vast majority of these drugs are neither spotted nor seized. They simply cannot be, given the growing scale and seriousness of the drug economy emanating from Syria.  

In trying to explain their confiscations, foreign countries are sometimes at a loss. The problems of black markets and the illicit smuggling of unregulated substances are real enough, as are the clear links to international organized crime.  

But when pressed on seizures, some local authorities defer to judgements that are out of date. When Italy seized millions of tablets in 2020, its police maintained, in the face of little evidence, that the shipment was intended to finance the Islamic State (ISIS).  

This is unlikely to be true. Suhail al-Ghazi, writing for the Turkish Center for Middle Eastern Studies (ORSAM), notes that the majority of Syria’s Captagon production rests with Hezbollah and the Syrian regime, which sell drugs through long-standing narcotics trafficking operations dating back at least to the 2006 war.  

But these other manufacturers and beneficiaries are hardly better than a desiccated Islamic State. The ancillaries of their drug smuggling are no less brutal.  

Their markets are in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Jordan’s military happens to be in between Syria and these markets.  

Syria’s emergence as a narco-state has broad implications. The drugs themselves are social and political menaces for Syria’s many neighbors. But so is the infrastructure they require and reward. A drug trade produces drug smugglers and drug gangs. It makes a drug gang out of what was once a government. Growing out of a pre-existing war, these gangs arm themselves and fight. They fight each other, and anyone representing law.

 Rose and Söderholm document numerous instances of violence between drug gangs within the Syrian state and its allies, and violence against border posts and law enforcement in Lebanon and Jordan, resulting conservatively in dozens of deaths. One incident on Christmas Day 2021 catches the eye: Jordan’s armed forces fought as many as 200 Syrian smugglers carrying machine guns who were trying to enter Jordan from Suweida and Daraa provinces in Syria. 

The dead of this new war include Jordanian and Lebanese soldiers, border guards, policemen — the smugglers themselves. Not to mention the civilians caught up in the trade.  

Work from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project indicates widespread drug-related corruption within the Assad regime. We can infer not only that the regime is complicit in this growing drug trade, but also that much of its nominally legitimate economic and political functions are either connected to or subsumed within the criminal world of drug production.  

With rough estimates indicating that the Captagon trade was worth more than $5 billion to Syria in 2021 alone, there is no incentive, let alone will, for a poor state, isolated by its own unrepentant actions, to tamp down the drug trade.  

Assad claims his government is a stabilizing influence, and as he tours the region in pursuit of diplomatic normalization and economic reconstruction, he claims he is a suitable partner for all manner of initiatives. He says he needs large sums of money to participate fully, of course. 

But a state built anew on these foundations — of corruption and illegality, and with violence entrenched in its drug economy — cannot stabilize itself. As Jordanian authorities are increasingly concluding, neither the drug economy nor the violence it brings can be contained by ordinary measures.

 

 With organized crime, terrorist organizations, and armed militias all participating in this black market, more violence is coming. Syria’s civil war is not over, and neither is the drug war likely to follow on its heels.  

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/how-syria-became-another-narco-state/