Category Archives: Politics

How Freedom Dies from A to Z

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Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”— French philosopher Etienne de La BoétieWe have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age. You can call it the age of authoritarianism. Or fascism. Or oligarchy. Or the American police state.
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The COVID-19 pandemic continues to be a convenient, traumatic, devastating distraction.

The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have allowed themselves to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being laid down right under their noses by the architects of the Deep State.

Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton: they have all been complicit in carrying out the Deep State’s agenda.

Frankly, it really doesn’t matter who occupies the White House, because it is a profit-driven, unelected bureaucracy—call it whatever you will: the Deep State, the Controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the corporate elite, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—that is actually calling the shots

Our losses are mounting with every passing day, part of a calculated siege intended to ensure our defeat at the hands of a totalitarian regime.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, media, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more are casualties in the government’s war on the American people.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized federal police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms are being steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

As a result, the American people continue to be treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.

None of these dangers have dissipated in any way.

They have merely disappeared from our televised news streams.

Thus, in the interest of liberty and truth, here’s an A-to-Z primer that spells out the grim realities of life in the American Police State that no one seems to be talking about anymore.

A is for the AMERICAN POLICE STATE. A police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

B is for our battered BILL OF RIGHTS. In the militarized police culture that is America today, where you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is rarely held accountable for violating your rights, the Bill of Rights doesn’t amount to much.

C is for CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE. This governmental scheme to deprive Americans of their liberties—namely, the right to property—is being carried out under the guise of civil asset forfeiture, a government practice wherein government agents (usually the police and now TSA agents) seize private property they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then, whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property and it’s virtually impossible to get it back.

D is for DRONES. It was estimated that at least 30,000 drones are  now airborne in American airspace, part of an $80 billion industry. Although some drones may be used for benevolent purposes, many are also being equipped with lasers, tasers and scanning devices, among other weapons—all aimed at “we the people.”

E is for EMERGENCY STATE. From 9/11 to COVID-19, we have been the subjected to an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security. The government’s ongoing attempts to declare so-called national emergencies in order to circumvent the Constitution’s system of checks and balances constitutes yet another expansion of presidential power that exposes the nation to further constitutional peril.

F is for FASCISM. A study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere economic units or databits.

G is for GRENADE LAUNCHERS and GLOBAL POLICE. The federal government has distributed more than $18 billion worth of battlefield-appropriate military weapons, vehicles and equipment such as drones, tanks, and grenade launchers to domestic police departments across the country. As a result, most small-town police forces now have enough firepower to render any citizen resistance futile. Now take those small-town police forces, train them to look and act like the military, and then enlist them to be part of the United Nations’ Strong Cities Network program, and you not only have a standing army that operates beyond the reach of the Constitution but one that is part of a global police force.

H is for HOLLOW-POINT BULLETS. The government’s efforts to militarize and weaponize its agencies and employees is reaching epic proportions, with federal agencies as varied as the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration stockpiling millions of lethal hollow-point bullets, which violate international law. Ironically, while the government continues to push for stricter gun laws for the general populace, the U.S. military’s arsenal of weapons makes the average American’s handgun look like a Tinker Toy.

I is for the INTERNET OF THINGS, in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free. The key word here, however, is control. This “connected” industry propels us closer to a future where police agencies apprehend virtually anyone if the government “thinks” they may commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

J is for JAILING FOR PROFIT. Having outsourced their inmate population to private prisons run by private corporations, this profit-driven form of mass punishment has given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep their privately run prisons full by jailing large numbers of Americans for petty crimes.

K is for KENTUCKY V. KING. In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers can break into homes, without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home as long as they think they may have a reason to do so. Despite the fact that the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between the citizenry and a police state, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid, leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner of abuses by law enforcement officials.

L is for LICENSE PLATE READERS, which enable law enforcement and private agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicles, and their occupants, all across the country. This data collected on tens of thousands of innocent people is also being shared between police agencies, as well as with government fusion centers and private companies. This puts Big Brother in the driver’s seat.

M is for MAIN CORE. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation. As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. There are at least 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.

N is for NO-KNOCK RAIDS. Owing to the militarization of the nation’s police forces, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for routine police matters. In fact, more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and all in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually possession of some small amount of drugs.

O is for OVERCRIMINALIZATION and OVERREGULATION. Thanks to an overabundance of 4500-plus federal crimes and 400,000 plus rules and regulations, it’s estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. As a result of this overcriminalization, we’re seeing an uptick in Americans being arrested and jailed for such absurd “violations” as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room.

P is for PATHOCRACY and PRECRIME. When our own government treats us as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police and other government agents, mistreated, and then jailed in profit-driven private prisons if we dare step out of line, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.” Couple that with the government’s burgeoning precrime programs, which will use fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics in order to identify and deter so-called potential “extremists,” dissidents or rabble-rousers. Bear in mind that anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is now viewed as an extremist.

Q is for QUALIFIED IMMUNITY. Qualified immunity allows police officers to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing. Conveniently, those deciding whether a cop should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all cronies with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.

R is for ROADSIDE STRIP SEARCHES and BLOOD DRAWS. The courts have increasingly erred on the side of giving government officials—especially the police—vast discretion in carrying out strip searches, blood draws and even anal and vaginal probes for a broad range of violations, no matter how minor the offense. In the past, strip searches were resorted to only in exceptional circumstances where police were confident that a serious crime was in progress. In recent years, however, strip searches have become routine operating procedures in which everyone is rendered a suspect and, as such, is subjected to treatment once reserved for only the most serious of criminals.

S is for the SURVEILLANCE STATE. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of the electronic concentration camp in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

T is for TASERS. Nonlethal weapons such as tasers, stun guns, rubber pellets and the like have been used by police as weapons of compliance more often and with less restraint—even against women and children—and in some instances, even causing death. These “nonlethal” weapons also enable police to aggress with the push of a button, making the potential for overblown confrontations over minor incidents that much more likely. A Taser Shockwave, for instance, can electrocute a crowd of people at the touch of a button.

U is for UNARMED CITIZENS SHOT BY POLICE. No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later, often attributed to a fear for their safety. Yet the fatality rate of on-duty patrol officers is reportedly far lower than many other professions, including construction, logging, fishing, truck driving, and even trash collection.

V is for VIRUSES and VACCINE PASSPORTS. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including the U.S.) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. The road we are traveling is paved with lockdowns, SWAT team raids, mass surveillance, forced vaccinations, contact tracing, vaccine passports, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dare to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.

W is for WHOLE-BODY SCANNERS. Using either x-ray radiation or radio waves, scanning devices and government mobile units are being used not only to “see” through your clothes but to spy on you within the privacy of your home. While these mobile scanners are being sold to the American public as necessary security and safety measures, we can ill afford to forget that such systems are rife with the potential for abuse, not only by government bureaucrats but by the technicians employed to operate them.

X is for X-KEYSCORE, one of the many spying programs carried out by the National Security Agency that targets every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. This top-secret program “allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”

Y is for YOU-NESS. Using your face, mannerisms, social media and “you-ness” against you, you are now be tracked based on what you buy, where you go, what you do in public, and how you do what you do. Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country.

Z is for ZERO TOLERANCE. We have moved into a new paradigm in which young people are increasingly viewed as suspects and treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, often for engaging in little more than childish behavior or for saying the “wrong” word. In some jurisdictions, students have also been penalized under school zero tolerance policies for such inane “crimes” as carrying cough drops, wearing black lipstick, bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades. The lesson being taught to our youngest—and most impressionable—citizens is this: in the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (politician, police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the reality we must come to terms with is that in the post-9/11 America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age.

You can call it the age of authoritarianism. Or fascism. Or oligarchy. Or the American police state.

Whatever label you want to put on it, the end result is the same: tyranny.

This article was originally published at The Rutherford Institute.

The Most Anti-American President Ever

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He doesn’t represent Americans. He represents everything that hurts Americans. He stands for tyranny, inflation, laziness, Communists, religious tyrants, oil dependence, economic stagnation and decline, destructive debt, open borders, the unlimited rights of criminals, the aristocracy of pull over merit, racism disguised as progressive thinking, coercive medical treatments, and the masking and brainwashing of children. A more horrible person at the head of a more anti-American movement has never been seen in this country. If you are an American and you support what this nasty, inept old man and his bosses are doing to us, then you are committed to the destruction of your country and your freedom.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Eight Months in, Biden’s Cascade of FailureA cognitively challenged Biden is pulled in every direction, by left-wing politicos collecting their debts, by his own spite, by his trademark narcissism, and by his hatred of all things Trump

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Almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross. None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth.

The Afghan Catastrophe

Seven months ago, Afghanistan was relatively quiet—with about 10,000 vestigial NATO troops, including 2,500 Americans, anchored by the Bagram Airfield. They were able to provide air superiority for the coalition and Afghan national army. With air power, NATO forces, if and when they so wished, could have very slowly and gradually withdrawn all its remnant troops—but only after a prior departure of all American and European civilians, coalition contractors, and allied Afghans.

The transient calm abruptly imploded as soon as Joe Biden recklessly yanked all U.S. troops out in a matter of days. Many left in the dead of night, leaving no one to protect contractors, dependents, diplomats, and Afghan allies. In Biden’s world, civilians protect the last Western enclave while soldiers flee.

Three weeks ago, Joe Biden and a woke and politicized Pentagon were assuring us that Afghanistan was “stable.” Now the country is reverting to its accustomed premodern, theocratic, and medieval chaos. It will likely soon reopen as the world’s pre-9/11-style terrorist haven—an arms mart of over $50 billion in abandoned U.S. military equipment. Thanks to the president of the United States, terrorists and nation-state enemies can now shop for arms and train there without hindrance.

The NATO coalition-builder Biden also dry-gulched his European allies, whose soldiers outnumbered our own. The humanitarian “good ole Joe from Scranton” deprecated the thousands of Afghan military dead who had helped the Americans. The families of the American fallen and wounded of two decades were all but told by Biden that the catastrophe in Kabul was inevitable—no other way out but chaos and dishonor. Why did he not tell us that earlier, when he was vice president, so many dead and wounded ago?

“Get over it,” was Biden’s messaging subtext. If Americans want to hear the blame game, he told us to scapegoat Barack Obama, or all prior presidents, or especially Donald Trump, or the intelligence services and military, or the Afghan army, or we naïfs who somehow think things are a mess right now in Kabul—or anything and everyone but Joe Biden.

Was Biden’s idea simply to get the United States “officially” out of Afghanistan and let the abandoned 10,000-plus Americans manage as they can?

Was Biden angry over our 20-year presence and thinking the Afghans would deserve what followed? Was he so delusional that he really believed the NATO forces could easily deter the Taliban with sanctimonious lectures from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman? The latter is a former head of EMILY’s List and an architect of the Iran Deal, so were she and others especially scarifying to naughty theocrats when they warned they might lose their slot in the “rules-based world order”? Or did Biden believe the Taliban would be deterred by Sherman’s exclamations, such as her ominous warning, “This is personal for me!”

The Inflation Fiasco

In January, Biden inherited a rebounding economy that was fueled by $1 trillion in stimulatory federal red ink. Given natural pent-up consumer demand, why did Biden need to print yet another $1 trillion, seek to green-light another $2 trillion for “infrastructure,” and raise even higher unemployment compensation to the point of discouraging employees from returning to work?

At the same time, he has alarmed employers with braggadocio threats that higher capital gains, income, payroll, and estate taxes are all on the way. More lockdowns only further eroded small businesses. The result was price inflation of all the stuff of life—homes, lumber, gas, food, appliances—as well as historic shortages of everything from cars and houses to the work of contractors and electricians. Any increase in wages due to labor shortages was soon erased by spirals in the consumer price index.

So, what was Biden thinking or, rather, not thinking? By paying workers not to work he would be evening out the ancient score with employers? Did workers need a vacation from the quarantine? Printing money was a way to spread the wealth—and diminish what the rich possessed? Was a $2 trillion deficit and $30 trillion in aggregate debt a way of bragging to Trump that he doubled the Trump red ink in less than a year? Would he pile up more debt than both Barack Obama and George W. Bush in half the time?

The Border Disaster

Biden took a secure border, along with increasingly legal-only immigration, and then destroyed both. He stopped construction of the border wall, encouraged an expected 2 million illegal entries over the current fiscal year, promised amnesties, and resumed “catch and release.” He did all that at a time of a pandemic, exempting illegal aliens from all the requirements of COVID testing and mass vaccinations that he had hectored his own citizens about getting. With planned mass amnesties and millions more invited to cross illegally in the next three years, was Biden seeking to found a new American nation within the now passé old American nation?

Did he believe that Americans did not deserve their citizenship and newcomers from south of the border were somehow more worthy? Did he see the 2 million new residents as instant voters under new relaxed rules of balloting? Did he think in a labor-deprived economy they would supply nannies, gardeners, and cooks to bicoastal elites? We strain to imagine any explanation because there is no logic to any.

Energy Insufficiency

Biden did his best in just seven months to explode the idea of American self-sufficiency in natural gas and oil. He canceled the Keystone Pipeline, froze new federal energy leases, put the Anwar oil field off limits, and warned frackers their end days were near.

So, what drove Biden? Did he object that motorists were saving too many billions of dollars per year in decreased commuting costs? Or was the rub that we had slashed too many imports of oil from the volatile Middle East and no longer would launch preemptive wars? Or perhaps the transition to clean natural gas instead of coal as a fuel for power generation had too radically curtailed carbon emissions? Did Biden feel that Middle East producers, the Russians, or the Venezuelans could better protect the planet while extracting oil and gas than could American drillers?

The Race Calamity

Biden blew up race relations by greenlighting the new hunt for the mythical “whiteness” monster. Were a few buffoonish white rioters who stormed the Capitol the tip of the spear of a previously unknown massive white supremacy movement, the most dangerous, he swore, since the Civil War?

Biden took affirmative action and the Civil Rights-era “disparate impact” and “proportional representation” ideas and turned them into disproportionate representation and reparations on the cheap. Biden made it acceptable to damn “whiteness,” as if all 230 million white Americans are guilty of something or other in a way that the other 100 million “nonwhite” are not.

So why did Biden kick the sleeping dog of racial polarization? To stir up his left-wing base? To alleviate his own guilt over the Biden family’s long history of racist insults, from “clean” Barack Obama to “put y’all in chains” to the “Corn Pop” sagas to “you ain’t black” and “junkie” to Hunter’s n-word and Asian racism? Did Biden see countries like Iraq, Lebanon, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia as positive models for diversity emulation?

The Crime Explosion

After Biden entered office, violent crimes ignited from the embers of the 120 days of mostly unpunished looting, arson, and organized violence in the streets of America’s major cities during summer 2020. Under Biden, jails were emptied. Federal attorneys and emulative local DAs exempted offenders. Police were defamed and defunded. Punishing crime was considered a racist construct.

The result is that Americans now avoid the Dodge City downtowns of most of America’s crime-ridden blue cities. They accept that any urban pedestrian, any driver after hours, any commuter on a bus or subway can be assaulted, robbed, beaten, raped, or shot—without any assurance that the media will fairly report the crime, or that the criminal justice system will punish the perpetrators. In Biden’s America looters prance into drug stores and walk out with shopping bags of stuff, under the terrified gaze of security guards who guesstimate at least they did not steal more than $950 of loot.

Was Biden’s plan to let the people redistribute ill-gotten gains? Or was he convinced that disproportionate criminal activity was karmic payback, or penance for the death of George Floyd? Did he really believe that we were far too overpoliced? Did he believe that the general public should experience, at last, the crime of the inner-city to ensure equity and inclusion?

So why does Biden so willfully exercise this destructive touch that blows up anything he taps?

There are several possible theories:

1) Biden is non compos mentis. He has no idea of what he is doing. But to the degree he is alert, Biden listens—sort of—only to the last person with whom he talks. And then he takes a nap. When Afghanistan blows up or inflation roars or the border becomes an entry door, his eyes open, and he becomes bewildered and snarly—like an irritable and snappy Bruce Dern waking up in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

Biden has no clue about the actual destructive implementation of his toxic policies, and no concern upon whom these destructive agendas fall. He vaguely assumes a lapdog left-wing media will repackage every Biden incoherence as Periclean, and every daily “lid” as Biden’s escape for presidential research, deep reading, and intensive deliberation. Biden appears to be about where Woodrow Wilson was in November 1919.

2) Or is Biden a rank opportunist and thinking he will ride woke leftism as the country’s new trajectory? He resents his prior subservience to Obama, and now feels he can trump past signature leftist administrations as the one true and only socialist evolutionary. He is not so much the manipulated as the manipulator.

Biden fantasizes himself as a hands-on dynamic leader who bites at reporters, snaps from the podium, and issues his customary interjections. He is therefore “in command” for four or five hours a day. He enjoys acting more radical than Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, or “the squad.”—and especially being far more leftwing than his old and now passé boss Barack Obama. Joe is in control and that explains the dross touch. For the first time in his life, such an incompetent has complete freedom—to be powerfully incompetent. Biden is then not demented as much as delusionally running things.

3) Biden is unfortunately what he always was: a rather mean-spirited plagiarist, liar, and nihilist, from his Clarence Thomas character assassination infamy and Tara Reade groping to his foul racist talk and his monumental habitual grifting. His disasters are the same old, same old Biden trademark, performance-art screw-ups.

Biden likes the idea of conservative outrage, of chaos, of barking at everyone all the time. Biden accepts that no omelets can be made without broken eggs, and sort of enjoys screwing up things, as Robert Gates and Barack Obama both warned. “Wokening” the Joint Chiefs of Staff, encouraging hundreds of thousands to pour across the border, and abandoning our NATO allies in Afghanistan—who cares when tough guy, brash-talking Joe on the move jumbles stuff up? The disasters in the economy, foreign policy, crime, energy, and racial relations? Biden is just shaking things up, stirring the pot, baiting people to watch Mr. “Come On, Man” in action, as he blusters and preens and leaves a trail of destruction in his wake.

4) Biden is nothing much at all. He’s just a cardboard-cut out, a garden-variety Democratic Party hack, who is against anything conservatives are for. He assumes he will undo all that Trump did, on the theory it is simple and easy for him in his lazy, senior moments. And he is tired anyway of thinking much beyond such Pavlovian rejectionism. A closed border is bad; presto, open borders are good. Improving race relations is bad; deteriorating relations must be good. Energy independence bad; dependency good. Biden works on autopilot in his minimalist day job: just cancel anything that Trump did and worry nothing about the effects on the American people

5) Biden is a hostage of both the Left and Hunter Biden. His task is to ram down a hard Left agenda, in the fashion of a torpedo that itself blows up when it hits the target. The Left ensured the base would not bolt in 2020. So, he owes them. Biden, more or less, signed his presidency over to the squad, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, and the Obama holdovers. They hand him a script; he tries to read it; and they follow up with the details. He is the old “Star Trek’s” tottering John Gill.

The Left may hope their own nihilist agenda sort of works. When it inevitably does not, then Joe, the delivery man, is blamed: so much more quickly, then, will be Biden’s necessary exit. They kept their part of the bargain by getting the basement denizen elected. Now he keeps the deal by handing over the presidency. Biden’s utility had about a six-month shelf life.

Now ever so slowly the leaks, the West Wing backstabbing, the furrowed anchor brows, and the unnamed sources will gently ease him out with 25th Amendment worries (e.g., “Perhaps President Biden might find taking the Montreal Cognitive Assessment of some value after all, for his own benefit, of course.”) Kamala Harris is not so inert as we are led to believe.

Hunter Biden, smeared and ruined with scandals of every imaginable sordidness, now embarks on his masterpiece con: peddling his kindergarten art at a half-million dollars per painting to “anonymous” quid pro quo rich foreign grifters. Why does Hunter pose such brazenness and unnecessary danger to his father, the president? Because the former addict can, and just for the f—k of it?

Hunter’s malicious behavior is an implied threat that if Joe’s staff slaps Hunter’s hand, he threatens to spill the “beans” on the “Big Guy” and “Mr. 10 Percent”—given he plays the wounded fawn as the underappreciated bad boy. Hunter was the bad-seed family money man without whose grift none of them would ever have lived in such mordida-generated splendor.

A cognitively challenged Biden then is pulled in every direction, by his own senility, by left-wing politicos collecting their debts, by his own spite, by his trademark narcissism, and by his neanderthal hatred of everything Trump was and did.

The problem for America is that theories one through five are not always mutually exclusive, but more likely force multipliers of the present insanity. At some point, some brave congressional representative or Senator will finally have to say to Biden, in the spirit of Oliver Cromwell and Leo Amery:

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Member of the Board of Advisors for both the Independent Institute as well as its quarterly journal, The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy.

Ten Things that will Disappear in Our Lifetimes

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Change is part of human life. Our world is constantly changing and evolving to fit our needs and to keep up with technology. In years past, we have seen the typewriter replaced by the computer and the clothes line replaced by dryers. Not everything has been completely replaced though; many things have been updated such as a wooden box camera to a digital camera. Those who adapt to the change will be the ones to thrive in the changing world. All others will be left behind. Here are 10 guesses on the things that will disappear in our lifetime:

1. The Check

Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with checks by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. The result of this means less mail traffic and the post office will suffer.

2. The Post Office

Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. E-mails and companies like Fed Ex and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.

3. The Newspaper

The younger generation simply doesn’t read the newspaper. They certainly don’t subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance.

4. The Book

You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages, but you will. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy and the price is less than half that of a real book. Another convenience is not lugging around a stack of heavy books.

5. The Land Line Telephone

Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don’t need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they’ve always had it. For the extra service, you’re paying double. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell provider for free.

6. Corporate Music

The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It’s the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it. Opportunities on the Internet such as online radios and websites like Pandora allow people to listen for free and reach the masses directly without a company.

7. Network Television

Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they’re playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes. People will choose what they want to watch online and through companies like Netflix.

8. Personal Files

Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD, and you can always re-install it if need be. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest “cloud services.” That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device.

9. Privacy

If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That’s gone. It’s been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7, “they” know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits. “They” will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again. You know who “they” are!

10. Fax Machine

Ever since the introduction of e-mail, the fax machine has not been needed or used as much. The only things the fax machine is still used for are when a scanner is not available to e-mail a document somewhere, secure documents that need to reach a location quickly, or when a signature is required. In the future, everyone will relay documents through their smart phones. Eventually, people may even teleport and then people will no longer need to send documents, but just hand them over.

The FDA has Proved Itself to be Totally Corrupt and Criminal Organization

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As I predicted, the corrupt US Food & Drug Administration (FDA), allegedly a regulatory agency but in actuality an agent for Big Pharma and agri-business, has, according to news reports, given final approval to Pfizer’s Covid “vaccine.” (Why only Pfizer’s? Is there favoritism at the FDA?) The FDA congratulates itself declaring the “vaccine” a “milestone as we continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic.” https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-covid-19-vaccine

In one of the worse and most transparent lies ever told by a US government agency, the FDA said:

“The FDA’s approval of this vaccine is a milestone as we continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. While this and other vaccines have met the FDA’s rigorous, scientific standards for emergency use authorization, as the first FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine, the public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product,” said Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, M.D. “While millions of people have already safely received COVID-19 vaccines, we recognize that for some, the FDA approval of a vaccine may now instill additional confidence to get vaccinated. Today’s milestone puts us one step closer to altering the course of this pandemic in the U.S.”

Notice the last two sentences to which I added emphasis. The purpose of the approval is to convince those resisting inoculation with an extremely dangerous and totally ineffective “vaccine” to submit and take the shot.

As so many experts, men and women with scientific and medical knowledge far beyond what the FDA, CDC, NIH, WHO can muster, have stressed, the scientific evidence that does exist proves beyond all doubt that the mRNA vaccines fail to protect and actually enable the virus to escape the immune response, thus creating variants that infect the vaccinated. No evidence exists that supports the FDA’s claims.

Consider Commissioner Janet Woodcock’s claim that millions of people have already safely received Covid-19 vaccines. The official vaccine adverse reporting systems of the US, UK, and EU as of mid-June, two months ago, report 22,821 vaccine-related deaths and 4,085,204 health injuries, some serious and permanent. Clearly, the vaccine was not safe for these 4,108,025 people. As it is known that only a small percentage of adverse vaccine reactions and deaths are reported, the actual number of people harmed by the vaccine is much larger. See: https://doctors4covidethics.org/official-eu-adverse-event-data-eu-uk-us/

Notice that the FDA gave a “safe” approval to a “vaccine” that official government databases for the US, EU, and UK show has killed as of last June 22,821 people and injured 4,085,204 people.

In its approval letter to Pfizer the FDA says that its analysis confirms that Pfizer’s “vaccine” is 95% effective. This statement is contradicted by all known evidence. From all over the world evidence is available that the majority of those in hospitals stricken with Covid are the fully vaccinated.

If the “vaccine” is 95% effective how is it possible that Iceland with a 95% vaccination rate has a massive outbreak of Covid? How is it possible that Israel, which almost exclusively used Pfizer vaccine, reports from the Israeli health ministry that at the beginning of July the effectiveness of the Pfizer “vaccine” was 64% and fell to 39% by the end of July? https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/08/23/does-the-fda-think-these-data-justify-the-first-full-approval-of-a-covid-19-vaccine/

The utterly corrupt FDA pulled 95% out of its ass.

Nowhere in the FDA’s letter of approval is there any mention that the vaccine produces Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE). ADE is a mechanism that increases the ability of a virus to enter cells and cause a worsening of the disease. The evidence is clear that the Pfizer “vaccine” and the rest of the mRNA “vaccines” produce virus variants that cannot be controlled by vaccines. https://www.globalresearch.ca/two-top-virologists-frightening-warnings-about-covid-injections-ignored-government-big-media/5753731

It is totally and illegally impossible for any vaccine that has this result ever under any conditions being approved.

Why has the FDA broken the law? What is the FDA’s real agenda. It most certainly is not public health.

Why does the FDA want to destroy the health of all Americans and all others in the world? What is the real agenda?

What is really going on here? Incompetence alone cannot be the answer. The incompetence required is too vast to be possible especially when from all over the world the most distinguished scientists and medical experts of our time are issuing alarms that are censored by “official health authorities” and the media. https://www.globalresearch.ca/two-top-virologists-frightening-warnings-about-covid-injections-ignored-government-big-media/5753731 The corrupt dumbshits doing the censoring are not capable of carrying the books for the real experts who are being silenced.

Clearly, we are being set up for something very bad.

Why Tyrants are Always Losers in the End

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Here’s the problem with tyrants: They take away the self-interest of their victims.

The more their victims give in to their control, the less they have to lose.

The more successful the tyrants are at victimizing them, the less incentive their victims have to do anything.

Tyrants want something from their victims. They want good will, free labor, a sense of power, or SOMETHING. The more you beat down your slave, the less your slave will have to offer.

The smug tyrants taking over America now will be no different. They’re starting at a stronger point because their victims have more to offer. We have been a largely prosperous and free country for many, many generations. Taking over such people isn’t really a challenge, not once you get them afraid. But once the tyranny sets in, they will produce less and less. They will have less and less to offer.

If nothing else, it will be amusing to watch. The same tyrants who pay millions of people to stay home and get college for free are going to create wards of the state with no incentive, no sense of purpose, no innovation, no brainpower — nothing. They will create a mass of mushy snowflakes with dough for brains and cotton candy for character. That friend of yours whose 25-year-old or 35-year-old child still lives in his or her childhood bedroom? That will soon be the norm, in the society now being created by tyrants.

Smug and sure of themselves as today’s totalitarians seem to be, they will reach the end of their road with people who have nothing left to lose. Today’s American Communists and tyrants will reach the same dead end that all tyrants have reached. And there won’t be a free country somewhere else on the planet to bail them out. Not this time.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Eric Margolis: This is Not the Worst Case Scenario in Afghanistan

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Eric Margolis talks with Scott about the situation in Afghanistan as American forces continue to withdraw. Of course, the last few days have seen nonstop headlines proclaiming an utter disaster in the country, many of them excoriating President Biden for having screwed things up so badly. But Scott and Margolis remind us just how much worse things could be. Margolis points out that for one thing, some Afghan government officials seem to have been quietly preparing for a transfer of power far in advance, such that when U.S. forces pulled out, they were prepared to more or less let the Taliban take over. You don’t have to be a fan of the Taliban to realize that this relatively peaceful transfer of power is far better than the alternative: months of bloody and destructive fighting followed by victory for the Taliban anyway. Even in areas like women’s rights, Margolis explains that the current generation of Taliban leadership isn’t as harsh as their fathers and grandfathers—Taliban spokesmen have been quick to reassure the West that they want women to play a bigger role in society. The last thing Americans should do is let war hawks use the chaos in Afghanistan as an excuse for us to go back into the country and stay forever.

Mass Civil Disobedience: The Only Answer

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Without mass civil disobedience, we will not make it out of this mess.

As Senator Rand Paul said recently, “They can’t arrest us all.” They can’t. If enough people stop complying with unconstitutional mandates and directives, it will send the government into chaos. It’s what they fear most: losing control. Control and power are all the people in power care about. Yes, they care about money, too. But without power, they don’t get any money. People in politics and government don’t make their money through voluntary persuasion, as legitimate businesses (small and large) do. Nancy Pelosi didn’t become a billionaire through creating a product or service that millions wish to buy. She became a billionaire through coercion, deceit and manipulation — decades of it, assisted by a dishonest, fawning media as well as many ignorant voters. Ditto for Joe Biden, and all the other politicians who became millionaires and billionaires.

Civil disobedience is the Kyrptonite of politicians. When they see us wearing masks, staying inside, getting vaccinated because they say so — regardless of our concerns, or the concerns of our doctors, including our mental health professionals — then they are happy. They know that if they can get the vast majority to do all these things, they can probably get the vast majority to do anything. This makes them happy; and their happiness is their sickness. They know if the vast majority do their bidding — some of them resentfully — then they can get the vast majority to intimidate and threaten those who will not (yet) comply. Everything now unfolding with vaccinations and vaccination passports demonstrates the polar opposite of civil disobedience — and everything is now unfolding precisely as evil, powerful people desire it.

It’s not about masks or a mostly survivable virus. It’s not about health or safety. It’s about the “safety” of the powerful to maintain/expand their control and, where relevant, their money flow. That’s all it is, and all it ever will be. It’s human nature at its absolute worse. It’s human nature just a couple of rungs above the actions of a Nazi Germany. We’re almost there. I believe today’s power mongers have the potential to be much worse than Hitler, inconceivable as that is. Just watch. People in power can go wherever they want with the unqualified and unconditional support of the vast majority of the people behind them. Unthinking or fearful people are all they need.

So far, they have ZERO losses in their column. Nothing, absolutely nothing, stands in their way. Other than mass civil disobedience, which has yet to happen.

What do we have to do? In mass numbers, we have to stop complying with the idiotic, the insane, the unsustainable and the brazenly, openly unconstitutional. Stop complying. It’s as simple as that. If you’re afraid of being put in jail, just remember that they can’t put all of us in jail. Break down the system. Make it all come to a screeching halt — not through fire and violence; but through simply refusing to participate in it, under these conditions.

If you’re too afraid to take those steps, now or ever, then you’re going to have to accept the consequences. Those consequences are unfolding very rapidly, almost daily, right before our eyes. Those consequences will become much worse than anything you ever feared about disobedience. And just think: You can tell your children and grandchildren that YOU are the generation who lost our freedom, when they ask, “What’s all the ‘freedom’ I hear about prior to 2020?”

Civil disobedience will not be enough. There is no one single thing that will fix this mess. In many respects, it’s too late. It’s too late to avoid a disaster because, if we’re honest about it, the disaster is unfolding. Joe Biden is not the cause of a disaster; he’s the result and consequence of a disaster that already happened, and that’s getting worse by the day. Kamala Harris and all that’s to follow will be even worse.

But we can minimize the impact and at least try to reverse course. We can experience, in authentic solidarity with fellow freedom-loving citizens (millions of them), the satisfaction that emerges from simply not complying, and from doing so in numbers of tens of millions.

You can make the tyrants crazy. They’re already evil, and that will never change. But let’s make them suffer. Let’s torture them, by refusing to comply.

You’re not helpless, so long as you remember that.

Iran is the World’s Greatest Executioner

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As the leading executioner per capita in the world, it is perhaps appropriate that a notorious killer, known as ‘The Butcher of Tehran,’ has ascended to the presidency. Following his rigged election, Ebrahim Raisi was inaugurated as president on August 5th. Listed as an international terrorist in the USA, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for his indictment for violations of human rights and crimes against humanity. He has boasted of his role as a member of the ‘Death Commission’ appointed by the then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988, which oversaw the massacre of more than 30,000 political prisoners, mostly supporters of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI-MEK) opposition movement. For his work as a ruthless executioner, Raisi was promoted to the position of Tehran Prosecutor in 1989, where he earned his ‘butcher’ sobriquet. He held that position for five years. In 2012 he became Deputy Head of the Judiciary. Raisi became head of Iran’s Judiciary in March 2019. Since then, he has directed the execution of 281 people in 2019, and 251 people in 2020, and 220 executions in the first eight months of 2021, including 23 in the first two weeks of August alone, according to the NCRI.

Three prisoners were hanged on the eve of Raisi’s inauguration, bringing to at least 22, the number of prisoners executed since July 23. From June 19, when the fake elections installed Raisi as the regime’s new president, and Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei replaced him as the new Judiciary Chief, at least 62 prisoners have been executed. The intensification of executions, particularly of political prisoners and opponents of the theocratic regime, is a favorite tool of repression used by the mullahs to frighten the population into submission. But ongoing mass uprisings in Khuzestan Province, where water shortages have caused a crisis and protesters have been gunned down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the regime’s Gestapo, have sparked huge street demonstrations in towns and cities across Iran, in solidarity with their Khuzestan cousins. Clearly the people have lost their fear of this repressive regime and are determined to see it overthrown.

It was an utter disgrace that some Western nations sent senior representatives to Tehran to attend Raisi’s inauguration. The mullahs trumpeted that the ceremony was attended by 10 presidents, 20 speakers of parliament, 11 foreign ministers, 10 other ministers, envoys of presidents, vice presidents and parliamentary delegations. The heads and officials of 11 international and regional organizations also attended, as did the representative of the UN Secretary-General, the President of OPEC and officials from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the European Union, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Parliamentary Union of the OIC Member States, the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) and the D-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation. Such a cringing act of appeasement to a regime that continues to finance proxy wars across the Middle East, sponsors terrorism internationally and has become a pariah state, is simply unacceptable.

The ceremony took place less than a week after a British and a Romanian national were killed in an Iranian drone strike on an Israel-operated oil tanker in the Arabian sea. In February this year, Assadollah Assadi, an accredited Iranian diplomat, was sentenced to 20 years jail in a Belgian court, after he was caught red-handed in a terrorist bomb plot. Assadi flew to Vienna from Tehran in a commercial airliner, with a fully primed bomb in his diplomatic pouch. He and his co-conspirators had planned to kill leading European and international political figures at an Iranian opposition rally in Paris. His murderous plot must have been condoned by the clerical regime’s leadership. Assadi’s jailing followed the expulsion of the Iranian Ambassador and First Secretary from Albania, for plotting to bomb an MEK gathering.

Repeated intelligence briefings have exposed how the mullahs have accelerated their race to build a nuclear weapon, enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, a hair’s breadth away from weapons grade, while building ballistic missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv. The theocratic regime’s estimated $16 billion support for Bashar al-Assad’s bloody civil war in Syria, their provision of money and arms to the Houthi rebels in Yemen, their sponsorship of the brutal Shi’ia militias in Iraq, the terrorist Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, should all have provided Western nations with pause for thought before accepting invitations to attend Raisi’s inauguration. But after each Iranian outrage there is an ominous silence from the West. The EU made no comment following the jailing of the Iranian diplomat and when criticized for failing to condemn a state-sponsored plot to kill and maim European citizens, lamely replied that they could not comment on the court proceedings of individual EU Member States. Such kow-towing acquiescence has simply emboldened the mullahs to further aggression abroad and repression at home.

It is surely unthinkable that the West should waste any further energy on trying to resurrect the defunct Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal? Talks in Vienna have stalled at Iran’s insistence that all sanctions imposed by former president Donald Trump under his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign must be lifted before any negotiations can take place. The deal was a failure from the outset and never stopped the mullahs’ efforts to build a nuclear bomb. Lifting sanctions would simply re-energize the corrupt regime, re-invigorating their sponsorship of proxy wars and international terrorism.

With protesters chanting “Death to the Dictator” and “Mullahs must get lost,” the time has come for appeasement to end and for Western nations to demand the indictment and prosecution of Ebrahim Raisi and the other mass murderers who have ruled Iran for the past four decades. Turning a blind eye to the brutal suppression and escalating death toll in Iran simply provides impunity to this criminal regime, encouraging them to slaughter more people.

Struan Stevenson, townhall.com