Emerald Robinson tweets:

@EmeraldRobinson

The corporate media: “People who say there was a shadow campaign to rig the 2020 election are conspiracy theorists!”
Time Magazine: “Read our story on the shadow campaign to rig the 2020 election!”

She’s referring to the most astonishing story of the week, Molly Ball’s article in Time: ”The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that saved the 2020 election,” a sordid tale of how Big Tech, BLM, organized labor and big business, particularly the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, colluded to defeat Donald J. Trump’s reelection.

The participants justified their behavior as “saving democracy.” Was this a “modified limited hangout” in the old Watergate sense? An effort to undo the public perception that the election was illegally stolen with an alternative that there was an unsavory but legitimate perception management by powerful people and institutions to defeat the man who had captured the angst of the middle class and worked to improve their lives? Or were members of the cabal playing neener neener on the voters they bested to further dispirit them and keep them from tipping over the chessboard they set up to wipe out the pawns? All these theories have merit, but I think these powerful people — or most of them — have been coopted by China and Biden is the perfect puppet to carry the sellout to China and to defeat Trump’s moves to strengthen America and improve the lot of working Americans and their communities.

The Cabal

You must read the Time article to get the full flavor of the brazen admissions of what was done. Here’s a brief summary of the most significant of them, devoid of the leftist spackle of the author. Business, the AFL-CIO, and Black Lives Matter worked together to change voting systems and laws, to get hundreds of millions of dollars to make voting less secure and worked with social media to keep the Biden message upfront, the Trump message buried and the country terrified of widespread violence if the president won re-election. (4.6 percent of people who voted for Biden said in a poll that they would not have done so, had the information about Hunter Biden’s corruption not been scotched by the media.)

The participants see themselves as the protectors of democracy and want their story told, the author explains. Initial moves were coordinated by Mike Podhorzer, senior adviser to Richard Trumka, president of the AFl-CIO. He saw in the COVID-19 reaction an opportunity to bypass normal, more secure election procedures, and working with Planned Parenthood, Indivisible, and Move On, “progressive data geeks and strategists, representatives of donors and foundations, state-level grassroots organizers, Working Families Party, racial-justice activists and others, to manipulate the election procedures. In time, they persuaded Congress to steer COVID relief funds for election administration, a feat aided by the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights. When the $400 million grant proved insufficient for their means, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative dropped into their hands another $300 million, which the National Vote at Home Institute used to advise secretaries of state on the new, insecure voting procedures. (Chan is the wife of Mark Zuckerberg — Facebook’s chairman, CEO and controlling shareholder).

Having altered the rules, the next step was taken by the Voter Participation Center, which sent out ballot applications to 15 million people “in key states” and urged people not to “wait until election day.” ”In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote.”

But rigging election procedures was only a part of the cabal’s work. They also worked at pressuring media platforms to remove content or accounts which in their view “spread disinformation.” Among those pressured to silence opposition views were Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Huge efforts were undertaken to persuade voters that the final results would not be known on election night until 70% of the public was made to believe that Biden won, including media election analysts.

All this was insufficient to swing the election to the most unqualified candidates — Biden and Harris. And yet that was insufficient to their ends. Following on the absurd media coverage of George Floyd’s death from a drug overdose and poor health while in police custody, Black Lives Matter was ginned up and the word was out that there would be even more riots if “Trump interferes with the election” (that is, if he won). A coalition tagged “Protect the Results” included “Women’s March, Sierra Club, Color of Change and Democratic Socialists of America.” This while the legacy media was calling the riots “mostly peaceful,” people watched their communities being burnt down and shops looted, and mayors of cities like New York, Portland, and Seattle took no steps to punish those involved.

A week before the election, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose Chief Executive Thomas Donohue resigned days after the Time article was published, approached Podhorzer. They were concerned about threats of riots if Trump were elected, and joined with Trumka, the heads of the National Association for Evangelicals and the North African American Clergy to “trust in our system,” in effect pre-judging any challenge to the rigged election.

On election night eve, analysts for the media having been conditioned to expect a late surge, ignored calling it for Trump despite his heavy lead, and Podhorzer then concentrated on winning the certification, pressuring election boards, GOP-controlled legislatures, state canvassing boards, and Congress.

If you believe, as Time’s author and the participants do, that all these shenanigans were to protect democracy, you’ll have to explain to me why Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit is wrong when she observes how shaky the new administration is:

Look, guys, any honest person who knew math knows. I know the left and the right who hates Trump loves to lie to themselves that “everyone hates Trump.”
1- This is not true.
2- Most people weren’t crazy about Trump but liked the way he governed.
3-The election wasn’t only dirty, it was submerged in fraud.
4-People who haven’t stolen elections don’t fight having fraud looked into.
5- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t turn DC into occupied territory.
6- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t try so hard to gaslight the country.
7- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t try to turn opposing them into a crime.
8- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t try to destroy the country they just took over.
9- More importantly, people who haven’t stolen the election don’t tell us how they STOLE THE ELECTION.
There is that “consent of the governed.” The left doesn’t think they need it anymore. They think they have it all sewn up.

China Was the Real Winner of the Election

In my view, the big winner of this “fortified election” gambit is China. Like Lee Smith, I see that a few at the top were coopted by China and profits to be made in dealing with China even on its terms, and used their powers to undermine, weaken and ultimately destroy democracy. Drawing an historical parallel with Sparta and Athens, he reminds us how the pro-Sparta oligarchy worked to undermine the rights of Athenian citizens. The “meritocracy” has decided their bread is best buttered in a globalized world. They see China as “big, productive and efficient” and American workers being displaced as people deserving of punishment, “reactionary racists” all. (Ignoring, of course, the extreme racism of the Chinese government now torturing and eliminating the Uyghar minority, among others.)

President Trump upended that, ending foreign wars and illegal immigration while returning jobs to Americans was the core of his appeal, and nothing could be more threatening to the oligarchy. This explains Big Tech and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s role. How to explain Labor’s? In my own view, I think it obvious that AFL-CIO head Rich Trumka has determined that the industrial unions are not worth fighting for — hence no complaints about closing down coal mines (and in Kamala Harris’s words training the miners to reclaim “land mines”) or shutting down the Keystone Pipeline and putting thousands of union workers out of work while impoverishing their communities. He sees the big gain for labor in a vastly increased public sector and rigging the rules to unionize more workers .

It’s not just labor and big business coopted, the think tanks and universities are also in the Chinese camp, says Smith:

Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.
The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. But the schools and their name faculty were in fact in the business of selling that research, much of it paid for directly by the U.S. government — which is why Harvard and Yale among other big-name schools appear to have systematically underreported the large amounts that China had gifted them.
Indeed, many of academia’s pay-for-play deals with the CCP were not particularly subtle. In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.”

The China Virus was a boon to them, leading to absurd lockdowns that weakened our economy, kept kids from schools, let Democrats like Cuomo boost casualties and increase panic all to defeat the president, and from the very start of China’s move, the media has played a willing handmaiden in our destruction.

California senator Dianne Feinstein and Silicon Valley as well cemented the Chinese techno-autocracy which played so significant a role in the cabal against Trump. Curious about why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined the anti-reelection cabal? Smith explains it. The Chamber no longer represents the interests of main street businesses, it was vehemently opposed to his tariffs on Chinese imports and his efforts to move the supply chains back home: More profits for big domestic business in keeping the cheaper China supply chains open.

The consequences of the oligarchy’s embrace of China is evident, Smith observes in the U.S. Security and Defense analyses fluffing up their reports to bury evidence of China’s aggression at our expense.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Smith’s account is the report that Wuhan was initially astir in fall of 2019 because of a revolt against air pollution and a quarantine was imposed to keep the revolt from spreading. Having found a quarantine a useful means to stopping a rebellion, they used it again in December of 2019 utilizing as a public health measure — ostensibly stopping the spread of the virus — but, in fact, designed to stop news of the government’s blunder in allowing the release of the virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Lockdowns here made the U.S. oligarchs like Bezos much richer while impoverishing Trump’s base. “In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat, city and state authorities normalized autocracy.”

He has much more to say and substantial evidence for his point of view, and I strongly urge you to read it all.

I have no simple solution to return us to democracy, though I think Roger L. Simon is correct when he argues that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ lead should be followed by all Republican state legislatures.

• Mandatory opt-outs from big tech’s content filters, a solution to tech censorship first proposed by Breitbart News.
• A private right of action for Floridian citizens against tech companies that violate this condition.
• Fines of $100,000 per day levied on tech companies that suspend candidates for elected office in Florida from their platforms.
• Daily fines for any tech company “that uses their content and user-related algorithms to suppress or prioritize the access of any content related to a political candidate or cause on the ballot.”
• Greater transparency requirements.
• Disclosure requirements enforced by Florida’s election authorities for tech companies that favor one candidate over another.
• Power for the Florida attorney general to bring cases against tech companies that violate these conditions under the state’s Unfair and Deceptive Practices Act.

Almost half the states are fully under Republican control, several others have Republican legislatures, and they have the power to do this. I think it is a better means to preserve democracy than allowing the U.S.-China oligarchy to turn us in an autocracy. Punch back twice as hard, as Instapundit urges. Next, I think set strict limits on gubernatorial emergency powers, and by all means strengthen and tighten election procedures, and dump the cabal’s new rules that maximize the ability to rig the vote.

Clarice Feldman, American Thinker

“The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all — is called “life.” Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft — and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them! Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”

State censorship has been evident over all time, but what is happening today, especially considering the ease of access and the voluminous amount of information available, is far beyond the scope of understanding for most in this country. The Internet is a wonder, but it is a very sharp double-edged sword. The real power among us understands this concept intimately, while the ‘public’ has little awareness of the potential for the controllers to eliminate history and speech by using the very tool that should allow for an expansion of learning and intellect. The Internet can store and make available all the works of man, both past and present, and all this information is seemingly accessible to anyone with little effort, but is that really the cases.

The risk that is missed by most, is that as easy as it is to access information today, that information can be manipulated, hidden, or eliminated just as easily, and that process could be controlled by a central ‘authority’ through any of its fascist partnerships. If much of the underlying information of recorded history; books, journals, letters, and all historical and political records and writings, can be captured, controlled, or even destroyed by nefarious efforts, then that would leave available only what is stored digitally. This would be an abomination, because it would also allow for the loss of much hard knowledge of the past and present by those controlling the Internet and communication systems. For this horror to occur, all books would not have to be destroyed, but if much of the important information were restricted from view by whatever means, or made very difficult to access, then people would know only what the state wanted them to know.

We live in a digitized age where physical classic and modern works, documents, books, and papers are very seldom sought. I find this very troubling, because the general population, especially the young, have been raised and trained in an era of television, cell phones and computers, and many have never read any physical material about history, culture, nature, science, art, or any other of a multitude of subjects. In other words, they are fully dependent on the mainstream media, technology, and the Internet for all the information they get, good or bad. It takes little imagination to realize that this could lead to a planned censorship over generations so as to mold minds in a way suitable to the state. If all information is thought to be available from limited sources that can be manipulated, censored, or fully controlled, what will be available in the future is what those that gain or hold power want to be available. In reality, the future is already here.
PropagandaBernays, EdwardBest Price: $36.00Buy New $15.23(as of 01:49 EDT – Details)

Censorship today is everywhere, and is affecting many areas of thought. To paraphrase Ray Bradbury, there are so many ways to burn books without ever starting a fire. Figuratively speaking, all the books have not been burned to date, but many are becoming more and more difficult to find or access, whether hard copies or online. But since most in this country now use only the Internet for so many things, this is going mostly unnoticed. We are living in a period of extreme tyranny, but it is more than that. It is a planned takeover of humanity as a whole, with the stated goal of creating a “Great Reset” that is based upon a technocratic world governing system controlled by oligarchs through smart grid technology.

Obviously, the Internet will be with us, and that can be a great thing, but we can never allow for the few to create and control the entirety of the technological systems. In other words, there needs to be multiple private opposing systems so that one “Internet of things” cannot be susceptible to any oligarchic control. If the ruling class and the state apparatus gain control of information, there will be no information, only propaganda.

Considering the situation today, censorship is far worse than I have experienced in my lifetime, and is worsening every day. It is getting almost impossible to find any alternative material or information that is either contrary to the state narrative, or in any way outside the thought police’s system of control. Any website or content that discusses real issues and truth concerning government, this fake virus pandemic, 5G technology, vaccines, election fraud, riots, and any other of a thousand issues not approved by the state, are disappeared or taken down. This is a daily occurrence, and searching for this content is becoming impossible due to the algorithmic manipulation by the big technology giants. These are not legitimate private companies, as most were funded by government and are partnered (in bed with) government, CIA, corrupt corporations and foundations, the pharmaceutical industry, and the mainstream media, among many other corrupt and criminal entities.

Censorship is absolutely rampant today. Web sites and alternative news platforms are being closed. YouTube and most all social sites with few exceptions are censoring everything possible, search engines are making almost any legitimate research impossible by hiding truthful or critical content, alternative journalism is being attacked and taken down, and many have been demonetized. The CIA controlled mainstream media are playing quarterback for the state, the global ‘elites,’ the corrupt ‘health’ organizations, the Fascist Biden administration, and are aggressively pushing every globalist agenda down the throats of gullible Americans.

We are experiencing a time when information should be the most abundant in the history of mankind, but it is being censored and eliminated to the point of closing the door to any information that is not approved by the controlling class and their political accomplices. This is unbelievably dangerous, because when the people allow speech to be manipulated or restricted in any way, truth is effectively erased, and all that is left is state propaganda. With speech censored and effectively disappeared, only the state narrative will be reported. In this environment, the masses will normally accept the lies as truth and the truth as lies. This can only lead to a slave society.

A country deprived of information and speech will cease to be free. A country without knowledge of its history will cease to be a country.

“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

Gary D. Barnett, LewRockwell.com

Some tyrant-governors are lifting a few of their restrictions by almost imperceptible degrees. For example, allowing restaurants to operate at 35 or 50 percent capacity instead of 25 percent after a year of nonstop lockdowns THAT HAVE ACCOMPLISHED NOTHING. Wow. Thank you, masters. You know, this is what serial killers do too. A murderer who’s suffocating you will, before snuffing you out completely, occasionally pause to prolong your agony and intensify his sick, evil pleasure at exercising control. These tyrants are even morally lower than a serial killer. At least the serial killer has to live on the run, and will likely face accountability for his crimes. The criminals destroying small businesses in America in the name of health, legality and science? They are lower than the lowest of the low.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Until now, I had no idea how dumb the GOP really was. Man, is our party dumb. The people who run the GOP are so dumb they couldn’t spell “win” if I were to spot them the W and the I.

First, the presidential election was clearly rigged and stolen, and they just let it happen. Now the leaders of the GOP won’t even admit it happened. They’re afraid, like whiny little snowflakes, of offending liberal activists, Democratic voters, assorted socialists, government bureaucrats, RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), woke corporate CEOs, the mainstream media and the masters of social media — you know, all the people who conspired to steal the election.

Don’t believe me? Ask Time magazine. Time just released a fascinating in-depth story of how Democrats, liberal activist groups, media, social media and, shockingly, corporate America all partnered in one big conspiracy to prevent Donald Trump’s reelection. Time admitted it was a “conspiracy.” It admitted it was an “alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”

The detailed Time story reads like a confession of a stolen election. It admitted the game plan: This conspiracy was based on taking advantage of COVID-19, mail-in voting, last-minute changes in voting laws, gobs of corporate money backing the effort, and collusion by media and social media to silence any dissent.

And now the delusional GOP leadership compounds the problem by ignoring reality. Republican leaders keep thinking they’re going to win it all back in 2022 and 2024. Really? How? What’s the plan?

To quote Martin Luther King Jr., “I have a dream.” I have a game plan that at least gives us a fighting chance to neutralize the Democratic advantage, compete and win elections.

First, money: Money is the mother’s milk of politics. Democrats have all the money in the world. President Joe Biden raised record sums. Where did it come from? A ton came from the biggest corporations in America. How will the GOP compete with that moving forward?

The answer is to tell corporate America to go to hell. Former President Trump should remake the GOP as the party “of the people, by the people, for the people.” It’s time to announce the GOP will no longer accept any corporate money. From now on, the GOP will be funded “by the American people” only. Ask every Trump voter to contribute $10 per month.

Seventy-four million Trump voters would be thrilled to fund a party that looks out for the little guy. Some may give $100 per month, some $1,000. But everyone has $10 per month to spare.

Let’s assume only 50 million Trump voters agree. That’s $500 million per month. That’s $6 billion per year without a penny from corporations. That’s $24 billion over the next four years — the most money ever raised by any politician or political party. That’s enough to win a lot of elections.

Next, we have to admit we can never win again without voter identification. That’s why we lost the presidency in 2020. Every major country in the world has voter ID, except us. Even Mexico has Voter ID — with photo and thumbprint.

Mail-in ballots didn’t lose the election. Voter ID did. With strict voter ID, you can’t cheat by mail or in person. Dead people can’t vote. Illegal aliens can’t vote. It’s all pretty simple — to ensure fair elections and election integrity, we must demand proof of who is voting and ensure everyone only votes once.

With Biden and Democrats in charge, we can’t get it on the federal level. And we’re never going to get it in deep-blue states such as New York and California. But we just have to get strict voter ID laws in place in six states that determined the 2020 election: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. Five of those six states have Republican-majority legislatures.

With this plan, even with all the damage Biden and the Democrats are doing to this country, we have a fighting chance at retaking America in 2022 and 2024.

Wayne Allyn Root, townhall.com

In this 2009 article, Lew Rockwell lists the problems with government mandates on private use of mobile phones. Observant readers will note the “public safety” arguments against the freedom to use phones as we choose are essentially the same as current claims that “public health” is a justification for dictating daily habits and behavior. ]

We all want freedom for ourselves, but many people have doubts about the way others might use their own freedom. Under these conditions, the state is there to help. Get enough people to favor enough restriction, and the state is good to go, administering every aspect life from its smallest to its largest detail.

Every day presents more cases, but the most recent case is stunning. It turns out that 97% of people polled support a universal ban on texting while driving. Half of those surveyed say that the penalty should be as severe as that for drunk driving. Among these, how many do you suppose do text and drive but don’t want to admit it to the pollster? Probably plenty. And yet I couldn’t find a single online defense of the practice anywhere on the web.

The truth is that it is not necessarily unsafe to text behind the wheel. It all depends on the situation. If you are in a traffic jam, and are late to an appointment, the ability to text can be a lifesaver. Or if there are no cars around, you might be able to risk it. On the other hand, it would probably be a mistake to attempt this doing 80 mph around slower traffic on a freeway.

How can we know the difference between when it is safe and when it is not? The principle applied on American roads is that the driver himself makes that decision. If this principle didn’t make sense, there would be no way that the roads themselves could work at all.

Think of this the next time you are in a big city zooming around curves and between lanes along with thousands of others, doing top speeds. Here we have 4,000-pound hunks of steel barreling down the road without aids other than a dotted yellow line on the road. These are real-life death machines in which one wrong move could cause a 100-car pileup and mass death. We do it anyway.

What’s remarkable is not that there are so many wrecks. The miracle is that it works at all and that, for the most part, people get to where they are going. And consider too the demographic behind the car: old, young, abled, disabled, experienced, inexperienced. Some people have a facility for driving and others do not. Some people have spatial agility and others do not.

How does it all work? Don’t tell me that it is due to central planning and the police. The police aren’t driving every car and controlling every wheel. Our human volition on the road and the decisions we make that affect other drivers are nearly 100% our own.

And yet it works. Why? The reason is that it is not in anyone’s interest to get in a crash. It is in everyone’s interest to get to where one is going in one piece and to do it efficiently. Roll together tens of thousands of people with the same broad goal and you get spontaneous cooperation. Something that people normally think could not work does in fact work. Looked at from that angle, the orderliness we see on the roads is a general expression of the capacity for human society to work in the context of self-interested individuals.

Now think of this poll showing a widespread opposition to texting while driving. I submit that you would get similar results from a poll that asked people about the right to drive:

Do you support or oppose the right of everyone to own 4,000-pound heaps of steel and control them completely and autonomously at top speeds in the midst of thousands of other citizens whose lives could be in danger with so much as a slight flick of the wrist to the right or left?

That question could elicit nearly 100% negative results. We generally trust our capacity to manage ourselves but we do not trust the capacity of others to manage themselves. And we surely don’t believe that society can generally function well under conditions of freedom. Even though we live in the midst of spontaneous order and use its brilliance every day (grocery store, the world wide web, restaurants, housing developments), we don’t really understand it.

Or how about this one:

Do you support the right of anyone over a certain age to buy and consume as much hard liquor as he wants, even to the point of drinking himself into a life-threatening stupor, neglecting the kids, wrecking family life, and killing brain cells that cannot be replaced?

Probably most people would say no. And yet this is precisely the reasoning behind Prohibition, which most people today regard as a terrible error. Today, we supposedly realize that the social cost of the right to drink hard liquor was greater than the supposed benefit we receive from enforcing Prohibition.

So it is with texting and driving. There are times when it is safe. There are times when it is not safe. The only ones who can really know the difference are the people behind the wheel. These people already enjoy the freedom to talk to passengers, to fiddle with their stereo, to drive following an exhausting jog, to drive while distracted with anxieties over work and marriage, to pray or sing in the car, and do many other things that seem like a distraction from the goal at hand. Somehow it all works, and there is a lesson here. You can count on more order to emerge from trusting freedom than you get from attempting to micromanage people’s lives.

Now, the libertarians among us might point out that these roads are publicly owned and that this is the core source of the problem. Under privately owned roads, there might be intense restrictions on what you can and cannot do and these might be part of the contract you make with the road owner.

The market would take care of the rest. If an owner were too restrictive, drivers would take other routes. If they are too lenient, their insurance premiums would rise and they would pay too high a price. The resultant rules of the road would be a result of this careful calibration, tested constantly by the forces of supply and demand.

Under the existing rules of private roads, we see no evidence of a crackdown on texting. Maybe it would come in the future, but at least there would be a market test. When a rule fails in private markets, the rule is changed.

But it is different with government. No matter how preposterous the rule, it stays and stays, regardless of whether it works to accomplish its end. And there can be no question that a crackdown on texting is coming. Obama has already banned texting while driving for federal workers. A bill that would deny federal funds to states is flying through the Senate. Look for a nationwide ban in the coming months.

The ban says, You don’t know what is good for you so you must be forced to do what the government thinks is good for you. The ban gets support because people generally think that while they are responsible and good at calibrating what is safe and unsafe, others are not. Through this method, all freedoms could be abolished.

It’s a bad way to form the rules of a society.

Llewellyn Rockwell, mises.org

Originally published November 2009.

One major difference between the United States and a Communist country: Communists have concentration camps; we don’t. At least — not yet. We are so very close to this, and the clueless millions who support Democrats either have no idea, or perhaps are just fine with it.

From Breitbart News: Uyghur, Kazakh, and other ethnic minority survivors of China’s brutal concentration camp system told the BBC in an extensive report published Wednesday that they witnessed and endured rape at the hands of Chinese government agents on a regular basis, including the use of electric batons to rape and torture women.

China has been operating concentration camps in Xinjiang, its westernmost and largest region, since at least 2018. While estimates suggested as many as 3 million people were imprisoned in the concentration camp system at its peak, the most recent estimates from the U.S. government suggest a population of about 2 million people remain trapped there. The number dropped after reports that the Chinese Communist Party sold concentration camp victims as slaves to factories nationwide. Beijing officials claimed the missing prisoners had simply “graduated” from the camps.

WE ARE LIVING IN A DICTATORSHIP. Do you believe it yet?

Example: Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported exclusively on Thursday night that Bank of America is allegedly turning over private information about its customers to federal law enforcement officials — without the knowledge or consent of its customers — in an apparent effort to identify those who participated in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol Building.

Carlson led off the segment by talking about how the Biden administration and law enforcement has stated that they want to go after domestic “extremists” but have not laid out a clear definition of what qualifies as an “extremist.”

“Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Calls for 60-Day ‘Stand Down’ to Discuss Extremism in the Military” [Breitbart News]

What exactly does he mean by “extremism”? Usually leftists refer to support for the Second Amendment, free speech rights, lower taxes, fewer regulations and opposition to the open-ended lockdowns of healthy people as “extremism”. Is the Secretary of Defense of the Biden regime suggesting that all members of the military must hold the far-left, socialist or Communist views of his party?

THIS is what dictatorship looks like. We are there.

#NotMyDictatorship

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

I’m not even sure one can still speak freely about theoretical matters. Nevertheless, against the background din of “insurrection” charges against MAGA America, I’ve tried to distill the hardcore libertarian take regarding the storming of the Capitol Building, on January 6, in a brief YouTube clip.

It is very plainly this: Principled libertarians will distinguish pro-Trump patriots from the armed wing of the Democratic Party: Black Lives Matter, Antifa and other criminal riffraff.

BLM rioters trashed, looted and leveled their countrymen’s private property, their livelihoods and businesses, doing billions in damages

In contrast, the ragtag men and women of the MAGA movement stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State. Once!

Yet, in reply to the fact that “entire cities were burned to the ground” by BLM troops (the Democratic Party’s violent militia), some of the staunchest of conservatives have asserted that “storming the Capitol building” is much worse than “than burning down strip malls.”

Wrong!

Principled libertarians, very plainly, think the opposite.

Like us or not, the radical property-rights libertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway—will strongly disagree with the Trump-blaming conservatives.

A certain kind of libertarian, the good kind, distinguishes clearly between those who, like BLM, would trash, loot and level private property—the livelihoods and businesses of private citizens—and between those who would storm the well-padded seats of state power and corruption.

The State is, after all, an entity that, by definition, forsakes the legitimate defense of the lives, liberty and property of its citizens.

The State’s standard operating procedure is to fleece us without so much as flinching, shake us down, so as to fatten its members and increase their sphere of influence.

Libertarians who live by the axiom of nonaggression will always prefer the man who proceeds against the State, to the man who destroys private property.

That is because the state is governed by aggression; whereas the institution of private property is rooted in peaceful, just and voluntary transactions between consenting participants.

There, I’ve said it!

It’s no secret that rock-ribbed libertarians—as opposed to the lite, fluffy establishment libertarian—view the State, certainly in its current iteration, as a criminal enterprise. For it operates with force and without the consent of the governed.

If you are tempted to argue this theoretical point, think only of the meaning of the 2020 election:

Upwards of 81 million people, or 51.3 percent of those who voted, not of the people, get to impose their will on more than 74 million, or 46.8 percent of the voters, as well as on the millions who didn’t vote.

Moreover, the winner in an election is certainly not the fictitious entity referred to as “The People,” but rather the representatives of the majority. And while it seems obvious that the minority in a democracy is openly thwarted, the question is, do the elected representatives at least carry out the will of the majority?

The answer is No! In reality, the majority, too, has little say in the business of governance – they’ve merely elected politicians who have been awarded carte blanche to do as they please.

Carte blanche because we are no longer a republic in which central authorities have only limited and clearly delineated powers. Certainly, all the people in the commonwealth are compelled to do as the Permanent State and the new, incoming state dictate.

No! Government governs without the consent of the governed, for the most, and with the backing of often-brutal police powers.

One never Trumpkin conservative at the Spectator whined that he couldn’t tell the difference between the Red Hats and Antifa, decrying that, “They [the Red Hats] were desecrating something they pretend to love.”

The non-statist libertarian has no problem telling the difference.

To us, those “citadels of democracy” mean very little that is good. Loss of life we lament—but the song-and-dance about the January 6 trampling of the Capitol Building we consider overheated.

Our country is not to be equated with our Capitol.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Parler, Gab, YouTube & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook and throttled by Twitter.