Perhaps the BIGGEST story of the Biden regime to date is the decision of Pelosi and her comrades in Congress to institute a nationalized police force.

They’re doing it by massively expanding the budget of the U.S. Capitol Police.

The U.S. Capitol Police exist to guard the Capitol building. That’s it. But now their powers and reach are quietly being expanded to Florida, California and potentially many other states.

This is more than just one more national police agency, to spy on citizens and do who knows what else to “prevent another January 6.” It’s an unaccountable monstrosity in the making. Note just one special feature of the U.S. Capitol Police: Unlike other federal policing agencies, they only answer to Congress — not to the people they’re policing. When their only jurisdiction was the physical U.S. Capitol building, that may make sense. But now their powers will go throughout the land, where they’re free to do anything they please to “prevent violence against members of Congress.” For example, the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to them. They are, quite literally, above the law — while enforcing whatever (Democratic) members of Congress feel, on a given day, to actually BE the law.

A police officer in Minneapolis, or any other town or city, can be prosecuted and convicted (guilty or not) for whatever he does to a citizen in that city. But a member of the U.S. Capitol Police does not have nearly the same accountability. And if they’re doing whatever they wish in the name of “preventing domestic terrorism” … well, they’ve got a total green light. Remember: There are consequences of rigged elections with only one party in charge of the federal government potentially forever. And this is one of them.

Such is the arbitrary nature of a dictatorship. Stop pretending we are not living in one. It’s all in place. Right now. And if you think the Supreme Court (which cannot possibly take on every case) stands ready to defend us against this national police force, you’re giving a lot more credit to most of the conservatives on the Supreme Court (including Trump’s 3 appointees) than they have earned in their handling of cases to date.

It’s much worse than whatever you might find to criticize about Homeland Security, the clearly politicized FBI, and all the rest. If we aren’t all libertarians now, then I don’t know what else to say other than: Welcome to the dictatorship. Because a secret police force run by one party in charge (thanks to rigged elections) is as defining an attribute of a dictatorship as censorship itself.

From Reason magazine: “The department does not need to become yet another unaccountable intelligence agency involved in the dubious and often nakedly political project of conducting widespread surveillance on the American people. Opening field agencies and monitoring “threats to members of Congress” are actions that dilute the Capitol Police’s very clear mandate to guard the Capitol building. The FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), Department of Homeland Security, and CIA are already empowered to investigate threats to political leaders; the federal government does not need to hire additional spymasters for this purpose, especially given that the agencies burdened with doing so have tended to violate the rights of innocent Americans.

But make no mistake: The Capitol Police has every intention of becoming just like the FBI and the NSA.”

Good luck, comrades. The punk-fascist-socialist-snowflakes are totally in charge now. And they’ve got guns.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The great thing about our freedom-based economic system is that the government doesn’t have to do much at all in order for the people to prosper and the economy to grow. Just sit back and watch the people create businesses, put each other to work, and provide for every imaginable human need.

But we now have a government in the hands of people who hate America and hate its freedom-based system. The current administration is actively working to undermine the American economy and advance the interests of our geopolitical adversaries. In no area is this more true than the field of energy. In this field, the Biden Administration came in with the explicit goal of undermining American energy production. Indeed if an administration wanted to undermine American energy prosperity as much as possible and comparably benefit our adversaries, it is difficult to think of anything it would do different from what the Biden Administration is doing.

During most of my adult life, “energy independence” has been a bipartisan goal throughout the federal government. That goal was actually achieved under President Trump. Within just a few months, Biden has undone that achievement. The administration has made no secret of its goals to reduce U.S. energy production of the things that work (i.e., fossil fuels) and to drive up their price. Let’s just make a small list of key actions in furtherance of those goals:

-On his first day in office, Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, intended to bring some 800,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Canada into the U.S.

-The next day, Biden suspended all permitting of oil and gas drilling on federal lands and waters.

-Biden’s EPA then set in motion the reversal of Trump Administration loosening of rules on methane emissions in the process of producing oil and gas. These tightened Biden restrictions have the effect of increasing the cost of production.

-Currently in the works are rules from the SEC to require extensive new disclosures by energy producers (and others) of supposed “climate”-related risks.

These are just examples of an overall hostility to fossil fuel energy development, specifically intended to have the effect of making energy projects more difficult and more expensive to develop. And so far, the government’s actions are rapidly accomplishing their intended goals:

-The price of a barrel of WTI crude oil has jumped from $53.30 on January 20 (Inauguration Day) to $74.56 yesterday. Crude oil prices are currently at a six year high.

-The average price of a gallon of gasoline at the pump has risen from $2.42 in January 2021 to $3.17 in June, according to EIA data.

OPEC members and Russia are the obvious candidates to step in to take advantage of the price increases, but it seems that those parties are currently having some kind of stand-off as to who gets how much of a quota when production goes up. From the Wall Street Journal, July 6:

[A] squabble between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over quotas is blocking an agreement [to lift production].

Do you think that a competent American administration might want to see American production go up at such a time? Wrong:

A White House spokesperson on Monday said it is urging OPEC and its allies [including Russia] to quickly come up with a compromise “that will allow proposed production increases to move forward.” The Administration is worried that higher gas prices could undermine Mr. Biden’s climate agenda and spending plans.

In lieu of energy independence, we are now seeing imports from Russia reach highs not seen for ten years. From S&P Global, April 16:

Imports of Russian oil, which consists mainly of fuel oil feedstocks and some crude, recently reached a 10-year high as US refineries continue to ramp up runs as the economy starts to recover from COVID-19. Russian oil imports as a share of US total oil imports hit a record high of 8% in January 2021, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration, up from 4% during 2018.

It’s hard to imagine a more counter-productive set of policies than what the Biden Administration is implementing under the rubric of supposedly “fighting climate change.” What they are actually doing is empowering the very worst actors on the world stage, while having no effect whatsoever on the “climate.”

Francis Menton

Richard Ruggiero writes: “I think the lesson of Trump is we’re wrong to expect in a leader what we’re unwilling to ourselves become. An ordinary guy with good principles is all we need. As long as he’s not a Marxist, as long as he doesn’t hate America, as long as he’s willing to follow The Constitution and The Declaration and enforce the rule of law and speak honestly and have good sense and care about reason, freedom and individual rights and understand that the only good commie is a dead commie.

We’re looking for a god, but there are no gods and we don’t need a god to be president.”

I totally agree. If I had a dollar for every person who told me, “I love Trump, but I can’t let anybody find out”, I’d be richer than Trump.

One thing that makes Trump so special is that he totally gets the weakness of his opponents. The vast majority of leftists are either (1) emotionally unstable bullies, or (2) gullible people who believe anything they’re told, so long as it comes from “the mainstream”. Accurate, strong, unyielding, productive, rational individualists could easily defeat such people — if they weren’t afraid to speak out, come out of the closet, and simply be who they are.

“I can’t offend my leftist family/friends/neighbors/clients” etc. Why not? Why not let them be offended? They’re offended at the drop of a hat already. Why? Because they are scared to death. It’s GOOD to scare people like this.

Trump became a substitute for standing up for yourself. That’s how the bullies and the ignorant win, no matter what the battle or what the context is. That’s how we got to a point where grotesquely, self-evidently WRONG and utterly STUPID people are now in charge of literally everything. The next time you find yourself thinking, “How is this all happening?” take a look in the mirror and ask yourself: “Have I done anything to stand up for what I believe, and who I am?”

We — the reasonable, the decent, the productive, the sane — have to “come out”, to stand up for what we believe and know to be true. There can be great strength in numbers. We don’t have to do what THEY do: plunder people’s savings, confiscate their wealth, devalue their currency, threaten to lock them up if they don’t go with the Party line, lock them down, force them to wear masks, force experimental vaccines on them … All we have to do is BE WHO WE ARE.

We would win in five minutes, without ever firing a shot. Look at these people, not just in the government, but in the culture: THEY ARE TRULY PITIFUL. If we cannot beat them, then we are nothing. But we are way more than something. Trump understood this. It fuels his fearlessness. His supporters voted for him, but most of those same voters– tragically — won’t do anything beyond that. Witness the results.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

March 2017, I received a tip from a friend in the intelligence community that the British Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ — the United Kingdom’s domestic and foreign spies — had been asked by the CIA to spy on candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 U.S presidential election campaign. He elaborated that Trump’s claim that “someone tapped my wires” was essentially true. The tip was potentially explosive, so I ran it past two other friends in the intelligence community, and they confirmed it.

When I went public with this, all hell broke loose in my professional life. The British spies denied spying on Trump, who by then was the president of the United States. Former Obama administration folks denied asking the Brits to do this and denied that it was done.

I was accused of fabricating this so as to make Mr. Trump look good. The prime minister of the U.K. had one of her deputies call my bosses at Fox News and demand that I recant what I had said or be fired. Fox asked me to lay low for 10 days, which I did, but Fox backed me when I explained the verifications conducted by my sources.

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My source spoke to British agents who confirmed that their colleagues had spied on Mr. Trump.

When I went back on the air, my colleague Bill Hemmer asked if I stood by my revelations. I told Bill that getting beaten up in the press is the price one occasionally pays for challenging those in power. Two months later, four GCHQ agents told The Guardian newspaper of London that my revelations were true, and my professional life returned to normal.

During one of my meetings with my sources, they told me that the National Security Administration, America’s 60,000-person strong domestic spy apparatus, was listening to our conversations and monitoring our texts and emails.

It is utterly terrifying to realize that your daily communications are being scrutinized by the government without probable cause and without a search warrant, both of which are required by the Fourth Amendment. It gives you pause before communicating; pause that churns the stomach; pause that is profoundly un-American.

Last week, my Fox colleague Tucker Carlson had a similar experience when an NSA whistleblower revealed to him that the NSA was monitoring his communications. He reported this on his Fox television show, and it is safe to say that the NSA became furious.null

Tucker, like me, believes that the Constitution means what it says. The rights it protects are both man-made, like the right to vote; and natural, like religion, speech, the press, self-defense, travel and privacy. The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called privacy the right most valued by civilized persons.

The point here is that the CIA folks who triggered the spying on Mr. Trump and the NSA folks who spied on Mr. Carlson and me have all taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. Thus, when they spy without warrants or have foreign colleagues do it for them, they are not only subverting natural and constitutionally protected rights, they are also committing the crimes of computer hacking and misconduct in office.

The whole purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to be an obstacle to the government’s appetite for information about us. The amendment was written while memories of the British use of general warrants — which permitted agents to search wherever they pleased and seize whatever they found — were still fresh in the minds of those who fought the Revolution and wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

On Dec. 4, 1981, 20 years before 9/11, President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333. This directed the military — the NSA is in the military — to begin spying on Americans whose communications presented a danger to national security, and to do so without search warrants. The NSA relies on this unconstitutional executive order for authority to engage in mass warrantless surveillance or targeted, individual warrantless surveillance.null

Subsequent presidential executive orders have been written with the mindset that the president as commander in chief can operate outside the Constitution.

This perverse rationale has brought us where we are today — a place that Reagan himself could never have recognized and of which he would never have approved. Today, the NSA captures all data communicated into, going out of and within the U.S. That includes the content of all text messages, emails and phone calls, as well as financial, legal and medical records — the list is endless. This data consumes 27 times the contents of the Library of Congress every year.

All this is far too much for the NSA to read and digest, which is how the hijackers and killers who perpetrated 9/11, and how domestic mass murderers and their confederates, have slipped past them.

But when the NSA targets a specific person, as it did to me in 2017 and does to Tucker Carlson today, it is sure to examine in near real time whatever it has gathered.null

This should provoke outrage across the political spectrum. The NSA was after Mr. Carlson and me because, as libertarians defending privacy and believing that the Fourth Amendment means what it says, we have been harshly critical of it. But the NSA is part of the government. Can the government use its powers to chill the free speech rights of its critics? Of course not.

The Supreme Court has ruled many times that chilling — government behavior that gives one pause or fear before speaking freely about the government — is a direct violation of the natural and constitutionally protected right to the freedom of speech.

Tucker Carlson and you and I can say whatever we want about the government and it cannot legally or constitutionally chill or prevent that. If it could, then our rights are just empty claims.

Why have we reposed the Constitution for safekeeping into the hands of those who subvert it?