Would it be turning America into a “banana republic” to hold governors and mayors accountable by arresting them and putting them on trial for their grotesque violations of Constitutional, as well as local, individual rights over the last two years? Here’s my answer to someone who raised that objection:

I don’t accept your premise. Your implied premise (which I realize you’ll deny, but it’s still implied by what you say) is that any behavior is acceptable by government officials, so long as we don’t become a “banana republic.” But we already ARE a banana republic — or worse — if government officials may declare “emergency” any time they wish and do anything they wish, with any rationalization, and then suffer NO consequences whatsoever when they suddenly set us “free.” Frankly, this is madness. Being a “banana republic” — whatever that term precisely means — is the least of our problems, by far. IF our legal system still has any validity (and I recognize it may be too far gone already), then no legal system worthy of the name would permit a governor or mayor to simply take over the private property and livelihood of individual citizens for a period of time, essentially kidnapping them or holding them hostage under a state of martial law, and then escape the legal system.

The root of the problem, of course, is not really legal or political. It’s philosophical and also (as a secondary consequence) psychological. The majority of people are apparently so evil, so stupid or so cowardly that it’s not possible to muster up any version of my solution to the problem, i.e., to put them on trial. My best guess is that about a third of the population (the ones who still support Biden) are irredeemably evil and applaud the insanity; another third are befuddled, confused, indifferent or cowardly; and another third are damn angry, but for whatever reasons sitting on the sidelines and waiting for someone or something to save us, as the tyrants go along their merry way unaccountable and unrestrained from doing even MORE damage tomorrow, next week or next year.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

As the average American wakes up from their slumber, feeling like they’re in Venezuela, know you aren’t alone. Our ruling class has spent decades getting high off our money supply while the rest of us worked to survive. We woke up to inflation nation, and before I go any further, I want to make sure we don’t lose sight of what inflation means.

By definition, inflation is an increase in the money supply. We hear inflation used to describe rising prices, but I want to clarify what it means. When used as a term to describe an increase in prices, our corrupt politicians like to blame “greedy” business practices. No, no, no. We aren’t letting politicians off the hook. Too much liquidity paired with a service economy that doesn’t produce goods, instead of importing them since we ship our jobs overseas, has our hard-earned money losing value daily. The average American makes less today than last year every time they head into work.

Our ruling class is driving America to the brink of collapse. The 2008 financial crisis will look like a walk in the park compared to where we are heading. Instead of allowing our economy to recover, politicians and the Fed decided to continue to flood the economy with cheap money instead of coming clean with the American people. The coming crash will devastate our country.

Politicians refuse to stop feeding at the trough, instead likely crashing the U.S. dollar. It is hard to believe that such recklessness is simply due to incompetence. It seems more of a concerted effort between ruling elites to crash the dollar and give rise to another form of fiat currency. While the U.S. continues to decline and bow down to the Chinese Communist Party, the rise of a new global power and a new world order seems imminent.

People are flocking to cryptocurrency, gold, and real assets as they try to salvage the value of the dollars they have. During this time of massive instability and uncertainty, I urge readers to look up different options that might make sense for them.

The genuinely moral crime is the devastation we have bestowed on future generations. Most mainstream economists and political pundits talk about finance and economies in convoluted terms to scare the average person into digging in too deep. Precisely our disinterest in understanding what the monetary policy our leaders engaged in has gotten us to where we are now. Citizens must be active participants in our country’s future.

That means we ought to start caring about who we elect and do our due diligence to understand economic and public policy. There is a worker revolt happening worldwide for those who are sick of the status quo and ready to shake up the corrupt system.

Representing NV01 in Congress will be the honor of a lifetime. I have worked shoulder to shoulder with those I am running to represent, and their futures will be at the forefront of my mind while I fight every day against those who want to radically transform our nation.

The era of the worker, the outsider, and those who don’t belong has arrived. America’s political landscape is changing. I look forward to fighting for legislation that will answer to the people and empower them. My priority is to audit the Federal Reserve Bank, fire Fauci, get to the bottom of Nov 3rd, and build the wall. Our leaders have destroyed our families and future generations with careless policies, and our people deserve honesty and solutions.

Carolina Serrano led the Latinos For Trump outreach effort for President Donald J. Trump in Nevada and is now running for US Congress in Nevada’s First Congressional District.

A tyranny does not stop being a tyranny because the tyrant chooses, on a whim, to stop enslaving you, or to enslave you a little less.
If a tyrant loosens your chains, or gives you a little extra food in your prison cell, you’re not suddenly free.

If he releases you from prison but retains the means and moral authority (in his eyes) to bring you back to prison any time he feels like it, you are not free.

We wouldn’t call a child molester no longer a molester if he abstained from violating children for a year, or two or even ten. A serial killer is still a serial killer in between sprees.

We would not call a spouse abuser a reformed man when, after beating his wife to a pulp on Tuesday, he brings her flowers on Wednesday. We would not say the abused spouse was a victim of abuse on Tuesday, but now is just fine on Wednesday.

This is the kind of emotional unintelligence that keeps people slaves. I see it happening now, and it’s both a sad and painful thing to watch. Tyrants have got you exactly where they want you.

Don’t kid yourself that the lifting of mask mandates in some states means anything at all. At best, it only means the tyrants are giving up a little of their power for now in order to retain their power — and abuse it even more — down the road. TRANSLATION: DemComs actually ARE a little worried about being slaughtered in upcoming elections.

Until or unless tyrants are hauled away, prosecuted and punished for everything they have done, and kept away from ever having any kind of power over others again, you are not free.

Until the moral (as well as legal) principle is established and upheld — that YOU are sovereign over your own life, including your own body — you are not safe, and you are not free.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Why is the Pentagon — under Biden regime control — dismissing all service members who won’t get vaccinated?

Is it really about health? Of course not. The great majority of people who got the vaccine are still getting COVID; and the current version of COVID is much less severe than the first (keeping in mind that the first version also had a 99 percent survival rate).

It’s not about health.

It’s about politics. More specifically: It’s about conformity to the political views of the regime in power.

By definition, the service members dismissed for not getting the vaccine are overwhelmingly Republican voters. They are probably Trump supporters. They surely still believe in the Bill of Rights, including individual sovereignty over one’s body — the things that previous generations of soldiers fought for, and they are also willing to fight and die for.

By ridding the military of all such “deplorable” soldiers, the military achieves its goal of a woke, leftist, “Democrat”, blindly conforming service pool.

This has real-life consequences. At some future time when the government seeks to use the military to enforce something that millions of citizens don’t wish to do — submit to medical treatment, give up their carbon-based fuel cars, surrender their guns, surrender their religious or philosophical beliefs — then you have a military willing to open fire on that noncompliant population.

Think of it this way: If YOU were a dictator, you would want a military to enforce your will, wouldn’t you? Would you prefer a military with uniform allegiance to your Party and political point-of-view, or a military with a diversity of viewpoints?

We will see how well this works out in practice. But you can be sure that’s the goal.

What else could the goal be? It’s certainly not the health and well-being of soldiers.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

It all began 42 years ago — Ted Turner’s creation of a 24/7 news network that would exist on something called cable TV. Few believed it could succeed.

And, for its first decade, CNN largely chugged along but wasn’t seen as a game-changer or ​a true competitor to big broadcast news entities based in New York in the form of CBS, NBC and ABC. That all changed when war broke out between the United States and Iraq in 1991.

On the night war exploded over Baghdad, CNN was the only news organization that was able to broadcast from the city under siege as the U.S. onslaught began, all courtesy of the CNN team’s ability to convince the Iraqi government to grant them a line out of the city to broadcast​, one that the competition could not secure.

“How CNN Won the War” was the glowing headline from the Washington Post on a story that perfectly chronicled the events that led to CNN officially becoming a major player. And off it went.

Until 2002, CNN was ​No. 1 in the cable news race. But competition that hadn’t existed before ended its dominance forever, primarily in the form of Fox News and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC. Despite the ratings results, CNN continued to carry itself as a credible, facts-first network of integrity that leaned heavily on solid reporting with a sprinkling of opinion and infotainment mixed in via programs such as “Larry King Live” and “Crossfire.”

In 2013, the network hired former NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker to take the reins as ratings continued to be below average at best. This gave Zucker a mandate to radically change the network from its journalistic roots of more than three decades — the months-long wall-to-wall coverage of a missing Malaysian airliner being an early example.

But two years later, the move to insert heavy doses of partisan opinion into its news reports only accelerated when Donald Trump – a Zucker hire at NBC for “The Apprentice” – jumped in to the 2016 presidential race. At first, CNN bear-hugged Trump’s every move. (Hillary Clinton’s giving a speech somewhere? Screw it. Let’s show an empty Trump podium with chyrons stating “Trump to speak soon” instead.) The real estate mogul’s 17 Republican challengers never had a shot; Trump blotted out the sun in terms of media coverage ​on his way to winning the nomination.

At that point, Zucker and CNN began to worry. Because while it was a ratings boon for the network to make Trump the centerpiece, there was growing concern that the guy could actually beat Hillary and become the nation’s 45th president. So Zucker unleashed the hounds, but it was too late. Trump would go on to shock the world in November 2016.

Undeterred, CNN decided there would be no honeymoon period for the new president. Talk ​about Russian collusion handing Trump the White House began even before the inauguration. And after the nonstop Trump-bashing, Harvard University concluded that CNN led the way, along with Zucker’s former home of NBC, in giving Trump 93 percent negative coverage in his first 100 days.

For the next four years, CNN served as the leading media resistance to Trump, throwing objectivity out the window. And after Joe Biden got elected, the network cheered the new president as it had throughout the entire campaign while still making Trump a prime centerpiece for over-the-top negative coverage despite his being out of office.

But as much as CNN tried to resurrect its lead character – who was banned from social media and largely off the grid for the year – his absence ​clearly showed the network was a one-trick partisan pony. Ratings fell 90 percent overall when comparing Jan​uary 2021 to Jan​uary 2022. That’s hard to do.

Which brings us to the events of this week: Zucker released a statement saying he had to resign because of a consensual affair with a female executive named Allison Gollust. WarnerMedia apparently has a rule against this, so Zucker – instead of a slap on the wrist for a benign offense – simply had to go abruptly.

Nobody believed this excuse. Turns out they may have had plenty of reason to be skeptical.

Per several reports, Zucker and Gollust allegedly advised then Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) – the older brother of then-​CNN anchor Chris Cuomo – on what to say during his COVID-19 daily briefings in the spring of 2020. They also reportedly told Cuomo how to respond to and how to criticize then-President Trump, to make it more compelling TV. (Gollust is a former communications director for Andrew Cuomo.)

Let’s unpack all of this:

In the spring of 2020, the country was in a horrific place. Businesses shut completely; people were scared. There were no COVID therapeutics, no vaccines. Hospitals ​were overwhelmed, thousands were dying ​each day. If ​ever there was a time for news organizations to educate and inform the public, this was it.

Instead, Zucker apparently believed it was the perfect time to exploit the situation for political gain and to help the network’s ratings.

Andrew Cuomo benefitted from briefings that made him​ appear to be the adult in the room ​regarding COVID and Trump ​appear to be the villain. ​Cuomo got a $5.1 million book deal as a result.

Chris Cuomo and Zucker/Gollust/CNN benefitted from marathon interviews with ​Cuomo’s governor/brother, which didn’t touch the governor’s alleged nursing home scandal. Ratings soared.

So, was Zucker’s departure ​simply about a consensual relationship with a co-worker? One might be forgiven for questioning that.

Moving forward, what’s next for CNN when the company falls under the Discovery Channel umbrella later this year? Let’s hear from its soon-to-be largest shareholder, John Malone of Liberty Media.

“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” Malone said in an interview that recently aired on CNBC.

The collapse of CNN is now complete: Nine-out-of-ten viewers, gone. Its top-rated anchor, ​Chris Cuomo, gone. Its network president, gone. Its integrity in shambles.

Oh, and new management coming in that is signaling big-time changes … changes that may bring CNN back to the proud network it once was before Jeff Zucker destroyed it.

Joe Concha