COVID-1984: It’s Getting Worse By the Hour

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The Governor of Pennsylvania has commanded that citizens wear masks in the house, at all times. HOW will this be enforced? If you live in PA, or if this comes to your state, how will you respond if your Karen neighbor spies on you and reports you?

Joe Biden’s “medical advisors” have talked about such mandates nationally.

This is literally where we are.

Someone who didn’t wear a mask gets sick. “You see? People who don’t wear masks get sick.”

Someone who always wore a mask gets sick. “You see? If everyone wore masks, nobody would get sick. It’s the non-mask wearers’ fault.”
But if masks work, then nobody who wears them would get sick. If you require another to wear a mask so YOU don’t sick, then what good is your own mask?

It’s so obvious! People are either too STUPID to see it; or too frightened to say it. Either way, no civilization can survive like this. If mass numbers of people are actually this stupid, we can’t survive; and if mass numbers of people are too fearful to state the obvious, they don’t deserve to survive.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Awaiting the Kraken

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The only way the Left could win this election was by massive fraud. That is what they realized during the early morning hours after midnight of Election Day.

So they piled it on.

This really is startling. Not that the Left cheated, not that they engage in psychological warfare to cover up their cheating.

But that all the constant pounding, the immense effort by the enemy-of-the-people, false and fake, media, the near-criminal defalcating do-nothingness of the DOJ, even the held-back news of Trump’s vaccine — failed miserably against the forces of MAGA.https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=freerepublic.com&width=692

We Republicans, or whatever we are, gained a governorship, at least ten seats in Congress, several statehouses, and, regarding the presidential race, support from nearly every demographic, including a tremendous gain amongst black and Latino voters.

President Trump himself garnered 73 million votes – 10 million more than in 2016.

It was the forces of MAGA that triumphed, not the Democrats.

Why did this happen? Because under the administration of President Trump, our blinders were removed. The curtain was drawn back. The sick cult of the left is the state religion no longer. Its high priests have been exposed as frauds and hucksters.

And we’ve realized we don’t have to lose. Trump taught us that.

And we’ve realized we can be joyful winning. It’s amazing, and a whole lot of fun.

Witness the D.C. MAGA march. How can it not be fun – after all, the MAGA movement is one of love. Does that need summing up? We are unified around the flag.

The entire message, the foundational idea, of the Left is the opposite. Witness the boarding up of D.C. – and the non-boarding up during the MAGA march.

Moreover, there is no set-in-stone reason the shift should not continue. 

There are even indications that the pace of the shift, the awakening, will continue. There are new social media replacing the old, censored and propagandizing, media, and a large shift to them is occurring. People are also fleeing a newly leftist, propagandizing, news network for more objective ones.

All of this in the face of a concerted effort to make us accept results of an election; we are supposed blindly to believe everything is O.K. with it. Anything claimed is at once condemned; even Trump’s attorneys are being told – by other attorneys, a big no-no – that they are traitors.

That is the measure of their desperation.

They are relying on deep state bureaucrats, the ones placed in positions by the various states to monitor the election process, to maintain the party line that everything is all right.

(Remember when no one believed in the deep state because, well, there wasn’t one?)

In the corrupt deep state’s maintenance of the party line, one of the things they played on early on relates to the difference between the crime of election fraud and its consequences.

Briefly, a criminal case for election fraud is a criminal case; a crime is a crime, whereas an election result that cannot be certified, because of lack of confidence in its results, is a completely different thing.

The Left has been conflating the two on purpose. But the purpose of criminal law is completely different from a process undertaken to assure the legality of votes cast. The former we generally leave to law enforcement. The latter we don’t.

The difference between the two should be obvious, but because it has been obfuscated, an example might do.

Someone places a faked ballot in with lawful ones. This is a crime. It is within the precinct of law enforcement. It is also irrelevant.

What is relevant is whether the votes cast were lawful and lawfully, properly, counted. Discrepancies by themselves, without more, are, let us repeat, are, enough to make this determination.

For it is evident that, say, 100,000 illegal ballots were secretly mixed in with the rest. If they are physically indistinguishable from legal ones, recounts or audits might be of no use. 

Jonathan Turley describes this problem as one of “authentication.” He recently said,

But the main thing I’m looking at is, when you talk about systemic problems is the, is how these ballots were authenticated. Because if there is a problem in the system as to authenticating ballots, that would affect the entire election. 

The same certainly can be said about votes, especially if the insertion were accomplished by means of a computer program. Such chicanery would subvert even a fair ballot authentication and vote counting system.

Thus, the question of whether to have confidence in the election is in the first place left to the legislature. That is what is meant by the idea of their having to certify results. They don’t certify that they were collected. They certify they are believable.

The power the legislatures have is plenary. How plenary? As many have newly discovered, legislatures can and have appointed the electors themselves, without elections. (Bush, @ B)

The state legislature could decide to ignore, for instance, an unfair election and to exercise the power to appoint electors itself. As the Supreme Court has said,

[T]here is no doubt of the right of the legislature to resume the power at any time, for it can neither be taken away nor abdicated.   McPherson v. Blacker, 146 U. S. 1, 35 (1892).

It’s not mechanical, although the Left would like it to be that way. It’s not a matter for the deep state to handle silently.

The point, really, is that state legislatures have a great deal of power in this matter. They certainly should and must take into account the evidence of fraud and chicanery, not to mention the perception of so many of their voters that the election was rigged. State legislatures are close to the people, and the people should let their concerns be known, without letting the legislatures squirm off the hook of their responsibility.

Having said that, a moment can be spent reflecting on how we got here.

Was any of this unpredictable? Of course it was. Yet it should have been prepared for. A major effort should have been expended in order to guarantee fair elections. We were caught flat-footed.

Should Trump have seen it coming? Yes. In his defense, he’s been attacked so fiercely and continually, it may well have been too much, even for him. And the scale of it all is shocking.

But we can take comfort in that no matter what, this election rigging need never surprise us again.

We know now we are the majority. We know the Left will stop at nothing, even targeting our children.

They do not realize that they give themselves away by seeking to brand as illegitimate ab initio any questioning of the voting process. This in itself is a hijacking, a perversion, of the process. It militates necessarily to the conclusion that any proclamation of their favored candidate is illegitimate as well.

And such an illegitimate outcome, if that is what is to occur, will only serve to galvanize us further.

Indeed, no matter whether our well-founded objections to the chicanery and discrepancies in this election will play out in a very un-level playing field, with the electoral gains we’ve made and the growing strength and size of our movement, there is little doubt that, with some effort, we will restore real, not feigned, democracy.

Our efforts will be energized by our righteous anger.

Paradoxically, we forbear only because of our lingering faith in the process, the same process that the Left has hijacked and perverted. But a day may soon come when we are provoked beyond the limits of our forbearance.

Then truly shall the kraken shall awaken.

Tadas Klimas, the author of several books, is a former FBI agent, awarded the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement (NIMA). He is also a former law professor and former Chief Legal Counsel to the Speaker of the Lithuanian parliament Prof. Vytautas Landsbergis.

Image credit: Picryl public domain

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The Historical Record Shows America was Founded Against Racism, not for it

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The following essay is part of The Federalist’s 1620 Project, a symposium exploring the connections and contributions of the early Pilgrim and Puritan settlers in New England to the uniquely American synthesis of faith, family, freedom, and self-government.

In recent years, some prominent voices on the left have contended that America is and has been from its inception a nation established on racism and racial subjugation. This judgment implicitly informs The New York Times’s 1619 Project. According to its introductory blurb, the project “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery … at the very center of our national narrative.”

The American Civil Liberties Union is more direct: “America was founded on white supremacy.” What are we to make of such a disturbing claim?

Before examining its intrinsic merits, we might begin by noting — and rejecting — the improper use that is sometimes made of this interpretation of our country’s character. The assertion that America is a fundamentally racist nation has been deployed to discredit our traditional political institutions, including and especially the Constitution.

More than one article has been written holding that the Electoral College was devised to protect the political interests of the slave states. The same claim has been made more generally about America’s system of federalism. Federalism means “states’ rights,” and everybody knows that the southern defenders of slavery held that their right to self-government at the state level permitted them to enslave African Americans. Later on, after slavery had been abolished, southerners used “states’ rights” to defend their systems of racial segregation and denial of voting rights for black Americans.

Such arguments are both exaggerated and, of course, fallacious. Aside from a few provisions (such as the Fugitive Slave Clause) that were admittedly included to protect slavery, most of the Constitution’s structures and principles were not designed exclusively by or for slaveholders. They were intended instead to both empower the federal government to tend to the nation’s needs and prevent the abuse of that power. They should be judged today by how well they accomplish those (utterly non-controversial) purposes.

From the fact that federalism once sheltered slavery, it does not follow that state-level self-government today is unworthy of the Constitution’s protection. To take an even more obvious example, the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech are not bad or tainted just because some southerners once used that freedom to defend slavery or segregation.

It is also worth noting that today’s left, in claiming that America is founded on racism, aligns itself with some historical characters it might wish to avoid. Racial politics makes for strange bedfellows. This point was made many times by the late Harry Jaffa in response to an earlier generation of critics of America, and it is no less relevant now.

It was, after all, Stephen Douglas — a proponent of the right of territorial governments to establish slavery or not as they saw fit — who argued that “this government was made on the white basis, by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.”

It was Abraham Lincoln — the Great Emancipator — who contended in response that America was founded on the Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal.”

It was Chief Justice Roger Taney — writing in Dred Scott, holding that black Americans could never be citizens — who contended that at the time of the Founding:

[Black Americans had] for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his own benefit.

Dissenting from Taney’s view, Justice John McLean noted:

I prefer the lights of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay as a means of construing the Constitution in all its bearings, rather than to look behind that period, into a traffic which is now declared to be piracy, and punished with death by Christian nations.

Lincoln and Frederick Douglass likewise rejected Taney’s account as both a misinterpretation of and a slander on the nation’s Founding. Similarly, in the twentieth century Martin Luther King, Jr., presented the struggle for civil rights as a call to live up to the nation’s original principles, not as a call to reject and replace them.

The point here is not to taunt the left with this embarrassing pedigree of ideas. It is rather to ask which interpretation of America’s fundamental character has proven more constructive. It seems obvious, from even a cursory glance at our nation’s history, that most of the work of making America better has been carried out by people like Lincoln, Douglass, and King, who believed it was fundamentally good to begin with.

As important as these considerations are, they cannot excuse us from the duty of confronting more directly the claim that America was founded on white supremacy, that it was fundamentally characterized by racism from its earliest origins. But is this claim defensible?

Certainly, slavery existed in America from the time of its earliest colonial settlements. That fact alone, however, cannot settle the question. After all, a country with racism in its midst is very different from a country dedicated to racism.

The question is often difficult to address because we are apt to be misled, either by indignation or by protective love. Outraged by the injustices that were committed against generations of African Americans, we might be inclined to condemn the country that committed or permitted those injustices as fundamentally bad.

This is a common enough temptation in our judgments about individuals. Thus a man who has committed theft can be dismissed as nothing but “a thief,” when he is more than only that. On the other hand, a spirit of patriotic affection for our country might lead us to overlook some real defects or minimize their scope.

Just as an affectionate son would not want to admit that his father is a thief, no warm-hearted patriot would want to admit that his nation was founded on racism. How can our minds escape the distorting influence of these natural human passions?

We might try to avoid this problem by taking as our guide an intelligent, sympathetic, and honest outsider. Since it is so hard to judge our own country impartially, we might learn from the judgments of a candid and foreign friend, one who is willing to acknowledge and explain what is good and bad about America. We find such a guide in Alexis de Tocqueville, whose great work, “Democracy in America,” frankly, and honestly, confronts our nation’s experience with slavery, but without holding that it should be understood to define the nation’s core character.

Tocqueville famously notes the decisive importance of a nation’s “point of departure” for its subsequent development. If you want to really know a man, you have to know his childhood. “Only then will you understand the origin of the prejudices, habits, and passions which are to dominate his life.” So it is, Tocqueville adds, with nations. “Peoples always bear some marks of their origins. Circumstances of birth and growth affect all the rest of their careers.”

If we can examine a nation’s birth and infancy, there we will find the origins of its “prejudices, habits, dominating passions, and all that comes to be called the national character.” Here Tocqueville might seem to offer decisive support for the contemporary left’s criticism of America. But unlike many contemporary voices, Tocqueville does not view slavery and racism as fundamentally shaping the nation’s dominant character.

In the first place, he points out that slavery primarily influenced only a particular, localized part of America. Virginia “had hardly been established when slavery was introduced,” and this institution ended up exerting “an immense influence on the character, laws, and future of the whole South.” For Tocqueville, slavery shaped the South but not the whole country’s way of life.

In the second place, Tocqueville presents the origins of slavery in America less as a deliberate choice of the New World settlements and more as a tragic accident the consequences of which gradually grew to immense proportions. Here is how Tocqueville suggests American slavery should be understood:

[An] evil which has percolated furtively into the world. … It began with an individual whose name history does not record; it was cast like an accursed seed somewhere on the ground; it then nurtured itself, grew without effort, and spread with the society that accepted it.

Tocqueville clearly regards the original southern settlers as less moral and less enlightened than their northern counterparts. The northerners came to America primarily to found self-governing communities based upon their (lofty and demanding) religious vision of a righteous society. The original Virginians came primarily in the pursuit of gain. Nevertheless, as Tocqueville reminds us, it would be unjust to the original southern settlers to say that they came to America with a premeditated purpose to establish slavery.For Tocqueville, the North’s combination of religion and self-government — and not the South’s experience with slavery — set the tone for all of America.

In Tocqueville’s view, America’s original national character was not characterized by the local introduction of slavery by certain settlers, but instead by the long-established culture and deliberate aims of the Anglo-American colonists as a whole. They were, to begin with, liberty-loving Englishmen. They came from a country that had long been agitated by party conflict, and therefore in which “each faction, in turn, had been forced to put itself under the protection of the laws.” Thus, they had learned the value of the rule of law, and had acquired “more acquaintance with notions of rights and principles of true liberty than most of the European nations at that time.”

In addition, by the time of the first settlements, “local government, that fertile germ of free institutions, had already taken deep root in English ways.” Thus the English settlers came to America already committed to “the dogma of the sovereignty of the people.”

Moreover, the northern settlers — and particularly the Puritans of New England — came to America not only with the general habits of freedom characteristic of all the English but with a peculiarly intense inclination toward self-government. They came, Tocqueville says, driven by a “purely intellectual craving,” seeking the “triumph of an idea.”

They wanted to establish communities based upon their Puritan religious and moral convictions. “Puritanism,” however, “was not just a religious doctrine; in many respects, it shared the most absolute democratic and republican theories.” These settlers had “shaken off the pope’s authority” and “acknowledged no other religious supremacy.” Accordingly, they “brought into the New World” a “democratic and republican” form of Christianity,” and “this fact singularly favored the establishment of a temporal republic and democracy.”

For Tocqueville, the North’s combination of religion and self-government — and not the South’s experience with slavery — set the tone for all of America. “New England principles spread first to neighboring states and then in due course to those more distant, finally penetrating everywhere throughout the confederation.” As a result, America was able to embark on its experiment with self-government at a time when most European nations were still ruled by absolute monarchies.

Tocqueville thus offers us a balanced account of America’s origins, one that is both critical and respectful, one that acknowledges the fundamentally good character of our country without ignoring the evils that have marked its history.

The despotism of slavery arose within America and did much to mar its development. But the Americans who built the country were not fundamentally a despotic people. On the contrary, they were a freedom-loving people who sought to establish and perpetuate republican self-government.

This Tocquevillian interpretation of America’s point of departure is certainly more plausible than the claim made by some today that America was “founded on white supremacy.” It is reasonable to suppose that what is fundamentally bad will tend to deteriorate and what is fundamentally good will tend to improve. Nazism was fundamentally established on an ideology of racism. Its evil accordingly grew more malignant over time and was only stopped by the application of overwhelming external force.

Self-generated improvement, however, has obviously been the course of American development. If slavery and racism were the deepest marks on America’s national soul, then why would it have moved so consistently away from them and toward the establishment of freedom and equality?Christianity provided Americans with the moral and spiritual resources to overcome differences of race, to cast aside old prejudices, to seek and to bestow forgiveness for past injustices.

A fundamentally racist nation would not have produced the generation of leaders who, in 1787, placed in the Constitution a power to abolish the foreign slave trade and who publicly condemned slavery and openly hoped for its eventual abolition. A nation founded on white supremacy would not have exerted itself first to limit the scope of slavery, later to abolish slavery, and finally to eliminate racial discrimination.

Ultimately, in a certain sense, America turned out to be a better country than even Tocqueville appreciated. He was deeply pessimistic about the potential for racial peace in America, even if slavery should be eliminated. Because slavery had been based on race, he thought, nobody on either side would be able to forget it or move beyond it. White Americans would never overcome their prejudices against black Americans, and black Americans would forever burn with resentment about the wrongs that had been done to them.

Tocqueville was certainly correct that the dire legacy of slavery would not be eliminated immediately upon its abolition. America’s path toward racial justice was long and difficult, continuing for many decades after the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, over time the process turned out better than Tocqueville expected. The country was not engulfed in a race war, and whites and black Americans gradually learned to live with each other as fellow citizens.

Here Tocqueville may have overlooked something about the Americans that he actually appreciated and examined closely in other contexts. Tocqueville is famous for his positive account of Christianity’s influence on American democracy. Besides noting the aforementioned role of Puritanism in planting the seeds of self-government, he emphasized Christian morality’s role in placing limits on the power of the majority in America, as well as its ability to elevate the souls of Americans above the narrow individualism and petty materialism that threatened to dominate their lives.

This is the truth but not the whole truth about Christianity. It also teaches its adherents to love their fellow human beings as created in the image and likeness of God, and demands that they forgive those who have wronged them just as they hope God will forgive their own wrongdoing. Indeed, Christianity provided Americans the moral and spiritual resources to overcome differences of race, to cast aside old prejudices, to seek and to bestow forgiveness for past injustices.

Racism existed in America from the beginning, but America was not founded on white supremacy. It was instead founded, as Tocqueville teaches us, on the spirit of religion, freedom, and self-government — a benevolent spirit that gradually overcame racial injustice. This is the true and constructive account of our country that we ought to teach our children.

Carson Holloway, a political scientist, is a Washington Fellow in the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.

Top Pathologist Calls COVID “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.”

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VIDEO: https://youtu.be/uEo3rnU12jw

Top pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson told government officials in Alberta during a zoom conference call that the current coronavirus crisis is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.”

Hodkinson’s comments were made during a discussion involving the Community and Public Services Committee and the clip was subsequently uploaded to YouTube.

Noting that he was also an expert in virology, Hodkinson pointed out that his role as CEO of a biotech company that manufactures COVID tests means, “I might know a little bit about all this.”

“There is utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians, it’s outrageous, this is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public,” said Hodkinson.

The doctor said that nothing could be done to stop the spread of the virus besides protecting older more vulnerable people and that the whole situation represented “politics playing medicine, and that’s a very dangerous game.”

Hodkinson remarked that “social distancing is useless because COVID is spread by aerosols which travel 30 meters or so before landing,” as he called for society to be re-opened immediately to prevent the debilitating damage being caused by lockdowns.

Hodkinson also slammed mandatory mask mandates as completely pointless.

“Masks are utterly useless. There is no evidence base for their effectiveness whatsoever,” he said.

“Paper masks and fabric masks are simply virtue signalling. They’re not even worn effectively most of the time. It’s utterly ridiculous. Seeing these unfortunate, uneducated people – I’m not saying that in a pejorative sense – seeing these people walking around like lemmings obeying without any knowledge base to put the mask on their face.”

The doctor also slammed the unreliability of PCR tests, noting that “positive test results do not, underlined in neon, mean a clinical infection,” and that all testing should stop because the false numbers are “driving public hysteria.”

Hodkinson said that the risk of death in the province of Alberta for people under the age of 65 was “one in three hundred thousand,” and that it was simply “outrageous” to shut down society for what the doctor said “was just another bad flu.”

“I’m absolutely outraged that this has reached this level, it should all stop tomorrow,” concluded Dr. Hodkinson.

Hodkinson’s credentials are beyond question, with the MedMalDoctors website affirming his credibility.

“He received his general medical degrees from Cambridge University in the UK (M.A., M.B., B. Chir.) where he was a scholar at Corpus Christi College. Following a residency at the University of British Columbia he became a Royal College certified general pathologist (FRCPC) and also a Fellow of the College of American Pathologists (FCAP).”

“He is in good Standing with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, and has been recognized by the Court of Queen’s Bench in Alberta as an expert in pathology.”

In case the above video gets deleted by YouTube, a backup via Bitchute is available here.

Paul Joseph Watson

Quotes from Leonard Read: Founder of FEE, Lover of Liberty

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ACCORDING to his biographer, Mary Sennholtz, “Leonard Read was one of the most notable social philosophers of our time. His name will forever be associated with the rebirth of the freedom philosophy.” In Gary North’s words, “the libertarian movement … can be traced to Read’s vision.”

The primary reason for those evaluations is that in 1946, when the prospects for freedom in the world were bleak, Leonard Read established the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), which North called “The granddaddy of all libertarian organizations,” and which inspired the formation of many other free-market organizations throughout the world. As not just FEE’s founder and leader but its heart and soul, Leonard Read traveled widely giving speeches, produced a wide array of pro-freedom pamphlets, and participated in hundreds of seminars to advance individual liberty—self-ownership and the solely voluntary arrangements it enabled.

He also wrote prolifically, including almost 30 books. And the core of his message was summarized well by Jacob Hornberger: Leonard Read took an absolutely uncompromising approach to the principles of freedom. He argued that man’s purpose on earth, whatever it is, requires the widest possible ambit for human growth and maturation. Therefore, he believed, a person should be free to do whatever he wants in life as long as it is peaceful.

Read’s foundation for his beliefs came from moral philosophy. As described by Bettina Bien Greaves: He reasoned that if it is moral to respect the life and property of individuals, then it is immoral to violate their rights to life and property; if it is moral to deal peacefully with others, then it is immoral to use force, fraud, or threat of force to impose one’s wishes on others; if voluntary transactions among private-property owners are moral, then to hinder or prevent voluntary transactions among willing traders is immoral.

No one, neither private individual nor public agency, should take property by force or coercion from one person for the benefit of another. These principles led Read logically to believe in the morality of private-property rights, a free-market economy, and free trade, and to the conviction that government intervention that violates private property, hampers free markets, and interferes with free trade is immoral.

Consider the following selection of Leonard Read’s shorter wisdom on liberty: We do not want nor can the people prosper under any form of governmental planned economy. The rise of civilized societies is the result of freedom.

In an essentially free society … no person imposes his will by force upon any other person … then knowledge, ideas, insights are free to emerge from many millions of potential sources. Creativity, in this event, has no external inhibition! Not enough knowledge exists in any discrete individual to rule a single person, let alone a society.

When the responsibility for one’s own welfare is surrendered to government, it follows that the authority to conduct one’s life goes where the responsibility is reposed.

Before a life can be valued for its own sake—not simply a means to someone else’s goal—that life must retain its own power to choose, along with its own quality, its own dignity.

Doing politically what we reject doing individually in no manner alters the immorality of the act; it merely legalizes the wrong … to anyone who believes in the right to life and to one’s honestly acquired property—no moral absolution is gained by legislation.

The person who attempts by force to direct or rearrange the creative activities of others is in a very real sense a slave-master. Given … the unrestrained freedom to act creatively … there will be as much good done by each for others as there is good within us to give.

Justice and so-called social justice are opposites … to promote the latter is to retard the former.

Sidney Powell: Trump Won in a Landslide and We’re Going to Prove It

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Speaking from the Republican National Committee in Washington D.C. Thursday afternoon, Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell detailed foreign corruption behind Dominion Voting Systems, the same software used during the 2020 presidential election in the United States.

“There is no doubt it has been used to alter elections in other countries,” Powell said, explaining the system was developed at the direction of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez to remain in power.

“The Dominion Voting Systems, the Smartmatic technology software and the software that goes in other computerized voting systems here as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election…we have one very strong witness who has explained how it all works. This affidavit is attached…it is a stunning, detailed affidavit because he was with Hugo Chavez when he was being briefed on how it works,” Powell said. “He has seen it operate and as soon as he saw the multiple states shut down the voting the night of the election he knew the same thing was happening here.”

During the 2020 presidential election, Powell alleges Dominion voting systems were used to flip votes from Trump to Biden.

“One of its most characteristic features is its ability to flip votes. It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden,” Powell said. “Notably, the Dominion executives are nowhere to be found now. They’re moving their offices overnight to different places. Their office in Toronto was shared with one of the Soros entities.”

As far as where the campaign goes from here, Powell explained the legal team isn’t giving up and in fact, is just getting started.

“This is stunning, heartbreaking, infuriating and the most unpatriotic acts I can even imagine for people in this country to have participated in, in any way, shape or form. And I want the American public to know right now, we will not be intimidated. American patriots are fed up with the corruption from the local level to the highest level of our government and we are going to take this country back. We are not going to be intimidated. We are not going to back down,” she continued. “We are going to clean this mess up now. President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it and we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom.”

Katie Pavlich, Townhall

Libertarianism Calls Us to a Higher Purpose

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Libertarians tend to have two special character traits. 
First, we’re a bit contrarian. We stand alone, if we must. 
Second, we’re logically consistent. We cannot stand hypocrisy. 

In our quest for intellectual consistency, we seek principles. In human action, we seek moral consistency. In other words, we seek to live by those principles. 

Our principles guide us. They help us sort out tough situations before all the data arrives. Here are some of the more common principles libertarians live by… 

The Self-Ownership Principle: Each person owns themselves. If someone else owns you, you’re a slave. 

Zero Aggression Principle: It is always wrong to initiate force to achieve a social or political goal. 

Law of Equal Liberty: Each person is free to do what he or she wills, so long as they don’t infringe on the equal freedom of another.

Natural Law: The Creator endows each person with rights, at birth, so we must all respect those rights in others (see: The Declaration of Independence)  

Maybe your preferred principle is not listed here. But chances are, that principle, as well as the ones listed above, are… 
Personally chosen statements of behavior. 

In other words, these principles represent your values. You selected them as an expression of your ethics. Since you chose them, you also enforce them. But we all slip sometimes. Hopefully, you’re forgiving of yourself in those moments where you don’t live up to values.  

Likewise, when others around you do not embrace and abide by them, those principles are non-binding.
But there is a “higher principle” for society. It’s higher because it can be repeatedly observed in nature. It’s the Principle of

Human Respect… 
Human happiness, harmony, and prosperity diminish when a person experiences violence, theft, or fraud.
This principle, unlike the others, has an “If X, then Y” relationship. In other words, when violence is used to achieve a personal, social, or political goal, the socially desirable benefits of human happiness, social peace, and/or wealth decline. You can test that proposition. 

Let’s be clear, each of the principles listed above is wonderful. But the Principle of Human Respect identifies a “cause and effect” relationship that is as consistent and observable as gravity. 

Nearly all political philosophies resort to coercive force to achieve their Utopias. Libertarians uniquely recognize that it’s wrong, on both an individual and a political level, to use threats backed by violence to pursue your (conservative or progressive) goals.

Only the Principle of Human Respect explains why we’d be happier and more at peace if everyone lived by any of the libertarian “principles.” 
———-

Jim Babka is the Editor-at-Large for Advocates for Self-Government and the co-creator of the Zero Aggression Project. 

A LIBERTARIAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE MODERN AMERICAN WELFARE STATE

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The US welfare state is much larger than commonly believed. The federal government alone funds and operates more than 100 anti‐​poverty or welfare programs, at a cost of more than $700 billion annually. State and local governments contribute an additional $300 billion to these programs, meaning we spend more than $1 trillion per year on welfare. In fact, since Lyndon Johnson first declared “war on poverty” in 1965, anti‐​poverty programs have cost taxpayers more than $23 trillion (on an inflation‐​adjusted basis).

The question isn’t whether all this spending reduced many of the worst deprivations of material poverty. Of course it did, and does. As George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen notes, under most classical economic theories, “a gift of cash always makes individuals better off.” $23 trillion is a huge sum of money by any measure. Regardless of how dim a view one takes of government competence in general, it would be virtually impossible for the government to spend $23 trillion without benefiting at least some poor people.

Measurements of poverty that fully account for welfare benefits, both cash and non‐​cash, show that the real poverty rate is far lower than the official census‐​bureau estimates. And, even a quick eye test shows that the sort of deep poverty that was widespread as recently as the 1960s–where large numbers of the poor lacked electricity or running water, or where malnutrition was widespread–has been all but eliminated.

This has led some to argue for continuing or even expanding the welfare state. But that would be the wrong lesson to draw. There remain ample reasons to question our current approach to fighting poverty.Among them:

THE WELFARE STATE IS UNSUSTAINABLE

Given the escalating cost of anti‐​poverty programs, it is fair to ask, even if those programs provide short‐​term benefits to the poor, whether they are sustainable into the future without seriously endangering economic growth. After all, one cannot redistribute wealth that doesn’t exist.

Even if welfare spending is a relatively small portion of overall federal spending, especially when compared with programs for the elderly like Social Security, Medicare, it nonetheless imposes a significant burden in the form of taxes or debt. Measured as a percentage of GDP, federal welfare spending has increased more than fivefold, from just 0.83 percent of GDP in 1965 to 4.4 percent today.

Moreover, even if future welfare spending can be accommodated without increasing debt or taxes, such spending will likely occur at the expense of other forms of government spending that are more likely to lead to economic growth. Most social welfare spending is pure consumption‐​based spending, rather than anything that could even tangentially be considered an investment. As such, it is far less stimulative of future growth.

Finally, as Tyler Cowen points out, both the poor and taxpaying non‐​poor will reduce their labor force participation in a welfare state. As a result, future economic growth may be slower than it has been in the past. Any policy that encourages more otherwise‐​able workers to drop out of the labor force would further slow growth.

Hundreds of years of history show that a growing economy lifts more people out of poverty that any government program. Yet, the welfare state perversely reduces that growth. This means not only more impoverished people in the future, but also fewer resources with which to provide welfare benefits. That, in turn, means higher taxes or debt, which will further slow growth, and so on, in a vicious cycle. Thus, even if we agreed that our current welfare policies were beneficial and wished to continue them, they may not be economically optimal.

THE WELFARE STATE IS BUREAUCRATICALLY INEFFICIENT

As noted above, the federal government alone runs more than 100 anti‐​poverty programs. Some 70 of these provide benefits directly to individuals, while the remainder are targeted to low‐​income communities. On top of this, there are a multitude of state and local programs. These programs come with overlapping (and often contradictory) eligibility rules, work requirements, and other restrictions, rendering the American welfare state a patchwork system of unaccountability and opaqueness.

It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to determine which programs are effective and which are not, a problem compounded by their being overseen by at least nine cabinet departments, six independent agencies, and dozens of congressional committees. Moreover, the systems complexity can mean that similarly situated individuals can receive wildly different benefits, based solely on their ability to navigate the system. And, while fraud and abuse are smaller than many believe, there is still far too much waste and duplication.

THE WELFARE STATE GETS THE INCENTIVES WRONG

It seems obvious that a successful welfare state would promote–or at least not inhibit–behaviors that have been proven successful at lifting people out of poverty and reducing long‐​term dependence, notably work and marriage. However, our existing welfare programs too often create precisely the wrong set of incentives.

Take work, for example. The interplay of taxes, welfare benefits, and the costs of employment can mean that someone leaving welfare for a job faces some of the highest marginal tax rates of any group. As soon as an individual earns outside income, welfare benefits begin to phase out. At the same time, the new worker must now pay taxes (payroll taxes, for instance, start with the first dollar of income). And, the worker will now incur expenses for such things as transportation, work clothing, and child care. In some states with very high welfare benefits, people can actually be left worse off financially in the short term by taking an entry‐​level job.

THE WELFARE STATE FAILS TO ADDRESS PEOPLE’S REAL NEEDS

It is impossible to walk through many poor neighborhoods, from inner cities to isolated rural communities, and believe that our welfare system is working the way it should. These are areas where the government has spent heavily to reduce poverty. A high percentage of residents are receiving some form of government assistance. And as a result, the poor may well be better off financially than they would be in the absence of government aid. Yet no one could honestly describe those communities or the people living in them as thriving or flourishing in any sense of the word. By that measure, at least, our welfare programs are a failure.

Perhaps The Economist put it best:

If reducing poverty just amounts to ushering Americans to a somewhat less meagre existence, it may be a worthwhile endeavor but is hardly satisfying. The objective, of course, should be a system of benefits that encourages people to work their way out of penury, and an economy that does not result in so many people needing welfare in the first place. Any praise for the efficacy of safety nets must be tempered by the realization that, for one reason or another, these folks could not make it on their own.

If we were to consider welfare according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we do a mostly successful job of tending to the base of the pyramid–people’s essential physiological needs. Nearly all Americans have food, shelter, clothing, and so on. But the higher up the pyramid we go, the less our welfare programs accomplish. In the end, we do next to nothing to assist people with needs on the social, ego, or self‐​actualization levels.

That is because satisfying those needs requires a degree of autonomy and self‐​sufficiency that is compromised by reliance on government assistance. People cannot be said to have control over their own lives if they are perpetually dependent on others.

Adding to this, welfare programs are painfully paternalistic. The vast majority of welfare is provided not in the form of cash, but as “in‐​kind” benefits like food, housing, or health care. The government decides how the poor should budget or spend their money. Moreover, legislators often attach a variety of demeaning conditions to benefits. Work requirements are widespread, and might even be justified, but some state legislators also have attached restrictions preventing the poor from purchasing seafood or limiting the number of daily ATM withdrawals they can make.

THERE ARE BETTER ANSWERS

Finally, we should recognize that welfare is not the only way to help the poor. It is possible to achieve similar or even greater levels of poverty reduction through other mechanisms.

For example, private charity is capable not only of dealing with material poverty but can often do a better job of dealing with underlying problems. Americans, after all, are extraordinarily generous. In 2015, we donated $373 billion to charity. Roughly $265 billion of that, or fully 71 percent, was given by individuals (the rest came from corporations, foundations, and other organizations). More than 83 percent of adult Americans make some charitable contribution each year. True, a substantial portion of that giving went to entities like universities, hospitals, and the arts, rather than to direct human services to the poor. But even so, Americans voluntarily gave tens of billions of dollars to help the poor. And it wasn’t just money. We also donated more than 3.2 million hours of our time. Roughly 65 percent of Americans perform some form of volunteer work. And that doesn’t include the countless hours given informally to help friends, family members, neighbors, and others outside the formal charity system.

Additional giving may be necessary to replace the welfare state, of course, but numerous studies have documented a “displacement effect,” whereby government programs crowd out private giving. For example, a comparison of charitable giving across countries confirms the finding that government welfare spending reduces private charitable efforts. Among rich countries, those with lower social expenditures as a share of the economy see a higher portion of their population donate to charity.

At the same time, other reforms–of education, of the criminal justice system, of barriers to economic participation–can reduce the need for welfare. Nothing will do more to reduce poverty than allowing the poor to become full participants in a growing economy.

Libertarians share a goal with those across the ideological spectrum: to reduce poverty and enable every American to rise as far as their individual talents will take them. Our answer to poverty has largely been to create more and more programs, while throwing more and more money at the problem. That has failed to truly empower the poor. There are better alternatives.

Michael D. Tanner