Their release comes a day after President Trump drew attention to their wrongful incarceration during a MAGA rally in Latrobe Pennsylvania. Fox News Host Tucker Carlson also drew attention to the case.
November 6, 2022 Sundance
By order of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips have been ordered RELEASED from custody, reversing the lower court decision which led to their detention and imprisonment for six days. {Background}
Konnech CEO Eugene Yu was arrested for exploiting access to U.S. election data, including election worker information, and transferring the files to China.
Eugene Yu and Konnech sued True the Vote and are using the U.S. civil judicial system to find out who told the FBI about the Chinese data harvesting operation. Federal Judge Kenneth Hoyt demanded that Phillips and Englebrecht reveal the names of everyone who was present when the original data files were shown to True the Vote.
Englebrecht and Phillips stated they did not ever possess the data file, do not have it and refused to name all the participants who may have seen it. Judge Hoyt threw them in jail last Monday until Englebrecht and Phillips give up the names to the court and the Chinese Communist Party.
Their release comes a day after President Trump drew attention to their wrongful incarceration during a MAGA rally in Latrobe Pennsylvania. Fox News Host Tucker Carlson also drew attention to the case.
100 Percent Fed Up reports- On Monday, Federal Judge Kenneth Hoyt held True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and True the Vote investigator Gregg Phillips in contempt of court over their refusal to identify a confidential informant who helped them obtain information that led to the discovery and, later, evidence that the E. Lansing, MI based election software company Konnech was storing election-related data on servers in China.
(Click HERE to donate). These two American heroes and warriors who are bravely fighting to ensure our elections are free and fair and unable to be stolen are in the midst of fighting six lawsuits related to their work to expose voter fraud in America.
Earlier today, Gregg Phillips posted a photo of himself wearing an orange jumpsuit in a federal prison on Truth Social.
This may be the first time in U.S. history that Americans have been jailed in a federal civil defamation suit.
Tonight, Catherine Engelbrecht announced that they have been released from federal prison, and for now, they are free!
Praise the Lord!!!!
Catherine released the following statement upon their release:
Those who thought that imprisoning Gregg and I would weaken our resolve have gravely miscalculated. It is stronger than ever.
The right to free and fair elections without interference is more important than our own discomforts and even this detention, now reversed by a higher court.
We are profoundly grateful for that. We will continue to protect and defend those who do the vital work of election integrity, and we will make sure that their findings become a matter of public record.
– Catherine Engelbrecht, True the Vote
Here is a portion of their appeal:
This contempt proceeding is founded on Defendants1 grossly misunderstood public statements by Plaintiff and the district court, having to do with both (1) Chinese Server Data – sensitive data one defendant, Gregg Phillips, witnessed on a TV monitor in a Dallas hotel room in late January 2021 – which data is the sole subject of Plaintiff’s claims of computer fraud – and (2) Election Breach Information – summary information about the resulting election system vulnerabilities, all publicly available, which Defendants wished to convey to the public as a warning.
As a result of its misunderstanding of Defendants’ modestly technical descriptions, Plaintiff has misunderstood this case to be in some way about hacking, or the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act, or about disclosure of sensitive data (whether of Plaintiff or individuals). All of these assumptions are incorrect. But the district court perpetuated that misunderstanding in ordering Defendants to make disclosures to Plaintiff that were alternatively impossible, inappropriate, or legally irrelevant.
Based entirely on its demonstrably flawed assumptions, Plaintiff inappropriately ex parte obtained a TRO seeking discovery outside standard civil procedure.2 Perhaps goaded by Plaintiff’s characterizations of this case as being about “election denialism”, the Court took the unusual step of issuing a TRO that compelled affirmative relief from Defendants (1) in the absence of any evidence from Plaintiff, (2) based on demonstrable mischaracterizations of Defendants’ public statements, (3) without permitting Defendants to proffer all relevant evidence, and (4) based on the incorrect conclusion that a person who witnessed Chinese Server Data not shown to belong to Plaintiff somehow “accessed” a “protected computer” of Plaintiff. Highlighting the hazards of ex parte hearings, the district court uncritically accepted Plaintiff’s counsel’s incorrect statement that Defendants “admitted hacking and theft of financial and other sensitive personal data of purportedly 1.8 million U.S. poll workers allegedly from a Konnech protected computer.”
Following the ex parte appearance by counsel for Konnech on the same day it filed its Complaint and motion for injunctive relief, whose merits and supposed urgency were both based on Plaintiff’s grave misconceptions about the types of information Defendants had spoken of, this Court issued the TRO, which holds, in pertinent part, that the defendants are enjoined from: – “accessing”, “using”, or “disclosing” “Konnech’s protected computers” and data; or – deleting or destroying same, Defendants pledged to comply with this portion of the order soon after. But the TRO also compels Defendants to disclose: – the identity of any individual involved in “accessing Konnech’s protected computers”, – the manner, means and time of “accessing” such computers, and – the identity of any individual to have received said data.
In a hearing on October 6, the court forced Defendants’ prior counsel to reveal to Plaintiff, in open court and against their protests, the name of one of the confidential informants to the FBI who happened to be in the Dallas hotel room. Defendants subsequently disclosed information responding to the remainder of the court’s order, substantially complying with the order and omitting only to publicly name a second confidential informant (“the Second Informant”) (1) who was not alleged to have “accessed” any computers in this case, let alone Konnech’s, (2) whom Plaintiff had failed to establish had relevant evidence, and (3) whose personal safety the district court said it did not care about.
On October 27, 2022, at a show cause hearing the Court held Defendants in civil contempt for failing to identify the third of three individuals. Aside from the fact that the individual in question had not “accessed” a “protected computer” known to belong to Konnech, Defendants’ hesitation in disclosing another confidential informant was due, in part, to their attempts to grapple with the nature of Plaintiff’s and the court’s misunderstandings, in part because Defendants were concerned about blowing the cover of confidential informants to the FBI and putting them at personal risk, and in part because their original counsel. But their hesitation was not, as Plaintiff and the court characterized it, contemptuous.
Crucially, in the October 6 hearing, Plaintiff misrepresented the disputed nature of their conclusions about Defendants’ statements, saying, “[T]here is Fifth Circuit precedent that says that the Court can consider a preliminary injunction without live testimony so long as there is no genuine issue of material fact.” DOC 30 TR at 9 (emphasis added). But there is a genuine issue of material fact here — consistent mischaracterizations by Plaintiff’s counsel about the nature of what Phillips saw (American poll worker data on a server located in China) and what Defendants have said they would do (report the fact of such data being breached and available in China – not the data itself).
1. Defendant Phillips Witnessed a Portion of the Chinese Server Data
Defendant Phillips witnessed, on a TV monitor in a Dallas hotel room, enormous amounts of data (he was told 350TB) on a server located in China, some of it including sensitive data on American poll workers.3 Also present were the person who accessed the data, Michael Hasson, whose name was revealed during the hearing of October 6, and the third individual. Some of the data appeared to have come from, or been taken from, Plaintiff Konnech.
But while the court’s order to show cause is entirely about this data, unrebutted testimony shows that Defendants did not themselves access the Chinese Server Data, did not download or copy it, do not otherwise possess it, and have never stated they would reveal it to anyone.
a. Defendants Did Not Download the Chinese Server Data Q. Did any — forgive me if I get the terminology — but did any downloading occur in your presence in that hotel room when the — whatever was up on the TV screen was up on the TV screen — was any access happening? A. No. Doc 47 TR, p.32 (Phillips answering). b. No Defendant Has a Copy of the Chinese Server Data Q. Do you have, in your possession, a copy of this electronic information that was displayed on that screen in the hotel room in Dallas? A. No, sir. Q. Does Ms. Engelbrecht have a copy? A. No. Q. Does True The Vote have a copy? A. No, sir. Q. Does anybody associated with True The Vote have a copy? A. No, sir. Q. Did you ever have a copy of the electronic data on your computer or otherwise in your individual possession? A. No. Doc 47 TR, pp. 33-34 (Phillips answering). On October 6, Defendants’ prior counsel had already informed the court that the Chinese Server Data was something Phillips had only seen, and did not possess: MR. BREWER: Your Honor, seeing it [data] and possessing it [data] are two different things.
THE COURT: Well, it may not be and it may be. c. DefendantsDidNotWitnessHackingorMeansof“Access” In unrebutted testimony, Defendant Phillips also made clear that what he saw in the hotel room was not “accessed” at that time. Rather, he was shown the results of the access on the TV monitor: Q. What, if anything, was your impression on the temporal relationship — that is the time relationship between when you walked into the hotel room and whenever whoever it was downloaded the information or data that appeared on the TV monitor that you saw?
A. It took about 20 minutes to get his computer hooked to the television screen. He had a problem with the cord that needed to hook into the hotel screen. Once he pulled it up, he went straight to his files that he was showing me. Q. Was it your impression that information was actively being retrieved at that moment in the hotel room, or was it your impression that that had already been done, and he was showing you something that had been done in the past? A. I think it was being done in the past. He certainly wouldn’t have been — there wouldn’t have been enough bandwidth at the hotel to download that kind [350TB] of data.
Defendants have also made clear exactly why they could not help Plaintiff – as it demanded in its supposedly urgent motion for a Temporary Restraining Order – with its serious security problems. Because the uncontroverted testimony is that Phillips did not know how the Chinese Server Data had been accessed:
THE WITNESS: I don’t know how it was accessed. I know it was accessed because I saw it, and I subsequently learned that the information had become important to the FBI. [As to] when, given the size of the data that I understand was downloaded, it was somewhere in the 350-terabyte range, and was downloaded over approximately three months in the first quarter of 2021.
Defendants Did Not Provide the Chinese Server Data to Anyone In unrebutted testimony, Defendants also made clear who gave the Chinese Server Data to the FBI – and it was not Defendants: Q. And so how was the data sent from Mr. Hasson to the FBI?
A. They have a method to transmit large chunks of data directly to them. Q. What’s that method? A. I didn’t do it. You’d have to ask Mike. Q. Were you involved in it being done? A. No. Q. Did you see it being done? A. No. Q. Who told you it was done? A. The FBI. Doc 47 TR at 54-55 (statement of Gregg Phillips). In the same podcasts Plaintiff has cited without understanding, Phillips has also explained unrefuted information about the China-based server that should have prevented the district court from attempting to make Defendants responsible for Plaintiff’s own security problems in China: “Important keynote here, guys, for everyone … We didn’t steal anything. They left it open. The database was a MongoDB database that they left open. … There were no tools used to break in.”
The second type of information, or data, in this case is about the basic fact of the breach of American poll workers’ data, which we will call Data Breach Information. This is the only information or data that Defendants “accessed”, possessed, or wanted to disclose.
2. Data Breach Information
The Data Breach Information includes the general fact that sensitive data on American poll workers was being stored on a computer server located in China. The Data Breach Information consists of the publicly available fact that election-related domain names hosted by Konnech on behalf of American cities were being hosted on the same China-based server as its American poll worker data, as was Konnech’s URL app.konnech.com (meaning that any data that ran through its apps ran through the insecure server in China), and, apparently, what appeared to be websites for the Chinese election system (e.g., 2dmeeting.com and 2dmeeting.cn). Exhibit 1 shows a screenshot from the publicly available website Binary Edge, which provides information on computer servers around the world. It shows the server information for Konnech-owned domain name Vote4Fairfax.com, a website run on behalf of Plaintiff’s client Fairfax County, Virginia, which Defendants confirmed was registered to Konnech before the domain name’s ownership information (aka WHOIS information) was recently concealed. The Binary Edge screenshot, taken before someone changed the server to one located in the U.S, reveals several key facts: • The screenshot was taken sometime shortly after December 29, 2020. • The domain name Vote4Fairfax.com was hosted in China, specifically, on Unicom, one of three “backbones” of the Chinese Internet, which is owned by the Chinese government. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Unicom • The computer server has IP address 101.66.244.52. • The same server hosted many other domain names – and their data – operated by Konnech on behalf of its American clients, such as the city of Boston (Vote4Boston.com), the city of Hillsborough (Vote4Hillsborough.net), and others. • Server 101.66.244.52 also hosted apps.konnech.com, as well as all the data on applications used by Konnech customers who access apps.konnech.com Exhibit 2 shows that the same domain names, as well as Konnech’s PollChief.com website and a few more domain names that Konnech operates on behalf of clients in Detroit and Lake County, have been belatedly moved to a server based in the United States. See Ex. 2 (accessed on November 1, 2022). It is this Data Breach Information that Defendants said, in their podcasts and The Pit event and other media, they wished to reveal to the public. This information does not belong to Plaintiff, was not accessed from them, is not defamatory, and is within Defendants’ First Amendment rights to speak about.
3. The Missed Opportunities in the Court Below
In fact, had the district court subjected Plaintiff’s testimony to cross-examination, consistent with due process, the court could have determined whether Plaintiff does indeed own the above-named domain names, and whether it was Plaintiff who moved the domain names from the server in China to the one in the United States. If Plaintiff does own the domain names or did move them from an insecure server in China to a server in the United States, then its entire motion for contempt, and its argument that it needs immediate injunctive relief in the form of Defendants helping it to understand its server’s “breach”, could have been denied. Why? Because Plaintiff knew its information was on a server in China, and Plaintiff did not require the names of private individuals in order to secure its data, as Plaintiff insisted in its overheated and ex parte Motion for TRO. Lacking such urgency, the court’s holding of the ex parte proceeding was itself inappropriate. And it made no sense for the court to order Defendants to tell Plaintiff what it already knew, nor to arbitrarily incarcerate them for a good-faith disinclination to disclose the names of confidential informants who could have told them what they already knew: that they were hosting their domain names and data on a server in China. The court did not allow Defendants to explain the crucial distinctions at issue here. It did not appear to appreciate the distinctions – admittedly somewhat technical in nature – when Defendants offered them. Witness the court’s questioning of Phillips regarding the data – the Chinese Server Data – of American citizens he saw that night in the Dallas hotel room: THE COURT: And you saw that there were bank accounts? THE WITNESS: There were bank accounts. THE COURT: You saw the names of the individuals? THE WITNESS: Yes, sir. THE COURT: You saw their Social Security numbers? THE WITNESS: Yes, sir. THE COURT: And you then said: We’re going to post this on a public domain? THE WITNESS: No, sir. There is two different datasets. THE COURT: Well, I’m not — I don’t care about the datasets. You know what I am describing. 14 “It’s unrelated,” Defendant Phillips began, because he did in fact know what the court was describing, but the court cut him off before he could explain the crucial distinction. See Doc 47 TR 5at 97, lines 3-17 (emphasis added). This was not Defendants’ only attempt to ensure the court was informed about the fundamental issues — and what they had and had not said they witnessed, possessed, or would disclose – before it issued the contempt citation: THE COURT: Okay. Do you recall making a statement on the podcast to the effect that you were going to create a website and would load the — this data that you saw onto the website for the people who would want to visit that site? Note, again, that Defendants’ podcast and website both relate to the open- source, publicly available Election Breach Information, not the Chinese Server Data. THE WITNESS: No, sir. That’s not true. THE COURT: I’m asking you. This is what you said — or what your podcast said. THE WITNESS: My podcast was referring to something we called the ripcord. The ripcord was related to an app called Open.INK, I-N-K. We were going to put the — we do all sorts of other research. We do a lot of open-source research, meaning Googling around and trying to find things. But we also do geospatial research.
It’s Worse Than We Thought – BREAKING: Detroit Election Officials Signed 2020 Contract to Use China-Linked Konnech Systems to Mass Scan Absentee Ballots and Check Ballot Signatures (VIDEO)
By Patty McMurray from 100 Percent Fed Up and Jim Hoft from The Gateway Pundit
Attorney Daniel Hartman and Hon. Timothy M. Kenny
Michigan Judge the Honorable Timothy M. Kenny recently held a hearing on signature validation in overseas ballots.
During the hearing in the 3rd Circuit Court of MI Judge Kenny repeatedly berated Attorney Dan Hartman and allowed the defense lawyer David Fink to go off on political rants about “right-wing fever dreams” and “election deniers.” (around the 3 hour mark) Attorney Fink accused Hartman of racism despite the fact that the lawsuit was filed by Kristina Karamo who is a black female conservative running for Secretary of State in Michigan.
Detroit Election Consultant Chris Thomas explained during the hearing how mailed absentee ballot signatures are verified. When Hartman asked how Detroit verifies signatures on ballots emailed to military overseas, Judge Kinney blew up at him and suggested he was attempting to disenfranchise the votes of military members, adding that he has a son who served 5 years overseas, which of course, had no relevance to the case. This was a bogus argument.
An animated Hartman explained the point of questioning how signatures from overseas ballots are verified, “What I’m trying to prevent is the person that is sitting in China—who hasn’t been to the United States or Detroit in 18 years—who may or may not exist—from casting a ballot through this lack of election security!”
“And I’m tired of being called a racist by Mr. Fink,” Hartman added. “I’m tired of Mr. Fink saying I’m trying to disenfranchise the heroes in the military when I’m trying to secure this election!” a frustrated Mr. Hartman said.
Mr. Hartman asked about the process for verifying signatures during the hearing.
When Attorney Daniel Hartman asked Daniel Baxter, the Election Administrator in the Detroit Metropolitan Area, about drop boxes, Baxter responded by saying that Detroit’s 20 ballot drop boxes are all monitored by surveillance video, but he could not confirm if they are under 24-hr camera surveillance.
Detroit Election Administrator Daniel Baxter also said the City of Detroit No Longer uses anything from Konnech
Detroit was neck deep in the Konnech election systems, a company that stored their data on China servers.
He also told Mr. Hartman that the city no longer uses anything from Konnech, an election software company whose CEO was recently arrested for allegedly storing poll worker data in China.
According to WDET– The City of Detroit canceled their contract with Konnech only days after he was arrested in Michigan as part of a Los Angeles Co.-based investigation.
Konnech had a five-year, $2.9 million contract with the county to administer poll worker assignments, communications and payroll. LA County prosecutors found that Konnech was storing information in China in violation of the agreement.
“Data breaches are an ongoing threat to our digital way of life,” LA District Attorney George Gascón said in a statement. “When we entrust a company to hold our confidential data, they must be willing and able to protect our personal identifying information from theft. Otherwise, we are all victims.”
Detroit had a similar contract with Konnech for the use of its PollChief software, which is said to have the ability to send mass letters, emails and phone calls to polling locations and record responses of election workers. The $320,000 contract, approved last year by Detroit City Council, was set to expire in June 2024. According to city and federal records, Konnech had worked with the city on several specific applications for more than a decade, including ballot “fast scanning” software and a mobile app for Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) returned ballots.
Following news of Yu’s arrest, Detroit terminated its current contract with Konnech. In a statement, City Clerk Janice Winfrey upheld the integrity of Detroit’s election process and the security of employee information.
“Our data, which is now back under our exclusive control, was housed on servers located in Lansing, Michigan. Konnech, per its contract, only provided logistical and call center support,” said Winfrey. “Out of an abundance of caution, all proper steps are being taken — including the termination of Konnech’s contract. My staff and I are confident that the 2022 election process will run smoothly delivering, after all votes have been counted, an unimpeachable work product.”
But now there are questions about the use of Konech systems in Detroit, Michigan elections.
Detroit City Council meeting that took place before the November 2020 election exposed the Konnech Systems were used for many different election functions
In a Detroit City Council Meeting on October 14, 2020, Timothy Gaffney, the Detroit Manager of Elections said this about the county’s use of the Konnech systems:
So the point of this Konnech contract was for us to actually have the ability to mass scan AV [Absent Voter] Applications. Right now, it’s a manual process where we have to actually enter them in one by one to get them done. So what we had to do was construct a software where we can scan 2,000 applications in a minute and then download a CSV file and upload it to our Qualified Voter File.
Actually, what we would do is actually pull a file from our qualified voter file. We match the voter information with the voter ID number. So from that process, the way we have it, cause they [Konnech] built it for us. The way it’s actually developed is it matches both names, pulls the signature off the application, it matches, it puts signatures side-by-side from the application and also from our Qualified Voter File. So, a human would still be there saying that this person’s signature is this person’s signature. I [??] that file, and then I upload to our Qualified Voter File. The Qualified Voter File will give us an error report if anything doesn’t match [??].
Director Gaffney explained they did not use the software for the August 2020 primary due to disbursement issues with their grant funding.
Diggersleuth was able to dig up the video from this meeting. And Diggersleuth also found the exact title of Konnech Contract No. 3045877, approved in October 2020 by the City of Detroit for the amount of $186,624.00.
It was unclear in the video of the City Council meeting if the software would be utilized for the November 2020 election. They wanted to make sure the technology was fool-proof. As Director Gaffney stated, “we try not to introduce anything new that would change the process too close to the election” and that “at this time, I would prefer to go with the manual hand process [for November 2020]. I would not like to introduce anything this close to the election.”
Here’s the video of the Detroit City Council meeting where they discuss their contract with Konnech:
The latest production from Joe Dan Gorman and Intellectual Froglegs is out. In this edition, Joe Dan Gorman talks about the 2022 Election and encourages everyone to get out and vote this Tuesday in the 2022 midterms.
Joe Dan Gorman’s mixture of current events is smart and very funny. In this video, Joe Dan again shares his respect for the reporting at The Gateway Pundit and conservative media.
Joe Dan was censored long ago on various social media platforms because of his effective and funny take on current events. Watch this edition and you’ll see why his work was censored by the radicals attempting to take over and destroy our great nation.
Portions of Steve Bannon’s recent speech about getting out the vote are in this special, including:
We gotta fight. I am telling you, we gotta fight. You have to be all in, not partway in, and you have to bring more. This an army of the awakened and you are the cadre, you are the tip of the spear…You need to put your whole being into this fight. Everything.
Joe Dan also provides ideas on how you can help and become a citizen journalist during this election.
Here is Joe Dan’s latest video – they really do just keep getting better – enjoy.
The Liberty Bell is an iconic part of America’s history.
In 1751, on the 50th anniversary of Pennsylvania’s 1701 first charter of liberties the Pennsylvania Assembly ordered a bell from London to be used as part of the commemoration festivities. It arrived on September 1, 1752 and was hung in the tower of the State House in 1753.
Sadly, the bell cracked the first time it was pealed, so the local Philadelphia foundry of Pass and Stow melted down the bell and recast it. But many citizens were displeased with the sound of the bell, so it was once again melted down, recast, and then rehung in the tower.
It was originally known as the “State House Bell.” It was some fifty years after the Revolution, in the midst of the growing national divide over the slavery issue, that abolitionists renamed it the Liberty Bell. It was called this because of the Bible inscription from Leviticus 25:10 emblazoned around the top of the bell — “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.” Its new name was popular among the public and became its permanent name.
Across the years, the Liberty Bell rang many times in September as part of several notable events in American history. For example:
September 1764 — It rang to call together the State Assembly, which voted to request that its official representative in London “use his endeavors to obtain a repeal or at least an amendment of the [Sugar Act]” — one of the underlying causes of the American War for Independence.
September 1765 — It rang to call together the Assembly to discuss the Stamp Act, another one of the onerous British policies that spurred independence.
September 1770 — It rang to assemble citizens, who passed a resolve stating that Parliament’s taxes violated the rights of Pennsylvania citizens.
September 1777 — It was transported by wagon to the Zion Reformed Church in Allentown to protect it from the British who, it was widely thought, would take the bell and melt it down to use for ammunition.
September 1824 — It rang to welcome hero Marquis de Lafayette (who was visiting America) to Independence Hall.
Of course, there were many other important times that the Liberty Bell was rung, including on July 8, 1776 to call citizens to assemble together outside the State House for a special announcement. At that time, the new Declaration of Independence was read to them by Col. John Nixon.
This month, we remember the famous Liberty Bell, named because of its Bible verse, as another example of the rich religious heritage of the United States.
Our nation’s history is full of wonderful stories like this one. At WallBuilders, we are often asked by legislators, courts, and schools to share such information about our rich moral, religious, and constitutional heritage. If our mission resonates with you, please consider supporting our work financially with a tax-deductible donation.
RONALD REAGAN TRIED TO WARN US in this video of several things happening today. A prophetic message of what life would be like with big Government and lack of patriotism that every American needs to watch and Share! This video was cut up from President’s Farewell speech and put to music composed by Steve Montgomery. Pray for America and Pray for the World. Tyranny is upon us and our freedom is being dismantled. Wake up before it’s too late. Ronald Reagan was Right!
Ronald Reagan’s A Time for Choosing Speech, October 27, 1964 clipped
Full Transcript Below:
“The Speech” is what Ronald Reagan called it. Today we call it, “A Time for Choosing,” and it was a pivotal turning point in Ronald Reagan’s life.
Ronald Reagan began a long side-career of public speaking as his acting career closed out. He traveled across the country meeting Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs, Chambers of Commerce and any other civic-minded local groups. This continued and intensified during his service as the General Electric spokesperson while hosting their sponsored television series. “The Speech” was delivered in various forms and to different audiences as each word was honed, measured and memorized.
During the 1964 Presidential campaign, Republican party officials in California, who knew Reagan’s powerful message and delivery, asked him to film a speech on behalf of the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater. The speech was aired on October 27, 1964 and it was electrifying. Donations to the Republican party and candidates increased dramatically.
The Republican Party took note and they targeted Reagan as a candidate from that point forward. He agreed in 1966 to run for Governor of California. He won two terms, and eventually won the Presidency.
Transcript of “A Time for Choosing,” delivered on national television on October 27, 1964
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn’t been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.
I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, “We’ve never had it so good.”
But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn’t something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven’t balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We’ve raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don’t own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we’ve just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.
As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.
Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.
This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down – [up] man’s old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the “Great Society,” or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people. But they’ve been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves; and all of the things I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations. For example, they have voices that say, “The cold war will end through our acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism.” Another voice says, “The profit motive has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state.” Or, “Our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century.” Senator Fullbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the President as “our moral teacher and our leader,” and he says he is “hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document.” He must “be freed,” so that he “can do for us” what he knows “is best.” And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as “meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government.”
Well, I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as “the masses.” This is a term we haven’t applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, “the full power of centralized government”this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don’t control things. A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.
Now, we have no better example of this than government’s involvement in the farm economy over the last 30 years. Since 1955, the cost of this program has nearly doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for 85 percent of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has known a 21 percent increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth of farming that’s regulated and controlled by the federal government. In the last three years we’ve spent 43 dollars in the feed grain program for every dollar bushel of corn we don’t grow.
Senator Humphrey last week charged that Barry Goldwater, as President, would seek to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better, because he’ll find out that we’ve had a decline of 5 million in the farm population under these government programs. He’ll also find that the Democratic administration has sought to get from Congress [an] extension of the farm program to include that three-fourths that is now free. He’ll find that they’ve also asked for the right to imprison farmers who wouldn’t keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnation and resell them to other individuals. And contained in that same program was a provision that would have allowed the federal government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil.
At the same time, there’s been an increase in the Department of Agriculture employees. There’s now one for every 30 farms in the United States, and still they can’t tell us how 66 shiploads of grain headed for Austria disappeared without a trace and Billie Sol Estes never left shore.
Every responsible farmer and farm organization has repeatedly asked the government to free the farm economy, but how – who are farmers to know what’s best for them? The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government passed it anyway. Now the price of bread goes up; the price of wheat to the farmer goes down.
Meanwhile, back in the city, under urban renewal the assault on freedom carries on. Private property rights [are] so diluted that public interest is almost anything a few government planners decide it should be. In a program that takes from the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a “more compatible use of the land.” The President tells us he’s now going to start building public housing units in the thousands, where heretofore we’ve only built them in the hundreds. But FHA [Federal Housing Authority] and the Veterans Administration tell us they have 120,000 housing units they’ve taken back through mortgage foreclosure. For three decades, we’ve sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. The latest is the Area Redevelopment Agency.
They’ve just declared Rice County, Kansas, a depressed area. Rice County, Kansas, has two hundred oil wells, and the 14,000 people there have over 30 million dollars on deposit in personal savings in their banks. And when the government tells you you’re depressed, lie down and be depressed.
We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they’re going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer – and they’ve had almost 30 years of it – shouldn’t we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn’t they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?
But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we’re told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a year. Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We’re spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you’ll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we’d be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present income should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however, is only running only about 600 dollars per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.
Now, so now we declare “war on poverty,” or “You, too, can be a Bobby Baker.” Now do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion we’re spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have -and remember, this new program doesn’t replace any, it just duplicates existing programs – do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain there is one part of the new program that isn’t duplicated. This is the youth feature. We’re now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps [Civilian Conservation Corps], and we’re going to put our young people in these camps. But again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we’re going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person we help 4,700 dollars a year. We can send them to Harvard for 2,700! Course, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.
But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who’d come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise. She’s eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who’d already done that very thing.
Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we’re always “against” things – we’re never “for” anything.
Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.
Now, we’re for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we’ve accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.
But we’re against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They’ve called it “insurance” to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term “insurance” to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they’re doing just that.
A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary – his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he’s 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can’t put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they’re due, that the cupboard isn’t bare?
Barry Goldwater thinks we can.
At the same time, can’t we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused upon presentation of evidence that he had made provision for the non-earning years? Should we not allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits supposedly paid for by her deceased husband? Shouldn’t you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under this program, which we cannot do? I think we’re for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we’re against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as was announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program is now bankrupt. They’ve come to the end of the road.
In addition, was Barry Goldwater so irresponsible when he suggested that our government give up its program of deliberate, planned inflation, so that when you do get your Social Security pension, a dollar will buy a dollar’s worth, and not 45 cents worth?
I think we’re for an international organization, where the nations of the world can seek peace. But I think we’re against subordinating American interests to an organization that has become so structurally unsound that today you can muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the General Assembly among nations that represent less than 10 percent of the world’s population. I think we’re against the hypocrisy of assailing our allies because here and there they cling to a colony, while we engage in a conspiracy of silence and never open our mouths about the millions of people enslaved in the Soviet colonies in the satellite nations.
I think we’re for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we’re against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We’re helping 107. We’ve spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we bought a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. In the last six years, 52 nations have bought 7 billion dollars worth of our gold, and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country.
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear.
Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.
Federal employees – federal employees number two and a half million; and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation’s work force employed by government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man’s property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury? And they can seize and sell his property at auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James Wier over-planted his rice allotment. The government obtained a 17,000 dollar judgment. And a U.S. marshal sold his 960-acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary as a warning to others to make the system work.
Last February 19th at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, “If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United States.” I think that’s exactly what he will do.
But as a former Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas isn’t the only man who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present administration, because back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his Party was taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. And he walked away from his Party, and he never returned til the day he died, because to this day, the leadership of that Party has been taking that Party, that honorable Party, down the road in the image of the labor Socialist Party of England.
Now it doesn’t require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the, or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.
Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men – that we’re to choose just between two personalities.
Well what of this man that they would destroy, and in destroying, they would destroy that which he represents, the ideas that you and I hold dear? Is he the brash and shallow and trigger-happy man they say he is? Well I’ve been privileged to know him “when.” I knew him long before he ever dreamed of trying for high office, and I can tell you personally I’ve never known a man in my life I believed so incapable of doing a dishonest or dishonorable thing.
This is a man who, in his own business before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent monthly checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn’t work. He provides nursing care for the children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by the floods in the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew medicine and supplies down there.
An ex-GI told me how he met him. It was the week before Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas. And he said that [there were] a lot of servicemen there and no seats available on the planes. And then a voice came over the loudspeaker and said, “Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to runway such-and-such,” and they went down there, and there was a fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in those weeks before Christmas, all day long, he’d load up the plane, fly it to Arizona, fly them to their homes, fly back over to get another load.
During the hectic split-second timing of a campaign, this is a man who took time out to sit beside an old friend who was dying of cancer. His campaign managers were understandably impatient, but he said, “There aren’t many left who care what happens to her. I’d like her to know I care.” This is a man who said to his 19-year-old son, “There is no foundation like the rock of honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life on that rock, with the cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a real start.” This is not a man who could carelessly send other people’s sons to war. And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all the other problems I’ve discussed academic, unless we realize we’re in a war that must be won.
Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy “accommodation.” And they say if we’ll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer – not an easy answer but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.
Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what then, when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.
You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin – just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this – this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits – not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.
A Time for Choosing by Ronald Reagan – 1964 Presidential Campaign for Barry Goldwater for President
Televised Campaign Address for Goldwater Presidential Campaign – 10/27/64.
Frequently referred to by conservatives as “the speech” (proper title “A Time for Choosing”), many consider this one of the best speeches on conservative principles and the best speech ever given by Ronald Reagan. The appeal was probably narrower than the intended audience, but among conservatives the speech still resonates.
Much of the content is timeless – as applicable today as when delivered in 1964.
Those words from former Politico Magazine editor Garrett M. Graff captures the hyperventilation in the media week. No it is not Vladimir Putin’s threat of unleashing a nuclear war or the word that our national debt has reached a staggering $31 trillion. No, it is the news that Elon Musk may go forward with the purchase of Twitter and . . . [triggering warning] . . . free speech protections might be restored on the platform. The pearl-clutching of various media and academic figures show how engrained the censorship culture has become in the United States.
After Musk indicated that he was going forward, the Twitter stock quickly soared. The news that Musk might bring an end to Twitter’s extensive censorship system has previously drawn people back to the platform. However, the media is in full panic mode that the control over speech could be loosened with Musk.Twitter employees also previously panicked at the thought that they might lose some of their control over the speech of others.
NBC News reporter Ben Collins wrote quickly raises the most immediate concern that the sudden ability to speak freely on Twitter could impact the midterm elections.
If Musk is really taking this site private, there are no real guardrails anymore. Rulemaking can be capricious.
He can elevate any idea or person he wants through recommendations and UX choices and there will be no oversight on this as a private company.
Consider that for a second: the loss of control over political speech could mean a loss of control over the midterm elections.
There is, of course, no concern by Collins that Twitter (and other social media companies) have long been “aligned” with Democrats and the Biden Administration.
NPR editor Neela Banerjee retweeted and echoed his concern about “the broader implications for the rest of us of a Musk takeover of Twitter.”
Others joined in on the collective panic that there could be a loss of control over what people say on social media.
BBC journalist Dickens Olewe warned that “Guardrails will be dropped, misinfo & conspiracy theories will thrive. No functional alternatives available, this is it: a complete destruction of the global public square. Been nice y’all.” In other words, free speech protections will lead to the destruction of “the global public square” by losing control of who can speak or what people can say.
PoliticusUSA head Sarah Reese Jones seemed to move from the desperate to the outright delusional: “Before 2020, Facebook deplatformed progressives, then it came for mainstream media and elevated only radicalized conservatives. Cut to 2022, we know Elon Musk plans to do same with Twitter. We know how damaging it will be.Tech giants pose ongoing threat to western democracy.”
That’s right, social media companies have been favoring conservatives and targeting progressives. That is why a wide array of conservative groups and figures have been banned or suspended. That is why the Hunter Biden laptop was buried before the election. That is why there are now numerous reports of backchannels with the government in censoring opposing views.
Euronews correspondent Shona Murray tweeted, “The end of Twitter as we know it is nigh.”
I certainly hope so.
However, it may be a case of “your Twitter is dead, long live Twitter.”
As discussed earlier, the Internet was once the greatest single advance in free speech since the printing press.
The one thing that we agree on is that this could be a historic moment and free speech could be returning to a major platform of social media. The company seemingly wrote off free speech years ago. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to “protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded dismissively that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”
However, the key is to break a culture of censorship at the company. If Musk moves out of San Francisco, it may help in that restructuring in replacing staff with those committed to free speech values. However, the key to restoring these values is to adopt what I have called the “first amendment model” for the company.
The question is whether Musk will continue to hold the courage to follow his stated convictions on free speech. I hope so. If so, the many censorship advocates in the media certainly do have reason to fear that free speech could be return to a major social media company.
Musk Twitter Purchase Back on Table, Unfortunately with Plan for Everything App
October 4, 2022 Sundance
The only thing I can do is research and write about it. With an even stronger degree of certainty than originally expressed, and with all of the subsequent data points falling into alignment with the initial suspicions, the background of Jack’s Magic Coffee shop remains unchanged. {Go Deep}
Six weeks ago, the Twitter security ‘whistleblower’ came forward to congress. The whistleblower is a former technology expert who came from within the research farm of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, is a well-known cybersecurity expert who left government work, entered the public world, and eventually became the head of Twitter security, reporting directly to the CEO. {Go Deep}
According to a recent SEC filing [LINK HERE], Elon Musk is now back to supporting the purchase of Twitter as the first step in creating the “everything app.”
{{{sarcastic voice}}} Gee, what could this be about? I mean what could go wrong?…. We already know the infrastructure of Twitter’s operational database is tied into portals with the Dept of Homeland security {citation}, and now Musk wants to use that central infrastructure to create an all-inclusive “everything app”?
The bigger risk to the surveillance state is discovery that Twitter and the U.S. intelligence community are in a public-private partnership. The Dept of Homeland Security has access by design, not flaw. How the stakeholder media are reporting on the issue shows the nature of the risk, (emphasis mine):
[…] The scathing disclosure, which totals around 200 pages, including supporting exhibits — was sent last month to a number of US government agencies and congressional committees, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. The existence and details of the disclosure have not previously been reported. CNN obtained a copy of the disclosure from a senior Democratic aide on Capitol Hill. The SEC, DOJ and FTC declined to comment; the Senate Intelligence Committee, which received a copy of the report, is taking the disclosure seriously and is setting a meeting to discuss the allegations, according to Rachel Cohen, a committee spokesperson. (link)
How would it damage the U.S. government if previous claims about the Chinese government having access to all user data on TikTok, are shown to be exactly identical to the U.S. government having access to all user data on Twitter?
Let that question settle in for a few moments, because that is exactly what I have been alleging since, well, 2011, when the U.S. State Dept first collaborated with Twitter in a joint public-private partnership to use the platform as a communication tool exploiting the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, Libya and beyond.
The issue of Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop is an issue of financial viability. The business model of Twitter just doesn’t exist as a free social media discussion platform while running the ultra-expensive data processing system needed for millions of simultaneous users. A global chat that requires exponential database responses as an outcome of simultaneous users is just ridiculously expensive. {Go Deep} However, if the computing system and massive database were being subsidized by the U.S. government, then the viability of the ‘free coffee‘ business model makes sense.
“Cloud computing is one of the core components of the strategy to help the IC discover, access and share critical information in an era of seemingly infinite data.” … “A test scenario described by GAO in its June 2013 bid protest opinion suggests the CIA sought to compare how the solutions presented by IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) could crunch massive data sets, commonly referred to as big data.” … “Solutions had to provide a “hosting environment for applications which process vast amounts of information in parallel on large clusters (thousands of nodes) of commodity hardware” using a platform called MapReduce. Through MapReduce, clusters were provisioned for computation and segmentation. Test runs assumed clusters were large enough to process 100 terabytes of raw input data. AWS’ solution received superior marks from CIA procurement officials”… (MORE)
♦ Legal Stuff – The issue of American citizen privacy and U.S. constitutional limits against the government listening in on communication is functionally obsolescent. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) prohibits communication intercepts on U.S. citizens without a valid search warrant. However, if a U.S. citizen is engaged in a conversation with a foreign person, all privacy restrictions are essentially gone. [Insert example of Michael Flynn taking to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak here]
Your phone calls can be intercepted by the government from the foreign side of the call. The govt can freely monitor the calls that involve foreign actors. The only rule is that your privacy must be maintained. If the foreign actor is in communication with a U.S. citizen, the U.S. citizen must be “minimized” or not identified in any intercept.
However, what happens when the phone call is on a community line that is connected, and visible, to the entire world? That’s the benefit of social media monitoring from a surveillance perspective. It is from that opaque and unresolved archaic legal perspective that surveillance authority of social media platforms, by the U.S. intelligence community, exists. Now you see why the SSCI is taking an interest in the Twitter whistleblower, classic risk mitigation.
Hopefully, you can also see why the 200-page whistleblower document was leaked, by a Democrat staffer, to the Washington Post and CNN.
CNN defends the equity interests of the U.S. State Dept., and WaPo defend the Intelligence Community (CIA, DHS, etc).
Within the narrative as constructed you will note, “Zatko further alleges that Twitter’s leadership has misled its own board and government regulators about its security vulnerabilities, including some that could allegedly open the door to foreign spying or manipulation, hacking and disinformation campaigns.”
If the relationship between Twitter and the U.S. intelligence community is a public-private partnership, why would Twitter want to shut down the portals given to the Dept of Homeland Security?
Answer, they wouldn’t… Ergo the response from Twitter to the whistleblower complaint is (emphasis mine), “What we’ve seen so far is a false narrative about Twitter and our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context.”
Put another way, the “lacks important context” is the nature of the security risk, which is structural to the relationship between the intelligence community and the platform. See how that works?
The integration between Twitter and the United States Intelligence Community has been hiding in plain sight:
July 26, 2021,(Reuters) – A counterterrorism organization formed by some of the biggest U.S. tech companies including Facebook (FB.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) is significantly expanding the types of extremist content shared between firms in a key database, aiming to crack down on material from white supremacists and far-right militias, the group told Reuters.
Until now, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s (GIFCT) database has focused on videos and images from terrorist groups on a United Nations list and so has largely consisted of content from Islamist extremist organizations such as Islamic State, al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Over the next few months, the group will add attacker manifestos – often shared by sympathizers after white supremacist violence – and other publications and links flagged by U.N. initiative Tech Against Terrorism. It will use lists from intelligence-sharing group Five Eyes, adding URLs and PDFs from more groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and neo-Nazis.
The firms, which include Twitter (TWTR.N) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) YouTube, share “hashes,” unique numerical representations of original pieces of content that have been removed from their services. Other platforms use these to identify the same content on their own sites in order to review or remove it. (more)
A shared hashing protocol is a form of data system integration. The databases of the identified social media platforms are integrated with the U.S. intelligence system.
…. And now Musk wants to integrate an “everything app”?
Follow the bouncing ball and you enter the world of the comprehensive surveillance state. But if you don’t do anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear right? Insert example of non-vaccinated repercussions, Canadian truckers and Dutch farmers here. Then add a digital identity, digital currency, energy resource apportionment and social equity. Where do you end up?
All I can do is research and write about it.
Even the influential members of the ‘Rebel Alliance‘ used to think I was crazy…. Not any longer.
OVER 100,000 citizens protested in Prague, Czech Republic on Wednesday under the motto “Czechia First.”
It was the LARGEST RALLY in Prague since the fall of the Communist regime over 30 years ago.
And, just like in America, the far-left media in the Czech Republic completely ignored the massive demonstration.
The protesters rallied against NATO and the EU elites destroying their way of life. The group was organized by a group who call themselves “politically unaffiliated citizens.”
Our longtime friend and German MP Petr Byrstron was a top speaker at the event.
The protesters want direct gas supply negotiations with Russia at low prices.
There were rallies in several Czech cities last week.
Prague Czech Republic 🇨🇿 Stunning Scenes 💣 Thousands gather in protest against soaring inflation directly attributed to NATO and EU Policies that are destroying their lives…. It's happening Everywhere 💣🔥👊 pic.twitter.com/iZbfOQQe9a
On Sunday The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft spoke with Petr on the movement in the Czech Republic and Germany.
This was an amazing interview. It is really chilling just how similar the globalist left acts in Western Europe with the same destructive policies and complete intolerance of opposing political voices.
Petr told us about the protest in Prague and upcoming rally in Berlin on October 8th.
Petr told us about what the Germans and Czechs are saying about Russia and who they believe sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines.
Petr also told us about Russia’s gas lines to Europe during the Soviet days and today.
And Petr Bystron spoke about the hundreds of Antifa rioters who threatened his family and vandalized his home last year on election night.
Petr is part of the populist future of Europe. It was an honor to speak with our friend Petr Bystron in Berlin.
A woman explains why she voted for Donbas to join Russia in the referendum held there.
You won’t see this on western media
if you paid attention, then you know that in 2014 Ukrainian leaders brought to power by USA declared war on the Russian part of Ukraine. They are now on the verge of losing that war in humiliating fashion.
The other remarkable thing besides the overwhelming Ukrainian defeat is how American goose-steppers hate Russia and want war without cause. Many of our people have an irrational hatred of Russia and a desire always for war. They follow leadership by habit without thought or decent sentiment.
it is one thing for ethnic Russians to support seceding from Ukraine and joining Russia. But eastern Ukraine has many ethnic Ukrainians who favor joining Russia also. In Donbass Ukraine shelled their own people for years. I’m talking about dropping artillery shells in civilian neighborhoods. Ukraine did that to their own people.
Neil Oliver, Indentured Servants of The World Need to Unite Against the Big Club
October 2, 2022 Sundance
During his weekly monologue Neil Oliver turns his attention to the “Big Club,” the bankers. WATCH:
[Transcript] – I want to tell you a story about money. To be more specific I want to tell you where money comes from. The truth, of which most people are unaware, is that money is created out of thin air. Furthermore, every single pound, dollar, euro, yen and all the rest is created out of thin air by unelected, unaccountable private business people who conduct their meetings in total secrecy and profit always from their actions.
Let’s imagine you want to borrow 200k to buy a house. When you go to the bank and ask for that money, the banker doesn’t give you existing funds, cash from a drawer for instance. Instead, he creates that 200k out of nowhere – money that previously did not exist. That money is not backed by anything real – no gold or anything else. It is conjured out of nowhere and exists now only because the banker says it does. He then says you have to pay him back the 200k plus – let’s say for the sake of example – another 200k in interest.
He is allowed to credit your account with money that did not exist until you asked for it and he pressed digits on a keyboard … and then he invites himself to charge you whatever interest he wants on that previously non-existent sum. Talk about a fool-proof way to make money. This is how all money is created in our world and this is why so many people are made to live crippled by debt. Every year the British people pay tens of billions of pounds to private bankers as interest on something that DID NOT EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE.
How could I be sure, but I suspect that if you or I were to attempt something similar, we would be thrown in jail before our feet touched the ground.
William Paterson, cofounder of the Bank of England in 1694, noted that:
“… the Bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.”
1694 … that’s at least as long as this has been going on … how long we’ve been submitting to debt created by a handful of rich people to keep everyone else under their control.
The Bank of England is technically owned by the British government, and so, notionally, by the British people. The fact of the matter however is that the government does not tell the Bank what to do. Like all central banks, the Bank of England is answerable instead to an entity called the Bank for International Settlements. The BIS is run by more unelected, unaccountable, secretive people over which we the British – like all people in the world – have no say and no control. Most people have never even heard of the Bank for International Settlements, but it is housed in a great glass tower in Basle, in Switzerland.
It is the BIS that controls the making and flow of well over 95 percent of the world’s money supply – via, to name but a few, the Bank of England, the US Federal Reserve, the People’s Bank of China, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation and the European Central Bank. It also influences a host of other smaller central banks including in unstable and failed states like Afghanistan and Libya.
We need an honest and open conversation about banks – all banks – and about another way of doing things – a way of potentially freeing the people of the world from the yoke of debt placed across their shoulders by secretive, unaccountable, profiteering private bankers. It may or not offer the solution to our woes, but I believe it is time now to talk about it and, more importantly, to invite more people to understand what banks actually do and how they do it.
If you don’t trust me, how about Thomas Jefferson, founding father and third president of the US, who said:
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow banks to control the issue of their currency … they will deprive people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
The Federal Reserve in the US was created at Christmas time 1913 – when most members were away for the holidays. By means of the Federal Reserve Act, all control over money creation was removed from Congress and given to the Federal Reserve Corporation, a private company controlled by bankers – all this despite Article 1 of the US constitution which declares:
“Congress shall have the Power to Coin Money and regulate the Value thereof.”
Federal was added to the name to trick the people into thinking they, via Congress, were in control.
Not anymore, not since that Christmas of 1913. The Fed is a private business corporation.
Or what about the words of Henry Ford, who transformed the car industry, who said:
“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
The private bankers would have us believe their way of doing business, of making money, is the only way.
So here, let me tell you an astonishing bit of forgotten history – so forgotten you’d be forgiven for thinking some people don’t want us to remember.
Back in August 1914, with the First World War looming, people feared the future. More and more were converting their bank notes – bits of paper – into gold sovereigns and half-sovereigns, as was their right in those days when Britain was on the so-called gold standard. But by 1914, the Bank of England had already been involved in dodgy dealings, creating money out of nothing – and there were far more bank notes in circulation than there was gold in the vaults to honour them.
If everyone tried to get their gold out at once, such a ‘run on the bank’ would have been catastrophic. At a stroke, Britain would have lost its ability to pay for the upcoming war.
The Bankers ran for help to the government and to the Chancellor David Lloyd George. The August Bank holiday was extended by three days, an Act was rushed through parliament and when the banks reopened, people were offered a new kind of Treasury note – issued not by the bank but by HM Treasury, in lieu of their gold. Since the first batches bore the signature of Sir John Bradbury, the then Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, the public nicknamed them Bradbury Pounds. Because each was backed by the wealth of the nation, the familiar strap line … about a promise to pay the bearer on demand … was unnecessary and therefore absent entirely.
The people accepted the Bradbury Pounds, trusted them on sight as cash they could see and hold and spend as they liked, with perfect confidence, and the banks were saved from certain collapse.
It was sovereign money – underwritten by the wealth of the nation and, perhaps most valuable of all, by the creativity and potential of the people of that nation. Unlike the money created out of nowhere by private bankers it was interest free and unburdened by debt.
Britons were briefly beyond the clutches of private bankers. But their reprieve didn’t last long. Having been spared the consequences of creating money out of nothing, those bankers were soon back at the Treasury door – demanding the State stop issuing debt-free money. The War was up and running and as is true of all wars, there was a killing to be made, in among all the killing.
The war must be run, those bankers said, only on money borrowed from them and repayable with interest – three and a half percent interest, as it happened. By the end of the First World War, Britain’s national debt had ballooned from 600 million in 1914, to 7 billion pounds. In 1914, remember, a pound was worth 122 pounds in today’s money. That’s inflation for you.
This is no longer the world of 1914. Any solution for 2022 must be made by us … for us, in the world of today.
Henry Kissinger said:
“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”
Right now, all around us, the people are being nudged ever closer to digital enslavement by secretive, unaccountable bankers.
Right now, control of energy by others we do not know is marching us towards the coldest, hungriest winter many can remember. Right now, is the time to take back control of money – its creation, its value and its flow. By so doing, we can begin the task of regaining control of our world. (link)
Today Giorgia Meloni will become Head of the Italian State. With your leadership, Western Europe will stand up and stop the advance of the globalist poison. LONG LIVE THE EUROPE OF THE PATRIOTS! via Candela Sol
The Italian Center Right Party won big in national elections on Sunday making Georgia Meloni the first female leader in the country’s history.
JUST IN – Italy's center-right bloc heads for election victory. Giorgia Meloni to become next prime minister — exit poll pic.twitter.com/7urRH8PKUx
“If Things Go in Difficult Direction, We Have Tools” – EU Chief Ursula Von der Leyen Threatens Italians of Repercussions If They Vote in Populist Candidate Giorgia Meloni
Italy will hold elections on Sunday. It is widely expected that populist candidate Giorgia Meloni will become Italy’s first female prime minister.
The elites are already in full panic.
CNN reported on the race. They’ve already started their smears:
Her policy platform will be familiar to those who have followed far-right rhetoric in recent years: She’s openly questioned LGBTQ+ and abortion rights, aims to curb immigration, and appears obsessed with the idea that traditional values and ways of life are under attack because of everything from globalization to same sex marriage.
It should be of little surprise to learn that one of her biggest fans is Steve Bannon, the man who largely created the political ideology of former US President Donald Trump and is credited with giving birth to the American alt-right movement.
European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen threatened Italy this week. Von der Leyen warned Italian voters that the European Union has ways to deal with rogue states that represent their people.
The regime will not allow dissent.
Von der Leyen threatens the Italians: "We will see the result of the vote in Italy. If things go in a difficult direction, we have tools, as in the case of Poland and Hungary." A desperate attempt to influence the vote in Italy that runs towards the far right. Game over Ursula! pic.twitter.com/MhkaiQus9x
Italians responded by removing the EU flag from their headquarters in Rome.
Some time ago, a group of Italian patriots went to EU headquarters in Rome, removed EU flag and replaced it with the Italian one. The squalid threats of Ursula von der Leyen do not scare the Italians and cannot go unnoticed. Italy belongs to the Italian people. Get up Italy 🇮🇹! pic.twitter.com/y9uCueYDod
European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has warned Italy of consequences should it veer away from democratic principles, issuing a barely veiled threat ahead of Sunday’s election that a rightist bloc led by Giorgia Meloni is expected to win.
The comments highlighted concern in some European capitals over the forthcoming election and suggested that relations between Brussels and Rome could get turbulent if Meloni and her partners secure victory.
“My approach is that whatever democratic government is willing to work with us, we’re working together,” von der Leyen said at Princeton University in the United States on Thursday, responding to a question on whether there were any concerns with regard to the upcoming elections in Italy.
“If things go in a difficult direction, I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have tools,” she added.
Matteo Salvini, the head of the League and a part of Meloni’s conservative alliance, denounced her comments as “shameful arrogance”.
Bishop Leon Benjamin is a preacher through and through, but during the 2020 Election he felt led by God to run for Congress, so he obeyed and did so. On Election Night, November 3rd, 2020, he was winning in a landslide and it appeared as if he was going to head to Washington DC to serve in the United States Congress.
At 3am, however, a bunch of votes poured in for his opponent, literally stealing the election right from underneath him. This is the same thing that happened to President Trump, as well. We, as the conservative movement, have focused so much on the rigging of the Presidential election that many don’t realize that it also happened in the Senatorial, Congressional and even local elections.
This is widespread election fraud of an even larger magnitude than is typically talked about.
“It happened down ballot. It happened on the Senatorial, as well as the Congressional level. And now we’re seeing that it probably happened on the school board level and the city council level, the mayoral level.
“I thank God that in Virginia, we had a new governor. Everybody is saying, ‘Virginia is red. Virginia has always been red.’ But now we are finding out that with the electoral process, the elections – it’s not really voter fraud – it’s election fraud. Being able to manipulate votes.
“The Real Story on the Document Hoax” – Jesse Watters Shares the Truth Behind President Trump’s Legal Actions Regarding His Presidential Records
President Trump shared Jesse Watters’s segment on FOX News showing how past Presidents maintained their presidential records and noted that he is obviously doing a better job. President Trump is guilty of no crimes.
The corrupt Biden FBI broke into President Trump’s home and stole records maintained there. President Trump was abiding by the law and the FBI raided his home.
President Trump shared the segment from Jesse Waters with attorney Mike Davis where it is clear that President Trump is doing a better job protecting his records than prior presidents (i.e. Clinton kept his records in a sock drawer, Obama kept his in an abandoned furniture store).
Davis also shared how President Trump has done nothing wrong and his documents protected by Secret Service at his home were much more secure than those records of past presidents.
The comment was made during the first day of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly’s latest session in New York.
“You see a crisis in every part of the world,” Vucic told Serbian state broadcaster RTS.
“I think realistic predictions ought to be even darker. Our position is even worse, since the UN has been weakened and the great powers have taken over and practically destroyed the UN order over the past several decades.”
Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine has escalated, Vucic argues. It is now in a much deadlier phase, he says, that could lead to World War III. (Related: Will this “great world conflict” that Vucic is warning about culminate with the end of Western civilization?)
“I assume that we’re leaving the phase of the special military operation and approaching a major armed conflict,” he says.
“And now the question becomes where is the line, and whether after a certain time – maybe a month or two, even – we will enter a great world conflict not seen since the Second World War.”
You can listen to Vucic speak below:
Aleksandar Vucic, President of Serbia:
Within a month or two, the world may enter into a military conflict not seen since World War II. pic.twitter.com/Ma0mIS1bkv
Vucic’s ominous words came on the same day that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the immediate “partial mobilization” of 300,000 troops. Putin indicated that he is not bluffing, and is prepared to use “all the means at our disposal” to protect Moscow’s territorial integrity.
“Now they (the West) are talking about nuclear blackmail,” Putin said.
“The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was shelled and also some high positions – representatives of NATO states – who are saying there might be possibility and permissibility to use nuclear weapons against Russia.”
Just to be sure that Russia’s aggressors know he is serious, Putin emphasized that his country has “various weapons of destruction” that it is ready to use immediately if need be.
“And with regard to certain components,” Putin added, “they’re even more modern than NATO ones.”
Should nuclear war break out between Russia and the United States as some expect, two thirds of the planet will starve to death within two years, determined a Rutgers University study.
As many as five billion people, the paper found, would not survive very long following the nuclear detonations, which would pollute the sky with radioactive soot while blocking out the sun and devastating food crops.
“One wonders how a generation that thinks words are ‘violence’ and misgendering someone is stochastic terrorism will react to an intercontinental nuclear war,” wrote Paul Joseph Watson for Infowars.
“The mind truly boggles.”
In the comment section, someone wrote that Putin technically has not mentioned the word nuclear at all in his statements. If anything, it is the globalists who are pinning that on him when they are the ones likely planning to drop them first.
“Russia has an arsenal of weapons that they have developed and have yet to use, including nukes,” this person wrote. “However, there’s much more fire power Putin can use before beginning to think about resorting to nukes.”
“Read between the lines, people, and stop being scared by the globalists’ propaganda that aims to destroy you all.”
As the current world order crumbles into dust, we will keep you informed about the latest at Collapse.news.
According to a prepared release from the White House, tonight Joe Biden will identify all members of the resistance as a threat to his view of American democracy.
The roadmap to the future aspirations of Democrats in power was made clear in their deployment of the COVID-19 control mechanisms. That power now forms the baseline of the midterm election effort of government ruling the lives of people, forever. All resistance to the effort is ‘domestic terrorism,’ and the state police (FBI) have been instructed to target all opposition with extreme prejudice.
Once again, the passive aggressive Alinsky mindset is on display. In Joe Biden’s America, democracy must be destroyed in order to preserve it. Individualism must be crushed, in order to create the crisis of the all-powerful collectivist state.
A constitutional republic built on the foundation of individual liberty stands directly in the way of the new foundation. The weapons of internal surveillance, DHS, DOJ-NSD, FBI and ODNI are now primed for full deployment against any ‘domestic terrorists’ who would oppose the regime.
As the worldview is expressed, opposing Anthony Fauci was considered to be an attack on the very foundation of science itself; and now, opposing Joe Biden is opposing the foundation of a democracy. A democracy built upon fraud.
You will conform to the new control mechanisms.
You will conform to the lockdowns.
You will conform to the social distancing.
You will conform to the mask wearing.
You will conform to the mandated vaccination.
You will conform to the new energy economy.
You will conform to the new electric vehicles.
You will conform to the new energy equity programs.
You will conform to the new speech guidelines.
You will conform….
Everything about the “new democracy,” the Build Back Better democracy, is based on conformity.
The Anger Games, Tucker Carlson Outlines the Hatred of Biden Toward a Nation He Divides
September 1, 2022 by Sundance
Tucker Carlson delivered a hard-hitting monologue last night, hitting the agenda of the installed occupant of the White House directly on target. Within the outline, Carlson notes the background of an angry, bitter and disconnected divider-in-chief and the hate-filled agenda he espouses. {Direct Rumble Link}
It is a remarkable moment captured and broadcast by Mr. Carlson, less than 24-hours before Joe Biden is scheduled to lay out his divisive national agenda of hate during a primetime speech on Thursday evening. WATCH:
Big Tech Doc Dump Proves Government Deliberately Withheld Documents from Plaintiffs!
If this were a Star Wars spinoff, we’d call it “Free-Speech Wars II: The Good Guys Strike Back.”
BIG news in the Missouri v. Biden federal free-speech lawsuit today.
The Gateway Pundit previously reported in May that Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, along with Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, filed a lawsuit (Missouri v. Biden) against the Biden Administration, including Biden himself, Anthony Fauci, the Department of Homeland Security and nearly a dozen federal agencies and Secretaries.
The suit alleges a massive coordinated effort by the Deep State (permanent administrative state) to work with Big Tech to censor and manipulate Americans – from average citizens to news outlets – on issues including the Hunter Biden Laptop from Hell, 2020 Election Integrity, COVID-19 origin and extent skepticism, COVID-19 vaccine skepticism, among other issues.
Here’s a copy of the First Amended Complaint:
In June, The Gateway Pundit began assisting Missouri AG Schmitt’s team and providing critical evidence of Facebook and Twitter censorship of the Gateway Pundit on all of these issues.
This evidence was submitted to the Louisiana Federal Court. See it here:
The case reached a CRUCIAL turning point in July, when AG Schmitt and his team won a huge victory.
They persuaded the federal judge to grant them limited discovery (investigatory powers) BEFORE the Court would decide the government defendants’ collective motion to dismiss this case.
This allowed AG Schmitt to compel the government AND FACEBOOK AND TWITTER and a few other social media platforms to turn over documents and communications exchanged between the government and the social media platforms, in which censorship was discussed.
In August, we reported that TGP’s Jim Hoft himself became the lead non-governmental plaintiff in the lawsuit against the government.
Since then, AG Schmitt’s team has been engaged in a slug-fest with the government and Big Tech to turn over the demanded documents.
Neither the government nor Big Tech wants to disclose the damning evidence against them and they’ve fought like hell to stop the disclosure.
As we reported, the turning point came just days ago when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a Joe Rogan interview that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden Laptop for 7 days following a request from the FBI to censor election “misinformation.”
Zuckerberg’s admission came after the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit forced Facebook to turn over documents – he was going to end up admitting it anyway.
It constituted a turning point in the battle for the preservation of the First Amendment and Free Speech in America. His admission proved that the US Government and Big Tech coordinated to censor speech.
Previously, the government’s lawyers kept trying to portray all of this as a conspiracy theory.
NOPE. NOW, IT’S A CONSPIRACY FACT.
TODAY we report that the Missouri Attorney General’s Office caught the Biden Administration red-handed.
After forcing Twitter and Facebook to unload a massive trove of documents, Schmitt’s Office was able to uncover two (2) explosive facts:
FIRST, that the Biden Administration withheld enormous amounts of evidence of the censorship from the materials they were supposed to produce in discovery. This is a big no-no. And
SECOND, that the US Government’s “Censorship Enterprise” was and is a MASSIVE EFFORT ACROSS SCORES OF FEDERAL AGENCIES to coordinate with Big Tech to CENSOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND CONTROL THEIR THOUGHTS AND BELIEFS.
TENS OF THOUSANDS of records including consistent and ongoing communications between the Big Tech and (for example) DHS, CDC, NIAID, the Census Bureau, the US Surgeon General, the State Department, the Treasury, the FBI, the US ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION (!!!), and on and on and on.
These documents prove that Big Tech views itself as an arm of the federal government – and the US Government views it the same way.
We now have irrefutable proof that Big Tech censored and continues to censor Americans to force-feed the nation with US Government PROPAGANDA. It’s all there in black and white.
Millions of Americans have been censored because their speech didn’t match the US Government’s preferred narrative.
This is the definition of Fascism.
Because he caught them withholding evidence, MO AG Schmitt is now asking the Court to force the government to turn over more records which they previously said didn’t exist. You can see the MO and LA Attorneys General’s arguments and those of the Government (arguing against disclosure), here. See documents below:
This is a great day for free speech on the future freedom of America!
We now know the Aug. 8, 2022, raid on former President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago was authorized by a federal judge at the request of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. We also know more than 40 federal prosecutors, FBI agents and “others” participated in what Garland called a “search” of the former president’s home to prevent the destruction of evidence in criminal activity.
No former president of the United States has ever been subjected to such indignity. This is the kind of abuse associated with totalitarian states like Russia, Communist China and dictatorships in banana republics.
We have now learned in the hours leading up to, during and since the Mar-a-Lago raid, dozens of elected state and federal Republican legislators have been accosted by federal law officers bearing warrants, demanding they surrender their cellphones and computers.
Members of the media are demanding, inter alia, affidavits behind these search warrants. It’s a pointless inquiry. The answers – if ever provided – will be full of lies. The truth is simple: The far left is desperate to preserve their power and are willing to weaponize every federal agency.
This is why there has been no accountability for horrific events in Afghanistan, the disaster on our southern border, over 150,000 American fentanyl deaths, a sanguinary crime wave in our city streets and runaway inflation. Here is how Washington’s far left troika – Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden – hope all this will play out:
Shortly after Labor Day, Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray will hold a press conference and will state:
Classified, illegally held documents seized at Mar-a-Lago reveal a plot to overturn a presidential election through insurrection, conspiracy and deadly violence. This plot involves Trump and more than a dozen Republican House members, most of whom are running for reelection. The names of Trump’s co-conspirators are …
Garland and the Department of Justice will determine what charges should be brought against the men and women who have abused their offices.
The hope of the far left troika is to retain control of both houses of Congress in 2022 and preserve unlimited power in the executive branch in 2024. Ignored by the troika’s allies in the mainstream media are questions about why the Biden DOJ didn’t simply subpoena the documents they wanted. The Mar-a-Lago raid was like a local public library sending a police SWAT team bursting into your home to collect an overdue book.
If the Mar-a-Lago raid does nothing else, it demonstrates how important it is for patriotic Americans to reclaim the House and Senate in November and the White House in 2024.
In our book “We Didn’t Fight for Socialism,” we warn of America coming to a fork in the road where one path leads to a revival of our Founding Fathers’ vision of freedom, liberty and self-government; the other to total government control of all aspects of our lives. We’ve arrived. Which direction will we take?
After the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” Franklin purportedly responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Can we keep it? The midterm elections in November and the presidential election in 2024 will answer this question.
The left is pulling out all stops – even weaponizing the IRS – to hold onto power. They are counting on complacency and weak Republican leadership to give them an edge. Unless patriotic Americans turn out to vote, Marxists will win, and America’s experiment will be cast into history’s ash heap. The battle for the heart and soul of our country will be won or lost at the ballot box starting in November.
American citizens who after the Russia hoax, the Whitmer kidnapping debacle and the burying of the Biden influence-peddling case view the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s estate with skepticism fit the profile of a potential “domestic violent extremist,” according to an intelligence bulletin distributed jointly by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
The Aug. 12 bulletin, obtained by Project Veritas, explains to local law enforcement officials across the nation that the Mar-a-Lago raid has prompted calls for violence against federal law enforcement and government officials. The intent of the bulletin is to assist in “effectively deterring, preventing, preempting, or responding to terrorist attacks against the United States.”
The recent developments, the brief states, “highlight the heightened threat since 2020 by domestic violent extremists (DVEs) motivated by a range of ideologies, who have grievances against a variety of targets including law enforcement.”
The FBI and DHS have observed since the Aug. 8 raid an increase in threats posted online that include a “threat to place a so-called dirty bomb in front of FBI Headquarters and issuing general calls for ‘civil war’ and ‘armed rebellion.'”
The bulletin spotlights people who believe the outcome of the 2020 election was fraudulent “and other claims of government overreach.”
The upcoming midterm elections, the brief warns, could become “an additional flashpoint around which to escalate threats against perceived ideological opponents, including federal law enforcement personnel.”
The attempt on Aug. 11 to break in to FBI headquarters in Cincinnati is seen as an illustration of the threat. The brief says an examination of the devices and online postings of the alleged perpetrator, Ricky Shiffer Jr., indicates he was “ideologically driven” and had “personal anti-FBI beliefs.”
Earlier this month, Project Veritas released a copy of an FBI document that cast symbols such as the Gadsden Flag, Revolutionary War imagery as “extremist.”
In 2009, the DHS under President Obama issued a report titled “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” that cast conservatives who protest federal government overreach and oppose abortion and illegal immigration as a terror threat.
The report from the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis said right-wing extremism in the U.S. is “divided into those groups, movements and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups) and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”
It also warned of “the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups.”
Another report that year from a DHS fusion center in Missouri instructed law enforcement agencies to watch for suspicious individuals who may have bumper stickers for presidential candidates such as Ron Paul, Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin. It also put a law-enforcement spotlight on people who oppose illegal immigration, abortion and federal taxes.
Robert Welch (1899-1985), founder of the John Birch Society, wrote what is arguably the best description ever of the fundamental differences between a government based upon law and one based upon men. His classic “Republics and Democracies,” slightly condensed below, was first delivered as a speech on September 17 (Constitution Day), 1961.
The first scene in this drama on which the curtain clearly lifts is Greece of the sixth century BC. The city of Athens was having so much strife and turmoil, primarily as between its various classes, that the wisest citizens felt something of a more permanent nature, rather than just a temporary remedy, had to be developed to make possible that stability, internal peace, and prosperity which they had already come to expect of life in a civilized society. And through one of those fortunate accidents of history, which surprise us on one side by their rarity and on the other side by ever having happened at all, these citizens of Athens chose an already distinguished fellow citizen named Solon to resolve the problem for both their present and their future. They saw that Solon was given full power over every aspect of government and of economic life in Athens. And Solon, applying himself to the specific job, time, and circumstances, and perhaps without any surmise that he might be laboring for lands and centuries other than his own, proceeded to establish in “the laws of Solon” what amounted to, so far as we know, the first written regulations whereby men ever proposed to govern themselves.
Undoubtedly even Solon’s decisions and his laws were but projections and syntheses of theories and practices which had already been in existence for a long time. And yet his election as archon of Athens in 594 BC can justly be considered as the date of a whole new and huge approach to man’s eternal problem of government.
There is no question that the laws and principles which Solon laid down both foreshadowed and prepared the way for all republics of later ages, including our own. He introduced, into the visible record of man’s efforts and progress, the very principle of “government by written and permanent law” instead of “government by incalculable and changeable decrees.” (Will Durant) And he himself set forth one of the soundest axioms of all times, that it was a well-governed state “when the people obey the rulers and the rulers obey the laws.” This concept, that there were laws which even kings and dictators must observe, was not only new; I think it can be correctly described as “Western.”
Here was a sharp and important cleavage at the very beginning of our Western civilization from the basic concept that always had prevailed in Asia, which concept still prevailed in Solon’s day, and which in fact remained unquestioned in the Asiatic mind and empires until long after the fall of the Roman Empire of the East, when Solon had been dead two thousand years.
Tyrants of Democracy
Unfortunately, while Solon’s laws remained in effect in Athens in varying degrees of theory and practice for five centuries, neither Athens nor any of the Greek city-states ever achieved the form of a republic, primarily for two reasons. First, Solon introduced the permanent legal basis for a republican government, but not the framework for its establishment and continuation. The execution, observance, and perpetuation of Solon’s laws fell naturally and almost automatically into the hands of tyrants, who ruled Athens for long but uncertain periods of time, through changing forms and administrative procedures for their respective governments. And second, the Greek temperament was too volatile, the whole principle of self-government was too exciting — even through a dictator who might have to be overthrown by force — for the Athenians ever to finish the job Solon had begun, and bind themselves as well as their rulers down to the chains of an unchanging constitution. Even the authority of Solon’s laws had to be enforced and thus established by successive tyrants like Pisistratus and Cleisthenes, or they might never have amounted to anything more than a passing dream. The ideal was there, of rule according to written laws; and the fact that those laws were at times and to some extent honored or observed constituted one huge step towards — and fulfilled one prerequisite of — a true republic.
But the second great step of a government framework as fixed and permanent as the basic laws were supposed to be remained for the Romans and other heirs of Greece to achieve. As a consequence Athens — and the other Greek city-states which emulated it — remained politically as democracies, and eventually learned from their own experiences that it was probably the worst of all forms of government.
But out of the democracies of Greece, as tempered somewhat by the laws of Solon, there came as a direct spiritual descendant the first true republic the world knew. This was Rome in its earlier centuries after the monarchy had been replaced. The period is usually given as from 509 BC to 49 BC, Rome having got rid of its kings by the first of those dates, and having turned to the Caesars by the second.
But the really important early date is 454 BC, when the Roman Senate sent a commission to Greece to study and report on the legislation of Solon. The commission, consisting of three men, did its work well. On its return the Roman Assembly chose ten men — and hence called the Decemviri — to rule with supreme power while formulating a new code of laws for Rome. And in 454 BC they proposed, and the Assembly adopted, what were called The Twelve Tables. This code, based on Solon’s laws, became the written constitution of the Roman Republic.
The Twelve Tables, “amended and supplemented again and again — by legislation, praetorial edicts, senatus consulta, and imperial decrees — remained for nine hundred years the basic law of Rome.” (Durant) At least they were in theory, and always to some extent in practice, even after Julius Caesar had founded the empire which was recognized as an empire from the time of Augustus. What was equally important, even before the adoption of The Twelve Tables, Rome had already established the framework, with firm periodicity for its public servants, of a republic in which those laws could be, and for a while would be, impartially and faithfully administered.
For, as a Roman named Gaius (and otherwise unknown) was to write in about 160 AD, “All law pertains to persons, to property, and to procedure.” And for a satisfactory government you need as much concern about the implementation of those laws, the governmental agencies through which they are to be administered, and the whole political framework within which those laws form the basis of order and of justice, as with the laws themselves which constitute the original statute books. And the Romans contrived and — subject to the exceptions and changes inflicted on the pattern by the ambitions and cantankerous restlessness of human nature — maintained such a framework in actual practice for nearly five hundred years.
The Romans themselves referred to their government as having a “mixed constitution.” By this they meant that it had some of the elements of a democracy, some of the elements of an oligarchy, and some of those of an autocracy; but they also meant that the interests of all the various classes of Roman society were taken into consideration by the Roman constitutional government, rather than just the interests of some one class. Already the Romans were familiar with governments which had been founded by, and were responsible to, one class alone: especially democracies, as of Athens, which at times considered the rights of the proletariat as supreme; and oligarchies, as of Sparta, which were equally biased in favor of the aristocrats. Here again the Roman instinct and experience had led them to one of the fundamental requisites of a true republic.
Checks and Balances
In summary, the Romans were opposed to tyranny in any form; and the feature of government to which they gave the most thought was an elaborate system of checks and balances. In the early centuries of their republic, whenever they added to the total offices and officeholders, as often as not they were merely increasing the diffusion of power and trying to forestall the potential tyranny of one set of governmental agents by the guardianship or watchdog powers of another group.
When the tribunes were set up, for instance, around 350 BC, their express purpose and duty was to protect the people of Rome against their own government. This was very much as our Bill of Rights was designed by our Founding Fathers for exactly the same purpose. And other changes in the Roman government had similar aims. The result was a civilization and a government which, by the time Carthage was destroyed, had become the wonder of the world, and which remained so in memory until the nineteenth century — when its glories began receding in the minds of men, because they were surpassed by those of the rising American republic.
Now it should bring more than smiles, in fact it should bring some very serious reflections, to Americans to realize what the most informed and penetrating Romans, of all eras, thought of their early republic.
It is both interesting, and significantly revealing, to find exactly the same arguments going on during the first centuries BC and AD about the sources of Roman greatness that swirl around us today with regard to the United States. Cicero spoke of their “mixed constitution” as “the best form of government.” Polybius, in the second century BC, had spoken of it in exactly the same terms; and, going further, had ascribed Rome’s greatness and triumphs to its form of government.
Livy, however, during the days of Augustus, wrote of the virtues that had made Rome great before the Romans had reached the evils of his time, when, as he put it, “We can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.” And those virtues were, he said, “the unity and holiness of family life, the pietas [or reverential attitude] of children, the sacred relation of men with the gods at every step, the sanctity of the solemnly pledged word, the stoic self-control and gravitas [or serious sense of responsibility].” Doesn’t that sound familiar?
But while many Romans gave full credit to both the Roman character and their early environment exactly as we do with regard to American greatness today, the nature and excellence of their early government, and its contribution to the building of Roman greatness, were widely discussed and thoroughly recognized. And the ablest among them knew exactly what they were talking about. “Democracy,” wrote Seneca, “is more cruel than wars or tyrants.” “Without checks and balances,” Dr. Will Durant summarizes one statement of Cicero, “monarchy becomes despotism, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes mob rule, chaos, and dictatorship.” And he quotes Cicero verbatim about the man usually chosen as leader by an ungoverned populace, as “someone bold and unscrupulous … who curries favor with the people by giving them other men’s property.” (Emphasis added.)
If that is not an exact description of the leaders of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the New Frontier, I don’t know where you will find one. What Cicero was bemoaning was the same breakdown of the republic, and of its protection against such demagoguery and increasing “democracy” as we have been experiencing. This breakdown was under exactly the same kind of pressures that have been converting the American republic into a democracy, the only difference being that in Rome those pressures were not so conspiratorially well organized as they are in America today. Virgil and many great Romans like him were, as Will Durant says, well aware that “class war, not Caesar, killed the Roman Republic.” In about 50 BC, for instance, Sallust had been charging the Roman Senate with placing property rights above human rights. And we are certain that if Franklin D. Roosevelt had ever heard of Sallust or read one of Sallust’s speeches, he would have told somebody to go out and hire this man Sallust for one of his ghost writers at once.
About thirty years ago a man named Harry Atwood, who was one of the first to see clearly what was being done by the demagogues to our form of government, and the tragic significance of the change, wrote a book entitled Back to the Republic. It was an excellent book except for one shortcoming. Atwood insisted emphatically, over and over, that ours was the first republic in history; that American greatness was due to our Founding Fathers having given us something entirely new in history, the first republic — which Atwood described as the “standard government,” or “the golden mean,” towards which all other governments to the right or the left should gravitate in the future.
Now the truth is that by merely substituting the name Rome for the name United States, and making similar changes in nomenclature, Atwood’s book could have been written by Virgil or by Seneca, with regard to the conversion of the Roman republic into a democracy. It is only to the extent we are willing to learn from history that we are able to avoid repeating its horrible mistakes. And while Atwood did not sufficiently realize this fact, fortunately our Founding Fathers did. For they were men who knew history well and were determined to profit by that knowledge.
Antonyms, Not Synonyms
Also, by the time of the American Revolution and Constitution, the meanings of the words “republic” and “democracy” had been well established and were readily understood. And most of this accepted meaning derived from the Roman and Greek experiences. The two words are not, as most of today’s liberals would have you believe — and as most of them probably believe themselves — parallels in etymology, or history, or meaning. The word “democracy” (in a political rather than a social sense, of course) had always referred to a type of government, as distinguished from monarchy, or autocracy, or oligarchy, or principate. The word “republic,” before 1789, had designated the quality and nature of a government, rather than its structure. When Tacitus complained that “it is easier for a republican form of government to be applauded than realized,” he was living in an empire under the Caesars and knew it. But he was bemoaning the loss of that adherence to the laws and to the protections of the constitution which made the nation no longer a republic; and not to the fact that it was headed by an emperor.
The word “democracy” comes from the Greek and means literally “government by the people.” The word “republic” comes from the Latin res publica and means literally “the public affairs.” The word “commonwealth,” as once widely used, and as still used in the official title of my state, “the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” is almost an exact translation and continuation of the original meaning of res publica. And it was only in this sense that the Greeks, such as Plato, used the term that has been translated as “republic.” Plato was writing about an imaginary “commonwealth,” and while he certainly had strong ideas about the kind of government this Utopia should have, those ideas were not conveyed nor foreshadowed by his title.
The historical development of the meaning of the word republic might be summarized as follows. The Greeks learned that, as Dr. Durant puts it, “man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.” The Romans applied the formerly general term republic specifically to that system of government in which both the people and their rulers were subject to law. That meaning was recognized throughout all later history, as when the term was applied, however inappropriately in fact and optimistically in self-deception to the “Republic of Venice” or to the “Dutch Republic.”
The meaning was thoroughly understood by our Founding Fathers. As early as 1775 John Adams had pointed out that Aristotle (representing Greek thought), Livy (whom he chose to represent Roman thought), and Harington (a British statesman) all “define a republic to be … a government of laws and not of men.” And it was with this full understanding that our constitution-makers proceeded to establish a government which, by its very structure, would require that both the people and their rulers obey certain basic laws — laws which could not be changed without laborious and deliberate changes in the very structure of that government.
When our Founding Fathers established a republic, in the hope, as Benjamin Franklin said, that we could keep it, and when they guaranteed to every state within that republic a republican form of government, they well knew the significance of the terms they were using. And they were doing all in their power to make the features of government signified by those terms as permanent as possible.
They also knew very well indeed the meaning of the word democracy, and the history of democracies; and they were deliberately doing everything in their power to avoid for their own times, and to prevent for the future, the evils of a democracy.
Let’s look at some of the things they said to support and clarify this purpose. On May 31, 1787, Edmund Randolph told his fellow members of the newly assembled Constitutional Convention that the object for which the delegates had met was “to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy.”
The delegates to the convention were clearly in accord with this statement. At about the same time another delegate, Elbridge Gerry, said: “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want [that is, do not lack] virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” And on June 21, 1788, Alexander Hamilton made a speech in which he stated:
It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience had proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.
At another time Hamilton said: “We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.” And John Adams warned: “Remember, Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself! There never was a democracy that ‘did not commit suicide.’”
James Madison, one of the members of the convention who was charged with drawing up our Constitution, wrote as follows:
Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
Establishing a Republic
Madison and Hamilton and Jay and their compatriots of the convention prepared and adopted a constitution in which they nowhere even mentioned the word democracy, not because they were not familiar with such a form of government, but because they were. The word democracy had not occurred in the Declaration of Independence, and does not appear in the constitution of a single one of our fifty states — which constitutions are derived mainly from the thinking of the Founding Fathers of the Republic — for the same reason. They knew all about democracies, and if they had wanted one for themselves and their posterity, they would have founded one. Look at all the elaborate system of checks and balances which they established; at the carefully worked-out protective clauses of the Constitution itself, and especially of the first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights; at the effort, as Jefferson put it, to “bind men down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution,” and thus to solidify the rule not of men but of laws. All of these steps were taken deliberately to avoid and to prevent a democracy, or any of the worst features of a democracy, in the United States of America.
And so our republic was started on its way. And for well over a hundred years our politicians, statesmen, and people remembered that this was a republic, not a democracy, and knew what they meant when they made that distinction. Again, let’s look briefly at some of the evidence.
Washington, in his first inaugural address, dedicated himself to “the preservation … of the republican model of government.” Thomas Jefferson, our third president, was the founder of the Democratic Party; but in his first inaugural address, although he referred several times to the Republic or the republican form of government, he did not use the word “democracy” a single time. And John Marshall, who was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, said: “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”
Throughout all of the nineteenth century and the very early part of the twentieth, while America as a republic was growing great and becoming the envy of the whole world, there were plenty of wise men, both in our country and outside of it, who pointed to the advantages of a republic, which we were enjoying, and warned against the horrors of a democracy, into which we might fall. Around the middle of that century, Herbert Spencer, the great English philosopher, wrote, in an article on “The Americans”: “The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature — a type nowhere at present existing.” And in truth we have not been a high enough type to preserve the republic we then had, which is exactly what he was prophesying.
Famous Prophecies
Thomas Babington Macaulay said: “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.” And we certainly seem to be in a fair way today to fulfill his dire prophecy. Nor was Macaulay’s contention a mere personal opinion without intellectual roots and substance in the thought of his times. Nearly two centuries before, Dryden had already lamented that “no government had ever been, or ever can be, wherein time-servers and blockheads will not be uppermost.” And as a result, he had spoken of nations being “drawn to the dregs of a democracy.” While in 1795 Immanuel Kant had written: “Democracy is necessarily despotism.”
In 1850 Benjamin Disraeli, worried as was Herbert Spencer at what was already being foreshadowed in England, made a speech to the British House of Commons in which he said:
If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.
Disraeli could have made that speech with even more appropriateness before a joint session of the American Congress in 1935. And in 1870 he had already come up with an epigram which is strikingly true for the United States today. “The world is weary,” he said, “of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.”
But even in Disraeli’s day there were similarly prophetic voices on this side of the Atlantic. In our own country James Russell Lowell showed that he recognized the danger of unlimited majority rule by writing: “Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.”
W. H. Seward pointed out that “democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.” This is an observation certainly borne out during the past fifty years exactly to the extent that we have been becoming a democracy and fighting wars, with each trend as both a cause and an effect of the other one. And Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a most prophetic warning when he said: “Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.” If Emerson could have looked ahead to the time when so many of the editors would themselves be a part of, or sympathetic to, the gang of bullies as they are today, he would have been even more disturbed. And in the 1880s, Governor Seymour of New York said that the merit of our Constitution was not that it promotes democracy, but checks it.
Across the Atlantic again, a little later, Oscar Wilde once contributed this epigram to the discussion: “Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.” While on this side, and after the First World War had made the degenerative trend in our government so visible to any penetrating observer, H.L. Mencken wrote: “The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.” While Ludwig Lewisohn observed: “Democracy, which began by liberating man politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion.”
Prerequisite for Revolution
But it was a great Englishman, G.K. Chesterton, who put his finger on the basic reasoning behind all the continued and determined efforts of the Communists to convert our republic into a democracy. “You can never have a revolution,” he said, “in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.”
And in 1931 the Duke of Northumberland, in his booklet The History of World Revolution, stated: “The adoption of Democracy as a form of Government by all European nations is fatal to good Government, to liberty, to law and order, to respect for authority, and to religion, and must eventually produce a state of chaos from which a new world tyranny will arise.”
While an even more recent analyst, Archibald E. Stevenson, summarized the situation as follows:
De Tocqueville once warned us that: “If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event will arise from the unlimited tyranny of the majority.” But a majority will never be permitted to exercise such “unlimited tyranny” so long as we cling to the American ideals of republican liberty and turn a deaf ear to the siren voices now calling us to democracy. This is not a question relating to the form of government. That can always be changed by constitutional amendment. It is one affecting the underlying philosophy of our system — a philosophy which brought new dignity to the individual, more safety for minorities and greater justice in the administration of government. We are in grave danger of dissipating this splendid heritage through mistaking it for democracy.
And there have been plenty of other voices to warn us.
So how did it happen that we have been allowing this gradual destruction of our inheritance to take place? And when did it start? The two questions are closely related.
For not only every democracy, but certainly every republic, bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The difference is that for a soundly conceived and solidly endowed republic it takes a great deal longer for those seeds to germinate and the plants to grow. The American republic was bound — is still bound — to follow in the centuries to come the same course to destruction as did Rome. But our real ground of complaint is that we have been pushed down the demagogic road to disaster by conspiratorial hands far sooner and far faster than would have been the results of natural political evolution.
Fabian Deception
These conspiratorial hands first got seriously to work in this country in the earliest years of the twentieth century. The Fabian philosophy and strategy was imported to America from England, as it had been earlier to England from Germany. Some of the members of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, founded in 1905, and some of the members of the League for Industrial Democracy into which it grew, were already a part of, or affiliated with, an international Communist conspiracy planning to make the United States a portion of a one-world communist state. Others saw it as possible and desirable merely to make the United States a separate socialist Utopia. But they all knew and agreed that to do either they would have to destroy both the constitutional safeguards and the underlying philosophy which made it a republic. So from the very beginning the whole drive to convert our republic into a democracy was in two parts. One part was to make our people come to believe that we had, and were supposed to have, a democracy. The second part was actually and insidiously to be changing the republic into a democracy.
The first appreciable and effective progress in both directions began with the election of Woodrow Wilson. Of Wilson it could accurately have been said, as Tacitus had said of some Roman counterpart: “By common consent, he would have been deemed capable of governing had he never governed.” Since he did become the president of the United States for two terms, however, it is hard to tell how much of the tragic disaster of those years was due to the conscious support by Wilson himself of communist purposes, and how much to his being merely a dupe and a tool of Colonel Edward Mandell House. But at any rate it is under Wilson that, for the first time, we see the power of the American presidency being used to support communist schemers and communist schemes in other countries — as especially, for instance, in Mexico, and throughout Latin America.
It was under Wilson, of course, that the first huge parts of the Marxian program, such as the progressive income tax, were incorporated into the American system. It was under Wilson that the first huge legislative steps to break down what the Romans would have called our “mixed constitution” of a republic, and convert it into the homogenous jelly of a democracy, got under way with such measures as the direct election of senators. And it was under Wilson that the first great propaganda slogan was coined and emblazoned everywhere to make Americans start thinking favorably of democracies and forget that we had a republic. This was, of course, the slogan of the first World War: “To make the world safe for democracy.” If enough Americans had, by those years, remembered enough of their own history, they would have been worrying about how to make the world safe from democracy. But the great deception and the great conspiracy were already well under way.
The conspirators had to proceed slowly and patiently, nevertheless, and to have their allies and dupes do the same. For in the first place, the American people could not have been swept too fast and too far in this movement without enough alarms being sounded to be heard and heeded. And in the second place, after the excitement of World War I had sunk into the past, and America was returning to what Harding called “normalcy,” there was a strong revulsion against the whole binge of demagoguery and crackpot idealism which had been created under Woodrow Wilson, and which had been used to give us this initial push on the road towards ultimate disaster.
And during this period from 1920 until the so-called great depression could be deliberately accentuated, extended, and increased to suit the purposes of the Fabian conspirators, there was simply a germination period for the seeds of destruction which the conspirators had planted. Not until Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power in 1933 did the whole Communist-propelled and Communist-managed drive again begin to take visible and tangible and positive steps in their program to make the United States ultimately succumb to a one-world communist tyranny.
Most conservative Americans are today well aware of many of those steps and of their significance. But there are still not enough who realize how important to communist plans was the two-pronged drive to convert the American republic into a democracy and to make the American people accept the change without even knowing there had been one. From 1933 on, however, that drive and that change moved into high gear, and have been kept there ever since.
Let’s look briefly at just two important and specific pieces of tangible evidence of this drive, and of its success in even those early years.
Changing Definition
In 1928 the U.S. Army Training Manual, used for all of our men in army uniform, gave the following quite accurate definition of a democracy:
A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any form of “direct” expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic — negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.
That was in 1928. Just when that true explanation was dropped, and through what intermediate changes the definition went, I have not had sufficient time and opportunity to learn. But compare that 1928 statement with what was being said in the same place for the same use by 1952. In The Soldiers Guide, Department of the Army Field Manual, issued in June 1952, we find the following:
Meaning of democracy. Because the United States is a democracy, the majority of the people decide how our government will be organized and run — and that includes the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The people do this by electing representatives, and these men and women then carry out the wishes of the people. [Emphasis added.]
Now obviously this change from basic truth to superficial demagoguery, in the one medium for mass indoctrination of our youth which has been available to the federal government until such time as it achieves control over public education, did not just happen by accident. It was part of an overall design, which became both extensive in its reach and rapid in its execution from 1933 on. Let’s look at another less important but equally striking illustration.
Former Governor Lehman of New York, in his first inaugural message in 1933, did not once use the word democracy. The poison had not yet reached into the reservoirs from which flowed his political thoughts. In his inaugural message of 1935 he used the word democracy twice. The poison was beginning to work. In his similar message of 1939 he used the word democracy, or a derivative thereof, 25 times. And less than a year later, on January 3, 1940, in his annual message to the New York legislature he used it 33 times. The poison was now permeating every stream of his political philosophy.
By today that same poison has been diffused in an effective dosage through almost the whole body of American thought about government. Newspapers write ringing editorials declaring that this is and always was a democracy. In pamphlets and books and speeches, in classrooms and pulpits and over the air, we are besieged with the shouts of the liberals and their political henchmen, all pointing with pride to our being a democracy. Many of them even believe it. Here we have a clear-cut sample of the Big Lie which has been repeated so often and so long that it is increasingly accepted as truth. And never was a Big Lie spread more deliberately for more subversive purposes.
What is even worse, because of their unceasing efforts to destroy the safeguards, traditions, and policies which made us a republic, and partly because of this very propaganda of deception, what they have been shouting so long is gradually becoming truth. Despite Warren and his Supreme Court and all of their allies, dupes, and bosses, we are not yet a democracy. But the fingers in the dike are rapidly becoming fewer and less effective. And a great many of the pillars of our republic have already been washed away.
Since 1912 we have seen the imposition of a graduated income tax, as already mentioned. Also, as mentioned, the direct election of senators. We have seen the Federal Reserve System established and then become the means of giving our central government absolute power over credit, interest rates, and the quantity and value of our money; and we have seen the federal government increasingly use this means and this power to take money from the pockets of the thrifty and put it in the hands of the thriftless, to expand bureaucracy, increase its huge debts and deficits, and to promote socialistic purposes of every kind.
We have seen the federal government increase its holdings of land by tens of millions of acres, and go into business as a substitute for and in competition with private industry to the extent that in many fields it is now the largest — and in every case the most inefficient — producer of goods and services in the nation. And we have seen it carry the socialistic control of agriculture to such extremes that the once vaunted independence of our farmers is now a vanished dream. We have seen a central government taking more and more control over public education, over communications, over transportation, over every detail of our daily lives.
Gradual Destruction
We have seen a central government promote the power of labor union bosses, and in turn be supported by that power, until it has become entirely too much a government of and for one class, which is exactly what our Founding Fathers wanted most to prevent.
We have seen the firm periodicity of the tenure of public office terrifically weakened by the four terms as president of Franklin D. Roosevelt, something which would justly have horrified and terrified the Founders of our Republic. It was the fact that in Greece the chief executive officer stayed in power for long periods which did much to prevent the Greeks ever achieving a republic. In Rome it was the rise of the same tendency, under Marius and Sulla and Pompey, and as finally carried to its logical state of life rule under Julius Caesar, which at last destroyed the republic even though its forms were left. And that, of course, is precisely one reason why the Communists and so many of their liberal dupes wanted third and fourth terms for FDR. They knew they were thus helping to destroy the American republic.
We have seen both the executive department and the Supreme Court override and break down the clearly established rights of the states and state governments, of municipal governments, and of so many of those diffusers of power so carefully protected by the Constitution. Imagine, for instance, what James Madison would have thought of the federal government telling the city of Newburgh, New York, that it had no control over the abuse by the shiftless of its welfare handouts.
We have seen an utterly unbelievable increase in government by appointive officials and bureaucratic agencies — a development entirely contrary to the very concept of government expounded and materialized by our Constitution. And we have seen the effective checking and balancing of one department of our government by another department almost completely disappear.
James Madison, in trying to give us a republic instead of a democracy, wrote that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be denounced as the very definition of tyranny.” The whole problem for the liberal establishment that runs our government today, and has been running it for many years regardless of the labels worn by successive administrations, has not been any divergence of beliefs or of purposes between the controlling elements of our executive, legislative, or judicial branches. For twenty years, despite the heroic efforts of men like [Robert] Taft to stop the trend, these branches have been acting increasingly in complete accord, and obviously according to designs laid down for them by the schemers and plotters behind the scenes. And their only question has been as to how fast the whole tribe dared to go in advancing the grand design. We do not yet have a democracy simply because it takes a lot of time and infinite pressures to sweep the American people all of the way into so disastrous an abandonment of their governmental heritage.
Centralized Power
In the Constitution of the American republic there was a deliberate and very extensive and emphatic division of governmental power for the very purpose of preventing unbridled majority rule. In our Constitution, governmental power is divided among three separate branches of the national government, three separate branches of state governments, and the peoples of the several states. And the governmental power, which is so divided, is sometimes exclusive, sometimes concurrent, sometimes limited, at all times specific, and sometimes reserved. Ours was truly, and purposely, a “mixed constitution.”
In a democracy there is a centralization of governmental power in a simple majority. And that, visibly, is the system of government which the enemies of our republic are seeking to impose on us today. Nor are we “drifting” into that system, as Harry Atwood said in 1933, and as many would still have us believe. We are being insidiously, conspiratorially, and treasonously led by deception, by bribery, by coercion, and by fear to destroy a republic that was the envy and model for all of the civilized world.
Finally, let’s look briefly at two or three important characteristics of our republic, and of our lives under the republic, which were unique in all history up to the present time.
First, our republic has offered the greatest opportunity and encouragement to social democracy the world has ever known. Just as the Greeks found that obedience to law made them free, so Americans found that social democracy flourished best in the absence of political democracy. And for sound reasons. For the safeguards to person and property afforded by a republic, the stable framework which it supplied for life and labor at all levels, and the resulting constant flux of individuals from one class into another made caste impossible and snobbery a joke.
In the best days of our republic, Americans were fiercely proud of the fact that rich and poor met on such equal terms in so many ways, and without the slightest trace of hostility. The whole thought expressed by Burns in his famous line “a man’s a man for a’ that” has never been accepted more unquestioningly, nor lived up to more truly, than in America in those wonderful decades before the intellectual snobs and power-drunk bureaucrats of our recent years set out to make everybody theoretically equal (except to themselves) by legislation and coercion. And I can tell you this. When you begin to find that Jew and Gentile, white and colored, rich and poor, scholar and laborer, are genuinely and almost universally friendly to one another again — instead of going through all the silly motions of a phony equality forced upon them by increasing political democracy — you can be sure that we have already made great strides in the restoration of our once glorious republic.
And for a very last thought, let me point out what seems to me to be something about the underlying principles of the American Republic which really was new in the whole philosophy of government. In man’s earlier history, and especially in the Asiatic civilizations, all authority rested in the king or the conqueror by virtue of sheer military power. The subjects of the king had absolutely no rights except those given them by the king. And such laws or constitutional provisions as did grow up were concessions wrested from the king or given by him out of his own supposedly ultimate authority. In more modern European states, where the complete military subjugation of one nation by another was not so normal, that ultimate authority of the ruler came to rest on the theory of the divine right of kings, or in some instances and to some extent on power specifically bestowed on rulers by a pope as the representative of divinity.
In the meantime the truly Western current of thought, which had begun in Greece, was recurrently, intermittently, and haltingly gaining strength. It was that the people of any nation owed their rights to the government which they themselves had established and which owed its power ultimately to their consent. Just what rights any individual citizen had was properly determined by the government which all of the citizens had established, and those rights were subject to a great deal of variations in different times and places under different regimes. In other words, the rights of individuals were still changeable rights, derived from government, even though the power and authority and rights of the government were themselves derived from the total body of the people.
God’s Ultimate Authority
Then both of these basic theories of government, the Eastern and the Western, were really amended for all time by certain principles enunciated in the American Declaration of Independence. Those principles became a part of the very foundation of our republic. And they said that man has certain unalienable rights which do not derive from government at all. Under this theory not only the sovereign conqueror, but the sovereign people, are restricted in their power and authority by man’s natural rights, or by the divine rights of the individual man. And those certain unalienable and divine rights cannot be abrogated by the vote of a majority any more than they can by the decree of a conqueror. The idea that the vote of a people, no matter how nearly unanimous, makes or creates or determines what is right or just becomes as absurd and unacceptable as the idea that right and justice are simply whatever a king says they are. Just as the early Greeks learned to try to have their rulers and themselves abide by the laws they had themselves established, so man has now been painfully learning that there are more permanent and lasting laws which cannot be changed by either sovereign kings or sovereign people, but which must be observed by both. And that government is merely a convenience, superimposed on Divine Commandments and on the natural laws that flow only from the Creator of man and man’s universe.
Now that principle seems to me to be the most important addition to the theory of government in all history. And it has, as I said, at least tacitly been recognized as a foundation stone and cardinal tenet of the American Republic. But of course any such idea that there are unchangeable limitations on the power of the people themselves is utterly foreign to the theory of a democracy, and even more impossible in the practices of one. And this principle may ultimately be by far the most significant of all the many differences between a republic and a democracy. For in time, under any government, without that principle slavery is inevitable, while with it slavery is impossible. And the American Republic has been the first great example of that principle at work.
In summary, I personally think that, as I said in the Blue Book of the John Birch Society, democracy is a weapon of demagoguery and a perennial fraud. I think that a constitutional republic is the best of all forms of government man has yet devised. Our Founding Fathers thought so too, and the wisest Romans had already come to that same conclusion. So I am in excellent company. It is company which we hope more and more Americans will join. To that end we are saying everywhere we can, and asking all of you and tens of thousands to say with us: This is a Republic, not a Democracy. Let’s keep it that way!
Neil Oliver, Think the Unthinkable and Accept That is the Better Reference Point
August 13, 2022 by Sundance
Neil Oliver returns from a vacation to deliver one of his best contemplative monologues to date. Mr. Oliver rightly says that if you reset your historic reference points, and you begin to recognize that thinking the unthinkable is actually the best reference point for your current state, it is like a key that unlocks the answers.
We are the battered spouses in an abusive relationship with government. Nothing we can do is going to appease the abuser, it is the inherent state of their disposition. WATCH:
[Transcript] – It is hard to think the unthinkable – but there comes a time when there’s nothing else for it. People raised to trust the powers that be – who have assumed, like I once did, that the State, regardless of its political flavour at any given moment, is essentially benevolent and well-meaning – will naturally try and keep that assumption of benevolence in mind when trying to make sense of what is going on around them.
People like us, you and me, raised in the understanding that we are free, that we have inalienable rights, and that the institutions of this country have our best interests at heart, will tend to tie ourselves in knots rather than contemplate the idea those authorities might actually be working against us now. I took that thought of benevolent, well-meaning authority for granted for most of my life, God help me. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was as gullible as the next chump.
A couple of years ago, however, I began to think the unthinkable and with every passing day it becomes more and more obvious to me that we are no longer being treated as individuals entitled to try and make the most of our lives – but as a barn full of battery hens, just another product to be bought and sold – sold down the river.
Let me put it another way: if you have been driving yourself almost demented in an effort to think the best of those in charge – those in senior positions in government, those in charge of the great institutions of State, those running the big corporations – but finding it increasingly impossible to do so … then the solution to the problem might be to turn your point of view through 180 degrees and accept, however unwillingly, that we are … how best to put this … being taken for a ride.
When you find a stranger’s hand on your wallet, in the inside pocket of your jacket … rather than trying to persuade yourself he’s only making sure it doesn’t fall out … it might be more straightforward to draw the conclusion you’re in the process of being robbed.
Once the scales fall from a person’s eyes, the resultant clarity of sight is briefly overwhelming. Or it is like being handed a skeleton key that opens every locked door, or access to a Rosetta Stone that translates every word into a language instantly understood.
Take the energy crisis: If you’ve felt the blood drain from your face at the prospect of bills rising from hundreds to several thousands of pounds while reading about energy companies doubling their profits overnight while being commanded to subsidise so-called renewables that are anything but Green while listening to this politician or that renew their vows to the ruinous fantasies of Net Zero and Agenda 2030 while knowing that the electricity for electric cars comes, in the main and most reliably, from fossil fuels if you can’t make sense of it all and just know that it adds up to a future in which you might have to choose between eating and heating then treat yourself to the gift of understanding that the powers that be fully intend that we should have less heat and less fuel and that in the planned future only the rich will have cars anyway. The plan is not to fix it.
The plan is to break it, and leave it broken. If you struggle to think the best of the world’s richest – vacuous, self-obsessed A-list celebrities among them – endlessly circling the planet on private jets and super yachts, so as to attend get-togethers where they might pontificate to us lowly proles about how we must give up our cars and occasional holiday flights – even meat on the dinner table … if you wonder how they have the unmitigated gall … then isn’t it easier simply to accept that their honestly declared and advertised intention is that their luxurious and pampered lives will continue as before while we are left hungry, cold and mostly unwashed in our unheated homes.
Here’s the thing: if any leader or celeb honestly meant a word of their sermons about CO2 and the rest, then they would obviously lead by example. They would be first of all of us willingly to give up international travel altogether … they would downsize to modest homes warmed by heat pumps. They would eschew all energy but that from the sun and the wind. They would eat, with relish, bugs and plants. They would resort to walking, bicycles and public transport.
If Net Zero and the rest was about the good of the planet – and not about clearing the skies and the beaches of scum like us – don’t you think those sainted politicians and A-listers would be lighting the way for us by their own example? If the way of life they preach to us was worth living, wouldn’t they be living it already? Perhaps you heard Bill Gates say private jets are his guilty pleasure.
And how about food – and more particularly the predicted shortage of it: the suits and CEOs blame it all on Vladimir Putin. But if the countries of the world are truly running out of food, why is our government offering farmers hundreds of thousands of pounds to get out of the industry and sell their land to transnational corporations for use, or disuse unknown? Why aren’t we, as a society, doing what our parents and grandparents did during WWII and digging for victory? Why is the government intent on turning a third of our fertile soil over to re-wilding schemes that make life better only for the beavers? Why aren’t we looking across the North Sea towards the Netherlands where a WEF-infected administration is bullying farmers off their land altogether, forcing them to cull half the national herd.
Those Dutch farmers are among the most productive and knowledgeable in the world, holding in their heads and hands the answers to all manner of questions about how best to produce food, and yet their government is so intent on scaring them out of the business that a teenage boy in a tractor, taking part in a protest to defend ancient rights and traditions, was fired on by police.
Why do you think it matters so much, to the government of the second most productive population of farmers in the world, to gut and fillet that industry? Why? Why have similar protests, in countries all across Europe and the wider world, been largely ignored by the mainstream media – a media that would have crawled on its hands and knees over broken glass just to report on a BLM protester opening a bag of non-binary crisps. Why the silence on the attack on farming?
And while we’re on the subject of farmland ownership, why is computer salesman Bill Gates buying so much farmland in the US – more than a quarter of a million acres in 19 states at the last count, while simultaneously promoting the production and sale of fake meat? And why have so many small planes crashed into massive food processing plants in the US, sparking fires and thereby hobbling the production and distribution of yet more of the very stuff of life? Why is this happening to farmers and farming … all across the hitherto developed world …?
Isn’t the simple obvious answer … the answer that makes most sense and that is staring us in our trusting faces … that power for the power-hungry has always rested most effectively upon control of food and its supply? Why are the powers that be attributing this to a cost-of-living crisis when everyone with two brain cells to rub together can see it’s a cost of lockdown crisis – the inevitable consequence of shutting down the whole country – indeed the whole world – for the best part of two years. Soaring inflation, rising interest rates, disrupted supply chains.
Might they be calling it a cost-of-living crisis as part of their bare-faced attempt to distract us from the fact that while ordinary individuals face a life and death struggle in the coming months, the corporations have celebrated their share of the greatest transfer of wealth in history? Doesn’t that seem more likely? However unthinkable, might it not be more compelling to ask why our government, and governments around the world, have effectively stood by and held the coats of huge corporations while those money magnets pulled almost all of the world’s wealth into their already creaking coffers?
Are our governments more interested in enabling, in aiding and abetting the rich, than in lifting so much as a finger to protect our livelihoods, our ways of life? I’m only asking. What about the money in our pockets? Why is it getting harder and harder to use good old cash, notes and coins? Why are we being nudged further and further away from spending-power we can see and hold, and towards a digital alternative that exists only on the hard drives of the banks that run the world? Why is that do you think?
Rather than dismiss as yet another conspiracy theory the idea of cash being ultimately replaced with transactions based on the exchange of what amount to glorified food stamps that will only be accepted if our social credit score demonstrates that we’ve been obedient girls or boys … how about taking the leap and focussing on the blatantly obvious … that if we are not free to buy whatever and whenever we please, free of the surveillance and snooping of governments and the banks that run them, then we have absolutely no freedom at all.
And while we’re on the subject of money and banks, why not pause to notice something else that is glaringly obvious – which is to say that the currencies of the West are teetering on the abyss, and that one bank after another is revealed, to those who are bothering to watch, as being as close to bankruptcy as its possible to be without actually falling over the edge.
Then there’s the so-called vaccines for Covid – I deliberately say “so-called” because by now it should be clear to all but the wilfully blind that those injections do not work as advertised. You can still contract the virus, still transmit the virus, still get sick and still die. Denmark has dropped their use on under-18s. All across the world, every day, more evidence emerges – however grudgingly, however much the various complicit authorities and Big-Pharma companies might hate to admit it – of countless deaths and injuries caused by those medical procedures.
And yet here in Britain and just about everywhere else, governments continue to try and get those needles into as many arms as possible, even the arms of the smallest and youngest. The ripe stink of corruption is everywhere. I trusted authority for most of my life.
Now I ask myself on a daily basis how I ignored the stench for so long. Across the Atlantic, the Biden Whitehouse sent the FBI to raid the home of former president Donald Trump. Meanwhile Joe Biden and his son Hunter – he of the laptop full of the most appalling and incriminating content – fly together on Airforce 1. No raids planned on the Obamas, nor on the Clintons. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan and onwards to China. Her son Paul, an investor in a Chinese tech firm and with seats on the board of companies dealing in lithium, was along for the ride, into that part of the world where three quarters of the world’s lithium batteries are made. Taiwan leads in that technology.
It is hard to think the unthinkable. It’s hard to think that all of it, all the misery, all the suffering of the past and to come might just be about money, greed and power. It is hard to tell yourself you’ve been taken for a fool and taken for a ride. It’s hard, but the view from the other side is worth the effort and the pain. Open your eyes and see. (link)
When asked about the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Fla., professor, author, and political commentator Victor David Hanson said, “right now, we don’t have the rule of law in Washington,” and added that, “The FBI is beyond redemption.”
Hanson, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush, made his remarks on the Aug. 9 edition of FNC’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, guest-hosted by Will Cain.
Cain asked Hanson why the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and why were they targeting Trump.
“Well, they’re afraid in the short term,” he said, in reference to the Democrats and the left, “but in the long term they believe they’re morally superior to America, and therefore any means necessary or justifiable for their morally superior ends.”
“And right now, we don’t have the rule of law in Washington,” said Hanson. “Whether you’re targeted or exempt depends on your ideology.”
Hanson, the professor emeritus of Classics at California State University-Fresno, is the author of 22 books, including The Case for Trump and The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribaliam, and Globalization are Destroying the Idea of America.
He continued, “So in the past when there was a dispute over the Archives or presidential papers, Barack Obama just said, ‘I’m not going to turn them over to the Freedom of Information. He spent $30 million resisting efforts to do that. George Bush had an Executive Order and said, ‘You know what, I’m not going to do this.’ And that was adjudicated.”
Former President Donald J. Trump. (Getty Images)
“Now we go after a president and go to his house with 30 agents,” said Hanson. “In the past, when a high official was called for a congressional subpoena, Eric Holder just said, ‘I’m not going and I’m not turning over any of this fast and furious.'”
“The idea that you would put him in shackles or you confront him with his family and grab his phone is just ridiculous,” said Hanson. “But this is what we’re doing on an ideological basis.”
“And when you start to do that, you don’t have a democracy anymore,” he added. “And I don’t think we do.”
Hanson went on to criticize the Jan. 6 committee, comparing it to the authoritarian committees of the French Revolution headed by Robespierre.
“To be on that Committee, you have to have one criteria and you have to vote to impeach Donald Trump,” said Hanson. “If you’re a Republican there was one other qualification, you had to be politically inert with no future and it was deductive.”
US Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) arrive to a hearing by the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the US Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, DC, on July 21, 2022. (Getty Images)
“It started with the premise that we’re going to destroy Donald Trump and then we’re going to bring in witnesses and we’re going to allow narratives for that end,” he added. “There is going to be no cross examination.”
As for the FBI, Hanson remarked, “I never thought I would say this: The FBI is beyond redemption. It is — all of its bureaus and its institutions that have to be farmed out and broken up. If you have a warrant, an FBI warrant, there is no guarantee that that has not been altered. If you subpoena and you want FBI records on phones … they will be wiped clean.”
“We just saw [FBI Director] Christopher Wray and he just stonewalled every question and then he flew on an FBI plane, our plane, a luxury jet because he had to go to his own vacation spot. He took over, remember, from Andrew McCabe — what did he do? He lied four times to federal investigators, and his wife was running for an office with Clinton-related PAC money while he was investigating Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal.”
A member of the Secret Service is seen in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida on August 9, 2022. (Getty Images)
“[McCabe] took over from James Comey who leaked confidential memos written on FBI devices to the media,” added Hanson, “and then when he was called before Congress, on 245 occasions, he said, he didn’t know or didn’t remember.”
“All of this is destroying this country,” said Hanson. “And it comes from the people who warned us democracy dies in darkness, and they have descended upon us, the greatest cloud of autocracy and illiberality in the history of this Republic. … [L]et’s pray to God the Republicans can save us.”
For this message I am relying on a short book by Paul Harvey entitled, OUR LIVES, OUR FORTUNES, OUR SACRED HONOR.
Most of the material comes from his book and I want mention this so you will understand that I’m not plagiarizing and pretending it’s my own work.
He starts out: The United States of America was born in 1776. But it was conceived 169 years before that.
The earliest settlers had watered the New World with much sweat, had built substantial holdings for themselves and their families. When the time came to separate themselves from the tyranny an ocean away in England, at best it meant starting all over again after the destruction of war.
All other world’s revolutions before and since were initiated by men with nothing to lose.
These 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence had everything to lose…nothing to gain…except one thing….OUR LIVES OUR FORTUNES OUR SACRED HONOR.
In the Pennsylvania State House, now known as
Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the best men from each of the colonies sat down together. What a tremendous hour in our Nation’s history, one of those rare occasions in history when we had greatness to spare.
These were men of means, well educated. Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers who owned large plantations; men of means, well educated. They all signed the Declaration of Independence knowing that the penalty would be death if they were captured.
On June 11, a committee met to draw up a declaration of independence. They were going to tell the British, no more rule by redcoats! Below the dam of ruthless foreign rule, the stream of freedom was running shallow and muddy. They were lighting the fuse to dynamite that dam.
This pact, “a partnership between the living and the dead and the yet unborn.” There was no bigotry, no demagoguery in this group. All had shared hardships.
Jefferson completed a draft of the document in seventeen days. It was adopted by Congress in July.
King George III had denounced all rebels in America as traitors. Hanging was the punishment for treason.
….For six months the names of the signers was kept secret. Each man knew the full meaning of that powerful last paragraph…where his signature pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor.
Fifty-six men signed their names beneath that pledge. Fifty-six men knew—when they signed—they were risking everything.
They knew if they won this fight, the best that could happen would be years of hardship in a struggling nation. If they lost, it would be a hangman’s rope.
But they signed…the pledge.
And they did pay the price!
Here is the fate of that gallant fifty-six. 5 signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died. 12 had their homes ransacked and burned. 2 lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army, another had 2 sons captured. 9 of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.
They signed and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
They held to that pledge!
Carter Braxton of Virginia, was a wealthy planter and trader, who saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts and died in rags.
Thomas Lynch Jr., signed that pledge. He was a third generation rice grower, Aristocrat, Large plantation owner. After he signed his health failed.
With his wife he set out for France to regain his failing health. The ship never got to France and was never heard from again.
Thomas McKean of Delaware was so harassed by the enemy that he had to move his family five times in five months. He served in Congress without pay. His family was kept in hiding. Everything he owned was taken from him. Poverty was his reward.
Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Ellery and Clymer, and Hall and Gwinnett, Heyward, and Rutledge and Middleton.
Thomas Nelson Jr., of Virginia, raised two million dollars on his own signature to get provisions for the allies…the French fleet. He personally paid back the loans, after the war wiping out his entire estate. He was never reimbursed by the government.
In the final battle for Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr., found the British General Cornwallis had taken over Nelson’s home for his headquarters.
He urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt and was buried in an unmarked grave. He’d pledged his life, fortune, and sacred honor.”
The home and properties of Francis Lewis were destroyed. The enemy put his wife in jail. She died within a few months.
Richard Stockton was captured and mistreated. His health was broken so badly that he died at fifty-one. His estate was pillaged.
Thomas Heyward, Jr., was captured when Charleston fell.
John Hart was driven from his wife’s bedside where she lay dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For over a year, he lived in forests and caves, when he returned home he found his wife dead and his children vanished. Only a few weeks later, he died from exhaustion and a broken heart.
Lewis Morris’ land was destroyed and his family scattered.
Philip Livingston died in just a few months from the hardships of war.
History remembers John Hancock best because of a quirk of fate rather than anything he stood for. His great sweeping signature attested to his vanity and stands out over the others. He was one of the wealthiest men in New England, he stood outside Boston one terrible night of the war and said, “Burn Boston, though it makes John Hancock a beggar, if the public good requires it.”
He, also, lived up to the pledge.
These were the stories and sacrifices of the American Revolution. These men were not wild-eyed, rabble-rousing ruffians. They were soft-spoken men of means and education. They had security, but they valued liberty more.
Standing tall, straight, and unwavering, they pledged: “For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
They won for us a free and independent America. The history books don’t tell a lot about what happened in the Revolutionary War. They didn’t fight just the British. They were British subjects at that time, and we fought their own government!
Some of us take our liberties too much for granted. We shouldn’t!
Tomorrow take a few minutes while enjoying your 4th of July Holiday celebration and silently thank God for these men who sacrificed so much for our nation.
It’s really not much to ask for the price they paid. Remember: Freedom is never free!
As thankful as I am for the terrible price these 56 signers were willing to pay to establish and provide a Nation where I can know freedom.
I’m even more thankful for the ONE who paid the price for me to have Freedom from the bondage of sin!
Because “THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.” He took my sin and died on the Cross sacrificing His Life in my place because I couldn’t pay the price for my own sins.
I was born a sinner and could not redeem myself.
The problem started in The Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and allowed sin into the human race.
When they sinned they lost the dominion God had given them over His creation. The Title Deed to the earth.
Satan gained that dominion and became the illegitimate ruler of the world. (That’s why he could offer Christ all the kingdoms of the world if He would only bow and worship Him.)
As descendants of Adam, we all are born with that sinful disposition which is handed down from generation to generation just like our DNA is.
Unless a way was found to free us of that sin, we were all bound for Hell!
GOD FOUND A WAY!
He sent Jesus to be part of the human race! Jesus had no sin because He was The perfect Son of God not the son of Adam. His mother was a virgin which qualified Him to be part of the human race, but without the sin handed down by a human father.
He was the perfect sacrifice for sin. Sinless human yet Divine! He could qualify as a man and could defeat Satan’s treachery and win back the Title Deed.
As a perfect sacrifice, He died in my place so I can be forgiven by God and adopted into God’s Family as a Joint Heir with Jesus Christ! Jesus paid the “wages of sin which is death” so you and I wouldn’t have to!
If Jesus hadn’t taken my sins and your sins to the cruel Cross and paid the penalty for our Redemption with His own Blood, we wouldn’t know the joy of sins forgiven and a clear conscience.
We wouldn’t have the hope of Eternal Life in Heaven!
The wonderful thing about this is it is a FREE GIFT! ANYBODY CAN CLAIM IT AND HAVE ETERNAL LIFE IF THEY JUST REPENT OF THEIR SINS AND REACH OUT TO JESUS!
Talk about a spiritual DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE!
As you celebrate July 4th, remember John said in John 8:36.
“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”
We have a lot to be thankful for as we celebrate the 4th!
We live in a Nation whose founding fathers sacrificed to provide the Blessings we enjoy as citizens free from cruel bondage.
We serve a God who has provided Freedom from Sin and gives us His Promise of Eternal Life in His wonderful Heaven.
I hope you have a nice, fun, safe 4th please take time to be aware of your blessings!
Let me suggest that If you just celebrate Independence Day because you don’t have to go to work and you can indulge in picnics, lots of food and a lazy day you’re missing the point!
We’ve been given the privilege of living in a wonderful country but remember it cost the shedding of blood, life, and limbs and more sacrifice than we can even imagine. Thousands have died on the battlefield to keep us free! Remember those who paid the ultimate price for these freedoms we take for granted and be thankful they cared enough about our remaining free!
This fact should compel us to be the very best citizens that we can be. It should compel us to pray for our United States! We are drifting away from being the nation our founding fathers envisioned us to be.
Take time to Thank God for His Blessings and for those who paid the ultimate price so we could celebrate this week.
I doubt if those 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence would’ve fought so hard if God hadn’t sent Jesus to give us His best!
I wonder if they would be pleased to see how far we have drifted from what they willingly paid such a heavy price to achieve.
Most of the laws they cited as they put our government together came right out of the Word of God. Our Government and laws were modeled after the Laws God uses to govern His Universe.
If we continue to let politicians dismantle the laws, we will lose our great nation forever and those who died for our Republic will have died in vain!
Tell Jesus you love and appreciate Him! We can’t imagine what He endured to free us from Satan’s Bondage.
The 4th will mean so much more if you know Christ and celebrate with the Author of our Freedom!
GOD HAS PROVIDED A NATION FOR YOU THAT IS NOW 246 YEARS OLD!
REMEMBER TO HONOR GOD AND MAINTAIN OUR FREEDOM!
REMEMBER ALSO, FREEDOM IS NEVER FREE! WE HAVE BEEN HANDED A WONDERFUL COUNTRY!
Attorney Daniel Hartman and Hon. Timothy M. Kenny
NarrowPathMinistries 