A couple of months ago we remarked on how big tech internet censorship of conservative voices was the liberal equivalent of book burning. Now mobs in Portland have taken a big step closer to actual book burning, demanding that Portland’s premier bookstore – Powells – stop selling a book critical of leftist hate/terrorist group Antifa. Read about it in the Foundation for Economic Education’s article The Mobbing of a Portland Bookstore Reminds Us Why Fahrenheit 451 Was Written.
or three days and counting, protesters in Portland, Oregon have gathered at a local bookstore to demand that it stop selling a new book critical of Antifa.
“Far-left activists surrounded Powell’s Books in Portland on Monday and demanded the store stop selling Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, a book about antifa written by Andy Ngo,” Reason’s Robby Soave reports. “The protests forced the store to close early.”
There are few acts of censorship as overt as a mob deciding which books people should be allowed to read. Ladies and gentlemen, antifa. https://t.co/pNdQKIw7SY
Ngo, the editor-at-large of The Post Millennial, a Canadian conservative news site, has documented the activities of Antifa, a leftist group that advocates violence in the name of fighting fascism. The journalist was beaten by Antifa activists at a rally in 2019, leaving him with a serious brain injury.
Left-wing activists say that because Ngo documents and criticizes the activities of Antifa, which claims to simply be “anti-fascist,” he is therefore a fascist. Saying his work is too dangerous to be allowed to be aired, Antifa members have called for Ngo to be banned from social media. Now they are trying to get his book banned from bookstores.
“We have to show up every day until they stop selling that f—king book,” one activist said. She claimed it was like “stopping the historical publication of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf.'”
“STOP SELLING ANDY NGO’S BOOK”
“HELL NO, WE WON’T NGO”
A crowd of #antifa have gathered outside @Powells bookstore in downtown Portland to demand they pull my book from their website. The store has already announced it won’t stock the book on shelves. pic.twitter.com/bsX5HMGDSW
“We have to show up every day until they stop selling that f—king book”
An #antifa protester outside @Powells Books explains that stopping the release of my upcoming book would be like stopping the historical publication of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” pic.twitter.com/8NVTtQwYNz
“Andy Ngo, this is my personal mission to f—king destroy your career.”
Portland antifa militant, Dustin Ferreira (@2lesslegs), has released a series of videos laying out threats to get my book on #antifa banned. He’s been angry I publicized his riot arrest info last year. pic.twitter.com/A6AQBAprRH
So far, the bookstore has not fully submitted to the protesters’ demands.
“This book will not be on our store shelves, and we will not promote it,” the store announced. “That said, it will remain in our online catalogue. We carry books that we find anywhere from simply distasteful or badly written, to execrable, as well as those that we treasure. We believe it is the work of bookselling to do so.”
“There are books in our stores and online inventory that contain ideas that run counter to our company’s and our employees’ values of safety, equality, and justice,” the explanation continued. “While we understand that our decision to carry such books upsets some customers and staff members, we do not want to create an echo chamber of preapproved voices and ideas. It is not our mission or inclination to decide to whom our customers should listen.”
The protests against the book have only generated more media buzz and attention to it, inadvertently—and rather ironically—helping it sell more copies.
Of course, the impulse to censor is understandable. We all think we know what is truly right, and we all believe that we’re the good guys. But the mob’s decision to engage in the modern-day equivalent of book-burning is nonetheless worth questioning.
In the novel Fahrenheit 451, author Ray Bradbury depicted a world in which firemen do not put out fires; they ignite them. In Bradury’s dystopian world, books have been outlawed, and it is the fire department’s job to go around burning them, with the eventual goal of eliminating books entirely from society. That way, the authorities reason, they can control peoples’ access to information. And by controlling what information people may access, they can control public opinion.
“You can’t build a house without nails and wood,” one character explains. “If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood.”
“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one,” the same character later says in defense of the society’s book-burning efforts. “Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it.”
“Now do you see why books are hated and feared?” another one of Bradbury’s characters asks. “They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.”
How does Bradbury’s message relate to Antifa’s book-banning campaign? Members of Antifa don’t generally come across as particularly “comfortable.” Yet tyrannical impulses can be found in insurgencies as well as in “the establishment.”
Like Bradbury’s “firemen,” Antifa is trying to limit the sharing of ideas in order to avoid criticism and prevent social outcomes they dislike. Rather than grapple with the criticisms Ngo makes of Antifa on their merits, they resort to deplatforming. They don’t seek to engage but to erase.
Of course, maybe critics are right that Ngo’s arguments about Antifa are weak or his facts are wrong. I don’t have any reason to believe so, but then again, I have yet to read the book.
However, we won’t ever get to the bottom of this debate by silencing one side of it. Indeed, the very fact that one side seeks to ban its opponents’ arguments suggests that, like the oppressors in Bradbury’s fictional society, they fear that their stance wouldn’t hold up to full public scrutiny.
Of course, history’s most infamous book burners were the Nazis, who also sought to “win the debate” through censorship. Antifa’s “anti-fascist” credentials are not helped by adopting typically fascist tactics.
Silencing speech cripples the contest of ideas that leads a free society toward truth over time. So censorship is worth fighting against, no matter how large the mob outside the bookstore grows.
There’s nothing easy about living through a political coup. The Big Tech firms long in cahoots with our government have been pushing a false narrative of evil MAGA-Nazis trying to undermine polite society for more than four years now.
Suppression started with Milo Yiannopoulos, accelerated to include Alex Jones and InfoWars and reach a temporary peak in 2018 with the persecution of alternative social media platform Gab in the wake of the Pittsburgh shooting.
Friday’s attack by an unhinged, vile piece of human excrement on a Synagogue in Pittsburgh wasn’t hours old before real world agendas pushed to the top of the news.
Twitter alternative Gab was immediately dropped by PayPal without specific reasons.
Then immediately, Gab’s latest hosting service unilaterally gave the company a 48-hour termination notice of its contract.
Gab was hounded to the point of extermination and only a herculean effort by CEO and total warrior Andrew Torba and his staff kept the company afloat. Today Gab can only take Bitcoin and checks for payment. Torba himself has no banking privileges or access to credit, payment processors etc.
All for what? Running a social network where someone posted something terrible hours before doing something terrible?
Or was this a political hit job? The coordination of the event with the response is a little too convenient for any person of room temperature or higher intelligence to stomach.
The Rhyme Without Reason
Sound familiar to what happened to Parler? The attack then on Gab was a dry run for this weekend. If no one would stand up for Gab who didn’t have the resources to fight this in court, then when it came time to do it for real to a more high profile firm they knew it would stand up.
This growing duopoly in internet on-ramp gatekeeping by Apple and Google has been something I’ve warned about for years (go look through the archives searching out terms like Gab and Facebook).
No one listened. We all kept retweeting Trump and I even finally broke down and bought an iPhone. Parler just got the Gab treatment literally over nothing.
I’m not going to say both events were scripted false flags (though there’s certainly enough evidence that there was something really hinckey going on at the Capitol) but they certainly had their action plans ready for when the right trigger occured.
In fact, I’d argue that it’s more likely the people posting vile garbage on these networks is a plant than a real violent dissident. We know that the FBI, for example, infiltrates militia groups all the time and in some cases there are more agents working undercover than there are actual militia guys.
When you’re in the narrative creation business and we know that a minimum of 30% of users on Twitter aren’t real but bots, is it really a stretch to think a Deep State actor isn’t posting inflammatory shit on Parler to give the tech giants the excuse they need to do the thing they desperately want to do anyway, namely destroy their up and coming competition?
These companies have normalized suppression of speech in the public commons that their networks operate on top of. I remind people all the time that they are bandwidth pigs, feeding at the subsidized trough of publicly-built and maintained infrastructure.
Net Non-Neutrality
Trump’s biggest sin in his time as president wasn’t, to these people, saying inflammatory things, it was getting rid of their cashcow, Net Neutrality.
Net Neutrality took pricing of bandwidth out of the hands of consumers. It handed the profits from it to Google, Facebook and all the crappy advertisers spamming video ads, malware, scams, and the like everywhere.
By mandating ‘equal access’ and equal fee structures the advertisers behind Google and Facebook would spend their budgets without much thought or care. Google and Facebook ad revenue soared under Net Neutrality because advertisers’ needs are not aligned with Google’s bottom line, but with consumers’.
And, because of that, the price paid to deliver the ad, i.e. Google’s cost of goods sold (COGS), thanks to Net Neutrality, was held artificially low. And Google, Facebook and the Porn Industry pocketed the difference.
They grew uncontrollably. In the case of Google and Facebook, uncontrollably powerful.
Look, I’m more than okay with saying that Apple, Google or Facebook have the right to restrict content on their services, but only if they are also doing that over their own privately-built public networks, their own private wires.
But, we all know that isn’t the case. They utilize the public airwaves, fiber trunks, satellites etc. that we paid to build. As libertarians we’ve always argued that freedom of association also meant freedom from association.
That freedom, through the application of private property, also comes with responsibility to the counter-party in any and all interactions. No one would have allowed these companies to build these networks in a true private property regime.
No way would they have become this big, this powerful or this cowardly if they had had to bear the true costs of their business roll out. These aren’t the bastions of the free market conservatives (and even classical liberals to an extent) think they are.
They are, ultimately, as we’ve seen from their actions this week, the biggest welfare queens in the world simply stepping on the competition to ensure conformity of information flow.
Continued Section 230 immunity has elevated their ever-changing Terms of Service above the proscriptions against limiting speech in the Bill of Rights.
Moreover, these firms use these Terms of Service to provide no guarantee of service. These ToS’s are contracts of adhesion, entered into where one party has unequal standing versus the counter-party.
But, since the whole idea of living under a coercive government is one big contract of adhesion, since you really aren’t an equal partner to the government in the social contract nor did you have any choice but to sign on the moment you were born, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when that reality is shoved into our faces when their power is threatened.
This is the fundamental problem with accepting any of these ideas as valid. The whole society is structured around these enshrined power imbalances and we think we’re going to upend them by voting for Orange Man Bad?
Globo-Stasi’s
The way they operate is far beyond the strictures placed on governments themselves, who have to at least create Byzantine rules to obfuscate the tyranny and force us into a corrupt and expensive court system stacked against us to get the barest minimum of injunctive relief, assuming the judge isn’t a partisan hack or a congenital moron.
I think it’s rich that a person like Angela Merkel, the first political leader to send police into a person’s home for posting hate speech on Facebook, is now clutching her pearls over the censorship by Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google.
Spare me the crocodile tears Frau Stasi.
Because now, anyone to the right of your rank and file BLM member is looking over their shoulder waiting for the hammer to fall on them. It has become commonplace on Twitter for the star-bellied bluechecks to call out for blood against any and all Trump supporters or worse, *shudder* Republicans.
They should be driven to the brink of extinction. Denied jobs or a living for using the wrong pronoun because they are simply, too stupid to matter. We’ve got people honestly thinking it’s okay to take children out of your home for voting for the wrong party.
This is all the bad news I can come up with (today). What I do know, however, is that what comes next is that Facebook, Twitter and Google have whistled far beyond their graveyards here.
The backlash will against them will be epic. Shareholder lawsuits as stock prices plummet will gut them leaving them in the position to be bailed out or nationalized by the government.
Because, at the very least, there is still some semblance of sanity in that corner of the legal system. These companies have attacked and alienated their customers. In the process they have tainted their brand and if their stock prices do not recover will have real problems in the future.
They may look invincible now, but wait until the government under control of totalitarians like Pelosi, AOC, Schumer and the rest, turn on them and gobble them up to regain their credibility with a rightfully outraged and horrified public.
The best thing all of us can do is complete that transition to other services, deploy our time, expertise and investible capital into building censorship-proof communications platforms without an owner to lean on.
All things built on a nodal structure have critical points of failure. Amazon nuked Parler, not Apple or Google. Gab is proof that a social network doesn’t need an app to survive or even thrive.
Finding Our Way Home
Dave Rubin, major partner in Locals, is convinced the days of monolithic, massive social networks are numbered and we’ll all be congregating into smaller, more intimate communities. And I don’t disagree with him.
In fact, I hope he’s right.
I’ve tried to use Patreon this way to bring people together. It’s why I started a private server on Slack for people to congregate away from the insanity of Twitter. It thrives today as a place where only the most interested and committed people hang out, share ideas and help each other.
It’s a community. The very thing lefties think libertarians are no good at building. Don’t let the wrapper fool you, though. Community is all we ever have on our minds.
Discord and Telegram are exploding as we go back to the days of Usenet and Yahoo Groups dedicated to specific topics of like-minded people. Gab has had private groups for years now.
The cries about echo chambers being a bad thing are falling on deaf ears all across the spectrum. People complain at me all the time that there are no use-cases for cryptocurrency and blockchains and I just look at them like they are children.
Now more than at any other point in history is there the opportunity for a real, properly-built and decentralized social media platform owned by those that hold the governance tokens and not a corporation or organization which is corruptible.
If you don’t discern any of these dynamics in the present, what are you choosing not to see?
The reason why history rhymes is that humanity is still using Wetware 1.0 and so humans respond to scarcity, abundance and conflicts over them in the same manner.
I am struck by similarities between the conflict-torn mid-1600s and the present: global climate change (The Little Ice Age in the 1600s), political upheavals and wars which intertwined civil and imperial conflicts. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century is a fascinating overview of this complex era which disrupted regimes and empires from England to China.
Climate change (The Little Ice Age) generated scarcities of grain in a time of burgeoning human populations. As in the present day, everyone assumed ample harvests would continue forever–expanding abundance is the New Normal. Alas, Nature is not a steady-state system and cycles are not tamed by our desire for ever-expanding abundance.
Humans respond to scarcity by assessing who’s getting the biggest pieces of the shrinking pie. When hunger begets desperation, various dynamics are set into motion as those without agency and capital, i.e. political and financial power do whatever they can to get enough to survive while those holding the majority of political and financial power, jockey to maintain or expand their power.
These dynamics are fluid and prone to non-linear flows in which relatively small actions unleash enormous consequences that are not predictable. If we squint, however, we can discern some repeating patterns in this chaotic swirl:
1. Private owners of capital (i.e. elites) seek to influence the state to protect / expand their holdings.
2. The dispossessed / disenfranchised masses seek redress / succor from the state.
3. The geopolitical balance of power becomes increasingly precarious as competition for control of resources and political power heats up.
4. The state’s resources are diminished by famine, decline of trade, etc. as pressures from geopolitical rivals, elites and the masses are spiking, reducing the state’s ability to respond to the multiple challenges / overlapping crises.
5. The overlapping crises reveal and exploit the weaknesses in the political, social and economic structures, and in the competing elites.
6. Leaders concentrate centralized power in the hands of the few as a coping strategy by reducing the influence of broad-based councils, assemblies, etc. This concentration of power at the expense of the many (including lower-level elites who were accustomed to holding some consequential power) increases resistance of those being cut out of the decision-making and increases the odds of catastrophic errors of judgment in the few at the top.
7. As the state falters or divides into warring factions, the most powerful elites take control of resources and power from the state, both as a defensive measure and as a means of exploiting the crisis to their own advantage.
8. Populist leaders arise demanding a fairer distribution of resources and power. The more repressed the masses, the greater the disorder created by this emergence of long-silenced voices.
9. Each node seeking to defend or expand its share of resources and power projects and amplifies persuasive rhetoric, symbols and beliefs to unify its supporters around deeply held values and aspirations.
10. With so many loyalties in play–local, regional, linguistic, political, social, religious and economic–each node / faction seeks to decisively cement loyalties by establishing all-or-nothing hard lines via ideologically “pure” rhetoric that demonizes competing factions, effectively dividing the populace into us-and-them camps that leave little middle ground for compromise or negotiation.
11. In this fevered competition for loyalty and trustworthy followers willing to sacrifice for the faction, leaders view every advance as evidence that compromise is unnecessary as total victory awaits the next “win.”
12. Given the grievous losses and potentially devastating consequences of competing factions gaining ground, the victors of each battle hasten to take revenge on the losing faction, laying waste and inflicting cruelties that harden the hearts of the surviving losers and inciting their own determination to exact a full measure of revenge when fortunes turn their way.
13. Only when the land, people and treasure are all exhausted does the promise of total victory fade, and the factions seek some negotiated settlement that leaves whatever power they still have intact lest they lose everything.
14. The eventual settlement could have been reached in the initial stages of disorder, but the leaders of the factions were too myopic, too confident in their own judgment and power, too greedy for more and too hubris-soaked to appreciate their own weaknesses and the immense pitfalls ahead.
If you don’t discern any of these dynamics in the present, what are you choosing not to see?
The Capitol Hill riot was an inexcusable, pathetic, and disgraceful display. Its consequences will extend well beyond the bloodshed and property damage inflicted by those who shamefully acceded to the left’s view that force is legitimate means of persuasion — exhibited repeatedly via the left’s normalization of political incitement and violence throughout President Trump’s term in office.
The riot not only overshadowed the corruption that marked the 2020 election and undermined the MAGA movement’s people and principles, but set up Americans of all political stripes for an onslaught on their rights and cherished freedoms. The riot was an accelerant for what was already likely planned under Democrat rule in Washington: crushing dissenters from its leftist orthodoxy as part of an effort to achieve total power by disenfranchising the opposition.
President Trump has personified this dissent, but the effort to delegitimize, de-platform, and ultimately destroy him andanyone around him is merely the opening scene of the “Godfather”-like settling of scores with all who threaten the ruling class’s power and privilege. This effort will directly harm not just the thousands of peaceful patriots who had descended on Washington D.C., and their tens of millions of like-minded neighbors across the country, but all Americans.
The coming crackdown on dissenters in the political realm was pre-ordained in the wee hours of Jan. 6, when both Georgia Senate seats flipped to the Democrats. Now, should Senate Democrats successfully blow up the filibuster, they will work to pass an agenda in which any one item, let alone all, could put Democrats in a virtually unshakeable control of the federal government for years to come.
They have made no secret of their agenda, which includes such items as mass amnesty for illegal aliens, statehood for Washington, D.C., statehood for Puerto Rico, and federal enshrinement of mail-in voting through a re-uppedH.R. 1. Needless to say, total leftist political control will erode liberty and justice, and be used to target dissenters in cruel and unusual ways.
In the near-term, the Capitol Hill riot has served as a pretext for other corrosive political acts: calls for the 25th Amendment to remove a sitting president, a second impeachment vote; consultations between the speaker of the House and the Pentagon about preventing the president from accessing the nuclear codes and discharging his other duties; and calls by our national security and legal apparatus against conservatives and their speech — all under the pretense of combatting domestic terrorism and punishing “incitement.”
This is not purely an issue of politics, for it will encompass all of civil society. The coming assault on dissenters will play out in arenas that far transcend our increasingly unrepresentative government.
Its adjuncts in big tech, woke capital, corporate media, and beyond have already started participating in the purge, of their own volition, in a continuation of the anti-cultural revolution of summer 2020. It is nothing less than the weaponization of civil society institutions against political dissenters, in conjunction with and often indirectly supported by the state. Americans are now primed to punish their fellow Americans for Wrongthink to a greater extent than we have seen before.
It will go far beyond banning the president of the United States from major social media platforms, purging countless like-minded voices, and stymieing their alternative means of communication. It will go far beyond pulling a U.S. senator’s publishing deal. It will go far beyond even firing people purportedly acting peacefully at political rallies. Ultimately, it will extend across every aspect of the digital world, and affect real life as well.
Yes, we are headed towards something like China’s “Great Firewall,” where, albeit without the power of a government gun, big tech will silence speech that challenges the ruling class’s official narratives, disappear the digital profiles of those who run afoul of its ever-changing terms of service, and take down websites where alternative ideas might proliferate.
More chilling is this thought: What is to stop the crackdown from going beyond communications to where and how you can work, bank, travel, eat, shop, obtain health insurance, and send your kids to school?
Think, for a second, about everything you do in daily life. Consider how reliant you are on goods and services controlled by entities in whole or in part run by executives who either hate your political views or think they can survive by currying favor with those who are contemptuous.
The left has already said it is making lists to prevent Trump administration personnel from getting jobs in the private sector. What’s to stop them or their allies in the media and corporate America from doing the same to any of us?
Is there any apparent limiting principle that will keep us from developing a CCP-style “social credit system with Western characteristics” — as my Federalist colleague Sumantra Maitra has put it — whereby private enterprises grade us on ideology and determine what we can and cannot do based on how closely we hew to its ideology?
In a world where politics has become all-pervasive, virtue-signaling demands not only disavowing but punishing the 74 million enablers of what the left has been asserting for years is Nazism. As in so many other matters, they have been projecting onto the right what the left itself endorses.
If you accede to the view that anything that challenges the prevailing progressive orthodoxy constitutes violence, then you will take any means necessary to snuff it out. There are an awful lot of true believers, useful idiots, cynics, and cowed people across American life seemingly willing to adhere to such a principle. It will likely push us to ideological segregation, which will only further fuel hostilities, strife, and chaos.
America’s Cold Civil War will only heat up as those with all the power take precisely the wrong lessons from the Capitol Hill riot and, rather than seeking to represent millions of Americans and address their concerns, simply chooses to punish or silence them.
The political frenzy unleashed by last week’s clash at the Capitol between police and Trump protestors poses a growing danger to Americans’ constitutional rights. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer compared the ruckus to Pearl Harbor – a “day of infamy.” Schumer complained that the “temple to democracy was desecrated… our offices vandalized.” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) compared an incursion that broke some windows and furniture with the 1814 British invasion that torched the Capitol.
The pro-Trump mob should not have charged into the Capitol. President Donald Trump should not have fired them up with absurd claims that he won the election “by a landslide.” Even conservative firebrand Ann Coulter declared that “it was assholic [for Trump] to tell a crowd of thousands to march to the capitol.” Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani should never have called for a “trial by combat” when addressing Trump supporters. Once the protestors charged into the Capitol, Trump should have speedily called for an end to the confrontation.
Trump deserves much of the blame for the Capitol chaos. But the debacle would have been far less without blundering by congressional leadership and their small army of protectors. A Washington Post analysis of the “disastrous failure” by Capitol Police noted, “Security at the Capitol building is controlled by Congress itself.”
The Capitol Police have an annual budget of almost half a billion dollars and two thousand officers – equal to the entire police forces of Cleveland or Atlanta. At some points video showed police standing back as people thronged inside the Capitol. The Post noted, “One image posted on social media showed an officer taking a selfie with one of the intruders, and a video seemed to show officers opening the security fence to let Trump supporters closer.”
One policeman was killed when he was dragged into a mob and beaten, and a 34-year-old female Trump supporter was reportedly trampled to death in the clash between police and protestors. Another Trump supporter died of a heart attack and another protestor died of a stroke.
President-elect Biden said that the protestors’ action was “an assault on the citadel of liberty: the Capitol itself…. An assault on the rule of law like few times we’ve ever seen it.” But rather than a “citadel of liberty,” the Capitol is the locale where politicians have negligently authorized endless assaults on the liberties of average Americans and the lives of uncounted victims around the world.
Violence of all types should be condemned, including that which comes from the government itself. SWAT teams carrying out no-knock raids happen thousands of times a year in American neighborhoods across the land. These attacks have been aided by a profusion of military-style equipment provided by Congress and federal agencies, as well as by the Justice Department constantly championing the legal prerogatives of law enforcement to use deadly force in almost any situation. An ACLU report characterized SWAT raids as “violent events: numerous (often 20 or more) officers armed with assault rifles and grenades approach a home, break down doors and windows (often causing property damage), and scream for the people inside to get on the floor (often pointing their guns at them).”
Failure to instantly submit to SWAT raiders can be a capital offense. A New York Times investigation found that “at least 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers died in raids from 2010 through 2016. Scores of others were maimed or wounded.” The vast majority of members of Congress have ignored the perennial police carnage they helped bankroll around the nation.
Dozens of protestors have already been charged with unlawful entry. The same standard should also apply to government officials in other contexts In 1984, the Supreme Court entitled government agents to intrude onto private land without a search warrant as long as they did not venture into areas where individuals were involved in “intimate activities” (i.e., nudist camps). “No Trespassing” signs no longer applied to G-men. The same court decision unleashed government helicopters to buzz low over any private land they chose to investigate – no warrant needed. (Private helicopter operators who perform the same trick over federal buildings are entitled to front-page obituaries.)
President-elect Joe Biden condemned the protestors “rummaging through desks. But where was the umbrage on Capitol Hill when the National Security Agency vacuumed up millions of Americans’ emails? Where was the outrage when Edward Snowden exposed NSA documents showing that the agency turns its surveillance dynamos on anyone “searching the web for suspicious stuff“? Thanks to lavish congressional appropriations, the NSA continues devouring Americans’ privacy.
We should also condemn the violence that Congress has authorized by U.S. military forces, which are now engaged in combat in 14 nations. Most members of Congress could probably not even name half of the nations where U.S. troops are fighting. After four U.S. soldiers were killed in Niger in 2017, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Schumer admitted they did not know that a thousand U.S. troops were deployed to that African nation. Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, admitted, “We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world militarily and what we’re doing.”
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius in 2017 proudly cited an estimate from a “knowledgeable official” that “CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years.” Syria has taken no hostile action against the U.S. but few members of Congress have taken any responsibility for the carnage inflicted by the Biden-Trump intervention in the Syrian Civil War. No evidence has surfaced thus far linking Syrians to any broken windows in the Capitol.
We should also condemn the blockades that the US government has imposed on Syria, Venezuela, Iran, and other nations. US Navy ships are ready to intercede even medical supplies to those nations whose governments have raised the ire of Washington policymakers.
In the wake of the clashes at the Capitol, Democrats are calling for a sweeping new “domestic terrorism” law that could profoundly restrict Americans’ freedom of speech and association. Many politicians have called for charging the Trump protestors with sedition, There are already more than enough criminal laws and the feds should concentrate on discovering and vigorously prosecuting the individuals who attacked police.
Shortly before the protestors forced their way into the Capitol, Mitch McConnell declared that American democracy could go into a “death spiral of democracy” if the 2020 election result was not accepted. McConnell warned that challenging the 2020 election would mean “every four years would be a scramble for power at any cost.” He also said that “self-government requires a shared commitment to the truth.” Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) condemned Wednesday’s protestors: “If you just feed this beast in an effort to appease it, it just gets stronger and bolder until it comes after the very people who are trying to appease it.”
It is possible to condemn both the protestors and the career politicians whose perennial abuses have been lessening Americans’ trust in the federal government.
Jonathan Turley reports Ron Paul Posts Criticism of Censorship on Social Media Shortly Before Facebook Blocks Him. The purge of conservative voices on the internet continues. The Oath Keepers organization has lost its website. NC Scout of Brushbeater and American Partisan had recently started a web forum and was kicked off by host ProBoards. Social media platform Parler was kicked off of Amazon Web Services.
We have been discussing the chilling crackdown on free speech that has been building for years in the United States. This effort has accelerated in the aftermath of the Capitol riot including the shutdown sites like Parler. Now former Texas congressman Ron Paul, 85, has been blocked from using his Facebook page for unspecified violations of “community standards.” Paul’s last posting was linked to an article on the “shocking” increase of censorship on social media. Facebook then proceeded to block him under the same undefined “community standards” policy.
Paul, a libertarian leader and former presidential candidate, has been an outspoken critics of foreign wars and an advocate for civil liberties for decades. He wrote:
“With no explanation other than ‘repeatedly going against our community standards,’ @Facebook has blocked me from managing my page. Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified.”
His son is Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted, “Facebook now considers advocating for liberty to be sedition. Where will it end?”
The riots are being used as a license to rollback on free speech and retaliate against conservatives. In the meantime, the silence of academics and many in the media is deafening. Many of those who have spoken for years about the dark period of McCarthyism and blacklisting are either supporting this censorship or remaining silent in the face of it. Now that conservatives are the targets, speech controls and blacklists appear understandable or even commendable.
The move against Paul, a long champion of free speech, shows how raw and comprehensive this crackdown has become. It shows how the threat to free speech has changed. It is like having a state media without state control. These companies are moving in unison but not necessarily with direct collusion. The riot was immediately taken as a green light to move against a huge variety of sites and individuals. As we have seen in Europe, such censorship becomes an insatiable appetite for greater and greater speech control. Even Germany’s Angela Merkel (who has a long history of anti-free speech actions) has criticized Twitter’s actions as inimical to free speech. Yet, most law professors and media figures in the United States remain silent.
“Treat the cause, not the symptom!” – The Rocky Horror Picture Show
No change this month. We’ll see what January brings . . .
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.
We remain in the gray zone between step 9. and step 10. I will maintain the clock at 2 minutes to midnight. Last month I indicated that there was a chance to move the clock back if authorities took Leftist violence seriously.
Looks like I was too optimistic.
Previously, I stated that the only thing keeping the clock from ticking to full midnight is the number of deaths. I put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) 600 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.
But as close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful. Things could change at any minute.
In this issue: Front Matter – Symptom, Not The Cause – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Harper’s Ferry 2.0 – Links
Front Matter
Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern, free of charge.
Symptom, Not The Cause
The Left has many errors in perception. Many of these errors are ‘own goals’ – the Left doesn’t know what the Right is thinking because they’ve managed to short-circuit the feedback mechanisms created by the Founding Fathers. As Sarah Hoyt puts it so eloquently (LINK):
For years I’ve told the left that when they used fraud to win, they’d broken the feedback mechanism. It didn’t mean their ideas were winning, that people agreed with them, or that they were safe. It was the equivalent of breaking the fire alarm and thinking they were safe from fires.
If you asked the average Leftist, I think most of them would say that Trump was the cause of the situation that we as a nation find ourselves in. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Trump is a symptom. Trump is, in many ways, a skilled communicator. He uses media to bypass gatekeepers and those that would interpret him to speak directly to the people. Could he have had tens of thousands of people chanting “Build The Wall” or “Lock Her Up” if those people didn’t believe that in the first place?
Of course not.
Trump found the messages that resonated with a very large group of Americans that had been bypassed by both the media and the political process for decades and gave them a voice. Does he believe in those messages?
I have no idea. I am not a mind reader. But Trump became a mirror of a large group of voters to show them that, yes, he heard them. And, yes, he’d fight for them. The degree that he actually followed through is debatable.
But back to the voice of the voters: People wanted to “Build The Wall” not because they hated the people coming across the border, but because borders matter. If everyone from Japan (for instance) moved to California, you wouldn’t have Californians: you’d just have more Japan. Americans, rightly, want to live in America. They’re not afraid of change, they just want the inevitable changes to be American, and not Japanese (for example).
“Lock Her Up” wasn’t just about Hillary – it was about the groups of politicians that served themselves and the state instead of voters. Why are the Clintons swimming in hundreds of millions in cash when they came into office as thousandaires? Why are the Obama family wondering which mansion to stay in each week rather than budgeting for a once a year family vacation?
Corruption. It wasn’t just Hillary, it was (and is) virtually every politician in Washington.
That’s what Leftists don’t understand – the movement Trump gave a voice to won’t go away regardless of what happens to Trump. The underlying causes aren’t getting better, they’re festering because the feedback mechanism is broken.
Violence And Censorship Update
The Capitol was stormed, but you know the details on that one. December had numerous violent protests by the Left, but only the Capitol having unscheduled visitors received major press coverage. Rationale?
Twitter® was, by far, the biggest way that Trump evaded the mainstream media lock on news selection and interpretation. Trump could speak directly to the American people without being a newscaster using the words “unfounded” every other word. He had sent 57,000 Tweets™ since he was on the service.
Not only was Trump censored, but I heard that the top 35% of his supporters were also censored. Journalist John Robb put it very well:
Bottom line: expect more, much more, censorship in the coming year.
Updated Civil War II Index
The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.
Violence:
Up is more violent. The public perception of violence dropped drastically during November, and dropped again in December. January? Too soon to tell.
Political Instability:
Up is more unstable. Instability dropped significantly in December. January – will it bring conclusion, or more tension?
Economic:
The economic measures took a small setback this month. I’d expect January to show a minor uptick.
Illegal Aliens:
Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Numbers of illegals being caught is rising again from a record November to a record December – the floodgates are opening.
Harper’s Ferry 2.0
In October of 1859, ever photogenic John Brown and 22 of his best friends decided that the time was right to trigger a slave uprising in the South. Their idea was to capture the Harper’s Ferry Arsenal and then – well, the “and then” part wasn’t exactly clear to anyone but Brown. His plan was that he would kidnap slaves locally, and then give them guns as part of a great army.
The slaves he kidnapped ran away from Brown, having no desire to take part in his plan. In the end, most of John Brown’s men were either shot by the United States Marines that retook the Harper’s Ferry Arsenal or were executed after a trial. Ironically, it was the actions of Robert E. Lee that stopped the locals from hanging Brown on the spot and allowing him to be taken for a trial.
This was the last major incident that happened before Civil War 1.0, and greatly divided the country: half saw John Brown as a (sort of insane) leader that was working for good even though people died in the raid. The other half saw him as a treasonous criminal and a threat to their way of life.
I think that the way that people think of the storming of the Capitol last week has exactly the same polarity. They went to go protest at the Capitol, found that they could (more or less) waltz in and claim the place. Having done so, they were like a terrier that caught a Ford F-150® pickup. “What the heck do I do now?”
Some see it as a (sort of silly) show to our government that the government exists at our pleasure, and that even the walls of the Congress, located in one of the most Leftist strongholds in the nation, is not safe. They see a group of people protesting an election that they feel was decided by fraud. They feel this way honestly and sincerely.
Others see it as treason against the nation and actions to prevent a president from being confirmed. They feel that their cause is just, since, even though there might have been irregularities in voting (50% of Biden voters think the election was stolen) that it’s okay. They think: “Trump will be gone, and the Electoral College is silly, since popular votes are what democracies do, anyway.”
Regardless, this is an action that won’t be repeated. The State is scared that it was tested and found to be so vulnerable. They won’t make this mistake again – even now thousands of troops are pouring into Washington D.C.
LINKS
As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much!!
From Ricky: “My self-imposed cut off for this batch of links is the GA Senate Race and the Congressional acceptance of the Electoral votes. Who the hell knows what is about to happen next.”
ON THE EVE OF DECIDING CONTROL FOR THE SENATE AND PRESIDENCY:
President-elect Joseph R. Biden vowed to defeat the National Rifle Association in a statement marking 10 years since the assassination attempt of former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson that left six people dead.
“Your perseverance and immeasurable courage continue to inspire me and millions of others,” Mr. Bidentweeted to Ms. Giffords Friday. “I pledge to continue to work with you — and with survivors, families, and advocates across the country — to defeat the NRA and end our epidemic of gun violence.”
In a statement on his transition website, Mr. Biden thanked Ms. Giffords for her anti-gun activism since the 2011 attack, in which the then-congresswoman was shot in the head and left with a traumatic brain injury and paralysis that ended in her eventual resignation…
The NRA responded to Mr. Biden in a tweet Sunday urging gun owners to “stay vigilant” in defending their right to bear arms under the incoming administration.
On Friday, Biden pledged to DEFEAT THE NRA,” the group wrote. “Biden wants to ban our semi-auto rifles, tax our guns/mags & more. He knows the only thing standing in his way to DISMANTLE THE 2ND AMENDMENT is NRA. Gun owners must stay vigilant & be engaged in elections and the legislative process.”
As president, Mr. Biden has promised to ban the manufacture and sale of so-called “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines, as well as institute a national buyback program so owners of existing “weapons of war” can either sell them to the government or register them under the National Firearms Act, according to his campaign website.
Mr. Biden also wants to limit the number of firearms people can buy to one per month in order to prevent the stockpiling of weapons, and he wants to prohibit all online sales of firearms, ammunition, kits, and gun parts. He also said he wants to “put America on the path to ensuring that 100% of firearms sold in America are smart guns” and that he will “issue a call to action for gun manufacturers, dealers, and other public and private entities to take steps to accelerate our transition to smart guns.”
A legislative counsel member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned Friday that the suspension of President Donald Trump‘s social media accounts wielded “unchecked power,” by Twitter and Facebook.
Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the ACLU said in a statement that the decision to suspend Trump from social media could set a precedent for big tech companies to silence less privileged voices.
“For months, President Trump has been using social media platforms to seed doubt about the results of the election and to undermine the will of voters. We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now, but it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions – especially when political realities make those decisions easier,” the statement read…
The ACLU isn’t the only voice in the legal community citing concern over the move to suspend Trump.
“I want a wide range of ideas, even those I loathe, to be heard, and I think Twitter especially holds a concerning degree of power over public discourse,” Gregory P. Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis told TheNew York Times.
Amazon will suspend the free-speech platform Parler from its web hosting service Sunday night, claiming content on the social media app violated the service’s rules.
Buzzfeed News reported that an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Trust and Safety team notified Parler that “violent content” on the platform violated their terms of service, and that the alternative to Twitter would be suspended as a result.
“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service,” an email obtained by Buzzfeed News stated. “[W]e cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,” the email reads. “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.”
Parler CEO John Matze shared his response to the announcement on his Parler account, noting that the Amazon’s “attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet” is part of a “coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place.”
“Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies,” Matze said in his post, shared by Dinesh D’Souza on Twitter.
Matze said the suspension would cause Parler to be offline for up to a week while the social media platform finds an alternative host, adding, “You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.”
Statement by Parler CEO John Matze. Bottom line: This is a coordinated assault but Parler is not going away pic.twitter.com/XmEQl2mHrx
Earlier Saturday, Apple removed Parler from the App Store after demanding the free-speech app provide a content-moderation plan with 24 hours to comply. The Google Play Store also removed the app.
“We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler App was used to plan, coordinate and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington DC on January 6,” a notice from Apple to Parler executives stated, referring to the Capitol Hill protest that turned violent last week.
The moves from Big Tech come after Twitter banned President Trump from its platform, prompting the president to move to Parler in an effort to communicate with United States citizens during the last two weeks of his term.
Former United States President Barack Obama is denouncing conservative media as “the single biggest threat to our democracy.” In his most recent effort to increase governmental control over news and technology companies, Mr. Obama contended that Facebook, Twitter and other media platforms needed to use stronger censorship to stop conservatives from spreading “crazy lies and conspiracy theories.”
“The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there,” Mr. Obama told the Atlantic on Nov. 11, 2020. “At the end of the day, we’re going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practices that address this, because it’s going to get worse. … If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.”
Mr. Obama blamed Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and “the entire right-wing media ecosystem” for interfering with his administration’s plans to fundamentally transform America.
Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and other liberals are broadcasting the narrative that the media does not censor conservatives enough. Yet Big Media and Big Tech are already notorious for censoring conservatives, labeling them racists as if it were objective fact.
Now evidence is piling up that these companies tried to interfere with the 2020 presidential election by censoring stories that would hurt Democrat Joe Biden’s chances of election.
Undercover investigators working for Project Veritas caught Google executive Jen Gennai on camera in 2019 boasting that only Google could prevent “the next Trump situation.” And in October 2020, Facebook executives announced that they were deliberately changing their search algorithms to limit users’ ability to share a story on the Biden family’s business dealings in China, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine.
Twitter went a step further. When the New York Post uncovered this story and others based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Twitter locked its account and blocked users from sharing the story.
The conservative Media Research Center reported out of the 1,750 Biden voters it surveyed, 1 in 6 would not have voted for him if they had known about scandals suppressed by the media.
Google, Facebook, Twitter—some of the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world—are altering what Americans can see and hear to censor conservatives and support liberals.
But Barack Obama says they aren’t biased enough.
The Bible foretold that truth would be cast down to the ground by an organized host of people in the end time. You need to understand the inner workings of this network and the dark spirit that empowers it!
Election Rigging
One of the biggest threats to free and fair elections in the United States is media bias and censorship. For eight years, behavioral psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, a liberal, has warned that Google can easily determine the outcome of elections by adjusting its search algorithms to favor one political party over another. Research shows that Google handles over 86 percent of all search queries worldwide. And when Google’s search results come up, 95 percent of the clicks are on the very first page of search results.
When Google pushes a site off of the first page, very few will ever click on it.
“Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some demographic groups—with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated,” Epstein wrote in a 2015 editorial, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election.”
Epstein based his calculations on experiments he conducted with Ronald Robertson and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Epstein told Fox News on Nov. 23, 2020, that he believed search engine manipulation shifted a “bare minimum” of 6 million votes to Joe Biden. If true, President Donald Trump would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral vote if Google had not biased its news coverage against him.
Former Google employee Zachary Vorhies went public as a whistleblower in 2019, leaking over 950 pages of internal Google documents to Project Veritas and the Justice Department. The information confirmed that Google has biased its algorithms to promote liberalism and suppress conservatism. It also revealed that Google has blacklists of search terms and a blacklist of websites.
Vorhies warned that “the reason why I collected these documents was because I saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company, and I realized that they were going to not only tamper with the elections, but use that tampering with the elections to essentially overthrow the United States.”
For 230 years, the U.S. has been a constitutional republic where people freely elect the representatives who govern them. Now Google’s board of directors is trying to change that, not by abolishing elections, but by gradually increasing its control over what people learn and know. If it can manipulate what people think is true, it can fundamentally change America into whatever it wants!
Deep State Media
Barack Obama was known as “Silicon Valley’s president.” Executives from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter had close relationships with his administration. Data from the Campaign on Accountability shows that Google representatives attended meetings at the Obama White House more than once a week. Almost 250 people switched from the Obama administration to Google or vice versa. Now Mr. Obama is pushing for a Biden administration to continue colluding with Big Tech.
Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson noted that a major reason Big Tech is so willing to cooperate with progressive politicians and “deep state” agents is to protect their monopolies. The Trump administration is pressing an antitrust review of tech giants to determine whether or not to prosecute them and divide them into smaller companies. So money and lobbyists from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter are flooding Washington, D.C., to protect these companies’ control over Internet searches and social media.
But the alignment between Silicon Valley and the deep state goes far beyond shared business interests. These two centers of power are also in ideological lockstep.
A 2017 survey by scientists at Stanford University quantifies what most people already know: Tech entrepreneurs are liberal. They favor abortion, gun control, homosexual unions, open borders, universal health care, wealth redistribution and other progressive causes. This explains why Google, and other tech companies went to such drastic lengths to bury stories critical of Biden while promoting stories critical of President Trump. They are tampering with elections “to essentially overthrow the United States” and transform the nation into a technocracy run by elites in the tech, media and political world.
Project Veritas caught nine current and former Twitter employees on hidden camera admitting that Twitter algorithms purposely hide tweets that use words like “God” or “America.” Twitter also restricts advertisements from pro-life organizations while promoting pro-abortion ads from Planned Parenthood. This type of censorship does not combat “fake news,” nor is it aimed to help Twitter establish a monopoly. It is an outright ideological attack on “God” and “America.”
Communist Connections
Mainstream media are becoming shockingly bold in the offensive to fundamentally transform America. An Atlantic article unequivocally declared that in the conflict between freedom of speech and government censorship, China is right and the United States is wrong.
“As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China,” wrote Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods. “Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. … Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing Internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the Internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values” (April 25, 2020).
In other words: to rein in conspiracy theories, the U.S. government needs to control Americans like the Chinese Communist Party controls Chinese.
The New York Post reported that Facebook’s Hate-Speech Engineering Team includes at least six foreign nationals recruited from Communist China. This team suppressed news reports about how Joe Biden’s son worked for a Shanghai investment firm that helped sell American technology with military applications to China.
Internal company documents released by Project Veritas show that Facebook actually favors Chinese and Korean visa workers over American citizens. These are the computer engineers secretly building artificial intelligence algorithms to recognize and suppress opinions they disagree with in your news feed. And the only reason we know they exist is because outraged whistleblowers are sounding the alarm.
The OpenPower Foundation—a nonprofit led by Google and ibm executives—set up collaboration between Chinese company Semptian and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. They are creating microprocessors that analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently. China is using these microprocessors to enhance its Internet surveillance and censorship capacities. One Semptian employee sent documents to The Intercept showing that the company has developed a mass surveillance system named Aegis, which allows government spies to see “the connections of everyone,” including “location information for everyone in the country.”
According to The Intercept investigative journalist Ryan Gallagher, “Aegis equipment has been placed within China’s phone and Internet networks, enabling the country’s government to secretly collect people’s e-mail records, phone calls, text messages, cellphone locations, and web browsing histories, according to two sources familiar with Semptian’s work. Chinese state security agencies are likely using the technology to target human rights activists, pro-democracy advocates, and critics of President Xi Jinping’s regime, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals” (July 11, 2019).
This is the type of power the Chinese Communist Party has to silence people who disagree with it. But where did key elements of that power come from? It came from the same tech companies Barack Obama is working with to stop “crazy lies and conspiracy theories.”
A Dual Prophecy
Many Americans do not believe in the devil. Still, the Bible reveals he is “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2). The devil’s primary way to deceive people is by broadcasting attitudes of selfishness, vanity, lust, violence, envy, bitterness and resentment against authority. He also speaks through “the children of disobedience,” more directly influencing the lives of people who are vulnerable to him.
An end-time Bible prophecy reveals how the devil uses a host of people to cast truth to the ground. “Yea, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host, and by him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was cast down. And an host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression, and it cast down the truth to the ground; and it practised, and prospered” (Daniel 8:11-12).
King Antiochus Epiphanes fulfilled this prophecy when he desecrated the temple in Jerusalem with an idol of himself. But the book of Daniel is primarily for the end time (Daniel 12:4). This prophecy about Antiochus is also being fulfilled in God’s Church and in America in our time.
Strong’sConcordance defines “host” as “a mass of persons (or figuratively, things), especially reg. organized for war (an army).” Depending on the context, the expression can refer to an army of demons, angels or men. The host referred to in Daniel 8 is an army of demons and evil men who help an end-time Antiochus in God’s Church and an end-time Antiochus in the United States of America.
Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry explains in America Under Attack that the spiritual Antiochus “cast down the truth to the ground” inside God’s Church, and a political Antiochus is doing the same thing in the United States. The most anti-Bible president in American history, Barack Obama, fulfills the role of the political Antiochus. He is out of office now, but he and his powerful allies have been at work in the mainstream media trying “to essentially overthrow the United States.”
A host of bureaucrats, military leaders, intelligence agents, media moguls, tech entrepreneurs, Wall Street financiers, and Chinese spies are helping Antiochus cast truth to the ground. This network is the biggest threat to America today. It aims to destroy the United States, its Judeo-Christian history, its constitutional form of government, and the biblical principles this form of government is largely based upon.
God is exposing the corruption in U.S. politics so people have a chance to repent before a lawless spirit destroys America, by replacing the rule of law with the horrifying rule of powerful deception and brutal force. When people do not sincerely love the truth, they come to believe lies (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12).
The values that helped make America great are being cast to the ground, but Antiochus and his supporters are only able to do this by “reason of transgression.” The devil is exploiting America’s lawlessness and lack of faith. God will allow this until people come to truly see the need for repentance toward God!
Mike Maharrey at the Tenth Amendment Center discusses The Anti-Commandeering Doctrine and its use to combat federal overreach.
The anti-commandeering doctrine provides a powerful tool to undermine overreaching, unconstitutional federal power. So, what is this doctrine? What is it based upon? And how can it be used as an effective tool for liberty?
How Do We Confront Federal Overreach?
Most people assume the feds have the final say. When Uncle Sam says jump, states and local government simply ask, “How high?” But given that the federal government was intended to limit its actions to constitutionally delegated powers and all other authority was left “to the states and the people” per the Tenth Amendment, how do we hold the federal government in check? How do we stop it from exercising powers not delegated?
This isn’t a new question. In fact, those skeptical of the Constitution raised it during the ratification debates. James Madison answered it in Federalist #46.
In his blueprint for resisting federal power, Madison offered a number of actions, but most significantly, he suggested that a “refusal to cooperate with officers of the union” would impede federal overreach.
“Should an unwarrantable measure of the federal government be unpopular in particular States, which would seldom fail to be the case, or even a warrantable measure be so, which may sometimes be the case, the means of opposition to it are powerful and at hand. The disquietude of the people; their repugnance and, perhaps refusal to cooperate with officers of the Union, the frowns of the executive magistracy of the State; the embarrassment created by legislative devices, which would often be added on such occasions, would oppose, in any State, very serious impediments; and were the sentiments of several adjoining States happen to be in Union, would present obstructions which the federal government would hardly be willing to encounter.” [Emphasis added]
What Is the Anti-Commandeering Doctrine?
Anti-commandeering is a longstanding Supreme Court doctrine. In a nutshell, the anti-commandeering doctrine prohibits the federal government from “commandeering” state personnel or resources for federal purposes.
In effect, the federal government is constitutionally prohibited from requiring states to use their personnel or resources to enforce federal laws or implement federal programs. State and local governments cannot directly block federal agents from enforcing federal laws or implementing federal programs, but they do not have to cooperate with the feds in any way. For instance, a local sheriff cannot block ATF agents from enforcing a federal gun law, but the ATF cannot force the sheriff’s office to participate in the enforcement effort.
Which Supreme Court Cases support the Anti-Commandeering Doctrine?
The anti-commandeering doctrine rests on five landmark cases, the first dating back to 1842.
Prigg v. Pennsylvania(1842), Justice Joseph Story held that the federal government could not force states to implement or carry out the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. He said that it was a federal law, and the federal government ultimately had to enforce it:
The fundamental principle applicable to all cases of this sort, would seem to be, that where the end is required, the means are given; and where the duty is enjoined, the ability to perform it is contemplated to exist on the part of the functionaries to whom it is entrusted. The clause is found in the national Constitution, and not in that of any state. It does not point out any state functionaries, or any state action to carry its provisions into effect. The states cannot, therefore, be compelled to enforce them; and it might well be deemed an unconstitutional exercise of the power of interpretation, to insist that the states are bound to provide means to carry into effect the duties of the national government, nowhere delegated or instrusted to them by the Constitution
New York v. United States(1992) the Court held that the regulations in the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendment Act of 1985 were coercive and violated the sovereignty of New York, holding that “because the Act’s take title provision offers the States a ‘choice’ between the two unconstitutionally coercive alternatives–either accepting ownership of waste or regulating according to Congress’ instructions–the provision lies outside Congress’ enumerated powers and is inconsistent with the Tenth Amendment.
Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the majority in the 6-3 decision:
As an initial matter, Congress may not simply “commandee[r] the legislative processes of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.”
She later expounded on this point.
While Congress has substantial powers to govern the Nation directly, including in areas of intimate concern to the States, the Constitution has never been understood to confer upon Congress the ability to require the States to govern according to Congress’ instructions.
Printz v. United States(1997) serves as the lynchpin for the anti-commandeering doctrine. At issue was a provision in the Brady Gun Bill that required county law enforcement officers to administer part of the background check program. Sheriffs Jay Printz and Richard Mack sued, arguing these provisions unconstitutionally forced them to administer a federal program. Justice Antonin Scalia agreed, writing in the majority opinion “it is apparent that the Brady Act purports to direct state law enforcement officers to participate, albeit only temporarily, in the administration of a federally enacted regulatory scheme.”
Citing the New York case, the court majority declared this provision of the Brady Gun Bill unconstitutional, expanding the reach of the anti-commandeering doctrine.
We held in New York that Congress cannot compel the States to enact or enforce a federal regulatory program.
Today we hold that Congress cannot circumvent that prohibition by conscripting the States’ officers directly. The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program. It matters not whether policymaking is involved, and no case-by-case weighing of the burdens or benefits is necessary; such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.
Independent Business v. Sebelius(2012), the Court held that the federal government cannot compel states to expand Medicaid by threatening to withhold funding for Medicaid programs already in place. Justice Robert Kennedy argued that allowing Congress to essentially punish states that refused to go along violates constitutional separation of powers.
The legitimacy of Congress’s exercise of the spending power “thus rests on whether the State voluntarily and knowingly accepts the terms of the ‘contract.’ ” Pennhurst, supra, at 17. Respecting this limitation is critical to ensuring that Spending Clause legislation does not undermine the status of the States as independent sovereigns in our federal system. That system “rests on what might at first seem a counterintuitive insight, that ‘freedom is enhanced by the creation of two governments, not one.’ ” Bond, 564 U. S., at (slip op., at 8) (quoting Alden v. Maine, 527 U. S. 706, 758 (1999) ). For this reason, “the Constitution has never been understood to confer upon Congress the ability to require the States to govern according to Congress’ instructions.” New York, supra, at 162. Otherwise the two-government system established by the Framers would give way to a system that vests power in one central government, and individual liberty would suffer.
Murphy v. NCAA (2018), the Court held that Congress can’t take any action that “dictates what a state legislature may and may not do” even when the state action conflicts with federal law. Samuel Alito wrote, “a more direct affront to state sovereignty is not easy to imagine.” He continued:
The anticommandeering doctrine may sound arcane, but it is simply the expression of a fundamental structural decision incorporated into the Constitution, i.e., the decision to withhold from Congress the power to issue orders directly to the States … Conspicuously absent from the list of powers given to Congress is the power to issue direct orders to the governments of the States. The anticommandeering doctrine simply represents the recognition of this limit on congressional authority.
Taken together, these five cases firmly establish a legal doctrine holding that the federal government has no authority to force states to participate in implementing or enforcing its acts.
Madison’s advice in Federalist #46, supported by the anti-commandeering doctrine, provides a powerful tool that states can use against federal acts and regulatory programs.
Can’t the Federal Government Punish Wayward States By Cutting Funding?
In simple terms, the federal government cannot use funding to coerce states to take a desired action. Independent Business v. Sebelius directly addressed this issue.
The federal government can withhold funding related to any action that a state refuses to take, but with some significant limitations and caveats. For instance, if the state refuses to enforce federal marijuana laws, the federal government can possibly cut some funding relating to drug enforcement. But it cannot cut unrelated funding to punish the state. In other words, Congress couldn’t cut education funding to punish a state for not cooperating with marijuana prohibition.
How Do We Determine What Is or Isn’t Constitutional? Isn’t that the Supreme Court’s Job?
The short answer is it doesn’t matter. Constitutionality isn’t part of the equation. The anti-commandeering doctrine doesn’t depend on a finding of constitutionality. States can refuse to provide personnel or resources for any federal activity regardless of its constitutionality. The utilization of state recourses, funds and personnel are totally at the discretion of the state government.
Will This Strategy Work?
The federal government relies heavily on state cooperation to implement and enforce almost all of its laws, regulations and acts. By simply withdrawing this necessary cooperation, states and localities can nullify many federal actions in effect. As noted by the National Governors’ Association during the partial government shutdown of 2013, “states are partners with the federal government on most federal programs.”
Partnerships don’t work too well when half the team quits. By withdrawing all resources and participation in federal law enforcement efforts and program implementation, states, and even local governments, can effectively bring the federal actions to an end.
Consider the 36 states that have legalized marijuana despite federal prohibition.
The legalization of marijuana in a state removes a layer of laws prohibiting the possession and use of marijuana even though federal prohibition would remain in effect. This is significant because FBI statistics show that law enforcement makes approximately 99 of 100 marijuana arrests under state, not federal law. When states stop enforcing marijuana laws, they sweep away most of the basis for 99 percent of marijuana arrests.
Furthermore, figures indicate it would take 40 percent of the DEA’s yearly-budget just to investigate and raid all of the dispensaries in Los Angeles – a single city in a single state. That doesn’t include the cost of prosecution. The lesson? The feds lack the resources to enforce marijuana prohibition without state assistance.
The same is true for virtually every federal action, from gun control, to Obamacare, to FDA mandates. The federal government depends on the states. And the states don’t have to cooperate.
Three years ago this week – Actually, on January 1st of 2018, I rolled out of bed and headed to the bathroom. After “using the facilities” I flushed the toilet and went to wash my hands, but when I turned the faucet to the ‘open’ position, some sputtering water came out followed by nothing but air.
Yes, on January 1st, we found out that our pipes had frozen. But. . . I was ready. Awhile before, I had purchased everything that I needed to set up a portable bathroom. Today, I want to walk you through the relatively easy process of making sure that you have what you need to set up a portable bathroom. I’ll also share some tips and tricks on how to make it function more efficiently (and be less stinky).
***There are links in this post. Some of the links may be affiliate links. My promise to you is that I will only recommend the most economical version of the best quality of items to serve you. All of these are the items that I have bought for my own family. If you click on a link, your price will remain the same. If you make a purchase, we may make a small commission that aids in the cost of the running of this website.***
Main parts of a Portable Bathroom System
There are two main parts to a portable bathroom – a portable toilet and a handwashing station.
Portable Toilet
Getting ready to set up a portable toilet is fairly easy.
1.) Find a place to put your portable bathroom.
On both instances that we had to set up our portable toilet, we have always used our main floor half-bath. There is usually enough room to put a 5-6 gallon bucket where our legs would normally be with room around the outside to be able to step around it to get to the door. If you don’t have anything like this, you could use the main larger bathroom in the house, or even the master bath.
If, however, you are completely devoid of any of these options, you can work outside the box a bit. There is such a thing as a pop-up privacy tent. These are usually used for showers or portable toilets while camping. You could set one of these up in an out-of-the-way room, but be warned, it won’t smell the best despite some suggestions that I will make later to keep the stench down.
2.) Source your FREE 5-6 gallon bucket.
Did you know that most grocery stores that have in-house bakeries will give away their frosting buckets (some of which are 5-6 gallons) for free? So the next time that you’re in a grocery store that has a bakery, walk over and ask them if they have any empty frosting buckets that they are willing to give away. Or you could even call ahead and ask for the bakery so that you can find out BEFORE you go whether or not they have any frosting buckets available at that moment. Several bakeries have told me that they throw them out at the end of the day on the day that they empty them.
Once you get it home, you will have to clean it with warm soapy water – and maybe a smidge of bleach to get the residue out of it. Once it’s clean and dried, you’re ready to use it when the need arises.
If, however, you prefer not to get free buckets, you can get cheap ones from any hardware store. If you ONLY intend to use them for a portable toilet, you don’t need to bother with getting food-grade buckets. Home Depot and Lowe’s both carry non-food grade buckets in their stores at reasonable prices.
Photo Credit: Amazon.com
3.) Purchase your toilet seat and heavy-duty trashcan liners.
I purchased my snap-on toilet seat from Amazon, but I didn’t feel the need to purchase specialized “Doodie bags” or trash bags that are marketed to collect human waste. We just used regular heavy-duty trash bags from Costco.
4.) Purchase kitty litter or gather an alternative.
Kitty Litter? Yes, kitty litter! You need something that (1) will absorb liquid waste and (2) will help keep both the liquid and solid waste from smelling as bad as it otherwise would. Kitty litter does passably at both of these. It won’t keep it from stinking at all, but it will reduce the stench and will help absorb the liquid that you’ll be adding to the bag.
Don’t like the idea of using kitty litter? There are other alternatives that you might have laying around for free. Do you have a fireplace? Start collecting the ashes in it. They work fairly well at both absorbing the liquid as well as dealing with the smell. Pine chips, sawdust, and newspapers torn into small strips also work.
Photo Credit: Amazon.com
Handwashing Station
We’ve covered what you need to be prepared to set up the portable toilet, but what do you need for a handwashing station. You can go two different routes for this.
First off, you can use hand sanitizer. And while this works fine if you just need to disinfect your hands, it doesn’t work if you also need to clean solid matter which may have gotten onto your hands from your ‘trip to the loo.’
We prefer to use our five-gallon water jug with a spigot. This allows us to wash any dirt and debris from our hands after using the ‘facilities.’ But having both hand sanitizer and a five-gallon water jug with a spigot on hand can’t hurt.
Setting up a Portable Bathroom
So besides gathering the items that you need, there are few other points to help you set things up in a way that will serve you well.
In the “portable bathroom”
Whether this is an actual bathroom or a pop-up privy, it works similarly. When you realize that you need to set up a portable toilet, grab your bucket, trash bags, snap-on lid, and odor fighter.
We double-line our bucket with two Costco heavy-duty trash bags and snap the toilet seat/lid onto the bucket over the two trash bags.
We take one of our glass bowls and fill it with kitty litter or ash and keep it in the sink. If you are using a pop-up privy, then you’ll want something on which you can set your bowl – whether it’s just some newspaper on the ground to contain any stray particles or a stool to put it at a level easier to reach. Then we place a scoop of some sort – usually a measuring 1/2 cup into the bowl. Once the facilities have been utilized, everyone is supposed to put a scoop of our anti-stink medium into the portable toilet.
Outside the Bathroom (or Privy)
Because we keep our bowl of kitty litter or ash in our bathroom sink, and because there isn’t much room on our bathroom sink, we have always placed our water jug with a spigot at the kitchen sink. Our kitchen sink has always had ample counter space beside the sink on which to set our water jug. It also allows for the flow of the jug into the sink, so we don’t have to worry about wastewater.
Another added benefit from doing it that way is that we always keep a hand towel near the sink, so we have a towel on which to dry our hands.
The process is a simple one, but if you haven’t thought it through, the first time could be more problematic than if you’d taken steps beforehand to know what you need to purchase and where you need to place it.
A practical benefit that we experienced
So before the incident when our pipes froze, my husband (the wonderful man that he is) only tolerated my prepping. He acknowledged that at some nebulous day in the future we might have need of an item here or there, but he saw no practical purpose in keeping all this stuff around that we weren’t using on a regular basis. And at that point, I would have said, “Don’t let me catch you getting him started on my food stash.”
But during Christmas vacation – while his dad was staying with us no less – our pipes froze, he realized that having items on hand was more than helpful. By investing about $40, I had SAVED us hundreds of dollars. It took four days for a professional company to figure out how to defrost our pipes so that we could have water. We would have had to pay for 2 hotel rooms for 3 nights plus all the meals that we would have had to eat out. It would have easily cost us $700-$1000.
But once he saw how a little money spent beforehand saved us a ton of money on a ‘regular day’ not some nebulous day after society collapses, his tone completely changed. He went from reluctantly ‘allowing’ me to prep to being completely on board with my prepping.
Not only that, but he has become a driver in our prepping. If I need something built, he’s right there to do it. He makes suggestions on what we should do next. He helps as we look for ways to make ourselves more self-sufficient right where we are. We are much more of a team than we were before our pipes froze…
A couple of months ago we remarked on how big tech internet censorship of conservative voices was the liberal equivalent of book burning. Now mobs in Portland have taken a big step closer to actual book burning, demanding that Portland’s premier bookstore – Powells – stop selling a book critical of leftist hate/terrorist group Antifa. Read about it in the Foundation for Economic Education’s article The Mobbing of a Portland Bookstore Reminds Us Why Fahrenheit 451 Was Written.
Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds wonders Is 2021 an Echo of 1641?
Yes, on January 1st, we found out that our pipes had frozen. But. . . I was ready. Awhile before, I had purchased everything that I needed to set up a portable bathroom. Today, I want to walk you through the relatively easy process of making sure that you have what you need to set up a portable bathroom. I’ll also share some tips and tricks on how to make it function more efficiently (and be less stinky).
Lower Valley Assembly 