Faced with mortal danger to their citizens, Israel and Ukraine are restoring the God-given right of self-defense to the people, by removing the roadblocks to lawful arms ownership and carry.
Yet here in the United States—the only nation with the right to arms enshrined in its Constitution and exercised in reality by its citizens—with violent crime soaring in many cities, politicians are trying to further disarm more potential victims. Practically, politically, legally and morally—that’s wrong. And it’s up to us to do our part to stop it.
A common misconception in the West is that the Israeli population is armed to the teeth. Not so. The young men and women carrying rifles on Israeli streets that we often see in media reports—uniformed or not—are actually members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). With few exceptions, serving in the IDF is mandatory for all Israelis.
Israel’s security and intelligence services are rightly considered the foremost in the world. So, Israel’s political leaders likely saw no need for civilians to be routinely armed and thus put many restrictions on owning or carrying a gun. Thus, last October, when Hamas death squads flew in on paragliders and attacked a music festival near Gaza, and then began a campaign of murder, rape and other unspeakable atrocities against Israelis, only about 2% of Israelis legally owned a gun. In other words, 98% of them were effectively defenseless.
For decades, those who oppose the Second Amendment have told us that we don’t need guns for protection. The authorities will protect us, they promised.
In the 1990s, the then-president of NBC News, Michael Gartner, said, “There is no reason for anyone in this country except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use, a handgun.” In 2022, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said that only the police should have guns.
American leaders could learn from their counterparts in Israel and Ukraine.
But the tragedy we saw in Israel shows the mortal danger of that kind of complacency. And you have to ask yourself: If a country with as much military, law enforcement, intelligence and security apparatus as Israel couldn’t protect its people, what country possibly could?
The good news for Israelis is that their government is now lifting some gun restrictions “to allow as many citizens as possible to arm themselves,” as Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir put it. “I want more weapons on the streets so that the citizens of Israel can defend themselves,” he said last January.
Ukraine authorities did much the same thing in 2022. Faced with Russia’s invading army—along with similar atrocities committed against civilians—in February, the Ukrainian parliament approved a new law allowing citizens the right to carry firearms in public for self-defense. “We will give weapons to anyone who wants to defend the country,” Ukraine President Zelenskyy said, and the government distributed 25,000 rifles to civilian defenders.
In both countries, armed citizens made a decisive difference. In Ukraine, almost 100 civilians mustered—some armed with hunting rifles—to defend bridges spanning the Mertovod River and forced Russian invaders to retreat. Armed volunteer civilians pushed the Russians out of four other towns, as well.
In Israel, while Hamas attackers executed people in their beds, murdered infants, burned down homes and massacred nearly 200 Israelies in Kfar Aza and Be’eri alone—with at least 1,200 reported overall at the time of this writing—in a third kibbutz called Nir-Am, armed defenders stopped them cold. There, a 25-year-old woman named Inbar Lieberman opened the armory, distributed guns to residents and set up ambushes against the attackers. Together, over a four-hour siege, they killed 25 Hamas terrorists before they could carry out their grisly plans. Thanks to Inbar Lieberman, Nir-Am was the only settlement bordering the Gaza Strip where no Israeli was killed that day.
Americans may not currently need to fight off hostile terrorists, like Israel, or invading armies, like Ukraine, but evil comes in many forms. It could appear at any time—as three gangsters kicking down your door at 3 a.m., as five masked robbers at your local restaurant or as the lone rapist waiting in your parking garage when you leave work to go home.
All that stands between that evil and any one of us is our Big R God Given Constitutionally backed Right and ability to defend ourselves. And the only thing that secures that freedom is our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and so, we must never surrender it—not now; not ever.
The Republican governor of Iowa has been under fire for a satanic statue that was slated to stand in the state house for two weeks.
She said she opposed the statue and urged Christians to pray. But after all, the Satanic Temple had followed the rules in having it installed, so their statue was a form of protected speech.
Yesterday a former congressional candidate from Mississippi, Michael Cassidy, beheaded and destroyed the statue. He faces a fine and up to a year in prison.
The past and the future were juxtaposed here. “We oppose X, but the rules say X is all right, so there’s nothing you can do.” That’s the past.
The future: “Fuck you. We’re taking this thing down.”
The so-called neutral public square is collapsing.
It may be just as well, since nobody really believed in it in the first place.
Appeals to the neutral public square ring hollow these days, because they come from the very people who once pretended they wanted neutrality in things like employment, promotions, education, and everything else under the sun, and once again “neutrality” wound up in practice meaning privilege for their side.
We’ve got multiple ideologies, incompatible with each other, uneasily coexisting under the same political roof. This is going to be a rough ride.
There are still Republicans who think they can stick it to their opponents by calling them hypocrites, or noting that they’re inconsistent in banning speech.
This is silly. The people we’re dealing with are not operating on the basis of general principles like freedom of speech or equality before the law or any of those pretty-sounding phrases.
They are operating on this basis: we intend to win, and if that means sticking it to our enemies good and hard regardless of any abstract principle, then we’re going to do it.
What this means for you: you’re living under a hostile regime, and you’re an enemy of the state.
Here’s a wild idea: how about we try to navigate this bizarre and challenging situation together?
And here’s another thing:
They’ll destroy the value of your money and (1) deny it’s happening, then (2) say it’s happening but it’s a sign of a good economy (they actually did this), then (3) admit that it’s bad but blame you for it (they actually did this, too).
After confining your kids in an ideological prison until age 18, they leave them with absolutely zero knowledge of how to navigate the 21st-century economy, and then shrug their shoulders as they gather statistics about underemployed young people with no prospects living with their parents.
They got tens of millions to cheer when you got fired for refusing an injection you neither wanted nor needed.
They’re colonizing your kids’ minds with crazy, anti-human theories.
Every last thing they get up to is a front in the war against you.
They want you discouraged and demoralized. They want to make you think nobody agrees with you. They want you to think they’ve won, so you’ll just give up.
That’s just not us. We don’t give up. We don’t have it in us. We fight, have kids and they deserve a better world. Moreover, we don’t care what people say about us. Anybody who was captain of his high school math team obviously cares about things other than popularity.
I want to break us the fuck out of all this. I want my community to be successful and secure, so that nothing the regime or its weird economy throws at them can harm them. While other people are arguing on Facebook, I want to combine the knowledge and talents of my community to make us all unbreakable. You don’t have to feel isolated. You don’t have to face the 21st-century economy alone. You don’t have to make your own lonely way under a system that’s throwing everything it has at you.
We need to stand our ground together and take back our country.
After October 7, the public was shocked at what they saw and heard on America’s campuses.
Americans knew previously they were intolerant, leftwing, and increasingly non-meritocratic.
But immediately after October 7—and even before the response of the Israeli Defense Forces—the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America.
Indeed, not a day goes by when a university professor or student group has not spouted anti-Semitic hatred. Often, they threaten and attack Jewish students, or engage in mass demonstrations calling for the extinction of Israel.
Why and how did purportedly enlightened universities become incubators of such primordial hatred?
After the George Floyd riots, reparatory admissions—the effort to admit diverse students beyond their numbers in the general population—increased.
Elite universities like Stanford and Yale boasted that their so-called “white” incoming student numbers had plunged to between 20 and 40 precent, despite whites making up 68-70 percent of the general population.
The abolition of the SAT requirement, and often the comparative ranking of high school grade point averages, have ended the ancient and time-proven idea of meritocracy. Brilliant high school transcripts and test scores no longer warrant admissions to so-called elite schools.
One result was that the number of Jews has nosedived from 20-30 percent of Ivy League student bodies during the 1970s and 1980s to 10-15 percent.
Jewish students are also currently stereotyped as “white” and “privileged”—and thus considered as fair game on campus.
At the same time, the number of foreign students, especially from the oil-rich Middle East, has soared on campuses. Most are subsidized by their homeland governments. They pay the full, non-discounted tuition rates to cash-hungry universities.
Huge numbers of students have entered universities, who would not have been admitted by the very standards universities until recently claimed were vital to ensure their own competitiveness and prestige.
Consequently, they are no longer the guarantors of topflight undergraduates and professionals from their graduate programs.
Faculty are faced with new lose/lose/lose choices of either diminishing their course requirements, or inflating their grades, or facing charges by Diversity/Equity/Inclusion commissars of systematic bias in their grading— or all three combined.
The net result is that there are now thousands of students from abroad, especially from the Middle East, far fewer Jewish students, and student bodies who demand radical changes in faculty standards and course work to accommodate their unease with past standards of expected student achievement.
And, presto, an epidemic of anti-Semitism naturally followed.
In such a vacuum, advocacy “-studies” classes proliferated, along with faculty to teach them.
“Gender, black, Latino, feminist, Asian, Queer, trans, peace, environmental, and green”-studies courses demand far less from students, and arbitrarily select some as “oppressed” and others as “oppressors”. The former “victims” are then given a blank check to engage in racist and anti-Semitic behavior without consequences.
Proving to be politically correct in these deductive gut-courses rather than pressed to express oneself coherently, inductively, and analytically from a repertoire of fact-based-knowledge explains why the public witnesses faculty and students who are simultaneously both arrogant and ignorant.
At some universities “blacklists” circulate warning “marginalized” students which professors they should avoid who still cling to supposedly outdated standards regarding exam-taking, deadlines, and absences.
All these radical changes explain the current spectacle of angry students citing grievances, and poorly educated graduates who have had little course work in traditional history, literature, philosophy, logic, or the traditional sciences.
Universities and students have plenty of money to continue the weaponization of the university, given their enormous tax-free endowment income. Nearly $2-trillion in government-subsidized student loans are issued without accountability or reasonable demands that they be repaid in timely fashion.
Exceptions and exemptions are the bible of terrified and careerist administrators.
Faced with an epidemic of anti-Semitism, university administrators now claim they can do little to curb the hatred. But privately they know should the targets of similar hatred be instead blacks, gays, Latinos, or women, then they would expel the haters in a nanosecond.
What is the ultimate result of once elite campuses giving 70-80 percent of their students As, becoming hotbeds of dangerous anti-Semitism, and watered-down curricula that cannot turn out educated students?
The Ivy league and their kindred so-called elite campuses may soon go the way of Disney and Bud Light.
They think such a crash in their reputations is impossible given centuries of accustomed stature.
But the erosion is already occurring—and accelerating.
At the present rate, a Stanford law degree, a Harvard political science major, or a Yale social science BA will soon scare off employers and the general public at large.
These certificates will signify not proof of humility, knowledge, and decency, but rather undeserved self-importance, vacuousness, and fanaticism—and all to be avoided rather than courted.
The government is using the censorship industrial complex to gain control of its own citizens. They are collaborating with private companies and others to suppress thought.
About 10 years ago, I read a story about someone who posted something on Twitter before leaving for a plane flight. By the time her flight landed in another country, she’d already been “canceled.”
What she wrote was a satirical joke that was easily explained once she landed. However, the damage had already been done. She was fired.
For months after, she couldn’t get a job because the first thing that came up when potential employers Googled her were the news stories about her Twitter gaffe.
She eventually discovered there are companies created solely to suppress and hide information on the internet, such as a negative news story. You could pay money, and a company would create tons of content that would change search results in your favor.
At the time I read it, this was revelatory. That was almost 10 years ago.
Fast forward to today, and not only is this common, but now it has grown into a political machine used for suppressing the thoughts of anyone who disagrees with the approved narrative at the time.
Disagree with lockdowns? Fake social media accounts can be used to downvote you, discredit you, and flag you to social media companies.
Fake accounts can be created to boost content that opposes your idea, so it will never be seen.
In 2020, Americans had their social media posts surveilled, and content flagged with the entire goal of suppressing views that went against the narrative at the time.
The plan was hatched by interns at a federal agency in the national security sector.
Not elected officials. Not actual federal workers. INTERNS.
They knew that they could “bury” information online. They just took it much, much further.
What once seemed like a sneaky way to change your internet profile now seems horrifyingly Orwellian when it is intentionally used for censorship.
The Worst Case Scenario
Controlling free speech (aka censorship) is one of the fastest ways to gain control.
If people cannot express their thoughts and ideas freely, it begins to seem like everyone thinks the same way.
As a result, this prevents movements from standing up, speaking out, and going against the grain.
Think of popular movements over the last few years: mask protests, lockdown protests, Black and Blue Lives Matter.
If people were not allowed to share their thoughts, none of these movements would have gotten off the ground.
Censorship ultimately becomes a threat to every infrastructure.
We’ve already seen people de-banked for their political views and statements on social media platforms.
It can trickle down to every part of our lives – including what we eat.
What if those “in charge” of the internet decide that they agree with the UN and start suppressing any information posted about meat?
Henry Kissinger famously said, “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”
If they control speech, they can control movements.
If they can control movements, they can control critical infrastructure.
If they can control infrastructures, they can control the food.
You may think, “No one is in charge of the internet.” Well, that’s somewhat true…for now.
The UN has created an organization just for this purpose. They just released a document of rules. And it’s terrifying.
The Development of the Internet of Trust
UNESCO stands for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
And they just released a plan to combat “misinformation” by creating what it calls the “Internet of Trust.”
The main goal straight from the source is: “Safeguarding freedom of expression and access to information through a multi-stakeholder approach.”
Here is what it says on the first page:
“Safeguarding freedom of expression and the right to information while dealing with dis- and misinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories requires a multi-stakeholder approach. This is the reason why UNESCO, the leading UN agency for the promotion and protection of freedom of expression and to information, is launching Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms. […] Cultivating an Internet of Trust is a shared responsibility among all stakeholders. It calls upon us all to sustain an enabling environment for freedom of expression and the right to information.”
The term, Censorship Industrial Complex, is a play on the “military-industrial complex.”
With the military-industrial complex, the military, private companies, and academia work together to help the US win on the battlefield.
In this case, it’s the government (with the help of big business and academia) using censorship of its own citizens to dominate.
Pete McGinnis explains it perfectly when he writes, “But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives.”
What’s worse is that our government knows and participates.
In the Testimony by Michael Shellenberger to The House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on March 9, 2023, Shellenberger spoke about the Censorship Industrial Complex. He said:
“Today, American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy. I am grateful for the opportunity to offer this testimony and sound the alarm over the shocking and disturbing emergence of state-sponsored censorship in the United States of America.
“The Twitter Files, state attorneys general lawsuits, and investigative reporters have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on a range of issues, including on the origins of COVID, COVID vaccines, emails relating to Hunter Biden’s business dealings, climate change, renewable energy, fossil fuels, and many other issues.”
What We’ve Learned Since
Since Michael Shellenberger’s explosive testimony in March, another whistleblower has come forward with even more documents showing government involvement in censorship on social media platforms.
As of publication, word came out that it was discovered the US and the UK military made plans for global censorship in 2018.
Again, global internet censorship.
Exactly like what the UN just created a list of guidelines for.
Shellenberger reports that one document “explains that while such activities overseas are ‘typically’ done by ‘the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense,’ censorship efforts ‘against Americans’ have to be done using private partners because the government doesn’t have the ‘legal authority.’”
Terrifying.
The CTIL (Cyber Threat Intelligence League) developed a strategy for censoring online.
Shellenberger reports, “In the spring of 2020, CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, such as anti-lockdown narratives like ‘all jobs are essential,’ ‘we won’t stay home,’ and ‘open America now.’ CTIL created a law enforcement channel for reporting content as part of these efforts. The organization also researched individuals posting anti-lockdown hashtags like #freeCA and kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios. CTIL’s approach to ‘disinformation’ went far beyond censorship. The documents show that the group engaged in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote ‘counter-messaging,’ co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups.”
How This Affects You and Me
It’s only a matter of time before people start seeking out alternative communication channels.
Not because they want to, but because they might be de-banked, discredited, or put in prison.
Censorship is a powerful weapon that can be used to control our actions and movements.
When Disney CEO Bob Iger sat down to talk with employees about his bumpy year at the helm Tuesday, he said, “I knew there were myriad challenges that I would face.” What he didn’t count on was those “myriad challenges” being millions of still-angry Americans. After management ran the brand into the ground over a popular parental rights’ law last year, nothing seems to be rehabilitating the company’s image. Even the second coming of Iger, who was behind the wheel for some of Disney’s best chapters, hasn’t brought back the magic for consumers. Now, staring down a holiday season with crashing stocks, box office losers, and even less goodwill, will Iger stop riding this polarized express?
Experts have their doubts. Stephen Soukup, who’s spent years analyzing Disney’s radical evolution, worries that as long as Iger is in charge, the right lessons won’t be learned. Still, the author of “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital” was encouraged by last week’s news that Disney was at least admitting that it was on the wrong side of public opinion when it comes to their extreme LGBT advocacy.
In its annual report to the Security and Exchange Commission, management conceded that they “face risks relating to misalignment with public and consumer tastes for entertainment, travel and consumer products, which impact demand for our entertainment offerings and products and the profitability of any of our businesses.”
“What they’re saying,” Soukup translated, “is that their values differed from what the values of their expected audience are — and that’s a big deal,” he underscored on “Washington Watch.” “For a long time, Disney has professed to be the arbiter of values. And it turns out that the American public said, ‘No thanks. We’re not interested in allowing you to tell us what we should or should not believe. We’re not interested in having you inculcate our children in what they should believe, and we’re not going to spend our hard-earned money rewarding you for trying to do so.’”
But is that enough to force them back to neutrality on an agenda that includes, among other shockers, the open “queering” of children? “It should be,” Soukup agreed. “I think Disney faces a couple of very serious problems in trying to recover from this ‘misalignment,’” he explained. “The first of these is the fact that it’s in the business of selling values. You know, storytellers from Aesop to Jesus to the Grimm Brothers all the way forward, have been in the business of using storytelling to transmit values and virtues from one generation to the next, and that’s the business that Disney [is] in. If its values and virtues do not align with the public, then it becomes a serious problem. It’s not as if they can simply say, ‘You know what? … We’re going to take politics and social policy out of our films. We’re no longer going to tell stories that have values.’ I mean, that’s the business they’re in. They have to tell stories that have morals. They tell stories that are intended to transmit values from one generation to the next. And that makes it very difficult.”
The second problem, Soukup insisted, is the guy at the top of the food chain: Iger himself. The two-time CEO, who was behind the wheel of Disney’s woke transformation from 2005 on, is the author of a lot of the extremist tendencies that got his company in hot water in the first place. And while there were some who thought Iger would find a way to rein in Disney’s activism, the last 12 months have given them zero reason for hope. “Disney is a political organization because of Bob Iger,” Soukup insisted.
“This didn’t start this year. It didn’t start in Florida. It didn’t start with Governor Ron DeSantis. As can be noted, ‘The Dictatorship of Woke Capital,’ Bob Iger has been fighting a political battle, particularly against conservatives, for at least the last decade. He’s fought the battle in North Carolina. He’s fought the battle in Georgia. He’s fought the battle in Florida. This is something that he believes firmly in. And the fight against Governor DeSantis in Florida that made so much news over the last several months was, in fact, Bob Iger’s doing.”
“If you look at what Disney has said about when it decided to get involved,” the vice president of the Political Forum continued, “it was when Bob Iger emailed the then-current leadership and said, ‘We have to do something about this law in Florida. We can’t sit idly by and allow this to happen.’ And what Disney decided to do was fire [CEO] Bob Chapek and bring back Bob Iger. So I think Disney has two serious problems. Their business model is one of selling values. And the man who runs the company is an aggressively and overtly political player.”
And it’s not just Disney who’s thumbing their nose at shareholders. Target, Bud Light, Starbucks, Nike, and a slew of other companies made a very intentional calculation to prioritize politics over profits. “In order for any of these businesses that have been punished by the public over the last year for being political, in order for any of them to make any headway in winning back their customers, they first have to get it,” Soukup emphasized. “It’s become clear, for example, that Target does not get it. That Target does not understand why its customers left it behind, why its customers got upset, why its customers started to boycott, and that they’re doubling down on the tactics that in fact alienated [people].”
While Target CEO Brian Cornell talks a good game, telling investors, “We are firmly focused on getting back to growth,” shelves of rainbow Santas and the hire of a senior-level Pride Lead say otherwise. “It was bad enough when they decided to politicize and sexualize the month of June,” Soukup said, “… but now they’re doing very much the same to Christmas. Their Christmas displays are reportedly very aggressively sexualized and very aggressively politicized. And that is a demonstration of the fact that the management of Target doesn’t understand or is unwilling to accept the verdict delivered to it by the public.” Until they do, they’re “courting the wrath of both customers and shareholders,” he insisted.
Maybe these Fortune 500 companies thought this wave of consumer activism rocking the country was a fad, that it would just blow over, and we’d all return to business as usual. But, as the latest quarterly reports for Target, Disney, and Bud Light prove, Americans’ outrage has staying power. At a time when retail sales are up, these trans-embracing giants are underwater.
“I think the public is exhausted with politics being everywhere and in everything. It’s not that Target is left-wing. It’s not that Bud Light embraced left-wing values. It’s not that Disney is liberal. They are,” Soukup said. “… But that’s not the point. The point is that people are tired of having politics shoved down their throat at every possible occasion. They’re just exhausted with the whole thing, and it’s not something that’s going to go away as long as they keep doing this. This is something that the public is going to react to negatively.”
And while these businesses can survive a good bit of public pressure, “The question is, how long does management survive?” Soukup asked. “How long do the boards and the shareholders agree to keep Bob Iger on, for example, if he doesn’t get it — if he continues to pursue the agenda that got Disney into trouble in the first place? … He may have built Disney into a giant entertainment company, and he may be the nicest man in entertainment, as everybody says. But … eventually, the Disney board and Disney shareholders are going to get tired of what he’s doing and his inability to recognize that he’s a big part of the problem.”
For now, the biggest takeaway is that Americans are finally sending a message companies can’t ignore. Sure, some CEOs will stubbornly carry on, willing to kamikaze their brands for radical causes, but there are plenty of rational executives who see the writing on the wall.
“I think it’s pretty clear that the general zeitgeist in American business is to depoliticize as much as possible at this point,” Soukup pointed out. “Sometimes that’s going to be very difficult, given positions that have been taken just in the last three, four, five years. But I think that a great many executives and managers have seen just how potent customer reaction can be.” And that’s a significant change from decades past.
“It used to be the case that nobody feared conservative consumers very much because conservative boycotts always failed. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think that even though these are not organized boycotts, they have been very effective — and they have certainly sent a message to the companies that have been affected and to others who might go down that same road. … To use The Godfather analogy, these guys are Luca Brasi [sleeping] with the fishes. They’re the warning to the rest of business that if you push this too far, you will end up the same way. So I think that what we’re starting to see among a great many corporate leaders is a desire simply to get out of the politics business.”
Whether Disney ever wakes up and joins them is anyone’s guess. Until then, Soukup advises, make the most of this Christmas season: “Vote with your dollars and invest with your dollars.”
All told, Disney has lost nearly $1 billion at the box office due to films like these bombing, according to box office analyst Valient Renegade.
What went wrong with these films? The common thread linking them all is a determined and ever-more-obvious woke agenda that is poisoning their storylines. Lightyear—an animated children’s film, for goodness’ sake—features a homosexual kissing scene. Strange World includes a teen gay romance. The Little Mermaid stars an African American Ariel, seemingly just in order to check a diversity box. The Marvelscontains only incompetent men so that masculine women can show off. According to lead actress Rachel Zegler, Disney’s new live action Snow Whitewill have a “modern edge,” and the titular character “is not gonna be saved by the prince.”
But Disney’s choice to double down on the political fads of the day, turning art and entertainment into propaganda, seems to be hurting their bottom line. The public seems to be rebelling against their scheduled indoctrination sessions at the theater. Will that be enough to cause a course correction, especially when Disney sees the success of recent films that specifically avoid including LGBTQ+, feminist, and race-related agendas? It’s hard to say.
If anything could bring studio executives to their senses, it would be the sensation of sinking lower in their plush leather chairs as their wallets slowly collapse. The Hollywood Reporter just ran an article titled “Marvel Studios Taking Stock of Strategy Amid ‘The Marvels’ Meltdown,” which suggests that Disney (the owner of Marvel) may consider a new direction, although the article hints that the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s problem is cranking out too many spin-off TV shows, not its political agenda. The article relates that Marvel and Disney are scaling back the number of superhero movies in 2024 from three to one. Marvel seems poised to reduce its output and focus on quality over quantity. But will that “quality” include a return to good, old-fashioned storytelling? Or will it mean just glitzier, better-written versions of the propaganda they’ve been churning out in recent years?
One problem with designing stories to fit a preconceived political mold is that, almost by definition, it works against those factors that make a story appealing. Stories touch us when they tap into the universal human experience, communicating something fundamental about what it means to be alive, the joys and sorrows, tragedies and triumphs common to us all. Stories are inspiring when they show us heroism, self-sacrifice, love—in forms that all of us, regardless of race or sexual orientation, can relate to. The best ones open our eyes to the mystery and wonder of the universe and the fragile beauty of human life. They take us out of ourselves and our limited “identity”—in the sense that progressives use the term.
Wokeism, on the other hand, is predicated on the assumption that no human experience is truly universal. Rather, one’s experience of life is fundamentally different if one is black or homosexual or female or part of any other subgroup one cares to mention. For this reason, we need greater “representation” of these types of people on screen, because a black or female or homosexual audience member can’t relate to all these “straight white males.” Because political correctness focuses obsessively on identity and separating people into categories, it misses (or intentionally obscures) what is common in human nature. Of course, it’s going to be less appealing to people generally when it sets out to appeal only to subcategories of the population. Wokeism divides, whereas truly great stories unite.
Part of the irony here is how shallow our fashionable vision of diversity really is, for it can only understand identities based on mere externals or accidental qualities, such as skin color or gender, as though those things were the most important, most fundamental aspect of a person. In reality, there are many other and much more profound forms of identity. For instance, though I am one of those dreaded “straight white males,” I can relate much better to a black woman who shares my religious views than I can to another white male who has different beliefs. What one believes and values is a much deeper, more important form of identity.
That being said, I feel no need to play the identity game anyway, even at this deeper level I am pointing to. That’s because I believe in the stability and universality of human nature, which ought to be at the heart of storytelling. Stories ought to explore timeless and universal truths by accessing those parts of human life that don’t change with time or place: love, courage, heroism, family, death, birth, the search for meaning, and so forth. I reject the principle that every perspective is altogether historically and culturally situated, and therefore necessarily dispossesses people of other times or cultures. It is an extremely narrow-minded view of humanity, destined only to further polarize people.
In the end, our most recent iteration of the “progressive” agenda is incompatible with true art. I am therefore not surprised by Disney’s travails. Either the art will die, or the agenda will die. Eventually, either Disney will fail, or they will start telling stories about the good, the true, and the beautiful, a triad once known as the transcendentals, because they transcend this sublunary realm of change and all of its petty politics that pass away as swiftly as the autumn leaves.
The FBI’s obsession with January 6th protesters has left a bunch of victims in its wake. For almost three years the Bureau has been focusing enormous resources to find, arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate people who for the most part did little more than trespass in the US Capitol.
Not only has the focus on the January 6th rioters been utterly disproportionate to the point of being oppressive, it has also caused the FBI to take their eyes off the ball. Time and again we see the FBI go off on a wild goose chase, looking for mythical Right-wing terrorists in Catholic Churches, at school board meetings, and in secret Islamophobic cabals. They are obsessed with the idea that there are insurrectionists everywhere except, you know, in those masses of crowds where Leftists declare they want to overturn the system.
The result? Actual predators who commit actual crimes are being let go. Even when the FBI has them dead to rights.
On January 6, 2021, the FBI explicitly chose to abandon a sting on a child pornographer in Virginia who was messaging with an undercover agent about having sex with a nine-year-old boy, opting instead to focus on prosecuting Donald Trump’s supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol. Less than three years later, the FBI discovered the same man living in Alaska where he appears to have been performing sex acts on a 10-year-old boy, according to court documents. On December 2, 2020, an internet user with the screen name “gayboy69freak” messaged an undercover agent with the FBI’s Washington Field Office, who was posing as a father pimping out his 9-year-old son, and told him that he wanted to travel to D.C. to have sex with the boy. The man also sent the agent a video of “a prepubescent minor male being anally penetrated by an adult male’s erect penis.” His IP address led the FBI to Brogan Welsh of Glenn Allen, Virginia. What appears to be a slam-dunk case against a child predator was abruptly abandoned just one month later. “On January 6, 2021, FBI, Washington Field Office, [decided] this investigation was halted due to events that occurred at the United States Capitol Building that day,” court documents say. The man was only arrested, and the court documents only filed, because Welsh moved to Alaska and crossed the Anchorage FBI’s radar in an unrelated perversion investigation. On October 24, 2023, after coming across troubling chats from Welsh on a phone they seized from a different alleged pervert, Alaska FBI agents went into his house and “located items including sex toys that are very small in size and apparently consistent with the body size of an approximate 10-year-old boy,” as well as children’s underwear. “The investigation has revealed that a 10-year-old boy was, in fact, residing at the residence belonging to Welsh,” the agents wrote. In other words, because the FBI called off the dogs even after Welsh sent child porn to an FBI agent, he appears to have gone on to molest a 10-year-old. It was as FBI agents worked through the Alaska case that they realized that the bureau’s Washington Field Office had slam-dunk evidence that it had never bothered to do anything with, and added it to charging documents filed November 6, 2023. The Alaska arrest of Welsh was made based on the initial child pornography crime in Virginia, not even his apparent crimes in Alaska. The Washington Field Office wouldn’t say how many other ordinary criminal investigations were put on hold because of January 6, but it did acknowledge that resources were diverted. “In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, WFO resources were surged to support the FBI’s response and investigation,” the office told The Daily Wire in a statement. Federal prosecutors have charged more than 1,000 defendants in what they call the “Capitol Breach,” and more than 65,000 legal documents have been filed in the cases, according to a Daily Wire database. Investigators and prosecutors have limited time, so it turns out that all that work likely comes at the expense of the cases they’d normally be handling.
The Daily Wire has an extremely disturbing story up today about a particular case that should make you ill. It is beyond horrifying because it tells you a lot about how indifferent the Bureau is to actual victims and how much they care about prosecuting (and suppressing) conservatives.
The facts:
On December 2, 2020, an internet user with the screen name “gayboy69freak” messaged an undercover agent with the FBI’s Washington Field Office, who was posing as a father pimping out his 9-year-old son, and told him that he wanted to travel to D.C. to have sex with the boy. The man also sent the agent a video of “a prepubescent minor male being anally penetrated by an adult male’s erect penis.” His IP address led the FBI to Brogan Welsh of Glenn Allen, Virginia.
What appears to be a slam-dunk case against a child predator was abruptly abandoned just one month later.
“On January 6, 2021, FBI, Washington Field Office, [decided] this investigation was halted due to events that occurred at the United States Capitol Building that day,” court documents say.
They had the man dead to rights. He was negotiating to get access to a child in order to rape him and demonstrated his intent by distributing horrific child pornography. Not only was the case a slam dunk, but more importantly the FBI had the opportunity to take a child rapist off the streets.
They chose not to. Not for any legal reasons, or to focus on defending the US government from an actual conspiracy to overthrow the government (as they pretend), but to pursue investigations that result in FBI SWAT teams raiding the houses of people who in many cases did little more than trespass. The FBI to this day spends enormous resources on monitoring people who, if they simply treated them normally, would turn themselves in. Instead, we get manhunts, presumably to generate publicity.
So why are there court documents that lay out this sorry history?
The man moved to Alaska where he started raping a young boy.
The man was only arrested, and the court documents only filed, because Welsh moved to Alaska and crossed the Anchorage FBI’s radar in an unrelated perversion investigation. On October 24, 2023, after coming across troubling chats from Welsh on a phone they seized from a different alleged pervert, Alaska FBI agents went into his house and “located items including sex toys that are very small in size and apparently consistent with the body size of an approximate 10-year-old boy,” as well as children’s underwear.
“The investigation has revealed that a 10-year-old boy was, in fact, residing at the residence belonging to Welsh,” the agents wrote.
In other words, because the FBI called off the dogs even after Welsh sent child porn to an FBI agent, he appears to have gone on to molest a 10-year-old.
These are the priorities of the FBI under Joe Biden.
When Adam Johnson first heard the media describe him as an “insurrectionist,” he wasn’t sure he understood the correct meaning of the word. After Googling it, he said to himself: “Oh. That’s bad.”
This was shortly after he entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and was photographed with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, thus becoming one of the poster children for an event some have likened to Pearl Harbor or the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Johnson has spent a few years being publicly contrite about his participation in the siege on the Capitol and cooperating with authorities, but not speaking much to the mainstream media that has largely dubbed him an insurrectionist who disrupted the peaceful transfer of power from former President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden.
When you read the interview with Johnson you discover a far less sinister figure than has been portrayed in the media. He literally just wandered into the Capitol because the door was open and the police seemed fine with him being there. He wasn’t part of the initial crush of people who actually did force their way into the Capitol, but more a tourist who wandered around.
Johnson said he wanted nothing to do with that group of rioters, so he wandered around for 10 minutes until he saw others walking into an open door. “I thought that’s where the protest was going,” he said. “I was under the impression that you were allowed to protest at the Capitol. I’ve seen it happen so often over the past 10 years.”
Once inside, he said, he broke from the pack and was roaming around alone for awhile.
“I was never ordered by police to not enter the building,” he said. “I was lost in the building and asked a police officer for directions to leave. He gave them to me, I thanked him and told him to stay safe.”
But prior to exiting, he got the notion to attempt to meet Pelosi, talk to her, maybe take a selfie, so he jiggled the handle of her locked door, then headed back to the Rotunda, which is when he saw an unattended “podium.”
Johnson, 37, said he had no idea it was Pelosi’s lectern and, when he saw news cameras pointed in his direction, he decided to grab it, then he smiled and winked at the photographers.
“I thought it would make a great picture, so I carried it 20 yards to the center of the room, gave a short speech and left it there.” His speech, he said, consisted of him railing against traitors and treason and his idea that budget items ought to be voted on separately.
Was Johnson wrong to enter the Capitol? Of course, although even the FBI had to concede he wasn’t a dangerous guy, and he was only convicted of a misdemeanor (after they had threatened to send him to jail for 20 years, they dropped most of the charges), but in order to convict him of a minor crime (they did manage to jail him for 71 days, which is hardly usual for a trespassing charge) they expended enormous resources.
For this they let a pedophile rape a child.
It was as FBI agents worked through the Alaska case that they realized that the bureau’s Washington Field Office had slam-dunk evidence that it had never bothered to do anything with, and added it to charging documents filed November 6, 2023. The Alaska arrest of Welsh was made based on the initial child pornography crime in Virginia, not even his apparent crimes in Alaska.
The Washington Field Office wouldn’t say how many other ordinary criminal investigations were put on hold because of January 6, but it did acknowledge that resources were diverted.
“In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, WFO resources were surged to support the FBI’s response and investigation,” the office told The Daily Wire in a statement. “However, WFO continued to diligently pursue its ongoing investigations. While I can’t speak to the specific circumstances of this case, the FBI takes all crimes against children investigations extremely seriously and facts must be followed to where they lead and with enough evidence collected for publishing.
Really? If so, it appears that letting child rapists roam free is standard practice for the FBI, and I sure hope this isn’t the case. I would rather believe that the FBI is lying now rather than believing that they shrugged a child rape.
This sort of admission, that a case was dropped, rarely appears in court filings, because a dropped investigation means nothing ever makes it to court. Welsh’s case is an exception because he tripped the wires of a different field office in Alaska, which picked up the case.
Federal prosecutors have charged more than 1,000 defendants in what they call the “Capitol Breach,” and more than 65,000 legal documents have been filed in the cases, according to a Daily Wire database. Investigators and prosecutors have limited time, so it turns out that all that work likely comes at the expense of the cases they’d normally be handling.
There are so many disturbing elements to this case, but I want to focus on just one more: it took The Daily Wire to bring it to light when the MSM should be trumpeting it to the world. It should be a national scandal, but the MSM is fully on board with prioritizing January 6th. because doing so helps the Democrats.
They, too, care less about child rape and more about a 3-year-old protest. It’s not like other group gatherings get this much attention–quite the opposite in fact. Only protesting’s in which the establishment can smear Republicans that is.
This, my friends, is your elite law enforcement agency’s and your MSM’s view of the world: prosecuting trespassers is more important than a child rape.
Insane. Just absolutely friggin’ insane I tell you.
The flagship publication of Hillsdale College, Imprimis, which the College claims has a readership of more than six million, has recently published an article by the current enfant terrible of conservatism, Christopher F. Rufo, entitled “Inside the Transgender Empire.” The article explores the question of how transgenderism became so successful, and especially how the transgendered and Drag Queens became so celebrated among the ruling elites. Rufo rehearses all the horrors that have been visited upon American society and politics by the transgender movement and, I believe, he thinks his analysis of that danger goes to the radical source of that danger.
It does not! His analysis is not radical enough; it ignores the fact that the triumph of the transgender movement will inevitably lead to cannibalism. If you think that statement is too harsh for polite readers, read on.
The Los Angeles Times has published not one but two rave reviews of a movie celebrating cannibalism. Glenn Whipp, reporting from the Telluride Film Festival in September of 2022, describes Bones and All as “a tender story of young love” starring two “fine young cannibals trying to negotiate their natures and doing their best to ethically source their next meal.” What makes the cannibalism ethical, one supposes, is that the movie’s two cannibal stars are “people on society’s margins” who are stigmatized and shunned. Whipp seems to think that this brings ethical issues into the equation. In this clash, the ethical conundrum seems to be a choice between the right to life of the victims of cannibals, and the cannibals’ desire to pursue the food of their choice; who is the real victim?—those who are eaten by the cannibals or the cannibals whose way of life is considered unacceptable and stigmatized by society?
The second review, by Mark Olsen describes the film as “part horror film, part coming-of age tale, part romance.” He explains part of the movie’s plot as “two young ‘eaters’” “attempting “to stake out a semblance of normalcy and stability.” But, of course, it is difficult to imagine normalcy and stability developing among cannibals, and the reviewer observes that “the film is driven by a sadness, a mournful, haunted quality that covers even moments of freedom and joy.” The “freedom and joy” presumably breaks forth from the mournful gloom when then cannibals have stalked and succeeded in consuming their next meal.
We should have been prepared for the praise of the morality of cannibalism. I, for one, have been prepared for it for years. Friends, casual acquaintances, and bystanders have endured my discussions, sometimes polemics and even screeds, on how the result of progressive thought would ultimately be cannibalism. All those many years ago, it sounded utterly fantastic, but when I first heard the claims from anthropologists and other social scientists that opposition to cannibalism was merely western food aversion—in other words, an irrational prejudice—I knew that cannibalism was coming.
Liberation movements from the very beginning sought to free human beings from the restraints of nature and of nature’s god. Marx, of course, wasn’t the first, but his simple account is the easiest to explain. We create God to put moral restraints upon ourselves. Creating this non-human or divine source gives the restrains greater authority. But once we realize that God is only a myth or creation, it loses its authoritative power as a tool of oppression for the ruling classes. Once the proletariat seizes power in the inevitable dialectic of history, God, will be exposed as a fraud foisted on the people and can be dismissed. A new, secular morality will be designed to support the party of the working class. Today’s secular religion of the “woke” resembles that party, but it no longer has its roots in the working class, even as it demands the same loyalty and metes out the same harsh discipline as Marxist-Leninism.
Feminism was a successful liberation movement. Once feminism realized that there are no significant or relevant natural differences between the sexes, it became obvious that there were no grounds in law or politics for any inequality. Elimination of classifications by sex for civil rights issues—equal opportunity in employment, voting rights, etc.—were certainly warranted and just, but once the natural distinction between the sexes was deemed irrelevant for civil rights, then it was almost inevitable (and here I paint with a broad brush) that it became irrelevant for all purposes.
Nonbinary ideology was the result of feminism, though I very much doubt it was ever its intention. In a non-binary world, men can have babies, and in the universe of political correctness the punishment for denying this form of irrationality is swift and severe. Just ask teachers and professors who refused to leave the world of reason and science. They have experienced the peculiar wrath that the nonbinary world can generate. Because it is so irrational in its insistence that commonsense be ignored, their wrath defies description and logic.
Liberation theology indulged the same conclusions as the Marxist-Leninists. Once it is realized that God is dead, then morality was “humanized,” or in the more radical vision of Nietzsche, once God is dead, everything is permitted, and nothing is forbidden. Homosexual liberation denies that the natural distinction between male and female is relevant for sexual congress; the gay rights movement denied nature and natural distinctions. Gays insisted that their lifestyle should be publicly accepted because gays lived and acted in a manner that demonstrated their belief that nature provided no standards for morality, and their demand to be seen and accepted in public was essential to the affirmation of this belief. In fact, the demand was not that the gay lifestyle be accepted, but that it should be recognized as superior because it was liberated from the constraints that restrained the lifestyles of heterosexuals whose sexual freedom was restrained because of their belief that nature imposed limitations. Bisexuals and polysexuals and other kinds of sexuals were still—well, “sexuals,” i.e., in the same situation.
Transgenders, however, made a much more serious commitment to their denial of nature and therefore made a greater claim to moral superiority. They resorted to technology, a much more radical and irreversible commitment to their attempt to extinguish nature altogether. Transgenderism seeks the ultimate victory of technology over nature—the goal of science at its very origins, “the conquest of nature.” Anyone who knows me could confirm that I predicted transgenders would soon outrank gays in the new morality, a morality which judges based on who is most committed to the denial of the relevance of nature and all standards of nature.
But has transgenderism succeeded? Has it driven out nature with its virtual pitchfork of technology? Or is it merely deluding itself? Isn’t cannibalism a greater denial of human nature? Doesn’t cannibalism outrank transgenderism in the new morality? Cannibalism is not just the technological transformation of nature. The limitation of transgenderism is its reliance on technology; it allows transformed nature to survive. Cannibalism, in radical contrast, doesn’t recognize human nature or nature in any form. It is the ultimate liberation—it is free from any restraints because it doesn’t recognize nature or nature’s God.
One thinks here of the state of nature, where, in the famous formulation of Thomas Hobbes, life, is nasty, brutish, and short. In other words, the state of nature is inhuman, inhabited by cannibals and virtual cannibals. Reason, the highest faculty of the human soul, is required for civilization to bring an end to the state of nature which is always looming in the backdrop of civilization. The state of nature and cannibalism are the antithesis of civilization and reason. Reason is the foundation of the West. It is Western reason that created science and technology and those creations have done much for the relief of the human estate, alleviating poverty and disease among other things.
But science, of course, cannot address the most important human and political questions—what is the good? what is justice? What is the best regime? What is moral?—those questions that animated classical political philosophy. These became known as value questions and were said to be beyond the competence of science, which rested on the fact-value distinction, a distinction that was crucial to the progress of science. Its power over nature—its conquest of nature—would not have occurred without the distinction between facts and values. Mathematical physics, the heart of modern science, would not have developed without the fact-value distinction. But modern science without a ground in morality inevitably led to complications of great magnitude: power over nature without any sense of how to use that power justly or for the good. It is power without purpose. It was truly a bargain with the devil. It eventually led to what a prominent political philosopher described as “the self-destruction of reason.”
Authoritative liberal opinion today holds that reason can tell us nothing about value questions; reason cannot decide between competing values or competing value systems because modernity has led us to believe that reason itself is merely the epiphenomenon of sub-rational forces, either one’s irrational passions, or one’s race, one’s ethnicity, one’s sex, one’s trans sex, or a host of other irrational factors. Reason is the basis of civilization, constitutionalism, and the rule of law; cannibalism is the antithesis of civilization, no matter how much individual cannibals might love one another (utterly impossible no matter how you define “love”) or how civilized people may marginalize them. Should Western Civilization adopt and protect cannibalism out of deference to those uncivilized (did I actually write that?) parts of the world that remain in the state of nature and practice cannibalism? We used to call this the Third World—sometimes the uncivilized world. The celebration of cannibalism forces us to give up the view that all cultures are equal and we must continue to believe that the West stands for white supremacy, exploitation, colonialism, and practically every other evil. If we can’t say that cannibalism is evil and uncivilized and should be condemned then it is not Western reason talking, but reason simpliciter. If we are so unreasonable to believe that cannibals are a “marginalized people” and should receive preference as a class, then the West will vanish, not with a bang, but with an inaudible whimper.
To think that it all started when the most advanced progressives were worried about “western food aversion.” Did this not mean that the non-western world, parts of which practiced cannibalism, often for religious or sacred purposes, was culturally inferior to the West? Shouldn’t we be more accepting of the cultures of others? Shouldn’t we be more open-minded? Should we not only respect other cultures but show the ultimate form of respect by imitating their culture? Shouldn’t we create a “diversity lottery” for cannibal immigrants? Isn’t diversity our strength? I am sure we will be better off (and stronger!) for it. Would it be unethical for me to become a vegetarian? This is a moral conundrum that may be the death of me!
You may have heard that as of yesterday, it’s been decided that beginning in 2026 all cars sold in the United States will be equipped with a “kill switch,” whereby the car can be disabled remotely if it is determined that you are driving poorly.
Rep. Thomas Massie sought to defund this provision of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bill of over 1000 pages. His amendment was defeated.
But I want you to see the differences in how he argues from the distorted Democrat points of views. You’ll IMMEDIATELY see it!
First Massie:
My amendment is simple. It will defund the federal mandate that requires all new vehicles after 2026 be equipped with a kill switch that can disable a vehicle if the vehicle has monitored the user’s driving performance, and that the vehicle determines that the driver is not performing well.
It’s so incredible that I have to offer this amendment. It almost sounds like the domain of science fiction, dystopian science fiction, that the federal government would put a kill switch in vehicles that would be the judge, jury and executioner on such a fundamental warrant as the right to freely travel. But here we are. It is federal law that this is mandated. And so I am offering this amendment to defund this mandate.
Then Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) delivers her response:
I rise in opposition to this amendment. Let me be clear. This act that the gentleman is trying to defund does not require auto manufacturers to install kill switches. It does not do that. Passive drunk driving technology is a vital tool in safeguarding our loved ones and other innocent people on our roads. This new technology offers a lifeline of hope to not only save lives, but to prevent the lifelong emotional toll and gargantuan costs these accidents inflict on families. Deadly drunk driving accidents can echo across generations, but we can seize this opportunity to stop such tragedies.
Between 2019 and 2021, Florida saw a 31% increase in drunk driving crashes in Mr. Massie’s home state of Kentucky, 190 people were killed in drunk driving crashes in 2021 alone. That was a 26% increase. When we saw these grim statistics, we acted in a bipartisan fashion in Congress. And how often do we see that both Republicans and Democrats supported the Halt act to require auto manufacturers to make this passive technology standard in new vehicles?
The sponsor of this misguided amendment will tell you that he worries about privacy concerns. We heard the same inane calls with seatbelt requirements. But you don’t have a right to engage in potentially fatal behavior that we know poses a major health threat to public safety. Passive drunk driving technology is pro-police. This anti-drunk driving technology lightens the load on police officers, allowing them to focus on more pressing safety concerns. The importance of this technology goes far beyond statistics. It’s about saving lives, preventing heartbreak and making our roads safer. It’s a passionate call to action to prevent alcohol-impaired driving from shattering the lives of those we hold dear.
This amendment, I understand, was dubbed the kill switch amendment and it does not require a kill switch. It simplyrequires passive technology to help us prevent drunk driving. In the name of the 406 people who were killed by a drunk driver in my own state of Florida last year alone, I urge my colleagues to vote no on this amendment. Let’s take steps to reduce deaths due to drunk driving and not increase them.
Now here’s Massie again:
Drunk driving is a serious problem. That’s why 31 states already have laws to implement interlock ignition technology, where if you’ve been convicted of a DUI, you have to pass this test in order to operate your vehicle. But this federal law that I seek to defund goes far beyond that. And I regret that I even have to spend some of my time reading this law to the other side of the aisle. But I will do that.
This law that was passed in a thousand-page bill two years ago requires that auto tmobiles can passively monitor the performance of a driver, not the blood alcohol content, but the performance of a driver in the operation of a motor vehicle that would accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired and not drunk. It says impaired, and to prevent or limit motor vehicle operation. That’s a kill switch.
Now the question is, how much time do you have once your dashboard tells you that it doesn’t approve of your driving? What if you’re a single mother and you’re out on a in bad weather and you’re trying to avoid some obstacles? Ice perhaps. And you’ve swerved three times and your dashboard says: swerve one more time and you’re going to be forced over to the side of the road, that you’ll have 100 yards to park this vehicle in the middle of nowhere and with your children in the back seat.
This isn’t some fantastical scenario. This is what will happen if this is implemented.
And this is the law. I have read it to you here. Now, you maybe all should have read it two years ago when you all voted for it on that side of the aisle, but it was in a bill that was 1039 pages long and so I can understand how you don’t know what the law has in it because it was never read in its entirety . But I’ve read the applicable parts to you here and now.
Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-IL) then speaks, evidently having heard none of what Rep. Massie just said:
More than 10,000 people die every year from drunk driving crashes. Drunk drivers are seven times more likely to be involved in a fatal crash than a sober person. So you would think that the Republicans would want to do something about it. Democrats have done something about it and said that NHTSA now will have drunk driver protection prevention technology.
You know that this technology has the potential of saving thousands of lives and I don’t see that you’re agreeing that we should be saving those lives. And I would say that we should all vote against the Drunk Driver Protection Act [her sarcastic name for the Massie amendment], and I yield back.
And finally Massie, who as you’ll notice is the only one who doesn’t sound like he’s reading a fourth-grade book report:
Well, we actually don’t know how this technology is going to work. And they don’t know over at the DoD, either, because we’ve sent a letter to them that they haven’t responded to yet, asking: will this have cameras inside the car? Will it monitor your eyes to see if you’re focused on the road? Will it have cameras on the outside of the car? How will it know what your performance is relative to the road that you’re driving on if it doesn’t in fact know which road you’re driving on?
Will it need to know where you are when you are driving? If so, who has access to this data? Who has access to those cameras? Will the Fourth Amendment be followed? Will you require a warrant for your insurance company to access this data? Will you require a warrant for the government to access this data once your car has been disabled and now you’re stuck on the side of the road with your children in it for reasons you don’t understand? How long until the police show up? Or what if you truly are disabled and you’re over to the side of the road? Does anybody show up? How long do you have to get out of the vehicle? Who decides when your vehicle kill switch is disabled and you get to drive again? Who’s going to adjudicate that on the side of the road?
What if it’s rush-hour traffic? What if you know you’ve already got points against you according to your dashboard, and it’s monitored your performance, and now there’s somebody’s pet in the road? Do you swerve to miss it and get your car disabled? What if there’s an emergency vehicle approaching from behind you, and you know, the right thing is to swerve off the road and let that vehicle pass? After you’ve done that three times and now your car says, do it one more time and we’re going to leave you on the side of the road and so then what?
This is in the law. This will become law in 2026. For every single vehicle manufactured after that. And it’s not about drunk driving. If it were, it would be just about blood alcohol content. This law has far more than that in it. It violates the Fourth Amendment. It violates so many amendments. It violates things that are so fundamental to our rights that they’re not even in the Constitution, like the right to travel freely. And so I urge support of this amendment. It will defund the law that was passed two years ago, that the other side of the aisle doesn’t even know exists because they haven’t even read it.
It’s an open-and-shut case, yet all the Democrats and 19 Republicans voted to keep this ‘kill switch’.
The rate at which things are getting crazier has truly gotten way out of control now.
So when others state that they’re having meetings on the protections of personal privacies, just understand that they’re trying to protect it from complete sociopaths like democraps and a lot of RINO fake Republicans.
Privacy concerns aren’t something that only weirdos care about. It’s not a niche issue. It’s for every last one of us.
The data gathering by Big Brother and Big Tech is not something unavoidable that we have to reconcile ourselves to, or that you have to be a tech whiz to fight against. The conversations need to begin talking about simple actions anyone can take to stymie the bad guys.
Please begin giving this some very serious thought here on in.
Israel knocked out internet and cell service in Gaza on Friday as its troops prepared to enter the terrorist stronghold but were forced by the Biden White House to restore communications within 48 hours.
Israel’s action took place as Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari hinted that the upward tempo of air strikes was a prelude to ground action.
Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said ground forces were “expanding their activity” Friday evening in Gaza and “acting with great force … to achieve the objectives of the war.” Israel says its strikes target Hamas fighters and infrastructure and that the militants operate from among civilians, putting them in danger.
The Hamas media center reported heavy nighttime clashes with Israeli forces at several places, including what it said was an Israeli incursion east of the refugee camp of Bureij in the central Gaza Strip. Asked about the report, the Israeli military reiterated early Saturday that it had been carrying out targeted raids and expanding strikes with the aim of “preparing the ground for future stages of the operation.”
By Saturday, internet and cell service were being restored.
Two days after cellular and internet service abruptly vanished for most of Gaza amid a heavy Israeli bombardment, the crowded enclave came back online Sunday as communications systems were gradually restored.
That’s a welcome development for Gaza following a communications blackout that began late Friday as Israel expanded ground operations and launched intense airstrikes that illuminated the night sky with furious orange flashes. A rare few Palestinians with international SIM cards or satellite phones took it upon themselves to get the news out.
By Sunday morning, phone and internet communications had been restored to many people in Gaza, according to telecommunications providers in the area, Internet-access advocacy group NetBlocks.org and confirmation on the ground.
⚠️ Confirmed: Metrics show a brief disruption to internet service in parts of the #Gaza Strip with indications of recovery; comms have been heavily affected by air strikes and damaged infrastructure as well as a near-total outage on Friday attributed to measures imposed by Israel pic.twitter.com/3xcQc6Vv6F— NetBlocks (@netblocks) October 29, 2023
What caused the about-face by Israel’s military command? Pressure from the White House.
A senior U.S. official said Sunday thatIsrael had shut off communications in the enclave of 2.3 million and the United States had pressured the government to switch them back on. The Israelis did not tell their U.S. counterparts why they had switched off communications, the official said.
“We made it clear they had to be turned back on,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations. “The communications are back on. They need to stay back on.”
Jake Sullivan gave more details Sunday on Jake Tapper’s “State of the Union.”
Speaking to MSNBC on Sunday, Sullivan underscored the importance of communications networks in Gaza, saying, “We do feel strongly that the restoration of that communications was a critical thing.”
“Because aid workers need to be able to communicate, civilians need to be able to communicate, and of course, journalists need to be able to document what is happening in Gaza to report it to the wider world,” he said.
Sure, internet connectivity aided aid workers. But it also aided Hamas. Most of the press in Gaza seem to have a personal interest in seeing Hamas emerge victorious and armed Hamas terrorists (as an aside, why is it that no one mewling about the Geneva Conventions ever wants to mention that Hamas terrorists are illegal combatants and not covered by the Law of Land Warfare?) use internet and cell connections to plan terrorist attacks, monitor the progress of the IDF, and coordinate combat operations.
What we are beginning to see is the White House imposing the same nonsense restrictions on Israel that it has on Ukraine. It is almost as if the policy of the United States is to drag out every conflict as long as possible and maximize suffering because of escalation or something.
The US has gradually increased the quantity and quality of weapons flowing to Ukraine and, at the same time, put targets of operational and strategic importance off-limits to attack. It took 20 months of warfare to agree to provide Ukraine with ATACMS and begin training F-16 pilots, unnecessarily extending that war. This was all done because of Jake Sullivan’s unreasoning fear that caused intestinal palpitations every time Putin or one of his lackeys mentioned a “red line,” see Putin’s War, Week 86. The Very Resistible Force Meets the Immovable Object in Donbas for more on the subject. Now, you can see the same impulse at work as Iran blisters.
“We have had numerous conversations – from the prime minister and the president on down, and certainly among military leaders and their counterparts – about Israeli military objectives and about the steps that they have taken and intend to take to achieve those objectives,” he said.
“We’ve asked them hard questions, the same hard questions that we would ask ourselves if we were seeking to conduct an operation to take out a terrorist threat,” he went on. “We’ve pressed them on questions like objectives and matching means to objectives, about both tactical and strategic issues associated with this operation.”
Sullivan said Hamas was “making life extremely difficult for Israel” by using civilians as human shields and placing its rocket infrastructure among civilian populations.
“That creates an added burden for Israel. But it does not lessen Israel’s responsibility under international humanitarian law to distinguish between terrorists and civilians, and to protect the lives of innocent people,” he said.
An astoundingly simple three-move checkmate of Western civilization: 1. UN & Israel must ensure safety of Gaza civilians. 2. Civilians shield Hamas, hiding in its secure tunnels. 3. Hamas attacks Israel, as Israel must not target Hamas because of civilianshttps://t.co/st5SyUOznA— Ukraine Reporter (@StateOfUkraine) October 30, 2023
The meddling in Israel’s entirely just chastisement of Hamas will result in more Israelis and Gazans dead because imposing limits on violence in warfare does not add to the humanity of essentially inhumane activity. It merely drags it out to ensure more and more people are killed; factually, Sullivan is wrong when he says, “It does not lessen Israel’s responsibility under international humanitarian law to distinguish between terrorists and civilians, and to protect the lives of innocent people.” Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions says:
The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.
The International Criminal Court statute covers the same ground.
Utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations” constitutes a war crime in international armed conflicts.
Three and a half years too late, New York magazine just published an article called “COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.” It’s the most popular article on their site right now.
I think we’re long past the point at which we say: good for them for figuring it out, even if belatedly. The time for that has officially gone by.
We don’t award partial credit for admitting the problems with lockdown three and a half years after the policy was implemented.
These belated statements of regret do no good. First and most obviously, it’s far too late to undo the damage from the policy. But second, these tend to be the same kind of people who always, after the implementation of some disastrous policy, can be heard saying, “This was a mistake in hindsight, but nobody could have known at the time.”
Yeah, sure.
Instead, we should draw lessons from episodes like this so we don’t get snookered the next time something stupid and evil comes along.
How’s this for one such lesson: the American establishment is not to be trusted, does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, and does not have your best interests at heart.
Whatever the establishment’s current obsession is, it’s almost certainly a boondoggle based on lies, and it never makes your life better. It only impoverishes you.
Oh, and if you have a dissenting opinion you’ll be called evil, a fool, a conspiracy theorist, a dupe of a foreign power, whatever.
Just a super bunch these people are.
John McCain ultimately admitted that the 2003 Iraq war “can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”
Well, that’s super. But as a result of this mistake, how did McCain look at the world differently? What new caution would he now exercise? How would his approach to future conflicts change?
We never got any answers, because nobody bothered to ask him these obviously central questions.
So again, what good does it do to admit, years later, that Boondoggle X was a mistake, if you’re assuredly going to go along with Boondoggle Y, as if Boondoggle X never occurred?
Don’t be the dolt who years later has to say, “We now know X was a mistake.” Be the person with a functioning brain who says at the time, “No way am I supporting X.”
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