Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Chapter 11.
On February 24, 1917, United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter Hines Page, was shown the intercepted Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany offered to give the American Southwest back to Mexico were Mexico to declare war on the United States.
On February 24, 1803, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, established the principle of judicial review.
Also, the First Amendment hasn’t been repealed yet. Oh, no! So the non-crime of uttering “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech” — that is, uttering disagreement — can only be thwarted indirectly.
One way is for government officials to get chummy with compliant social media companies and point them to utterances (posted comments, videos) to censor.
Another is to fund organizations with missions of defunding wrongthinkers.
The Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky reports on the taxpayer-bankrolled conspiracy.
Congress funds the State Department and “two State Department-backed entities,” including National Endowment for Democracy; which has in turn been funding a British organization called the Global Disinformation; which has a group called the AN Foundation that is also called Disinformation Index Foundation; which is sending blacklists of websites that supposedly purvey disinformation to American ad companies like Microsoft-owned Xandr.
The State Department, not constitutionally authorized to censor our speech, gave over $300 million (three tenths of a billion) to the Endowment in 2021.
Websites to be deprived — and that probably have already been deprived — of advertising dollars as ad distributors seek to avoid “risks that arise from funding disinformation” include the New York Post, Reason, Newsmax, The Federalist, American Spectator.
No commie egalitarians; no woke websites.
All very roundabout and mostly under the radar. As intended.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. . . .
Additional Letters From The Federal Farmer, 53 (1788), authorship usually attributed to Richard Henry Lee (pictured), but this has been disputed.
On February 23, 1898, Émile Zola was imprisoned in France after writing J’accuse, a letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism and wrongfully imprisoning Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Zola was a leading force in extending realism to the novel.
Fifty-eight years earlier, Austrian economist Carl Menger was born.
Menger [shown in sketch, above] would go on to contribute to the development of the theory of marginal utility, which supplanted cost-of-production theories of value in economics, in his first book, translated into English as Principles of Economics. Though expert in mathematics (he served as tutor in economics and statistics to Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, the Crown Prince of Austria, starting not long after the publication of the Principles), his approach to marginal theory was the least mathematical of his famous “co-discovers” of the principle, William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras. Rooted in a subjective theory of value, it was the most realistic and least model-based of the marginalist revolutionaries, and he was most interested in price formation, not “price determination,” which focused almost exclusively on equilibrium conditions. He developed an evolutionary theory of money, as well. In his second book, he expanded upon invisible hand processes in society — made most famous in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and contributed the opening salvo in what came to be known as the Methodenstreit, in which he attacked the misuse of historical method in economics by the technocratic “socialists of the chair” in the German-speaking world.
Zola died in 1902; Menger died in 1921.
VAERS is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Little blips of data run along the bottom of the graph through 2020, a year in which there were 2466 reports of negative effects.
And then came 2021, the year in which mRNA and viral vector vaccines were rolled out in the United States, pushed heavily by the federal government and All Responsible Opinion, subsidized per the dose to the drug companies, as well as by lifting the burden of liability for . . . adverse effects.
The number of Floridians reporting such adverse effects soon after taking the vaccines spiked to 41,473.
The next year it subsided a bit, but to an otherwise walloping high of 9,104.
“In Florida alone, there was a 1,700% increase in VAERS reports after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to an increase of 400% in overall vaccine administration for the same time period,” Florida Health tells us in the online “Health Alert on mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety,” of February 15. “The reporting of life-threatening conditions increased over 4,400%. This is a novel increase and was not seen during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign.”
“Just publish the data; give us the facts,” Dr. John Campbell stated in his online talk on the report. He’s appreciative of the Sunshine State’s newfound transparency: “Well done, State of Florida.”
But nearly all other governments have failed to acknowledge such data much less act on it “in meaningful ways”: “badly done, other 49 states. Badly done, the UK; badly done, Europe; badly done, Canada; badly done, New Zealand, Australia.”
Quite a spike in government “badly dones.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Chapter 10.
On Feb. 22, 1943, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl, and their colleague in the White Rose resistance organization, Christoph Probst, stood trial before the Volksgericht — the People’s Court that tried political offenses against the Nazi German state. Found guilty of treason by Roland Freisler, head judge of the court, the three were executed that same day.
The method of capital punishment was guillotine.
Their six pamphlets had spread throughout German-held territory before the war ended.
Except, of course, Congress is exactly where you’d expect to find such a person!
Especially when voters don’t discover the truth about said candidate until it is too late.
“The constituents in NY-3 elected Representative Santos in part due to his biographical exaggerations and apparent deceptions,” complains Congressman Brandon Williams (R-NY).
Still, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) isn’t comfortable pushing to oust the fraudster — which would require a two-thirds vote of the House of Representatives — without the Ethics Committee first finding sufficient official wrongdoing. Even given the fantastical pre-election fibbing, the Speaker points out that “the voters have elected George Santos” and “they have a voice in this process.”
Only that’s the problem. Voters don’t have a voice.
“There is no way for constituents to recall a member of Congress,” informs The Washington Examiner, “though they can be expelled in the House by a two-thirds vote. This action has only been taken five times in history, only against members convicted of crimes and only twice for crimes other than the treason of joining the Confederacy during the Civil War.”
Speaker McCarthy doesn’t speak for the voters in NY-3. Neither can two-thirds (or even ninety-nine percent) of Congress.
But Congress can and should let voters speak for themselves.
And not just this once with Serial Liar Santos. Let voters conduct the official ouster whenever those citizens realize they’ve been had, whenever they determine that they have a turkey representing them.
Every member of Congress — Republican, Democrat or independent — should stop virtue-signaling with press statement pronouncements to the effect that Congressman Santos “should” resign.
Instead, legislate for the people; give us the power of recall.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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La République est l’organisation par laquelle toutes les opinions, toutes les activités demeurant libres, le Peuple, par la divergence même des opinions et des volontés, pense et agit comme un seul homme. Dans la République, tout citoyen, en faisant ce qu’il veut et rien que ce qu’il veut, participe directement à la législation et au gouvernement, comme il participe à la production et à la circulation de la richesse. Là tout citoyen est roi ; car il a la plénitude du pouvoir, il règne et gouverne. La République est une anarchie positive. Ce n’est ni la liberté soumise A l’ordre comme dans la monarchie constitutionnelle, ni la liberté emprisonnée DANs l’ordre, comme l’entend le Gouvernement provisoire. C’est la liberté délivrée de toutes ses entraves, la superstition, le préjugé, le sophisme, l’agiotage, l’autorité; c’est la liberté réciproque, et non pas la liberté qui se limite; la liberté non pas fille de l’ordre, mais MÈRE de l’ordre.
The Republic is the organization by which, all opinions and all activities remaining free, the People, by the very divergence of opinions and of wills, thinks and acts as a single man. In the Republic every citizen, in doing what he wishes and nothing but what he wishes, participates directly in legislation and government, just as he participates in the production and circulation of wealth. There every citizen is king; for he has plenary power, he reigns and governs. The Republic is a positive anarchy. It is neither liberty subjected to order, as in the constitutional monarchy, nor liberty imprisoned in order, as the provisional government would have it. It is liberty delivered from all its hobbles, superstition, prejudice, sophism, speculation, authority; it is mutual liberty, not self-limiting liberty; liberty, not the daughter but the MOTHER of order.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Idée générale de la revolution au XIXe siècle (1851), p. 235, as cited in Anarchism (1908) by Paul Eltzbacher, p. 76.