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Fourth Amendment rights national politics & policies

The J. Edgars’ Threat Tags

Last year, Attorney General Merrick Garland found himself under fire for putting parents under fire. That is, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was shown to be targeting for investigation parents upset at school boards for promoting Critical Race Theory.

Garland tried to weasel out of the situation, but since then a lot of details accumulated, like the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center special “snitch line” allowing Democrats to report on parents who buck school board opinions on race.

And now it’s been shown to be worse: it is not just about CRT. Parents who complained about mask mandates also got flagged for being “threats.”

From its inception, the FBI has engaged in shady political activities. The Hoover years — in which J. Edgar erected quite a fiefdom for himself, giving rise to the moniker “J. Edgars” for FBI agents — has served as a casebook on how a government operation is not supposed to work.

During the Trump years, agents were caught lying on FISA surveillance warrant applications to engage in a long-running coup attempt. More recently, it was shown in court that the FBI had encouraged the Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot.

On May 11, Representatives Jim Jordan and Mike Johnson co-signed a letter to Merrick Garland on the matter. Whistleblowers, they informed him, had confirmed the FBI was actually investigating concerned parents as “domestic terrorists” using the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division’s “threat tag” system.

Most investigations fizzled, since there was no real threat to be found on most tips, but the partisan slant of the tagging/targeting procedures suggests that the FBI has become, again, a deviously rogue agency pursuing partisan political goals.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Thought

Lin Yutang

My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier. . . . I am doing my best to glorify the scamp or vagabond. I hope I shall succeed. For things are not so simple as they sometimes seem. In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from being lost in serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed coolies. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him.

Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (1937), Ch. I : “The Awakening,” p. 12.
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Today

John Hancock

On May 24, 1775, John Hancock was elected president of the Second Continental Congress.

Hancock’s involvement with Samuel Adams and his radical group, the Sons of Liberty, won the wealthy merchant the dubious distinction of being one of only two Patriots (the other being Sam Adams) that the Redcoats marching to Lexington in April 1775 to confiscate Patriots’ arms were ordered to arrest. When British General Thomas Gage offered amnesty to the colonists holding Boston under siege, he excluded those same two men from his offer.

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international affairs too much government

Rebellion in Shanghai

For months now, Ratta, a Shanghai-based firm that makes an e-ink writing tablet called the Supernote, has been blocked from shipping its products as usual. Ratta’s shipping warehouse has been locked down to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Finally, when the lockdown proved endless, the company was able to move much of its shipping operations in-house and begin fulfilling long-delayed orders.

In Shanghai, life has become almost impossibly difficult. The city’s 26 million residents must resort to sometimes desperate measures to even eat.

Employees permitted to work at a company office are often prohibited from leaving that office. The government fences off apartment buildings when any residents test positive for COVID-19. Similar tyrannical measures are imposed in other Chinese cities.

It’s a classic non-cure-worse-than-disease scenario. The mild but super-infectious omicron version of COVID-19 has eluded all totalitarian expedients. Nevertheless, people are being killed to save them.

Shanghai residents have started to rebel, banging pots and pans from their balconies, pulling down the makeshift barbed-wire fences designed to confine them, taking to the streets to protest, producing songs and videos that go viral despite what National Review calls “the CCP’s watertight censorship.”

Singing China’s national anthem, now being censored, has also become an act of rebellion. It has a line about refusing to be slaves.

Can the protests succeed?

No government, no matter how powerful, is omnipotent. Ultimately, its ability to impose its will depends on the resistance of the people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Jacob Burckhardt

Nothing in the world is better suited to laziness than orthodoxy. If you gag your mouth, stop up your ears and put a blinder over your eyes, you can sleep peacefully.

Jacob Burckhardt was a teacher and reserved, cautious mentor to Friedrich Nietzsche.
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Today

The Liberator

On May 23, 1788, South Carolina became the 8th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

Other May 23 events include:

* 1813: South American independence leader Simón Bolívar entered Mérida, where he was proclaimed El Libertador (“The Liberator”), leading the invasion of Venezuela.

* 1900: Sergeant William Harvey Carney became the first African American to be awarded the Medal of Honor, for his heroism in a Civil War battle fought 37 years prior, in 1863.

* 1958: Birthday of American comedian and game show host Drew Carey.

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by Paul Jacob video

Watch: How Few Politicians…

Just how sneaky can politicians get? Enough to make us spend a lot of effort and money to counter-act their lies.

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Thought

G.K. Chesterton

I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities — and found no statues of Committees.

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Thought

Auberon Herbert

If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force. Force is the very weakest and most treacherous of all human implements. 

Auberon Herbert, “The Ethics of Dynamite,” The Contemporary Review (Volume 65, 1894), p. 686.
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Today

Term limits

On May 22, 1995, in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Arkansas’s congressional term limits law, 5-4, overturning the congressional term limits then the law in 23 states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

Other May 22 events include

* 1856: South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks savagely beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in the halls of Congress as tensions rise over the expansion of slavery. Sumner did not return to the Senate for three years while he recovered.

* 1848: Slavery was abolished in Martinique.

* 1807: A grand jury indicted former Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr on a charge of treason. Burr (in portrait, above) was later acquitted.