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crime and punishment ideological culture national politics & policies

The FBI vs. the Anarchs

antifa, gaslighting, terrorism, terrorist

Glenn Beck got a visit from the FBI.

It wasn’t one of “those” kinds of visits, where you don’t know whether to reach for your lawyer, your publicist or your . . . Get Out of Jail Free card.

The visit was arranged by Kash Patel, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As Mr. Beck tells the tale, this was all in response to his recent analyses of Antifa. 

“So we dove in head first, and we analyzed the Antifa network and we went from the street thugs to the support groups, eventually to the funding. To say the FBI was interested in this might be an understatement,” said Beck.

Beck is enthusiastic about the president’s defining of Antifa as a terrorist organization. 

Is this good?

Yes. And maybe no.

Yes, in that watching its leaders now flee the country is a joyous occasion; and yes, in that Antifa is a terrorist organization — and treating it as such is a recognition of fact, of reality. Governments shouldn’t operate under delusions or lies.

Antifa has been very localized in practice, engaging in violence on the streets of big cities from Washington, D.C., to Portland, Oregon.

And in most of those Democrat-run cities, the authorities have turned the other way, saying (as covered last week) that Antifa “doesn’t exist” and “isn’t a real thing.”

Local law enforcement should have started rooting out this vile nest of anarchs years ago. Making federal cases out of Antifa should not be necessary.

But maybe it is — since Antifa’s mob violence supports one national party and is so often given license by that party. While police and voters are supposed to ignore the masked “protesters’” violence because “they do not exist.”

As Glenn Beck relates, this trickery does not appear to be working any longer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Today

Leo Tolstoy

Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work. Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie, a more or less unconscious hypocrisy, camouflaging the lowest passions we possess.

Leo Tolstoy, written for 1908’s The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, but published later, in 1917, as quoted by Antony Flew, Equality in Liberty and Justice (2001), p. 89.
Categories
Today

Boundaries

On October 20, 1803, the United States Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase.

Exactly 15 years later, the Convention of 1818 signed between the United States and the United Kingdom which, among other things, settled the Canada-United States border on the 49th parallel for much of its length.

Categories
Update

A Few Isms … from Above

Women miss the ancient experience of being mainly with women, says Camille Paglia:

How Christendom replaced Jesus-as-God with Hitler-as-the-Devil — historian Alec Ryrie elaborates his thesis (discussed in these pages before) as developed in his newest book:

As the House of Representatives hold hearings on “UAPs,” ufologist Richard Dolan speculates what it all means. Caution — he believes that ETs are here now:

Meanwhile, the transit of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is on the other side of the Sun; it’s gone past perihelion; and NASA is not releasing any better images of the object, under cover (not implausible) of the federal government shutdown. Lots of discussion on YouTube. From all over the map. Happy searching. And for a search engine, try Freespoke.com.

Categories
Thought

J.S. Mill

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

John Stuart Mill, “The Contest in America,” Fraser’s Magazine (February 1862).

Categories
Today

The Surrender of Cornwallis

On October 19, 1781, representatives of British commander Lord Cornwallis handed over Cornwallis’s sword and formally surrendered to George Washington and the comte de Rochambeau, at Yorktown, Virginia. The Revolutionary War (or War for Independence, or Colonial Rebellion, or whatever you wish to call it) was over except for the paperwork.

Categories
Update

Splits

On October 16, 2025, the Anglican Communion split, officially, into two, with the breakaway group calling themselves the actual Anglican Union, and the churches aligned with the Church of England and the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury condemned as something close to heretics.

But that’s not the kind of thing we follow here at ThisIsCommonSense.org.

Speaking of big splits, Mt. Etna may be in the process of splitting into two, with a huge hunk of the mountain predicted to slide off in the Mediterranean Sea. That would be a disaster of possibly horrific proportions. In early June a massive eruption caught world attention. It may be worthwhile to follow current reporting.

But that is also not a topic for these pages.

More relevant are secessionists movements in these United States, with the recent votes, these last few years, in eastern Oregon, in which more than a dozen counties are in effect petitioning the Oregon legislature to be let go, so they can be united with Idaho. It’s called the “Greater Idaho Project,” and Paul Jacob has written about this in these pages.

The occasion for this update is the nifty map and article at Brilliant Maps.

Categories
Today

Leo Tolstoy

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908).

Categories
Today

An Auctorial First

On October 18, 1775, African-American poet Phillis Wheatley was freed from slavery, upon the death of her master. Widely appreciated in her day, she was the first African-American to publish a book.

Categories
ballot access incumbents political challengers Voting

You Have Entered the Incumbent Zone

gerrymandering, Louisiana, incumbents

“Would you agree that incumbent protection is one of those?” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito asked Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, arguing in the congressional redistricting case Louisiana v. Callais.

One of what, you ask? 

Alito was referring to the High Court’s 2023 ruling in Allen v. Milligan, where it declared: “A district will be considered reasonably configured if it comports with traditional districting criteria.”

Yes, Ms. Nelson acknowledged: “Incumbent protection has been considered a traditional districting criteria.”

That whopper stood out from the rest of the debate. While it certainly wasn’t the focus of this redistricting case heard by the Supremes on Wednesday, in this political Twilight Zone in which we reside — this crepuscular nightmare — let me submit for your consideration that we have just identified a rather large thumb placed on our electoral scales.

The aim of elections is not to guarantee any particular outcome. Yet, protecting incumbents means seeking a very, very particular outcome.

Elections should make sure that — above all else — the voting public shapes the government.

Definitely not that the government shapes the public. 

By drawing fancy lines for districts.

The founders worried most about monarchy and anarchy, kings and chaos. But they realized that three classes were especially dangerous in republics: secure government workers (“job holders”; bureaucrats), factions (partisans; special interests) and protected politicians (incumbents). To hear, from the highest court in the land, that the regular practice of creating and revising legislative districts routinely “and of course” protects incumbents can only lead to one conclusion:

Redistricting needs a full-scale, fundamental change.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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