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End the Great American Myth: Secession, Not Revolution

Posted by M. C. on December 24, 2020

Nothing would give Klaus Schwab and The Davos Crowd more pleasure than turning us into them — willing to use indiscriminate violence to push otherwise humble and decent people into crazed killers and repudiate their inherent meekness, their inherent desire to pursue their bliss, allowing everyone else that same courtesy.

But, leftism as practiced today, is aggressive. It is rapacious and rests on the idea that no one can exist outside their preferred outcome lest anyone see their world for the nightmare it truly is.

Secession is not only not an option, it is expressly verboten.

https://tomluongo.me/2020/12/22/end-american-myth-secession-not-revolution/

Author: Tom Luongo

I remember the 1970’s driving around New York City with my family during the holidays like they were yesterday.

Back then the talk in the front seat of the car between my parents was New York City’s bankruptcy. My dad, NYPD at the time, was as much a part of this as anyone since the Police pension fund helped bail out the city government back then.

The West Side Highway fell down and because of that I grew up with a fear of heights and, especially bridges. I really hated taking the back way (New Jersey) into Staten Island. The mere mention of the Outer Bridge crossing would nearly put me into a panic attack.

I remember thinking then, “If these people can’t pay the bills now, what’s it going to be in ten or twenty years?” Sure, I was a naive ten or eleven at the time and had no idea about capital flight, but the sentiment was sound.

Even then the Emperor was naked to this child’s eyes. This was Rome near the end and the Sword of Damocles hung over the heads of my generation in ways we could barely articulate.

So, for me, the idea of the U.S. breaking up into its component parts has been a constant companion most of my adult life. And, as a libertarian, I always think in terms of secession first, rather than revolution. It sits on my shoulder whispering in my ear the truth of what’s in front of us.

We’ve reached a very important moment in world history. It is that moment where the promises of classical liberalism are failing in the face of a creeping totalitarian nightmare.

America as mythology has always stood as the ‘shining house on the hill’ for this enlightened idea that the wishes of the individual pursuing his bliss creates the community and culture which lifts the world out of a Hobbesian State of Nature.

The war of all against all, (bellum omnium contra omnes).

But America as Mythology and America as Reality are two vastly different rough beasts. And it is that difference between them that is being exploited today by The Davos Crowd to set the process in motion for their next victory.

Brandon Smith at Alt-Market brought up the trap conservatives are being led into today in his recent article. He argues, quite persuasively, that the ‘right’ is being radicalized into thinking about an armed civil war to fight the corporatist left-wing useful idiots in an orgy of violence.

To be clear, what I believe is happening is that conservatives are being prodded and provoked, not to separate and organize but to centralize. I think they want us to support actions like martial law which would be considered totalitarian. Conservatives, the only stalwart defenders of civil liberties, using military suppression and abandoning the Bill of Rights to maintain political power? That is a dream come true for the globalists in the long term. And despite people’s faith in Trump, there are far too many banking elites and globalists within his cabinet to ensure that such power will not be abused or used against us later.

Nothing would give Klaus Schwab and The Davos Crowd more pleasure than turning us into them — willing to use indiscriminate violence to push otherwise humble and decent people into crazed killers and repudiate their inherent meekness, their inherent desire to pursue their bliss, allowing everyone else that same courtesy.

But, leftism as practiced today, is aggressive. It is rapacious and rests on the idea that no one can exist outside their preferred outcome lest anyone see their world for the nightmare it truly is.

Secession is not only not an option, it is expressly verboten.

I’ve made the argument that violence, not secession, is one very possible outcome of where the current political divide is taking us. Brandon uses the situation in Germany in the 1920s/30s as his historical guide. In short, Fascism rose to meet the violence of the Communists with the old monied elite providing the means for the conflict.

The parallels to today are striking. In November’s issue of Gold Goats ‘n Guns I likened the rising frustration of the American right to that of the Fremen Jihad of Frank Herbert’s classic Dune.

When you marginalize the tens of millions of people who produce the goods which sustain their false reality, when you remove their ability to speak their mind and make their voices heard, when you insult them, berate them, hector them and beat them then you will bear the consequences when the sleeper awakens, in Herbert’s words.

This isn’t a threat or an open letter of defiance. This is an observation of what always comes next. These people know that they have been lied to, their children spiritually separated from them. The election was a cruel joke meant to rub our noses in their complete power over us. You can
see it every day on Twitter.

What comes next will benothing short of a Fremenesque jihad by the 70+ million people who voted for Donald Trump. If his allies prove the systematic thievery of the election it will fuel a simmering anger to boiling over into a near-religious frenzy.

Because these are people who still believe in the Mythology of America, they are very susceptible to this programming. That mythology is worth fighting for in their minds.

Brandon Smith, however, is making a finer point which I tend to agree with. And that is that secession, not revolution, is always the better option rather than the pre-packaged violent one which the oligarchs always seem to prepare for us.

To broaden Brandon’s point, I want to challenge the precepts of that American mythology in the hope we can avoid the kind of religious war that is brewing.

There are two wars which bear most of the weight of that mythology — The American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War.

The first one is the good war. It is the foundation of the mythology. We know the narrative: brave colonials fought a war of independence, a war of secession, from the evil English. It brought forth the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence and all the symbology of our shared American identity.

That mythology, while simplistic, held a core truth, that there are some things worth fighting for, when pushed to an extreme.

However, was 1770’s America that extreme a place? Was war the only practical outcome? Or was it the dream of those men whose tolerance for tyranny shallower than the norm. In other words, could America have seceded more peacefully in ten or twenty years’ time?

Viewed that way, this was a war of secession that the English and the Colonies didn’t have to fight. There may have been an equitable way out of conflict. But the colonies chose war just as much as the Crown did if we’re being honest with ourselves.

The Civil War, on the other hand, is supposed to be the shameful one. And from the Mythology side it truly is. Lincoln’s war can only be characterized as a war to prevent secession in the same way that Crown fought to prevent the colonies from seceding.

The mythology states this was the war we had to fight to prevent slavery’s survival into the 20th century. But, was it that? Slavery may have been a dividing line to stoke the passions but it wasn’t the big factor driving the states apart, the Tariff of Abomination was.

Again, if we’re being honest with ourselves wasn’t Lincoln’s war where the ideals of the American Revolution – a compact between the sovereign states – were finally betrayed?

Aren’t we reaping the whirlwind of that war today with a Supreme Court who believes it has the power to ignore interstate grievances because none of the justices, even Thomas and Alito, believe in the compact of equals today?

Remember, the South was more than willing to leave in peace. And any reasons Lincoln had for fighting the war over the seizure of Federal property, i.e. the proximate cause for the events at Fort Sumter, could have been worked out, again, equitably as gentlemen, rather than through the butchering of 600,000 Americans over four years.

From the Mythology Lincoln is the Great Uniter and Buchanan, his predecessor, the Worst President in History simply because he refused to either bail out the railroad banks in 1857 or prevent the South’s secession in 1860.

What if the mythology of America today has these two wars backwards? What if all the conservatives mourning the Constitution today thanks to a feckless Supreme Court and treasonous Congress have it all wrong? What if the America they mourn the death of today died in 1865 not 2020?

Would that America still be worth finally fighting a bloody civil war for? Because that’s what The Davos Crowd is daring Donald Trump to do.

What if the better response is to do what the South tried to do and failed.

Simply walk away and say, “No more.”

Because fighting the bloody war of all against all, becoming raving fascists rising up to stop the rapacious (and economically backwards) communists in the process is always the wrong option.

Secession is always an option. Opting out of the hyper-collectivizing impulses of in-group/out-group bias is always the right choice. They want us to throw the first punch, to lash out, fire first out of fear, c.f. Fort Sumter, to justify their brutality afterwards.

But, as I said in the quote above, the states with the grievances today are the ones that produce the wealth of this fiction known as the U.S. It’s where the food is grown, the electricity generated, the goods produced and people aren’t shitting in the streets.

The food lines may be long in Texas but there’s still food to distribute.

The balance of power in the U.S. today in real terms is reverse of what existed in 1860. Post-Trump America looks a lot different than pre-Lincoln.

Because of that and the reality that the people pulling off this great coup against sanity are some of the most unimpressive leaders in history, the potential for a successful secession is far higher than it was for the Confederacy.

Brandon Smith is right that they invoke the Confederacy to shame conservatives as racists, conflating issues separated by more than 150 years of history. This is why the all-out assault on the history of the war, whitewashing it of any nuance.

Theirs is a mind-virus that grows beyond the ability of the oligarchy to control. And it is truly best to not just walk but run away from such people. Better to let them sink into their own cesspit of ideological rabbit holes while keeping the lines of trade open, if they have anything worth selling, of course.

They will turn on themselves soon enough.

Having grown up a Yankee and matured as a Southerner I’ve seen this descent of the American mythology from both perspectives. The eleven year-old me knew this day would come.

The Mythology of America is just that, mythology, worth using as the basis for the new story rather than a shackle keeping us chained down, staring at the Abyss and despairing at what was lost.

New York was a dream not a fixture in the night sky. God didn’t put his finger on the Empire State Building and spin the world.

Because Texas was too big for it to ever stay in balance, even if he did. And California is one bad day away from Big One which washes it from our memory.

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Pelosi’s “Mandate”: What “Consent of the Governed” Really Means | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 23, 2020

So, even if we define “the governed” or “the people” as merely the adults—most of whom presumably pay taxes, by the way—then neither Biden nor Trump managed to even get a plurality, let alone a majority. The plurality of these American adults chose to vote for neither of these candidates.

The plurality of people did not bother. Disdain, ignorance, apathy…?

https://mises.org/wire/pelosis-mandate-what-consent-governed-really-means

Ryan McMaken

The 2020 election failed to live up to the projections of many pollsters and Democratic strategists. The predicted landslide failed to materialize, and the Democrats lost seats in the House. This means in 2022 the Democrats will be defending a razor-thin majority in the House—a majority they’re almost certain to lose in a midterm election if Biden is the final victor. The Democrats did well. But not that well.

Nonetheless, Nancy Pelosi in the days following the election reportedly declared the Democrats “have a mandate!” But do they?

ye-join-button_250x55.png

Let’s consider what constitutes a democratic victory given the standard handed down to us by pundits and politicians on the left. According to the current narrative, the legitimacy of a president’s electoral victory depends on the number of votes he receives through the “popular vote.” That is, when it comes to votes from the overall national population, the candidate with a majority—or a plurality, depending on the standard one is using—ought to be declared the victor.

At this time, it appears the popular vote doesn’t exactly scream “landslide” for the presumed winner, Biden, no matter how you look at it. Biden’s popular election tally in 2020—as in most presidential contests—failed to get much more than a bare majority. This time, it came in at slightly above 51 percent, according to the government’s numbers.

In other words, nearly half of those who voted, voted against Biden.

Only in Washington could anyone spin this as a “mandate” to rule in whatever manner the Democrats wish. The US Senate, of course—no matter how Georgia’s runoff elections go—will be about evenly divided. In the House of Representatives, the Democrats will, at best, capture 51 percent of all seats.

The Consent of the Governed?

The vulgar version of democratic theory generally used by Washington politicians and the US news media stipulates that whichever party (or coalition of parties) receives a majority of votes has the consent of the governed.

Yet, “the governed” does not include merely those who voted in the election. It’s problematic enough that the 51 percent who voted for the victors gets to rule over the 49 percent who voted for someone else. But in this scenario we’re not only talking about people who actually voted. After all, it’s not just active voters who are subject to the laws and diktats of the regime.

So, how many of “the governed” have actually voted for Joe Biden?

If we look to the population in its entirety, the percentage who have signed off on a Biden presidency is rather small. Out of the 330 million residents in the United States—a group we can plausibly refer to as “the governed,” 81 million of them reportedly voted for Biden. That comes to around 24 percent of the total.

At the same time, about 22 percent of the whole population voted for Donald Trump. That means 53 percent of “the governed” either voted for someone other than Trump or Biden, or didn’t vote at all. It also means about 75 percent of the population did not vote for Biden. 

mand

It’s hard to spin this as a case of “the people” signing off on the Democratic Party’s—or any party’s—agenda.

Some might take exception to this on the grounds that I’ve included children in the total. Of course, some hard-core small-d democrats on the left insist that children should indeed get to vote.  And given that today’s children will be paying trillions of dollars in interest on today’s national debt, it’s not as if children are irrelevant. But for the sake of argument, let’s include only the adult population among “the governed.” 

According to the Federal Register, the “estimated voting age population” in the United States as of 2019 was 255 million. That’s just people over 18. 

What proportion of the adult population cast a vote for Joe Biden?

The answer is 31 percent, or less than one-third. The total for Donald Trump was 29 percent, according to the official account. That means nearly 40 percent of eligible voters either voted for someone else, or didn’t vote at all. It also means nearly 69 percent of voting-age Americans did not vote for Biden. 

mand

So, even if we define “the governed” or “the people” as merely the adults—most of whom presumably pay taxes, by the way—then neither Biden nor Trump managed to even get a plurality, let alone a majority. The plurality of these American adults chose to vote for neither of these candidates.

In the actual US electoral system, of course, one clearly does not need to obtain a majority of the popular vote to win. The legal victor is whoever gets the most electoral votes, regardless of how many eligible voters participate. Many presidents have won the presidency—e.g., Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy—without ever winning a majority of votes cast.

Yet the popular narrative underlying pundits’ and politicians’ appeal to democracy is that winners obtain moral legitimacy—not to be confused with legal authority—by “getting the most votes.” We see, however, that more often than not a majority of the adult population—and a lopsided majority of the overall population—never casts a vote for the victor.

Moreover, there is no reason to assume that those who voted for the winner all did so for the same reason. Do all of the tens of millions of Biden voters or Trump voters cast their votes with identical policy preferences in mind? It’s clear they do not and have not. Thus, there can be no mandate, and it would be nonsensical to conclude that it is even possible that the electoral victor, in the face of such a large and diverse voting population, can “represent” his constituents in any meaningful way.

But old myths of democracy die hard, and the winners in contests like the 2020 election will predictably spin their victories as a type of democratic mandate while portraying themselves as the instrument of “the will of the people.” Many Americans will believe them.

Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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Covid-19 catch-22: Regime-change policies come packed with US pandemic relief | The Grayzone

Posted by M. C. on December 23, 2020

While the US public was forced to grovel for months for a $600 direct payment, the same piece of legislation pumps billions of dollars into “democracy programs” — US government code for regime-change operations via civil society NGOs — and foreign military assistance. The measly $600 survival checks pale in comparison to the massive foreign spending on regime change and titanic allocations to prop up US-friendly authoritarian militaries.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/12/22/covid-regime-change-us-pandemic-relief/

Alexander Rubinstein and Jeb Sprague

The longest piece of legislation in United States history, containing both a coronavirus relief package and the annual omnibus spending package, quickly passed through Congress on December 22, with little opposition. While technically separate bills, the omnibus and stimulus were debated and passed together, at the same time.

The massive piece of legislation — a staggering 5,593 pages in length — lays bare the priorities of the US government, prioritizing regime change in foreign nations and the imperatives of empire over the basic needs of Americans.

In just a few hours, it passed through the House of Representatives by 359-53, and through the Senate by 92-6.

While the US public was forced to grovel for months for a $600 direct payment, the same piece of legislation pumps billions of dollars into “democracy programs” — US government code for regime-change operations via civil society NGOs — and foreign military assistance. The measly $600 survival checks pale in comparison to the massive foreign spending on regime change and titanic allocations to prop up US-friendly authoritarian militaries.

On so-called “Democracy Programs” alone, the legislation appropriates $2.417 billion, and $6.175 billion on the “Foreign Military Financing Program.” Another $112.9 million is appropriated for “International Military Education and Training.”

$6 billion more is allocated toward the domestic procurement of US Air Force missiles and US Navy weapons of war. This is in addition to the $740 billion defense bill passed earlier in December.

By contrast, the stimulus package comes at a value of $900 billion, with the largest portion devoted to business bailouts.

The Federal News Network reports that the $1.4 trillion omnibus includes $671.5 billion allocated to “base defense spending,” with another $77 billion going to “overseas contingency operations.”

Some unnecessary nuance meant to obfuscate a political reality which reveals how little the US government cares about its citizens: the foreign funding is in the omnibus bill and coronavirus relief in a stimulus bill, but the bills were combined into a single piece of legislation pic.twitter.com/7aCXRMcOeX

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) December 22, 2020

Stimulating regime change and intervening in the Global South

The legislation stipulates: “$300,000,000 shall be made available for a Countering Chinese Influence Fund to counter the malign influence of the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party and entities acting on their behalf globally.”

In Hong Kong, where CIA cutout the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has given financial support to activist groups leading riots that rocked the city for months on end, the United States is now devoting $3 million for local destabilization efforts, including “internet freedom,” activists’ legal fees, and “democracy programs.”

Similarly, the legislation devotes $8 million to NGOs for activities in Tibet or to support the Tibetan government-in-exile. It appears that, every fiscal year between 2021 and 2025, it allows for the additional appropriation of $8 million per year to support Tibetan communities in Tibet, as well as $6 million per year to support them in Nepal and India, and another $3 million per year for “Tibetan governance.”

The bill also allocates $3.3 million for the US government-backed media outlet Voice of America, and $4 million to the similarly operated Radio Free Asia every year between fiscal years 2021 and 2025, in order “to provide uncensored news and information in the Tibetan language to Tibetans, including Tibetans in Tibet.”

In perhaps the most bizarre appeal to a regime-change activist lobby, an entire section of the bill is devoted to defining US policy “regarding the succession or reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.”

US Covid relief bill Dalai Lama

The bill also directs the secretary of state to establish a US consulate in Tibet.

Meanwhile, aid to a number of countries is conditioned on their taking part in Washington’s economic aggression. For example, $85.5 million in assistance to Cambodia is contingent on it “taking effective steps” to enforce “international sanctions with respect to North Korea,” and “assert[ing] its sovereignty against interference by the People’s Republic of China.”

US Covid relief Cambodia China North Korea

As for Latin America, the legislation stipulates that “not less than $33,000,000 shall be made available for democracy programs for Venezuela.” By contrast, the legislation appropriates $461.3 million for Colombia, a country which has seen massacre after massacre and scores of political assassinations — with more than 290 human rights activists killed in 2020 alone.

While 20 percent of the funds are not releasable until Colombia shows it is “taking effective steps to hold accountable perpetrators of gross violations of human rights in a manner consistent with international law,” given Washington’s record in the country, it will likely give the green light regardless of the facts on the ground.

Globally, $70 million is made available to support “internet freedom,” with an additional $2.5 million potentially available “to surge Internet freedom programs in closed societies.”

Meanwhile, a Ronald Reagan-inspired program aimed at expanding US influence and the “war on drugs” in the Caribbean, the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, is being given a $74.8 million injection.

The combined Corona Package/Omnibus includes $74m for the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative.

The CBSI w/its roots in the Reagan founded CBI is an important mechanism for the “war on drugs” & gains US influence in security agencies across the region.

Pg.184 of my recent book: pic.twitter.com/4CP8Lnfm8v

— Jeb Sprague (@JebSprague) December 22, 2020

In Zimbabwe, where former President Robert Mugabe passed away in 2017, the government is still not off the hook. The legislation states: “The Secretary of the Treasury shall instruct the United States executive director of each international financial institution to vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan or grant to the Government of Zimbabwe.” This language is aimed at depriving the cash-strapped African nation of international relief.

$15 million is going toward “democracy programs” in South Sudan, while $60m is being repurposed away from the “Global War on Terrorism” and “made available for assistance for Sudan”.

In central Africa, $325 million is being earmarked for assistance to Congo, with some part of this appearing to be intermingled with “peacekeeping” operations.

The phantom Russian menace

With $453 million appropriated for assistance to Ukraine, $290 million for “countering Russia,” $173 million for NATO, and $132 million for NATO ally Georgia, the legislation comes close to appropriating a billion dollars toward new cold war policies against Moscow.

US Covid relief bill Ukraine

The rationale for this spending may be the re-emergence of an old menace; a hint buried more than 5,000 pages into the document states that it is US policy “to not recognize any incorporation of Belarus into a ‘Union State’ with Russia, since this so-called ‘Union State’ would be both an attempt to absorb Belarus and a step to reconstituting the totalitarian Soviet Union.”

In one striking example of how hell-bent the legislation’s authors are on regime change and confronting Russia, the following phrase appears verbatim nine times: “The Government of Belarus, led illegally by Alyaksandr Lukashenka.”

The legislation also demands a report from the director of national intelligence, the secretary of state, and the secretary of treasury that identifies all of Lukashenka’s assets and those of his family, plus “identification of the most significant senior foreign political figures in Belarus, as determined by their closeness to Alyaksandr Lukashenka.”

The insistence on such information seems aimed at fast-tracking a list of entities to impose sanctions, in an effort to destabilize the country and make it ripe for a takeover by the US- and EU-backed opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskay, whose name appears six times in the legislation.

Along with detailed attention on cyber activities in Belarus, the bill explains how US officials will put together a comprehensive strategy and cost estimate for carrying out various operations aimed at the country, one of which includes: “Expand independent radio, television, live stream, and social network broadcasting and communications in Belarus to provide news and information, particularly in the Belarusian language, that is credible, comprehensive, and accurate.”

Middle East madness

As the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden has promised not to condition aid to Israel in any circumstance, including potential annexation of the West Bank, Congress has rushed to pump the apartheid regime full of fresh cash.

Of the $6.1 billion appropriated for funding foreign militaries, a whopping $3.3 billion — more than half — “shall be available for grants only for Israel,” and must be “disbursed within 30 days of enactment of this Act.”

US Covid relief bill Israel

Additionally, it appears that $500 million is appropriated for “Israeli Cooperative Programs,” which includes weapons procurements.

While it is difficult to interpret different allocations and far-distanced portions of the legislation going to the same target, one thing is clear: loads of money has been appropriated to a far-away apartheid state, as Americans remain unprotected from rent-related water shutoffs under the legislation.

The plan leaves people behind, with:
-NO support for adult dependents
-NO hazard pay for essential workers
-NO student loan relief
-NO recurring stimulus payment
-NO retroactive unemployment insurance
-NO water shutoff moratorium
-NO aid to states and local governments

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) December 22, 2020

Meanwhile, any aid to the Palestinian Authority will be held up if its officials initiate or support any kind of investigation at the International Criminal Court (ICC) that seeks the prosecution of Israeli nationals for crimes against humanity.

In neighboring Syria, which has been constantly bombed by Israel since the outbreak of the foreign-backed proxy war against the country’s government, Congress has appropriated $40 million toward ” non-lethal stabilization” — in other words, destabilization assistance.

While the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has largely been defeated, $710 million to counter the group remains “available until September 30, 2022”.

Iran, meanwhile, is mentioned 22 times in the legislation.

The ‘‘Afghanistan Security Forces Fund” of $3 billion will “remain available until September 30, 2022,” and is geared toward the “security forces of Afghanistan, including the provision of equipment, supplies, services, training, facility and infrastructure repair, renovation, construction, and funding…”

US Covid relief bill Afghanistan

The legislation also appropriates $250 million to reimburse the governments of Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Oman on border security spending, with $150 million going to Jordan, a geostrategic lynchpin that shares a borders with Iraq, Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian West Bank.

Another $241.4 million of appropriations through the “Department of State, foreign operations, and related programs” will be made “available for assistance to Tunisia.”

Egypt’s military, notorious for its repressive crackdowns on dissent, is due to receive a colossal $1.3 billion, according to the guidelines established in the Camp David Accords.

While US citizens continue to suffer the economic fallout of haphazard government shutdowns that have been largely ineffective in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, Congress passed a greatly reduced stimulus packaged alongside a massive handout to corporate America and its foreign client states.

Now it is up to the outgoing president — notorious for his “America First” rhetoric — to sign the legislation into law. Reports indicate he intends to do just that.

Alexander Rubinstein

Alexander Rubinstein has covered foreign policy, police, prisons, and protests for a variety of publications including The Grayzone and Mint Press News. Follow him on Twitter at @RealAlexRubi.

Jeb Sprague

Jeb Sprague is a Research Associate at the University of California, Riverside and previously taught at UVA and UCSB. He is the author of “Globalizing the Caribbean: Political economy, social change, and the transnational capitalist class” (Temple University Press, 2019), “Paramilitarism and the assault on democracy in Haiti” (Monthly Review Press, 2012), and is the editor of “Globalization and transnational capitalism in Asia and Oceania” (Routledge, 2016). He is a co-founder of the Network for the Critical Studies of Global Capitalism. Visit his blog at: http://jebsprague.blogspot.com

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Julian Assange’s Fiancée Sits Down With Revolver to Reveal Deep State’s Plot to Erase Our First Amendment – Revolver

Posted by M. C. on December 23, 2020

https://www.revolver.news/2020/12/revolver-exclusive-interview-julian-assange-fiancee-stella-moris-smith-robinson/

For years, America’s oligarch class has grown fat by betraying the country they rule over. They’ve outsourced the country’s wealth and well-being to China. They’ve embroiled the country in one disastrous war after another — wars that did nothing to make America safer but did a great deal to enrich the defense contractors who supplied them. They’ve colluded with Big Tech and Big Finance to gradually chip away at the basic rights that Americans once took for granted.

To the badly misnamed, oligarch-captured “intelligence community,” the imprisoned Wikileaks Editor and free speech activist Julian Assange remains Public Enemy Number One.

As head of Wikileaks, Assange published leaked documents from former Army soldier Chelsea Manning (born Bradley Manning). Manning has already gone free, but Assange has been a hunted man ever since. For seven years, Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid an unjust extradition on trumped-up charges.

In 2016, Wikileaks released emails from the DNC and John Podesta. These emails exposed how the Democrat Party rigged the primary race for Hillary Clinton. After an informed public unexpectedly rejected Hillary Clinton for president, Washington, D.C.’s rage against Assange boiled over. Assange was assigned a key role in the Russiagate conspiracy theory that charged Russia with handing Trump the 2016 election. In spring 2019, Ecuador revoked Assange’s asylum, and he was dragged out of the embassy to face extradition on more than a dozen espionage charges in the U.S. 

But another possibility exists. President Trump could thumb his nose at the Deep State’s decade-long obsession with persecuting Assange, and give him the pardon he deserves. Revolver has advocated just such a course.

Remarkably, a steadily-growing group of fair-minded patriots around the world have come together to ask for Assange’s freedom. Former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin had her emails published by Wikileaks in 2008, but on Saturday she called her prior attacks on Assange a ‘mistake’ and called on President Trump to pardon the Wikileaks publisher. Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz and Democrat Tulsi Gabbard have joined forces to endorse clemency for Assange as well. Actress Pamela Anderson wants clemency as well, as does Iranian dissident and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi.

A recent tweet by Pastor Mark Burns mistakenly announcing an imminent pardon for Assange has racked up nearly 200,000 likes on Twitter.

Stella Moris-Smith Robinson is a human rights lawyer who was born in South Africa. She was a member of Assange’s legal team during his stay at the Ecuadorian embassy. Now, she is his fiancée. The pair have two children together. Moris has spent years fighting relentlessly for Assange’s freedom, and she graciously agreed to join Revolver for an exclusive interview.

—

First off, many thanks for agreeing to do this interview and for your bravery in defense of Julian and his mission. Your appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight was powerful and remains a must see for patriots all over the world. Let’s start with the crime with which Julian is actually charged, a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. Is there any evidence at all that Julian committed espionage? From what I’ve seen he published classified information, which is something that all major newspapers have done, such as the New York Times. Also there are claims that he assisted his source Chelsea in hiding her identity — which is also a standard journalistic practice. So where’s the actual crime here?

There isn’t one. This is an unconstitutional, political case that has bent the law to suit its political objective. It turns necessary journalistic practices — communicating with a source and having and publishing true information — into crimes.

Saying that it is a crime for Julian to have published this material is as absurd as saying that US journalists are legally bound not to violate China’s, Turkey’s, or France’s secrecy or censorship laws, even though they are publishing in the U.S. Whatever those countries’ legislations have to say about that, I think we can all agree — that proposition cannot be correct. 

I sometimes hear Julian mentioned in the same breath as famous American whistleblowers. But their cases are different. They are American citizens. They worked for the US government. That does not apply to Julian. Julian is a publisher. He wasn’t in the United States. He wasn’t a government employee or a contractor. He never signed a confidentiality agreement. The only promise he made was to the public, to publish the truth about governments and corporations. Everyone has their role in a free society and Julian’s role is to publish.

The strength of the First Amendment is that it is simple, clear, absolute. It is truly exceptional when you compare it to equivalent rights in Europe, and that comes from the fact that it isn’t what people think it is. It doesn’t grant people rights that can be taken away. It bans lawmakers and the executive from interfering with speech and publishing. So what is unlawful is passing laws attempting to criminalize speech and the press. 

See the rest here

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Why Has the Flu Disappeared? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on December 23, 2020

They ‘overwhelmingly agree’ that this is so; their certainty is remarkable at this early stage. But why would these measures have worked so unintentionally well for flu, which has been with us for millennia, but Covid cases are still skyrocketing? Do masks let one particle through and stop another?

Flu disappeared because the government hands out a ton of money for COVID.

As noted by professor William M. Briggs, a statistical consultant and policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank, in the video above, “CDC, up until about July 2020, counted flu and pneumonia deaths separately, been doing this forever, then just mysteriously stopped … It’s become very difficult to tell the difference between these,” referring to the combined tracking of deaths from “PIC.” They’re even using PIC to state that cases are above the epidemic threshold:10

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/12/joseph-mercola/why-has-the-flu-disappeared/

By Joseph Mercola

Mercola.com

With COVID-19 still dominating headlines, influenza (flu) has been conspicuous in its absence, especially during what is typically peak flu season. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracks influenza (flu) and pneumonia deaths weekly through the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Mortality Reporting System.

It also creates a preliminary estimate of the burden of seasonal flu, based on crude rates of lab-confirmed flu hospitalizations. Such estimates are intended to give an idea of how many people have been sick from or died from the flu in any given season — that is, except for 2020.

“April 4, 2020, was the last week in-season preliminary burden estimates were provided,” the CDC wrote on its 2019-2020 U.S. flu season webpage.1 The reason the estimates stopped in April is because flu cases plummeted so low that they’re hardly worth tracking. In an update posted December 3, 2020, the CDC stated:2

“The model used to generate influenza in-season preliminary burden estimates uses current season flu hospitalization data. Reported flu hospitalizations are too low at this time to generate an estimate.”

They also added, “The number of hospitalizations estimated so far this season is lower than end-of-season total hospitalization estimates for any season since CDC began making these estimates.”3

Flu Deaths Plummet While COVID Cases Rise

In late summer 2020, warnings surfaced that there might soon be a “twin-demic” of flu and COVID-19 that would decimate the globe.4 So far, this hasn’t panned out. In the U.S., the CDC reported that the percentage of respiratory specimens submitted for influenza testing that test positive decreased from greater than 20% to 2.3% since the start of the pandemic.

As of September 18, 2020, they noted that positive influenza tests have “remained at historically low interseasonal levels (0.2% versus 1 to 2%).”5 Further, from September 29, 2019-February 29, 2020 to March 1-May 16, 2020, the CDC noted a 98% decrease in influenza activity.6

Similar drops have been observed worldwide, including in the Southern Hemisphere countries of Australia, Chile and Southern Africa, which often serve as sentinels for influenza activity in the U.S.

All three areas had very low influenza activity during June to August 2020, which is their peak flu season. From April to July 2020, only 33 influenza positive test results were detected in Australia; 12 in Chile; and six in South Africa, for a total of 51 positive tests. For comparison, during April to July in 2017 to 2019, 24,512 specimens tested positive for influenza.7

It was initially thought that the steep drops in influenza activity were due to decreased testing, since people with respiratory symptoms likely received COVID-19 tests instead. However, according to the CDC, public health officials have made a concerted effort to test for flu, and even though “adequate numbers” have been tested, little to no flu virus has been detected.

In Australia, meanwhile, they tested “markedly more specimens for influenza” this season than usual, yet still detected very few cases of flu.8 So what happened to the flu?

CDC Tracking Combines COVID, Flu and Pneumonia Deaths

The “COVID” deaths the CDC has been reporting are actually a combination of pneumonia, flu and COVID-deaths, under a new category listed as “PIC” (pneumonia, Influenza, COVID).

Their COVIDView webpage, which provides a weekly surveillance summary of U.S. COVID-19 activity, states that levels of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and “associated illnesses” have been increasing since September 2020, while the percentage of deaths due to pneumonia, flu and COVID-19 has been on the rise since October.9

As noted by professor William M. Briggs, a statistical consultant and policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank, in the video above, “CDC, up until about July 2020, counted flu and pneumonia deaths separately, been doing this forever, then just mysteriously stopped … It’s become very difficult to tell the difference between these,” referring to the combined tracking of deaths from “PIC.” They’re even using PIC to state that cases are above the epidemic threshold:10

“Based on death certificate data, the percentage of deaths attributed to PIC for week 49 was 14.3% and remains above the epidemic threshold.

The weekly percentages of deaths due to PIC increased for seven weeks from early October through mid-November and are expected to increase for the most recent weeks as additional data are reported. Hospitalization rates for the most recent week are also expected to increase as additional data are reported.”

Did Masks and Lockdowns Stop the Spread of Flu?

It could appear that flu hasn’t just vanished into thin air but rather cases could be being mistaken for COVID-19 — or even intentionally mislabeled as such. Another theory centers on viral interference, which is the phenomenon in which a cell infected by a virus becomes resistant to other viruses;11 basically, cells are rarely infected with more than one virus, so COVID-19 could be winning out over influenza.

However, with COVID-19 being such a novel virus, with reportedly only a minority of the population having been exposed, there should still be plenty of room for influenza to spread.12

According to the CDC, however, flu cases began to decline in response to “widespread adoption of community mitigation measures to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2.” In other words, they believe that flu cases have plummeted because of the widespread adoption of mask wearing, social distancing and lockdowns.

In their MMWR weekly report released September 18, 2020, they state, “In the United States, influenza virus circulation declined sharply within 2 weeks of the COVID-19 emergency declaration and widespread implementation of community mitigation measures, including school closures, social distancing and mask wearing, although the exact timing varied by location.”13

But here again this leaves many unanswered questions, the primary one being why, if the COVID-19 mitigation efforts are so effective against the spread of flu, are COVID cases still rising? The two viruses are spread basically the same way. As Irish science journalist Peter Andrews put it in RT:14

“The scientific establishment is quickly forming ranks behind the theory that the flu has gone away because of Covid restrictions — especially masks, social distancing and lockdowns.

They ‘overwhelmingly agree’ that this is so; their certainty is remarkable at this early stage. But why would these measures have worked so unintentionally well for flu, which has been with us for millennia, but Covid cases are still skyrocketing? Do masks let one particle through and stop another?

The proponents of this theory have an explanation. They claim that people with Covid are more contagious than those with flu. It has a longer ‘incubation period’ than flu does, and its ‘R rate’ is three times higher than that of flu. But even if all of these estimates were right, there is still the unanswered question of why flu would have been eradicated so completely.”

Problems With Lockdowns

When asked whether he believes lockdowns were responsible for getting rid of the flu, Briggs said in the video, “No, absolutely not. Lockdowns only help spread the flu … Locking down the healthy, quarantining the healthy, is asinine.” Briggs believes that lockdowns would only increase flu infection because the virus spreads more easily when people spend more time indoors, in close quarters with others, in dry, indoor air.

He also pointed to lockdown failures, like the one that occurred in New York City. The mortality rate from COVID-19 reached beyond 50 deaths per million per day in April 2020, despite a full lockdown being implemented in March. The state ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients from hospitals until May 10, when the order was reversed, but by then the virus was already ravaging nursing homes’ elderly residents — the most vulnerable.

“By facilitating the transmission of the virus from hospitals to nursing homes, the rate of spread within the elderly population was maximized, and any possible benefit from lockdown of the young and healthy population was rendered moot,” Dr. Gilbert Berdine, an associate professor of medicine at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, explained.15

Social Distancing and Masks to Stay to Fight Flu?

The CDC is already using the mysteriously low number of flu cases this season as an impetus to suggest that masks, school closures and social distancing could become the new normal every fall to combat the upcoming flu season:

“If extensive community mitigation measures continue throughout the fall, influenza activity in the United States might remain low and the season might be blunted or delayed. In the future, some of these community mitigation measures could be implemented during influenza epidemics to reduce transmission, particularly in populations at highest risk for developing severe disease or complications.”16

Meanwhile, even while stating that flu cases are next to nonexistent this season, and that the COVID-19 mitigation measures already in place are likely effective at curbing its spread — they still want you to get your flu shot, “especially this season”:17

“Given the novelty of the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertainty of continued community mitigation measures, it is important to plan for seasonal influenza circulation in the United States this fall and winter. Influenza vaccination of all persons aged ≥6 months remains the best method for influenza prevention and is especially important this season when SARS-CoV-2 and influenza virus might cocirculate.”

If you want to be proactive, it’s worth remembering that flu shots are controversial, and your chances of getting influenza after vaccination are still greater than 50/50 in any given year.

According to CDC data, for example, the 2017-2018 seasonal influenza vaccine’s effectiveness against “influenza A and influenza B virus infection associated with medically attended acute respiratory illness” was just 36%.18 Meanwhile, we already know that vitamin D optimization is a good idea, not only for COVID-19 but also for influenza.

Sources and References

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The reimagined police as servants of the left – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on December 23, 2020

Antifa and BLM were allowed to destroy huge swaths of many cities across America, rioting with impunity using firearms, bats, bricks, fireworks, Molotov cocktails, fists, and just about anything you can use to destroy property and physically harm people.

On the other hand, a group of Oregonians were barred from entering a public place to protest lockdowns that are destroying people’s lives.

To Serve and Protect is now To Arrest and Enforce…unless they don’t want to do that either.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/the_reimagined_police_as_servants_of_the_left.html

By Carol Brown

We back the blue, but will they back us?

Like most conservatives, I support the police and the vital role they serve in a civilized society.

But like many conservatives, watching them stand down on orders from blue-state mayors during months of riots was jarring.  (They even stood down during a Back the Blue rally in Denver when speakers were attacked.)

Many of us asked how the police could obey such orders and allow criminals to have free rein in our streets — criminals whose victims, I might add, included over 2,000 police officers.

Don’t police officers swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution?  Well, yes, they do.  In fact, that is their paramount responsibility.

Perhaps this year, it seems we witnessed the rule and not the exception — the rule being that most people, including the police, will be cowards in the face of tyrants.

I have to assume that many police officers struggled with the position they were in this year, as noted in a piece written by David Hudson at Law Enforcement Today:

There comes a time, and maybe more specifically, there will come a time, in which a law enforcement officer must remember what he or she swore to when taking this oath.  Remember that order is everything, and by that, I mean the U.S. Constitution comes first, then State Constitution. Everything else is subordinate.

A law enforcement officer’s oath of office dilemma is this: “Do I enforce a law that is in opposition to the United States Constitution?”  In the current climate we see that law enforcement officers may have to face this dilemma.  I urge you to read about the Constitution, the powers delegated to Congress by the Constitution, the applicable laws passed by Congress and Supreme Court case law. I ask you to be introspective on how you will deal with this dilemma, all while taking into account what you swore before God and Country.

But struggle as some may have, the end result was that they obeyed, and in so doing abdicated their primary oath.

It’s scary stuff that does not bode well for the future.

And yesterday, perhaps a bit of that future arrived when anti-lockdown protesters tried to gain entry to the Oregon State Capitol building, where the Legislature was holding a special session.  Breitbart reports:

While legislative sessions are normally open to the public, today’s was closed to anyone other than lawmakers, police, some staff, and reporters, the Oregon Statesman-Journal reported. Legislators met to attempt to pass pandemic-relief measures including landlord and tenant assistance.

It appears that some of the protesters showed up armed (some with firearms and at least one with a pitchfork).  Although Oregon is an open carry state, several cities have open carry bans in public places.  And as is the case in many open carry states, no firearms are allowed inside public buildings anywhere in the state.

So there’s that.

It also appears that some of the protesters were aggressive against the police (who were armed and in full riot gear), spraying them with tear gas and bear spray.


YouTube screen grab.

For their part, the police appeared to get aggressive, pushing, using pepper spray, and shooting people at close range with rubber bullets.  Four people were arrested.

This event was complicated.  Among other things, it highlighted how differently the police may respond to one group and not another.

Antifa and BLM were allowed to destroy huge swaths of many cities across America, rioting with impunity using firearms, bats, bricks, fireworks, Molotov cocktails, fists, and just about anything you can use to destroy property and physically harm people.

On the other hand, a group of Oregonians were barred from entering a public place to protest lockdowns that are destroying people’s lives.

One would have hoped the police could have found a way to funnel people through a door and check for weapons, weeding out those who had them.  But maybe not.  I’m not a police officer, but I understand enough to realize that heated situations are complex and dangerous.  But aren’t they trained to handle such situations?

It was maddening to see the disparity between how rioters were given free rein all year while folks in Oregon were met with the full force of the law.

And this is a huge concern, because I fear that the police may be slowly morphing into an arm of the Democrat party to be used against citizens in ways that target conservatives and allow Marxists to roam free, destroying everything in their path.  This is one way I fear the left plans to “reimagine” the police.  Law enforcement can become a tool at the disposal of tyrants to inflict grave harm and further corral the citizenry into submission.  (See here for an AT blog post from 2013 that addresses this very thing.)

Yesterday’s event in Oregon also highlights how it feels like a powder keg is about to blow across this country.  Citizens are enraged and feel powerless.  It feels as though the stolen election was the final straw.  If the ballot box is rigged, then what’s left?  When you lose your voice in a civilized society, what remains?  Violence, I’m afraid.

This situation also highlights a phenomenon that probably has a name, but far be it from me to know it.  It goes like this: the left creates an environment that locks us out of power and silences our voice.  All the while, they accuse us of being “extremists” and “terrorists” even though we’re peaceful, law-abiding citizens.

But then they push us up against the wall such that we feel out of options.  It is at this point that otherwise law-abiding and peaceful citizens may express their rage in violent ways for lack of any other choice.  And in so doing, they become the thing they were falsely accused of being all along.  Their now violent actions confirm in the minds of the mindless that, you see, they are extremists and terrorists!

It’s a trap, part of the tangled, dark, evil sickness that is enveloping us from which we must break free.

To read more about what happened in Oregon yesterday, see here and here.  Normally, I would summarize more, but these days, it’s hard to know what to believe that’s in print, another sad sign of the times.

Please God give us strength and show us a path through.

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Red and Blue States: It’s Time for a Multistate Solution | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 23, 2020

With that in mind, we must ask: Why should America be a single country at all? The states have for years already been working to nullify federal legislation on guns, drugs, healthcare, immigration, the environment, and police militarization. Why hold the states together in a union whose diktats they each want to escape? That steady resistance is unlikely to do anything but grow. Last month, after one of Biden’s top covid policy advisors called for a national lockdown, more than a dozen Republican governors expressed their refusal to comply. How much more will it take before states decide to just walk away entirely?

On the campaign trail, Biden identified himself as a “transition candidate” for a deeper, more radical leftism coming down the line. First, the likes of Kamala Harris will take the reins of the country; then, AOC and “the Squad.” 

https://mises.org/wire/red-and-blue-states-its-time-multistate-solution

James Ketler

Far from being a unitive force, powerful, centralized government only serves to pit blocs of the electorate against each other. Division grows in lockstep with the ceaseless expansion of federal power, and the 2020 presidential election was a mere symptom of how heated that division has become. How much worse can it get? That remains to be seen. After Joe Biden’s contested presidential win, the country may have to break apart into multiple independent political units if it is to avert further social disintegration.

Power and Polarization

To win elections, candidates must pander to the lowest common political denominator; i.e., they must promise to expand wide-reaching projects like social security, public healthcare, economic stimulus, and the military. In fact, candidates are incentivized to outpromise one another and when in power to follow through on carrying out at least some of those promises in the interest of reelection. The mass-democratic structure lubricates this process, as costs are distributed across the entire population and thus become more or less “hidden.” That’s led to a constant, creeping growth in government power, behind which Republicans and Democrats almost always form a united front. As Tom Woods says: “No matter who you vote for, you always wind up getting John McCain.” Within that statist unity, however, exist the seeds of electoral division.

Old, widely accepted government programs are used by politicians as a springboard for new, more expansive powers. Consider, for instance, the Green New Deal; it could only have been seriously proposed because of the broad-based support the New Deal programs have today. Each new law, regulation, bureau, and program is like a brick on top of which many others can be laid. Government seldom abrogates any of its power, tending instead towards constantly expanding it. That raises the stakes higher and higher with each successive election, with the winning party taking office with more power than ever before.

Centrally, as vote seekers, candidates must always work to demonize the opposition and distance themselves from them. To safeguard their own interests, voters must factionalize behind one candidate or the other, often coming to develop a deep, politico-cultural affinity with their choice, though they may only be the “lesser of two evils.” This drives a sharp wedge down the center of the political spectrum, pushing both sides further and further apart. As competing ideologies vie for control of the system, smaller and more amicable politico-cultural disputes thus become the faultlines of national fractionation. Many nuanced opinions are pounded into the ground and replaced, instead, by the Republican-Democrat binary. These two sides look at politics with irreconcilable politico-cultural presuppositions, driving each side—as both fight for control of the same system—to hate the other.

Once one party seizes control of the federal apparatus, it tries to solidify support from independents and moderates, while also working to “punish” its political rivals. From the enlightened, liberal principles that originally drove its adoption in the West, democracy has melted and deformed—as it was always inevitably bound to—into an arena of open-faced realpolitik. Both parties seek to win by any means necessary, and the losers must always “accept the results of the election”—that is, have the will of the majority imposed upon them. It’s a system that neither side can consistently accept and that both—for the good of the people—must agree to reject.

America’s Division Crisis

Nearly eight in ten Republican voters agree that this year’s presidential election was rigged against President Trump through the perpetration of widespread voter fraud. Biden’s “win” was, as they see it, a fait accompli—predetermined before the first vote was cast. The legitimacy of the past few elections have been widely contested, moreover, as with, for instance, the Democrats’ accusations of Russian interference in 2016. After years of investigations and hearings, at least, those accusations were proven false, but this time around, further inquiry into the Republicans’ claims of voter fraud have been blocked by the mainstream media and the Washington establishment. With just cause, therefore, Trump loyalists have grasped at every legal recourse they can find in hopes that something will stick. But the bid to overturn the election was, from its inception, a long shot. On January 20, the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump will be forced under the yoke of a Biden presidency, which will only serve to turn up the heat in the country even more.

Nevertheless, Joe Biden has continuously tried to position himself as a moral leader who will “unite” the nation. In his November 7 victory address, he said, “I will govern as an American president. I’ll work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did.” Does anyone, though, actually believe that? Biden’s politics have differed over the years, but it’s clear that his 2020 agenda is by far further to the left than that of any other president in American history. At his side is Kamala Harris, who was rated the most progressive senator in all of Congress last year. How can anyone pretend to imagine that the next administration will be at all “unifying”? Better yet, how can anyone think any modern presidency will bring America together? Since 2016, the Democratic Party has freely embraced the tenets of socialism and radical progressive politics, while the rise of Trump helped fuel the growth of a new “America First” nationalist populism in the Republican Party. In just the past four years, the two parties have aggressively shifted away from each other and toward their ideological fringes. Moving forward, that split will likely only widen further.

On the campaign trail, Biden identified himself as a “transition candidate” for a deeper, more radical leftism coming down the line. First, the likes of Kamala Harris will take the reins of the country; then, AOC and “the Squad.” The Constitution-bashing, history-flipping platform of these soon-to-be party leaders will only exacerbate left-right tensions even further as they deal the coup de grâce to America’s founding principles. On the conservative side, Trump insiders have already pointed to the possibility of the outgoing president staging a comeback campaign in 2024. And if he doesn’t run himself, it’ll be one of his children, or his closest allies in Congress—perhaps Tom Cotton or Matt Gaetz. The “Trump brand” looks like it’s here to stay in the Republican Party, and, if it is, it will continue to focus on carrying out the MAGA agenda. In fact, after four years of Biden, the Trump camp may be more energized than ever before. As the national consciousness continues to fork apart all the more diametrically, friends and neighbors will become—in the affairs of state, at least—ever more bitter enemies, and the dream of a “united” US will fall further out of reach.

With that in mind, we must ask: Why should America be a single country at all? The states have for years already been working to nullify federal legislation on guns, drugs, healthcare, immigration, the environment, and police militarization. Why hold the states together in a union whose diktats they each want to escape? That steady resistance is unlikely to do anything but grow. Last month, after one of Biden’s top covid policy advisors called for a national lockdown, more than a dozen Republican governors expressed their refusal to comply. How much more will it take before states decide to just walk away entirely?

Secession would give states full sovereignty over their own affairs, so that voters could live under policies more friendly and suitable to their own local and regional interests. There would no longer be a system of national politics, through which voters control and domineer others hundreds of miles away. From the very earliest years of the republic, secession was considered a viable possibility. The United States was not considered a single, monolithic blob, as it often is today, but rather a voluntary confederation of free and independent states associated for the preservation of the common good. If the political tides turned and the Union ceased to be beneficial to its constituent parts, each was free to leave it. In 1816, Thomas Jefferson made this clear: “[I]f any state in the union will declare that it prefers separation….I have no hesitation in saying ‘let us separate.’ I would rather the states should withdraw, which are for unlimited commerce & war, and confederate with those alone which are for peace & agriculture.”

Though the public perception of secession has been radically altered since the Civil War, America’s founding principles respect the right of every state to leave the Union. At this point, the states’ reassertion of that right has been long overdue. Secession is now the only way for the millions of tired and fed-up Americans to protect their interests against federal tyranny. Without it, nothing else can prevent the eventual breakdown of the social order, which is looming in the country’s future.

Just this past summer, far-left looters clashed violently with right-wing groups and police in city streets across the nation from Portland to Kenosha. Some of the postelection “Stop the Steal” rallies have themselves led to dangerous confrontations, including stabbings in Washington, DC, and a shooting in Washington State. Indeed, a poll from September revealed that around 20 percent of voters in general would eagerly support the use of violence against their political opponents. Although the pivotal spark may have not yet arrived, the scaffolding for potential civil disaster is already in place. When the last straw breaks, will America spiral into chaos and insurrection, or will cooler heads agree to peaceful separation?

A Secessionist Moment

The idea of secession is, thankfully, neither alien nor farfetched to voters. In fact, widespread calls for secession have already been made in response to recent presidential elections. After Obama’s reelection, the White House’s “We the People” initiative was inundated by petitions from all fifty states to be granted the right of unilateral secession. When Trump was elected, Democrats in Oregon and California organized serious mass secessionist movements that almost led to both states holding referenda on the topic. With each new election, the politico-cultural divide in America grows deeper and a national breakup looks all the more alluring. The impending Biden presidency may be the drop that spills the bucket.

A poll from Hofstra University this past September found that 44 percent of Republican respondents were open to the possibility of seceding if Joe Biden was elected. For millions of Trump voters, self-determination is an essential component to preserving their families, finances, and ways of life. Even Rush Limbaugh—the “king of conservative talk radio”—recently pondered whether, without secession, right-wing ideals can ever truly “win” again. If some Republican-majority states managed to leave the Union, that might mean lower taxes, fewer regulations, the repeal of gun laws, a new gold standard, school choice, abortion bans, and a more free healthcare market across the board. As independent states, they may discover that Trumpian politics doesn’t actually represent them after all and instead forge paths more in line with their own local traditions. At last, political diversity would be allowed to emerge and flourish in these smaller, decentralized states, keeping the government more homegrown and orienting politics more toward the interests of the people.

What’s most promising is that a few recent murmurings of secession have actually come from GOP lawmakers. After the election, Price Wallace, a state congressman from Mississippi, expressed his interest in secession, followed by Congressman Randy Weber, who succeeded Ron Paul for Texas’s fourteenth congressional district seat. Weber’s secessionist endorsement helped generate attention for the Texas Nationalist Movement (or “Texit”), including a sudden spike in the group’s membership registrations. Weeks later, Texas state congressman Kyle Biedermann announced that when the Texas House resumes session in January, he’ll introduce a bill to allow a popular referendum on the question of secession. Seemingly in support of Biedermann’s proposal, the chairman of the Texas Republican Party, Allen West, then commented, “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a union of states that will abide by the constitution.” Evidently, state legislators are entertaining the notion, many with considerable interest.

America may be on the brink of a “secessionist moment,” and if it is, the time to dismount the surly tiger of big government is now. Like dominoes, the process need only begin with one single state and many more will surely follow. After everything, that’s the only real solution left for America—shaking hands, splitting up, and staying friends from afar, for clearly the country has already split apart in heart, mind, and soul, and at last this internal reality must be reflected in the legal reality. Author:

James Ketler

James Ketler is a high school student living in Massachusetts with his brother, sister, and parents. He became interested in libertarianism in 2015 after hearing about Rand Paul’s presidential campaign and followed the rabbit hole straight down to Mises and Rothbard. When he’s able to find the time, James loves to study and write about liberty, ethics, history, and economics.

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Rich Millennials Plot the End of Civilization | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 23, 2020

Mises saw it differently. “The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples’ want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers,” he wrote in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.

Where do these ideas come from? University faculty, of course. Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist and an emeritus economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst said he has been professionally arguing against capitalism’s selling points since his teaching career began, in 1967, but that his millennial students “are more open to hearing that message than their parents ever were.”

https://mises.org/wire/rich-millennials-plot-end-civilization

The New York Times managed to find some young people whose silver spoons provide a sour taste in their mouths. To hear them talk, their good fortune is making them sick. 

“I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible,” Sam Jacobs, 25, told the Times. Jacobs went off to college a normal young man and came back a socialist. Suddenly his family’s “extreme, plutocratic wealth” became too much of a burden for him. 

“He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism,” Zoë Beery wrote for the NYT, “and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.”

Wow, that is some self-loathing. If only Ludwig von Mises were able to counsel young Jacobs, whose grandfather founded Qualcomm and who is set to inherit $100 million. In his book Epistemological Problems of Economics, Mises wrote, “Through all the changes in the prevailing system of social stratification, moral philosophers continued to hold fast to the fundamental idea of Cicero’s doctrine that making money is degrading.”

Beery writes that wealth is concentrated in the upper brackets and “Millennials will be the recipients of the largest generational shift of assets in American history.” 

That doesn’t seem like a worrying thought; however, it is for Rachel Gelman, a thirty-year-old in Oakland, California, who described her politics to Beery as “anticapitalist, anti-imperialist and abolitionist.”

“My money is mostly stocks, which means it comes from underpaying and undervaluing working-class people, and that’s impossible to disconnect from the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery,” the guilty Gelman said. “Once I realized that, I couldn’t imagine doing anything with my wealth besides redistribute it to these communities.”

Mises saw it differently. “The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples’ want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers,” he wrote in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.

Elizabeth Baldwin is a thirty-four-year-old democratic socialist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was adopted from India by a white family when she was a baby. Now, thanks to her adoptive parents, she is wealthy, with a stock portfolio containing shares in Coca-Cola and Exxon-Mobil. 

But, she hates the thought of having her wealth tied up in multinational corporation shares and instead “would rather put my money into a community that has been denied economic resources and disrupts the system.” 

She’s directing her funds toward what she and other wealthy millennials describe as the “solidarity economy.” Fellow traveler and democratic socialist, Emma Thomas, a twenty-nine-year-old, described what she’s now investing in as “an economy that is about exchange and taking care of needs, that is cooperative and sustainable, and that doesn’t demand unfettered growth.”

“At some point, these numbers on a screen are imaginary,” Thomas told the Times. “But what’s not imaginary is whether you have shelter, food and a community. Those are true returns.”

Where do these ideas come from? University faculty, of course. Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist and an emeritus economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst said he has been professionally arguing against capitalism’s selling points since his teaching career began, in 1967, but that his millennial students “are more open to hearing that message than their parents ever were.”

We can only thank goodness the parents of these young people believed in serving customers and saving their wealth. This wealth was not created nefariously. As Murray Rothbard explained, “On the free market, it is a happy fact that the maximization of the wealth of one person or group redounds to the benefit of all.” 

What these millennials are up to is not to be ignored. As Mises wrote in his book Liberalism, “Modern civilization will not perish unless it does so by its own act of self-destruction.” Author:

Doug French

Douglas French is former president of the Mises Institute, author of Early Speculative Bubbles & Increases in the Money Supply, and author of Walk Away: The Rise and Fall of the Home-Ownership Myth. He received his master’s degree in economics from UNLV, studying under both Professor Murray Rothbard and Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

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