‘It is unacceptable for the Director of the FBI or any civil officer to exercise his power in a way that targets one political class while doing favors for the other,” Greene’s office said.
I have always wondered about those Latin Mass Catholics!
WASHINGTON, D.C — Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray should be impeached for the agency’s role in targeting pro-lifers and Latin Mass Catholics, according to a resolution set to be introduced by Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“Under Wray’s watch, the FBI has intimidated, harassed, and entrapped American citizens that have been deemed enemies of the Biden regime. As such, Director Wray has turned the FBI into Joe Biden and Merrick Garland’s personal police force,” the resolution, first obtained by The Daily Caller, states. “The Soviet-style tactics used by the FBI against normal Americans are unprecedented in this country. FBI whistleblower Garret O’Boyle told congressional investigators that the FBI created a terrorist threat tag following the Dobbs Supreme Court decision in 2022.”
“O’Boyle confirmed that the purpose of the tag was to target pro-life individuals. On September 23, 2022, armed FBI agents in tactical gear raided the family home of Mark Houck, a pro-life Catholic and father of 7 young children, because he obstructed access to an abortion clinic,” the resolution states.
Houck later beat the charges in federal court, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews.
Wray “has become a lackey of the Biden regime, persecuting the enemies of his handlers, including both public and private citizens,” the resolution states.
The resolution states further:
FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin obtained a leaked FBI document that targets Traditional Latin Mass Catholics. The document, titled “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists (RMVE) and their interests in ‘Radical-Traditionalist Catholics’ or RTCs,” was reported out of the Richmond Field Office and dated for January 23, 2023. This leaked document outlined a plan for the FBI to spy on Catholics, particularly Latin Mass-attending Catholics, who, according to the document, have harbored “white supremacy.” The FBI document indicated intentions to have informants within the Catholic Church, on advice from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Congresswoman Greene’s office provided further comment to The Daily Caller. “It is unacceptable for the Director of the FBI or any civil officer to exercise his power in a way that targets one political class while doing favors for the other,” her office said.
While the resolution may not pass the U.S. Senate, it could have a chance in the House of Representatives. At a minimum, it would force Democrats to record a vote on the appropriateness of using the federal government to target conservative American citizens.
US military officials are walking back claims that a drone strike Central Command (CENTCOM) launched on May 3 in northwest Syria killed a senior al-Qaeda leader after evidence emerged that a civilian was killed.
When the strike was first launched in Syria’s northwest Idlib province, reports immediately emerged that the strike killed a sheep herder with no ties to any militant groups. The Associated Pressspoke with family members and neighbors of the victim, Lotfi Hassan Misto, who insisted he was innocent.
According to The Washington Post, Misto was a 56-year-old father of 10, and the paper spoke with terrorism experts who said it was unlikely he was affiliated with al-Qaeda.
“We are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official,” an unnamed military official told the Post. Another official claimed the person they killed was al-Qaeda but offered no evidence. “Though we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda,” the official said.
CENTCOM’s initial press release on the strike did not name the person they killed. Since then, the command has refused to share any details of the operation or say why they could have targeted the wrong person.
The US military is notorious for undercounting civilian casualties or lying about them. The Pentagon is also known for investigating itself and finding no wrongdoing, even in instances of significant civilian deaths, such as the August 2021 Kabul drone strike that killed 10 civilians, including seven children.
Those who today reasonably say that the defense of an island eighty miles off the coast of mainland China and five thousand miles from Hawaii (let alone the mainland United States) cannot possibly be a core national interest can take comfort in following the footsteps of such brave and principled forebearers as Rothbard.
Writing pseudonymously in a series of articles for Faith and Freedom in the 1950s, Murray Rothbard took on the question of whether or not the United States should defend Formosa (Taiwan) from attack by mainland China. While his conclusions will surprise no one familiar with his work (that war is the health of the state, that individuals concerned with the fate of Taiwan should do as they will privately, but that their lives and property are not for the government to command), a review of the articles’ contents are worthwhile, nonetheless. For apart from such typically memorably Rothbardian lines as “only those who want to socialize America really look forward to the third and perhaps last World War,” we find many of the same ludicrous rationales for war with China used today excoriated with great wit by Rothbard.
For example, Rothbard begins the first of these, “Along Pennsylvania Avenue,” by rhetorically posing the question of how it happened that a smattering of islands eighty miles off the coast of mainland China became “necessary to our defense,” and as an answer he replies:
…[the government] were forced to portray the Reds as “island hopping” their way to the United States. […For] if the Reds take Formosa, they will be one island nearer to the United States. It is an age-old story: a peaceful Pacific “moat” is needed for our defense. In order to protect his moat, we must secure friendly countries or bases all around it. To protect Japan and the Philippines, we must defend Formosa, to protect Formosa we must defend the Pescadores. To protect the Pescadores, we must defend Quemoy, an island three miles off the Chinese mainland. To protect Quemoy we must equip Chiang’s troops for an invasion of the mainland. Where does this process end? Logically, never (18).
Readers unfamiliar with the history of the region may be interested in some additional context regarding Rothbard’s mention of equipping Chiang Kai-shek, the dictator of Taiwan and exiled leader of China’s failed Republic, for an invasion of the mainland. Despite having been driven from the off by force of arms, and only secured in their island fortress by virtue of the United States Navy repeatedly intervening to prevent a cross-strait invasion by the PLA, it was the official policy of Taipei to retake the mainland by force. Though such plains never got far off the ground—and were mostly abandoned by the 1970s—it was not until the constitutional revisions of the 1990s that Taiwan officially gave up such a policy of armed reconquest in favor of focusing strictly on its own defense.
Writing in the 1950s, near the height of the first Taiwan Strait Crisis and when talk of an invasion of the mainland by Taipei was still openly planned and called for by Chiang, Rothbard heroically pushed back against those who equated isolation with appeasement. In a scene all too familiar, he complained that Congress’ answer to heightened tensions over Formosa was to write what “amounted to a blank check for war in China whenever the President shall deem it necessary,” noting sadly that only two congressmen had opposed the resolution on the grounds that the United States should not actively seek to “engage their boys in a war on foreign soil,” the rest merely arguing over the scope or scale of the commitment to be made.
Rothbard was predictably red-baited for his efforts, even attacked by a fellow “libertarian” in Faith and Freedom. He defended himself in a series of further articles, “Fight for Formosa?” Parts I & II, and reflecting on the experience some years later in The Betrayal of the American Righthe had this to say:
I could never—and still cannot—detect one iota of devotion to ‘freedom’ in the worldview of those whose zeal for crusading abroad makes them blind to the real enemy: the invasion of our liberty by the State…to give up our freedom in order to “preserve” it is only succumbing to the Orwellian dialectic that “freedom is slavery.”
Indeed.
Those who today reasonably say that the defense of an island eighty miles off the coast of mainland China and five thousand miles from Hawaii (let alone the mainland United States) cannot possibly be a core national interest can take comfort in following the footsteps of such brave and principled forebearers as Rothbard.
It may seem completely off the wall, and frankly, if I’d even thought, much less written about this even just four years ago, I’d have called the men in white coats to come check if, you know, everything is OK. Today? Well, we’ve already seen some things which none of us would have thought possible… and yet here we are.
A few issues back we highlighted the newly — and dare I say, appropriately named and promoted— “Restrict Act.” With the evil TikTok as the scapegoat providing cover for what amounts to easily THE most diabolical legislature I’ve ever seen proposed, freedom of speech will be no more — irrespective of platform.
Some questions to ponder: Is TikTok a tool of the CCP? And furthermore, if the CCP could get its hands on the data from TikTok and any other large user platform, would it? And also, would ANY government, yours included — wherever that may be — wish to have access to the data from ANY social media platform and if it could obtain it, would it?
The painfully obvious answers to these questions reveal the absurdity of singling TikTok out as a problem while pretending to be “protecting citizens” for “national security.” It is a red herring and a step towards censoring and hence controlling EVERY social media platform.
What else? We are to believe that “highly classified information” was leaked about the war in Ukraine. We are also led to believe that a low ranking 21-year-old (who would absolutely NOT have access to highly classified information) somehow had it and then put it on Discord?
Now, if you believe that, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
In a 2020 essay, Angelo Codevilla examined the rot at the core of the FBI. He goes far too easy on the FBI in early decades, but he was right enough when it came to the present state of the agency. He wrote:
Thus FBI officers became standard bureaucrats who learned to operate on the assumption that all Americans were equally likely as not to be proper targets of investigation. They replaced the distinctions by which they had previously operated with the classic bureaucratic imperative: look out for yourselves by making sure to please the powerful.
Special counsel John Durham on Monday released his report on the FBI’s role in investigating the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. This investigation, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” had been—according to Durham’s report—”swiftly” opened as a full-blown investigation in response to “unevaluated intelligence information” by FBI personnel “without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information.”
Durham shows that the investigation had been pushed forward largely by FBI agent Peter Strzok, a man known to be politically hostile to candidate Trump. Durham also notes a curious difference between the FBI’s enthusiasm for investigating Trump, and the agency’s more cautious procedures used in investigating the Hillary Clinton campaign:
The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.
Durham went on to conclude that
An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.
Rather, the FBI engaged in a “lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents.”
All in all, the Durham report paints a picture of a highly unprofessional FBI that apparently greenlights investigations based on agents’ political agendas and on politically convenient rumors. Durham sums it up: The FBI and Justice Department “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law.”
The report was so damning that even CNN’s Jake Tapper admitted it is “devastating to the FBI,” and that the report’s conclusions serve as additional reminders that FBI agents—including many in leadership—played key roles in promoting the “Russiagate” myth.
Conde was truly a rare gem: a thoughtful writer and political analyst and gifted researcher with a wealth of personal knowledge and experience who paid a heavy price for his defiance.
David W. Conde set the groundwork for Philip Agee’s 1975 whistleblowing account, Inside the Company.
In 1970, David W. Conde, an American journalist working in Japan, who had served with the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Branch in World War II, published a now-forgotten book in New Delhi, CIA—Core of the Cancer.
Five years before publication of CIA whistleblower Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, the book provided a damning indictment of the CIA’s involvement in criminal operations—particularly in Southeast Asia—and manipulation of public opinion through tax-exempt foundations financed by large corporations that corrupted a generation of intellectuals.
Conde wrote that, “while there seems no question that historians will record that the CIA’s greatest defeat was its failure to overcome [Fidel] Castro’s forces at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the CIA’s greatest victory may well turn out to be not its food poisoning, its ballot-stuffing, its coup d’états, or its mobilization of labor unions or students to serve U.S. interests overseas, but its research grants to U.S. and foreign scholars.”[1]
These scholars played an influential role in helping condition the public in the U.S. and in countries around the world to support U.S. foreign policy interests and Cold War mobilization against the Soviet Union.
Conde noted that, “in Hitler’s Germany and Prince Konoe’s Japan, thought police used torture, and ordered death or [used] the threat of death to convert communists into anti-communists, but America being a rich country, relied upon the power of its money.”
This money had a deeply corrupting effect, tarnishing intellectual and scientific integrity, debasing political life and causing almost all societal institutions to be up for sale.
A Maverick Caught in the Cross-Hairs of an Anti-Red Psychopath
For the first time, a full-sized digital scan of the Titanic has been made public, which could reveal new secrets about the ship that lies 12,500 feet down in the Atlantic.
Titanic’s front section
BBC News said the scan was conducted about a year ago by Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, and Atlantic Productions, who are making a documentary about the Titanic.
Titanic’s stern
The vessel is split into two sections, the bow and the stern, separated by 2,600 feet and surrounded by a large debris field.
Titanic’s bow
Magellan and Atlantic Productions spent over 200 hours surveying the wreckage with submersibles, capturing over 700,000 images — this allowed them to create a never before seen, high-definition, 3D reconstruction of the vessel.
Looking at the present, with each passing day, I see a very probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades.
In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are/were willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, huge unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil, and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion…
I look at present members of the Establishment or people on its fringes who, in the name of Americanism, betray the interests of most Americans by fomenting militarism, applauding rat-race individualism, protecting undeserved privilege, or stirring up nationalistic and ethnic hatreds. I see pretended patriots who desecrate the American flag by waving it while waiving the law.
In Nazi Germany, the Gehieme Staatspolizei, or Gestapo, was literally the Homeland Police (Security). It was the MOTHERLAND in the USSR, the FATHERLAND in Nazi Germany, and now the HOMELAND in Nazi America! Homeland Security and the FBI are the American Gestapo.
In the months after Hitler took power, the SA and Gestapo agents went from door to door looking for Hitler’s enemies. Socialists, Communists, trade union leaders, and others who had spoken out against the Nazi Party were arrested, and some were killed. By the middle of 1933, the Nazi Party was the only political party, and nearly all organized opposition to the regime had been eliminated. Democracy was dead in Germany.
This will be the fate nowadays of gun owners, anti-vaccine advocates, freedom activists, self-sufficient people, and everyone against the current diabolical regime that got in place by stealing, lying, and cheating.
Many different groups, including the SA and SS, set up hundreds of makeshift “camps” in empty warehouses, factories, and other locations all over Germany where they held political opponents without trial and under conditions of great cruelty.
Quick Note: If the FEMA camps don’t ring you any bells…it should. Do You Live Near Any Of These FEMA Camps? Christians, Gun Owners, Veterans, Tea Partiers, Homeschoolers, etc., Are The Targets In The New World Order
Despite the finger-pointing and outcries of dismay from those who are watching the government discard the rule of law at every turn, the question is not whether Joe Biden is the new Adolf Hitler, but whether the American Police State is the new Third Reich.
February 22, 1933, SS and SA become auxiliary police units Less than a month after Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany, he calls on elements of the Nazi Party to act as auxiliary police. The SS, initially Hitler’s bodyguards, and the SA, the street fighters or Storm Troopers of the Nazi Party, now have official police power. This further increases the power of the Nazi Party in German society.
With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.
These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where the only law that counts comes in the form of heavy-handed, unilateral dictates from a supreme ruler who uses a secret police to control the populace.
I know you already guessed and you are right, that danger is now posed by the FBI, whose laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues, and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government; recruiting high school students to spy on and report fellow students who show signs of being future terrorists; or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.
Consider the FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain, interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police, and generally act as a law unto themselves—much like their Nazi cousins, the Gestapo—and then try to convince yourself that the United States is still a constitutional republic.
Just like the Gestapo, the FBI has vast resources, vast investigatory powers, and vast discretion to determine who is an enemy of the state.
Today, the FBI employs more than 35,000 individuals and operates more than 56 field offices in major cities across the U.S., as well as 400 resident agencies in smaller towns, and more than 50 international offices. In addition to their “data campus,” which houses more than 96 million sets of fingerprints from across the United States and elsewhere, the FBI has also built a vast repository of “profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime.
All of this is made possible by the agency’s nearly unlimited resources (its minimum budget alone in fiscal year 2015 was $8.3 billion), the government’s vast arsenal of technology, the interconnectedness of government intelligence agencies, and information sharing through fusion centers—data collecting intelligence agencies spread throughout the country that constantly monitor communications (including those of American citizens), everything from internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails.
Much like the Gestapo spied on mail and phone calls, FBI agents have carte blanche access to the citizenry’s most personal information.
AI excels at echo-chamber reinforcement of risky or error-prone suppositions and policies:Spirals of Delusion: How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous. What’s the threshold for concern that the AI conclusions are riskier than presented? How do we calculate the possibilities that the AI conclusions are catastrophically misguided?
At what point will decision-makers realize that trusting AI is not worth the risk? If history is any guide, that realization will only arise from financial losses and bad decisions. For the rest of us, it might just be the novelty wears off as the inadequacies pile up: Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT.
In the real-world, the costs are all we know for sure and profits remain elusive and contingent.
No one knows how the flood of AI products will play out, but we do know it’s unleashed a corporate frenzy to “get our own AI up and running.” Corporate fads are one of the least discussed but most obvious dynamics in the economy. Corporations follow fads as avidly as any other heedless consumer, rushing headlong into whatever everyone else is doing.
Globalization is a recent example. Back in the early 2000s, I sat next to corporate employees on flights to China and other Asian destinations who described the travails and costly disasters created by their employers’ mad rush to move production overseas: quality control cratered, proprietary technologies were stolen and quickly copied, costs soared rather than declined, and so on.
So let’s talk about costs of AI rather than just the benefits. Like many other heavily-hyped technologies, Large Language Model (LLM) AI is presented as stand-alone and “free.” But it’s actually not stand-alone or free: it requires an army of humans toiling away to make it functional: “We Are Grunt Workers”: The Lowly Humans Helping Run ChatGPT Make Just $15 Per Hour (Zero Hedge).
“We are grunt workers, but there would be no AI language systems without it. You can design all the neural networks you want, you can get all the researchers involved you want, but without labelers, you have no ChatGPT. You have nothing.”
The tasks performed by this hidden army of human workers is euphemistically sanitized by corporate-speak as data enrichment work.
What makes this form of AI pricier than conventional search is the computing power involved. Such AI depends on billions of dollars of chips, a cost that has to be spread out over their useful life of several years, analysts said. Electricity likewise adds costs and pressure to companies with carbon-footprint goals.
Corporations are counting on the magic of the Waste Is Growth / Landfill Economy to generate higher margins from whatever AI touches–don’t ask, it’s magic–but few ask how all this magic will work in a global recession where consumers will have less income and credit to buy, buy, buy.
LLM-AI is riddled with errors, and nobody can tell what’s semi-accurate, what’s misleading and what’s flat-out wrong. Despite wildly optimistic claims, locating the errors and semi-accuracies can’t be fully automated. Errors are inconsequential in an AI-generated book report, but when patients’ health is on the line, they become very consequential: I’m an ER doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients.
This raises fundamental questions about precisely how much work LLM-AI can perform without human oversight, and the all-too breezy claims that tens of millions of jobs will be lost as this iteration of AI automates vast swaths of human labor.
AI excels at echo-chamber reinforcement of risky or error-prone suppositions and policies:Spirals of Delusion: How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous. What’s the threshold for concern that the AI conclusions are riskier than presented? How do we calculate the possibilities that the AI conclusions are catastrophically misguided?
At what point will decision-makers realize that trusting AI is not worth the risk? If history is any guide, that realization will only arise from financial losses and bad decisions. For the rest of us, it might just be the novelty wears off as the inadequacies pile up: Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT.
MCViewPoint 