Watch Live: In First Post-COVID-19 Event, Trump Speaks On “Law & Order” At White House “Peaceful Protest” Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/10/2020 – 13:55
Following last night’s interview on Tucker Carlson, President Trump will hold his first “live event” since being diagnosed with the coronavirus Saturday afternoon. Starting at 1400ET, Trump will speak from the South Lawn balcony about “law and order” in an event that has been cheekily dubbed a “peaceful protest”, which CBS News says is expected to draw hundreds of people.
The address notably comes just two weeks after the president nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. Hearings to move her nomination forward are set to begin next week.
Notably, the White House is coordinating with Candace Owens’s “Blexit” group, and black conservative activists are expected to attend.
2,000 invitations have reportedly been issued, and attendees will be required to bring (and wear) masks, all attendees must also complete COVID-19 screenings.
On Friday, Dr. Fauci was widely quoted for describing Trump’s Sept. 26 ceremony unveiling the nomination of Judge Barrett as a “super spreader event”. And many have claimed that the White House is tempting fate by holdng another one.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/36VTMLF Tyler Durden
‘White Supremacist’ Narrative Unravels: Whitmer Kidnap Suspect Attended BLM Rally, Another Called Trump A ‘Tyrant’ Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/10/2020 – 13:40
Last week, the FBI says it foiled a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D), after the FBI infiltrated an anti-government militia and arrested 13 members who “talked about murdering ‘tyrants’ or ‘taking’ a sitting governor.”
And while the FBI never suggested a race-based ideology in its criminal complaint, the MSM – as well as Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D), took the ‘white supremacist’ ball and ran with it – hard.
On Friday, however, the Washington Post profiled several members of the group. Notably absent were accusations of ‘white supremacy’ – perhaps after acknowledging:
“One of alleged plotters, 23-year-old Daniel Harris, attended a Black Lives Matter protest in June, telling the Oakland County Times he was upset about the killing of George Floyd and police violence.”
Another alleged plotter, Brandon Caserta, called President Trump a ‘tyrant’ – adding ‘Trump is not your friend, dude.‘ Caserta notably has an anarchist flag behind him in several videos he’s recorded.
Wow! This is big. Brandon Caserta, one of the ringleaders of the group of men arrested for a plot where the group planned to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, hated President Trump too!
“They are oppressing you for a paycheck. If you’re still supporting law enforcement, you are supporting the people who are enforcing slavery on everyone else.”
This is Brandon Caserta, a man who was arrested for a plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer. He’s a police hating anarchist. pic.twitter.com/3qGZpPpOJw
What’s more, there isn’t a shred of evidence included in the FBI’s criminal complaint, nor subsequent reporting, that the men adhered to a white supremacist ideology.
And so, it appears that the FBI busted an anarchist, anti-government militia which plotted violence against elected officials – yet hated both sides of the aisle.
Let’s see how fast this entire affair disappears from the news cycle.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/36TCmiW Tyler Durden
On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard over eight hours of argument in a set of consolidated challenges to the Trump Administration’s repeal of the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan and proffer of an alternative, the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule. The panel hearing the challenges consisted of Judges Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard and Justin Walker. (Welcome to the D.C. Circuit Judge Walker! Nothing like starting out in the deep end.)
I have yet to have a chance to listen to the audio of the argument, but based upon press reports and twitter threads, it seems like the argument did not go too well for the Trump Administration. It seems that even Judge Walker seemed skeptical of DOJ’s attempt to defend the ACE rule. Preliminarily, it seems that the court is unlikely to sustain the Trump Administration’s regulation, but I suspect it’s also unlikely to reinstate the Clean Power Plan either.
This means there could be a clean slate for climate policy in 2021—and that would be a good thing. The ACE rule is a completely inconsequential from a climate standpoint, so good riddance. The Clean Power Plan, while more aggressive and more costly, was never a serious solution to the climate challenge either. The Clean Air Act was not written with greenhouse gases in mind, and is a poor mechanism for global climate control.
Climate change should not be tackled sector-by-sector, nor should the federal government seek to micromanage energy efficiency gains and emission reductions through centralized regulation. A more sensible strategy would involve universal pricing of carbon, such as through a revenue-neutral carbon tax (like the one adopted in British Columbia), supplemented by policies to accelerate the innovation, development and deployment of low-carbon technologies. Technology inducement prizes would help drive innovation, incentivized procurement could and reform of permitting and siting rules could help with development and deployment. Such an approach would not only out-perform the efforts to drive climate policy through the EPA, they would also be preferable to a Green New Deal. Alas, I am not optimistic that this is the approach the next administration will take.
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On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard over eight hours of argument in a set of consolidated challenges to the Trump Administration’s repeal of the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan and proffer of an alternative, the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule. The panel hearing the challenges consisted of Judges Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard and Justin Walker. (Welcome to the D.C. Circuit Judge Walker! Nothing like starting out in the deep end.)
I have yet to have a chance to listen to the audio of the argument, but based upon press reports and twitter threads, it seems like the argument did not go too well for the Trump Administration. It seems that even Judge Walker seemed skeptical of DOJ’s attempt to defend the ACE rule. Preliminarily, it seems that the court is unlikely to sustain the Trump Administration’s regulation, but I suspect it’s also unlikely to reinstate the Clean Power Plan either.
This means there could be a clean slate for climate policy in 2021—and that would be a good thing. The ACE rule is a completely inconsequential from a climate standpoint, so good riddance. The Clean Power Plan, while more aggressive and more costly, was never a serious solution to the climate challenge either. The Clean Air Act was not written with greenhouse gases in mind, and is a poor mechanism for global climate control.
Climate change should not be tackled sector-by-sector, nor should the federal government seek to micromanage energy efficiency gains and emission reductions through centralized regulation. A more sensible strategy would involve universal pricing of carbon, such as through a revenue-neutral carbon tax (like the one adopted in British Columbia), supplemented by policies to accelerate the innovation, development and deployment of low-carbon technologies. Technology inducement prizes would help drive innovation, incentivized procurement could and reform of permitting and siting rules could help with development and deployment. Such an approach would not only out-perform the efforts to drive climate policy through the EPA, they would also be preferable to a Green New Deal. Alas, I am not optimistic that this is the approach the next administration will take.
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Bret Stephens wrote a column in the Times, titled The 1619 Chronicles. It may be his last. He carefully describes how the 1619 Project has been modified in a foundational way.
The 1619 Project contended that 1619, and not 1776, was the “true founding” or “moment [America] began.” This position has been criticized by historians across the spectrum.
Last month, the 1619 Project was quietly edited. The passage originally read:
The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
The passage now reads:
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
The phrase “understanding 1619 as our true founding” was struck out. Without explanation.
Stephens writes:
Those concerns came to light last month when a longstanding critic of the project, Phillip W. Magness, noted in the online magazine Quillette that references to 1619 as the country’s “true founding” or “moment [America] began” had disappeared from the digital display copy without explanation.
These were not minor points. The deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, defended the change:
In a tweet, Hannah-Jones responded to Magness and other critics by insisting that “the text of the project” remained “unchanged,” while maintaining that the case for making 1619 the country’s “true” birth year was “always a metaphoric argument.” I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.
She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.
Stephens has receipts:
Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):
“1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”
“1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619?”
Silverstein tries to defend his work:
In an email, Silverstein told me that the changes to the text were immaterial, in part because it still cited 1776 as our nation’s official birth date, and because the project’s stated aim remained to put 1619 and its consequences as the true starting point of the American story.
Readers can judge for themselves whether these unacknowledged changes violate the standard obligations of transparency for New York Times journalism. The question of journalistic practices, however, raises deeper doubts about the 1619 Project’s core premises.
I suspect it will be Stephens, and not Silverstein, who is subjected to punishment.
Stephens also cites Sean Wilentz, who wrote a thorough book about slavery in the United States:
In a lengthier dissection, published in January in The Atlantic, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz accused Hannah-Jones of making arguments “built on partial truths and misstatements of the facts.” The goal of educating Americans on slavery and its consequences, he added, was so important that it “cannot be forwarded through falsehoods, distortions and significant omissions.”
Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s. The list goes on.
Read the rest of the column.
Randy Barnett and I are working on a book, tentatively titled Slavery and the Constitution: 1776 to 1896. We thought it appropriate to start with the Declaration, and finish with Plessy. Now, we are more confident with our starting date.
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The cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike rose to global prominence in mid-June 2016 when it publicly accused Russia of hacking the Democratic National Committee and stealing its data. The previously unknown company’s explosive allegation set off a seismic chain of events that engulfs U.S. national politics to this day. The Hillary Clinton campaign seized on CrowdStrike’s claim by accusing Russia of meddling in the election to help Donald Trump. U.S. intelligence officials would soon also endorse CrowdStrike’s allegation and pursue what amounted to a multi-year, all-consuming investigation of Russian interference and Trump’s potential complicity.
With the next presidential election now in its final weeks, the Democrats’ national leader, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and her husband, Paul Pelosi, are endorsing the publicly traded firm in a different way. Recent financial disclosure filings show the couple have invested up to $1 million in CrowdStrike Holdings. The Pelosis purchased the stock at a share price of $129.25 on Sept. 3. At the time of this article’s publication, the price has risen to $142.97.
Drew Hammill, spokesman for Pelosi, said:
“Speaker Pelosi is not involved in her husband’s investments and was not aware of the investment until the required filing was made. Mr. Pelosi is a private investor and has investments in a number of publicly traded companies. The Speaker fully complies with House Rules and the relevant statutory requirements.”
The Pelosis’ sizeable investment in CrowdStrike could revive scrutiny of the company’s involvement in the Trump-Russia saga since the Democrats’ 2016 election loss.
Dmitri Alperovitch: The CrowdStrike co-founder reportedly was thanked by a senior U.S. official “for pushing the government along” in its DNC hacking probe. CrowdStrike.com
After generating the hacking allegation against Russia in 2016, CrowdStrike played a critical role in the FBI’s ensuing investigation of the DNC data theft. CrowdStrike executives shared intelligence with the FBI on a consistent basis, making dozens of contacts in the investigation’s early months. According to Esquire, when U.S. intelligence officials first accused Russia of conducting malicious cyber activity in October 2016, a senior U.S. government official personally alerted CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch and thanked him “for pushing the government along.” The final reports of both Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee cite CrowdStrike’s forensics. The firm’s centrality to Russiagate has drawn the ire of President Trump. During the fateful July 2019 phone call that would later trigger impeachment proceedings, Trump asked Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to scrutinize CrowdStrike’s role in the DNC server breach, suggesting that the company may have been involved in hiding the real perpetrators.
Pelosi’s recent investment in CrowdStrike also adds a new partisan entanglement for a company with significant connections to Democratic Party and intelligence officials that drove Russiagate.
DNC law firm Perkins Coie hired CrowdStrike to investigate the breach in late April 2016. At the outset, Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussmann personally informed CrowdStrike officials that Russia was suspected of breaching the server. By the time CrowdStrike went public with the Russian hacking allegation less than two months later, Perkins Coie had recently hired Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that produced discredited Steele dossier alleging a longstanding conspiracy between Trump and Russia.
Shawn Henry: Behind closed doors, the CrowdStrike president admitted under oath in December 2017 that his firm “did not have concrete evidence” that Russian hackers actually stole any emails or other data from the DNC servers. “There’s circumstantial evidence, but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.” CrowdStrike.com
CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry, who led the team that remediated the DNC breach and blamed Russia for the hacking, previously served as assistant director at the FBI under Robert Mueller. Since June 2015, Henry has also worked as an analyst at MSNBC, the cable network that has promoted debunked Trump-Russia innuendo perhaps more than any other outlet. Alperovitch, the co-founder and former chief technology officer, is a former nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the Washington organization that actively lobbies for a hawkish posture toward Russia.
Campaign disclosures also show that CrowdStrike contributed $100,000 to the Democratic Governors Association in 2016 and 2017.
The firm’s multiple conflicts of interest in the Russia investigation coincide with a series of embarrassing disclosures that call into question its technical reliability.
In early 2017, CrowdStrike was forced to retract its allegation that Russia had hacked Ukrainian military equipment with the same malware the firm claimed to have discovered inside the DNC server.
During the FBI’s investigation of the DNC breach, CrowdStrike never provided direct access to the pilfered servers, rebuffing multiple requests that came from officials all the way up to then-Director James Comey. The FBI had to rely on CrowdStrike’s own images of the servers, as well as reports that Justice Department officials later acknowledged were delivered in incomplete, redacted form. James Trainor, who served as assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, complained to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the DNC’s cooperation with the FBI’s 2016 hack investigation was “slow and laborious in many respects” and that CrowdStrike’s information was “scrubbed” before it was handed over. Alperovitch, the former CTO, has claimed that CrowdStrike installed its Falcon software to protect the DNC server on May 5, 2016. Yet the Democratic Party emails were stolen from the server three weeks later, from May 25 to June 1.
Yet the most damaging revelation calling into question CrowdStrike’s Russian hacking allegations came with an admission early in the Russia probe that was only made public this year. Unsealed testimony from the House Intelligence Committee shows that Henry admitted under oath behind closed doors in December 2017 that the firm “did not have concrete evidence” that Russian hackers actually stole any emails or other data from the DNC servers.
“There’s circumstantial evidence, but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated,” Henry said.
“There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.”
The Henry testimony was among a trove of damning transcripts released by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff only after pressure from the then-acting Director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell.
As RealClearInvestigations reported last month, Henry’s House testimony also conflicts with his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee two months prior, in October 2017. According to the Senate report, Henry claimed that CrowdStrike was “able to see some exfiltration and the types of files that had been touched,” but not the files’ content. Yet two months later, Henry told the House that “we didn’t see the data leave, but we believe it left, based on what we saw.”
Adam Schiff: CrowdStrike testimony was released by the House Intelligence Committee chairman only after pressure from the then-acting Director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell. AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Notably, Henry’s acknowledgment to the House that CrowdStrike did not have evidence of exfiltration came only after he was interrupted and prodded by his attorneys to correct an initial answer. Right before that intervention from CrowdStrike counsel, Henry had falsely asserted that he knew when Russian hackers had exfiltrated the stolen information:
Adam Schiff: Do you know the date in which the Russians exfiltrated the data from the DNC?
Shawn Henry: I do. I have to just think about it. I don’t know. I mean, it’s in our report that I think the Committee has.
Schiff: And, to the best of your recollection, when would that have been?
Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated. We do not have concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have indicators that it was exfiltrated.
Henry then improbably argued that, in the absence of evidence showing the emails leaving the DNC server, Russian hackers could have taken individual screenshots of each of the 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments that were ultimately put out by WikiLeaks.
Keeping Henry’s admission under wraps for nearly four years was highly consequential. The allegation of Russian hacking was elevated to a dire national security issue, and anyone who dared to question it – including President Trump – was accused of doing the Kremlin’s bidding. The hacking allegation also helped plunge U.S.-Russia relations to new lows. Under persistent bipartisan pressure over allegations of Russian meddling, Trump has approved a series of punitive measures and aggressive policies toward Moscow, shunning his own campaign vow to seek cooperation.
Meanwhile, during the several years that CrowdStrike’s own uncertainty about its hacking allegation was kept from the public, the firm has enjoyed a stratospheric rise on Wall Street. In 2017, one year after lodging its Russia hacking allegations, CrowdStrike had a valuation of $1 billion. Three years later, after going public in 2019, the firm’s valuation was set at $6.7 billion, and soon hit $11.4 billion. Just over a year later, its market cap was $31.37 billion. CrowdStrike has more than doubled its revenue on average every year, going from $52.75 million in 2017 to $481.41 million in 2020.
CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, which spread Trump-Russia collusion allegations via the Steele dossier, are not the only private companies to play a critical and lucrative role in the Trump-Russia saga.
The firm New Knowledge, staffed by several former Democratic Party operatives and intelligence officials, authored a disputed report for the Senate Intelligence Committee that accused a Russian troll farm of a sophisticated social media interference campaign that duped millions of vulnerable Americans. Ironically, the company itself took part in a social media disinformation operation in the 2017 Alabama Senate race to help elect the ultimate victor, Democratic candidate Doug Jones. Just as the Democratic Party’s impeachment proceedings were in full swing a year ago, another cybersecurity firm with Democratic Party ties, Area One, accused the Russian spy agency GRU of hacking into the Ukrainian company Burisma with the aim of uncovering dirt on Joe Biden. Graphika, a firm with extensive ties to the Atlantic Council and the Pentagon, has recently put out reports accusing Russians of impersonating left-wing and right-wing websites to fool hyper-partisan American audiences.
Having generated the seminal Russian hacking allegation, CrowdStrike sits at the top of what has become a booming cottage industry of firms and organizations to help shape the multi-year barrage of Russia fear-mongering and innuendo. And with her new investment in CrowdStrike, Nancy Pelosi — the highest-ranking elected official of a party that has promoted Russiagate above all else — is already profiting from its success.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/36XKKOt Tyler Durden
Bret Stephens wrote a column in the Times, titled The 1619 Chronicles. It may be his last. He carefully describes how the 1619 Project has been modified in a foundational way.
The 1619 Project contended that 1619, and not 1776, was the “true founding” or “moment [America] began.” This position has been criticized by historians across the spectrum.
Last month, the 1619 Project was quietly edited. The passage originally read:
The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
The passage now reads:
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
The phrase “understanding 1619 as our true founding” was struck out. Without explanation.
Stephens writes:
Those concerns came to light last month when a longstanding critic of the project, Phillip W. Magness, noted in the online magazine Quillette that references to 1619 as the country’s “true founding” or “moment [America] began” had disappeared from the digital display copy without explanation.
These were not minor points. The deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, defended the change:
In a tweet, Hannah-Jones responded to Magness and other critics by insisting that “the text of the project” remained “unchanged,” while maintaining that the case for making 1619 the country’s “true” birth year was “always a metaphoric argument.” I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.
She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.
Stephens has receipts:
Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):
“1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”
“1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619?”
Silverstein tries to defend his work:
In an email, Silverstein told me that the changes to the text were immaterial, in part because it still cited 1776 as our nation’s official birth date, and because the project’s stated aim remained to put 1619 and its consequences as the true starting point of the American story.
Readers can judge for themselves whether these unacknowledged changes violate the standard obligations of transparency for New York Times journalism. The question of journalistic practices, however, raises deeper doubts about the 1619 Project’s core premises.
I suspect it will be Stephens, and not Silverstein, who is subjected to punishment.
Stephens also cites Sean Wilentz, who wrote a thorough book about slavery in the United States:
In a lengthier dissection, published in January in The Atlantic, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz accused Hannah-Jones of making arguments “built on partial truths and misstatements of the facts.” The goal of educating Americans on slavery and its consequences, he added, was so important that it “cannot be forwarded through falsehoods, distortions and significant omissions.”
Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s. The list goes on.
Read the rest of the column.
Randy Barnett and I are working on a book, tentatively titled Slavery and the Constitution: 1776 to 1896. We thought it appropriate to start with the Declaration, and finish with Plessy. Now, we are more confident with our starting date.
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“Big Tech Has Become A Tool Of Totalitarian Facism” – Google Has ‘Memory-Holed’ The Great Barrington Declaration Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/10/2020 – 12:50
The bureaucrat/scientists who have been guiding the American response to the coronavirus – even Dr. Fauci acknowledges that the Trump Administration has accepted most of his recommendations (even if Trump hasn’t always followed them on a personal level).
JUST IN: Dr. Fauci clarifies answer to “hypothetical question” where he said earlier mitigation would have saved more lives.
Many who have been closely following coverage of the 2nd wave of the virus hammering Europe have heard Europe’s leaders explain to indignant reporters how their lockdown-free approach differs from an outright ‘herd immunity’ strategy question, as well as the growing acceptance of lockdown-free approaches to tackling the coronavirus (even as Sweden imposes new restrictions as Europe’s second wave looms). Just yesterday in the UK, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said a return to ‘lockdown’ status within London was “inevitable”, even as London’s infection rate lags the hot spots in northern England (in and around Manchester, as well as a few other areas) by a sizable margin.
Leaders in Europe have all warned that returning to a national lockdown would be an absolute last resort, as their economies struggle to recover from the springtime mass closures that wrought unprecedented havoc on the real economy (even if it hasn’t always translated over to the market).
But an even bigger threat to the status quo engineered by Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx and their colleagues around the world is the sudden emergence in academia of a credible, and vocal, chorus of dissent, as researchers who are luminaries in their field speak out against lockdowns.
Since the spring, libertarians have criticized governors and even President Trump for following in the footsteps of communist China, which clearly allowed the virus to spread unchecked for weeks, or even months, before stepping in. Fewer than 100k cases have been confirmed in China – a figure that many observers suspect is far short of the real number.
But we digress. As many of the springtime hotspots from around the world – densely populated areas like Madrid and Paris – suffer through second waves that are equally, if not more, punishing than the first round, more laypeople are starting to question: what was this all for?
And whatever happened to Dr. Fauci saying that the goal was to “flatten the curve” so hospitals aren’t overwhelmed? Not force businesses to close for longer than 6 months, destroying the livelihoods of millions, as we hope and pray for the FDA to expedite approval of a vaccine.
Well, on Oct. 4, a group of scientists from Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and other distinguished academic institutions from around the world published the Great Barrington Declaration, a brief statement offering an alternative public policy approach. Instead of mandating business closures, lockdowns should be lifted, and a shift to “focused protection” should be implemented. Resources should be focused to protect the vulnerable (the elderly and those with CDC-designated risk factors). The young and health population should be allowed to live normally, with the hope that they would eventually build up immunity.
Critics have attacked the statement’s recommendations, but their criticisms are mostly superficial or easily addressable. The most salient, in our view, is the notion that we don’t yet know how long immunity from COVID-19 lasts, now that confirmed cases of reinfection have been found around the globe. To be sure, those cases are few and far between, and there’s a substantial amount of anecdotal and scientific data suggesting that health care workers have developed lasting immunity.
But since the approach challenges the status quo in the US, a position that Democrats have embraced at risk of their political reputations, big tech has rallied to try and censor the Great Barrington Declaration. First Reddit buried discussion of the declaration; now Google has “memory holed” the declaration, as one Twitter user explains.
You can see the authors, kulldorf, gupta, bhattacharya’s names and know this this was written by medical professors at harvard, stanford, and oxford.
there’s no slant, not editorializing, it’s primary source info.
now let’s have a look at google.
pretty different looking results, huh? not only do they not lead with the declaration itself or its authors, they lead with dishonest hit pieces.
they try to tie it to climate denial and fake science.
um, no. this is “fake search.”
the google results for “great barrington declaration” are simply not search results at all.
it’s a propagandistic hit piece ducking the science, ignoring the credentials of the authors, failing to show the declaration, and spinning it as some kind of fringe cabal of “deniers.”
it’s staggeringly blatant once you see it, but will anyone?
or will they be fooled by this because it’s subtle and you think google is a search engine, not a radicalized editorial column.
and it’s now EVERYWHERE.
Reddit will not allow users to see it.
OMG 😯
– reddit has censored discussion of The Great Barrington Declaration
– and Google has removed it from their search engine results (can only see articles about it now, as they cannot censor those
know what a man fears by watching what he tries to silence.
these groups know they have lost the debate.
they know that the facts and the science are not on their side.
and now they want to win by lying.
what choice have they left themselves?
when you have hitched your wagon to “credentialism” from buffoons like fauci and brix and ding and topol and then the REAL credentialed crowd shows up and calls you out, what can you do?
you’re cornered by your own argument. so you have to hide this fact. it’s fatal to you.
and oh how they are going to try to hide it.
at the risk of sounding tinfoil hatty: big tech has become an apparatus of totalitarian fascism.
this is what that looks like. you push a government line and “right-think” while politicizing all things.
government and business in the same bed to shape society for “it’s own good.”
that’s what fascism is.
“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
when mussolini said that, he meant it as a positive.
“totalitarian” was a complement. and make no mistake, big business LOVES this.
it’s profitable and certain and protects your market position and entrenches oligopoly.
big business does not like free markets. it likes “less competition and a thumb on the scale.”
they LOVE fascism. this fascism is always and everywhere a leftist youth movement. it’s not right wing, it’s left. (yes, i know what wikipedia says, it’s wrong. read your history on where these parties came from. they all emerged from socialist parties)
now it comes from san francisco. and this is the part we need to understand:
they thought they were the good guys. hitler, stalin, mussolini, all of them
they thought there were the way forward to a greater society, a more perfect nation, justice, & progress.
and the companies that helped them thought so too they are not sitting around twirling their moustaches in sinister fashion plotting the the downfall of the world.
it’s far worse.
they honestly believe that they are the anointed whose great wisdom & intellect gives them a right & a duty to tell the benighted masses how to live
they have convinced themselves that calling fascism “antifa” means they are the good guys
but make no mistake, this is an attempt to rule you and it’s showing its true colors now
they, like all despots, believe that they will be benign.
history is not kind to that presumption.
we seem to be at a crossroads.
we can either see this for the power play that it is and seek out new ways to get information and communicate and take back our data and our speech, or we can fall under this spell and become lost in this propagandistic house of mirrors.
search and social media do not have to be like this.
the can be peer to peer, open source, and provide personal agency.
remember that you are not google’s customer, nor twitter’s.
you are their product.
they sell you to their customers.
did you not ask who pays the bills?
but this can change and will change.
the more they adulterate and censor, the more incentive there is to leave their walled gardens and find a better way.
this is going to be the awkward adolescence of internet and social media.
The New York Times reports that the CDC asserted the power to require mask-wearing on “airplanes, trains, buses and subways, and in transit hubs such as airports, train stations and bus depots.” The article is vague on the source of statutory authority: it merely cites the agency’s “quarantine powers.” I’ll assume the agency has these delegated authorities. Would this delegation of power be constitutional?
I wrote about the constitutionality of federal mask mandates in two priorposts. Jack Balkin had flagged a similar proposal:
Next, Congress could focus on technologies of travel. It could provide that any person who uses any facility of interstate commerce for travel, whether privately or publicly owned (e.g., a car, a motorcycle, a taxi, a limo, an Uber car, a bus, a subway, a boat, or a plane) shall wear a mask during the entire period of travel.
Jack suggested that the federal government could regulate the so-called “channels” and “instrumentalities” of Commerce. Chief Justice Rehnquist discussed these two heads of authority in U.S. v. Lopez. Randy and I write in An Introduction to Constitutional Law:
First, “Congress may regulate the use of the channels of interstate commerce.” In Darby and Heart of Atlanta, for example, the Court upheld Congress’s authority to keep “the channels of interstate commerce free from immoral and injurious uses.” In such cases, Congress can regulate local activities that block the flow of interstate commerce.
Second, “Congress is empowered to regulate and protect the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, or persons or things in interstate commerce, even though the threat may come only from intrastate activities.” For example, Congress could protect ports and railroads from foreign terrorist attack, even though these hubs are entirely intrastate.
I suggested that part of Jack’s suggestion could be consistent with precedent:
I think this position has more precedent. For example, Congress imposes a host of mandates on people who fly airplanes. For example, airplane passengers are required to put on a seatbelt, watch a safety briefing, and if cabin pressure drops–you guessed it–wear a mask! I’m not sure this reasoning would extend to privately-owned modes of conveyance. Congress imposes mandates that car manufacturers include seatbelts, but states in turn require people to use those seatbelts. I do not think Congress could reach every single mode of private, non-commercial travel.
The CDC’s proposal was more narrow, and would not have extended to private modes of conveyance. This order would probably be within Congress’s powers. But I am still skeptical that Congress quietly delegated to the CDC such broad power to regulate every facet of public transportation in the country.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2GB8L33
via IFTTT
The New York Times reports that the CDC asserted the power to require mask-wearing on “airplanes, trains, buses and subways, and in transit hubs such as airports, train stations and bus depots.” The article is vague on the source of statutory authority: it merely cites the agency’s “quarantine powers.” I’ll assume the agency has these delegated authorities. Would this delegation of power be constitutional?
I wrote about the constitutionality of federal mask mandates in two priorposts. Jack Balkin had flagged a similar proposal:
Next, Congress could focus on technologies of travel. It could provide that any person who uses any facility of interstate commerce for travel, whether privately or publicly owned (e.g., a car, a motorcycle, a taxi, a limo, an Uber car, a bus, a subway, a boat, or a plane) shall wear a mask during the entire period of travel.
Jack suggested that the federal government could regulate the so-called “channels” and “instrumentalities” of Commerce. Chief Justice Rehnquist discussed these two heads of authority in U.S. v. Lopez. Randy and I write in An Introduction to Constitutional Law:
First, “Congress may regulate the use of the channels of interstate commerce.” In Darby and Heart of Atlanta, for example, the Court upheld Congress’s authority to keep “the channels of interstate commerce free from immoral and injurious uses.” In such cases, Congress can regulate local activities that block the flow of interstate commerce.
Second, “Congress is empowered to regulate and protect the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, or persons or things in interstate commerce, even though the threat may come only from intrastate activities.” For example, Congress could protect ports and railroads from foreign terrorist attack, even though these hubs are entirely intrastate.
I suggested that part of Jack’s suggestion could be consistent with precedent:
I think this position has more precedent. For example, Congress imposes a host of mandates on people who fly airplanes. For example, airplane passengers are required to put on a seatbelt, watch a safety briefing, and if cabin pressure drops–you guessed it–wear a mask! I’m not sure this reasoning would extend to privately-owned modes of conveyance. Congress imposes mandates that car manufacturers include seatbelts, but states in turn require people to use those seatbelts. I do not think Congress could reach every single mode of private, non-commercial travel.
The CDC’s proposal was more narrow, and would not have extended to private modes of conveyance. This order would probably be within Congress’s powers. But I am still skeptical that Congress quietly delegated to the CDC such broad power to regulate every facet of public transportation in the country.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2GB8L33
via IFTTT
