Friday March 31, 2023
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has finally made history. He has indicted former President Donald Trump as part of an investigation, possibly for hush money payments. We are all waiting to see the text of the indictment to confirm the basis for this unprecedented act. But history in this case — and in this country — is not on Bragg’s side.
The only crime that has been discussed in this case is an unprecedented attempt to revive a misdemeanor for falsifying business documents that expired years ago. If that is still the basis of Thursday’s indictment, Bragg could not have raised a weaker basis to prosecute a former president. If reports are accurate, he may attempt to “bootstrap” the misdemeanor into a felony (and longer statute of limitations) by alleging an effort to evade federal election charges.
While Trump will be the first former president indicted, he will not be the last if that is the standard for prosecution.
It is still hard to believe that Bragg would primarily proceed on such a basis. There have been no other crimes discussed over months, but we will have to wait to read the indictment to confirm the grounds.
What we do know is the checkered history leading to this moment.
The Justice Department itself declined to prosecute the federal election claim against Trump. There was ample reason to decline.
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Friday March 31, 2023
Consequential Strategic Change – Upon leaving his meeting with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping said to Putin, “Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years – and we are driving this change together”.
The ‘Entente’ was sealed during hours of talks over two days, and amidst a plethora of signed documents. Two powerful states have formed a duality that, in marrying a gigantic manufacturing base to the pre-eminent raw materials supplier and the advanced weaponry and diplomatic nous of Russia, leaves the US in the shade. A seat in the shadows (assumed through volitation, or inability to contemplate such radical transition) reflects the US with its back turned towards participation in the unfolding multipolar world.
With the US in thrall to hegemony, the emergence of a global trifurcation is inevitable – including the three spheres of trade war: Eurasia, led by Russia China; Global South influenced by India – and with the US dominating over the EU and Anglo-Sphere.
But that was not the essence of what President Xi meant by ‘change’; trade, military interchange and monetary system change were already ‘baked in’. What Xi and Putin are suggesting is that we must cast aside the old spectacles of western orientalism, by which we have been accustomed to view the world, and to think it differently and in diverse ways.
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Friday March 31, 2023
In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era.
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Thursday March 30, 2023
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) came out swinging against a move by a fellow Republican Senator to ban the popular social media app TikTok by unanimous consent. Citing the First Amendment of the US Constitution, Sen. Paul vowed to resist any attempts to restrict the speech of Americans. Also today...US Senate (finally) votes to repeal the disastrous 2002 Iraq War authorization. And: a sneak peek into a corrupt DC court. Watch today's Liberty Report...
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Wednesday March 29, 2023
We learned from the "Twitter Files" that Biden Administration officials exerted tremendous pressure on US social media companies to silence and "disappear" posters with opinions the government didn't like. Now, Children’s Health Defense Director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is doing something about it: suing those very government officials for violating the US Constitution! Also today: Why does the US keep blocking a UN investigation of the NordStream sabotage? Finally: Will AI put you out of work? Watch today's Liberty Report...
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Wednesday March 29, 2023
Societies advance through the creation, expression, and evaluation of alternative ideas. Therefore, for almost a millennium, we have had universities where ideas and discoveries are born and different perspectives are debated in “marketplaces of ideas” or “learning communities.” Yet there has been a decline in rational, reasonable discourse on issues of the day on modern campuses. This has been demonstrated by numerous suppressions of speakers, including one recently—and most shockingly—at the Stanford Law School, where a federal judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan, was prevented from speaking by a student protest, aided and abetted by the law school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) dean.
The university’s own administration was helping to lead the suppression of speech and ideas. It is incidents like this one that have made members of university communities afraid to express themselves, fearing potential negative outcomes (e.g., insults, attacks on character, possible physical attack, or efforts to dismiss) from individuals opposed to their viewpoints. Hence, expressed viewpoint diversity is on a notable decline. We are moving at least partway in the direction of universities in 20th-century totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. And this movement has spread to the broader society.
Individuals are increasingly engaging in self-censorship—the consequences of using an inappropriate word become too costly, so we muzzle our expression. One recent example came courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg, who is hardly a paragon of reactionary anti-woke thinking. She recently was pressured into apologizing for suggesting that some people had been “gypped”—a synonym for “cheated” or “ripped off.” Goldberg has profusely apologized for using a word that some apparently find offensive. Why? It turns out that the word may be thought to imply that Roma people (commonly referred to as “gypsies”) are untrustworthy.
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Wednesday March 29, 2023
In a wide-ranging interview, Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-producer and co-host of the Ron Paul Liberty Report, discussed the Republican takeover of the US House of Representatives, the 2024 US presidential elections and the ‘rivalry’ between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, the many divisions in American society and the Republican Party, the corrosive effects of ‘wokeness’ on the fabric of the American Republic, the significance of the revelations from the ‘Twitter files,’ and the case of Hungary as a positive example for European conservative movements.
In January, Republicans took back the House. We saw what went on with the vote for House speaker. What sort of dealmaking took place to get the vote pushed through after fifteen attempts, and is what happened good for the Republican Party and for conservatives, in your view?
I think the dealmaking stemmed from the fact that the Republican platform to take back the House and Senate was not very well defined. Basically, it was Kevin McCarthy saying “it’s my turn,” and that didn’t sit well with some Republicans who were elected on something very, very different, which was to get back to some of the things that at least the Republicans talked about, which is fiscal conservatism, which is stopping the warfare-welfare state, which both parties agree upon. So that was the issue.
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Wednesday March 29, 2023
We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry. This is mind-control in its most sinister form.
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Tuesday March 28, 2023
Like the PATRIOT Act after 9/11, the RESTRICT Act introduced in the Senate is using a "crisis" to decimate our core Constitutional liberties. The bill gives any presidential administration the power to simply end any social media company it deems a "national security threat." Also today: US pressuring Europe to break with China - will it work? Today on the Liberty Report...
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Tuesday March 28, 2023
In Belgrade on March 24, Serbian minister Nikola Selakovic and Russian Ambassador to Serbia Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, laid a wreath at a memorial to children killed in the illegal 1999 NATO terror bombing of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The ceremony and the anniversary of the attack went predictably unmentioned in America.
The remarks of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic were also ignored in the West. “24 years ago, the modern international law finally died,” Vucic said during a commemorative event in Sombor, the first city to be bombed by NATO and President Bill Clinton.
“Nothing worse could happen in the world than what was done here, to a small country, which was guilty only of seeking to make its own decisions, and to be free. As such it didn't appeal to those powers which destroyed the old international order in 1989/90 and created a new one in which only they have the final say in everything.”
The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, in its Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, mentions numerous war crimes perpetuated against the people of Yugoslavia, now Serbia.
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