House Republicans Warn: Subpoenas Will Fly To The FBI Over 'Twitter Files'

Outspoken Members of the Incoming US House Republican majority have warned the FBI that subpoenas and hearings will be high on the agenda in the next Congress. This after the latest release from the Twitter Files shows direct contact between the Bureau and the pre-Musk social media company. Also today: House Democrats warn Facebook to keep censoring opinions they don't like. And...military-industrial complex runs wild at Ukraine's DC party. Watch today's Liberty Report:



from House Republicans Warn: Subpoenas Will Fly To The FBI Over 'Twitter Files'

The Tea Party, Fifteen Years Later

December 16, 2022, is the fifteenth anniversary of the modern Tea Party. That fact will come as a surprise to many readers who take the mainstream narrative about the Tea Party at face value. The mainstream account begins on February 19, 2009, when Rick Santelli, live on CNBC from the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), declared a rebellion against "socialism" one month into the Obama administration.

If you’re already sensing something amiss, that’s understandable. An editor at establishment NBC lighting the fire of an anti-establishment rebellion? An uprising over mere proposed Obama bailouts of mortgage holders coming four months after silence over (if not a defense of) George W. Bush's $700 billion TARP bailout of Wall Street? If this mainstream narrative seems fishy the more you delve into it, that is because it is.

What really happened 15 years ago and how was the Tea Party transformed from a libertarian grass-roots movement to today's almost completely dead establishment version? What are some of the lessons that can be learned?

The Ron Paul Revolution (October 2007)

The ground-zero event that founded the Tea Party was the registration of the domain TeaParty07.com on October 24, 2007, by supporters of Ron Paul's first presidential campaign. Here is archive.org’s snapshot of the site on November 13, 2007 displaying the famous original curled flyer:


(bigger)

Twelve days after the site registration came Guy Fawkes Night on November 5, 2007, when Paul supporters set off the first "money bomb," a campaign fundraiser which (for Internet fundraising) raked in a record $4.3 million. Then on December 16, 2007, came the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Paul supporters in Boston re-enacted the dumping of tea into Boston Harbor and a newcomer to politics, ophthalmologist Rand Paul, spoke at Faneuil Hall. A second money bomb set off on this commemoration of the Tea Party raised over $6 million, shattering the previous record set 41 days earlier.

What was this schism on the American Right about? It was a rebellion against the Republican Party's wars (in particular, the twin disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq), its drunken-sailor federal spending (e.g., a $500 billion unfunded expansion of Medicare for a new prescription drug program), and its burgeoning post-9/11 federal spy and police state (for example, the Patriot Act signed into law on October 26, 2001).

From Grass-Roots Activism to Big-Money Corporatism (February 2009)

By February 2009, the GOP lay in complete tatters. In addition to its endless wars and domestic spending spree, it had added a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street after the financial crisis of 2008. This in addition to a series of earlier post-9/11 outrages including a new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in November of 2001 (by all common sense, a massive encroachment on a function each airline should have been responsible for to begin with), the so-called No Child Left Behind Act in January of 2002, and a Frankenstein consolidation of 22 executive-branch agencies into a new, gigantic Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in November of 2002. 

As if all that weren’t bad enough, instead of nominating Ron Paul in 2008, the GOP had nominated conservative "war hero" John McCain and Alaska governor Sarah Palin. A war-weary public completely rejected the ticket in favor of a younger, articulate Barack Obama who promised peace and a revived economy. 

The Santelli rant sprang the conservative and GOP establishments into action to transform a marketing vehicle that would serve to not only distract the public from their recent colossal policy failures, but also serve as a gold mine of self-enrichment: t-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, Taxed Enough Already (TEA) yard signs, fluff books from the conservative pundit class, Glenn Beck rallies promoted by the Fox News Channel, and Rush-Limbaugh brand iced tea and children's books.

As Sarah Palin replaced Ron Paul as the face of the movement, a surreal change in advocacy followed. The anti-interventionist Tea Party, once outraged about the endless occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, was now wanting the US to bomb and invade Iran just as it had Iraq. Rally chants of "End the Fed" were replaced with “USA! USA! USA!” a paean to the US military-industrial empire.

A Tea Party in February?

By 2014, the faux Tea Party's fifth anniversary, it was clear that the mainstream media were firmly on board advancing the new, ersatz establishment narrative, as 2014 headlines such as "Tea Party Marks Fifth Anniversary" made clear.

Still, glaring inconsistencies remained. The grass-roots Paulist Tea Party began on December 16, 2007, the 234th anniversary of the original Sons of Liberty protest of 1773. The conservative and GOP forgery of February 19, 2009, was not connected to anything but the advancement of the self-serving and corporatist interests of Big Conservatism and the GOP. Even the latter’s supposed founder, Rick Santelli, was quickly pushed offstage while the Fox News Channel, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and others took center stage.

Epilogue: Decentralization vs. Fighting to Gain Control of Leviathan

While the Ron Paul Revolution, from the spread of homeschooling to Austrian economics, continues on fifteen years later educating people around the world, conservatives and the GOP in late 2022 find themselves in circumstances much like those of early 2009. Unfortunately, they have no quick scam to hoodwink the public with this time around.

The Trump presidency, bereft of any consistent underlying philosophy seen so clearly in both Ron Paul presidential campaigns, promised to drain the D.C. swamp but then, in complete contradiction, worked to maintain the empire by hiring a series of crazed war hawks (including Bush-era fossil John Bolton), bombing Syria, assassinating Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani, and creating a new wing (Space Force) of the military-industrial complex that did little more over four years of Trump’s presidency than try its best to undermine Trump at every turn. Going along with the oppressive Fauci-Birx economy-killing COVID lockdowns and other measures sealed Trump’s fate in terms of destroying his chances of re-election.

While the conservative pundit class now focuses obsessively on the recent Twitter files documenting how social media actively worked against Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, they are already quickly forgetting the 2022 midterm Big Red Wave that quickly vanished on election day, never mind their promised 2012 Mitt Romney landslide against Obama that never materialized. 

While Twitter’s spiking of the October 14, 2020, New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop undoubtedly had an impact on the 2020 election, in effect it was nowhere near the daily impact of the most successful progressive and Democratic Party super PAC that ever was: the government “schools.” The conservative pundit class has zero solutions to it other than vouchers and charter schools that only serve to shift and repackage Marxist indoctrination. They cannot comprehend the idea that once government has its hands on tax revenue, it has all the leverage and spends it in a manner that best advances its interests, which is always progressive causes.

Now pundits such as Laura Ingraham are seriously proposing that the GOP’s only way to counter the Democrats is to outdo the Democrats at their ballot-and-vote-manipulation schemes. (This from the woman who championed Mitt Romney over Ron Paul in 2012, then after Romney’s defeat, proposed reviving Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy as the new ticket to endless future GOP victories.)

A national breakup is the only way to truly save Red states from the growing pathologies in the Blue ones (high crime, taxes, onerous business-smothering red tape), but the conservative pundit class won’t go for it in a million years. As part of his legacy, Ron Paul may have persuaded them to no longer want any part of new wars such as those in Syria and Ukraine that they would have loved under George W. Bush. However, they have no intention of truly dismantling the US military-industrial empire. Leave Puerto Rico and Guam? Are you kidding?! USA! USA! USA!

Reprinted with permission from Mises.org.

from The Tea Party, Fifteen Years Later

‘Twitter Files’ Make it Clear: We Must Abolish the FBI

As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.

The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.

The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a US government entity that included the FBI as well as other US intelligence agencies expressly forbidden from domestic activities, numbered 80 agents engaged regularly in telling Twitter which Tweets to censor and which accounts to ban. The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US government did not like.

US Federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that sink in.

This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it occurred under a Trump Administration. Indeed, Congress would be gearing up for Impeachment 3.0 if Trump-allied officials had engaged in such egregious behavior. But since these US government employees were by-and-large acting to suppress pro-Trump sentiment, all we hear are crickets.

What is interesting about these Twitter revelations is how obsessed the FBI and its government partners were with satire and humor. Even minor Twitter accounts with small numbers of followers were constantly flagged by the Feds for censorship and deletion. But knowledge of history helps us understand this obsession: in Soviet times the population was always engaged in joking about the ineptitude, corruption, and idiocy of the political class. Underground publications known as samizdat were rich with satire, humor, and ridicule.

Tyrants hate humor and cannot withstand satire. That is clearly why the FBI (and CIA) was determined to see a heavy hand raised against any American poking fun at the deep state.

There is good news in all of this, however. As Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote over the weekend, a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll found that even though the mainstream media has ignored the “Twitter files,” Americans have not. Nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that Twitter was involved in politically-motivated censorship in advance of the 2020 election. Some 70 percent of those polled believe Congress must take action against this corporate/state censorship.

As Professor Turley points out, although the First Amendment only applies to the US government, “it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.”

So now we have proof that the FBI (along with US intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security) have been acting through “private” social media companies to manipulate what Americans are allowed to say when they communicate with each other.

Is there anything more un-American than that? Personally, I find it sickening.

We do not need the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies viewing us as the enemy and attacking our Constitution. End the Fed…and End the Federal Bureau of Investigation!

from ‘Twitter Files’ Make it Clear: We Must Abolish the FBI

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Andrew Napolitano, a 2024 Third-Party Presidential Ticket?

The 2024 United States presidential race would become much more interesting if Children’s Health Defense Founder and Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has tenaciously challenged the tyranny and propaganda pursued in the name of countering coronavirus, runs for president with legal scholar and former New Jersey Judge Andrew Napolitano as his running mate on a third-party ticket. That is the presidential ticket possibility suggested by political commentator and trends forecaster Gerald Celente in a Friday interview with host David Knight at the David Knight Show.

Twenty-five minutes into the interview, Celente broached the idea of a Kennedy-Napolitano ticket. Many Americans’ reaction to such a ticket may be similar to Knight’s initial response upon hearing its suggestion. Knight stated, “I would support something like that, even if I didn’t agree with them on all the issues, because I think they tell people what they really believe.” You can watch the interview here.

Celente further suggested that Kennedy and Napolitano could seek the Libertarian Party nomination.

Celente mentioned in the interview his having spoken along with Kennedy and Napolitano at the September 4, 2021 Ron Paul Institute (RPI) conference in Virginia near Washington, DC. Regarding what a Kennedy-Napolitano campaign would look like, Kennedy and Napolitano’s speeches at that RPI event provide a promising preview.

Watch Kennedy’s speech here:

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/december/17/robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-andrew-napolitano-a-2024-third-party-presidential-ticket/

Congress To Sneak $37 Billion Ukraine Aid Into Must-Pass Omnibus Bill

As opposition to Washington's Ukraine blank check mounts, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has signaled that the next huge check - nearly $38 billion - will be conveniently hidden in a year-end, must-pass omnibus bill. It's a way to keep the gravy train flowing while sparing Members the inconvenience of having to face voters. Also today...White House to send more troops into Ukraine. What could go wrong? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Congress To Sneak $37 Billion Ukraine Aid Into Must-Pass Omnibus Bill

The New York Times’ shameless Covid contortions

The New York Times has just discovered that some Americans are no longer wearing masks. Welcome to life in the mainstream-media bubble.

The Times sent its reporters last week across Los Angeles County to assess the state of Covid precautions. Los Angeles is at the epicentre of a national movement among blue-state health officials and their press allies to scare the public back into Covid submissiveness. The director of Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health, Barbara Ferrer, has proclaimed: ‘This is the time for everyone to put their mask back on right now… We need to get the mask back on.’ If residents insist on holding a Christmas party, it should be held outside and guests should be tested before arrival, according to Ferrer. The Los Angeles Times has been backing up her campaign, with recent headlines like: ‘Dangerous weeks ahead in LA County as coronavirus suddenly surges.’ ‘Dangerous’ here equates to around a dozen Covid deaths per day in a county of nearly 10million people. LA County, like other jurisdictions, does not distinguish deaths with Covid from deaths from Covid, making even that small tally a likely exaggeration.

Last week, the New York Times decided to venture forth into this ‘dangerous’ surge. And what it found was apparently stunning and newsworthy. For instance, it reports that a mother and children shopped for groceries in the south-east corner of Los Angeles County without masks, while half of the employees in that same Boyle Heights supermarket wore no face coverings. (The New York Times was seemingly not surprised by the 50 per cent of workers who still were wearing face coverings.)

It also reports that a 60-year-old retired screenwriter flew from LA to New York without feeling the need to don a mask while on the plane. This screenwriter told the Times reporters that he was ‘less worried about getting sick by Covid’ than he was about ‘being inconvenienced by Covid’. So noteworthy was this sentiment that the paper highlighted it in its print edition: ‘Less worried about catching a virus than about “being inconvenienced” by it’, reads the pull quote.

The Times is clearly struggling to make sense of what it is seeing. The ‘perception of the coronavirus, in the age of vaccines and survival stories’, it says, has ‘seemingly evolved from a deadly threat to an annoyance for the healthy’. Those Covid ‘survival stories’, seemingly as dramatic as surviving an avalanche, have presumably influenced people’s perceptions. The reporters can’t be too sure of their diagnosis for this cavalier attitude, however, so they are careful to couch their reporting in terms of impressions and appearances. Healthy individuals ‘seem less concerned about Covid this December’, they offer tentatively.

Just as it did at the height of the Covid pandemic, the New York Times trots out its usual phalanx of ‘health experts’ to rebuke those members of the public who are insufficiently fearful. Readers who hoped that they had heard the last of Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, will have likely underestimated the tenacity of both the New York Times and its safetyist sources.

In his latest NYT appearance, Osterholm complains that seven of his acquaintances have contracted Covid in the past two weeks. ‘Why?’, he asks rhetorically. ‘Because they think it’s over’, he answers. ‘What they’re trying to do is move into a post-Covid world. And unfortunately, that world isn’t ready for us yet.’ That post-Covid world will never be ready for us, in the eyes of Osterholm and his colleagues. The virus, he ‘warned’, in the Times’s paraphrase, ‘is still in the driver’s seat’ – and perhaps it always will be.

Did the Times ask Osterholm how sick his seven acquaintances became? It would appear not. One may surmise with a high degree of confidence that their illness would have been manageable and temporary. But Osterholm and the Times continue to obey the rule of all safetyist Covid reporting: flog the case count and ignore the mildness of the cases.

The Times article does eventually reveal the number of daily Covid deaths nationally: just 290 a day. In a population of 332million, those 290 deaths work out to 0.087 deaths per 100,000 people, or 0.87 deaths per million people. In 2022 so far there have been about 2,000 deaths per day from heart disease – over six times as many daily deaths as the current Covid death count – and nearly 1,700 per day from cancer – over five times as many daily deaths as the current Covid death count. Yet the Times is not urging people to stop snacking between meals and to get off their butts and exercise: that would be fat-shaming. It does imply, however, that those who are trying to ‘move into a post-Covid world’, in Osterholm’s words, are being selfish.

Read the whole article here.

from The New York Times’ shameless Covid contortions

Chaining Down the Tyrant in the Texas Governor’s Mansion

Texas Governor Greg Abbott went into tyrant mode in 2020 on the excuse of a coronavirus “emergency.” He unilaterally imposed a plethora of mandates and new government programs. Included among Abbott’s actions that year were statewide forced closures of businesses, schools, and other places beginning in March, as well as mandated mask wearing beginning in July.

Abbott’s coronavirus crackdown measures were met with sharp criticism from many Texans. Included among them were some Republican members of the state legislature. Notably, in September of 2020, state Republican Party executive committee members, having had enough of the governor’s power overreach, took the heroic and unusual action in September of 2020 of publicly rebuking Abbott, a fellow Republican, in a resolution approved by a 54 to 4 vote. That resolution called on Abbott “to immediately rescind all COVID-related mandates, closures, and restrictions and to open Texas NOW.” Nonetheless, Abbott continued his coronavirus crackdown.

Abbott has since rescinded much of the unilaterally ordered mandates and programs of his coronavirus crackdown. Abbott even feigned heroism for freedom in March of 2021 when repealing draconian mandates he himself had imposed for many months on people in the state. But, Abbott never apologized for any of these measures or the freedom and prosperity that they trampled; instead he suggests his actions had all been appropriate given the circumstances.

What to do with the unrepentant Abbott who seems just a new crisis of the day away from unilaterally springing on Texans another slew of mandates and programs at the cost of violating their freedom, health, and wealth? To deal with Abbott, as well as any successor in the Texas Governor’s Mansion who may have similar tyrannical proclivities, legal chains must be placed on executive power to protect against that power again being similarly abused.

Last week, Republican Texas state Representative Brian Harrison introduced legislation that promises to restrain Abbott and future Texas governors from unilaterally and tyrannically exercising expansive power during a future “emergency” situation as Abbott did during the coronavirus scare. Whether or not the bill is the perfect solution, it does suggest the sort of steps that must be taken to address the problem. In a Texas Scorecard article last week, Brandon Waltens briefly described key provisions of Harrison’s Liberty Protections in Emergencies Act (HB 911) as follows:

The bill would require emergency orders to be narrowly tailored and subject to expedited judicial review. It would also sunset orders after 30 days if the Legislature does not give their approval, and prevent the governor from reissuing expired or rejected orders.

Waltens also noted in his article an additional fact that suggests chains should be put on Abbott. Waltens wrote that Texas is one of just 11 states still in a “COVID state of emergency” due to Abbott having just last month renewed that order for the state.

Of course, the coronavirus scare revealed tyrants in government across America, not just Abbott in the Texas Governor’s Mansion. It is thus important that every state legislature, local elected body, and the United States Congress consider and, as needed, approve legislation to protect against the next crisis of the day being used by tyrants at any level of government to exercises destructive, expansive, unchecked powers.

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/december/14/chaining-down-the-tyrant-in-the-texas-governor-s-mansion/