Ninety miles from the South Eastern tip of the United States, Liberty has no stead. In order for Liberty to exist and thrive, Tyranny must be identified, recognized, confronted and extinguished.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called on President Joe Biden to declare a “climate emergency” Monday night while appearing as a guest on The Rachel Maddow Show.
“[Biden] can do many, many things under the emergency powers of the president that he could do without legislation,” Schumer said.
The Senate leader added that ex-President Donald Trump used the emergency powers “for a stupid wall, which wasn’t an emergency.”
“If there ever was an emergency, climate is one,” Schumer told Maddow.
Declaring a national emergency would give the Biden administration more flexibility in combatting the climate “crisis,” including being able to generate more federal funding, The Hill reported. The possibility of using the powers of the executive to enact climate legislation has many Republicans concerned, according to The Hill.
Under the Trump administration, many Republicans were wary about Trump’s use of the emergency powers to redirect more funding for the border wall with congressional opposition, The Hill reported.
“If today, the national emergency is border security … tomorrow the national emergency might be climate change,” Senator Marc Rubio told CNBC in 2019.
Despite the GOP’s opposition, the new administration has already signaled their extensive commitment to...
With much fanfare (and catchy background music) Twitter has launched the Birdwatch program, a platform that seeks to enlist the “community” to identify and comment on misinformation contained in tweets. The company will initially select 1,000 such “Birdwatchers” in its monitoring of information exchanged on its once neutral platform. Not surprisingly, many of us are not thrilled by the program. While the programs does not allow direct removal of tweets, it is clearly designed to flag tweets that the majority views as misleading. That can then be used by Twitter to further support its expanding censorship of information on the Internet.
The selected Birdwatchers will at least initially post on a public Birdwatch website as opposed to the targeted twitter account.
Adding a “community-based” system is little improvement over a purely “corporate-based” system of censorship. Twitter still maintains that it will regulate speech and this new platform effectively invites the community to help identify those tweets worthy of being flagged for possible removal or bans. The program will also likely encourage campaigns to add such flags on the Birdwatch site in order to pressure Twitter to ban opposing viewpoints. It is not clear who will watch the Birdwatchers in that sense.
The suspicion that this system is meant to enhance Twitter’s censorship policies is hard to avoid. After all, Twitter users can already flag what they view as misinformation by responding directly to a Tweet or using their own account to do so. This is an effort to build a consensus in a community that could be used to support the company in what is rumored to be plans for “much bigger” moves on speech regulation. Many critics are not satisfied with being able to respond to opposing viewpoints with their own views. They want to silence opposing viewpoints and control information exchange. Just recently, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos told CNN’s Brian Stelter that we must find new ways to cut off “conservative influencers” including cable news: “We have to turn down the capability of these Conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences… There are people on YouTube for example that have a larger audience than daytime CNN.”
For free speech advocates, the use of such community-based systems is a familiar method of speech curtailment and controls. Popular speech does not need protection. The key to free speech is the protection of speech that a community or the majority does not favor.
Notably, when Dorsey appeared before the Senate to apologize for the blackout on the Hunter Biden scandal before the election as a mistake, Democratic senators demanded more censorship. Dorsey agreed that “misleading information, as you are aware, is a large problem. It’s hard to define it completely and cohesively.” Instead of then raising concerns over censoring views and comments on the basis for such an amorphous category, Senator Chris Coons pressed him to expand the categories of censored material to prevent people from sharing any views that he considers “climate denialism.”
One of the loudest voices for censorship has been Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal who seemed to take the opposite meaning from Twitter admitting that it was wrong to censor the Biden story. Blumenthal said that he was “concerned that both of your companies are, in fact, backsliding or retrenching, that you are failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.” Accordingly, he demanded an answer to this question:
“Will you commit to the same kind of robust content modification playbook in this coming election, including fact checking, labeling, reducing the spread of misinformation, and other steps, even for politicians in the runoff elections ahead?”
“Robust content modification” has a certain Orwellian feel to it. It is not content modification. It is censorship. If the Democratic party is going crackdown on free speech, it should admit to being the party of censorship and...
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told Breitbart News during a conference call Monday that House Republican Conference chair Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) attacks against Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and himself represent her “vindictive style.”
Gaetz spoke to Breitbart News as he announced that he will travel to Wyoming to “inspire” the state to oust her as their representative in Congress.
The Florida conservative, long known for being a proponent of Trump’s America First foreign policy of noninterventionism, said that Cheney wants the Republican Party to reflect her “America Last” vision.
He said:
In the wake of the Biden presidency, the Republican Party establishment is trying to wrangle the conservative movement back under their control. They want the GOP to look and sound like Liz Cheney. I have a competing vision for Republicanism and I intend to showcase it by going after the America Last politicians in both parties.
More than half of the House Republican Conference has committed to support a resolution calling to remove Cheney as the House GOP chair after she voted to impeach President Donald Trump.
Now, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said Sunday that Cheney has to “answer” to the House GOP Conference about her leadership as the third-ranking Republican.
Gaetz said that his call to remove Cheney arose after Cheney supported Massie’s primary opponent.
However, the battle between Gaetz and Cheney became more personal as a spokesperson told the Washington Examiner, “Rep. Gaetz can...
Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.
“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.
In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.
“So much information, on so many people,” he said.
East Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.
Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.
A still-standing portion of the former Berlin Wall and a guard tower.
“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”
U.S. officials have defended the government collection of information since word of it broke in newspaper stories based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The records are used only to track down terrorists overseas, officials say. The collection has been carefully vetted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body of U.S. judges whose actions are largely kept secret. There is no misuse.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, tried to provide an out for President Barack Obama, offering as a possible explanation for the sweeping nature of the U.S. collection efforts that “the Internet is new to all of us.” She was roundly mocked for that statement, and her administration appeared far less forgiving more recently, when similar spying charges were leveled against the British government.
Germans are dismayed at Obama’s role in allowing the collection of so much information. Before his presidency, hundreds of thousands of Germans turned out to hear him speak in Berlin. During a visit last week, the setup was engineered to avoid criticism: Obama spoke to a small, handpicked audience, many from the German-American school. Access to the Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop for his speech, was severely limited, as was access to Berlin’s entire downtown.
As many Germans as heard Obama speak turned out at quickly arranged protests, including one by self-proclaimed tech nerds near the historic Checkpoint Charlie, where U.S. soldiers welcomed visitors from the communist sector of Berlin for four decades with a sign, “You are entering the American sector.” One demonstrator added this coda: “Your privacy ends here.”
The center-left newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung took Obama to task over the surveillance issue. “Governments do not have the right to conceal broad lines of policy,” the newspaper wrote. “President Obama is operating according to an odd maxim: ‘I am doing a lot of the same things that George W. Bush did, but you can trust me because I am the one doing it.’ Not even Obama is deserving of that much trust.”
“Everyone knows that gathering so much information is bullshit,” said Reinhard Weisshuhn, a political activist and foreign policy adviser. “It’s a total breach of trust by the government. This is how a society destroys itself.”
For 15 years, the Stasi tracked Weisshuhn’s every move and conversation. His Stasi file, which he, like many other Stasi targets, reviewed after the Berlin Wall collapsed, ran to 9,000 pages. He was shocked, and he’s quick to stress that the United States shouldn’t be compared to the totalitarian East German state.
“But that doesn’t mean the president gets a free pass,” he said. “The United States is an open society. This is a problem that must be honestly addressed and fixed.”
Weisshuhn shares a common German perception on the scandal: Snowden, who’s been charged under the Espionage Act for leaking news of the domestic spying, isn’t the bad guy.
“In our case, we thought we were being paranoid until we saw what they’d gathered and realized we’d been naive,” Weisshuhn said. “Here, it’s not the whistle-blower who is wrong, it’s the gathering of information.”
Germans, especially those raised in the east, are unconvinced by arguments that the sweeping collection of information is used only to track terrorists. The assertions by U.S. officials that unspecified attacks have been thwarted don’t persuade them, either. They haven’t forgotten the fear of living under a government that used vague threats to justify blanket spying. In East Germany, the threats came under the banner of disloyalty to socialist ideals. In the United States, the monitoring programs come under the banner of anti-terrorism.
Dagmar Hovestaedt is the spokeswoman for the German Stasi Records Agency, which showed 88,000 people last year what the Stasi had gathered on them. She said the U.S. should consider doing the same.
“This is a study on how to deal with the information the NSA is now gathering,” she said of her archive. “To say that the NSA is the equivalent of the Stasi is too simplistic, but the people who are spied on do have a right to know what was learned about their lives, what they had hoped to keep private that was not. Transparency is essential.”
Still, she noted that Stasi victims have a large advantage in finding out what was studied.
“It’s easy to make information available when it was gathered by a state that no longer exists,” she said.
Stefan Wolle is the curator for Berlin’s East German Museum, which focuses in part on the actions of and reactions to the Stasi. What becomes clear when studying the information the organization gathered is the banality of evil: Simple pieces of everyday life are given much greater importance than they deserve when a secret organization makes the effort to gather the information.
“When the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world I knew,” he said. “A large part of what I found was nothing more than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people today put in emails or texts to each other.
“The lesson,” he added, “is that when a wide net is cast, almost all of what is caught is worthless. This was the case with the Stasi. This will certainly be the case with the NSA.”...
Like a thorn in the side of his antagonists, Donald Trump just made it clear that he will not be going away anytime soon.
With Senate Democrats about to launch another kangaroo court to impeach a private citizen from an office he no longer holds, Trump announced the establishment of the “Office of the Former President.”
And while this isn’t an official government office, you may recall that before assuming office, President Joe Biden would stand before a backdrop advertising the Office of the President Elect, which is also not an official government agency.
“Today, the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, formally opened the Office of the Former President,” read a statement shared on the social media platform Telegram.
“The office will be responsible for managing President Trump’s correspondence, public statements, appearances, and official activities to advance the interests of the United States and to carry on the agenda of the Trump Administration through advocacy, organizing, and public activism,” the release continued.
As a former president, Trump maintains his Secret Service protection, has access to classified briefings — for now — and has the use of a Presidential Townhouse in DC.
With House Democrats delivering a rushed article of impeachment against Trump to the Senate Monday evening, an unprecedented second show trial will soon commence — the motivation for impeaching a man from an office he no longer holds is to ensure that Trump cannot run for office again.
On that note, the announcement of the formation of the office based in Palm Beach County, Fla., is seen by some in the media as Trump possibly “gearing up for...
