It is no secret that I think Nikki Haley is a Constitutional threat. And you won’t find many, if any, authors here who support her bid. That’s not to say we should not have some op-eds that support here. But so far, that’s not what people are sending me.

This particular content does not provide any actual evidence or proof of its claims, but it is amusing, especially if you agree with the idea that Haley appears to be an establishment meat-puppet backed by globalists and the military-industrial complex. Her donors and her supporters (like Chris Sununu) tend to be your classic inside-the-beltway types. She’d have a hard time selling herself as an outsider or a disruptor, nor has she tried.

Prove she is or prove she isn’t. Pick a side and have a go. Just be nice about it—no personal attacks or threats. Defend the candidate or defend the video (or pick some ground in between).

And please feel free to send in op-eds for or against any of the candidates. It’s good for debate, and that’s good for the ‘Grok! and our readers.

Latest NH Poll: Trump 45, Haley 18, Christie 14, DeSantis 11, Ramaswamy 10, Hutchinson 0

Latest National poll: Trump 67, DeSantis 11, Haley 10, Ramaswamy 3, Christie 3, Hutchinson, Burgum

Note: Some browsers will block this video (‘cuz Facebook), so you may also be able to view it here.

 

 

 

The post Pick a Side: Is Nikki Haley an Establishment Meat Puppet? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Born and raised in the US, I married into Australia in 1980 and stayed there for most of 38 years. The Australian government recently asked for public submissions concerning “the Covid response.” Here I quote parts of my reply, verbatim, dated December 12, 2013, re-arranged with numbering for GraniteGrok.com:

1. What about the fact that the whole pandemic fakery was intended to lead to a police state with loss of freedom of speech, surrender of property rights, and humiliation of everyone? What about the unjustified lockdowns and loss of small businesses? What about Australia’s worldwide loss of reputation? Can it be regained? It sure can. Let Oz be the leader in the jailing of ministers, bureaucrats, medical traitors, and judges. Remove Australia’s signature right now from the UN Charter and all its pomps and all its works. Throw the globalists out. Or reinvent Port Arthur jail to hold them.

How is it possible, after so many facts have come to light, that the Australian government still doesn’t acknowledge that the Covid illness was planned? It was a bioweapon (similar to many previous ones, such as AIDS and polio). US Senator Rand Paul has shown that certain American persons interacted with Chinese persons in Wuhan to make Covid-19 “jump.”

2. I quote from the 2023 book, “Wuhan Cover-Up,” by Robert F Kennedy, Jr, Chapter 38:
“The CIA’s cutout USAID invested $64 million in bioweapons research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV] and, with NIAID, funneled all their grants to WIV through EcoHealth Alliance, which the evidence suggests was functioning as a CIA front after December 2015. Sir Jeremy Farrar, who masterminded the coverup with Dr. Fauci, [Francis] Collins, and [Peter] Daszak, is the Director of Wellcome Trust, an organization with deep ties to MI5….

“In May 2021, President Biden asked US intelligence agencies [oh, please] to conduct an investigation of Covid’s origins…. In August…they told the White House they were unable to determine whether the Covid bug originated in the Wuhan lab. Then … a current CIA officer told Congress that CIA officers had bribed officials on that team … with ‘significant monetary incentive’ to change their position from that [the virus] originated in the Wuhan lab to ‘unable to determine.’ …” Congress then “detailed those charges in a letter to FBI Director William Burns.”
No Law enforcement action by Attorney General Merrick Garland has followed.

We want to thank Dr. Mary Maxwell for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Steve@GraniteGrok.com.
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Fraud vitiates everything it touches. Everything about Covid is fraudulent. Just the fact that no one got arrested after the above whistleblower’s revelations is enough to tell you the US government is hopelessly corrupt. UK, too. From Kennedy’s book again, page 360:
“[British epidemiologist] Neil Ferguson made a professional career using crooked modeling to sow panic in a series of concocted pandemics…. In 2001, Ferguson’s wildly exaggerated projections about … foot-and-mouth disease sparked the British government’s culling of eleven million sheep and cattle.” (Bet they knew…. Bet it was economic sabotage.)

3. My expertise in the matter at hand can be seen in my 2013 book “Consider the Lilies” and such parts of my 2011 book “Prosecution for Treason” that deal with disease as a bioweapon and describe how traitors can and do avoid the law.

In 2020, as soon as President Trump ordered Operation WarpSpeed to attain a vaccine for Covid, I was in US district court and later in First Circuit Court of Appeals to seek a restraining order against the mandating of any vax. My appeal brief, in Maxwell v US Department of Defense, quoted from Questions asked in the Australian Parliament, published in Hansard 1 June 2021 and 5 February 2021. My purpose was to show the irresponsibility of various governments and the absurdity of the pandemic:

In Parliament, Tony Zappia, MP, asked John Skerritt, Deputy Secretary of Health Products Regulation. “Once you get vaccinated, will you have to be vaccinated in, say, 12 months’ time?” Dr Skerritt replied: “If you know the answer to that, could you tell us? That’s the $64 billion question. And that, of course, is one of the primary questions that people following this epidemic are asking. We hope not. There are two possibilities: either the current vaccines don’t provide long-term protection per se, or there is antigenic or virus strain drift.”

Senator Malcolm Roberts asked (thinking of ivermectin?): “The vaccine only has provisional approval. Is it true that provisional approval is only possible where there are no approved pharmaceutical treatments available?” Mr Edwards replied: “The provisional approval is possible where there is not a similar treatment available in that, for that group of patients.”

Fiona Martin, Ph.D., MP, asked about the inconsistency between states as to vaccinating children up to age four years. Dr Murphy replied: “We are spending well over $23 million, I think, on a comms campaign, which is in three phases. The first phase is to get people confident about the registration process. They feature gentlemen in white coats and other people to assure people that our registration processes are as rigorous as anywhere in the world….”

Tony Zappia, MP, asked, “Have there been any concerns raised in respect to pregnancy and the vaccine?” Dr Skerritt replied: “Again, it’s more a lack of data rather than any evidence of miscarriages and the like. … Some clinical groups are recommending that, if you’re not in a high-risk or high-exposure group and if you’re pregnant, you hold off until you have the kid.. …There hasn’t been any evidence—and I’ll check with Dr Cook that my statement is correct—of ill effects in pregnancy. It was more that, in clinical trials, it’s normal to exclude pregnant people.”

Mike Freelander, MD, MP, asked about providing vaccines to our Pacific neighbors. Dr Murphy replied: the “Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade have invested over half a billion dollars in a vaccine for the Pacific.” Dr Skerritt said, [Our funding] will cover the full population of East Timor, Papua New Guinea and all the Pacific islands, …and a lower percentage targeted at vulnerable groups—in countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, we hope, and the Philippines.” [Poor things.] — end of Hansard quotes

4. Shame, shame on Australia for always licking the boots of the US and the UK. And shame on America for throwing away its birthright. I can show you that the autism epidemic and the tragedy of Thalidomide were deliberately caused. And now you are asking citizens to weigh in on the COVID response. Here is my best advice: Round up all Australians, here or abroad, who played any part in the production or dispensing of Covid and the vaccine. Who approved of the false PCR testing? Who mandated masking and social distancing? Who made a fortune with taxpayers’ money on the testing and ventilating? Was there genocidal intent?

If so, you can get them for the crime of genocide. You can also get them for war crimes, although that has to be in the context of war. Is killing thousands of citizens and injuring millions a war situation? Probably, but we need not go that far. Ordinary crimes of homicide and assault will do. Grievous bodily harm. Terrorism. Funding terrorists (I mean paying our terrorists in office). Perjury. Theft of public funds. What about the ‘theft’ that occurred when people were dismissed from their jobs and lost their income based on refusal to be assaulted by the vaccine?

5. Honor to the first man who will take charge! Admiration to new heroes! If you’re going to die for your country, don’t do it by taking a stupid vax. Do it with truth guts, and energy…. Come on, it’s late. Hurry! — end of quotes from my submission to pmc.gov.au.

 

Dear Grokkers, There is a little problem with my publishing at GraniteGrok.com. Namely, Disqus has canceled me. Thus, if readers challenge me in Comments — as I hope they will — I may be unable to reply.

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Londonderry Times publisher Deb Paul has been dragged through the court system thanks to detractors around town who are less than enthusiastic about her refusal to toe their line. This Wednesday, a judge will decide how effective their campaign against her has been.

Deb has been found guilty of not knowing that while the words don’t explicitly make her responsible, she must ensure that politicians who advertise in her publication send her artwork and copy that satisfies state election law. The secretary of state does not pay Deb Paul. She is not on the payroll at the AG’s office or any other enforcement authority. Yet, according to a judge (to the applause of the scoundrels that reported her as the state does not police the practice unless notified), it is her job to know every nuance of this bit of election law text and enforce it – in her spare time.

The Union Leader Editorial Page put it like this.

 

She spent the day before Thanksgiving standing trial over political ads purchased in her newspaper. She will now spend a day the week before Christmas finding out her sentence for failing to use what reporter Damien Fisher, writing for InDepthNH, termed “the magic words.”

The New Hampshire campaign finance law specifies a number of requirements for political advertising. It does not say who is responsible for a failure to meet those requirements. Attorney General John Formella’s office insisted that Deb Paul was responsible and not the campaigns or candidates. Judge Kerry Steckowych, presented with a one plus one equals two case, decided that yes, the ads in question did not contain the “magic words.” Somehow, even without the magic words labeling the ads in question as “paid political advertisement,” witnesses in the case easily identified them as the political ads they obviously were.

 

The UL further suggests that Deb Paul has paid enough. A trip through the court system is not inexpensive in either time or actual money. She is not likely to make the same mistake again, and we agree. No one was harmed. Not even the detractors in the political cesspit of Londonderry on whom she reports. Individuals whose cabal deserves the appropriate and necessary sting of the free press.

Hers and ours.

Regardless of what punishment the judge decides is fair, and we think a warning will do, the free press and independent media are more important to the liberty of the nation, the state, and the town of Londonderry than the “magic words.” We feel obligated to rise in support of Deb Paul and her newspaper. To share more of its content with our audience who, and this may not come as a surprise, agree that the town has become a stink-hole of political insiders. A swamp of its own that needs draining.

We can’t promise anything will be drained. The kind of politicians who attack the media by any means necessary to silence them are not the sort to go quietly. The general public’s tendency to sit on their hands and ignore what goes on in plain sight is likewise a persistent problem, but they are the laxatives needed to move the bowels, so to speak. And quite often, you only need a hundred voters who never showed up to vote in a local election before to show up once. Sometimes fewer, and on occasion more.

Deb has been working on encouraging this for years, and we’d like to help.

Wouldn’t it be something if the attention brought upon the town by self-proclaimed doyens attempting to silence independent media was a breeze that brought much-needed winds of change?

It would.

 

The post Let Londonderry Times Publisher Deb Paul Go … With a Warning appeared first on Granite Grok.

There are questions about Hunter Biden and his prior acts in the public arena. To the extent his actions have a bearing on his dad, they may be worthy of note.  Those questions include but are not limited to:

·         Did the federal bureaucracy act differently in cases involving Hunter Biden than they otherwise would have?

·         Did Hunter Biden receive special treatment in interviewing?

·         Was he given preferential treatment in the form of alleged felonies being allowed to expire?

·         Did he receive warnings about planned federal raids?

·         Did he receive any sweetheart deals?

Something we know is that President Biden enlisted White House staff to push challenged accounts of Hunter’s conduct. Something else we know is the White House staff was used to attack the House Republicans’ investigative process.

It appears now that the White House may have given House Republicans another avenue of investigation. This time, it may bear on the formal impeachment inquiry into the President rather than the criminal charges against Hunter Biden.

We want to thank Marc Abear for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Steve@GraniteGrok.com.
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Hunter Biden defied a congressional subpoena. That act opens him up to another criminal prosecution. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about the first son’s decision.  She told reporters President Biden “was certainly familiar with what his son was going to say.”

The comment suggests Mr. Joseph Biden knew in advance that his son would defy Congress.  It seems to imply father and son had discussed it beforehand.  Is that true?  And if that is true, it is almost certainly a mistake both legally and politically. Doesn’t it imply the President obstructed a Congressional investigation?

If it is true the president was speaking with his son about committing a potentially criminal act, don’t we need to know how the president may have supported his son’s effort to commit a felony?

Jean-Pierre has since declined to clarify her remarks about what may have gone on between the Bidens, father and son.  Clearly, multiple sources reported Joe Biden knew about Hunter’s planned speech on Capitol Hill.

Will the Justice Department prosecute  Hunter Biden for contempt of Congress?  Merrick Garland and his DOJ had no issues prosecuting Steve Bannon when he defied a subpoena for the Jan. 6 committee two years ago.

President Biden has stated any individual who defies Congress should be criminally prosecuted.  We shall see if that applies to everyone.

Will House investigators probe Joe Biden’s role in Hunter’s defiance of a congressional investigation?  It seems like the White House has admitted to that.

Stay tuned for another episode of “As the Crackhead Turns.”  Who will he bring down with him?

The post How Will Hunter Bring Dad Down?  appeared first on Granite Grok.

The owner of the shop, who is known as ‘Silver Dave’ told The Liberty Block that he is very excited about the new shape. “It’s beautiful, useful, perfect for bartering, and it’s better than pre-1965 90% silver dimes because it says right on it that it’s a tenth ounce of pure silver,” Dave told TLB, adding that “It may be the lowest premium (cost over silver price) fractional silver in the world.” Indeed, the roughly $3.30 per item does appear to be less expensive than any other 1/10th Troy ounce silver product on the market. The large online sellers have already placed large purchase orders for the small rounds, according to Silver Dave.

The post Silver Dave Launches Best Silver Barter Piece Yet! appeared first on The Liberty Block.

President Biden recently repeated the claim that high prices are caused by greedy businesses. Biden is not alone in trying to gaslight the people into thinking price inflation is rooted in the actions of private individuals and not the fiat money system Americans have lived under since 1971.

In the media, we see excessive consumer spending on luxury items, for example, being blamed for continued price inflation. The fact is that increased consumer demand can only cause prices to rise in those sectors of the economy subject to the increased demand. Prices increasing across the economy are always the result of the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy.

Trying to minimize the harm of inflation, some people in government and media will insist that, while many prices for goods are higher than they were pre-lockdown, they are still lower than were prices in the 1990s when you consider that the quality of these goods has increased. The argument is that buyers are getting higher value today than 30 years ago. Of course, any increased quality is because of market-driven innovation. If America had a free-market monetary system instead of central bank-controlled fiat currency, prices would drop as quality increases.

It is also important not to ignore the fact that the Federal Reserve’s devaluation of the dollar’s purchasing power creates an incentive for individuals to spend money as soon as they receive it and a disincentive for them to save. This is because the dollar will have less value a year from now than today. Therefore, high levels of spending are a rational response to an irrational fiat money system.

High prices and supply shortages were inevitable after the lockdowns. However, prices would have adjusted back more if the Federal Reserve had not pushed interest rates to zero. While the Fed has raised interest rates, it has not raised rates to anywhere near where they would likely be in a free market. In fact, rates are not at historically high levels, yet many worry the Fed’s rate increases are pushing the economy toward a recession. This shows how addicted Americans are to the Fed’s “easy money,”

When the dollar’s purchasing power erodes, workers will seek higher wages. This is why periods of high price inflation are accompanied by strikes and other types of union activity aimed at increasing wages. This has made unions another popular scapegoat for price inflation when the truth is that Fed-caused price increases are the real reasons behind labor unrest.

Sadly, the increase in nominal wages gained by the recent series of strikes is unlikely to keep up with the declining real wages resulting from the Federal Reserve’s assault on the dollar’s value. This is why, contrary to the claims of many progressives, working people are the victims, not the beneficiaries, of price inflation. As a Texas union official once told me, “Gold has always been the friend of the worker.” This makes sense because gold is money whose value cannot be manipulated by the central bank.

Inflation is the act of money creation by the Fed, and high prices are a symptom of inflation, not a cause, and not the fault of greedy businesses, consumers, and unions. The Federal Reserve is also the engine of the welfare-warfare state. Therefore, to restore a system of limited government, individual liberty, and free markets, Congress must cut spending and audit, then end the Fed.

 

Ron Paul | Ron Paul Institute

Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.

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HB1291 reduces the power of our consistently anti-liberty zoning boards to write anti-liberty rules where there is no basis. A typical town’s 1.8-acre minimum lot size has been justified by the scarcity of water and septic capacity and was adopted in an era of poorer understanding and technology.

HB1291 simply limits the ability of town zoning to impose this restriction when water and sewer are not an issue. The previous bill freed lots that are on town water and sewer; the current bill frees those lots, plus lots for which engineering ensures adequate water and septic capacity. That is not exactly “HB44 on steroids,” as the Coalition of NH Taxpayers claimed here on Saturday.

I did check the bill’s sponsors, as that article requested. One is my own Representative, Josh Yokela, rated 100% and Legislator of the Year by the NH Liberty Alliance. Another is nearby Scott Wallace (93.8%, grade A), for whom I have voted. Even prime sponsor Ellen Read (27.1%) is not quite rated a Constitutional Threat.

The text of the bill, as introduced, is available on the General Court website. That version does not permit minimum-acreage lots to be “chopped up” into four lots, as the CNHT article states. It permits one “accessory dwelling unit” as a matter of right and one more subject to the usual restrictions for subdivisions, including “aesthetic standards,” but only as applied to ordinary lots.

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The conflict between zoning and liberty plays out across the state. I hung out with some sign carriers outside the polls a couple of years ago and was astonished to be arguing for liberty AGAINST my comrades. You see, a landowner here is planning a huge subdivision of riverfront condos. (“He’s not even from New Hampshire,” my homies whisper.) The development will have a drastic impact on traffic and on our “rural character,” as development always does. So the goal of local “conservatives” is to use our gunpoint apparatus to shut the flatlander down: to deny him his preferred use of what is his land, no matter if he recently bought it to develop it.

New Hampshire’s unaffordable housing is legend and is caused by insufficient supply to meet demand, driving up home prices and rents. The key reason we can’t meet demand is municipal regulation. HB1291 limits this regulation in cases where it is clearly senseless. It is a dainty amendment of RSA 674:71. I would instead have taken a chainsaw to a power originally granted to protect against contaminating adjacent water but now corrupted to let town busybodies dictate “aesthetic standards.”

And lack of “affordable workforce housing” has been deemed a “crisis,” and towns are now required to ensure that they provide a suitable amount, now written into law (RSA 674:58). That’s a big-government solution to the problem. HB1291 is a small-government solution.

Preserving the “rural character” of a town is a value. It’s not everyone’s value. My town has a board that uses tax money to achieve “conservation” – and another board tasked to lure new business. A politician’s “vision” for a town or the state should always face a key question: Do we have to make this decision as a collective? Do we have to have a single “vision” and use the threat of armed force to restrain nonconformists?

And how does restraining town zoning boards become a key issue for a “taxpayer coalition” at all? Ah yes, the newcomers, certainly illegals from Brazil with twelve kids apiece, will burden our government schools. But this is a consequence of New Hampshire providing free instruction as an entitlement. Declaring something a right, with its price set to zero, results in overuse and calls to and by conservatives to regulate unrelated things that might drive up the cost of providing that “right” – just as “free health care” gave Washington a rationale to punish unhealthy lifestyles.

Who should decide? In this case, the landowner should decide. That is the essence and the huge benefit of having private property.

 

The post Zoning: HB1291 is NOT HB44 On Steroids appeared first on Granite Grok.

Desantis on townhall last night; no questions about Disney and don’t say gay; his views on abortion and trump’s presidency; the resignation of the president of UPenn contrasted with the president of Harvard hanging on with support of the university; banning conversion therapy (SCOTUS turned down a case visiting this issue) and its implications for free speech. Houthis attacking ships with little reprisal from the U.S. or other nations and its implications for an upcoming election year. Is the U.S. in danger of terrorist attacks as Director Wray has been alluding to?

The post The Conservatarian Exchange Podcast #184 appeared first on The Liberty Block.

Man Made Global Climate disasters have an annoying habit of not happening. The predictions of experts never come to pass. And that’s great for blogging. One sad tale of demise we are particularly fond of is the disappearing beaches.

 

In 1995, 2500 experts got together and decided they could make a comfortable living if they said things like in 25 years, “most of the beaches on the East Coast would be gone.”

 

Tony Heller uses Jones Beach on Long Island as his example, showing satellite photos from 1994 and 2023. The beach looks bigger today than before the doomsday predictions. We prefer the shoreline closer to home. Hampton Beach is a top-shelf, well-maintained strip of sand. It’s clean, and it’s still there. It hasn’t shrunk at all, not since 1995 or, as we showed here, 1950.

 

Hampton Beach, NH shoreline 1950 Hampton Beach High Tide 2020 For educational use only

 

My wife made a few trips this past summer and assures me it’s the same beach she’s been visiting since she was a child. The prediction wasn’t just bad or wrong; we’re three years past the end of East Coast beaches, and there’s not only no there there, but there might be more there than in 1995. A result common when considering the armageddon predicted by those who – predictably – have a fiscal interest in precipitated fear.

We also spent a lot of time boating over Portsmouth Way and out into the ocean, and high tide or low, and there is zero evidence of the apocalypse predicted by the Climate Cult or the myriad globalist beneficiaries of those fears.

It’s a scam. An expensive one. And it is not going away unless we make it so.

 

The post Reminder: It’s Been Almost Four Years Since East Coast Beaches “Disappeared” appeared first on Granite Grok.

Power-hungry, lawless and steadfast in its pursuit of authoritarian powers, the government does not voluntarily relinquish those powers once it acquires, uses and inevitably abuses them.

Likewise, any presidential candidate who promises to be a dictator on day one, if elected, will be a dictator-in-chief for life.

Then again, the president is already a dictator with permanent powers: imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional thanks to a relatively obscure directive (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20), part of the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, which gives unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president in the event of a “national emergency.”

That national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security.

The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.

For all intents and purposes, the Constitution has long been suspended, and we’ve been operating in a state of martial law for some time now.

The emergency powers that we know about which presidents might claim during such states of emergency are vast, ranging from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, including implementing an internet kill switch, and restricting travel.

Yet according to documents obtained by the Brennan Center, there may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public.

Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been planning and preparing for such crises for years now, quietly assembling a wish list of presidential lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.

We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.

Mind you, the police state with the president at its helm has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.

The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.

All of the imperial powers amassed by past presidents—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were passed from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden and will be passed along to the next president.

These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

These are the powers that continue to be passed along to each successive heir to the Oval Office, the Constitution be damned.

The war on disinformation, the war on electoral corruption, the war on COVID-19, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration: all of these countermeasures have become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history about how easy it is for freedom to fall and tyranny to rise.

What we desperately need is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution’s principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats and bureaucrats—answer to and are accountable to “we the people.”

We must recalibrate the balance of power.

Congress must also put an end to the use of presidential executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements as a means of getting around Congress and the courts.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely—no matter which party holds office.

The process of unseating a dictator and limiting the powers of the presidency is far from simple but at a minimum, it must start with “we the people.”

Make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.

 

John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute

The post How Absolute Power Corrupted the President appeared first on Granite Grok.

If you’ve forgotten who Peter Vlaming is, he’s a French Teacher in Virginia who (in 2018) was removed for refusing to address a Transgender student by their preferred gender/pronoun. Vlaming was accused of bullying and discrimination and let go. He sued on religious and free speech grounds.

And he’s winning!

 

In a gratifying win for religious freedom and free speech, the Virginia Supreme Court concluded Thursday that embattled Virginia high school teacher Peter Vlaming, who had been fired over his refusal to use a student’s preferred pronouns because of his religious faith, was protected by the free exercise and free speech clauses of the Virginia Constitution.

The majority decision, which was written by Justice D. Arthur Kelsey, is a landmark victory for freedom of conscience and expression in the state. In its opinion, the court held that religious exercise is protected under the Virginia Constitution unless it threatens the public safety or order.

 

The case returns to the trial court to address “constitutional, statutory and breach-of-contract claims” with the State Supreme Court ruling attached. A ruling that makes the school’s claims impossible to defend. It based his termination on the presumption of what amounts to bullying, framing his beliefs as a threat, but the court tore that up and threw it away. (Related: Students Walkout in Support of Teacher Fired for Not Using Transgender Pronoun.)

 

The court wrote that the issue was not whether the school board’s policies forbidding discrimination and harassment applied (as the school board had asserted) or did not apply (as Vlaming had asserted) to the compelled-speech situation Vlaming alleged. Rather, the issue was whether Vlaming’s sincerely held religious beliefs caused him to commit overt acts that “invariably posed some substantial threat to public safety, peace or order,” and if so, whether, under a “strict scrutiny” review of the claim, the government’s compelling interest in protecting the public from that threat could be satisfied by “less restrictive means.”

The court wrote that when religious liberty merges with free-speech protections, as it did in Vlaming’s case, mere “objectionable” and “hurtful” religious speech (or in Vlaming’s case, “nonspeech”) wasn’t enough to meet this strict scrutiny standard.

 

Your feelings don’t trump his natural rights.

That’ll leave a mark and provide hope for educators across the state – especially in places like the infamous Loudon County.

 

Alliance Defending Freedom is handling the Vlaming Case.

The post Fired School Teacher’s Day In Court: School Can’t Compel Him to Use Preferred Pronouns appeared first on Granite Grok.

The Bill of Rights turns 232 years old today. Adopted in 1791 as a consolation prize for the Anti-Federalists,  it has been perhaps the most important part of American legal history since the eighteenth century and has served as an inconvenient reminder of the laissez-faire libertarian philosophy that permeated American political theory in the late 18th century.

As I noted in “Magna Carta and the Fantasy of Legal Constraints on States,” words written on parchment do not actually protect anyone’s freedoms, and legal constraints on state power are only as good as the ideological backing they receive from the population.

Nevertheless, for all its weaknesses, the Bill of Rights—when taken seriously by the general population—has played a part in preserving basic human rights for Americans that were eviscerated in many nations long ago. Thanks to the First Amendment and those who support it, for example, freedom of speech is often more respected in the United States than is almost any place one might hold up as an example. One can be arrested and imprisoned for saying unpopular things in France and Germany, just to name two examples. (And we’re not even considering the far more illiberal states of Asia.)

How absurd it was, for example, to hear the French pretend to be supporters of freedom of speech in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre when the French state imposed legal sanctions on people for saying allegedly anti-Semitic or racist things. In Germany, one can be imprisoned for saying unpopular things about Nazis or the Holocaust. What most (but not all) Americans understand—and what the French and Germans don’t—is that in a free country, some people will say repugnant things.

The First Amendment can also be partly credited for the lack of strong anti-defamation laws in the United States. For example, thanks to the First Amendment, federal law makes it very difficult for government agents to sue members of the public for alleged “defamatory” behavior. The whole concept of defamation, of course, is just a way to shut people up who say things the “victims” don’t like.

Moreover, religious freedom has never been more than a temporary convenience for people in most of the world. The French government seized Catholic churches long ago, and most of Europe shut down religious services during the Covid Panic. In the United States, these shutdowns were shorter, less widespread, and more haphazard due primarily to the lingering power of the First Amendment, as written. And certainly, for all the anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism that has reared its head in America over the decades, nothing compares to the government-sanctioned anti-Semitism that has at times permeated France, Germany, Austria, and a host of other “free” countries in Europe.

And as far as being Catholic goes, even the worst anti-Catholic persecutions in American history have nothing on the persecutions concocted by anti-Catholic regimes of the Spaniards, French, Mexicans, Brits, Japanese, and many others.

As for property rights — which includes the right to own weapons for self-defense — the US regime has managed to find new exceptions to this every year, but even in that case, the US often comes off looking relatively less awful. We need to look no further than the French regime’s scattered jihads against basic privacy and property.

Of course, most regimes do this every time there’s an “emergency.” In Canada, during World War II, the federal government mandated registration of all firearms, which it claimed was necessary to fight domestic subversion. Human rights go right out the window in the UK whenever the state feels the “need.” The US itself suspended habeas corpus and a host of other human rights during the Civil War. And the Bill of Rights didn’t prevent the internment of the Japanese-Americans, many of whom, unlike the Reservation Indians of old, were full-blown American citizens.

In the long sordid history of conquest and colonialism, the US has held its own (in a bad way), whether in the Philippines in Iraq or on the Western frontier of North America. And yet, the presence of the Bill of Rights and the ideology it represents has long been an inconvenience and an impediment — albeit often a weak one —to an even more aggressive state in terms of prosecuting “enemies” of the state who oppose American militarism.

A Bright Spot in an Unnecessary Constitution 

Bizarrely revered by many as a “pro-freedom” document, the document now generally called “the Constitution” was originally devoted almost entirely toward creating a new, bigger, more coercive, more expensive version of the United States. The United States, of course, had already existed since 1777 under a functioning constitution that had allowed the United States to enter into numerous international alliances and win a war against the most powerful empire on earth.

That wasn’t good enough for the oligarchs of the day, the crony capitalists with names like Washington, Madison, and Hamilton.  Hamilton and friends had long plotted for a more powerful United States government to allow the mega-rich of the time, like George Washington and James Madison, to more easily develop their lands and investments with the help of government infrastructure. Hamilton wanted to create a clone of the British Empire to allow him to indulge his grandiose dreams of financial imperialism.

The tiny Shays Rebellion in 1786 finally provided them with a chance to press their ideas on the masses and to attempt to convince the voters that there was already too much freedom going on in America at the time.

The Federalists didn’t mention that they’d benefit personally from the new constitution, of course, but instead focused on the idea that without a stronger central government, the country would be overthrown by the powers of “faction.”

Patrick Henry and the Anti-Federalists pointed out—correctly—that the US already had proven it had sufficient means to deal with European powers, and that in the bloody history of states, the true threat to freedom lay not in there being too much freedom, as the Federalists claimed, but in the overweening power of centralized states.

Virtually no one believed that a new constitution was necessary to secure what they had earlier called their “English Liberties,” including freedom of speech, a right to due process, jury trials, and more. Those freedoms were already assumed to be assured to all non-slaves. Those freedoms had been won in the Revolution. The people didn’t need a more powerful Congress to protect them. If their freedoms were threatened, the people could rely on highly democratic (for the time) state legislatures and a decentralized militia system.

But, in the end, the Federalists won out after they promised to adopt a Bill of Rights to limit the power of Congress. As we know, though, the Bill of Rights began to break down immediately, and it was only a matter of time until the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson’s embargo, and other even worse crimes perpetrated on the states and the people.

It was the Constitution of 1787, after all, that strengthened the institution of slavery, set the stage for the fugitive slave acts, and made provision for the criminal prosecution of those who attempted to help set escaped slaves free.

That’s what sort of “pro-freedom” document the Constitution was and is.

What the Constitutions Should Have Said 

The Bill of Rights would never have been necessary, however, if so much power had not been granted to the central government by the constitution of 1787 in the first place.

Indeed, the earlier constitution of 1777 (the so-called Articles of Confederation) had itself been too detailed and powerful.

After all, the whole idea of a national constitution had always been sold on really just two premises: 1) It would assist in national defense and 2) it would facilitate trade among the member states.

In other words, it should never have been anything more than a customs union and a mutual defense agreement. So, in the service of sound political science, I have composed a new constitution for us:

Article 1. The United States shall meet every two years in Congress assembled to negotiate terms for the maintenance of a union of independent states. There shall be no duties or taxes imposed on trade among the states or the people therein. The states, in Congress assembled shall set the standards for membership in the United States and provide provision for member withdrawal and the conditions for receiving the benefits of mutual defense as a member of the Union.

The End.

Nothing more is necessary or prudent. Independent states enter into mutual defense agreements quite frequently, without surrendering their independence, and trade agreements are a quite mundane affair in the history of states.

Any appeal to “patriotism” or lofty ideas of “America” or the fanciful notion that people in Arizona are the countrymen of people in New York has no backing in the day-to-day realities of living. Never in history was there a group of 330 million people spread across four million square miles who were part of the same community and who shared the same experiences, interests, or even the same economic ties.

In reality, the people of Colorado, for example, have more in common with the people of Saskatchewan—in terms of economic interests, culture, and history—than with the people of Georgia or Delaware or Pennsylvania. People only believe the residents of the US states make up “one people” because their third-grade teachers told them as much. Actual experience tells us otherwise.

Those who demanded the Bill of Rights had attempted to preserve this idea of government on a human scale: government that reflects the realities of daily life, human relationships, and the necessity of free commerce—rather than the ideological fantasies of nation builders. Even to this day, the idea that the minutiae of life and commerce should be governed by a group of millionaires sitting in luxury 2,000 miles away is repugnant to the reasonable mind. In preventing this, the Bill of Rights has largely failed, although things most certainly could have been worse.

 

Ryan McMaken is executive editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power and Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in public policy, finance, and international relations from the University of Colorado. He was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities and Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

 

Ryan McMaken } Mises Wire

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The post The Bill of Rights: The Only Good Part of the Constitution appeared first on Granite Grok.

America’s university systems are rotten to their core. The proof is in the Congressional hearings when university presidents refuse to denounce calls for genocide and in the streets filled with college kids chanting their approval for mass murder.

BREAKING: Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), presses Harvard President Claudine Gay on campus antisemitism during Congressional hearing. pic.twitter.com/8U7LnVqZ26

— Breaking 4 News (@Breaking_4_News) December 5, 2023

Still, our academic institutions weren’t captured on Oct. 7 when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel. This isn’t a new nightmare for American students. They have suffered in the ever-increasing radicalized world of collegiate education for decades. Traditional beliefs are demonized, while professors promote harmful sexual and racial ideologies as inherently good. (ROOKE: There’s A Good Reason Trad Wives Can’t Stop Telling You About Their Sex Lives)

And thus, there is little campus support for college-educated conservative women.

Most groups available to women are geared toward uplifting progressive causes antithetical to traditional values and beliefs. In “You’re Not Alone: The Conservative Woman’s Guide To College,” author Karin Lips shows young women entering their college years how to navigate their hostile campuses to find like-minded students and mentors.

“This book is here to mentor you on how to thrive on campus as a young conservative woman, even in the face of liberal intolerance,” she wrote. “You can earn good grades. You can make friends. You can successfully prepare for your career.”

Lips is the founder and president of the Network of Enlightened Women (NeW). It originally started as a book club for women who wanted to read classic books which were being left off the University of Virginia’s college syllabus. However, it has since grown into a national organization encouraging conservative women to connect on issues important to them.

In my new book, I tell the story of @CHSommers visiting UVA when I was a student.

Buy it today to see how campuses have changed and strategies for dealing with what’s happening on campuses today.https://t.co/8hBPS7DUhh

— Karin Lips (@klips) December 13, 2023

Although we differ in opinion on whether it is positive how our campuses have become predominately female, offering women a different path than bitter feminism is important if we want them to find their purpose. GirlBoss attitudes strip women of their femininity and encourage them to search for a life without family. It does our society no good to have large swaths of our female population stuck in lives that don’t fulfill them. Feminism would have them believe a family is incompatible with success, while the right mentor could show them options giving them the possibility of having both.

Lips’ advice for women to look for college campuses with higher ratios of women to men was ingenious. Of course, it would make sense that if a woman is looking for a man willing to marry young, she will need to be in an environment where men have less of a romantic choice. She calls this the “man deficit.” (ROOKE: Why Are So Many American Men Killing Themselves? The Answer’s Obvious)

“In places where there is a ‘man deficit,’ or an undersupply of college-educated men, men are less likely to commit. The college and post-college hookup culture, declining marriage rates among college-educated women, and lack of commitment by men, … are byproducts of an undersupply of college-educated men,” Lips wrote.

Her research found that “58% of women in college self-identify as liberal…whereas only 15% identify as conservative” and “almost 60% of female professors identify as liberal, while 22% identify as conservative.” Although the lack of intellectual diversity among the faculty and students can be lonely, it also makes it easier to find professors sympathetic to conservative students, according to Lips. She urges these women to create relationships with friendly faculty because they often help connect students with programs and think tanks looking for the next generation of conservative thinkers.

Lips’ guide gives conservative women a much-needed blueprint for holding on to their traditional values while finding their purpose.

 

Mary Rooke | Daily Caller

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline, and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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Another tragic loss as an otherwise young and healthy man suddenly drops dead. Lt. Col. Jered Little, “commander of Public Health Activity-Hawaii,” was proudly advertised en masse to encourage uptake of the COVID Vaccine. He died suddenly on Nov. 30 of a heart attack or stroke.

 

Arlington, VA mourns the sudden loss of one of its own, Army Lieutenant and Officer Jered Little, who passed away unexpectedly on Thursday, November 30, 2023, at the age of 39. The exact cause of his death has not been disclosed, but it is believed that he suffered a heart attack or a stroke.

 

Jab Poster Boy for the military passes away Nov 29 at age 39 pic.twitter.com/OxIA9pl6Ct

— Bama_Jeans (@bamajayt) December 12, 2023

 

 

Jered Little was an exceptional officer known for his leadership, dedication, and commitment to service. His military career was marked by strategic acumen and an unwavering sense of duty. Beyond his military life, Jered was a respected member of the Arlington community, often volunteering at local schools and mentoring young people.

 

 

His government and its public health apparatus lied to him despite his service, and now he is dead.

 

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Hello, Friends of Freedom,

Our wonderful country has been beset with an atmosphere of incivility for quiet sometime now. In my awareness of politics over the last 40 years it keeps going from one depth of darkness to even lower levels of attack not only on candidates but their families as well.

It seems the ability to speak in a disparaging way about each other as candidates is more important than addressing the issues we see all around every day, i.e., Poverty, homelessness, looting in our stores, suppression of freedom with civil implemented mandates that have no legal bases at all, and the ongoing spending our tax dollars for foreign wars, wasteful government bureaucratic offices, and of course lavish lifestyle of our leaders while the average American struggles to pay bills.

What is civility, and did we ever have it as a country? In our beginnings, we certainly did have attacks in the press at the time of each political party, but there was a limit, and when the important work had to be done, they actually did work together for the common good.

Our fathers and founding statesmen affirmed over and over in their writings that the most important source of our civil virtues was our grounding in religious faith and its freedom of expression in the culture.

A few quotes:

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall: “One great object of the colonial charters was avowedly the propagation of the Christian faith.”

John Adams: “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were….the general principles of Christianity.”

The list of government officials who validate the role of the Christian faith in our founding as a nation is or could be a good-sized book containing those quotes.

President Harry Truman openly affirmed that, “ In this great country of ours has been demonstrated the fundamental unity of Christianity and democracy.”

Also, our great French ally and statesman Alexis de Tocqueville recorded in his great work, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: “There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America-and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.”

We were blessed with the most unique form of government, perhaps since governments have been formed for the overall good of society. Our incredible Constitution, our Declaration of Independence, and our Bill of Rights have enabled mankind to achieve dignity, self-respect, nobleness, and prosperity that is unprecedented yet in modern or ancient history.

The Constitution, of course, being the CORNERSTONE of the building of the country, has laid a clear blueprint of the ideas of the founding fathers in relationship to freedoms that should be afforded to all of humanity.

Since we have had a decline of civility, perhaps we should examine the reason why. Could it be that we have simply accepted the cultural buzz and lies from the media about the role of faith and particularly Christianity that is nowhere regulated by law in any of their founding documents yet is presented as fact to a historically uneducated populace?

Let’s look at the celebration of Christmas. Since it is fast approaching, many people will not acknowledge its important role in the formation of Western Society. In fact, we have been pressured and had a veil of fear placed over us as Christians (if you are one). The simple greeting is no longer delivered with a robust smile and confidence but many Christians shy away from this incredible time of joy and often mutter the pablum phrase, “Happy holiday.” WORDS MATTER! (on an aside note, three of the Presidents of Ivy League colleges would not acknowledge evil with their words, and it cost one of them their job, and hundreds of petitions are moving for the firing of all three of them) Yes, WORDS MATTER! To deny the celebration of your faith by not acknowledging history is a dangerous thing, not just a polite way of saying I don’t want to offend anyone. The offense is in the suppression of your freedom of expression.) But I digress…lol.

For example, the widespread use of the word “HOLIDAYS” to describe what has traditionally been called Christmas for over 180 years in our culture. The removal of the Christian emblem of the Holy Family from public venues. No observance or acknowledgment in our public schools of the largest celebrated holiday in the Western World, if not the entire world? Yet we are reduced to and subjected to silence about it. This never happened when I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s. Christmas still had a space and a place in every public venue, from banks to grocery stores, to libraries, and even public schools. But now people are even afraid to wish someone a MERRY CHRISTMAS? How did we get here?

I will tell you how we got here.

A simple phrase called Separation of Church and State. First of all, this phrase is found nowhere in any of our founding documents. Many have been taught that it is a part of the FIRST AMENDMENT, which simply states,

“CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW RESPECTING AN ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION OR PROHIBITING THE FREE EXPRESSION THEREOF.”

The words “separation,” “church,” or “state” are not found in the First Amendment. Yet many people, having never read the Constitution, think it is there. Also, if you prove to them it is not there, then they will say, but it is implied.

I hope in the next weeks to show you the origin of this phrase and how it has been used as a political tool to drive a wedge between common sense and civil celebration. Targeting the historically uneducated as they unwarily defend this phrase and use it to detract from the original intention of the founding fathers ideas, and especially targeting the idea of faith in the public arena.

Until Next Week,

Allen

The post Church and State Part I appeared first on Granite Grok.

Nothing says let’s all get along like a gang of Muslime yutes (Yooouths) beating up a guy dressed as Santa on his way to be Santa for some local kids.

Half a dozen migrant youths attacked the 54-year-old victim whilst others watched and laughed.

 

The 54-year-old victim was due to perform at the Königsalm on Königsplatz in the city of Kassel on Dec. 6 when he was approached by a gang of youths who crossed the street and confronted him.

According to the victim, Rainer B., the gang comprised several teenagers of a migrant background around 15 years of age. He told police they insulted him, calling him a “son of a bitch” and a “fat man” and ordered him to remove his Santa Claus costume.

They said they were Muslim and that Germany was “their country,” the victim said, as reported by the Hessische Allgemeine newspaper.

When he refused, the gang turned violent and struck him, resulting in injuries to his neck and tearing his costume. In self-defense, the man hit one of his attackers in the face, causing them to flee towards Martinsplatz.

 

The Muslims are teaching the kids that Germany is their country. Is that the sort of thing that could rile up the Fatherland, or have the once proud German people been diversity whipped into submission?

One positive note. Santa did his gig. He showed up all tussled up and torn and talked to the kids. No pictures were allowed, which is a bit of a bummer. Given the cultural arc of Germany, it might have been useful to have that one on hand for the grandkids. Here I am with Santa after a group of adherents of the Religion of Peace roughed him up a bit.

Not that the caliphate would allow you to keep something like that.

Oh, and in keeping with my intermittent habit of messing with song lyrics.

 

I saw Muslims kicking Santa Claus.
On his way to Kessel Town last night
To scratch some angry itch
They knocked him down into the  ditch
Tore his suit did those Muslim Yutes
Then called him a son of a bitch.

 

I couldn’t help myself. Ans yes, it could be better.

 

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For the first time in the state’s history, a lawsuit by disgruntled parents may have caused at least a temporary school closure. Windham Elementary School was voted to be temporarily closed on Thursday by their school board. The students will now attend Townsend Elementary School.

A lawsuit brought by parents led by Attorney Deborah Bucknam alleges the school is failing to provide basic educational services as required by the State Constitution. In an emailed message to VDC, Bucknam shared some more details about what transpired at the school board meeting.

“At the Board meeting, there were several references to our lawsuit as at least part of the reason for closing (I think it was the entire reason). So, for the first time in Vermont history, parents have held an entire school district to account,” she wrote.

She continued to suggest that it was largely the lawsuit that prompted this action.

“If my clients had not been there pushing the District, in my opinion, this school would still be open—and the teaching principal, Jenna Cramer, would likely still be employed. We shone the light on what was going on at Windham, and they were forced to make major changes,” she wrote.

The message includes that this development may help school choice advocates. School choice is when a community is allowed to send its students to other schools of each family’s choice, and their tuition money follows the students accordingly.

“The State will likely fight very hard to keep control, but I think this victory helps our school choice campaign,” she wrote. “If we get past the motion to dismiss–and I am hopeful that we will—we can engage in discovery, which will force them to provide information to parents about the operation of the school—and that can be a template for other parents in other districts—which will shine the light on the sorry state of Vermont’s schools.”

State trying to get the case dismissed

The state had argued to dismiss the lawsuit, prompting Bucknam to write an argument to the Windham Superior Court last week stating why it should not be dismissed. In it, she describes some of the shortcomings regarding Cramer’s job performance.

It states, “Ms. Cramer and Mr. [Marco] Lazin did not prepare curriculum or lesson plans for the children. By the middle of October, they told the parents that they had not started teaching the children from a curriculum because they had not received all their ‘supplies.’”

It continues, “Ms. Cramer was frequently late for school, and the children, instead of learning lessons, spent their days watching animal and PG-13 music videos, including one where a llama used the f—word, and, as indicated above, included showing a violent video [including a decapitation and a person being lit on fire] shown to first and second graders.”

Cramer was fired in November, leaving Lazin as the only teacher.

Also, in Bucknam’s written argument, she notes earlier this month, the school chose not to hire either of the two candidates that they had for teachers.

“At the December 5, 2023 meeting, the Windham School Board decided not to hire any of the candidates, leaving the school to continue with one inexperienced teacher and unlicensed substitutes,” it states.

In conclusion, her argument states, “Plaintiffs have sufficiently plead both a violation of the Education Clause and the Common Benefits Clause of the Vermont Constitution, and have requested relief which this Court has the power and authority to grant. Thus the State’s motion to dismiss must be denied.”

In a phone call on Friday, she further emphasized that this case could provide a legal template for other communities in Vermont to force changes at their schools if they feel that their kids are also being denied basic education rights.

 

Michael Bielawski | Vermont Daily Chronicle

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How big is the federal government? Two measures are the number of civilian employees (nearly two million) and the number of agencies (now exceeding 440). These numbers barely hint at their massive meddling into business activities and the personal lives of Americans.

While government was relatively small and less intrusive during its first hundred years, the Constitution held defects. In part, they resulted from the unavoidable compromises of consensus. The founders knew this, and some had anticipated civil war decades before the first shots were fired. Many other problems emerged during the great expansion of the nineteenth century due to the industrial revolution, the growth of America’s land area, and several political factors, mostly unanticipated. As population grew from about five million in 1800 to more than seventy-six million in 1900, government gained accordingly.

It was during the early twentieth century that the government acquired many extraconstitutional powers to intervene in our lives. This was accompanied by a great expansion of its jurisdiction and cost: new agencies, more government workers, more taxes. To give you a hint of this growth, here is an excerpt from the Congressional testimony of Doctor Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute in 2005:

We come, then, to the nub of the matter. Search the Constitution as you will, you will find no authority for Congress to appropriate and spend federal funds on education, agriculture, disaster relief, retirement programs, housing, healthcare, day care, the arts, public broadcasting—the list is endless. That is what I meant at the outset when I said that most of what the federal government is doing today is unconstitutional because it is done without constitutional authority. Reducing that point to its essence, the Constitution says, in effect, that everything that is not authorized—to the government, by the people, through the Constitution—is forbidden. Progressives turned that on its head: Everything that is not forbidden is authorized.

Almost 19 years have elapsed since Doctor Pilon’s testimony. Today, the federal government is far larger and more intrusive, having enlisted the support of Big Tech, Big Pharma, academia, the legacy media, and others. But still, how did the government grow so large?

A Fateful Error

It actually began during America’s founding, according to Professor Randy Barnett of George Mason University. In his most recent book, Our Republican Constitution, he cites the principal-agent dilemma that arose after the 1787 constitution was ratified: The adoption effectively dissolved the Articles of Confederation and the Continental Congress. In turn, this deprived the states of an active forum to oversee the new government. Furthermore, there was no provision in the Constitution for an independent plenary tribunal to adjudicate disputes concerning federalism. No wonder then that several delegates refused to sign the final draft. In his last work, The Rise and Fall of Society, Frank Chodorov wrote this about the charter’s signers: “The ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before its authors, now in position of authority, began to rewrite it by interpretation, to the end that its bonds would loosen . . . to extend the power of the central government.”

Some readers might respond that the states now had the Senate as their forum for overseeing legislation. Although members of the Senate were to be appointed by their respective state legislatures, and the Senate body held veto power over bills, the small states were outnumbered. Importantly, Senate bills were subject to defeat by the House of Representatives, in which a few densely populated commercial states reigned supreme.

Exploiting the Stealth Clauses

Federalist delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention openly stated their desire for a strong central government. In private communications with these colleagues, Alexander Hamilton expressed hope that the new government would eventually consolidate, with the states losing power and importance over time.

It should not be surprising then that the final draft Constitution held expressions that were capable of more than one interpretation. I shall refer to these as stealth clauses because they have been employed by federal courts to produce outcomes that were clearly unintended using customary meanings at the time of founding. Let us examine a few cases and consider their consequences.

How the Courts Boost Federal Power

First of all, courts do not base their decisions exclusively on the text of the Constitution with its amendments. No, instead they refer to the Constitution Annotated, a publication weighing many pounds. The Constitution Annotated is comprised of an amended Constitution annotated with analyses of all federal Court decisions since the federal judiciary opened for business. Constitutional lawyers depend on this publication to employ the rule of stare decisis, which serves to honor judicial precedents of like cases.

Murray Rothbard discussed the issue at length in his work Anatomy of the State. In the chapter “How the State Transcends Its Limits,” he quotes from The People and the Court by Professor Charles L. Black Jr.:

The prime and most necessary function of the [Supreme] Court has been that of validation, not that of invalidation. What a government of limited powers needs, at the beginning and forever, is some means of satisfying the people that it has taken all steps humanly possible to stay within its powers. This is the condition of its legitimacy, and its legitimacy, in the long run, is the condition of its life. The court, through its history, has acted as the legitimation of the government.

It should be noted that the court is biased to favor Congress (the justices call it deference) in these cases. This is common knowledge and is openly conceded by judicial appointees and by justices in their official opinions. Indeed, Chief Justice John Roberts provided the key defense for the Affordable Care Act, even though that law was opposed by twenty-six attorneys general during a court challenge.

The earliest event that my research uncovered was not a court case but a dispute between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton was promoting his ambitious plan to improve the new nation’s financial condition; it would require Congress to charter a bank modeled after the Bank of England. Jefferson believed this was unconstitutional; the Constitution did not even mention banks.

But Hamilton convinced President George Washington that the Constitution was not meant to cover everything the nation might need in the future, and to meet this need, Article I, Section 8 ended by granting power to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” (emphasis mine) the enumerated federal powers granted by the Constitution. So, the “bank law” was passed by Congress and signed into law, creating the First Bank of the United States.

Of all stealth clauses, the commerce clause was almost the last to be exploited. Article I, Section 8 states that “Congress shall have the power to regulate commerce among the several states.”

In the case Wickard v. Filburn, a poor Ohio farmer was fined $117 for planting more wheat than his allotted 111 acres under a New Deal law. The government claimed his infraction “affected” market prices of wheat, even though he planted it just for family use. The false principal established after the Supreme Court upheld this case had a profound outcome. Almost all federal agencies could be disbanded if the case were overturned.

In a case under the New Deal’s National Recovery Act, a poor immigrant operated his dry-cleaning shop in New Jersey. He was fined one hundred dollars for charging five cents less than was allowed by the National Recovery Act to dry-clean a garment. He was jailed for a second infraction, while his family struggled to pay the fine.

In both of these cases, the government claimed that the violations affected interstate commerce, even though that was patently false. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court upheld both cases. Clearly, government inspectors chose to prosecute the innocent citizens to serve as examples and create fear in others.

The Constitution refers to general welfare in two places, the preamble and the taxing and spending clause. These references have been used as justification for a number of measures that were surely not envisioned by the framers. One example was adoption of the prohibition amendment. Another was the Social Security Act and countless other measures passed for the “general welfare.”

 

Formerly an IT worker, John Carroll is now retired and makes his home in Texas. He is currently developing plans for what he calls “A Well-Tempered Federalism.”

John Carroll | Mises Wire

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Elon has announced his new University. You heard right. The world’s richest man is getting into public education. He’s got a plan to create a STEM-focused primary and secondary school in Austin.

 

Elon Musk, who moved to Texas during the pandemic, is planning to start a university in Austin, according to tax filings for the billionaire’s latest charity called The Foundation.

The new institution, seeded with a roughly $100 million gift from Musk, will start with a STEM-focused primary and secondary school. Once that’s operating, it “intends ultimately to expand its operations to create a university dedicated to education at the highest levels,” according to an application to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status obtained by Bloomberg.

The university will employ “experienced faculty” and feature a traditional curriculum “alongside hands-on learning experience including simulations, case studies, fabrication/design projects and labs,” according to the application, which was filed in October 2022 and approved in March. It will seek accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.

Is any of that CRT or diversity voodoo at Musk U? No clue, but given his interest in advancing free speech, it would be counter-productive to consider any of that. The Culture War has been flanking the sciences for a while, making several successful incursions. But you can’t have #woke science. And you can’t make people with no interest in it apply or succeed in these fields; not that success was ever the goal of anything having to do with CRT or DEI – unless by success you mean making them killing fields for the budding intellect of America’s youth.

They’ve done a fine job of that.

Let’s hope Musk U (my name, not his) and his primary and secondary education efforts steer clear of anything that is not academic.

 

Tuition is in Dogecoin & u get a discount if u have a dog

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2021

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Early this year, Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member, was arrested and charged with transmission of national defense information and other charges. Teixeira allegedly leaked classified documents on the Ukraine war and other foreign policy issues to a Discord gaming group.

The document propagated from there and appeared in many news articles in the following months.

The Post article sympathetically portrays the struggles of U.S. government officials fighting to suppress the unapproved eruption of hard facts. In a passage sue to boost sales of Kleenex inside the Beltway, the Post quotes a U.S. government official who was permitted to remain anonymous: “We were blindsided and furious,”

The Post, which partnered with PBS for a television program on the Discord leaks, noted that the “top secret… leaks predicted Ukraine’s failure to make substantial gains in its counteroffensive — a multibillion-dollar effort that cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. The bleak forecast provided a sharp contrast to Washington’s optimistic messaging on the war, and it hurt Ukraine’s relationship with its chief backer, the U.S. government.” The “bleak forecast” was vastly more accurate than anything emitted by the Biden White House. A senior defense official (anonymous, of course) told the Post that the Pentagon raced to determine “what information may have been compromised.” But the real challenge was determining which official lies had been debunked.

The Post bewailed how the leaks discomfited the Ukrainian government. The Post noted that the “the leaks included never-before-released casualty estimates for Ukrainian forces, weaknesses in Ukraine’s ability to service damaged armored vehicles and the country’s shrinking supply of air defense munitions, which left population centers vulnerable to Russian cruise missile strikes and drones. Other documents warned that Ukraine was struggling to sustain troops, artillery and equipment, which probably would result in only “modest territorial gains” that fall “well short” of Kyiv’s goals.”

But the only reason that the “leaks” caused an international uproar is because U.S. government officials and their foreign partners had been brazenly lying about Ukrainian successes and prospects for victory. Folks who read foreign news sources or independent American outlets or websites (such as Mises.org) were far more likely to recognize that the war would have no happy ending for either Ukraine or Russia.

The Post omitted mentioning the role of federal censorship in deluding Americans about the Ukraine war. In July 2023, the House Judiciary Committee revealed that the FBI routinely colluded with Ukraine’s spy agency which sought help to suppress social media accounts that criticized the Ukraine government or “inaccurately reflects events in Ukraine” (including accurate battlefield reports of Ukrainian military defeats). The House report revealed that the FBI “routinely relayed these lists [of accounts] to the relevant social media platforms” and sought their suppression. The House report noted that “authentic accounts of Americans, including a verified U.S. State Department account and those belonging to American journalists, were ensnared in the censorship effort and flagged for social media companies to take down.” The CIA also pressured Twitter, calling for the suppression of “long lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos guilty of ‘anti-Ukraine narratives,” journalist Matt Taibbi reported.

Washington Post readers are the cream of the intellectual crop, at least according to Washington Post readers. So how did Post devotees respond to the indignation about the leaker?

The article generated almost 600 comments. Among the most liked was an outburst from “ArtPope”:” Don’t understand why this article was written other than to support the pro-Putin, anti-Ukrainian position of the white nationalist evangelical fascist RepubliQans.” “Thinking4″ replied: They have profound ignorance of democracy and that their very words and actions undermine the standing of the US in the world.” (Thinking4 was probably not an English major.)

None of the most liked comments showed any outrage about Team Biden’s perennial lies on Ukraine. Instead, raw hatred was popular: “Find these traitors. Put their butts in jail. 10 years minimum. No deals.” “Make it 30,” came a quick reply, and another person piled on: “In solitary.” Said another: “Throughout history, the traditional punishment for treason is hanging. I’m ok with that.” “Mario TRUTH” joined the lynch mob: “What Teixeira did was nothing short of America WORST traitor it has ever seen. He not only aided in murdering 1000’s of innocent people, he intruded in Ukrainian leaders planning of a counteroffensive that would have saved many of the 1000’s Teixeira killed.”

So, U.S. government officials are entitled to blindfold and deceive the American people to avoid “intruding” on foreign leaders planning a military attack? This theory of democracy gets curiouser and curiouser.

The Post noted that the Discord leaks “depicted Zelensky in a new light, revealing his apparent interest in occupying Russian border villages and obtaining long-range missiles to hit targets deep inside Russian territory — an assertion that Ukrainians deny and would have deeply angered Washington.” So, America’s favored foreign leader was conniving to pull the United States into World War Three? Maybe Biden should have asked if Americans supported such recklessness? No, he was president, so he was entitled to delude Americans and pretend to rule the world.

Perhaps the greatest intellectual calisthenics in the long article was the paragraph that exonerated all Biden administration falsehoods on Ukraine. The Post offered a finger-wagging explanation: “Rather than exposing willful deceit by a U.S. government eager to bury bad news, the Discord leaks revealed a sharp divide between the U.S. intelligence analysts who authored the documents and many senior officials at the White House, Pentagon and State Department who were overly sanguine about Ukraine’s prospects for success.”

Do the Post reporters and editors have no shame? They were not smart (or honest) enough to hark back to one of the clearest lessons from the Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971. As philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, during the Vietnam War, “the policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy but chiefly if not exclusively destined for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress.” CIA analysts did excellent work in the early period of the Vietnam conflict. But “in the contest between

public statements, always over-optimistic, and the truthful reports of the intelligence community, persistently bleak and ominous, the public statements were likely to win simply because they were public,” Arendt commented. The Post rationalized the bias of Team Biden: “U.S. officials viewed the airing of pessimistic battle outcomes as detrimental to their endeavor to raise support for the war effort, both in Congress and internationally.” Truth-telling never competed with cheerleading for more bombs and missiles.

Biden, his appointees, and plenty of former military officials on the gravy train have made endless brazenly false statements about the Ukraine war. The result is that the Ukrainian government is on the verge of conscripting Ukrainian grandfathers to send on daily suicidal Pickett’s Charges so that Ukrainian politicians can keep pocketing billions of dollars in handouts from the U.S. government. Ukraine prohibited any males between the age of 18 to 60 from leaving the country – as if the government had a preemptive right to send them to their death. Ukraine is closing its western border to “military age males” the same way that East Germany closed its border to West Europe decades ago.

But it remains a “no cost” war inside the Washington Beltway, where Ukrainian flags quickly replaced BLM banners after the start of the war. Nothing has changed for the policy class in the last 60 years. Arendt castigated the lavishly-paid intellectual cheerleaders for the Vietnam War who ignored “the untold misery that their ‘solutions,’ pacification and relocation programs, defoliation, napalm, and anti-personnel bullets, held in store.” In the subsequent decades, intellectuals became more affluent but not more trustworthy.

Will the Washington Post ever honestly examine the costs of its own kowtowing to officialdom? The Post could do a great in-depth investigation of why its own editorial page and columnists have made so many false, misleading, or deranged statements on the Ukraine war. But don’t expect hell to freeze over any time soon.

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including 2012’s Public Policy Hooligan, and 2006’s Attention Deficit Democracy. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and many other publications.

James Bovard | Mises Wire

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