Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling against Donald Trump’s tariffs sent the 47th president into a rant that leaves little doubt who he is and what Constitutional crisis he is about to cause, writes Joe Lauria.

Reacting to a U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling his tariffs policy unconstitutional, U.S. President Donald Trump launched into an unhinged rant on Friday confirming that he considers himself above the law as any tinpot authoritarian leader would.

The court ruled 6-3 that the U.S. Constitution makes clear that only Congress can levy tariffs, which are really taxes, on the U.S. population. Thus Trump’s extensive tariffs, imposed since January 2025, are illegal and American consumers and companies are due a refund of around $200 billion, the court said.

The ruling unleashed Trump in full psychotic mode, railing against justices as “fools and lapdogs;” the plaintiffs in the lawsuit the court ruled on as “sleazebags, major sleazebags” serving an unnamed foreign power and he announced a new 10 percent worldwide tariff “over and above our normal tariffs already being charged” in defiance of the court.

Trump argues he is still allowed to impose tariffs over the heads of Congress by the authority of the 1974 Trade Act. That act allows a president to unilaterally impose tariffs of up to 15 percent (hence the new 10 percent measures), but only for 150 days, after which Congress must continue them.

However, Friday’s ruling means he must vacate the existing tariffs, which he is so far refusing to do.

Trump tries to justify his existing tariffs as having been imposed under an emergency act. But the court struck that down, arguing in essence there is no economic or national security emergency in the United States today.

In his madness, Trump furiously claimed he had authority to impose embargoes and “destroy countries” but the Supreme Court dared rule he couldn’t even put a single dollar tariff on a nation’s imports. He exclaimed:

“I am allowed to cut off any and all trade or business with that same country. In other words, I can destroy the trade, I can destroy the country. I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country-destroying embargo. I can embargo, I can do anything I want, but I can’t charge one dollar because that’s not what it says, and that’s not the way it even reads. I can do anything I want to do to them, but I can’t charge any money. So I’m allowed to destroy the country, but I can’t charge them a little fee.

Think of that. How ridiculous is that? I’m allowed to embargo them, I’m allowed to tell them you can’t do business in the United States anymore, ‘we want you out of here,’ but I want to charge them $10. I can’t do that.

It’s incorrect, their decision is incorrect. But it doesn’t matter because we have very powerful alternatives … .”

In fact, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution asserts Congress has the authority to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” and to regulate commerce with foreign nations.  Embargoes, such as those on Cuba, North Korea and Iran, are imposed by Congress, not the White House (unless there is an emergency).

With Trump having amassed a U.S. strike force poised to illegally attack Iran, the timing of his cry that he can destroy nations brings little comfort.

An Historic Constitutional Crisis

1808 British political cartoon ridiculing the ‘Embargo Act of 1807’. President Thomas Jefferson reassures his petitioners, ruined businessmen, that the embargo on warring Europeans may show good results in 15 to 20 years. (British Cartoon Prints Collection/U.S, Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons)

Trump has uncorked a Constitutional crisis reminiscent of one of his favorite presidents, Andrew Jackson, who in 1832 defied a Supreme Court decision regarding Cherokee sovereignty in the state of Georgia that ultimately led to the tribe’s forcible removal in the Trail of Tears.

There have been a few other instances of presidents defying a federal court. Thomas Jefferson, in a case relevant to Trump’s, defied an order by Supreme Court Justice William Johnson in 1808, while Johnson was doing double duty sitting on the federal circuit court in South Carolina.

The ruling involved the Embargo Act of 1807, which forbade all U.S. foreign trade to stop British and French ships from harassing U.S. ships on the high seas. It was an even more extreme measure of economic warfare than Trump’s tariffs.

The South Carolina case involved a shipowner whose ship was impounded by federal customs officials and who sued to get it back.

Jefferson had appointed Johnson to the Supreme Court, but Johnson ruled that under the Embargo Act, only Congress could authorize the seizing of a ship.  Jefferson ignored the ruling.

The case went to the Supreme Court in February 1808 but the court said it lacked appellate jurisdiction to review the case so Jefferson continued to defy the lower court’s order until the end of his term.

The Embargo Act was an economic disaster, even greater than that brought on by Trump’s tariffs. Exports plunged from $108 million to $22 million in just one year, sinking U.S. GDP by five percent before Congress repealed the Act in March 1809.  The unpopularity of the Act led to the protest slogan of spelling embargo backwards: O grab me.

An 1807 political cartoon showing merchants caught by a snapping turtle named “Ograbme” (“Embargo” spelled backwards). The embargo was also ridiculed in the New England press as Dambargo, Mob-Rage, or Go-bar-’em. (Public Domain/Wikipedia)

In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to detain suspected Confederate sympathizers without trial. Sitting as a circuit judge, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who delivered the majority opinion in the 1857 Dred Scott case that African-Americans couldn’t be U.S. citizens and Congress couldn’t prohibit slavery in U.S. territories, ruled in 1861 that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus and he released an imprisoned Confederate, a member of the Maryland legislature.

Lincoln ignored the ruling. In 1863 he got Congress to authorize him to do so.

If Trump continues to defy the court he will add his name to this record. Indeed, he gave his clearest indication that he will defy the Supreme Court on the existing tariffs, which were struck down.

“All of those tariffs remain. They all remain,” he said. “I don’t know if you know that or not. They all remain. We’re still getting them and we will after the decision. I guess there’s nobody left to appeal to.”

It will be interesting to see how he interacts with Supreme Court justices who sit in their robes in the front row at Tuesday’s State of the Union address.

Original article:  consortiumnews.com

By Andrew P. NAPOLITANO

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Legal scholars have many lenses through which to examine the U.S. Constitution. Lawyers need to master about 150 Supreme Court decisions in order to have a sufficient understanding of the government.

But most of what lawyers have studied is theory — how the Constitution is supposed to work, as opposed to how it actually does work. This “supposed to” versus “actually does” conundrum is often called the formal versus the functional.

Formally, the United States still has a Constitution. We still have the three branches of government. Congress still has the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The president is still elected by the Electoral College. The courts still function to resolve disputes and to define what the laws mean and what the Constitution means.

Yet, thanks in large measure to the public fear and mania in the war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s, the war on terror in the 2000s and 2010s, and now the war on immigrants, functionally, Congress found it easy to cut constitutional corners and to look the other way as one crisis after another has led to the expansion of executive powers and the erosion of personal freedoms.

The principal victim in all these wars has been the quintessentially American right to be left alone, which is expressly protected in the Fourth Amendment, which reads:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or Affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched or the persons or things to be seized.”

The courts have held that all searches and seizures, except for a few exigent circumstances, undertaken without warrants are by definition unreasonable, and thus in contravention of the amendment.

In 1947, when overstaying an immigrant’s visa was a civil wrong — like filing your taxes late or failing to shovel the snow from your sidewalk — Congress crafted the concept of administrative warrants in which one federal agent authorized another to look for these civil wrongs. The theory was these were not crimes and no one could go to jail, so a judicial warrant wasn’t needed.

The war on drugs began the slow erosion of the right to privacy by a law enforcement belief that the mere possession of controlled dangerous substances was so harmful to the social order that its eradication was a greater good than preserving constitutional norms.

Unfortunately, this attitude permeated into the judiciary, which soon became loath to allow — using Justice Benjamin Cardozo’s phrase — the criminal to go free because the constable has erred.

But, in the war on drugs, just like in the war on terror, the constable did not err, he intentionally violated constitutional norms because of a belief that he could get away with it.

Then in 2001, the Patriot Act permitted one federal agent to authorize another to conduct searches of personal private records in the custody of one’s physician, lawyer, banker, telephone and computer service provider, even the mailman.

The theory was that you gave up your privacy when you allowed these custodians to house your records. And, in a strike at the First Amendment, it prohibited the recipient of an agent-written warrant from telling anyone of its receipt.

“The British use of general warrants was a principal impetus to the American Revolution. The whole purpose of the Fourth Amendment was to eliminate and forbid general warrants.”

Then, after the drumbeat of anti-immigrant hysteria and paranoia infected government at nearly all its levels and Congress converted immigration violations from civil wrongs to criminal acts, the feds told their agents to use administrative warrants to arrest people.

This was done in blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment, and is being done somewhere in the United States even as this essay is being read.

Administrative warrants are general warrants that authorize the bearer to look where he wishes and seize what he finds. The British use of general warrants was a principal impetus to the American Revolution.

The whole purpose of the Fourth Amendment was to eliminate and forbid general warrants.

Today in Minneapolis and elsewhere, searches and seizures of persons, houses, papers and effects are being conducted without judicial warrants.

Administrative warrants often don’t even name the person seized. They permit appearance, occupation and location as the descriptive authorization for group stops and arrests.

This has resulted in regular, consistent, systematic and massive violations of Fourth Amendment rights of citizens and immigrants.

Throughout this sordid history of government indifference to the Constitution, the attitude of the feds who did the violations, and often the jurists and jurors who validated them, and the legislators who enabled them, has been us versus them.

We don’t use drugs, they do. We aren’t terrorists, they are. We were born here, they weren’t.

Until now.

Now, we have seen on the streets and in the homes of the hapless residents of Minneapolis the reason we have a Fourth Amendment.

The government cannot be trusted to evaluate or restrain itself when it comes to compliance with the Constitution. Hence the solemn requirement of the interference by the judiciary between the government and its targets.

Hence the absolute requirement of probable cause of crime. Hence the mandatory requirement of specificity.

Now, the Trump administration — beating the bushes against all immigrants, even longtime law-abiding residents with American children and grandchildren — has used administrative warrants, which have never been authorized by the Supreme Court, to break down the doors of the homes of immigrants and American citizens and drag them in their underwear in subzero weather to awaiting government vehicles.

Now, the same feds who trample freedoms kill innocent Americans in the streets.

Paraphrasing Justice Louis Brandeis, when the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law and due process; it invites anyone to become a law unto himself; it propagates the anarchy it produces.

There have been times when the Constitution protected us.

Functionally today, those days are gone.

Original article: consortiumnews.com

Junte-se a nós no Telegram , Twitter e VK.

Escreva para nós: info@strategic-culture.su

A constituição de 1988, tão cultuada pela burguesia nas últimas quatro décadas como a suposta consagração da democracia, nunca foi nem poderia ser uma verdadeira conquista democrática. Pelo contrário, ela enterrou a revolução impulsionada pela classe operária a partir das greves do ABC, que se espalharam por todo o Brasil, destruíram a máquina sindical da ditadura, construíram a CUT e o PT e chegaram ao campo, onde os camponeses pobres e sem terra reproduziram a ascensão dos operários da cidade, deram início às ocupações de terras e formaram o MST. A burguesia, os latifundiários, os militares e o capital internacional, pela primeira vez na história do Brasil, tinham a sua máquina estatal, o seu poder político, ameaçados pelo movimento revolucionário das massas oprimidas, lideradas pelos operários do ABC. Aquela revolução proletária, se continuasse – e a tendência era continuar – tornaria o domínio político do regime insustentável para as classes dominantes.

Aproveitando-se das vacilações da direção do PT, a burguesia conseguiu desviar a luta das massas para as instituições do próprio regime militar, primeiro com a farsa das Diretas e depois com outra farsa, a Assembleia Constituinte. A burguesia desarmou os trabalhadores e passou a jogar dentro do seu terreno, um terreno permeado por toda a lama fascista da ditadura. Uma vez mais, com medo da revolução, a burguesia “democrática” salvou os senhores do antigo regime, colocou suas fardas no cabide e lhes vestiu terno e toga. Ela comprovou que é incapaz de desempenhar um papel verdadeiramente progressista.

Os operários e camponeses, as massas exploradas do país, esboçavam eles mesmos a tomada das fábricas, dos latifúndios e indicavam a formação de instituições livres do controle da ditadura e das classes proprietárias. Estavam sendo plantadas as sementes de órgãos ao estilo da Comuna e dos sovietes, órgãos sob a administração dos próprios explorados, da esmagadora maioria do povo. O golpe da Constituinte, ao desviar forçosamente a luta democrática para as estruturas do velho e apodrecido regime, acabou com qualquer possibilidade de democracia.

Os deputados e senadores foram eleitos dentro das instituições viciadas daquele regime em desmoronamento, o que resultou no domínio esmagador (77%) de constituintes do PMDB-PFL, sendo que quase 40% do total dos constituintes haviam passado pela Arena. David Fleischer aponta que, dos 559 constituintes, 542 tinham sido governadores ou vices, prefeitos ou vices, secretários de Estado, deputados estaduais ou vereadores. Fica claro, portanto, que a constituição “democrática” ou “cidadã” foi elaborada pelo próprio regime militar, pelo Estado ditatorial e fascista, pelos seus funcionários. Concomitantemente à carreira burocrática, cerca de 40% dos constituintes eram capitalistas ou latifundiários.

As campanhas pelas Diretas e pela Constituinte impulsionaram o PMDB, a ala esquerda do regime ditatorial, e alçaram como grande herói nacional um apoiador do golpe de 1964, relator da lei antigreves, contrário à anistia “ampla, geral e irrestrita” e defensor da cassação de direitos políticos, o Dr. Ulysses – uma liderança tão magnânima e popular que ficou em sétimo lugar nas eleições de 1989, mesmo com toda a propaganda feita pela burguesia! O resultado não poderia ser outro: os operários que, com milhares de greves, foram os responsáveis pela derrubada da ditadura, e exigiam a redução da jornada de trabalho para 40 horas semanais, ficaram com 44 horas; os sem terra, que aplicavam no campo eles próprios aquilo que a burguesia havia feito duzentos anos antes nos EUA e na França, ficaram sem a reforma agrária; o poder dos militares continuou intacto, a polícia da ditadura continuou exatamente a mesma na “democracia” e o aparato judicial da ditadura foi elevado a senhor da ordem constitucional.

A própria direção do PT – que fez alianças com Ulysses Guimarães, Mário Covas (que fez acordo com a UDR para barrar a reforma agrária) e Fernando Henrique Cardoso, que minou a luta de rua e ajudou a burguesia a canalizá-la para as instituições do regime militar, rebaixou as reivindicações da sua base e, finalmente, corroborou a farsa da Constituinte – teve de reconhecer que tudo aquilo significava uma derrota para a classe operária e o povo brasileiro. A constituição “não mexeu nos pilares da dominação, ela não mexeu na estrutura de poder deste país”, pelo contrário: “privilegiou o capital em detrimento do trabalho” – essas foram algumas das conclusões de Lula à época. Ele deixou claro, ao votar contra a constituição: “ainda não foi desta vez que a sociedade brasileira, a maioria dos marginalizados, vai ter uma Constituição em seu benefício.” Olívio Dutra também afirmou que “os avanços foram mínimos”. A bancada do PT, ainda em outubro de 1987, já admitia que o projeto em votação sobre as questões sociais “ficou distante das reivindicações populares”. Mas, no final, o PT assinou embaixo o texto constitucional e, com o passar dos anos, trocou as críticas pelos confetes.

O PT passou a se orgulhar dos seus feitos como tendo sido fundamentais para a conquista dos direitos na constituição, como se tivessem institucionalizado as reivindicações populares. Paulo Paim acha inclusive que a constituição é “mais progressista” do que o momento em que ela foi produzida. Esqueceu-se Paim, que foi líder operário, de todas as greves e mobilizações populares que foram traídas pela Constituinte supostamente “mais progressista” que elas? Comparado com o movimento revolucionário que chegou a exigir, de dentro das fábricas, um novo regime social, um governo operário, e cujas reivindicações não foram verdadeiramente atendidas, o resultado, na verdade, foi o de medidas extremamente rebaixadas.

Não, o que a Constituinte fez foi suprimir a soberania popular. A burguesia castrou a classe operária com a manobra da Constituinte para reduzir a sua mobilização, e só quando a classe operária estava jogando em território inimigo, em total desvantagem, é que “participou” da Constituinte totalmente controlada pela burguesia e os latifundiários, apenas para dar legitimidade àquela farsa. A constituição deveria ter sido elaborada e proclamada no estádio da Vila Euclides, então seria uma constituição verdadeiramente democrática. Uma democratização só poderia ocorrer com a tomada do poder pelos sindicatos – e não os “democratas” provenientes do regime militar. Foi somente a relação de forças ainda relativamente equilibrada (pois só a terapia de choque de FHC derrotaria o proletariado) que obrigou a burguesia a distribuir algumas migalhas para os trabalhadores e oprimidos.

Todos os políticos e intelectuais da própria burguesia dizem que a constituição “equilibrou” as reivindicações dos trabalhadores com as dos patrões. Mesmo que isso fosse verdade (o que não é, pois as exigências dos patrões foram, de longe, muito mais atendidas do que as dos operários), mesmo assim isso já seria a maior admissão de que a constituição é antidemocrática por natureza. Os trabalhadores são a maioria esmagadora da população, como é possível uma democracia igualar a vontade da maioria absoluta com a de uma ínfima minoria? Pode haver igualdade entre o explorador e o explorado? Os patrões queriam manter as 48 horas semanais, os operários queriam reduzir para 40 horas – a constituição conciliou as duas reivindicações e deixou em 44 horas. A vontade da minoria exploradora vale tanto quanto a da esmagadora maioria explorada (“o ponto prioritário do movimento sindical”, nas palavras de Meneguelli, ou seja, a reivindicação fundamental da maioria assalariada do país).

No campo, a vontade de uma minoria insignificante de latifundiários prevaleceu sobre a de milhões de sem terra. Tudo isso significa que, na melhor das hipóteses (a Nova República ser fruto de um contrato entre o trabalho e o capital), isso por si só não tem nada de democrático, mas que sua essência, a essência do regime político brasileiro pós-ditadura, é escancaradamente antidemocrática. A minoria exploradora não pode ter o mesmo peso da maioria explorada – isso não é uma democracia, é uma fraude. E essa fraude foi realizada por meio de um golpe contra a classe operária e as massas empobrecidas, contra a maioria do povo brasileiro.

Segue nostro Telegram.

L’omicidio di Charlie Kirk ha catalizzato l’attenzione dei media e della politica, ma, più che come un episodio di violenza isolata, riteniamo la sua morte vada letta come il sintomo di una vera e propria patologia sociale che affligge gli Stati Uniti. Lo stesso, del resto, Kirk sosteneva con forza la sacralità del Secondo Emendamento e, già nel 2023, aveva affermato: «Penso che ne valga la pena. Credo che valga la pena avere, purtroppo, un costo di alcune morti per arma da fuoco ogni anno, così che possiamo avere il Secondo Emendamento a protezione degli altri diritti donati da Dio».

Quella frase sintetizza, in modo brutale, l’impensabile conseguenza che larga parte della destra statunitense è disposta ad accettare pur di restare ferma sulle proprie posizioni: alcune vittime annuali come prezzo inevitabile per preservare il diritto alla diffusione delle armi. È una posizione che, letta alla luce dei dati disponibili, risulta non solo cinica, ma profondamente lontana dalla comprensione del fenomeno: gli Stati Uniti si trovano infatti in una condizione quantitativamente e qualitativamente diversa rispetto al resto del mondo, compresi i Paesi nei quali sono in corso guerre, con un’epidemia di armi e di morti da arma da fuoco che non trova paragoni.

Per comprendere la portata del problema, è necessario guardare ai numeri. Le stime effettuate nel 2017 dal progetto indipendente Small Arms Survey sul possesso di armi mostrano che gli Stati Uniti hanno una densità di armi da fuoco possedute da civili decisamente maggiore rispetto a qualsiasi altro Paese: circa 120 armi ogni 100 persone, cioè più di una arma per abitante in media, un dato senza paragoni a livello globale, e che probabilmente sarebbe ancora maggiore se rilevato oggi. Paesi che condividono con gli USA sistemi politici ed economici simili — come Italia, Canada, Germania, Regno Unito, Francia — presentano livelli di detenzione civile molto più bassi (per l’Italia il dato risulta essere di 14,4 armi per 100 abitanti). Persino un Paese in guerra da oltre dieci anni, come lo Yemen, pur classificandosi al secondo posto assoluto, risulta avere una diffusione di armi da fuoco tra i civili pari a meno della metà rispetto agli USA (52,8 ogni 100 abitanti).

Questa proliferazione di armi che ha luogo negli Stati Uniti rende inevitabilmente più probabile che dispute quotidiane, litigi domestici, crisi personali o errori si traducano in tragedie mortali. Non sorprende, dunque, il fatto che i dati sulle vittime mostrino che il numero complessivo di decessi legati alle armi da fuoco è enorme e strutturale. Nel 2023, secondo le statistiche del Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), quasi 47.000 persone sono morte per ferite da arma da fuoco: in tale cifra rientrano omicidi, suicidi, incidenti, decessi in contesti di intervento di forze dell’ordine e casi con circostanze non determinate. Di queste morti, la maggioranza è costituita da suicidi: oltre il 55–58% dei decessi per arma da fuoco sono autolesionisti, un indicatore che obbliga a ragionare sulla questione non solo in termini di criminalità, ma anche di salute pubblica.

Se il discorso pubblico si concentra quasi esclusivamente sulla violenza criminale e sugli episodi di sparatorie di massa, che, secondo la definizione, includono solamente quegli episodi con almeno quattro vittime tra morti e feriti, la statistica ci ricorda che l’emergenza non si limita a questi casi, ma riguarda anche persone che si tolgono la vita con armi facilmente disponibili. Allo stesso tempo, il Gun Violence Archive (GVA) registra ogni anno decine di migliaia di decessi non suicidari da armi da fuoco (compresi omicidi, incidenti e sparatorie di massa), ai quali vanno aggiunti i feriti, che nel 2023 sono stati oltre 36.000, per un totale di circa 83.000 persone che sono state colpite da almeno un proiettile. Sia i dati del CDC che quelli del GVA ci suggeriscono che la società statunitense convive con due fenomeni interconnessi e con cause parzialmente sovrapposte — la cultura dell’rma, la facilità di accesso, il contesto politico che ne normalizza la detenzione.

Alla luce di questi numeri che ricordano un bilancio di guerra, la posizione della destra repubblicana risulta unicamente ideologica, in quanto la proprietà delle armi viene elevata quasi a valore costituzionale assoluto. Tale impostazione ignora sfacciatamente gli elementi empirici che dovrebbero pesare nella formulazione delle politiche: la prevalenza delle pistole nelle dinamiche omicide (le pistole sono coinvolte nella maggior parte degli omicidi armati), l’effetto di massa della disponibilità di armi sulla probabilità che una crisi personale si trasformi in omicidio o suicidio, e l’enorme disparità dei tassi di mortalità tra Stati con regolamentazioni diverse. Stati come Massachusetts, New Jersey o New York, che applicano norme più restrittive, mostrano infatti tassi di mortalità per arma da fuoco molto più bassi rispetto a Stati con norme permissive o più deboli nei controlli. Le argomentazioni pro-arma che si basano su un’attitudine di “prevenzione personale”, dunque, non reggono davanti all’evidenza. Tutti i dati concordano infatti su una cosa: la presenza di un’arma aumenta la probabilità che un conflitto sfoci in morte, e la facilità di accesso alle armi facilita anche l’escalation di violenze che altrimenti resterebbero incompiute o che avrebbero effetti meno gravi.

La retorica secondo cui qualche morte è un “costo necessario” per mantenere una libertà costituzionale evita una domanda centrale: perché un diritto dovrebbe venire esercitato in modo tale da mettere a rischio la vita degli altri in numeri così elevati? Nessun altro diritto costituzionale è giustificato come sacrificio collettivo di vite umane in questa scala. Inoltre, la normalizzazione della violenza armata, oltre a causare vittime dirette, produce paura diffusa, erosione del tessuto sociale e un maggiore controllo privato attraverso la forza. Sostenere che mantenere lo status quo armato protegga “altri diritti” è una tautologia priva di senso empirico.

Anche il confronto internazionale dovrebbe offrire spunti ai decision maker statunitensi. Infatti, i Paesi che hanno introdotto regolamentazioni più severe e politiche integrate (controlli, registri, misure di prevenzione) hanno visto una diminuzione sostanziale delle morti per arma da fuoco nel lungo periodo. L’Australia, dopo i massacri degli anni Novanta, e il Canada, con normative più stringenti, hanno ridotto drasticamente il numero di omicidi e di incidenti mortali legati alle armi. Gli Stati Uniti, con l’ecosistema legislativo e politico attuale, si collocano invece su una traiettoria opposta, con livelli di possesso pro capite stratosferici e numeri di vittime che li pongono ai vertici dei Paesi più violenti del mondo tra quelli nei quali non sono in corso conflitti armati.

L’assassinio di Charlie Kirk, tragico e simbolico, dovrebbe servire da stimolo per una discussione più ampia e onesta sul rapporto tra diritti, sicurezza e responsabilità collettiva. Se si continuerà a considerare le vittime collaterali come un “costo” inevitabile, il risultato sarà una perpetuazione del problema, che si traduce in migliaia di decessi ogni anno, famiglie distrutte, comunità terrorizzate e un Paese che, per quanto forte e ricco, si dimostra incapace di proteggere la vita dei suoi cittadini.

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

All attempts by the government to evaluate the content of speech and deter or punish what the government and its benefactors hate or fear is un-American, unconstitutional and unlawful; and if not stopped, will reduce the American people to serfdom.

During the past three months, the Trump administration has sought to withhold the delivery of governmental benefits in order to punish or reform its perceived political opponents. These opponents — in the understanding of the White House — are colleges and universities that permit speech the White House claims is hateful, law firms who represent clients or employ lawyers who have been vocally critical of the administration, and even one of the 50 states because of language used in a statute and words articulated by its governor.

Can the federal government condition the acceptance of benefits upon the non-assertion of a fundamental liberty? Asked differently, can the feds withhold privileges to those lawfully entitled to them because it disapproves of the speech of the recipients of the privileges? In a word: No.

Here is the backstory.

Under the natural law, embraced by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, our rights come from our humanity. These are the rights to live, worship or not, associate or not, say what one thinks and publish what one says, defend yourself using the same means as the government, to be left alone, to travel, and to fairness and due process. These natural rights are basically the rights protected from governmental interference by the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution doesn’t purport to grant fundamental rights. Rather, since the rights pre-existed the nation, the Constitution essentially prohibits the government from interfering with the rights.

The classic example is the First Amendment, which reads in part “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” James Madison, who drafted the amendment, insisted upon referring to “speech” as “the” freedom of speech, in order to emphasize the understanding of the Framers that free speech came before the government. When did it come? It came to all humans at the age of reason.

The rights that come from our humanity are claims against the whole world. Thus, to exercise them, one doesn’t need a government permission slip. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, if all the world but one were of like mind on an issue and only one person disagreed, because the freedom of speech is a natural right and thus a claim against the whole world — meaning it may be exercised with impunity — the world would have no more right to silence the one dissenter than would he, if he had the power, have the right to silence the world.

This Madisonian/Millian understanding of human rights is the modern articulation of the Natural Law, codified 775 years ago by St. Thomas Aquinas.

Jefferson and the revolutionary generation accepted Aquinas in the Declaration, which states that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. Those rights are inalienable because they are natural and, thus, they cannot be taken away by legislation or command; they can only be voluntarily given up. A bank robber waives his natural rights when he steals money from the bank. Because he denied others the natural right to their money, he has waived his own rights.

When the government gives out privileges, like a driver’s license, the right to vote, a security clearance or research funds, it does so with strings attached. Those conditions must be rationally related to the privilege granted. You will drive the speed limit, you will only vote once in an election, you won‘t disclose the secrets you learned, you will not interfere with the human rights of others on your campus.

Much of this is second nature to the recipients of governmental benefits, even though the government grants benefits when it lacks the authority to do so. Financial aid to education and foreign countries are nowhere authorized by the Constitution, but the feds give it away anyway.

Can the feds take these privileges back for the abuse of them? The short answer is: yes, but subject to natural rights. Thus, state governments can withdraw the driver’s license of a persistent speeder or drunk driver, but they cannot withdraw a driver’s license because the driver is driving to a political rally in support of a candidacy adverse to the government that gave him the driving privilege.

The strings attached to governmental benefits cannot infringe upon or chill the exercise of fundamental liberties by the recipients of the benefits.

The Supreme Court articulated this legal principle with respect to individuals in 1972 in Perry v. Sindermann (invalidating the firing of a public school teacher who criticized the board of education) and with respect to the states in 2012 in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (invalidating a portion of the Affordable Care Act which punished the states for not re-writing statutes).

These cases articulated and reinforced the doctrine against unconstitutional conditions.

That doctrine is the basis for the recent spate of judicially imposed injunctions barring the White House from denying the benefits and privileges the government has given out because the recipients have exercised or declined to exercise their freedom of speech as the White House wishes.

If this doctrine were not the law, then our natural rights would not be inalienable. Imagine the government requiring public speech or enforcing public silence in return for the benefits it gives out. Well, you don’t need to imagine that, as it is happening under our noses today; and but for an independent judiciary, the feds would be able to use the withdrawal of privileges and benefits to silence speech they hate and fear.

Unbridled freedom of speech has been and remains utterly integral to our history, humanity and happiness. It is the principal protection of all other freedoms. Without it, we will become servants to whomever runs the government. Is that what’s coming?

Original article: The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity

“If Syria falls entirely under jihadist rule, it will become a global terror hub. Western leaders must act decisively, not just for Syria’s future, but for their own security.”

By Javier VILLAMOR

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

At a time when the European Union is considering lifting sanctions on the Syrian regime, Ribal al-Assad, founder of the Organisation for Democracy and Freedom in Syria, cousin of former ruler Bashar Al-Assad and well-known critic of the previous regime, warns of the dangers of this decision in an interview with europeanconservative.com.

The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime did not bring stability or democracy to Syria but rather the rise of a government dominated by Islamist extremists. The conflict, which began in 2011 as a popular uprising against the regime’s repression, turned into a prolonged civil war with the intervention of multiple international actors. While Assad held on with support from Russia and Iran, the opposition fragmented, allowing jihadist factions, many linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS), to gain ground.

The outcome accelerated when Russia, weakened by the war in Ukraine, reduced its support for Assad, leaving him without his primary military and economic backing. At the same time, Turkey maneuvered to install allied Islamist groups in power, securing positions for former leaders of ISIS and Al-Nusra in the new Syrian government.

With a collapsed state and no viable democratic alternative, figures with terrorist backgrounds managed to take high-ranking positions endorsed by certain international actors. Far from achieving peace, Syria has become a hotspot of instability and a sanctuary for extremism at Europe’s doorstep.

What is your opinion on the European Union’s current policies towards Syria?

Honestly, I am shocked. Many are rushing to lift sanctions on the Syrian regime, arguing they could be reinstated if violence resurges. However, these atrocities are ongoing. Daily massacres are being committed. Recently, over ten people were killed in Arzej, more than 50 in Fahl, and several others in Homs. Kidnappings, killings, and discrimination against minorities, particularly the Alawites, are systematic. Employees are being dismissed based on sectarian affiliation, as seen in Latakia’s electricity directorate. Government facilities are being dismantled, impoverishing certain regions.

Despite these crimes, European leaders, including President Macron, are engaging with the perpetrators and even suggesting lifting sanctions. This approach is naive and reminiscent of Biden’s misguided policies in Afghanistan. How can we negotiate with jihadists? The European Union has never met with leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, or Al-Qaeda. So why recognize a group whose leader was ISIS’s deputy commander? Their history of terrorism is well documented—from 9/11 to bombings in Madrid, London, and beyond. These militants have committed countless atrocities, killing thousands in Iraq, Syria, and beyond.

Some analysts argue that the war in Syria is linked to competing gas pipeline projects controlled by Iran and Saudi Arabia, both passing through Syrian territory. Meanwhile, Western leaders are meeting with extremist figures. How do you see their rule over Syria’s resources and sovereignty?

Several European countries, like France, seem to be replicating their past dealings with the Assad regime. France, for example, maintained silence on Hezbollah’s arms trade in exchange for control over Beirut and Tripoli ports. The same French company also operates the container terminal in Latakia, renewing its contract even after the regime’s actions. If France was truly an adversary of the Assad regime, why would it maintain these agreements?

Western governments are short-sighted, hoping to prevent jihadist fighters from returning to Europe by engaging with them. However, this approach is dangerous. Europol has reported thousands of radicalized fighters that are back in Europe, requiring immense surveillance resources. Now, extremists in Syria number around 40,000-50,000, with 20,000 being foreign fighters. If they stay in power, their numbers will only grow, posing a global threat. Haven’t we learned from past mistakes of appeasing jihadists?

In your recent proposal, you oppose lifting sanctions without significant reforms being implemented first. What is your suggested approach for Syria?

Sanctions should remain in place until a new constitution guarantees equal rights for all citizens, irrespective of religion, ethnicity, or gender. The judiciary must be independent. Why should the West support a regime that does not share democratic values? If a government does not ensure equality among its citizens, we should not back it.

The only way forward is to rid Syria of extremism and implement genuine democracy. After years of war, a federal system is needed to rebuild trust. Syrians have lost family members, homes, and livelihoods. There is deep distrust and sectarian division, making it unrealistic to expect unity under a centralized system. A federal structure would respect cultural differences and provide regional autonomy, ensuring stability without fragmentation.

Ribal Al-Assad in a meeting with members of the European Parliament about the future of Syria

Which political groups in the European Parliament you think understand Syria’s situation?

The conservative groups understand what is happening in Syria far better, undoubtedly. However, leftist parties should also recognize the dangers of extremism, particularly concerning minority rights, women’s rights, and human rights. Recently, videos surfaced showing extremists attacking LGBTQ individuals in Syria, threatening them with mutilation. Yet, some Western governments continue to engage with these groups, ignoring their fundamentalist agenda.

Europe must not legitimize these extremists. Islam is a beautiful religion, but its perverted interpretation by radicals cannot be accepted. When people migrate, they should respect the culture, laws, and traditions of their new country. Western governments must enforce this principle rather than tolerate ideological subversion.

Do you think remigration, as proposed by parties like the AfD, is feasible?

Some countries are keen on returning Syrian refugees, especially those who initially stated they would go back if the Assad regime fell. However, many now fear returning under Islamist rule. While Assad’s regime was brutal, replacing it with jihadist extremists is worse. For years, I have worked to unite democratic forces into a viable alternative to dictatorship. Syrians desire genuine democracy, not another oppressive regime.

Could Trump’s leadership provide an opportunity for change? Who could lead this effort?

Under Trump, the U.S. successfully fought Islamist extremists, targeting them regardless of their affiliations. Some policymakers mistakenly considered alliances with Al-Qaeda against ISIS, forgetting their long history of attacks against the West. Trump rightly treated all Islamist extremist groups—whether Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, or ISIS—as threats.

In 2020, Trump ordered strikes against Al-Nusra leaders. While Al-Baghdadi was eliminated, Al-Jolani survived. However, his administration understood the need to eradicate all such groups. Unfortunately, today, we have heard little from Trump regarding renewed efforts against extremism.

Turkey’s expansionist ambitions also pose a serious threat. Ankara is pushing Islamist militias into Libya and consolidating power in Syria. If unchecked, these groups will threaten Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and the Gulf. Recent clashes at the Lebanon border highlight this growing instability. Arab states, except Qatar, are alarmed by Turkey’s increasing influence and support for extremists.

If Syria falls entirely under jihadist rule, it will become a global terror hub, attracting thousands more extremists. Western leaders must act decisively, not just for Syria’s future, but for their own security.

Original article: The European Conservative

By Andrew P. NAPOLITANO

❗️Join us on Telegram, Twitter , and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
–First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

When James Madison agreed to be the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention during the summer of 1787, he could not have known that just four years later he’d be the chair of the House of Representatives committee drafting the Bill of Rights.

In doing so, he insisted that the word “the” precede the phrase “freedom of speech” in what was to become the First Amendment, so as to reflect the views of the Framers that the freedom of speech preexisted the government.

Madison believed that pre-political rights, which he enumerated in the Bill of Rights, are natural to our humanity. Madison knew that when he wrote, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” he and the ratifiers meant no law. As direct and unambiguous as those words are — the Constitution as amended is the supreme law of the land — Congress and the courts have not always been faithful to them.

The first serious federal attack on free speech came in the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which criminalized criticisms of the foreign policy of the federal government and the administration of President John Adams. The same generation — in some cases, the same human beings — that had ratified the First Amendment in 1791, a mere seven years later assaulted, defied and nullified it.

In response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, the two most prominent thinkers in America — Thomas Jefferson, who had written the Declaration of Independence, and Madison — secretly authored the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, respectively. These state laws reflected the views of many ratifiers of the Constitution that the states that formed the federal government retained the power to correct it. All but one of the dreadful Alien and Sedition Acts were repealed by 1802.

During the War Between the States, President Abraham Lincoln arrested around 3,000 journalists and newspaper publishers in the North due to their harsh criticism of his government. He argued that the state of war gave him emergency powers to preserve the Union, which included evaluating and silencing the content of speech. Shortly after his death, the Supreme Court profoundly rejected his argument and set free those whom he had arrested, ruling that the Constitution admits of no emergency powers and free speech exists during war as well as peacetime.

At the height of the anti-immigrant hysteria whipped up by President Woodrow Wilson, Congress enacted the Espionage Act of 1917, which punished speech deemed harmful to America’s war efforts. Wilson was determined to win the First World War at the price of the suppression of ideas that he hated or feared.

He went so far as to arrest some of his former Princeton students for reciting “subversive materials” aloud outside a military draft office in Trenton, New Jersey, arguing that the First Amendment only restrained Congress, not the president. The materials they read aloud? The Declaration of Independence.

Then, a series of Supreme Court decisions instructed that if the government’s principal purpose or effect is to suppress speech because of its content, the suppression is unconstitutional. These opinions harkened back to Madison, who believed that the only moral and constitutional remedy for hateful or harmful or even seditious speech was not suppression and punishment but rather more speech.

A famous Chicago case put to rest the concept of freedom of speech versus public safety. The issue was the “heckler’s veto,” which takes place when audience members are so intentionally disruptive that they effectively prevent the speaker from speaking. Father Arthur Terminiello, a Roman Catholic priest who was an outspoken opponent of the Truman administration, gave an incendiary speech in a hall in Chicago, which the sponsors of the speech had rented for that purpose.

The speech delighted Terminiello’s supporters and infuriated his opponents. The opponents numbered about 1,600 people, and the supporters about 800. When it became apparent that violence might break out, the police ordered Terminiello to stop speaking and to leave the venue. When he disregarded their instructions, and the audience stormed and destroyed the podium, Terminiello was charged with and convicted of breach of the peace.

The Supreme Court reversed and held that the government cannot silence a speaker because it fears his words or the reaction of the audience. It also held that it is the duty of the government to protect speech, not to nullify or avoid it. In doing so, the court moved First Amendment jurisprudence significantly closer to where it is today — an absolute protection for public political speech.

In 1969, the court articulated that protection when it held unanimously that all innocuous speech is absolutely protected and all speech is innocuous when there is time for more speech to challenge it. With notable exceptions like the cases of Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, and the Patriot Act of 2001, that attitude generally prevailed in government in America.

Until now.

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice secured indictments of Americans and Russians for advancing “Russian propaganda” in America. The feds claim that articulating views of the war in Ukraine from a Russian perspective and holding out those views to be fact are somehow criminal.

These are political prosecutions. The effect of words is measured by their ability to be accepted in the marketplace of ideas, not whether they offend the government. The core purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of speech. That purpose protects the most caustic, incendiary and hateful speech hurled at the government, and admits no exceptions or prosecutions for content.

We are at the cusp of dark days for free expression. The remedy is to exercise it — loudly, persistently and in the government’s face.

Original article: ronpaulinstitute.org

By Andrew P. NAPOLITANO

❗️Join us on Telegram, Twitter , and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Can the president fight any war he wishes? Can Congress fund any war it chooses? Are there constitutional and legal requirements that must first be met before war is waged? Can the United States legally attack an ally?

These questions should be front and center in a debate over the U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Sadly, there has been no great national debate. The media are mouthing what the CIA is telling them, and only a few websites and podcasts — my own, “Judging Freedom” on YouTube, among them — are challenging the government’s reckless, immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional war.

All power in the federal government comes from the Constitution and from no other source. Congress, however, has managed to extend its reach beyond the confines of the Constitution domestically and in foreign affairs by spending money in areas that it cannot regulate and purchasing compliance from the states and foreign countries by bribery.

Examples of this domestically are the numerical minimum blood alcohol content to trigger DWI arrests, and maximum speed limits. In both instances, Congress offered money to the states to pave highways provided they lower both numbers, and the cash-strapped states accepted the money along with congressional strings. These are bribes, of which the criminal consequences Congress has exempted itself.

Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war on a nation or group. The last time it did so was to initiate American involvement in World War II. But Congress has given away limited authority to presidents and permitted them to fight undeclared wars. Examples of this are President George W. Bush’s disastrous and criminal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

Congress has not only not declared war on Russia; it has not authorized the use of American military forces against it. Yet, it has given President Joe Biden a blank check for $175 billion and authorized him to spend it on military equipment for Ukraine however he sees fit.

He has promised to continue giving Ukraine whatever it needs for “as long as it takes.” As long as it takes to do what? He cannot answer that because he has no clear military objective. Eliminating Russian troops from Ukraine and Crimea or Russian President Vladimir Putin from office are not realistically attainable military goals.

We don’t know how many American troops are in Ukraine, as they are out of uniform and their whereabouts a secret. We do know that they are involved in hostilities, since much of the hardware that Biden has sent requires American know-how and security clearances to operate and maintain. And some of the weaponry has American troops actually targeting Russian forces and pulling the triggers.

Are American soldiers killing Russian soldiers? Yes. None of it has been authorized by Congress, but Congress has paid for it in borrowed dollars.

Now back to the Constitution. The War Powers Resolution, which requires presidential notification to Congress of the use of American military force, is unconstitutional because it consists of Congress giving away one of its core functions — declaring war. The Supreme Court has characterized delegating away core functions as violative of the separation of powers: Only Congress declares war; only the president wages war.

Don’t be surprised if Biden gives War Powers Act notice secretly to the Gang of Eight. What’s that? The Gang of Eight is the Congress within the Congress. It consists of the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate with which the president legally shares secrets.

Just as Congress cannot delegate away its war-making powers to the president, it cannot delegate them away to the Gang of Eight. The concept of the Gang of Eight is antithetical to democratic values. Informing them of whatever violence the president is up to is done under an oath of secrecy. What kind of democracy operates and kills in secret?

The various treaties to which the U.S. is a party limit its war-making to that which is defensive, proportional and reasonable. So, if a foreign power is about to strike — like on 9/11, while the government slept — the president can strike first in order to protect the U.S. Beyond an imminent attack, the basis for war must be real, the adversary’s anti-U.S. military behavior must be grave, the objective of war must be clear and attainable, and the means must be proportionate to the threat.

Does Congress uphold the Constitution? Does the president? The answers are obvious. We have reposed the Constitution for safekeeping into the hands of those who ignore it. The consequences are death, debt and the loss of personal liberty.

Original article: judgenap.com

❗️Join us on Telegram, Twitter , and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

I predict future happiness for Americans,
if they can prevent the government from
wasting the labors of the people under
the pretense of taking care of them.

— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Last week, Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward Markey of Massachusetts revealed that automobiles sold in the United States with a GPS or emergency call system accumulate the travel data of the vehicle on computer chips located in the vehicle and the vehicle manufacturers have remote access to the computer chips. They revealed this is a letter to the Federal Trade Commission that, at this writing, has gone unanswered.

The senators complained that the computer chips in late-model vehicles retain the records of the location and driving habits utilized by the operator of each vehicle.

One probably expects some of this as most GPS systems ask if you are looking for directions to a location to which you have traveled in the past. That very request on your dashboard should trigger the observation that the vehicle’s computer chip has stored the requests you have input to the GPS.

But it doesn’t stop with a record of your GPS requests. What the two senators revealed was truly startling. The computer chips record every movement and speed of the vehicle; and some vehicles — those equipped with certain sensors and exterior cameras — also record the surroundings of the location of the vehicle.

Both senators complained that Americans largely do not know that the manufacturer of the vehicle they drive has remote access to the computer chips in the vehicle, and most Americans are largely unaware that the vehicle manufacturers make this data available to the government without a search warrant.

Is this constitutional? In a word: NO.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was written to protect the quintessential American right — the natural human right — to be left alone. Justice Louis Brandeis called it the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized persons.

It presumes that you can think as you wish and say what you think and read what you want and publish what you say, that you can exclude whomever you wish — including the government — from your property and from your thoughts; that you can move around from place to place; and do all this without a government permission slip, fear of government reprisal or the government’s prying eyes.

This natural right is expressly protected by the Fourth Amendment, which requires a warrant issued by a judge based upon probable cause of crime before the government can invade your property or spy on you, directly or indirectly. When the government has access to the data in your personal vehicle, it is simultaneously invading your property and spying on you.

The warrant requirement serves three purposes.

The first is to force the government to stay in the lane of crime solving, rather than crime predicting.

The colonists loathed when the British entered their homes with general warrants ostensibly looking to see if the colonists had purchased government stamps as the Stamp Act required. The true goal of these forced entries was to search for revolutionary materials in order to help the government predict who might be planning the revolution that came in 1776.

The second purpose of the warrant requirement is to prevent fishing expeditions using general warrants. General warrants permit the bearer to search wherever he wishes and seize whatever he finds. Thus, the Fourth Amendment also requires that the warrants specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

The third and most fundamental purpose of the warrant requirement is to reduce to writing the right to privacy. All persons naturally yearn for privacy. The Framers knew this and believed they had guaranteed it in the Fourth Amendment. They were wrong.

Some have argued that the culprits with these computer chips are the vehicle manufacturers. They are wrong. The culprit is the government.

The federal Department of Transportation — found nowhere in the Constitution — mandates the specs for the computer chips installed in vehicles sold in the United States. And the recent amendment to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires all persons and entities that manufacture or install facilities that transmit data over fiber-optic cables in the U.S. to make those facilities available to the federal government’s spies.

That mandate includes the CIA, even though its charter forbids it to spy domestically or engage in domestic law enforcement; the FBI, even though the federal prosecutors for whom FBI agents work cannot use evidence in federal prosecutions obtained via surveillance without a search warrant; and the National Security Administration, the federal government’s 60,000 dedicated domestic spies, whose management falsely claims it obtains warrants from the FISA court for all its spying.

What have we here?

What we have is the slow silent erosion of personal liberty perpetrated by a Congress afraid of the intelligence community it created in 1947 and which it is supposed to regulate, enabled by every president since Ronald Reagan who has looked the other way when the spies plied their foul crafts, and carried out by nameless faceless bureaucrats with large and awful eyes whose appetites for acquiring private data about ordinary Americans as to whom there is no suspicion or probable cause of criminal behavior is utterly and literally insatiable.

Even former President Donald Trump, who was infamously the subject of unlawful and unconstitutional spying when he was a private citizen and while in the White House, has fallen for all this.

What we have here is only lip service by our elected representatives to the words, their meanings and the underlying values of the Constitution. Efforts to stop this in the House and the Senate last month fell short by a single vote in each house. And that was before the Wyden/Markey revelations about your car spying on you!

Do you know anyone who has consented to this? Who will protect us from lawless government? Don’t we know by now that sacrificing liberty for safety leads to neither?

Original article: ronpaulinstitute.org

Can one arrive at a better grip on the dynamics behind the Russo–Sino ‘transformation’ sweeping the Middle East through visiting the points in the western Global Order that are at maximum high stress? Do these latter arcs of tension cast the regional Middle Eastern metamorphosis in a wider context? I believe they do.

The U.S. gives one clear example: For most of recent history, American liberal democracy was a Protestant mainline project – as Ross Douthat writes. “Our form of government has no sense, unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith”, Dwight Eisenhower said in 1952. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are the Protestant bones to that state of consciousness.

However, in the decades after Eisenhower, the mainline suddenly collapsed – declining numerically, and losing overt influence in all the institutions. Indeed, the traditionalist conservative opposition to the cultural transformation of the United States, more or less, lost its self-belief.

Subsequent efforts to revive some religious ‘Right’ failed to gel, primarily amongst the young. What took the mainstream’s place was the antagonistic conviction that liberalism “should not need a religious ‘ghost’ in the machine at all: There should just be liberal culture” – alone and on its own.

Thus liberal culture – often termed ‘woke’ – is a set of precepts that defies clear definition or nomenclature; one, which from the 1970s, drifted into a radical enmity towards the eclipsed ‘mainline’. Many pretend not even to have heard the term‘woke’.

Others (such as Professor Frank Furedi) have called the liberal shift from being merely adversarial, to being hegemonic, as in ‘our democracy’ to be, not a ‘turn’, but a rupture. Or, in other words, our project became not aimed just at rejecting previous cultural forms, but in erasing them altogether. In the political upheavals that followed, the political vocabulary of the West lost much of its salience. Left, Right, cultural Marxism – what reality is left to these labels today?

Woke defies nomenclature by treating politics as a matter of personal moral hygiene: It isn’t something you ‘do’; it is what you ‘are’. You think ‘right thoughts’ and utter ‘right speak’. Persuasion and compromise reflect moral weakness in this vision. Yes, it is cultural revolution.

But over time, the project kept on bumping up against the U.S. system’s gross contradictions, and its underlying endemic corruption and élite entitlement. Everywhere, it seemed, schisms were only deepening. ‘Old think’ was pushing back, but also since woke politics overwhelmingly is concerned with linguistics and the emotional, its’ practitioners were, and are, not very adept at doing real politics.

This essentially is what sets the Russian and Chinese approach apart. The latter do the real politics of compromise (which is so abhorrent to a ‘moral hygiene’ perspective that is more intent on inhabiting an elevated moral station).

In the failure to ‘achieve’ this hygienic society, an iconoclastic ‘turn’ was held to be essential – a shift to complete focus on ending those cultural and psychological structures in society, seen to perpetuate oppression, and to keeping ‘Old Think’ still ‘ticking over’.

Once you see these (oppressive) forces in operation, adherents believed, you can’t ‘unsee’ them; you are, well, “awake”, and you should refuse any analysis or explanation that doesn’t acknowledge and condemn how they have permeated western societies.

“Accepting this view also meant rejecting or modifying the rules of liberal proceduralism, since under conditions of deep oppression those supposed liberties are inherently oppressive themselves. You can’t have an effective principle of non-discrimination unless you first discriminate in favour of the oppressed. You can’t have real freedom of speech unless you first silence some oppressors”, Douthat concludes.

The point here, as it relates to the wider global context, is that despite the odds, the Traditionalists’ moral sensibility survived its initial collapse, and is resuscitating in new form, even as mainline formal religiosity has waned. Secondly, this episode underlines how the impulse to moral integrity is connected to past metaphysical structures and memories, albeit if only in the form of unconscious memory.

This clash of vision is the ‘contradiction’ at the heart of the western crisis. It is not clear whether it is susceptible of resolution, or whether ‘something will break’ in the system.

So let us turn now to a different crisis – this time in Israel: The crux of the contention lies again with the dichotomy inherent within an ‘idea’; the ‘idea’ of what is America, and what it is that is ‘Israel’?

One side holds that Israel was founded as a ‘balance’ between Jewishness and Democracy. The other says ‘nonsense’; Israel always was the establishment of Israel on the ‘Land of Israel’. Ostensibly, the crisis bringing hundreds of thousand Israelis on to the street is who has the final word on what is Israel: the Knesset (parliament) or the Supreme Court?

The clash comes from the Israeli Supreme Court having such broad powers of judicial review, that the judiciary may overrule the executive and—more controversially—the legislature. The Court, government supporters aver, then is anti-democratic by design; especially when, as in Israel, the appointment of judges is insulated from popular endorsement. Lacking a constitution, the Court is instead governed by a set of ‘basic laws’ which has allowed its judiciary to claim ever greater jurisdiction and privilege of judicial review.

The question becomes not only ‘what is Israel’, but what is ‘democracy’.

Ami Pedahzur, a political scientist studying the Israeli Right, explains that the religious Right “has always considered the Israeli Supreme Court to be an abomination”.

Of course, it is more complicated than that: Like in the U.S., two primal forces are pitted against one another, with little prospect of any reconciliation. One loose approximation would be that the crisis pits mainline Ashkenazi Jews, hailing from European countries, against underdog Mizrahi Jews, who hail from the Middle East and North Africa (roughly speaking).

Although the latter make up a little more than half the population, only 1 of 15 Supreme Court seats is occupied by a Mizrahi jurist.

In this sense, threatening to circumscribe the Court’s review powers over which the Israeli voter has no direct influence is seen by the government as ‘pro-democracy’. Nonetheless, Netanyahu’s opponents in Israel and in the U.S., accuse him of attempting to undermine, or even, to destroy ‘Israeli democracy’.

Here, the ‘shoe is on the other foot’ to that of the U.S. It is an inversion of the American situation. The Israeli ‘mainline’ (i.e., the establishment controlling Israel’s power foci) is secular (and mainly liberal Ashkenazi). It is the Netanyahu government which is seeking to reinstate Jewishness as a moral basis for society:

“They want a Jewish state, which they believe is predicated on traditional values – and isn’t a carbon copy of Berlin or London or New York; they want that state to be democratic, by which they take to mean letting voters – not unelected and unaccountable officials, shape policy”, Liel Leibovitz writes.

Angry protestors in Israel and in the Biden Administration flatly reject these cultural norms, and insist on the superior virtue of liberal democracy. And additionally, that you cannot have real democracy until ‘democracy’s opponents’ and exceptionalist biases have been cancelled, and removed from proximity to power.

The White House is angry, ostensibly at the ‘threat to liberal democracy’, but more tellingly, because Team Biden fears Israel is tilting towards Russia, thus rupturing western ‘unity’ versus Russia. Team Biden fears that Netanyahu’s Israel will triangulate, pitting the U.S. against Russia. This anxiety, in its backhanded way, reveals the fear of the ‘Rules-Order’ and dollar hegemony fragmentation to the thrall of the Russian and Chinese vision of sovereign societies structured around legacy moral precepts.

To be very plain, the western liberal cultural revolution’s shift from being merely adversarial to a project not aimed just at rejecting previous cultural forms, but in erasing them altogether is what is being globally rejected and collapsing. A new moral-cultural sensibility is rising, even as formal institutions of religion have ebbed. It is that which is articulated by Presidents Xi and Putin.

Again simply put, Russia’s quiet, background revival of Orthodoxy and China’s of Taoist and Confucian values as the possible framework against which the regulation of modern technological society can be set – in no small part – has opened the path to metamorphosis and the inflection gripping much of the world.

Sunni Islam in the late 19^th century tried to merge Islam and modernity, but with little success. What the Russo-Sino model seems to offer is a way to bring traditional meanings back into an otherwise hollow modernity, but without creating a separate, stand alone, religious regulatory structure.

Again, this shift is happening in the U.S.; it is happening in Israel; so why not across the Middle East?

The transformative effect of the Chinese-Russian entente on global politics affirms this crucial ideological transformation of our time. It brings to an end a long cycle of (sometimes enforced) westernisation of non-western societies dating back to Peter the Great’s founding of St Petersburg in 1703. A new cycle of cultural consciousness is in the process of forming.

This month, China struck an accord for a new regional security architecture by bringing together Saudi Arabia and Iran. Also in March, President Assad – long a pariah for the West – could be seen making a State Visit to Moscow – with full honours; and days later, was visiting the UAE. At the same time, Iraq and Iran signed a security co-operation agreement designed to end the U.S.-inspired Kurdish insurgency strikes into Iran. And President Raisi has been invited to Riyadh by King Salman, after Eid.

Could we have entertained such a concatenation of events, even one year ago? No!

Israel today is displaying what a society looks like when it is so riven that it hovers at the cusp of breakdown. The scope for any resolution is fleetingly small; the contradictions are too great. And to be clear, Israel is not alone in this plight whence the normal means of defusing conflicts are gone. France, Germany and the UK are mired in country-wide protests. More European states may follow.

The ostensible issue is always the same: elections in Europe, as in Israel, ‘come and go’. Some are won, time and again, but the winners never hold power in the true sense of the word. Through the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the defence establishment, academia, cultural elites, the media, and economic wheeling and dealing, the liberal cultural hegemony persists in power.

Put starkly, in Israel, this failure of ‘being in power’ is seen to be existential to the Religious Right who say it’s clear: Without Judaism we have no identity, and no reason to be in this land.

Lack of societal meaning – and the dead hand of ubiquitous identity politics – is turning deadly. More so in the West, since the woke Revolution has not exhausted itself. In the rest of the world however, the transition to ‘meaning’, to the reason to be, what we ‘are’, is easier, since woke never gained real traction.

Israel looks to be the ‘canary in the mine’ for how the U.S. and Europe might look – once the contradictions of a decaying society at home can no longer be papered over. But for the Middle East region, it’s over. It has decided to ‘move on’. Collectively it can see that the world is on the cusp of a new era and is looking East. Washington may try to present these changes as if some form of Henry Kissinger ‘triangulation’ (as David Ignatius suggests).

The brutal truth however, is that this regional transformation came about precisely because the U.S. and its toxic ‘with us, or against us’ doctrine was wholly excluded from the negotiations.

Moral integrity is reviving, and this is what matters.