Patriotic Americans Flee the Democratic Party

by

Zeno Potas

      Speak out against party lines, Comrade, and you will soon be consigned to the ash heap of history. That is what being a members of the Democratic party have been shown repeatedly. Have an idea different than the party’s? No, you don’t, or else. Sound familiar? Anyone who has read history knows that these are the utterings of Communist or a NAZI. In the twenty-first century, this is a Democrat.

      Take for example former Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski. He WAS one of the few remaining conservative Democrats in Congress. Since his views were not party lne he went under siege from the left in his own party, battling for his political life against progressives teamed up to replace him with a candidate that was far more in line with liberal orthodoxy. He knew he didn’t stand a chance. Before his defeat he stated, “There are Democrats who are a lot more conservative than I am on issues. (who are silent.) I wish there were more moderate Democrats.”(who had their own mind.) In the 2020 primary Lipinski was defeated in the Democratic primary by progressive challenger Marie Newman.

      Another Democrat Representative, Jeff Van Drew, also could no longer be a clone to the party. Van Drew was the Democratic nominee in New Jersey's 2nd congressional district in the 2018 election. He was elected with 53% of the vote against Republican nominee Seth Grossman, who received 45% of the vote. "I’m proud to be a Democrat because to me it always represented working people, middle class people and issues of compassion."

       However, after a short time on Capitol Hill he became extremely disgruntled with the old guard of the party, who are controlled by the Lefist elite both inside and outside the United States, and the new, ever growing, Progressive pro-Communist ideolgy being pushed down his throat. On December 19, 2019, Van Drew announced that he would be leaving the Socialist Democrats and joining the Republican Party, and he officially did so on January 7, 2020. Here, in his own words, are his reasonig and hopes and fears for America.

      "My decision to leave the Democrat Party was one that was not entered into lightly. The pressure of party bosses, activists, and even my colleagues, was great, but the Democrat Party has changed. It is no longer the party that my grandparents and I grew up admiring. It is not the party that once allowed for and encouraged free thought and robust debate. Now, it is a mob that drives policy decisions with the goal of starting over with a new system of governance."

      "I was always told that Republicans would marginalize me, push me aside and treat me like dirt. This could not be further from the truth. I have been welcomed with open arms, and even when I have disagreed on some issues, my views have been respected. The picture of Republicans that is painted by Democrats and their allies in the media is mostly false; in fact, many of my former colleagues firmly believe the Republican Party is the sole cause of many societal ills. It is this unjustified logic that allows them to treat their colleagues, their constituents and their fellow citizens with disdain and call them deplorable, or worse. We must work in concert to keep America unified and push back against that ignorance. I have never been driven by partisan politics, only a desire to better the lives of my constituents."

      "America is under immense pressure to turn its back on the things that have made it exceptional. Make no mistake, many proposals put forth by the House majority in this Congress, while cloaked in the language of good intentions, are not governed by truth and are communistic in nature. Many continue to run away from America. I cannot – I must run toward America. I will fight for my district, my state, and my nation."

       "Winston Churchill once stated – “…that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” America is not perfect, but it is better than every alternative."

      "I will always be focused on supporting proposals that keep America strong and prosperous. We must continue to provide our society with the opportunities on which our past, present and future generations have and will continue to thrive. We cannot stand by and idly watch; we must be actively involved in the fight for this nation. I love America and the opportunity for which it stands. We must continue to improve ourselves without destroying all the values that have made us great."

                                    THIS IS A PATRIOT - THIS IS AN AMERICAN

Edward Snowden - Hero or Traitor?

by

       Phillip Todd

      Hero or traitor? Like politics in the United States,

when you talk to people, they have a black or white opinion on Edward Snowden. He is thought of as a man who outed the largest world-wide government conspiracy of all times or he that gave our enemies an insight on our nation’s secrets. The US government pulled his passport as he was traveling through Russia, which left him stateless and unable to travel internationally, stranded in Russia forever? The public is divided.

      He has just released a new book Permanent Record in which he again speaks to his reasoning with the disclosures. He once again states that he believes in what is right and what is wrong not what is legal and what is not. He speaks of what the government is doing without telling it’s citizens. One example is when Snowden discusses at length how the government in general, and the spy agencies in particular, rely on outside contractors. He makes clear that for all intents and purposes they are barely distinguishable from formal employees, with one major exception: they are generally better paid. Taxpayers foot the bill but few voice concern.

      Now criminally charged (by the US) and living in Moscow, he has few defenders outside the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and free speech purists. Other than security matters, his crime was that Snowden revealed that American citizens were subjected to mass government surveillance. The privacy that they valued was not intact. Uncle Sam was a silent partner in their lives and most never even knew it.

      After the Snowden revelations, an intermediate US appellate court reinstated a lawsuit brought by the ACLU that challenged the constitutionality and statutory legality of the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata collection. In 2015, a three-judge panel held that “the program exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized”. But the court did not adjudicate the larger constitutional issue.

      Will it continue? I am speaking of the mass surveillance and data harvesting system that now pervades our lives. Edward Snowden still has hope that “we the people” can and will put an end to this. Here now is his stand alone article entitled:

         The Age of Mass Surveillance Will Not Last Forever

The Power to End it is in Your Hands.

      "When I was working at the CIA, if you had told me that there would soon come a youth rebellion that relied on lasers and traffic cones as sword and shield, and that it would come to paralyze one of the world’s richest and most powerful governments, I would have—at the very least—raised an eyebrow. And yet as I write these words nearly a decade later, this is exactly what's happening in Hong Kong, the city where I met with journalists to reveal the secret that would transform me from an agent of government into one of the world’s most wanted men. As it happened, the very book that you now hold in your hands lay on the desk, the desk of the last hotel room I would ever pay for with a credit card.

What I showed those journalists was proof, in the form of the government’s own classified documents, that the self-described “Five Eyes”—the state security organs of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada—had together conspired to weaken their laws. They had forced clandestine access to the networks of their largest telecommunications and internet titans (some of whom hadn't needed much in the way of arm-twisting) in pursuit of a single goal: the transformation of the free and fragmented internet into history’s first centralized means of global mass surveillance. This violation of our fundamental privacy occurred without our knowledge or consent, or even the knowledge and consent of our courts and most lawmakers.

      Here’s the thing: Although the global response to this violation was furious, producing the largest intelligence scandal of the modern age, mass surveillance itself continues to work today, virtually unimpeded. Nearly everything you do, and nearly everyone you love, is being monitored and recorded by a system whose reach is unlimited, but whose safeguards are not. But while the system itself was not substantially changed—as a rule, governments are less interested in reforming their own behavior than in restricting the behavior and rights of their citizens—what did change was the public consciousness.

      The idea that the government was collecting the

communications of those who had done nothing wrong had once been treated as a paranoid conspiracy theory (or as the subject of instructive fiction, such as the work you're about to read). Suddenly, this prospect had become all too real—the sort of universally acknowledged truth that can be so quickly waved away as obvious and unremarkable by the crooked timber of our political operators.

      Meanwhile, the corporations of the world digested the realization that their darkest shame—their willful complicity in crimes against the public—had not been punished. Rather, these collaborators had been actively rewarded, with either explicitly retroactive immunity or informal guarantees of perpetual impunity. They became our latest Big Brother, striving to compile perfect records of private lives for profit and power. From this emerged the contemporary corruption of our once-free internet, called surveillance capitalism.

We are coming to see all too clearly that the construction of these systems was less about connection than it was about control: The proliferation of mass surveillance has tracked precisely with the destruction of public power.

      And yet despite this grim reading from my seven years in exile, I find more cause for hope than despair, thanks in no small part to those lasers and traffic cones in Hong Kong. My confidence springs not from how they are applied—to dazzle cameras and, with a little water, to contain and extinguish the gas grenades of a state gone wrong—but in what they express: the irrepressible human desire to be free.

      The problems that we face today, of dispossession by oligarchs and their monopolies, and of disenfranchisement by authoritarians and their comfortably captive political class, are far from new. The novelty is in the technological means by which these problems have been entrenched—to put it simply, the bad guys have better tools.

      You have heard that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Herein lies the folly of every system of rule whose future relies more heavily on the omnipotence of its methods than the popularity of its mandate. There were times when empires were won by bronze and boats and powder. None survive. What outlasts each forgotten flag is our greatest technology, language: the empire of the mind.

      It is true that we have been thrust, like Marcus Yallow and his friends, into an unequal battle. But no amount of even the most perfect surveillance, no amount of repression or rent-seeking, can or will change who we are. From brave students in Hong Kong to brilliant cypherpunks in San Francisco, there is not a day that passes without individuals searching for the means to restore and improve the systems that govern our lives. 

      We have seen ingenuity and invention give rise to systems that keep our secrets, and perhaps our souls; systems created in a world where possessing the means to live a private life feels like a crime. We have seen lone individuals create new tools—better tools—than even the greatest states can produce. But no technology, and no individual, will ever be enough on their own to curtail for long the abuses of our weary giants, with their politics of exclusion and protocols of violence. This is the part of the story that matters: that what begins with the individual persists in the communal.

The changing of an age takes more than lasers and traffic cones: it takes the hands that hold them.

It takes you.”

Attorney General William Barr Speaks on the Leftist Drift in America

by

      The Staff of the American Constitutionalist

      Attorney General William Barr is slamming

Democrats who refuse to condemn the violent riots rocking America this summer, saying far left extremists are on a mission to "tear down" U.S. institutions key to democracy. In a series of interviews this week the Attorney General spoke of the on going attack, from within the country, on the American way of life. We have made his comments available on a question and answer format.

AC: What do you think of the radical Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA groups? Antifa’s stated long-term objective, both in America and abroad — and it got its birth in Europe — England, then Germany, then the United States — is to establish a Communist world order and this is a fact, by the way, this information has been put out, it’s not like we’re conspiracy theorists and so forth. In the United States, Antifa’s immediate aim is to bring about the demise of the Trump administration. Black Lives Matters co-founders have said they are trained Marxists. Who are these “peaceful protesters” as the media describes them?

AG Barr: "They are revolutionary groups that are interested in some form of Socialism or Communism. They're essentially Bolsheviks. Their tactics are fascistic," he said. “They high-jack these demonstrations and they provoke violence and they have various tiers of people from the sort of top provocateurs, down through people who are their minions and sort of run the violent missions. Mao – Mao Tse Tung used to speak about the guerrilla being like fish swimming in the ocean the way the guerrilla moves through the people.”

AC: How so?

AG Barr: "The way the guerrilla...hides out among the people as a fish in the ocean...what they do is they are essentially shielding themselves or shrouding themselves in First Amendment activity," he explained. "They go into the demonstrations, which are exercising First Amendment activity, and they insinuate themselves in there to shield themselves. That's where they swim. And what they do is they hijack these demonstrations and they and they provoke violence. It’s a difficult phenomenon to deal with. They’re highly organized at these demonstrations. And these tactics that they use are designed – and the way the media responds to them, of course — the media doesn’t take footage of what’s happening. They don’t take the footage of the rocks being thrown.”

AC: The media, are they lying to the American people?

AG Barr: "They are projecting a “narrative" and selling a "lie" to the American people in their watered-down coverage of the civil unrest.” Barr noted that, “ Antifa’s acts of extremist violence are “highly organized at these demonstrations” and that “the media doesn’t take footage of what’s happening.” "You don't see it on the networks. You don't see it on the other cable stations. And yet you hear about these peaceful demonstrators. So it's you know, it's just it's a lie. The American people are being told a lie by the media," Barr said. “The media has become "extremely monolithic," he concluded, "and it's wedded in many ways to the Democratic Party."

AC: The Democratic party doesn't speak out against the violence that is going on in their cities are they supporting these anti-American values riots or is there something else?

AG Barr: "The left has "pulled away from the umbrella of classical liberal values that have undergirded" America and made a "secular religion" out of seeking "complete political victory," he argued. “It began the day Trump won in 2016, and from that point forward, there's been the resistance, Barr stated. “Power has become a "secular religion of the left," Barr asserted. "They want to run people's lives so they can design utopia for all of us...and it's the lust for power. They view their political opponents as evil because we stand in the way of their progressive utopia that they're trying to reach," he said. "and that's what gives the intensity to the partisan feelings that people feel today, because for them, this pilgrimage we're all on is a political pilgrimage. I think it’s because of the desire for power, is essentially their state of grace and their secular religion,” Barr continued. “They want to run people’s lives. That’s what turns them on. They weren’t expecting Trump’s victory, and it outrages them.They were trying to impeach Donald Trump from Day One. They have done everything they can..and I think it's because of the desire for power that the left wants."

AC: The attorney general also commented on the hostile treatment he received last month before the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee. You testified in front of this very hostile Leftist Democrat led panel. When you asked why their party was silent on this attack on America, what was their response?

AG Barr: "I said during my hearing: “Can any of you just come out and say it's not OK to burn down federal courthouses?' I mean, they talk about the rule of law. They talk about the importance of the federal legal system to protection of civil rights. Well, the heart of that is our court system. And they're not willing, not one of them piped up to say, 'No, it's not OK to be burning down federal courts,” he said “Many of them are just cowards and are afraid from, you know, about a challenge from the left," Barr said referring to Democrats who haven't condemned the riots. "So for them, it's careerism."

 

AC: The election, what are your thoughts on massive mail-in voting?

AG Barr: "The idea of conducting elections by wholesale mail-in ballots is reckless and wrong," Barr said, everyone knows what has happened in these cases. The "reckless" push by Democrats to expand mail-in voting could raise "serious questions about the integrity of the election," Attorney General William Barr "I think it is grossly irresponsible to be doing what the Democratic Party is doing now," Barr said. "We've had very close races in recent history, the country is divided. If anything, we should be assuring the integrity of our elections so that government going forward would be legitimate and be accepted as legitimate." 

 

      Barr clarified that because of the process required to obtain an absentee ballot, such voting is safer than general mail-in balloting, in which ballots are automatically sent "to everyone on the voting list," resulting in "thousands and thousands of ballots floating around, not just the state but the country. "I have friends who haven't lived in California in 21 years who received ballots," Barr said. "There are ballots left in boxes in apartment buildings, ballots for people who used to live at addresses are delivered to those addresses. They can be filled out by anybody. This is reckless and it could create serious questions about the integrity of the election, and to do this when we are closely divided country as we are is playing with fire in my view."

AC: Any thoughts on the President?

AG Barr: “I went back and I watched his victory speech after election night. People should go back and look at it. It was very measured, it was a very statesman-like speech. He offered the olive branch, he praised Hillary Clinton, thanked her for all her service to the country, talked about working together to make things better for the American people.

That was the day he won, and from that point forward, there’s been the resistance. They were trying to impeach him from day one. They have done everything they can. They’ve shredded the norms of our system to do what they can to drive him from office or to debilitate his administration.”

AC: Thank you, Mr. Attorney General

Socialist Media Continue to Oust Left Leaning Moderates For Not Being Left Enough

by

       George Sontag

      A one-sided Progressive Communist media continues to strengthen as centrist and moderate writers continue to be pushed out. Such are the facts as two long time journalists lost their positions this week. Their crime was they did not and would not write agenda driven propaganda.     

       Our first journalist is Andrew Sullivan who penned his last op-ed in New York Magazine on Friday after being forcedout. Sullivan’s take on it was this, "What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to (Lefist)critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same space. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here."

      The columnist spoke of how "we all live on campus now," noting the increasingly limited exchange of ideas, other than Leftist, on college campuses, has spilled into everyday media. Making his point he stated that according to a survey, only 1.46 percent of the faculty at Harvard University identify as "conservative, but that’s probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine."

        “I’m not a conservative,” Sullivan stated, in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November." our opinion on his statement is that his politics are moderate-left, but apparently, not left enough.

      Then there is New York Times opinion columnist and editor Bari Weiss who announced Tuesday she is leaving saying she was bullied by colleagues weeks after reporting there was a “civil war” inside the paper. She said she doesn’t understand how toxic behavior is allowed inside the newsroom and "showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery."

      Weiss published a scathing resignation letter that she sent to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger on her personal website. She stated, “a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” She continues, “stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history,” she wrote, Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.” (opinionated propaganda)

      She also spoke out against the censorship at the paper, “Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired. “Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher. Rules at the paper are applied with extreme selectivity and work goes unscrutinized if it aligns with the new orthodoxy. The fact is “we can assure ourselves of job security by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? Self-censorship has become the norm.”

      In her resignation letter, Weiss noted that her own “forays into Wrong-think” have made her the subject of “constant bullying by colleagues” who disagree with her views. "They have called me a Nazi and a racist,” she wrote, for questioning the agenda.”

      “The paper of record, the New York Times, is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people,” Weiss wrote. “This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet Union space program is lauded for its “diversity”;(Communist propaganda) the unethical doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned;(unlawful acts) and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.”(re-writing history) She also noted that much of the information and “facts” published at the New York Times comes from social media not news reports. “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times,” but social media acts as the ultimate editor.”This is what our media has become. It is nothing more than a propaganda machine for change. That change is towards Corporate Socialist Communism and they wrap it up in red, white, and blue so it can be palatable.

*Note - Media reporter Yashar Ali tweeted  that in recent weeks, he had "repeatedly heard rumors from sources that Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan were going to work on a project together."

The Unconstitutional Law Allowing Federal Troops in Coastal Cities

by

       M. Richard Maxson

       In United States criminal law, the border search exception is a doctrine that allows searches and seizures at international borders and their functional equivalent without a warrant or probable cause. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects Americans from random and arbitrary stops and searches. According to the government, however, these basic constitutional principles do not apply fully at our borders. Federal law allows certain federal agents and military, including Homeland Security, to conduct search and seizures within 100 miles of the border into the interior of the United States. 

 

      The doctrine is not regarded as an exception to the Fourth Amendment, but rather to its requirement for a warrant or probable cause. The government’s view is that the expectation of privacy less at the border or it’s cities. The country's interests at the border are balanced against the Fourth Amendment rights of entrants. This balance at international borders means that routine searches are "reasonable" there, and therefore do not violate the Fourth Amendment's proscription against "unreasonable searches and seizures". Pursuant to this authority, officers may generally stop and search the person and property of anyone at random, or even based largely on ethnic profiles without probable cause or a warrant. This, to originalists, is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, but the Supreme Court has clearly and repeatedly confirmed that the border search exception applies within 100 miles of the border of the United States. 

      Roughly two-thirds of the United States' population lives within the 100-mile zone—that is, within 100 miles of a U.S. land or coastal border. That's about 200 million people. Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont lie entirely or almost entirely within this area. Nine of the ten largest U.S. metropolitan areas, as determined by the 2010 Census, also fall within this zone: New York City, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego and San Jose. This is why you are seeing Federal agents in major cities. IT IS LEGAL.

      Many people think that border-related policies only impact people living in border towns like El Paso or San Diego. The reality is that Border Patrol's interior enforcement operations encroach deep into and across the United States, affecting the majority of Americans. Even in places far removed from the border and/or coastline, deep into the interior of the country, immigration officials enjoy broad—though not limitless—powers. Specifically, federal regulations give multiple U.S. agencies the authority to operate within 100 miles of any U.S. "external boundary." There are limits in this 100-mile zone. However, agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

      Under this “law” many violations of constitutional rights have occurred. Federal agents are stopping, interrogating, and searching Americans on an everyday basis and often in ways that our Constitution does not permit. Also, the Border Patrol rejects any geographic limitation on agents' authority. Unfortunately, at least two federal circuit courts condone Border Patrol operations outside the 100-mile zone, federal regulations and Supreme Court precedent notwithstanding.

      No matter what the agents think, our Constitution applies throughout the United States, including within this “100-mile border zone.” The expansion of government power both at and near the border is part of a trend toward expanding police and national security powers without regard to our most fundamental Constitutional rights. If Americans do not continue to challenge the expansion of federal power over the individual, we risk forfeiting the fundamental rights and freedoms that we inherited—including the right to simply go about our business free from government interference, harassment and abuse.