Another well written and thoughtful essay by Professor Codevilla:

Censorship, Masks, Vaccines, Right, and Revolution

Surrender to today’s oligarchic priorities augurs no peace for tomorrow.

By Angelo Codevilla
May 17, 2021

The New York Times on May 6 published a full-dress condemnation of Facebook’s decision merely to continue suspending Donald Trump from its platform. The Times said that “our democracy” demands shielding voters and their representatives from what it considers falsehood concerning the 2020 presidential election. Rather than trying to show that any particular statement was false, or demonstrating the truth in opposition to Trump, the Times merely pointed out that his “lies” were dangerous because the majority of state legislatures had already voted to impose restrictions on the practices that had made 2020’s electoral outcome possible.

Hence Trump and all other purveyors of “untrustworthy content” must be banned permanently. By the same token, any number of persons and entities involved in managing the 2020 election have refused to turn over their records to legislatures that want to audit them. Most recently, Maricopa County, Arizona apparently deleted a directory full of election databases before delivering to the Arizona legislature the equipment on which it was stored.

(Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer denies that’s what happened. A spokesman for the auditors says they alleged no malice aforethought on the part of the county; they merely asked for clarification. ”Maybe it was deleted because it was a duplicate of something that was elsewhere.”)

The bigger point is this: No law empowers the Times and Facebook, much less officials in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc., to decide what is and is not properly part of public discourse about elections. The First Amendment argues against it. Yet they presume to censor. By what right?

On the instruction of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)—and without objection from Republican leaders—the Capitol Police department has refused to release any details about who killed Ashli Babbitt on January 6 in the Capitol. The suspicion is that this is because the killer may be a special agent on Pelosi’s protective detail, a black man who reportedly pledged allegiance to Black Lives Matter. By what right does anyone preclude discussing the possibility that a politically motivated murder may have occurred?
iStock/Getty Images

On May 9, the University of Massachusetts suspended three girls for having been mask-less. No matter that they were off-campus and outdoors, where even the Centers for Disease Control says they were at negligible risk themselves and posed no serious risk to others. They were not allowed to take final exams and forfeited the $16,000 tuition they paid for the semester. Again, no statute empowers. Ordinary contract law forbids such behavior. And yet . . . by what right was this done?

By a similar token, most universities have announced that students will need to show proof of vaccination in order to be admitted to campus in the fall, and wear masks to boot, regardless of whether they have had the virus, or of their personal preferences.

Note well that when the University of Massachusetts students—and all others as well—accepted admission to their respective institutions and paid their respective tuitions, they entered into mutually binding contracts. Neither any law nor contract empowers those institutions to impose the wearing of masks, never mind the introduction of drugs into their bodies.

And yet on May 13 after the Centers for Disease Control had canceled the requirement that vaccinated persons wear masks—responding to a veritable revolt among American physicians and the general public, especially parents, against that requirement’s self-contradictory, absurd, irrelevance to public health—congressional Democrats, Democratic governors, major retailers, and airlines all pledged to maintain the requirement for people entering their premises.

The absence of law and relevance to public health notwithstanding. By what right?
An Absense of Consent

Questioning such claims of right is no mere rhetorical exercise. It points to the fundamental clash of regimes that is revolutionizing American life in our time. It is the clash between our ruling class’s assertion of the right to rule by its own discretion—which it calls “our democracy” and the democratic republic under which we had been living.

Our republic’s founders recognized a twofold test by which to judge whether an act of government is right. First, by the very act of revolting against the laws of King and Parliament, Americans asserted that laws are to be obeyed not because of who promulgates them but above all because they are right in and of themselves—right by nature. No one may rightfully command wrongdoing, like trying to do something naturally perverse, like turning another human into an animal by enslaving him or turning a man into a woman.

The second test follows from the basic fact of natural human equality: that laws must emanate from the will and consent of the majority. But for the effective sovereignty of the many to produce laws that are right in and of themselves, they must be able to distinguish between true and false, better and worse. And since our republic’s basic premise is that “all men are created equal,” they sort themselves into majorities and minorities on any given issue by persuading one another.

That is why the American republic has always forbidden any interference in the flow of the facts and opinions by which the many exercise their sovereignty. That very premise of equality also enshrines the integrity of private contracts. A contract is a done deal because it is among equals.

But denial of human equality, of right, wrong, and persuasion, is the essence of what the ruling class calls “our democracy.” The regime under which we live consists of persons, regardless of whether they sit in what is legally the public or private realm, who are related to one another intellectually, morally, professionally, socially, financially, politically, maritally, and extramaritally. They are interchangeable. They suppose themselves superior to the rest of us. As they impose their concurrent will on us, they reverse republicanism’s very premises.
The Interest of the Stronger

Whence does the New York Times or Facebook get the right to decide once and forevermore that certain facts and arguments are so “untrustworthy” that ordinary people cannot pass judgment on whether they are true or not? Answer: they don’t get it by persuading you because they do not acknowledge the existence of a tribunal of truth, or that confronting contrary claims is the only path to truth. For such as they, the substance of right is neither adherence to nature nor to popular consensus but merely the power to make one’s assertion stick. Just as Plato’s Thrasymachus stated 2500 years ago, “Right is the interest of the stronger.” They get their right to power from each other as they join together in browbeating you.

That is why the restriction of information to that which is useful to the powerful few is as indispensable to what they call “our democracy” (and that the ancients called oligarchy) as the free circulation thereof is to republican government. The oligarchs already know all they need to know about right and wrong: right is what tends to foster their own power, and wrong is whatever might threaten it. Hence, oligarchies reduce public discourse to “narratives” approved or not according to whose interests they serve and when.

Between January and May, the oligarchy judged it essential to keep schools closed, to mandate masks, to hype the threat of white supremacy, and to suppress evidence of a political murder in the U.S. Capitol. No one should be surprised that as its priorities change, old narratives are thrown under the proverbial bus, and new ones imposed.

In what our oligarchs call “our democracy,” no interest is common to the powerful few and the powerless many. This is because, from their point of view, differences in power between human beings are as great as the differences between the human species and the other animals. Just as equality is republicanism’s bedrock—and hence contracts are as binding within it as are laws, so inequality of power is oligarchy’s essence. That is why lawlessness is oligarchy’s rule as regards contracts as it is regarding laws.

Within oligarchy, all is fluid.

That is why America’s republican many should be clear that the oligarchy’s structures and potentates offer no safety whatever. Surrender to today’s oligarchic priorities augurs no peace for tomorrow.

The many’s prospect of recovering a modicum of republican right lies in clearly, wholly, denying the legitimacy of oligarchic claims to power and privilege and insisting on the exclusive authority of republican law and private contracts. The oligarchy’s power over republican institutions ensures that such insistence will require substantial challenges, including civil disobedience. That, in turn, puts a premium on leadership.

But that is another story.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/0...ight-and-revolution/

This message has been edited. Last edited by: chellim1,

quote:

Questioning such claims of right is no mere rhetorical exercise. It points to the fundamental clash of regimes that is revolutionizing American life in our time. It is the clash between our ruling class’s assertion of the right to rule by its own discretion—which it calls “our democracy” and the democratic republic under which we had been living.

This was, and is, the problem with Britain's "constitution", which is neither written down nor specific. (The Magna Carta only matters if you give a hoot where some bishop grazes his sheep or whether one drunken wastrel or another "ascends" to some feudal title or another.) This is why the founders wrote down our Constitution, and made it as specific as possible (mostly by precluding possibilities, which is logistically a lot easier than listing what is permitted anyway). This is also precisely what our little elites are trying to take away from us.

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But denial of human equality, of right, wrong, and persuasion, is the essence of what the ruling class calls “our democracy.” The regime under which we live consists of persons, regardless of whether they sit in what is legally the public or private realm, who are related to one another intellectually, morally, professionally, socially, financially, politically, maritally, and extramaritally. They are interchangeable. They suppose themselves superior to the rest of us. As they impose their concurrent will on us, they reverse republicanism’s very premises.

And that's what they're after - the right to rule according to their whim. As long as any competition happens behind closed doors among the elites, the elites are willing to believe that they're giving the rest of us a sporting chance to participate in our own governance.

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:

quote:

And that's what they're after - the right to rule according to their whim. As long as any competition happens behind closed doors among the elites, the elites are willing to believe that they're giving the rest of us a sporting chance to participate in our own governance.

And by what right?
Because they went to an Ivy league school? Because they are rich? Because they have powerful friends?
Yes... I suppose that's what makes them 'elite' and able to deprive the rest of us of our rights.

A "sporting chance to participate in our own governance"? You mean because we have elections? Which may actually be fair and legitimate, sometimes, in some locations?
But the big ones, the important ones will be decided for us. Even though that all went wrong for them in 2016, they were able to fix it right in 2020.
I guess if voting mattered they wouldn't let you do it.

Once again, Angelo Codevilla brings it:

Regime vs. Regime

We who swear to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic owe no allegiance whatever to the oligarchy that now runs this country.

By Angelo Codevilla
May 20, 2021

The attempt of America’s ruling class to convict 455 persons of “armed insurrection”—i.e. of waging war against the United States, a species of treason—for protesting insufficient scrutiny of the 2020 election on January 6 in the Capitol, while at the same time it excuses and even cheers the burning and looting of courthouses, police stations, and downtowns all over America, is not the exercise of a “double standard.”

The people in and out of government who do this are not corrupt. Instead, acting as part of the regime—the oligarchy—they are replacing the American republic and waging war to crush its remains.

The sooner Americans realize that we are being governed by people at war with our Constitution and contemptuous of ourselves, the sooner those people may be treated as the enemies they are.

In the Washington Post, the Justice Department explained why the words of its indictments of those it claims trespassed on the Capitol will not result in the severe prison sentences they imply. Those words try to fit acts prima facie of mostly peaceful protest into the Democratic Party’s and associated oligarchy’s narrative of “armed insurrection against our democracy.” But in the Post story these “legal experts” mention regretfully that, their best efforts notwithstanding, what remains of the U.S. legal system cannot wholly erase the fact that “trespassing is still only trespassing, even in the U.S. Capitol,” and that “a misdemeanor is still only a misdemeanor.” Drat, still!

Nevertheless, these prosecutors and friendly experts fill most of the article with how they combine unlimited pretrial detention under harsh circumstances and limitation of legal assistance to press the accused to accept maximum penalties and to forgo bringing cases to juries.
The Narrative vs. Reality

Keeping evaluation of cases within the administrative-judicial system—out of the hands of the accused’s peers—is an essential part of suppressing the reality of what happened and did not happen on January 6. Forcing the accused to plead guilty to charges formulated according to the narrative that white supremacist Americans unlawfully obstructed the 2020 election is essential to establishing the validity of that fraudulent political claim.

That, in turn, is an essential weapon in the oligarchy’s attack on the American republic and its supporters. Reality is the opposite: the oligarchy itself committed the only unlawful acts of interference during the 2020 election. Anyone looking for evidence of oligarchic interference may begin with Time magazine’s February 4 story, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” and continue to the ongoing campaigns to thwart audits of vote counts.

Today’s Justice Department, acting as part and parcel of the oligarchy that calls itself “our democracy” has pushed partisanship to the point of war by one regime in favor of another. Inevitably, this has created the horrid reality of political prisoners among us—people who are being punished for supporting the republic against the oligarchy. When regimes war on each other, whose side you are on becomes the practical definition of justice.

The following shows that the oligarchy’s system of justice consists precisely of negating what the U.S. Constitution defines as right. The founders passed the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth through Eighth Amendments, precisely to place the judicial power’s capacity to hurt individuals ultimately and firmly in the hands of the people. They did it to prevent those in power from using that power to cow opposition and force support. But that is exactly what the regime that calls itself “our democracy” is doing.

Consider: The Fourth Amendment prohibits officials from searching a person or his home and papers without prior consent or a legal order. A warrant must be based on probable cause, or reasonable suspicion of criminal behavior. It must also be very specific in describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. The Fourth Amendment is intended not just to prevent bothersome “fishing expeditions” into innocent matters. It also means to outlaw using investigations themselves as a form of punishment and intimidation.

And yet first the Justice Department, and now regime-friendly judges, have used and are using investigations to draw a dragnet through American society to embarrass, punish, and chill countless persons who are or may be opposed to the oligarchy’s desires. Having been at the Capitol on January 6, or merely in Washington, D.C., has been enough to earn a SWAT team’s intrusion and trashing of one’s home. Other departments of government including the armed forces, plus any number of corporations, examine social media posts for heterodox views. Though punishment does not always result, spreading fear always does. Which is the main point.
Political Power vs. Constitutional Rights

The Fifth Amendment’s prohibition of compulsory self-incrimination was meant to prevent officials from pressuring suspects into admitting guilt for crimes they did not commit. Guilt and innocence were supposed to be determined at trial. But the modern American justice system relies almost entirely on over-charging offenses and then discounting them to obtain a guilty plea—the truth of what really happened be damned. This has placed dictatorial discretion in officials’ hands, resulting in laxity for socio-political favorites and oppression for those out of favor.

Misuse of the plea bargain system is playing a major role in the oligarchy’s attack on the republic because the oligarchs are combining it with neglect of the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury, to hear and question witnesses, and to be defended by a lawyer. Trials for the events of January 6 are not to begin until at least some nine months after the fact, on no particular schedule. During this lengthy and indeterminate time, the accused are held in solitary confinement under conditions harsher than most murderers ever experience. Their lives have already been ruined. And for what? The pressure on them is enormous to sign anything and at least set a date by which their nightmare will end.

This is possible because the Justice Department also acts in defiance of the Eighth Amendment, which protects against excessive bail or fines. The Constitution’s framers assumed that all but a few dangerous defendants would be granted bail—money pledged in exchange for the promise to appear for trial. Overheated rhetoric aside, none of the persons arrested in connection with January 6 actually injured anyone, or have a history of injuring anyone. The allegation that they are dangerous is purely a political one, and the purpose of denying them bail is all too obviously to pressure them to support a political narrative and to warn the oligarchy’s potential opponents of what the administrative system has in store for them.
Deny Their Legitimacy

The Eighth Amendment also forbids cruel or unusual punishment. What might that be for trespassing? What is cruel or unusual punishment for disagreeing with the socio-political agenda of powerful people?

The Bill of Rights has long since applied to the states. Erasing the distinction between what had been public and private, between the powers of those in political office and those of corporations, institutions, etc., is oligarchy’s essence.

Arguably, the imposition of very cruel penalties on persons out of step with people and institutions that are part of the ruling oligarchy is contemporary America’s most prominent feature. These include deletion of careers and livelihoods, public imputations of racism, etc. They amount to something like outlawry.

And for what, specifically? Loud and clear is the ruling narrative: “our democracy” is under armed assault by hordes of white supremacists who lurk throughout society, ready to unleash another, deadlier version of January 6. But the reality is that “trespassing is still only trespassing.”

To keep this reality in context, one might recall Arlo Guthrie’s hilarious 1967 song “Alice’s Restaurant,” the saga of a hippie arrested for dumping trash, whom the legal system throws in with “all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people . . . Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! . . . nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me! . . . And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest Father raper of them all . . . he said, ‘What were you arrested for, kid?’ And I said, ‘Littering.’ And they all moved away from me.”

Humor and irony, however, are powerless against the logic of warring regimes. The oligarchs are not fooling around. Appealing to the Constitution can only increase their determination to bury its remnants under the administrative powers it creates or enhances. This is a regime alien and inimical to ours.

That is good as well as bad news. The good aspect of it is that we who swear to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic owe no allegiance whatever to the oligarchy that now runs this country. Nor can we persuade them about right and wrong. If we are to avoid becoming the oligarchy’s mere subjects we can and must treat them as the enemies they are: deny their legitimacy, and rebuild the republic amongst those of us who love it.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/20/regime-vs-regime/

quote:

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:

And that's what they're after - the right to rule according to their whim. As long as any competition happens behind closed doors among the elites, the elites are willing to believe that they're giving the rest of us a sporting chance to participate in our own governance.

Yep, and braaaack was nice enough to let us know this. Mark Levin posted this on Gab today (video embedded).

“Ordinary men and women are too small minded to govern their own affairs. The order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their right’s to an all mighty sovereign.”

FBHO and ALL of his link-minded ilk!

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The New York Times on May 6 published a full-dress condemnation of Facebook’s decision merely to continue suspending Donald Trump from its platform.

I'm confused: NYT condemned Facebook? For being fully dressed? Or what does this opening line mean?
Oh, wait: I get it now. Facebook didn't go far enough in condemning Trump, so NYT condemns Facebook. Is that it?

quote:

Originally posted by Cookster:
Yep, and braaaack was nice enough to let us know this. Mark Levin posted this on Gab today (video embedded).

I'd be willing to bet that that was taken out of context. Not even Hadji is stupid enough to say that.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
I'd be willing to bet that that was taken out of context. Not even Hadji is stupid enough to say that.

You would think... but perhaps he said it. I'm pretty sure he thought it... and he has enough hubris to actually say it. Of course, like most of his past, it was scrubbed.

Mark Levin Show
@marklevinshow_fnc
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This video has been deleted from every platform (including google) years ago. It took me along time to find it. make it go viral!

"Ordinary men and women are to small minded to govern their own affairs. The order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their right's to an all mighty sovereign"

That is why the restriction of information to that which is useful to the powerful few is as indispensable to what they call “our democracy” (and that the ancients called oligarchy) as the free circulation thereof is to republican government. The oligarchs already know all they need to know about right and wrong: right is what tends to foster their own power, and wrong is whatever might threaten it. Hence, oligarchies reduce public discourse to “narratives” approved or not according to whose interests they serve and when.

Great article. I thought he nailed it here.

When FB, Twitter, CNN, WaPo, et al suppress what they consider "untrustworthy" news, they aren't doing it to protect the public, they're doing it to protect their monopoly on what passes for conventional wisdom. They're scared to death that the Proles might start thinking for themselves.