Several years
ago the Commonwealth of Virginia enacted a law restricting firearms purchases
to one per month. This was intended to discourage smuggling of weapons to urban
areas outside Virginia with tight gun control laws and (unsurprisingly) high
homicide rates. The law didn’t seem to do much good and in a rare outbreak of
common sense was later repealed, though there’s recent misguided talk from Attorney
General Mark Herring of reviving it.
During its
short period in force, the prohibition spawned a popular saying in the Old
Dominion: “Buy one gun a month – it’s the law!”
A similar attitude may be appropriate in light of an
estimate that due to vague statutes and the proliferation of federal regulations
– which have the force of law – we wake up in the morning, go to work, come
home, eat dinner, and go to sleep unaware we may have committed
several federal crimes in the course of the day. The number varies but
the average
number of crimes per American seems to be about three.
The more important point is that every
one of us is probably guilty of something. “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be
indicted for some federal crime,” retired Louisiana State University law
professor John Baker told the Wall Street Journal in July
2011. “That is not an exaggeration.”
- This means that if they want you, they
can get you.
- That
in turn means that who gets charged, prosecuted, and jailed is a matter of
the relevant officials’ discretion.
- And
that in turn means that discretion can and will be politicized.
Like
the boychiks used to say in the good ol’ NKVD (People’s
Commissariat for Internal Affairs; Народный комиссариат внутренних дел):
“Give
Us the Man, and We Will Make the Case.” (I guess nowadays, we should say
“person.”)
Let’s
stipulate that the true Rechtsstaat, where justice is
administered in a politically neutral manner is few and far between in human
history. The norm is politicized justice where holders of power – in an
elective system, the winners – use the justice system to harass and terrorize
the losers.
But America
today must be the only country that’s ever been so goofy that the losers are
able to terrorize the winners. Whatever your feelings about the current
administration, consider: the feds come in like gangbusters, breaking down
doors, rousting targets from their beds, seizing their personal documents and
devices, and subjecting them to piled-on charges and questioning designed to
result in perjury, obstruction, and conspiracy charges – especially the phony
crime of “lying
to the FBI” – adding up to decades in jail. Those accused are
forced to plead guilty to a lesser charge or bankrupt themselves hoping they
will be vindicated by a jury of sheep their peers, where the feds
have a 90 percent-plus conviction rate. That’s treatment meted out to Paul
Manafort, Mike Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen, and
others.
Conversely,
clear evidence of crime, such as mishandling classified material, is a freebie:
“No
reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” Oh, some of the emails
are “personal?” That’s OK, you decide what’s what – we trust you! There’s a
claim a foreign power hacked a computer server, which some compare to an act of
war demanding retaliation – no, we don’t need to see the server itself, your
contractor’s report is good enough for us! And while you’re at it, go ahead and
purge your electronic records (even material
you’re obligated to preserve) and smash
up your smart phones and pull out SIM cards. Oh, hey, does anyone
need immunity? No need to bargain, we’re happy to provide! That’s the treatment
accorded to Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Tony Podesta, and their
ilk.
It’s no
coincidence, Comrades, that this disparity is the work of denizens of a law
enforcement and intelligence apparatus that is focused like a laser on two
closely linked objectives: One, get Donald Trump. Two, at all costs,
make sure that he cannot in any way move forward on his stated objective to
improve ties with Russia. Those objectives are the two sides of the coin called
Russiagate. All else, including the disparity of treatment given those close to
Trump versus his opponents, is a function of Russiagate. Three other things
also follow:
- Trump’s powerlessness, even
within his own administration. What kind of Chief Executive
is reduced to tweeting what his subordinates ought to do – for
example, providing Congress with documents demanded from the Department of
Justice – versus ordering them to do it?
- Trump’s personnel. People wonder,
especially on foreign policy, why has Trump surrounded himself with a
swarm of neoconservatives and Bush-retread Republicans? Maybe he is one of
them. Or maybe anyone who dissented from the established warmongering line
would be putting his head through a noose.
- Flipping the “Russians did it” narrative:
Among the President’s defenders, on say Fox News, no less than
among his detractors, Russia is the enemy who (altogether now!)
“interfered in our elections” in order to “undermine our democracy.” Mitt
Romney was right! The only argument is over who was the intended
beneficiary of Muscovite mendacity, Trump or Hillary – that’s the variable.
The constant is that Putin is Hitler and only a traitor
would want to get along with him. All sides agree that the Christopher
Steele dossier is full of “Russian dirt”
– though there’s literally zero actual evidence of Kremlin involvement but
a lot pointing to Britain’s
MI6 and GCHQ.
The Russia!
Russia! Russia! hysteria is sometimes called a new McCarthyism, but that’s
unfair – to Tailgunner Joe. In his day, whatever his excesses, there
really were Stalinist agents at the State Department. This new panic
is nothing we’ve seen before, except maybe during the Salem witch frenzy of the
1690s.
Which brings
us to Maria Butina, a Russian grad student and Second Amendment advocate jailed
(and refused bail) on thin allegations of unregistered lobbying. As Phil
Giraldi observes: “If you are a Russian and you are caught talking to anyone in
any way influential, there is potentially hell to pay because the FBI will be
watching you. You are automatically assumed to be part of a conspiracy. Once
‘evidence’ is collected, you will be indicted and sent to prison, mostly to
send a message to Moscow. It is the ultimate irony that how the old Soviet
Union’s judiciary used to function is now becoming standing operating procedure
in the United States.” Butina has been portrayed as some kind
of honey
pot femme
fatale, a cross between Anna Chapman and Natasha from “The
Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle,” using her Slavic charms to bewitch the
naïve ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ crowd at the
National Rifle Association. Among Butina’s nefarious activities: networking
at the National Prayer Breakfast. If they arrested everyone with foreign
government connections schmoozing at the Prayer Breakfast, they’d have to shut
the thing down. Honestly, I doubt even the investigators believe
Butina is guilty of anything, and if she were any other nationality but Russian
she wouldn’t be facing years in jail. [ATTENTION: A
legal defense fund for Butina has now been formed!]
Which brings
us to the biggest threat to what’s left of our liberties as Americans. (No, not
the yanking of the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan.) As
is well known, we are facing an unprecedented, coordinated campaign of
deplatforming, shadowbanning, flitering, and other foul means of putting
dissenting voices into a digital GULag. While the glove belongs to tech giants
and their executives, the hand inside is the government’s. Using
Russian meddling as a pretext, companies that do billions of dollars of
business with the federal government are only too happy to police the web of “suspected
Russian-linked accounts.” And since, as
Hillary says, Putin is the leader of the worldwide “authoritarian,
white-supremacist, and xenophobic movement” who is “emboldening right-wing
nationalists, separatists, racists, and even neo-Nazis,” anything and anybody
that fails Virginia
Senator Mark Warner’s or Mark
Zuckerberg’s sniff test is now fair game. We are told that to sow discord
and chaos Russian troll farms and social media ads
target “divisive” issues related to race, Black Lives Matter, and Ferguson, absent which we’d all be
holding hands singing Kumbaya. Connecting
Putin and Russia with racism feeds into a cockamamie phantasmagoria of Crimethink concepts that
increasingly are considered outside the protection of what was once quaintly
known as free speech: hate
speech, fake news, conspiracy theories, white nationalism, white
supremacy, white privilege, patriarchy,
“cisgenderism,” and many more. The idea of “I
disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say
it” is out the window. Instead we have: anyone to the right of me
gets what he deserves.
While we hear
a lot about the “input” end – violation of free speech rights, a deadly, valid
concern – even more worrisome is the “output”: limiting what Americans can see
and hear that differs from the official media line, itself largely a bulletin
board for government sources. Unsurprisingly, that line is unfailingly for war
and intervention. As Patrick
Armstrong puts it, maybe the censors could just buy some old Soviet jamming
equipment.
It is hard to
escape the notion that we are approaching the edge of some profound historical
moment that will have far-reaching, literally life and death consequences, both
domestically and internationally. In the period preceding World War I how many
Europeans suspected that their lives would soon be forever changed – and, for
millions of them, ended? Who in the years, say, 1910 to 1913, could have
imagined that the decades of peace, progress, and civilization in which they
had grown up, and which seemingly would continue indefinitely, instead would
soon descend into a horror of industrial-scale slaughter, revolution, and
brutal ideologies?
Whether opposition to the gathering darkness can
be effective is uncertain. But what is not uncertain is our duty to oppose it,
even at the risk of committing three felonies a day. “Fellow Thought criminals – unite!”
[A version
of the foregoing was delivered to the Ron
Paul Institute Media & War 2018 Conferenceon August 18, 2018.]
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/18/have-you-committed-your-three-felonies-today.html
