POLICE STATE: All Vehicles Will Require KILL SWITCH So Government, Police, Can DISABLE YOUR CAR

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Don’t buy them. Buy an old, used American classic. They’re prettier and more fun anyway. Start preparing for what’s coming.

BIG BROTHER WILL WATCH YOU DRIVE: Disgusting Infrastructure Bill Installs KILL SWITCHES in All New Vehicles, Turns America into a POLICE STATE

By Cullen Linebarger, TGP, January 2, 2023:

Many people view cruising alone down the open road as the ultimate form of freedom. We regret to inform you that liberty will completely evaporate soon unless Congress acts.

The website Motorious reported on Friday that former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr has been sounding the alarm on a terrifying item buried within the Biden-McConnell “infrastructure” legislation, which passed in August 2021. According to Barr, the government will now have the power to shut off your vehicle if they determine you are partaking in any “illegal” activity.

Does anyone really believe the Biden Regime will not abuse this newly obtained power? Of course, they will! Particularly if such power can effectively target those opposed to the Regime’s agenda.

Better not be driving a gas-guzzling vehicle. The Regime might think you are a conservative and leave you stranded in the middle of a highway.

TRENDING: January 6 Book Released: FIRSTHAND TESTIMONY of Harrowing Tragedy from the J-6ers Living It! “The American Gulag Chronicles: Letters from Prison”- Please Purchase a Copy to Support Political Prisoners of Biden Regime!

Yet another reason to remove Biden as soon as possible. Here are the full details from Motorious:

According to an article written by former U.S. Representative Bob Barr, hidden away in the recently passed infrastructure bill, the very one I warned before would negatively impact drivers across the country if it were to pass, is a measure to install vehicle kill switches into every new car, truck, and SUV sold in this country. The regulation likely won’t be enforced for five years, so maybe there’s time to do something about this.

As we’ve seen both in this country and others recently, what constitutes “law-abiding” can change drastically overnight. For example, in September a car was pulled over in New Zealand and the occupants arrested when police discovered the trunk was full of Kentucky Fried Chicken meals.

They were smuggling the fast food to customers in locked-down Auckland, against quarantine measures. Yet not too long before, delivering restaurant orders to people was considered a reputable, legal activity.

It gets even better: Barr points out that the bill, which has been signed into law by President Biden, states that the kill switch, which is referred to as a safety device, must “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired.”

In other words, Big Brother will constantly be monitoring how you drive. If you do something the system has been programmed to recognize as driver impairment, your car could just shut off, which could be incredibly dangerous.

There is the possibility the kill switch program might measure your driving as impaired, then when you try to start the car up again the engine won’t fire up. That would potentially leave you stranded.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Kick Woke Criminal Justice Reforms to the Curb

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The Illinois Supreme Court halted the state’s new law eliminating cash bail pending further litigation.  Good.  Maybe sanity will prevail in the end.  Here’s what no-cash bail laws do:  A New York man was arrested for beating his wife.  He was released on no bail.  Less than 24 hours later, he shot her dead in front of her three children.  The no-bail situation in New York City has gotten so bad, Mayor Eric Adams now calls it ‘catch and release’ and said, “We have to stop passing laws that protect the guilty.”

Eric Adams might finally be telling the truth, but other Democrats who brought you insane ideas like no-bail are now trying to cover up the consequences of their insanity.  In Chicago, the mayor – who condones riots – wants to switch from police scanners to encrypted radio frequencies.  This will prevent journalists from reporting breaking crime stories and the public from learning about threats to their safety.  In Colorado, a Democrat senator’s wife is urging lawmakers to defund the police the sneaky way by reallocating funds to social services.  In case you don’t know, several cities got mugged by the reality of what happens when you defund the police and moved to re-fund their police departments.  But not in Seattle, which has found another sneaky way to defund the police.  The tolerance for riots and disparagement of police professionals caused a number of vacant positions in the police department and the city council voted last month to eliminate 80 of them.

But try as they might, the stupid Democrats can’t cover up the fact that large cities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles are now more dangerous than war zones like Iraq or Afghanistan for young males.  The most dangerous city is actually St. Louis where the progressive prosecutor won’t accept arrests by 300 officers and the mayor won’t authorize pay increases for officers, causing the police department to operate at less than half strength.  Staffing shortages and progressive prosecutors are being blamed for the rise in violent crime in many cities across the country last year.

And Democrats can’t cover up the fact that Target lost $400 million last year to organized retail theft.  Overall, retail theft is up more than 26 percent and is closing in on $100 billion a year.  Houston – and elsewhere – we got a problem.  Walmart is warning it will have to raise prices and close stores, if this keeps up.  The CEO specifically blamed progressive prosecutors and their soft-on-crime policies.  The violence is so bad in North Philly, a gas station owner hired armed security.  Police don’t respond and nobody feels safe, he said.  A restaurant in D.C. is closing down because employees are being attacked and their cars are being broken into.  The insane Democrats who run the city voted late last year to reduce penalties for illegal gun possession, carjacking, robbery, and other crimes.

Another business closed, this one in Portland, another Democrat city that loves riots.  The owner cited “unrelenting criminal behavior” and “escalating safety issues” for employees. “We have no protection, or recourse, against the criminal behavior that goes unpunished,” an open letter posted on the front door said.  Here’s the interesting part:  You hear these progressive prosecutors and other apologists for high crime say, ‘don’t worry about it, insurance will cover any losses.’  Not true.  The owner went on to write: “Do not be fooled into thinking that insurance companies cover losses. We have sustained 15 break-ins … we have not received any financial reimbursement since the 3rd.”

Think about all this the next time the Democrats are flashing you a big smile and asking you to keep them in power.  Better yet, take action now.  The city council in Roanoke recently asked state lawmakers to undo the Democrats’ woke criminal justice reforms and bring back no-knock warrants, traffic stops for broken tail lights and other minor infractions, and holding suspects without bond for violent offenses.  Voters in Democrat-controlled Kansas City, Missouri voted up a constitutional amendment requiring the city to spend more on police.

This is not a situation where reforms swing between competing values on a pendulum.  The Democrats threw the pendulum out the window with their woke criminal justice reforms.  But this is still America and citizens like you can take action so they can’t turn your life into a war zone.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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Remembering When Gun Control Was at Least Remotely Rational

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A curious mutation in gun control activism occurred during the last few decades, whence began a fixation on something dubbed the “assault rifle.”

Never mind that an assault rifle, insofar as the designation was ever at all valid, had always referenced a weapon with a “select fire” feature allowing three types of operation: semi-automatic, fully-automatic or in three-shot bursts. This doesn’t, of course, describe the class of rifles (e.g., AR-15-style) now targeted, whose operation is semi-automatic only (one bullet released per trigger pull), just like 50 percent of all new guns sold. But whatever you call them, here are two facts:

The obsession with banning them is much, much newer than they are.

They’re merely part of a weapons class (rifles) used in fewer killings than are “personal weapons” — hands, fists and feet. That’s according to the FBI, mind you.

In contrast, handguns are used in 62 percent of murders committed with firearms. There was a time when this guided gun-control activists’ thinking, too.

Back in the ’80s and into the ’90s, our rancorous firearms debates centered around banning handguns. I disagreed with such a course, but at least the gun-control set’s arguments contained a smidgen of logic.

These weapons are used to commit a robust plurality of our nation’s murders, they said.

They’re concealable and thus are criminals’ firearm of choice, they said. So if anyone believed in gun control as remedy, the focus on handguns at least made sense: Banning firearms would reduce crime, the thesis went, so it was rational to focus on the guns most used, by far, in crimes. It was today’s SJW’s grandfather’s gun control.

But those days now almost seem quaint. Emotion, which always figured prominently in gun-control appeals, has now completely taken over. No longer is there focus on handguns, not even a peep. Instead, it’s all Assault Weapons™ all the time. A couple of reasons for this leap to mind:

  • High-profile mass shootings, which became a lamentably regular phenomenon starting in the ’90s, are often committed with semi-automatic sporting rifles such as the AR-15 (even though a semi-automatic shotgun would be far more effective in such a scenario; i.e., against soft targets at close range).
  • They’re low-hanging fruit — Gun grabbers’ previous failures perhaps taught them that targeting handguns is currently in vain; pistols are the most commonly owned type of firearm, after all. So they focus on AR-15-type weapons.

This can be effective because

  • laymen often find them scary, as they may look like sub-machine guns they see in movies. And as anti-Second Amendment activist Josh Sugarmann demagogically put it in 1989, “Assault weapons…are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully-automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons”;
  • AR-15-type rifles are possessed by only a minority of gun owners, and with gun owners being just 32 percent of the country, this translates into their being in relatively few Americans’ hands. And people are more amenable to banning a product when doing so won’t affect them directly; and
  • given how the weapons have been misrepresented, the argument “Why do you need such things, anyway?” can be persuasive.

As to the last point, one correct response is that if our freedoms are based on “needs,” we’ll have relatively few freedoms left. We don’t need a fast sports car, ice cream, opera, palatial homes, swimming pools (drowning is the most common cause of death in children 1-4), to go hang-gliding (one of the more dangerous sports) or a multitude of other things. This is why a freedom must be considered innocent until proven guilty; the burden must lie not with the person who’d retain it, but with the one who’d remove it.

Lastly, those who’d criminalize firearms generally believe the weapons are at best superfluous because they trust the government to protect them. That’s certainly a quaint idea. Remember the L.A. riots in 1992, when the government, constrained by political correctness, refused to quell the unrest and allowed miscreants to run amuck? Hapless truck driver Reginald Denny was beaten to within an inch of his life, and some of the only people we saw who could defend themselves were Korean store owners wielding firearms. There also was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, during which many police abandoned their posts and armed gangs were roaming about. Then, of course, there were 2020’s 600-plus BLM/Antifa riots, which also were allowed to proceed unfettered and destroyed billions in property and claimed at least two dozen lives.

But, hey, we’re sure that the next time the boogeymen come, the gubmint will be there for you, right?

Well, you just rest secure in that knowledge, Mr. Liberal, and may you, if worse comes to worst, rest in peace. I’ll just rest with a piece, thank you.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on MeWe, Gettr or Parler, or log on to SelwynDuke.com

©Selwyn Duke. All rights reserved.

ELECTION INTEGRITY: New York City Removes 441,083 Ineligible Names from Voter Rolls Thanks to Judicial Watch!

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New York City Removes 441,083 Ineligible Names from Voter Rolls Thanks to Judicial Watch!

We just settled a federal election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed 441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take reasonable steps to clean its voter registration lists in the future.

We filed the lawsuit in July after the city failed to clean voter rolls for years. The lawsuit, filed under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), pointed out that New York City removed only 22 names under federal law over six years (Judicial Watch v Valentine et al. (No.1:22-cv-03952)).

Our suit detailed how New York City’s “own recent data concedes that there were only 22 total” removals under this provision “during a six-year period, in a city of over 5.5 million voters. These are ludicrously small numbers of removals given the sizable populations of these counties.”

Moreover, the “almost complete failure of Kings, Queens, New York, Bronx, and Richmond Counties, over a period of at least six years, to remove voters” under a key provision of federal law “means that there are untold numbers of New York City registrations for voters who are ineligible to vote at their listed address because they have changed residence or are otherwise ineligible to vote.”

The settlement details how the city responded to our notice about its voting roll deficiencies with a massive clean-up:

[The Board of Elections] notified Judicial Watch that, in February 2022, they removed, pursuant to Section 8(d)(1)(B) of the NVRA, 82,802 registrations in Bronx County, 128,093 in Kings County, 145,891 in New York County, 66,010 in Queens County, and 18,287 in Richmond County, for a total of 441,083 registrations.

[The Board of Elections] notified Judicial Watch that going forward they intend to cancel registrations pursuant to Section 8(d)(1)(B) in each odd-numbered year in the months following a federal election.

Specifically, the city also agrees to track in detail and report its voter roll maintenance efforts through 2025:

For both 2023 and 2025 … the [Board of Elections] will notify Judicial Watch … on or before March 31, by means of separate excel spreadsheets for Bronx County, Kings County, New York County, Queens County, and Richmond County, of the number of removals, including removals pursuant to … the NVRA, made during the previous two years.

The NVRA requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove” from the rolls “the names of ineligible voters” who have died or changed residence. Among other things, the law requires registrations to be cancelled when voters fail to respond to address confirmation notices and then fail to vote in the next two general federal elections. In 2018, the Supreme Court confirmed that such removals are mandatory (Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Inst. (138 S. Ct. 1833, 1841-42 (2018)).

This historic settlement is a major victory for New York voters who will benefit from cleaner voter rolls and more honest elections. We are pleased that New York City officials quickly acted to remove 441,000 outdated registrations from the rolls. We look forward to working together under this federal lawsuit settlement to ensure New York City maintains cleaner rolls for future elections.

We are a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of our work, we assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other achievements.

California settled an NVRA lawsuit with us and began the process of removing up to 1.6 million inactive names from Los Angeles County’s voter rolls. Kentucky also began a cleanup of hundreds of thousands of old registrations last year after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.

In February 2022, we settled a voter roll clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North Carolina removed over 430,000 ineligible names from the voter rolls.

In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of our challenge to Maryland’s Democratic legislature’s “extreme” congressional redistricting gerrymander.

In May 2022, we sued Illinois on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two other registered Illinois voters to prevent state election officials from extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law.

Robert Popper, Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads our election law program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.

Happy New Year!

As we welcome the new year, we recall a few of our successes in 2022:

We made it more likely that voters in North Carolina will have cleaner elections, and we are making headway for voters in Illinois by challenging its election law permitting mail-in ballots to be received as long as two weeks after Election Day.

We scored a win against two unconstitutional California quota mandates for sex, race, ethnicity, and LGBT status requirements for corporate boards.

We continue to uncover unsettling information regarding COVID-19, including the Biden administration’s extensive media plan for a propaganda campaign to push the vaccine.

I anticipate that Judicial Watch will carry its largest and most important caseload in our 29-year history into 2023 and engage our full arsenal of research, investigations and litigation into critically important public policy fronts. For example, uncovering critical race theory in our public institutions:

We successfully settled a civil rights lawsuit that we filed on behalf of a Massachusetts teacher who lost his position as head football coach after raising concerns about the promotion of critical race theory and Black Lives Matter propaganda in his daughter’s seventh-grade history class.

We uncovered critical race theory instructional materials from the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, including a PowerPoint slide with a graphic titled “MODERN-DAY SLAVERY IN THE USA.” We are pursuing similar lawsuits against the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy to see if they are teaching similar racist, anti-American propaganda.

We’re certainly eager to learn more about Hunter Biden and apparent efforts by the administration to block investigations.

After the Allied victory over Hitler in 1945, but before the victory over Japan, Winston Churchill found himself in a similar situation of looking both back and forward. He declared: “We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, butlet us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead.”

Dark clouds hang over our country, but they only motivate us. As Churchill also observed, “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.”

We are grateful that you are with us as we enter 2023. All of us wish you and yours a Happy New Year!

I hope you’ll make a special New Year’s contribution in support of our essential work ahead.

Until next week …

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

HHS Records Reveal Biden Admin Flights Stopping in Multiple Cities to Drop Unaccompanied Alien Children–Plane Originating in San Diego Stopped in Three Cities

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Washington, D.C. – Judicial Watch announced today that it received 16 pages of records from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) detailing the nighttime transportation of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) by air from Texas to Tennessee, as well as two other flights making multiple stops across the country. 

The Administration for Children and Families, a division of HHS, produced the records in response to an October 2022 lawsuit filed after HHS failed to respond to a May 20, 2021, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:22-cv-03044)), asking for:

· All documents related to the preparation and logistics involved in the transportation of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) to and from Chattanooga’s Wilson Air Center on May 14, 2021.

· All ACF officials’ internal email communications related to the transportation of UACs to and from Chattanooga’s Wilson Air Center on May 14, 2021.

The records include a May 15 email from a person whose name is redacted to an unnamed person at MVM Inc’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) Transport DFW (Dallas Fort Worth) Command Center detailing charter flights.

One flight travelling from SAN-OKC-CHA-EWR [San Diego, Oklahoma City, Chattanooga, Newark airports] via “Swift Air,” which was operating a Boeing 737 with “148 seats” [likely the number of passengers]. It indicates that there would be two buses at the San Diego Convention Center, two buses in Oklahoma City, two buses in Chattanooga, and two buses at Newark.

A second flight, from MFE-ELP-EWR [McAllen, El Paso, Newark] also via “Swift Air,” and a 737, with 150 seats, notes: “Pecos [TX] will be bused to ELP [El Paso] to catch charter flight. 1 bus will report 0800. 2 buses to report at 0800 at Delphi EIS [Delphi Emergency Intake Site]

The records also include a May 13, 2021, email thread from a redacted person at MVM Inc. to RF1Badging@rf1.us [likely Response Force 1] and others regarding an Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) transport of minors from Kay Baily Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas on Friday, May 14, 2021, before dawn, at 3 a.m.

RF1 Badging then replies, “Please be advised that the following UCs [Unaccompanied Children] … does not match in our system.” He then proceeds to list the details of nine children. 

Also in this thread is an email from an individual at Culmen International stating that one of the minors is “not cleared to travel.” 

The records include a list for a charter of 36 children from Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador. A handwritten note on the spreadsheet says: “Dallas to Tennessee Air Charter Flight 5/14/2021.” The record notes that the children are to be transported to these shelters: La Casa de Sidney, Lincoln Hall Boys’ Haven, Children’s Home of Kingston, Children’s Village Shelter, and Cayuga Center TFC. It indicates three of the minors are “reunifications.”

(Chattanooga’s unaccompanied migrant minor housing facility, La Casa de Sydney, was closed in 2021 after reports of runaways and sexual battery.)

An undated “Transfer of Custody” form indicates the transfer of six Guatemalan and Honduran children from “KBH” [likely Kay Baily Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas] to La Casa de Sidney. 

“These shocking documents forced out by a Judicial Watch lawsuit show the Biden administration effectively trafficking unaccompanied alien children, dropping them off in city after city like items for delivery,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The Biden open borders crisis is resulting in the most massive child and human trafficking operation ever.”

In a May 26, 2021, letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Tennessee Senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, along with Tennessee Congressman Chuck Fleischmann, detailed their concerns regarding unaccompanied minors:

We write to seek information on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) management of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) in federal custody and the facilities used to house them. We are particularly concerned about recent reports regarding the use of Chattanooga, Tennessee, as a central location for resettling UACs in the United States.

There are media reports that, within the last week, at least four planes carrying UACs landed at Wilson Air Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, before swiftly boarding the children onto buses and transporting them to multiple cities across the southeastern United States for apparent resettlement, with zero transparency regarding what was happening. For months, reports have detailed how thousands of children are being housed in neglectful conditions at mass shelters operated by HHS under a veil of secrecy. We are deeply troubled by the lack of transparency and accountability regarding the conditions that HHS is subjecting these children to.

In September 2021, Judicial Watch revealed HHS documents that list 33 separate incidents of alleged sexual abuse in a one-month time period tied to unaccompanied alien children shelters.

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

ICE Admits It Has ‘No Records’ For Hundreds Of Thousands Of Illegal Immigrants Released With Electronic Monitors

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  • U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) that it has “no records” of 377,980 illegal immigrants enrolled in its “Alternatives to Detention” program.
  • TRAC sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for data on the program, which used to electronically monitor illegal immigrants into the country.
  • “ICE’s response that they could no longer find records on immigrants in Alternatives to Detention (ATD) that they had previously released came as a shock, particularly after they informed us recently that they had been misleading the public for several months by releasing extremely inaccurate ATD data. The agency really needs to come clean. The American public deserves to have accurate data about the ATD program,” TRAC assistant Professor Austin Kocher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted it has “no records” of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants released into the country with electronic tracking devices, the agency said in a Dec. 22 letter to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

ICE informed TRAC that it had “no records” of the 377,980 individuals monitored by the agency’s “Alternatives to Detention” (ATD) program used to electronically track illegal immigrants released into the country. TRAC had asked for data via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on those in ATD custody from the start of fiscal year 2019 to August 2022. (RELATED: ‘Didn’t Have To Happen’: This Wyoming Sheriff Wants An Illegal Alien Who Raped An 8-Year-Old Imprisoned, Not Deported)

“ICE’s response that they could no longer find records on immigrants in Alternatives to Detention (ATD) that they had previously released came as a shock, particularly after they informed us recently that they had been misleading the public for several months by releasing extremely inaccurate ATD data. The agency really needs to come clean. The American public deserves to have accurate data about the ATD program,” TRAC assistant Professor Austin Kocher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

ICE started the ATD program in 2004 to monitor illegal migrants released into the country using ankle monitors, GPS tracking and cellphones. With limited detention space, ICE relies on the program to hold those awaiting the years-long backlogs in immigration courts.

The agency has previously provided TRAC with data on individuals enrolled in ATD, disclosing which technology was used, dates of entry into the program among other key details.

TRAC’s latest issue with ICE isn’t the first time the data on the ATD program has faced scrutiny.

The DCNF recently reported on errors and miscalculations in the ATD data on illegal immigrants not tracked with any technology and others tracked using GPS monitoring. At the time, ICE had privately disclosed different data to participants of a private event that showed an over 18,000% discrepancy in public data on those not tracked with any technology and another roughly 600% difference in publicly disclosed GPS tracking data.

ICE later apologized for the issue and updated the data.

“Upon further inspection of what participants were provided against what was publicly available online, it became clear there was a data miscalculation. Teams worked quickly to address and reconcile the issue, now updated on ICE.gov. We regret ICE provided erroneous ATD enrollment data and worked to resolve the miscalculation going forward,” an ICE spokesperson told the DCNF at the time.

TRAC is concerned over ICE’s consistent errors.

“When Congress ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to publish data on immigrant detention, perhaps it should have been clearer that it expected ICE to produce accurate data—not inconsistent, error-ridden, and misleading data that the agency currently provides to the public on a regular basis. These sloppy, uncorrected errors—more of the norm rather than the exception—demand immediate attention from both the public and from Congress,” TRAC wrote on Sept. 20 after ICE incorrectly released data from May 2021 instead of September 2022.

ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

JENNIE TAER

Investigative reporter.

RELATED VIDEO: Border Patrol Union VP: No One Is Helping Us

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

The EPA’s Latest Regulation Could Devastate The Trucking Industry

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  • The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule Tuesday that will impose stricter emissions standards on new heavy-duty vehicles, a regulation that will significantly raise operating costs for truckers, experts and industry representatives told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
  •  “The costs associated with this are also a concern because these are costs that not only the industry will bear … prices will go up for everybody,” Texas Trucking Association President John Esparza told the DCNF.
  • “It’s an overreach that is indicative of this administration’s tendency to set aside balance to achieve the goals of activists that they are politically aligned with,” Mandy Gunasekara, a senior policy analyst for the Independent Women’s Forum and former EPA Chief of Staff during the Trump administration, told the DCNF.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule Tuesday that will impose stricter nitrogen dioxide emissions standards on new heavy-duty trucks, a move that will substantially hike operating costs for truckers, experts and industry representatives told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The EPA’s rule, which is more than 80% stricter than the previous regulation, will require large trucks, delivery vans and buses manufactured after 2027 to cut nitrogen dioxide emissions by nearly 50% by 2045, according to an agency press release. The agency’s rule is intended to push truckers to phase out diesel-powered vehicles and use electric vehicles (EV) instead; however, the compliance costs associated with such rules could suffocate an industry that is not ready to transition to EVs, experts told the DCNF.

“It’s an overreach that is indicative of this administration’s tendency to set aside balance to achieve the goals of activists that they are politically aligned with,” Mandy Gunasekara, a senior policy analyst for the Independent Women’s Forum and former EPA Chief of Staff during the Trump administration, told the DCNF. “It’s going to squeeze out the mid-sized and smaller trucking companies because they’re not going to be able to afford to purchase the new, extremely expensive equipment required to continue to do what they do.”

The new rules are intended to phase out older trucks that emit more nitrogen dioxide and will push drivers to purchase electric trucks or newer models of diesel trucks that do not produce as much nitrogen dioxide when they burn fuel, according to the EPA.

“If small business truckers can’t afford the new, compliant trucks, they’re going to stay with older, less efficient trucks or leave the industry entirely,” Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association President Todd Spencer told trade publication Freight Waves. “Once again, EPA has largely ignored the warnings and concerns raised by truckers in this latest rule.”

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said that the rule would protect “historically overburdened communities,” that are disproportionately affected by trucking emissions as truck freight routes are often located near “vulnerable populations,” according to the press release. Nitrogen dioxide gas can exacerbate respiratory diseases like asthma and form acid rain in the atmosphere which can damage lakes and forests, according to the EPA.

“The EPA is happy to go easy on big trucking since they support regulations that will harm their smaller competitors far more,” Steve Milloy, Energy and Environmental Legal Institute senior legal fellow and former Trump administration EPA transition team member, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Regan announced the new rule in front of an electric garbage truck produced by Mack Trucks and following his remarks, Mack spokesman John Mies stated that his company supports the administration’s zero emissions targets for trucks and is working to cut “dangerous” emissions produced by diesel trucks, according to CNN.

“Companies have taken the initiative to electrify a certain percentage of their fleet by a certain year and have made plans to build the necessary infrastructure, but they are then told that there isn’t enough power to achieve what they’re seeking,” Texas Trucking Association President John Esparza told the DCNF. “The costs associated with this are also a concern because these are costs that not only the industry will bear … prices will go up for everybody.”

The EPA’s final rule is the first step in its “Clean Trucks Plan” which seeks to heavily regulate trucks’ emissions to push drivers to adopt electric trucks.

Gunesakara echoed Esparza’s comments and said that such targets were a “technological fantasy” that could cost truckers their jobs due to the high price of electric trucks. Gunesakara added that the EPA’s rules would force truck drivers to drive older, more polluting and less efficient vehicles for longer as diesel trucks will be rapidly phased out long before EVs can become a more viable alternative.

The EPA touted its new rule and said that it will result in up to 2,900 fewer premature deaths, 18,000 fewer cases of childhood asthma and 6,700 fewer hospital admissions as well as an overall annual net economic benefit of $29 billion due to fewer missed work days. The agency’s trucking rules are less strict than California’s regulations as heavy vehicles in the state must cut nitrogen oxide emissions by 75% starting in 2024, and 90% starting in 2027, according to a California Air Resource Board rule.

The EPA did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

JACK MCEVOY

Energy & environment reporter.

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Speculative climate chaos v. indisputable fossil fuel benefits

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

13 U.S. States Warn that Giant Climate Activists Funds Are Buying Up Public Utilities

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We are besieged on all sides

Paraphrasing Ayn Rand, climate as a social principle . . . condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men’s return to “nature,” to the state of grunting sub animals digging the soil with their bare hands.

“The dinosaur and its fellow-creatures vanished from this earth long before there were any industrialists or any men . . . . But this did not end life on earth. Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of “equilibrium” that guarantees the survival of any particular species—least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.”

13 US States warn that giant climate activists funds are buying up public utilities

BY: Joanne Nova, CFact,  |December 23rd, 2022|Climate, Economy, Energy|0 Comments

Move over divestment and boycott — and move in activist shareholders wielding other people’s money. After naive shareholders sold out, they didn’t have much influence over a company. But if they bought enough shares instead, they could practically run the place.
Good people left their money unguarded in pension plans and it came to be used against them.

The three largest asset managers in the world are BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. They swept up the retirement money left unwatched in accounts Big-Government forced everyone to have. The Big Three now manage $20 trillion dollars combined. They also happen to want to end fossil fuel use and save the world — because they are nice people, right. So we face the dilemma — The citizens rejected NetZero, but the citizen’s money gives the power to men like Larry Fink, head of Blackrock, to harrass the boards of oil and energy companies in order to get NetZero through the back door.

To appreciate how influential these monster funds are, ponder that they are the largest shareholders in nine out of ten of the S&P 500 Index companies and lately, they have been buying up US power utilities.

These funds joined the climate activist clubs (like GFANZ), and made their political ambitions clear. Despite that screaming potential conflict-of-interest, the government agency that was meant to stop this sort thing (FERC) gave special approval instead. Apparently BlackRock and Vanguard were allowed to buy as much as 20% of some public utilities if they just promised to be “passive” investors who didn’t use their shares to influence management. Who needs fences, just ask the fox not to eat the chickens OK?

Imagine if someone managing a galactic-blob of money made decisions about your energy grid, and what your electricity will cost, and you got no say in it? Government by Oligarchs? They won’t care what your electricity bill is.

The US State governments are the best hope for the West. Last month 13 US State Attorney’s raised the alarm. Perhaps this was one of the reasons Vanguard dropped out of GFANZ?

This is how we win. But it’s just the start of this battle. This is one facet of the dark bubble driving the madness.
State AGs Sound the Alarm About BlackRock, Vanguard Buying Large Stakes in Utilities

Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman says he doesn’t want Larry Fink to ‘be my emperor’

The acquisition by investment managers BlackRock and Vanguard of ever-increasing shares in America’s public utility companies is setting off alarm bells from conservatives and progressives alike.

In November, 13 state attorneys general petitioned FERC to deny Vanguard’s request. Claiming that residents of their states could be harmed if utilities are compelled to stop using fossil fuels in favor of wind and solar power, the attorneys general argued that “Vanguard is not entitled to a blanket authorization to acquire substantial equity and voting power in utility companies.”

Read more.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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Governor Ron DeSantis Eliminates ESG Considerations from State Pension Investments

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Kari Lake Trial Bombshells: Data Expert Testifies ‘No Doubt’ She Would Have Won

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UPDATE: 

Everything the Corrupt Judge Had to Ignore to Kill Kari Lake’s Lawsuit

“We can conclude with a degree of mathematical certainty that this affected this chunk of voters. Is That enough to have changed the outcome? And I am offering the opinion that that range is enough to put the outcome in doubt.”

2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and her attorneys once again took the stand on Thursday as the trial moved forward proving  she was the rightful winner of the race.

Lawyers for Lake are focusing on problems with ballot printers at a majority of the polling places in Maricopa County, home to more than 60% of voters. The defective printers produced ballots that were too light to be read by the on-site tabulators at polling places. Lines backed up in some areas amid the chaos and confusion.

Expert in Kari Lake election suit: ‘No doubt’ she would have won without Maricopa Election Day chaos

The trial is set to conclude Thursday.

By Natalia Mittelstadt, Just The News, December 22, 2022:

Election modeling expert Richard Baris said Thursday in the Kari Lake election lawsuit that his projections showed as many as 40,000 voters were disenfranchised over Election Day chaos in Arizona’s Maricopa County, causing him to “have no doubt” that she would’ve won the gubernatorial election had there been no problems at polling centers.

Baris is the final witness for Lake in the scheduled two-day trial for her election lawsuit.

Baris testified that 25,000 to 40,000 voters were disenfranchised in the county as a result of roughly one in five vote centers suffering problems with ballot tabulator machines in the first hours of Election Day

“We’ve got about 20% of the locations out there where there’s an issue with the tabulator,” Maricopa Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican, said on election night. Describing the problem, he said that after some voters filled out their ballot, the machine wouldn’t accept it. Since then, the county has admitted that 70 out of the 223 vote centers experienced issues on Election Day.

Election officials, however, assured voters their ballots would still be counted as a result of redundancy protocols.

The vote margin between Lake and Hobbs is 17,117 votes.

Baris said the net gain Lake would’ve received in the votes that weren’t cast on Election Day would have made her the winner of the Arizona gubernatorial election.

Baris testified that his firm, Big Data Poll, typically finds the difference in the exit-poll participation rates between early voters and Election Day voters is about 5-8%. In Maricopa County last month, however, the difference was about 20%, further suggesting that would-be voters there stayed home upon learning about voting machine problems.

That has “never happened to me before,” he said.

Following Baris’ testimony, Lake’s lawyers rested their case, and legal counsel for the defendants called their first witness, Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mayer, who said he has been involved in polling for the last 30 years, testified that there was no data to support the idea that ballot tabulator issues on Election Day caused voters to be disenfranchised and affected the outcome of the election.

The professor discounted Baris’ polling data, noting issues with self-reporting rather than using systematic methods, and said that Baris’ conclusions about his own data weren’t supported by the data.

During direct examination by the defendants’ legal counsel, he addressed the declarations regarding long wait times at vote centers, saying that the estimates widely varied and people generally do not correctly guess wait times due to the frustration of waiting in line.

Under cross-examination by Lake’s legal counsel, Mayer said that he didn’t verify the accuracy of the wait times provided by Maricopa County.

Lake, the 2022 Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee, is suing her Democratic opponent, Governor-elect and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs; Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer; the county Board of Supervisors; and county Director of Elections Scott Jarrett.

Lake’s case alleges the “number of illegal votes cast in Arizona’s general election … far exceeds the 17,117 vote margin” between her and Hobbs.

The trial began Wednesday with the testimony of Richer, Jarrett, cybersecurity expert Clay Parikh, county temporary technician Bradley Benticort, and Republican National Committee attorney Mark Sonnenklar.

Following Baris’ testimony, the defendants’ legal team will call four witnesses to the stand, then each side will give closing arguments.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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Maricopa County Witness Is a Woke Professor Who Wasn’t in Maricopa County on Election Day and Who Based His Testimony on What the County Told Him

Shady Democrat Operative Ryan Macias Testifies In Kari Lake’s Election Trial – DAMNING Evidence Against Him Presented During Cross-Examination – WATCH LIVE

Katie Hobbs Witness Makes Case for Tossing Out Malfunctioning Tabulator Machines: “One of the Most Common Issues that Arises on Election Day Operations”

Shady Democrat Operative Ryan Macias Testifies In Kari Lake’s Election Trial – DAMNING Evidence Against Him Presented During Cross-Examination – WATCH LIVE

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Confusion’: Trump-Era Border Policy’s Uncertain Fate Is Only Worsening Illegal Immigration

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The number of illegal immigrant crossings is surging at the southern border as the fate of a major Trump-era immigration order known as Title 42 remains uncertain.

A federal judge recently ruled that the Biden administration must end the policy, which former President Donald Trump invoked in 2020 to expel certain illegal immigrants to prevent the spread of COVID-19, on Dec. 21 before Republican states asked the Supreme Court to intervene, which resulted with a temporary pause on the order. Areas like El Paso, Texas and Yuma, Arizona, have seen surges that have overwhelmed local resources surrounding the previous Dec. 21 deadline even as some illegal immigrants continue to face expulsion.

In Yuma, Arizona, Mayor Douglas Nicholls says a recent surge in illegal immigration will lead to the release of migrants onto the town’s streets. Yuma County Supervisor Jonathan Lines says the surge coincides with “confusion” over when Title 42 ends.

“There is so much confusion from the illegals coming across the border regarding Title 42 , numbers continue to climb as many believe they will be granted permission to stay. The President must address the open border and the consequences of illegals pouring into our communities overwhelming the Hospitals and NGOs. If DHS proceeds with street releases the burdens will be placed on the already strained resources of local cities. This is not sustainable,” Lines told the DCNF.

Federal border authorities in El Paso have moved roughly 10,000 illegal immigrants that crossed into the area recently, as many released from custody were sleeping on city sidewalks and on the floors of the local airport.

Migrant encounters at the southern border typically decrease at this time of year. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered over 45,000 migrants at the southern border in October 2019, over 71,000 in October 2020 and over 164,000 in October 2021.

CBP encountered a record of more than 230,000 migrants in October 2022.

As of publication, CBP hasn’t officially released encounter numbers for November 2022. However, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) says border agents arrested more than 209,000 illegal immigrants during that time period.

The encounters during that time period are up from more than 174,000 across CBP in November 2021, more than 72,000 in November 2020 and more than 42,000 in November 2019.

AUTHOR

JENNIE TAER

Investigative reporter.

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

Leaks From J6 Prisoner: They Are Being Ziptied, Sexually Assaulted In The Middle Of Night

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“The treatment I have endured since my arrest has shaken my faith in humanity…..”

This will sicken you, break your heart, and incite you to act – I pray.

J6 Political Hostage Jon Mellis Speaks Out – Jan 6 Detainees Have Been Sexually Assaulted and ‘Ziptied In the Middle Of The Night’ – Coming Up on Two Years of Isolation and Abuse

By Alicia Powe, GTP, December 1, 2022:

J6 political prisoner Jonathan Mellis warns he and other J6 defendants in the “Patriot Pod” of the DC Gulag are being tortured by “racist, hateful, and abusive correctional officers,” sexually assaulted and treated like animals for being Trump supporters.

Mellis described the abuse in a letter to The Gateway Pundit and is pleading for help from the American people.

“The treatment I have endured since my arrest has shaken my faith in humanity,” wrote the 34,-year-old who was apprehended nearly two years ago in a pre-dawn FBI raid while visiting his parents at their home.

“I was arrested on February 16, 2021, as if I were an Al Qaeda terrorist. I have not seen my family’s faces in almost 2 years. My father, Gennaro Mellis, died a few months after my arrest. I was denied bond back then and still today,” he continued “I hope you can forgive me for reaching out for assistance. I am struggling.”

The last time Mellis saw his father, he was being hauled away by FBI agents in a pre-dawn raid.

“My father was a decorated Vietnam War hero. He was a retired US Army Major, and also retired from the Navy. The last time I ever saw my father I was in handcuffs in front of his house surrounded by dozens of militarized FBI agents. My father was my best friend. My father knew my character and stood by me until his death on May 17, 2021,” he explained. “Unfortunately, my widowed mother is being forced by circumstance to sell the home our family grew up in. It looks like I will never get to see the inside of the home my father raised me in.”

Mellis has spent a year in solitary confinement and 35 days in “the hole,” a “worst version of solitary confinement with chains.”

“The DC Gulag is a special kind of hell,” wrote Mellis, who resided in Williamsburg, Virginia prior to his arrest. “We J6ers have been housed in our own unit together called the Patriot Pod. “

“There have been many instances where one or several of our brothers have been beaten, maced, or even sexually assaulted by our jailers. One of us was zip-tied in the middle of the night in his cell and severely beaten,” the letter states. “One of us was maced for not wearing his mask. One of us was sexually assaulted while he was strip-searched on his way back from his lawyer.

“For nearly a year of my incarceration, I have been subjected to solitary confinement. This means 23 hours or 22 hours every day in my cell. I got 1 or 2 hours a day outside of my cell to shower and make a phone call. I was taken out of this pod randomly one day and placed in the hole, which is a worse version of solitary confinement with chains, for 35 days with no due process or explanation.”

In Dec. 2021, a US Marshals Service conducted an inspection of the DC jail and Patriot Pod and found “systemic failures” including jail employees withholding food and water from inmates as punishment and turning off the water in their cells.

“Human waste and raw sewage overflowed in toilets and there was rampant drug use, according to the inspection,” NBC Washington reports.

According to the Marshal’s statement inspection determined the conditions of the main jail facility conditions “do not meet the minimum standards of confinement as prescribed by the Federal Performance-Based Detention Standards.” As a result, approximately 400 inmates in federal custody were transferred from the DC jail to federal prison.

“The DC Gulag is a nasty building unfit for human habitation,” Mellis wrote. “It is infested with black mold, rats, and toilets that do not flush. The drinking water from the sinks is frequently brown and stinks like rotten eggs. We are not given proper cleaning chemicals and this is how we live. We rely on ourselves to keep our spirits up because we do not have access to visitation or even video visits.”

Correctional officers retaliated against the J6 defendants for complaining about the filthy conditions after the failed inspection by spiking their food cleaning products, Mellis claims. 

“Our entire pod’s food has even been poisoned with cleaning chemicals after court rulings against this jail because of how we are treated or when our complaints resulted in the US Marshalls inspecting this jail,” he explained. “This jail failed the inspection resulting in hundreds of Federal inmates being transferred out of here. This jail lost a lot of money because of this. Simply put, this jail hurts us and hates us.”

On January 6, four people were killed by police officers including Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt.  The officer who killed Babbitt, Lt. Michael Byrd, was exonerated from criminal charges and provided special housing by the federal government.

[….]

Democrats and the anti-Trump entire corporate press demonize the men and women who protested the fraud-ridden 2020 presidential election as “insurrectionists” who arbitrated an attack comparable to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. The Department of Homeland Security warns Americans who claim  the election was fraudulent and the believe that Trump can be reinstated pose a national security threat.

But most of the J6 political prisoners, a majority of who are veterans, are “good men” and “just family men,” Mellis said in a phone call from jail.

Keep reading….

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Unsolved Riddle of Homelessness

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New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced he is instituting involuntary hospitalization for homeless people deemed to be mentally ill and in crisis.  It’s déjà vu all over again.  Emptying the mental hospitals is arguably what created the homeless problem in the first place.  The thinking at the time was that civil liberties are paramount – homeless people aren’t criminals and you can’t keep them locked up in psych wards.  The counter-argument is that people who are not in their right mind can’t fend for themselves and create social problems when left to their own devices on the streets.  Involuntary hospitalization is more humane than what is occurring now.  The mentally ill now make up about a third of the homeless population in the United States.

I’ve seen all kinds of solutions to homelessness tried over the last 40 years, but nobody has solved the riddle.  The ideas have ranged from the intriguing to the truly insane.  Washington, D.C. opened city homeless shelters with a capped number of beds back in the 1980s.  I asked a D.C. government official at the time if this was rationing and he dissembled.  Fast forward to today and you find big homeless encampments in D.C. downtown parks and across from Union Station, so the homeless shelter approach clearly didn’t solve the problem.  As for encampments elsewhere, some areas allow camping anywhere as a point of pride, while others confine encampments to designated areas.  The worst idea of this lot is to allow the homeless to camp in your front yard with impunity, as in Illinois after the first of the year, but homeowners fled Portland after it was allowed there.

Democrat-controlled San Francisco passed a new tax in 2018 to end homelessness for all time.  Spending on the homeless is up 400 percent but there are more homeless than ever in San Francisco and the conditions in which they live are deteriorating.  Rat-infested hotels – that’s the solution the Democrats came up with.  The police no longer respond to calls about stolen packages, break-ins, and other problems caused by the homeless.

Another idea is to provide free permanent housing for the homeless, but the result in Los Angeles was one-bedroom apartments costing $700,000 apiece and corruption.  Meanwhile, the number of homeless people on the street is up 41 percent.  The idea also doesn’t seem to be working in Washington, D.C. where the city is placing homeless people in upscale apartment buildings.  It only takes one homeless person to create chaos and ruin an entire building, I heard one landlord say.

Another idea is to connect the homeless to lots of social services, like drug treatment and job training.  But the most intriguing idea I’ve heard comes from philanthropists who created an entire village, I forget where, in which the homeless can find their dignity by having a role to play in a real community.

But none of these ideas address mental illness, which is one-third of the problem.  Critics are already pounding away at New York City’s new involuntary hospitalization policy, but the city defends it, saying it will connect mentally ill homeless people with the psychiatric treatment they need.  Some critics say the city doesn’t have enough crisis centers or other capacity to deliver the mental health services required.  But involuntary hospitalization is only one new policy taking effect.  The city is also going the permanent housing route by cracking down on landlords who refuse to take homeless people with government housing vouchers.

So there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet that will solve the problem in all cases.  I haven’t heard the idea expressed yet that all the approaches have some merit, that triage should occur and a custom solution built for each homeless individual.  I also haven’t heard anything about family and friends being brought into the process.  Government isn’t the answer to everything.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

The Three Traits of Tyranny

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According to John Locke and the American Founders

The American founders who drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence grounded their case for separating from Great Britain on a philosophy of government derived from the writings of John Locke: especially from Lockean notions of legitimate government vs. illegitimate government, i.e. tyranny.

In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke wrote:

“Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the common-wealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.”

Here, Locke defined “political power” as power within right, i.e., legitimate government.

For Locke, the opposite of legitimate government (“political power”) is “power beyond right,” which he called “tyranny.”

“…tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to. And this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private separate advantage. When the governor, however intitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule; and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion.”

In these two passages, we can see Locke’s criteria for distinguishing legitimate government from tyranny.

  1. Rule of Law vs. Rule of Man: Legitimate government involves “making laws” and “the execution of such laws.” Tyranny is “When the governor, however intitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule…” In modern terminology, this is the distinction between “the rule of law” and “the rule of man.”
  2. Public Good vs. Private Advantage: Legitimate government is “only for the public good.” Tyranny is the use of power “not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private separate advantage.”
  3. Rights Protection vs. Rights Non-Protection: And the whole purpose of government, according to Locke, is the protection of “rights”/“property,” by which he means rightful ownership of possessions as well as one’s own body. Thus, tyranny is when a ruler’s “commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion.”

According to the American Founders, in each of the above three regards, the British government was behaving tyrannically. Thus the Declaration of Independence and thus the Revolution.

Watch Michael Boldin of the Tenth Amendment Center discuss this article:

This article was originally published on Dan Sanchez’s Substack publication “Letters on Liberty.”

AUTHOR

Dan Sanchez

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in chief of FEE.org.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

DeSantis Denies ‘U-Turn’ On Revoking Disney’s Special Privileges

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A spokesman for Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis denied reports that Florida is walking back his plans to revoke Disney’s special tax district in Friday comments to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

DeSantis signed legislation eliminating Disney’s Reedy Creek Improvement District in April, ending special administrative and tax privileges the company had enjoyed since 1967, following a public spat between Disney and DeSantis over a bill banning classroom instruction on gender and sexuality for young children. Florida lawmakers were reportedly planning to walk back the elimination of Reedy Creek, due in part to concerns about the additional costs it could impose on the state, according to a Friday Financial Times report.

The Reedy Creek Improvement District allows Disney to operate its own government within Disney World in Florida, meaning it collects taxes to fund its own water, roads and other infrastructure.

“Florida lawmakers are working on plans to reverse a move that would strip Disney of its right to operate a private government around its theme parks,” the Financial Times report read. “State lawmakers are working on a compromise that would allow Disney to keep the arrangement largely in place with a few modifications.”

DeSantis’ team denied any plans to reverse course on its rebuke of Disney.

“Governor DeSantis does not make ‘U-turns,’” DeSantis press secretary Bryan Griffin told the DCNF. “The governor was right to champion removing the extraordinary benefit given to one company through the Reedy Creek Improvement District.”

“We will have an even playing field for businesses in Florida, and the state certainly owes no special favors to one company. Disney’s debts will not fall on the taxpayers of Florida. A plan is in the works and will be released soon,” he said.

The dispute between DeSantis and Disney began when then-Disney CEO Bob Chapek came out against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill following widespread pressure to oppose the legislation, which activists had characterized as anti-gay. The legislation bans classroom instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade.

Soon after DeSantis signed the bill eliminating the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Disney stepped away from politics and quietly removed itself from the fight with DeSantis in an apparent effort to preserve its special tax district.

Disney did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

AUTHOR

LAUREL DUGGAN

Social issues and culture reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: Disney CEO Pledges To Double Down On LGBT ‘Storytelling’ In Animated Kids’ Movies

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

If You Really Wanted to Destroy the United States…

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Save this column. It should be the script for every elected official who actually wants to save the Republic.

If You Really Wanted to Destroy the United States, Then . . .

It would be hard to imagine any planned agenda to destroy America that would have been as injurious as what we already suffered the last two years.

By Victor Davis Hanson. November 30, 2022

First, you would surrender our prior energy independence.

Reduce new gas and oil leases on federal lands to the lowest levels of any president in history. Cut back production at precisely the time the world is emerging from a two-year lockdown with pent-up consumer demand.

Make war on coal and nuclear power. Drain the strategic petroleum reserve to make the pain for consumers more bearable for midterm election advantage.

Cancel the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil and gas field. Block pipelines like the Keystone oil pipeline and the Constitution natural gas line.

Overregulate and demonize frackers and horizontal drillers. Ensure there is less investment for their exploration and production.

Make use of internal combustion engines or fossil fuel power generation prohibitively expensive. Achieve a green oil-dependency along the lines of contemporary Europe.

Second, print trillions of dollars in new currency as the lockdowns end, demand rises, and consumers are already saturated with COVID-19 subsidies. Keep interest rates low, well below the rate of inflation, as you print more money. Ensure that passbook holders earn no interest at the very time prices skyrocket to the highest per annum level in 40 years.

“Spread the wealth” by sending money to those who already have enough, while making it less valuable for those deemed to have too much. Ensure runaway high prices to wean the middle class off its consumerism and supposedly to inspire them to buy less junk they don’t need. Damn the rich in the open and in the abstract, court them in the concrete and secret of darkness.

Third, end America’s physical boundaries. Render it an amorphous people and anywhere space. End any vestigial difference between a citizen and resident. Up the current nearly 50 million who were not born in the United States —27 percent of California’s population—to 100 million and more by allowing 3 million illegal aliens to enter per year.

Fourth, destroy the public trust in its elections. Render Election Day irrelevant. Make proper auditing of 110 million mail-in/early ballots impossible. Normalize ballot harvesting and curing.

Urge leftist billionaires to infuse their riches to “absorb” the work of state registrars in key precincts to ensure the correct “turn-out.”

Blast as “election denialists,” “insurrectionists,” and “democracy destroyers” anyone who objects to these radical ballot changes, neither passed by the U.S. Congress nor by state legislators. Weaponize the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice.

Fifth, redefine crime as one rich man’s crime, another poor man’s necessity.

Let those who need “things” exercise their entitlement to them. Rewrite or ignore laws to exempt the oppressed who take, or do, what they want as atonement for past systemic racism and oppression.

Six, junk the ossified idea of a melting pot and multiracial society united by common American values and ideals. Instead, identify individuals by their superficial appearance. Seek to be a victim and monetize your claims against perceived victimizers. Call anyone a “racist” who resists.

Encourage each tribe, defined by common race, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation affinities, to band together to oppose the monolithic “white privilege” majority. Encourage social and tribal tensions. Racially discriminate to end discrimination.

Greenlight statue toppling, name changing, boycotting, cancel culturing, ostracizing, and Trotskyizing. Erase the past, control the present, and create a new American person for the future.

Seven, render the United States just one of many nations abroad. Abandon Afghanistan in shame. Leave behind thousands of loyal Afghan allies, billions of dollars in equipment, a billion-dollar embassy, and the largest air base in central Asia. Appease the theocracy to reenter the Iran nuclear deal.

Beg enemies like Venezuela, Russia, and Iran to pump more oil when it is politically expedient for us to have abundant supplies—oil that we have in abundance but won’t produce. Discourage friends like Guinea from producing more energy and cancel allies’ energy projects like the EastMed pipeline.

Trash but then beg Saudi Arabia to pump more oil right before the midterms for domestic political advantage.

Eight, neuter the First Amendment. Enlist Silicon Valley monopolies to silence unwanted free speech while using Big Tech’s mega profits to warp elections. Declare free expression “hate speech.” Criminalize contrarian social media.

Nine, demonize half the country as semi-fascists, un-Americans, insurrectionists, and even potential domestic terrorists. Try to change inconvenient ancient rules: seek to pack the court, end the filibuster, junk the Electoral College, and bring in two more states.

Twice impeach a president who tried to stand in your way. Try him when he is an emeritus president and private citizen. Raid his home. Seek to indict a future rival to the current president.

Ten, never mention the origins of the COVID virus. Never blame China for the release of SARS-CoV-2 virus. Exempt investigations of U.S. health officials who subsidized Chinese gain-of-function research. Ignore the Bill of Rights to mandate vaccinations, mask wearing, and quarantines.

We have done all of the above. It would be hard to imagine any planned agenda to destroy America that would have been as injurious as what we already suffered the last two years.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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