Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClear Politics,

Supercharging their efforts to gaslight America, Donald Trump’s enemies are denying the law of physics.

At least since Isaac Newton formulated his laws of motion, we’ve understood that every effect can be explained by its cause. This insight was a radical break from more primeval beliefs that things just happened or resulted from the will of often inscrutable deities and phantasmatic beasts.

Trump opponents reject this foundation of science and logic. Going beyond their grotesque comparisons of him to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, they now cast Trump as a mythical beast – like Golem, Leviathan, or Kraken – who wreaks whirlwinds of destruction without prodding.

Trump’s chief primary opponent, Nikki Haley, says that “chaos” accompanies him. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan argues that “impeachments, embarrassments, scandal, [and] 1/6” follow in his wake. Democrats and their stenographers at once-great news organizations say Trump’s description of his enemies as “vermin” upon whom he will seek “retribution” is proof that he plans to rule as a murderous dictator.

In their telling, all of this has come out of thin air – the uncaused cause and inevitable result of Trump’s movement across the landscape. Like the winds and thunderclaps of yore, he unleashes himself upon an innocent people. The tumult is solely a reflection of his evil nature. This is superficial to the point of being laughable, but it’s the story they’re telling.

Trump is not the cause of this uproar. The behavior they deem beyond the pale and disqualifying is largely the effect of the vicious and dishonest attacks they have leveled against him since he announced his candidacy in 2015.

Donald Trump is the greatest victim not felled by an assassin in the history of the presidency. No one has more of a right to express grievance than this man whose enemies have sought retribution against him for the sin of winning an election. He is not a cosmic force determined to impose his will, but a man under siege who largely lashes out in self-defense.

Trump’s enemies have memory-holed the ways they have caused the behavior they denounce: the unfounded abuse they hurl at him, the myriad ways they have corrupted our institutions to undermine him, the chaos they have unleashed because of their hatred of him. They want us to forget that they:

• Cast him as a Russian agent who colluded with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election.
• Branded him a racist by falsely claiming he praised white supremacists and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville.
• Portrayed him as a nincompoop by insisting that he had instructed Americans to inject bleach to fight COVID.
• Helped swing the 2020 election by enabling Joe Biden and 51 former high-ranking intelligence officials to dismiss the evidence of his son Hunter’s shady foreign business dealings as likely “Russian disinformation.”

The calumny did not stop when Trump left office. They call him a criminal because highly partisan prosecutors, some of whom ran on the promise to “get Trump,” have brought 91 felony indictments against him while other states are working to keep him off the ballot. They call him a kleptocrat because foreigners stayed at his family’s hotels while he was president.

None of these efforts – and there are plenty more examples – were grounded in reality; all were demonstrable falsehoods. Yet when Trump responded to their baseless depiction of him as a treasonous, racist thief, they cited it as proof that he is unfit for high office.

What does this say about them? That is the question that is almost never asked. Neither is the great what-if: What would a Trump presidency have been like if his enemies had not engaged in relentless personal attacks against him? Trump is no Reagan; he is not sunshine and hope but preternaturally combative and often insulting. Still, we don’t know what aspects of Trump’s character would have come to the fore absent the daily bludgeoning. They never gave him a chance. Would Trump and his supporters have been so aggrieved by his 2020 loss if the establishment hadn’t spent four years using every dirty trick in the book to deny him power – and spent the five months before the election justifying the political violence of the BLM-inspired riots?

He lost, but he also had plenty of reason to believe he was shafted.

Nothing – not even Trump – happens in a vacuum. The laws of cause and effect abide. This raises a conundrum for voters as we head toward November. Trump’s enemies will only ratchet up their attacks. Trump, rightfully angered by his mistreatment, seems likely to double down on his oft-intemperate responses (even though it is not in his, or the country’s best interest). He can’t seem to help himself. Who could?

I understand why many Americans recoil at the prosect of four more years of tumult. But they need to ask themselves: Who caused the problems? By defeating Trump, they will only be rewarding the real cause of the chaos.

J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

It’s helpful to think of a COVID experience as a never-ending house of horrors, with room after room of scandal and outrage, so much so that you never quite get through it. There simply are not enough researchers or column inches to cover it all.

In the past, any one of these outrages would be enough to call forth enormous public debate. Introduce them all at once—starting March 2020—and gradually unfold and codify them over a few years and many features slip through the cracks.

Consider, for example, the continued requirement that any legally immigrating person coming to the United States from another country and seeking residency is absolutely required to get the COVID-19 vaccine, a shot widely admitted not to protect against infection or spread and is associated with injury on a scale without pharmaceutical precedent.

And yet the U.S. government requires it.

The evidence is here from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Note the language: “to prevent the following diseases.”

That is completely untrue. You cannot make it true simply by claiming that it prevents something. It does nothing of the kind, despite its moniker of being a vaccine. All the others are indeed vaccines that generally prevent the disease because they are sterilizing shots. The COVID-19 shot is not. And yet there it is, riding the coattails of public-health valor from past ages.

It is generally not possible to avoid the requirement. You can appeal for a religious exemption, which involves several rounds of correspondence and documentation. They have variously been granted after much headache, bureaucracy, and expense. Very few will go to the trouble.

Meanwhile, the United States is currently experiencing a wave of immigration from asylum seekers which this country has never seen in raw numbers before. There is no requirement that these people coming across the Southern border and then shipped around the country face any such requirement of COVID vaccination. That only kicks in if you seek to immigrate the old-fashioned way, which is to say, by seeking legal permission.

Based on reports from Archive.org, it appears that the addition of the COVID-19 shot was in the first week of October 2021. It was not there and then it was, by pure bureaucratic edict. Edit file, submit, done.

This was long after it was well known that the vaccine did not stop infection or transmission, and long after the CDC was aware of the health risks of the vaccine. It was also a time when vaccine uptake was dramatically dropping from the levels of the initial enthusiasm from earlier that year.

By this time, vast numbers had grown skeptical and were willing to take their chances. The market for shots was headed south. It appears that immigrant populations—who had not been required to get it for the first ten months of 2021—were roped into the market as mandates began to invade private workplaces and cities. In other words, this was a forced recruitment of immigrant populations to boost the demand for the shots.

The Biden administration attempted to impose such mandates on the whole of the private sector. The Supreme Court blocked that measure in January 2022. So most were repealed. But the one for legal immigration stayed, and has not been challenged in court.

There is a darker way to understand this policy move too. It serves as a filtering mechanism. Many people around the world were fleeing shot mandates from their home countries. Adding this one to the list of required injections was a way to signal to the world: the United States would not provide any sanctuary to shot refuseniks, so don’t bother even trying.

It also operates as a culling mechanism against anti-lockdown and anti-mandate opinions. It assured that the United States would not be allowing people to work here who think for themselves, look at evidence, or otherwise refuse to bow to the pharma agenda.

The CDC further elaborates on the regulation: it must be within 12 months and it does pertain to children too. There is a narrow range of exemption for repeated shots but that requires additional paperwork.

There is simply no basis for this mandate at all. The vaccine is not efficacious in the normal sense of that term. Nor is it necessary for healthy adults, much less children, who face a near-zero risk of medically significant outcomes. There is the additional peculiarity that whatever immune response occurs from the shot fades quickly, and ever less pertains to the existing strain in the community of this fast-mutating virus.

In other words, there is nothing defensible about this policy at all. It is keeping untold families apart and preventing U.S. citizens from moving to the United States with children and spouses from other countries who decline the shots. They have worked to get back but the vaccine mandate here bars them from doing so. Sadly, there are few in Congress willing to take up the causes and do something about this.

It’s the sort of rule that is enforced with no rationality at all but which benefits powerful pharmaceutical companies. The issue has been barely covered in the media at all, and there are currently no real efforts ongoing to push back because the victims are powerless and much of the world has moved on.

Meanwhile, this COVID vaccine is being gradually added to every list of requirements that is available, from immigration to the childhood schedule to school attendance. This is despite how the shot has completely failed to perform up to the promise of the first year. This is fully known by vast swaths of the world’s population, and yet U.S. bureaucracies persist in their impositions without the slightest sense that they ought to acquiesce to the reality that everyone knows.

From the Brownstone Institute

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The FBI’s seizure of contents from safe deposit boxes during a raid on a Beverly Hills vault in 2021 violated the U.S. Constitution, a federal appeals court ruled on Jan. 23.

Agents raided U.S. Private Vaults, a business that allowed people to rent safe deposit boxes anonymously, based on the belief that criminals were using the service. The search warrant stated that agents could only open the boxes to inventory their contents and identify the owners for the return of their property.

However, agents brought drug-sniffing dogs and planned to set aside cash worth more than $5,000, with the intent to seize the money.

The FBI searched the contents of about 700 safe deposit boxes.

When people who rented boxes asked the FBI for their belongings back after the raid, the bureau refused, saying it was going to file for forfeiture or transfer ownership to the government. The renters of the boxes then sued.

A U.S. district judge previously ruled in favor of the government, finding the search was covered by what’s known as an inventory exception to the requirement for a warrant in the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

That exception, though, doesn’t apply to the raid on U.S. Private Vaults, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled.

The ruling hinged largely on how the exception requires searches to operate on standardized instructions and highlighted how the FBI, in the Beverly Hills raid, used supplemental, customized instructions.

“Once the government begins adding a set of ‘customized’ instructions to a ’standardized‘ inventory policy—particularly the type of custom instructions presented by this case—the entire search stops being conducted pursuant to a ’standardized’ policy,” U.S. Circuit Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. wrote in the ruling.

‘No Probable Cause’

During oral arguments, the appeals court panel compared the search to the “writs of assistance,” or unlimited searches executed by British authorities in pre-founding America.

“What you’ve got is a declaration or an understanding that from the beginning, the authorities intended to search all the boxes, all of them,” Judge Smith said at the time. “There was not probable cause available with respect to all of the boxes, but they did it anyway. Now, how do we distinguish that from what the colonists were upset about, and which led to the Fourth Amendment?”

In response, a government lawyer said the raid was “a unique situation” that involved “rampant illegal conduct.” U.S. Private Vaults has acknowledged in a plea agreement to recruiting criminals and conspiring to launder money.

“We note that it is particularly troubling that the government has failed to provide a limiting principle to how far a hypothetical ‘inventory search’ conducted pursuant to customized instructions can go,” Judge Smith said.

Many of the plaintiffs have already had their belongings returned by the FBI but pressed forward with the case for an opinion in their favor.

The ruling remanded the case back to U.S. District Judge Robert Klausner, who previously dismissed the case, for a ruling that directs the FBI to destroy records the bureau collected on the box renters who are members of the class-action case.

The opinion “draws a line in the sand, to ensure something like this never happens again,” Rob Johnson, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, which was representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “If this had come out the other way, the government could have exported this raid as a model across the country. Now, the government is on notice its actions violated the Fourth Amendment.”

“This is a good day for our country and the principle that the government’s power to search our property has limits,” added Jennifer Snitko, who was among the box renters.

The FBI didn’t respond to a request for comment.

‘Significant Privacy Interest’

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles told news outlets that the office is “prepared to destroy records of the inventory search.”

The ruling also said the government went outside the authority outlined in the search warrant.

U.S. Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke concurred with the ruling in full, while U.S. Circuit Judge Carlos T. Bea, agreeing that the search violated the Constitution, found the second finding regarding the warrant scope to be unnecessary.

Judges Smith, Bea, and Klausner were appointed by President George W. Bush. Judge VanDyke was appointed by President Donald Trump.

Judge Smith also wrote a separate, concurring opinion that addressed the plaintiffs’ argument that the inventory exception, typically applied to automobiles, shouldn’t extend to stationary locations such as apartment buildings or safe deposit boxes.

“Plaintiffs do have a significant privacy interest in their safe deposit boxes, given that their conduct indicates they intended their items to be ‘preserved … as private,’ and society generally views the privacy expectations of items in safe deposit boxes as reasonable,” Judge Smith wrote.

“Ultimately, given the greater privacy interests at stake and the implication of the rights of third parties,” he added, “I would hold that the inventory search doctrine does not extend to searches of box contents in a locked vault.”

Following news that Billionaire Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman withdrew support for ‘Republican’ presidential candidate Nikki Haley, Donald Trump pounced, threatening to kick Haley donors out of the MAGA tent.

“Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our Country. Her False Statements, Derogatory Comments, and Humiliating Public Loss, is demeaning to True American Patriots,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Her anger should be aimed at her Third Rate Political Consultants and, more importantly, Crooked Joe Biden and those that are destroying our Country – NOT THE PEOPLE WHO WILL SAVE IT.”

“I knew Nikki well, she was average at best, is not the one to take on World Leaders, and she never did. That was up to me, and that is why they respected the United States,” Trump continued. “When I ran for Office and won, I noticed that the losing Candidate’s ‘Donors’ would immediately come to me, and want to ‘help out.'”

“This is standard in Politics, but no longer with me. Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp,” the note continues. “We don’t want them, and will not accept them, because we Put America First, and ALWAYS WILL!”

Nikki Makes Lemonade

In response to Trump’s threat, the Haley campaign has resorted to texting registered Democrats to tattle on the bad Orange Man™.

“Hey, it’s Nikki Haley,” reads the text, submitted to ZeroHedge by a registered Democrat. “Donald Trump said if you support me, he will permanently bar you from the MAGA camp.“

“I will not be intimidated,” the note continues.

“This isn’t a coronation. This is an election,” the note continues, using well-worn Democrat talking points suggesting Trump would be… elected royalty?

Haley, a former UN Ambassador, closes by saying she’s “always been the underdog,” which only makes sense if her nickname for all the men she allegedly cheated on her husband with was “dog.”

And what’s this? Paid X ads?

For some real fun, read the replies…

This is just getting embarrassing.

Authored by Autsin Alonzo via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Newly released documents allege that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) knew it was wrong to censor concerns about the security of mail-in voting ahead of the 2020 election, yet it proceeded to do so anyway.

On Jan. 22, a tranche of documents published by America First Legal (AFL) alleged the Department of Homeland Security’s CISA was aware that mail-in ballots were less secure than in-person voting ahead of the 2020 election.

Nevertheless, it undertook an “unprecedented censorship campaign to mislead the American people about the truth,” according to Gene Hamilton, AFL’s vice president and general counsel.

“Common sense dictates that ballots submitted via mail are inherently less secure than verified, in-person voting by a citizen who shows identification before casting his or her ballot,” Mr. Hamilton said in a press release.

“The American people were lied to, and there must be accountability.“

AFL lawyer Michael Ding told The Epoch Times that the new documents were produced after AFL sued the CISA in November 2022.

Mr. Ding said AFL’s suit called for CISA to disclose documents it did not provide under an April 2022 Freedom of Information Act request. Under a court-managed process, Mr. Ding said, documents are gradually materializing.

“As we get closer to election day this year. I do hope that the election meddling and censorship that this agency engaged in during 2020 does not happen again,” Mr. Ding said.

“But ultimately, I think Americans need to hold these government officials accountable for trampling on their constitutional rights.”

The recently released documents detail how CISA acknowledged that mail-in voting carried more significant risks than in-person elections, yet it coordinated with technology companies to censor what it called misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation regarding the 2020 election.

Ahead of the 2020 vote, a wave of legislative changes were made in 23 states and the District of Columbia allowing Americans to vote by mail due to the supposed risks posed to voters by the COVID-19 virus.

By the fall of 2020, only voters in Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas needed to report a reason to cast an absentee ballot by mail, according to internal CISA documents obtained by AFL. As early as September 2020 CISA knew mail-in voting would create significant problems, according to the documents.

An email replied to by Matthew Masterson, a senior cybersecurity advisor at CISA, on Sept. 24, 2020, revealed that the agency was aware of “three major challenges” with mail-in voting, observed during the primary elections.

Physically mailing and returning the ballots would be difficult, high numbers of ballots would be incorrectly completed, and there would likely be a shortage of personnel to process ballots, the email said.

Mr. Masterson’s email, referencing Wisconsin, said the state was short 700 poll workers and had to deploy 675 Wisconsin Army National Guard members to fill the gap.

That same email said the agency “could not conclude that voting … increased the spread of COVID.”

By October 2020, CISA had created an internal chart expanding on those risks. The chart, published by AFL, said, “For mail-in voting, some of the risk under the control of election officials during in-person voting shifts to outside entities, such as ballot printers, mail processing facilities, and the United States Postal Service.”

Also, in October 2020, CISA shared information about mail-in voting with members of the press during so-called unclassified media tours, according to newly-released emails.

Media outlets “covered up the evidence,” AFL said, choosing instead to report on statements made by then-CISA director Chris Krebs that downplayed the election integrity concerns raised by President Donald Trump.

At the time, the CISA ran a “rumor control” page reassuring Americans of the safety of mail-in balloting. Simultaneously, the CISA was watching social media for any commentary on the integrity of mail-in voting. It allegedly went so far as to contract multinational professional services company Deloitte to aid monitoring efforts.

Copies of “Elections Daily Digest” reports obtained and published by AFL showed Deloitte was preparing “daily social media trends” reports on the topics of voter suppression, COVID-19, vote-by-mail, election technology, and removed/flagged social media posts. These reports included the number of daily mentions of each topic and assessments of “change in sentiment.”

“Deloitte’s reports provided CISA with confirmation that its social media monitoring and censorship apparatus was working,” AFL said in a release.

“CISA interfered in the 2020 presidential election. CISA knew that in-person voting did not increase the spread of COVID. CISA knew mail-in voting was less secure. CISA nevertheless supported policy changes to encourage unprecedented widespread mail-in voting.”

CISA formed the Election Integrity Partnership 100 days before the 2020 election “to censor narratives relating to mail-in voting,” AFL said.

The Election Integrity Partnership, which involved CISA and Stanford University’s Global Engagement Center, aimed to “censor Americans’ speech in the lead-up to the 2020 election,” according to a report published on Nov. 6, 2023, by the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

‘Pre-Bunking’ Stories

Washington-based AFL is led by Stephen Miller, who was a senior adviser to President Trump. On its website, Mr. Miller calls his organization an “answer to the ACLU” referring to the American Civil Liberties Union.

AFL, Mr. Ding said, first became interested in potential government censorship of electronic speech in July 2021.

At the time, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a press briefing that the White House was “flagging” posts, which they considered to be misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine, for Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook to remove.

In an email, CISA’s public affairs adviser Scott McConnell said the agency will not comment on the situation.

AFL also expressed alarm when the DHS issued a National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin in February 2022. The bulletin declared “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis-, dis-, and mal-information, introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors,” as a “terrorism threat.”

That bulletin said the CISA was working with “public and private sector partners—including U.S. critical infrastructure owners and operators—to mitigate risk.”

AFL published the first round of documents in May 2023. Those, according to AFL, detailed how CISA employees created both formal and informal partnerships with technology companies to monitor and flag accounts as well as delete posts. Moreover, the CISA employees, with official approval, allegedly set up back-channel electronic communications with private companies via Signal, a self-deleting messaging app.

Most notably, in the May round of documents, Brian Scully, a member of the CISA’s Countering Foreign Interference Task Force, detailed how the agency was working to both debunk unfavorable ideas and “pre-bunk” specific stories before they spread online.

Missouri v. Biden

Mr. Ding said AFL’s CISA investigation is closely related to, but not directly involved with, the Missouri v. Biden First Amendment case, which is due to be considered by the Supreme Court as soon as March.

Missouri v. Biden, filed by the office of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, alleges the federal government coordinated with major technology companies to suppress social media posts that were politically disagreeable to the candidacy of then-candidate Biden in 2020.

For now, the Supreme Court has stayed an injunction—previously confirmed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—that directly prevents the government from engaging in similar activities.

Mr. Bailey, a Republican, previously told The Epoch Times he wishes to restore the national injunction and move ahead with his effort to “unroot and dismantle” what he called a “vast censorship enterprise.”

AFL will continue to publish more documents related to its suit against CISA as they are released.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

According to the FBI, you may be an anti-government extremist if you’ve:

a) purchased a Bible or other religious materials,

b) used terms like “MAGA” and “Trump,”

c) shopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cabela’s, or Bass Pro Shops,

d) purchased tickets to travel by bus, cars, or plane,

e) all of the above.

In fact, if you selected any of those options in recent years, you’re probably already on a government watchlist.

That’s how broadly the government’s net is being cast in its pursuit of domestic extremists.

We’re all fair game now, easy targets for inclusion on some FBI watch list or another.

When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions—warrantlessly and without probable cause—for “extremism” indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we’re all in trouble.

Clearly, you don’t have to do anything illegal.

You don’t even have to challenge the government’s authority.

Frankly, you don’t even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.

All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.

This is how easy it is to run afoul of the government’s many red flags.

In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

We’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent now.

It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

For instance, a so-called typo in a geofence search warrant, which allows police to capture location data for a particular geographic area, resulted in government officials being given access to information about who went where and with whom within a two-mile long stretch of San Francisco that included churches, businesses, private homes, hotels, and restaurants.

Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms.

These data fusion centers, which effectively create an electronic prison—a digital police state—from which there is no escape.

Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda.

As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.”

These fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censors and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.

It’s a setup ripe for abuse.

For instance, an investigative report by the Brennan Center found that “Over the last two decades, leaked materials have shown fusion centers tracking protestors and casting peaceful activities as potential threats. Their targets have included racial justice and environmental advocates, right-wing activists, and third-party political candidates.”

One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peacebuilding summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”

This is how the burden of proof has been reversed.

Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.

Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.

Consider some of the many ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.

• Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.

• Disinformation eradication campaigns. In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

• Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

• Thought crimes programs. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State. It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

• Security checkpoints. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots.

• Surveillance and precrime programs. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to warrantlessly identify and track someone’s movements in real-time, whether or not they have committed a crime.

• Mail surveillance. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts.

• Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

• Vehicle kill switches. Sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, “vehicle kill switches” could quickly become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to put the government in the driver’s seat while rendering null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. As such, it presumes every driver potentially guilty of breaking some law that would require the government to intervene and take over operation of the vehicle or shut it off altogether.

• Biometric databases. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level with a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

• Limitations on our right to move about freely. At every turn, we’re tracked in by surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. For instance, license plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, police can track vehicles in real time.

• The war on cash. Digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme.

These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.

In this way, the groundwork is being laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen.

What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

In effect, you will disappear.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to disappear.

Many Americans fear that the coming Fall election season will see a return of BLM-style riots on US streets, and especially in major cities. Corporate media has at times seemed to almost positively encourage this scenario given Trump’s frontrunner status for the Republicans.

Here’s one of a seeming myriad examples of the MSM being not exactly “subtle”:

“Everything will change for European and Asian democracies if a man bent on dictatorship re-enters the White House,” wrote Financial Times.

“If Trump wins, everything changes,” the op-ed continued, with the author at one point suggesting even that nuclear Armageddon is right around the corner the minute Trump returns to office: 

“The most worrying hedge against Washington’s exit from Pax Americana would be a rush for the nuclear threshold,” FT wrote.

And for another recent example, The L.A. Times speculates that “election-related violence” is something more likely to target the political right. It’s the “lesson” and supposed legacy of Trump, the publication wrote.

“However, Republicans should recall a cardinal lesson from the events of Jan. 6, 2021: The polarizing forces dividing America place mainstream Republicans in the crosshairs of their more radical brethren.”

And accordingly, “any threat of election-related violence this year may target the political right even more so than Democrats and persons on the left.”

Basically, voices from both sides of the aisle agree: we are headed into an election season which could spark mayhem on a level which could potentially surpass the chaos on city streets of the 2020 George Floyd riots, where whole blocks burned and innocent store owners were shot, and very often police and law enforcement were attacked in between widespread looting, and innocent bystanders brutally jumped and beaten by frenzied mobs.

The trend of an increasingly ‘militarized’ American police force has been rapidly increasing since 2006, with the surplus military gear being spread across every state. Having  already documented America’s conversation to a turnkey totalitarian banana republic (confirmed over a year later by Edward Snowden), the armored vehicles and even-more-armored personnel was last most evident in the mostly-peaceful chaos of Ferguson, Missouri; but if the media is stoking the fear once again – given Trump’s lead – we could indeed see the armor and weapons shown below on display every night a 6pm on your evening news over the summer.

As we’ve been chronicling this week, ZeroHedge is here at the SHOT Show with our proverbial “boots on the ground” (though we are quite opposite to the interventionista Neocons of course), which is the world’s largest shooting sports, hunting, and law enforcement industry expo of its kind. The closed-door event is held at the Venetian Expo in Vegas through Friday. It features 500+ suppliers, some of which are defense contractors, offering weapons and gear from Tier 1 operators to law enforcement to civilian markets. 

We found that especially among suppliers of law enforcement, first responders, and producers of civil defense tech and products, the open question of whether American cities will be on fire going into November or also into January—when the next president takes office—is foremost on their minds. This theoretical scenario and conversation was “in the air” so to speak.

The BLM riots encouraged the industry to come up with lighter weight, sleek and modern protective gear as opposed to the older, more sluggish and bulky standard of police riot protective gear, which doesn’t help with ease of rapid maneuverability. 

Below: Like the ancient Roman phalanx maneuvering, but the 21st century version… companies like Defilade envisions the need for close-quarters rapid engagement fight and then flight speed (if need be) flexibility in their protective gear, also useful for prison guards and rapid response teams. 

In general, light-weight and form-fitting protection is a prominent theme at this year’s SHOT. They claim to produce the thinnest, most advanced protection against impact and blunt force trauma.

One interesting and unexpected surprise was the number of European and foreign suppliers of anti-riot measures and high tech crowd control items and gadgets.

Finland defense contractor comes to America, predicting riots

One distributor from Finland (shown), a country widely known as a peace-loving and pretty harmonious Scandinavian society (which obviously sees far fewer full-on riots and mass street unrest), said that they see the American market as ripe and as in need of their police riot response protective suits, which as it turns out can repel knife attacks along with deflecting large bricks (remember the whole rumored piles of bricks phenomenon and fears?) or skull-cracking projectiles hurled at great distances from angry crowds.

The company out of Finland specifically told us “no need to look at our tactical body armor collection—which the US already has in abundance, what American law enforcement really needs is our full body anti-riot gear because that’s what Americans do more of [than Scandinavians for sure]—they riot“…

The Finnish company has seen much more demand in the good ole US-of-A… and not Scandinavia (well Sweden’s Malmö is a big exception in terms of random mass violence perhaps).

More foreign companies worried about safe-guarding American democracy, ironically enough…

A Taiwan firm which focuses on non-lethal riot control measures & gear…

And Pakistan…

America’s firefighters and first responders are increasingly coming under fire, literally

We were not surprised to see that fire departments across the nation have been sweeping up bullet-proof protection, giving the rising number of incidents where first-responders get shot by the very individuals they are seeking to rescue.

Increasingly, firefighters are first through the door in mental distress domestic disturbances or highly unpredictable suicide situations. Extra protection is needed for what first responders call Active Shooter/Hostile Event Response (ASHER) scenarios.

As it turns out the maker of the below is based very close to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.

And now for something more on the offense side of riot and hostile crowd control measures… we are assured these (below) won’t kill targets even if fired at close range and with a head shot (unlike 40mm aerial flash-bangs that might score the unfortunate direct hit let’s say)…

No more bulky “beanbag guns”

Alternative Ballistics makes a special nonlethal ball-bearing fired at high velocity with a conventional 9mm round embedded in the projectile’s center which unleashes huge kinetic force on impact. It affixes to various pistol types, making the weapon non-lethal in the slit-second it takes to attach the “alternative” add-on (see video below).

No more bulky so-called “beanbag guns” to incapacitate someone (or more or less a shotgun, which could prove of a somewhat inconvenient size); instead, this fits on the belt. Compact and non-lethal is the name of the game, and this is cutting edge.

See their demo…

A perp thinks they’re merely dealing with a harmless mall cop… is that a toy? what’s in that belt?

Think again…

For something definitely more lethal (and we’re not necessarily talking about the firearm itself)…

We just included this cause it’s tactikool…

Just in case things have to go lethal real quick: a bespoke tactical shotgun…

Let’s just call the below a monster of a multi-task breaching tool, especially good for any unpredictable urban environment where a bad guy could be holed up in an impossible to reach place.

* * *

Below: Penn Arms’ PGR 40mm Pump Multi-Launcher…

There’s increasing overlap involving high quality, lighter weight military grade weaponry with domestic law enforcement utilization cross-over (things tend to go lethal boom on military side vs. things go merely concussed in civilian domestic situations). This particular company has a major contract supplying Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC), but sees increasing demand on the domestic police and SWAT side of things. 

Not a Pizza Hut worker despite appearances…

The below won’t kill you but it won’t feel too good either…

In a follow-up report, we will later examine the toys that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies have deployed throughout the land (and sometimes in the hands of local or state agencies) as ‘early detection’ for a radioactive dirty bomb, even with the capability to pick up on nasty substances/nuke-related materials being transported across state lines. The public doesn’t know about this. But it certainly reveals the “thinking” of federal bureaucrats. Let’s hope things don’t ever come to that. 

Lest this humble SHOT Show review gets mistaken for some kind of simplistic ‘apologetic’ for our increasingly militarized police departments everywhere (a years’-long and very worrisome post 9/11 trend for sure), we leave you with this, which we certainly don’t officially endorse in a literal sense, but just to show that the dominant streak or outlook here remains firmly Libertarian and 2nd Amendment-driven through and through…

Too far?

True castle doctrine has never been tried 🏰 https://t.co/x9DFtDH5Zo

— Ivan (@kommandostore) January 22, 2024

* * * 

For our earlier SHOT coverage, see–>

• Boots On The Ground: ZeroHedge Invades SHOT Show
• SHOT Show Day 2: Best Gear & Equipment For Special Forces Operators
• SHOT Show Surprise: Bloomberg Leaks Biden Draft Rule On Gun Export Restrictions

Via The Libertarian Institute

The Senate is planning to add money to upcoming legislation to fund President Joe Biden’s military buildup in the Middle East and war in Yemen. Senator Susan Collins says the legation should be a priority as US Central Command is quickly depleting its funds. Senator Jack Reed believes Congress will need to pass multiple rounds of funding to allow Biden to wage war across the Middle East. 

Following the Hamas attack on southern Israel, Biden ordered thousands of troops and multiple aircraft carrier strike groups into the region. Politico reports the Department of Defense informed Congress the deployment of additional troops and warships to the Middle East over the past four months has cost $1.6 billion. The Pentagon estimates the cost will be $2.2 billion over the course of the year. 

The cost estimates do not include the price of the interceptors and munitions used in fighting the Houthis. Congress has not authorized Biden’s war in Yemen or the military surge in the Middle East. A growing number of American lawmakers, including within Biden’s party, have voiced opposition to the White House waging a war in Yemen without Congressional authorization. 

A Pentagon official said at some point, the holes in the Department of Defense budget will have to be filled by Congress. An official told Politico, “It will be, I think, a hole that we would want to be filled. It is a bill that will be due and we will have to pay for it within a limited amount of resources.”

The Senate is now preparing to fund the conflicts in the Middle East, but there are no plans to authorize the war. Politico reports Congress is considering several options for authorizing the war spending. The outlet explains, “Lawmakers are aware of the unplanned cost and are weighing how to pay for it. Options include adding it to the annual spending bill, adding it to the $111 billion emergency supplemental for Ukraine and Israel, or funding it through a stand-alone supplemental for war costs.”

The White House has been pushing Congress to pass a $111 billion bill that provides funding for the wars in Ukraine and Israel, the military buildup in the Asia-Pacific, and border security. The legislation has been delayed for several months over debate on immigration policy. 

Sen. Collins, a Republican member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is urging the body to take action. “[US Central Command] needs [the funding] sooner. They’re fast running out of funds,” she said.

Some delusional wishful thinking in the Pentagon press briefing room…

The US has attacked Yemen nearly every day over the past week and the Pentagon says the “fight between Israel and Hamas continues to remain contained in Gaza.” https://t.co/hTrbBj8kuh

— Kyle Anzalone (@KyleAnzalone_) January 21, 2024

Senator Jack Reed believes Congress will have to pass multiple rounds of funding to fight wars in the Middle East. He said, “I sense, given the unexpected cost, that there will have to be a separate supplemental. These aren’t routine costs. They’re because of our reaction to the Houthi disruption, to Iranian malign behavior, etc. And I think that’s probably where we would go for it.”

Senators Dan Sullivan, Mitch McConnell, and Mark Kelley have all called for adding money to the supplemental war legislation to replace the interceptors and munitions used to fight the Houthis in Yemen.

Former President Donald Trump filed a motion Thursday to join his co-defendant in his Georgia election case, arguing that District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified over misconduct allegations, and injecting “racial animus” into the case with recent comments made at the Big Bethel AME Church following said allegations.

Trump moved to adopt co-defendant Michael Roman’s Jan. 8 claim that Willis awarded a “lucrative” contract to her alleged lover, special prosecutor Nathan Wade – through whom she benefited from lavish vacations using taxpayer money paid to Wade.

Trump’s attorneys also cited her speech at the AME Church, which they say was a “glaring, flagrant, and calculated effort to foment racial bias into this case,” the Daily Caller reports.

“The awesome power to prosecute ought never to be manipulated for personal or political profit,” reads the motion. “In addition to the extensive misconduct alleged in Roman’s motion, the DA did just that in her speech by wrongfully inserting racial animus into this case to publicly denounce and rebuke the defendants, and to defend her personal and political reputation against the numerous and diverse allegations Roman made in his court filing.”

“The DA’s provocative and inflammatory extrajudicial racial comments, made in a widely publicized speech at a historical Black church in Atlanta, and cloaked in repeated references to God, reinforce and amplify the ‘appearance of impropriety’ in her judgment and prosecutorial conduct,” the filing continues.

She also straight up lied!

As the Caller notes,

During her speech, Willis also falsely claimed that she paid all three special prosecutors on the case the same hourly rate. John Floyd, the attorney known as Georgia’s top racketeering expert, was only paid $200 as recently as May 2023, while Wade was paid $250 an hour, according to billing statements and contracts obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Willis also hired a firm to monitor media coverage days before announcing the investigation into Trump.

Fani Willis’ office agreed to pay $10,000 on a service to monitor her media coverage just days before announcing the probe into former President Donald Trump, according to invoices and emails obtained by the @DailyCaller News Foundation.🧵https://t.co/U7an4Mx7l7

— Katelynn Richardson (@katesrichardson) January 23, 2024

Trump attorney Steve Sadow told the Caller: “The motion filed today on behalf of President Trump seeks to hold District Attorney Willis legally accountable both for her misconduct alleged in a motion filed by Mr. Roman as well as her extrajudicial public statements falsely and intentionally injecting race into this case,” adding “In doing so, DA Willis violated her Special Responsibilities of a Prosecutor under the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct.”

“Her attempt to foment racial animus and prejudice against the defendants in order to divert and deflect attention away from her alleged improprieties calls out for the sanctions of dismissal and disqualification,” he continued.