The story that won't go away
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. – George Bernard Shaw
The Friday Letter / No. 462 / Orlando, Florida“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is robbing the human race,” John Stuart Mill wrote in his 1859 essay “On Liberty.” It robs “those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.”
John Stuart Mill
It is difficult to believe that anyone could be unaware of the all-out war on our republic waged by the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, who has turned the FBI into a political and paramilitary arm of the Democrat Party. To use one of the Left's favorite terms, Merrick Garland is an existential threat to the United States.
If you've been away from the planet recently, this story is about Garland's ordering the FBI to investigate and arrest parents who aggressively object to local school boards over their mask requirements and the teaching of critical race theory. Garland has labeled these parents domestic terrorists because they “harass and intimidate” school board members.
The least important part of this story is Garland's corruption. His daughter is married to the co-founder of Panorama Education, which received $16 million from a Mark Zuckerberg non-profit organization. Panorama has multi-million-dollar contracts with school boards across the nation to develop programs that involve collecting confidential student data.
Panorama has a $2 million contract with Fairfax County, Virginia, Public Schools to monitor the social and emotional learning of its students. It's part of a $78.8 million contract to help the school board develop a “welcoming” and “culturally responsive” environment for students, Sam Dorman writes at Fox News.
Skeptics say it's a scheme to teach critical race theory and other leftist dogma. Put the pieces together, and one thesis is that Merrick Garland doesn't want parents nosing around in the family business.
The more important part of this story is the obvious: the accelerating repeal – by fiat, not by legislation – of our constitutional rights. The federal government has precisely zero authority over public education at any level, and it doesn't take a constitutional scholar to know this.
We can continue to put up with leftist school board members financed by George Soros, or we can replace them with parents and other patriotic citizens who aren't intimated by the teacher unions. As Newt Gingrich explained this week, the choice is pretty simple. It's not about Republican or Democrat. It's about whether we want to live under tyranny or in freedom.
Merrick Garland, who takes his orders from Susan Rice and perhaps others in the White House cabal, doesn't want parents to have a say in how their children are educated (even though they pay for it). Like Terry McAuliffe, Virginia's Democrat candidate for governor, he believes the state owns the rights to our children, and anyone who objects is an enemy of the state.
“By liberty,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “was meant protection against the tyranny of the political rulers,” people he described as “in a necessarily antagonistic position to the people whom they ruled.” The rulers of old acquired their authority by inheritance or conquest, people, Mill said, who “did not hold it at the pleasure of the governed.” Those who rule from the White House, whoever they are, certainly appear to long for those days.
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground,” Thomas Jefferson said. Reversing the natural progress is a national imperative that requires every one of us to get up and do something about it. Time is of the essence. The bird is on the wing.
Horses, dead, the beating of
The Washington Post is a propaganda arm of the Democrat Party and not a reliable news source. It has value, however, in how it shows the party's hand. Post editorials from last weekend suggest rising heartburn in the WAPO newsroom and editorial board. (Yes, we know. Newspapers claim their editorial writers and reporters are independent of one another. Don't believe that for a minute.)
As reported at Just the News, the Post says exhuming the debunked Russian collusion hoax is “well founded” and urges Congress to federalize elections, in violation of Article 1 of the Constitution, to prevent Trump's re-election.
The Saturday editorial was written before Trump's big rally in Iowa, but Post propagandists were well aware of the expected crowd and Trump's continued popularity. Further beating of the Russia collusion dead horse seems to us the kind of desperation usually reserved for two out in the bottom of the 9th with nobody on and trailing by three.
We have reason for angst on the constitutional conservative side as well. Trump drew 35,000 in Butler County, Pa., right before the election while Biden stayed in his basement and didn't campaign. Yes, Pennsylvania was corrupted by the state Supreme Court's refusal to enforce the law, and the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to hear the appeal.
That's just the point. It could happen again. And it's important to note that of the 40 or so court challenges to state election results, not one was decided on merits because not one was even heard.
At the risk of becoming a dead horse-beater ourselves, we must say that Trump continues to fight old battles when he should be preparing for the next one. His constant complaining about election fraud in 2020 – indisputable though it is – plays well with the bearded bubbas waving Trump flags but won't bring home the squishy Republicans who abandoned him. We need them as much as we need the principled conservatives.
Trump needs to talk about 2022 and 2024, not 2020, and let others keep reminding voters that the cesspool we call our election system is corrupt, incorrigible, and intolerable. Trump is a businessman. He knows how to delegate. This should be an easy call for him.
. . . And yet, the evidence keeps building
Savvy politicians know when to wade into the snake pit and when to take the high road. For all his acumen in engineering the greatest economic prosperity in the last century, President Trump keeps stepping in it when he injects himself into knife-fights better left to his lieutenants (see above).
What news propagandists failed to anticipate was that sooner or later the truth would start to surface on a whole range of matters. Fox News' drone videos of 10,000 abandoned steel panels in a Texas field, enough for 100 miles of border wall and already paid for, tell a story the media can no longer conceal.
The legacy media can no longer hornswoggle people into believing that Joe Biden is actually running the country, or that his State Department and Pentagon leaders are anything but inept buffoons.
They can no longer pretend that inflation is only “transitory,” as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claims, meaning that if you ignore it, it will go away. Even though it's unlikely she pumps her own gas or peels back the corn husks at the grocery store, she knows this is a lie. Americans, even the majority that is low-information and easily manipulated, are catching on.
And they can no longer pretend the 2020 election was honest. Just monitor revelations unfolding in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Dig a bit deeper, and you will see that election fraud is pervasive. Now, Dominion Voting Systems may be as innocent as a nun, but isn't it strange that its name keeps popping up in stories about voting irregularities?
In Northeastern Pennsylvania's Lucerne County, election workers discovered that Republican ballots in the May 18 primary election were mislabel as Democrat on electronic voting screens. Dominion Voting Systems blamed the glitch on “human error.”
“County Administrative Services Division Head David Parsnik acknowledged the county does not test the on-screen ballots after they are approved,” the Times Leader reported. “The county leaves it up to Dominion to program them into the electronic ballot marking devices with no county examination before the machines are locked up for delivery,” Parsnik told the newspaper.
“The mistake prompted many Republicans to question to accuracy of the ballot and voting process,” the newspaper reported. No kidding.
And as long as we have pretty much made the theme of this Friday Letter all about beating dead horses, let's beat this one again: Technology now exists to keep the votes honest, something we've been using here in Florida for some time: It's called a pen and piece of paper.
Short takes on the news
Why Trump wants Raffensperger out. A Democrat state judge dismissed the voting integrity watchdog Voter GA's lawsuit that accused Fulton County election officials of processing fraudulent ballots in the 2020 election, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. The suit sought review of 147,000 mail-in ballots. State investigators said they found no fraud, though four election workers, including a manager, testified that up to 20,000 ballots looked suspicious. “A poll manager swore that ballot after ballot was circled the same way,” the Independent Sentinel reported. “Each had an empty circle in the middle. It was probably marked with toner ink instead of a pen or pencil. None were folded or creased. They were printed on a different stock paper.”
As was common with other challenges to state results, the judge shared his opinion with us that the Fulton County results were honest, but he didn't actually rule on the merits. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger claims the election was fair and that Biden won Georgia by 12,000 votes. Videotape of election workers hiding suitcases of ballots under a table apparently does not lead to suspicion of fraud. . .
A Republican won a special election for the Iowa House of Representatives, flipping a seat Democrats had held for 29 years. This was the second Republican flip since Biden took office. Over the summer the GOP flipped a seat in the Connecticut Senate.
Quotes for today
“When politics is your religion and government is your God, a public building is your church.”
– Julie Kelly at American Greatness, explaining why Robert Reeder, a non-violent protester at the Capitol, was sent to prison for three months “for parading.”
“Make no mistake; the deep state was the central actor in the plot to destroy the president. It is alive and active. It has not receded.” – Theodore Roosevelt Malloch in How to End the Deep State
Correction
A story last week about the FBI becoming a weapon of the Democrat Party incorrectly identified Carter Page as Clarence Page. Carter Page served briefly in the Trump Administration. Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
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