"Have You Committed your Three Felonies Today?" - Jim Jatras At RPI''s Media & War Conference
Our adversaries can always play the ace of spades...war. And at that point dissent will be a crime. It is uncertain whether our opposition to the gathering darkness will be effective, but what is not uncertain is our duty to oppose it. Jim Jatras on why we must find our voice to oppose war and empire...
Our adversaries can always play the ace of spades...war. And at that point dissent will be a crime. It is uncertain whether our opposition to the gathering darkness will be effective, but what is not uncertain is our duty to oppose it. Jim Jatras on why we must find our voice to oppose war and empire...
Our adversaries can always play the ace of spades...war. And at that point dissent will be a crime. It is uncertain whether our opposition to the gathering darkness will be effective, but what is not uncertain is our duty to oppose it. Jim Jatras on why we must find our voice to oppose war and empire...
We're running a little short, so I'm going to have to shrink my introduction of my good friend Jim Jatris, the first person I met in Washington, D.C., when I came back from Eastern Europe in 2001.
He's been a great friend and mentor since then.
Jim is all that's good in Washington.
There's not a lot good, but I think Jim is because he's been in the city, but not of the city.
He's been an attorney, a diplomat.
He was a senior Republican Senate official.
He's seen everything, and he's a brilliant writer.
If you read his stuff, you'll know that.
and a great observer of the scene, Jim Jatris.
That was Daniel's attempt to blame me for the wrong turn his life has taken.
I'd like to first off say how honored I am to address this august gathering of thought criminals and thank Dr. Ron Paul, Daniel, the sponsors, and of course, Emmanuel Goldstein.
For those of you who live in Virginia, several years ago, you may recall we had this goofy law where you could only purchase one firearm a month.
This was intended to stop guns being taken to cities outside of the Commonwealth, which have very strict gun laws and consequently very high homicide rates.
And it didn't seem to do much good.
And in a rare outbreak of common sense was later repealed, although our distinguished Attorney General Mark Herring is talking about bringing it back.
But during its short period in force, the prohibition spawned a popular saying here in the old Dominion, buy one gun a month.
It's the law.
I think we should take a similar attitude toward an estimate that due to vague statutes and the proliferation of federal regulations, which themselves have the force of law, that we wake up in the morning, go to work, come home, eat dinner, go to sleep, unaware we may have committed several federal crimes in the course of the day.
The number varies, but the average number of crimes per American seems to be somewhere around three.
I think we can add to those, you know, Gary's seatbelt flights, no seatbelt flights, Dan's violation of the child labor laws, walking around with cans of bug spray.
I mean, the crime wave is uncontrolled.
The more important thing is that every one of us is probably guilty of something.
Quote, there is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime, retired Louisiana State University law professor John Baker told the Wall Street Journal in July 2011.
That is not an exaggeration.
This means that if they want you, they can get you.
That in turn means that who gets charged, prosecuted, and jailed is a matter of the relevant official's discretion.
And that in turn means that that discretion can and will be abused and politicized.
Like the boychicks used to say at the good old NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, Narodni Commissariat of Nutrenisch Gjel, give us the man and we will make the case.
Except now we'd have to say, give us the person, we will make the case.
Let's stipulate that the true Rechtstadt, the rule of law state, where justice is administered in a truly impartial fashion, is a very rare thing in human history.
The norm is politicized justice, where the holders of power in an elected system that means the winners use the justice system to harass and terrorize the losers.
But America today must be the only country that has ever been so goofy that the losers are able to terrorize the winners.
Whatever your feelings about the current administrations, consider.
The feds come in like gangbusters, breaking down doors, rousting targets from their beds, seizing their personal documents and devices, subjecting them to piled-on charges and questioning designed to result in perjury, obstruction, conspiracy charges, especially the phony charge of lying to the FBI, adding up to decades in jail.
Those accused are forced to plead guilty to a lesser charge or bankrupt themselves in the hope they will be vindicated by a jury of sheep, their peers, where the feds have a 90% plus conviction rate.
That's the treatment meted out to Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, George Papavopoulos, Michael Cohen, and others.
Conversely, clear evidence of crime, such as mishandling classified material, is a freebie.
No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.
Oh, some of those emails are personal.
That's okay.
You decide what's what.
We trust you.
There's a claim a foreign power hacked a computer server, which some compare to an act of war demanding retaliation.
No, we don't need to see the server itself.
Your contractor's report is good enough for us.
And while you're at it, go ahead and purge your electronic records, even material you're obligated to preserve, and smash up your smartphones and pull out the SIM cards.
Oh, hey, does anyone need immunity?
No need to bargain.
We're happy to provide.
That's the treatment accorded to Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Sheryl Mills, Tony Podesta, and their ilk.
It's no coincidence, comrades, that this disparity, which is characteristic of what is called anarcho-tyranny after the late, great Sam Francis, is the work of denizens of a law enforcement and intelligence apparatus that is focused like a laser on two closely linked objectives.
One, get Donald Trump.
Two, at all costs, make sure that he cannot in any way move forward on his stated objective to improve ties with Russia.
Those objectives are the two sides of the coin called Russia Gate.
All else, including the disparity of treatment given those close to Trump versus his opponents, is a function of RussiaGate.
Three other things also follow from this.
One is Trump's utter powerlessness even within his own administration.
What kind of chief executive is reduced to tweeting what his subordinates ought to do, for example, providing Congress with documents demanded from the Justice Department versus ordering them to do it?
Secondly, Trump's personnel.
People wonder, especially on his foreign policy team, why has he surrounded himself with this swarm of neoconservatives and Bush-era retreads?
Maybe he's just one of them, or maybe anyone who dissented from the established warmongering line that he might appoint to office would be putting his head into a noose, and they know it.
Flipping the Russians did it narrative.
Among the president's defenders, say on Fox News, no less than among his detractors, Russia is the enemy who all together now interfered with our election in order to undermine our democracy.
Mitt Romney was right.
The only argument is over who the intended beneficiary was of Muscovite mendacity.
Was it Trump or was it Hillary?
That's the variable.
But the constant is that Putin is Hitler and only a traitor would want to get along with the Russians.
And that includes, of course, Dr. Paul's son, Rand Paul, who has been called a traitor umpteen times since he went to Moscow.
All sides agree that the Christopher Steele dossier is full of Russian dirt, though there's not any evidence at all of Kremlin involvement in the assembling of that dossier and plenty of evidence pointing to Britain's MI6 and GCHQ.
The Russia-Russia-Russia hysteria, sometimes called a new McCarthyism, but that really is unfair to tailgunner Joe.
In his day, whatever his excesses, there really were Stalinist agents of the State Department.
This new panic is nothing we've ever seen before, except maybe during the Salem witch frenzy of the 1690s.
Which brings me to Maria Butina, a Russian grad student and Second Amendment advocate jailed and refused bail on thin allegations of unregistered lobbying.
As Phil Giraldi around here somewhere has observed, if you are a Russian and caught talking to anyone in any way influential, there's potentially hell to pay because the FBI will be watching you.
You are automatically assumed to be part of a conspiracy.
Once evidence is collected, you will be indicted and sent to prison, mostly to send a message to Moscow.
It is ultimate irony how the old Soviet Union's judiciary used to function.
It is now becoming a standing operating procedure in the United States.
And as Mr. Whitehead pointed out, another Soviet tactic we've come up with is to accuse people of being mentally ill.
They used to send them to the Srbsky Institute of Punitive Psychiatry in Moscow for sluggish schizophrenia, it was called, which could only be diagnosed by an expert because, you see, sluggish schizophrenia has no symptoms.
Butina has been portrayed as some kind of a honeypot femme fatale, a cross between Anna Chapman and Natasha from the adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, using her Slavic charms to bewitch the naï Molon Lave crowd at the National Rifle Association, among her nefarious activities, networking at the national prayer breakfast.
If they arrested everyone with government foreign government connections schmoozing at the prayer breakfast, they'd have to shut the thing down.
Honestly, I don't think even the investigators believe Boutina is guilty of anything, and if she were of any nationality other than Russian, she wouldn't be facing years in prison.
And by the way, a legal defense fund has just been set up for her.
It's MariaButinafund.com.
Which brings us to the biggest threat to what's left of our liberties as Americans.
And I don't mean the yanking of the security clearance of John Brennan.
As is well known, we are facing an unprecedented coordinated campaign, as Caitlin described, of deplatforming, shadow banning, filtering, and other foul means of putting dissenting voices into a digital gulag.
While the mailed glove belongs to the tech giants and the executives, the hand inside is the governments.
Using Russian meddling as a pretext, companies that do billions of dollars of business with the federal government are only too happy to police the web of suspected Russian-linked accounts.
And since, as Hillary says, Putin is the leader of the worldwide authoritarian white supremacist Zeumbophobic movement who is emboldening right-wing nationalists, separatists, racists, and even neo-Nazis, anything and anybody that fails Virginia Senator Mark Warner's or Mark Zuckerberg's SF test is now a fair game.
We are told that to sow discord and chaos, Russian trolls, farms, and social media ads target divisive issues related to race, Black Lives Matter, and Ferguson, apps of which we'd all be holding hands and singing kumbaya.
Connecting Putin and Russia with racism feeds into a cockamame phantasmagoria of crime think concepts that increasingly are considered outside the protection of what was quaintly known as free speech.
Hate speech, fake news, conspiracy theories, white nationalism, white privilege, white this, white that, patriarchy, cisgenderism, and many more.
The idea of I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it, is out the window.
Instead, we have anyone to the right of me deserves what he gets.
While we hear a lot about the input and violation of free speech rights, a deadly valid concern, even more worrisome is the output, limiting what Americans can see and hear that differs from the official media line, itself largely a bulletin board for government sources.
They are trying to cut us off from what in effect is our Sami's dot, our listening to the shortwave radio from the free world.
I wish I were as optimistic as Caitlin is.
Output Limits Freedom00:01:03
It is hard to escape the notion that we are approaching the edge of some profound historical moment that will have far-reaching, literally life and death consequences, both domestically and internationally.
I wonder, in the period preceding World War I, how many Europeans suspected that their lives would soon be forever changed and for millions of them prematurely ended.
Who in the years, say, 1910 to 1913 could have imagined that the decades of peace, progress, and civilization in which they had grown up and which seemingly would continue indefinitely would instead soon descend into a horror of industrial-scale slaughter, revolution, and brutal ideologies?
Let's always remember our adversaries can always play the ace of spades, which is war.
And at that point, dissent literally will be a crime, and it will be treated as such.
Whether opposition to the gathering darkness can be effective is uncertain, but what is not as uncertain is our duty to oppose it, even at the risk of committing three felonies a day.