Tag Archives: #FascismFromTheLeft

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Ve need to see your papers!

It seems that President Joe Biden and his Administration are very concerned, very concerned! about how Americans are going to prove that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19. There are just so many ways that such could be documented, that I’m surprised that no one has yet suggested the very simple way that the German government found in the late 1930s.[1]I suppose that I have to note here that yes, I am using sarcasm; too many people take things so deathly seriously.

From The Washington Post:

‘Vaccine passports’ are on the way, but developing them won’t be easy

White House-led effort tries to corral more than a dozen initiatives

By Dan Diamond, Lena H. Sun and Isaac Stanley-Becker | March 28, 2021 | 11:00 AM EDT

The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as “vaccine passports” — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen.

The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again.

The administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology, said five officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the effort. The White House this month took on a bigger role coordinating government agencies involved in the work, led by coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, with a goal of announcing updates in coming days, said one official.

I was initially fooled when I saw the tweet by William Teach, which used a photo of an American passport as the illustration. I had originally thought that this was going to be a story about how American passports could be stamped to notify foreign countries that a traveler had been vaccinated.

But nope, I was wrong: the story was about how Americans will prove internally that they had been vaccinated!

The White House declined to answer questions about the passport initiative, instead pointing to public statements that Zients and other officials made this month.

“Our role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,” Zients said at a March 12 briefing.

The initiative has emerged as an early test of the Biden administration, with officials working to coordinate across dozens of agencies and a variety of experts, including military officials helping administer vaccines and health officials engaging in international vaccine efforts.

Count on it: as the Biden Administration wants to continue pushing vaccination, they will concomitantly push employers to require proof of vaccination before allowing people to work. The left have no interest, no interest at all, in enforcing existing law requiring people to prove that they are eligible to work under our existing immigration laws, but, damn it, you’d better be vaccinated!

I had frequently complained about the Obama Administration’s passage of the HITECH Act, which required that all medical records be digitized, so that your next physician could easily obtain your medical records from your past doctors, noting that there will never be enough safeguards that hackers won’t be able to break through them. It would only make sense that, if you are a candidate for a job, that a company, if it could, might want to check your medical records to see if you had even been treated for mental illness or had diabetes or a heart condition that could drive up their medical care costs, or which might indicate that you were more prone to missing time from work due to illness. While I’m sure that would be illegal, there would be ‘dark’ companies which might be willing to provide such a service to established human resources departments.

But now? The Biden Administration wants to have a way in which people can prove they had been vaccinated, and the only reason for that is to punish those who have not.

Those initiatives — such as a World Health Organization-led global effort and a digital pass devised by IBM that is being tested in New York state — are rapidly moving forward, even as the White House deliberates about how best to track the shots and avoid the perception of a government mandate to be vaccinated.

One of the teams working on vaccine passports is the Vaccination Credential Initiative, a coalition endeavoring to standardize how data in vaccination records is tracked.

If there’s a standardization of data in how vaccination records are tracked, then they will be tracked, and the notion that they will “avoid the perception of a government mandate to be vaccinated” will simply be propaganda. If the records can be tracked, they will be tracked, and you can count on the Biden Administration, as well as states with Democratic Governors, who have never shied away from intrusive and unconstitutional mandates to fight COVID-19, to use every tool they have to force compliance.

“The busboy, the janitor, the waiter that works at a restaurant, wants to be surrounded by employees that are going back to work safely — and wants to have the patrons ideally be safe as well,” said Brian Anderson, a physician at Mitre, a nonprofit company that runs federally funded research centers, who is helping lead the initiative. “Creating an environment for those vulnerable populations to get back to work safely — and to know that the people coming back to their business are ‘safe,’ and vaccinated — would be a great scenario.”

This was, of course, the justification for the mask mandates, that you must wear them to protect other people. If you refused to wear a mask, you were harming other people, because the assumption was that you carried the virus. And the vaccination ‘passports’ will have the same underlying assumption: if you have not been vaccinated, you are a carrier.

There’s a lot more at the original, but there is part of one last paragraph I need to quote. An official, speaking anonymously, said that:

some of the considerations include how to adjust for the spread of variants, how booster shots would be tracked and even questions about how long immunity lasts after getting a shot. There’s “a lot to think through,” the official said.

And there it is: it’s not just getting your two-shot vaccine this year, but the government will want to track you, and your movements, every time the CDC decides that there’s another variant out there, and that you require periodic booster shots or re-vaccination.

“It’s for our own good,” we will be told, and there will be plenty of sheeple out there, ready and willing to go along with the Mandates of Our Betters.

I guess that we’ll need a new forearm tattoo every year!

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References
↑1 I suppose that I have to note here that yes, I am using sarcasm; too many people take things so deathly seriously.
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Impeach Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd! He thinks the General Assembly doesn't matter

We knew that this bovine feces would happen!

Judge rules in Beshear’s favor, blocks laws limiting governor’s COVID-19 powers

By Jack Brammer | March 3, 2021 |3:31 PM EST

Franklin Circuit Judge and Authoritarian Enabler Phillip Shepherd. Photo: Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts.

Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd temporarily blocked Thursday three new laws that limit the governor’s powers to deal with emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic.

In a 23-page order that is a legal victory for Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and a defeat for the Kentucky General Assembly, the judge granted Beshear’s motion for a temporary injunction and partially stayed the effectiveness of the three new laws the legislature approved earlier this year.

Besherar spokeswoman Crystal Staley said, “We appreciate the order. The ability to act and react quickly is necessary in our war against the ever-changing and mutating virus.

Apparently, according to Judge Shepherd, ‘need’ defines the Governor’s powers, not the General Assembly. What powers wouldn’t the Governor have, if he declares a state of emergency, under this kind of standard?

Shepherd said the court “is mindful that the challenged legislation seeks to address a legitimate problem of effective legislative oversight of the governor’s emergency powers in this extraordinary public health crisis” but “is also mindful that the governor and the secretary (Health and Family Services Secretary Eric Friedlander) are faced with the enormous challenge of effectively responding to a world-wide pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Kentuckians and over 500,000 people in the United States.”

Republicans campaigned against the authoritarian use of power by Governor Beshear in last November’s elections, and the voters rewarded the GOP with 14 additional seats in the state House of Representatives, bringing their majority to 75-25, and 2 additional seats in the state Senate, bringing their majority to 30-8.[1]Only 19 of the 38 seats were up for election in the state Senate.

The judge said all parties in the case “are acting in good faith to address public policy challenges of the utmost importance” but “the governor has made a strong case that the legislation, in its current form, is likely to undermine or even cripple, the effectiveness of public health measures necessary to protect the lives and health of Kentuckians from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Oh, so as long as the Governor is “acting in good faith,” he is exempt from legislative oversight?

The Judge stated that the Governor has been ‘adjusting’ his executive orders to be less restrictive as time passes, as current conditions warrant and public health concerns decrease, but that “the court believes those decisions should be made based on medical and scientific evidence, not on arbitrary deadlines imposed by statutes irrespective of the spread of the virus.” Since when does a judge have the authority to decide what motivates the legislature or whether the legislators have taken their decisions based on the right things?

The governor’s general counsel, Amy Cubbage, recently noted that the current executive orders dealing with COVID-19 would expire March 4 unless the legislature extends them or the court rules in Beshear’s favor.

Did the Governor ask the General Assembly to extend them? The Governor filed suit as soon as the General Assembly overrode his vetoes, but if he attempted to work with the legislature, as Judge Shepherd had “strongly urged” him to do, I found no story in the Lexington Herald-Leader telling us about it. All I could find was an article entitled “‘See you in court,’ Beshear tells legislative leaders on taking up his vetoes this week.”

One hopes that the legislature and Attorney General Daniel Cameron immediately appeal the decision to the state Court of Appeals, which has been friendlier to restraining our authoritarian Governor, but we can count on the Governor then taking it to the state Supreme Court which, though officially non-partisan is in practice controlled by Democrats.

It may be time for a little revolution!

References

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↑1 Only 19 of the 38 seats were up for election in the state Senate.
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LOL! A group calling itself Refuse Fascism actually advocates fascism, in seeking to deny the right of the accused to counsel But the left have always had an authoritarian streak to themselves; leftism and liberty are mutually exclusive

The left, so many of whom want to defund the police and emasculate law enforcement, will tell you that everyone deserves an attorney who will vigorously defend them in court.

Unless, of course, the defendant is Donald Trump. Then there’s Hell to pay! From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

From laughs over ‘Philly-delphia’ to vandalism at home, Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen draws backlash

by Jeremy Roebuck | February 13, 2021- 6:53 PM

Philadelphia attorney Michael T. van der Veen has taken a starring role in Donald Trump’s impeachment defense over the last two days — but he’s also incurred backlash.

Vandals smashed windows and spray-painted “TRAITOR” on the driveway of his suburban Philadelphia home Friday night, after he spent hours on the Senate floor hurling partisan invective and testily condemning the former president’s second impeachment trial as “constitutional cancel culture.”

A group of demonstrators with the group Refuse Fascism gathered outside his Center City law office chanting, “When van der Veen lies, what do you do? Convict. Convict.”

There’s more at the original. Another article from the Inquirer noted:

Michael van der Veen hired 24-hour private security for his family after vandals smashed windows and spray-painted “TRAITOR” on the driveway of his suburban Philadelphia home Friday night. He told reporters Saturday he received more than 100 death threats.

And they acknowledged being caught off guard by the level of rancor from Trump’s critics and supporters alike — even given the country’s fiercely divided politics and how other lawyers in his orbit have fared.

“I’ve been representing controversial clients for 30 years, and I’ve never experienced this type of vitriol,” said William J. Brennan, another local member of the team whose past clients include priests accused of sexual abuse and judges facing corruption charges. “We had no political agenda here. We are not partisan warriors. We are criminal defense lawyers who represented a client.”

So far, the Editorial Board has been silent, not condemning the attacks on President Trump’s defense lawyers, but, given the state of the #woke dominating the newsroom and the lack of actual journalism from the Inquirer, I wouldn’t be surprised if the editors remained silent.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees that anyone acused of a crime has the “to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

The hand-written copy of the proposed Bill of Rights, 1789, cropped to show the text that would later be ratified as the Sixth Amendment. Click to enlarge.

But, apparently the oh-so-tolerant left don’t believe in the Sixth Amendment and the right of the accused to defend himself and have the assistance of counsel. members of the laughably named Refuse Fascism group demonstrated outside of Mr van der Veen’s office:

Refuse Fascism has a logo as part of their Twitter biography, telling us that, “In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse To Accept a Fascist America!” But what would be more fascist than not allowing an accused defendant to have an attorney to defend himself?

This was their tweet:

Of course, were one of the members of Refuse Fascism arrested, he’d be screaming, “Lawyer! Lawyer! Lawyer!” at the top of his lungs.

In American history, we are taught that patriot John Adams served as counsel for the defense in the trial of eight British soldiers accused of murder during a riot in Boston on March 5, 1770, what was called the Boston Massacre, and he won acquittals.

Before we had our independence, before we had our Constitution and the Sixth Amendment, Mr Adams, passionate advocate of freedom, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and second President of the United States, took on the unpopular cause of defending those British soldiers, because he believed that every man deserves a defense, every man has a right to a defense.

That lesson seems to have been lost on the members of Refuse Fascism. Rather, in protesting the attorneys representing President Trump, they are protesting the right to counsel. They are not refusing fascism, but advocating it.

Of course, Refuse Fascism has an absolute right to assemble and advocate anything they wish. But I, too, have the freedom of speech, and the right to point out that Refuse Fascism is itself advocating fascist behavior.

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The New York Times and The Washington Post want to censor other people’s #FreedomOfSpeech WaPo OpEd piece argues that the Sedition Act of 1798 was a good idea

From 1984, Chapter 2:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an oldfashioned pen, what he had been writing — and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.

Winston Smith knew that all evidence of incorrect thought needed to be erased, yet he couldn’t help from keeping his diary. Mr Smith had found the beautifully-paged blank book in the window of “a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town,” the type of shop that Party members were not supposed to frequent, and just buying the thing had been a violation of discipline. George Orwell didn’t really imagine computers or word-processors or the horrors, horrors! of widespread self-publication on the internet, where anybody, anybody! could read things.

From the Editorial Page of The Wall Street Journal:

Speech and Sedition in 2021

The progressive press decides that dissenters should be suppressed.

By The Editorial Board | January 29, 2021 | 7:21 PM EST

Most Americans learn in school about flagship political excesses in U.S. history like Joe McCarthy’s 1950s inquisitions, the post-World War I Red Scare and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Yet a recent Washington Post opinion piece purports to explain “what the 1798 Sedition Act got right.”

The law banned a wide range of political speech and publication. It was passed by the ruling Federalists to suppress the rival Democratic-Republicans, whom they saw as seditious. The Post piece argues that though their solution was “flawed,” the Federalists had reason to worry about “unregulated freedom of the press.”

The author of the referenced Washington Post OpEd piece is Katlyn Marie Carter, an assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and currently a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. She is writing a book entitled “Houses of Glass: Secrecy, Transparency, and the Birth of Representative Democracy.” She argued:

Citing the problem of misinformation in 1801, Rep. John Rutledge Jr. (S.C.) did not mince words in identifying falsehood as a particular threat to democracy. “In a Republican Government, where public opinion rules everything, it is all-important that truth should be the basis of public information,” he asserted. If public opinion was ill formed — poisoned by lies, deception, misrepresentations or mistakes — the consequences could be dire. “Government, which is the preservative of the general happiness and safety, cannot be secure if falsehood and malice are suffered to rob it of the confidence and affection of the people.”

Rutledge’s words sound like a premonition. Democracies are uniquely dependent on public opinion and trust, which makes the truth crucial to their function — and early Americans knew it.

While the communications world in 1801 was a far cry from the world of smartphones and social media, the two shared a key similarity. When the Internet debuted, it prompted significant optimism that the ease of access to information would promote knowledge. Similarly, early Americans had faith that a newly expanded print media would spread enlightenment. But like today, this initial hope soon gave way to concern. By the late 1790s many concluded that the truth was actually endangered by unregulated freedom of the press; they believed the only way to secure the republic was to punish people for spreading lies. Otherwise, falsehood would poison public opinion and people’s trust in their elected officials would be unduly eroded.

Rutledge’s warning came as he argued for renewal of the Sedition Act of 1798, which among other things, criminalized “false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute.”

Who, I wonder, did Dr Carter believe would determine what was true and what was not? We noted earlier that the (purportedly) private publisher Twitter has, in effect, determined that transgenderism, the idea that people can change their sex through a combination of drug therapy and surgical procedures, is the truth, and speech arguing differently must be prohibited. The New York Times gave OpEd space to Andrew Marantz to claim that Free Speech is Killing Us, and Chad Malloy[1]Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy. The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names … Continue reading to state that Twitter’s restrictions on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promote the freedom of speech. One side of the argument is simply to be suppressed, or, as Mr Orwell put it, “Ignorance is Strength.”

Twitter and Facebook and Joe Biden have all determined that the matter is settled, and therefore statements to the contrary are simply falsehoods, and ought to be suppressed. So far, so far! the government under President Biden hasn’t acted to declare such speech seditious, but private social media sites, which have near monopolistic publication control, apparently have.

Of course, President Biden has only been in office for eleven days now, so give it time; he just might try to use the power of government to shut people up.

The Journal continued to note articles by Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times calling for advertiser boycotts of Fox News, as did Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post. So much for “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” So much for “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”  Apparently these august credentialed media sources believe that Freedom of the Press means only their Freedom of the Press, 

I’ve reached the point where I’ve quoted too much from the Journal, and there is much more at the original. But just one more paragraph:

Much of American journalism, which was supposed to revert to its historic role as a check on those in power after Donald Trump left town, is now devoted to shutting down the commercial lifeline of other media. Think of the precedent for the next populist Republican President who might declare pro-choice publications “deadly.”

Of course, the last populist Republican President did not do that; the worry is that the current pro-abortion Democratic President might declare pro-life publications “deadly.”

That would include this publication!

The next step? Look for the left to start pressuring site hosting services to stop hosting sites like The Pirate’s Cove and The Other McCain and Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion and RedState because those sites don’t agree with what is apparently the Accepted Wisdom concerning transgenderism, and that’s simply unacceptable to the left. Because Parler used Amazon as its site hosting service, Jeff Bezos, owner of the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post was able to lights out the service.[2]Note that I had a Parler account. Parler was a free speech site, but, sadly, its software and presentation were poor.

The Pirate’s Cove uses the blog tagline, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all,” while The Other McCain has, “‘One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.’ — Arthur Koestler”. The left and the credentialed media want us to do the latter, just shut up.

I’ve never been very good at shutting up.

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References
↑1 Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy. The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names and biological sex.
↑2 Note that I had a Parler account. Parler was a free speech site, but, sadly, its software and presentation were poor.