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national politics & policies partisanship Regulating Protest

Home of the Surveilled 

Abusive investigations that must themselves be investigated are piling up.

In the case commanding our attention today, the meta-investigating organization is the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It is investigating the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

Who does FinCEN pursue? True scoundrels? Hapless executives caught in a regulatory net?

Nope. FinCEN has been on fishing expeditions. It hasn’t been going after persons suspected of either willfully committing crimes or even tripping over regulations accidentally, or at least not only such types.

It has been going after anybody whose purchasing history puts them in the category of wrong-thinking rightists — hence, I guess, crypto-terrorists.

FinCEN has been instructing banks to scan customer records for evidence of suspect purchases. Not illegal purchases. Just “suspicious” in light of an ideological filter, unconstitutionally applied.

On Twitter, Representative Jim Jordan reported recently that the subcommittee now knows that FinCEN required financial institutions to screen transactions in which terms like “MAGA,” “Trump,” “Bible,” and “Bass Pro Shop” popped up. 

Apparently, if you’re fishing while wearing a MAGA cap and quoting Genesis, you just might be on the verge of shooting up your local post office.

Please don’t ask me to explain what anybody involved with FinCEN could possibly be thinking by engaging in this illegal spying. Or whether they have even a glancing acquaintance with constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

I’m just glad Jordan and his Weaponization Subcommittee are on the job, “watching the watchers.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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partisanship Regulating Protest Second Amendment rights

Partisanship & Pretense

Protest is a tricky business. 

Had those in power their druthers, no protest would be allowed. Had those out of power their way, all their demands would be met.

I’d say the necessary middle ground lies in the rule of law.

Did the recent Tennessee legislature’s reaction to three legislators who broke House rules follow the law?

Not according to The Washington Post, which provided the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” spin in the headline: “Tennessee House expels two Democrats in historic act of partisan retaliation.”

In the wake of the shooting at the Covenant School in late March, with its death toll of six, “activists descended on the Tennessee Capitol and demanded that lawmakers pass gun-control legislation. Republicans, with supermajorities in both chambers, refused to do so. The three lawmakers — dubbed the Tennessee Three — said they joined the protests inside the legislative chamber to speak out for Tennesseans whose voices have been ignored.”

But what they did is disrupt the proceedings of the legislature. Noisily. Angrily. Not-very-reasonably.

While it’s true that the votes to remove two of the three offending members were along partisan lines, it’s also true that all three offending members were unified by party.

But only two were removed from the legislature. Both are black, and the woman not removed is white. So of course the big issue for many became racism.

She escaped expulsion by one vote.

Was that vote racist?

Well, the two who were ousted used bullhorns within the legislative chamber. She did not.

That does seem an extra-outrageous breach of decorum.

Of course, the whole idea of legislators jumping sides to pretend they are “voiceless” protesters is itself absurd, making the issue here neither partisanship nor racism.

It’s a question of posturing and pretense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Note: After his expulsion last week, the Nashville-Davidson Metro Council yesterday voted to return Rep. Justin Jones to the state legislature on an interim basis. A special election will be held to fill the seat in the coming months.

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general freedom property rights Regulating Protest

Don’t Destroy Farmers

It’s lucky that today’s anti-agriculture tyrants weren’t around when the Fertile Crescent was just getting going.

But they’re here now.

And they seem hell-bent on destroying farms.

That’s what thousands upon thousands of European farmers are saying, anyhow, and we should listen to them. After all, they provide the food we eat. We need to eat in order to survive. If we don’t survive, we can’t continue living. So, whatever we do, let’s keep the farmers.

But that’s not current policy, at least in Europe. In the Netherlands, Belgium, and elsewhere, powerful political interests continue their crusade to shut down thousands of farms in the glorious cause of pursuing “climate goals” which, they believe, by being achieved will enable the fine-tuning of the weather and the creation of the best environment.

Or at least to say they gave it the old college try.

“I want to have the possibility to continue my dad’s farm,” Brendt Beyens told the AP. “But right now I feel like the possibility of that happening is slowly shrinking and it’s getting nearly impossible.”

So once again, thousands of tractors are clogging the streets, this time in Brussels, the capital of Belgium (video of the protest is on Twitter). The farmers object to being destroyed. They have a point.

Nor is it just about the livelihoods of sodbusters. With food prices rising worldwide and the threat of serious famine looms in Africa and parts of Asia, it’s also about saving lives.

My advice for today is don’t destroy farmers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ideological culture international affairs Regulating Protest

Making Symbolism Count

“Governments do unconscionable things every day; it is in their nature,” writes Katherine Mangu-Ward in the February Reason. “But not all transgressions are equal.”

Ms. Mangu-Ward’s piece is entitled “Bodies Against the State,” and though she doesn’t quite come out and say it, not all protests are equal, either, with some deserving more respect than others.

“In China, crowds of people line the streets,” Mangu-Ward writes. “They are holding blank sheets of paper.” This is something I’ve written about, too, in “Point Blank Protest” back in November. “The police nonetheless know what they mean. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party know what they mean. The world knows what they mean.”

Helpfully, she explains: “the protesters’ goal is to make manifest the implied violence that authoritarian states use to keep order.”

Of course, in China, even more than here (not all transgressions being equal), the state’s violence is too often more than merely implied. 

And in America, the symbolism of protests has been marred by too much violence — something Mangu-Ward mangles in her piece. But the point of pitting oneself symbolically against state crimes remains important, as she explains: “The most perfect and enduring image of a person weaponizing his body against the state was taken after the brutal suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The unknown Chinese man standing in front of a tank didn’t have to hold a sign for the entire world to know exactly what the problem was.”

The art of protest needs some perfecting in the west. When our protests run to riot, their symbolic impact becomes confused, and adds to our ideological strife, clarifying nothing — quite unlike Tank Man, and the blank paper protests.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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general freedom international affairs Regulating Protest social media

Rotten Apple

Apple Inc. has a good side and a bad side.

A strong work ethic, oodles of innovativeness, much neat technology.

But a taste for censorship and a willingness to abet the censorious efforts of China’s totalitarians.

One manifestation of Apple’s contempt for unfettered discourse? Its apparent threat to kick the Twitter app off the iOS platform now that Twitter is run by someone friendlier to freedom of speech than the previous management.

Obnoxious though this would be, it’s not half as horrible as knowingly facilitating Chinazi repression. Yet Apple has recently crippled the iPhone AirDrop feature that protestors in China have used to share files like videos of the surging protests against the government’s insane zero-COVID mega-lockdown policies.

Because of a new iOS update, iPhone users in China — and only in China — can now only send files to persons not on their contact list for just ten minutes, hampering the ability of protesters and others to evade Chinese government censorship.

The company’s officers read the news. If Apple really didn’t intend to do this, all it has to do is roll out another update pronto to restore full AirDrop functionality.

Reclaim the Net notes, however, that Apple has often helped the Chinese Communist Party conduct its censorship: for one thing, by removing thousands of apps from its Chinese store at their behest. The deleted apps include VPN apps that helped users evade China’s wide-ranging and determined censorship of the Internet.

Think Different, Apple, not in lockstep with tyrants.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Sources of Trudeau 2022

The willingness of Canada’s thug-in-chief to so obnoxiously penalize protest — for one, “de-banking” trucker-protesters and supporters alike without even fake court orders — has shocked many of civilized sensibility.

Shouldn’t be surprising, though. It’s nothing new either in Justin Trudeau’s conduct or in that of Western governments. (The Canadian parliament has now endorsed the crackdown.)

David Solway reports that Trudeau’s reign has long been blighted by tyrannical policies as well as by overt sympathy for terrorists, dictators, and dictatorship.

And Glenn Greenwald observes that it has become standard in the West for many “who most flamboyantly proclaim that they are fighting fascists [to] wield the defining weapons of despotism” — weapons like squelching dissent (directly or indirectly by enlisting private firms to function as agents of repression) and punishing dissenters without trial.

Greenwald relates the example of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. When the U.S. government found no way to criminally charge him, it pressured firms to terminate his financial accounts and kick WikiLeaks off private servers.

Such tactics as pressuring, or ordering, companies to censor and financially ostracize political opponents “without a whiff of due process” are now part of the standard governmental toolkit.

The scale on which Trudeau has been doing this, and the flagrancy of it, may seem new in North America. But he is relying on well-established precedent. Pre-pandemic precedent.

But the framework for opposing this new authoritarianism has more precedent. Alberta’s premier, Jason Kenney, has rightly sued Trudeau and the Canadian government for abuse of authority in resorting to emergency powers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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