The politicized Department of Justice

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “stan.”]

Here’s an interesting look back at the history of the DOJ, and how it’s been a politicized force for a long time – often but not always on behalf of the Democrats. The article includes suggestions for reform.

I want to add that one of Obama’s less well-known but nevertheless consequential acts was to import large numbers of leftist lawyers into the DOJ during his term. And by “large numbers” I mean large. Attorneys J. Christian Adams and Hans A. Von Spakovsky have written about it here, in a series of pieces that much alarmed me at the time (starting in 2011):

In 2011, we produced the Every Single One series for PJ Media about an unprecedented wave of ideological hiring of leftist attorneys into the career ranks of the Justice Department. The series documented the partisan and radical background of every single one of the 113 new Justice Department lawyers hired into the Obama Civil Rights Division from January 2009 to January 2011.

With the help of PJ Media, we will now be updating that revealing report — and sharing details about the background of Justice Department attorneys hired since 2011. Because we have obtained all of the resumes of the attorney hires in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice since then.

And once again, every single one of them has an intensely ideological background…

When we are finished, you will see that the Obama Justice Department has assembled a law firm of hundreds of fringe leftists to enforce a brave new vision of civil rights law.

Why the Civil Rights Division? Simple — it may be one of the most powerful components of the entire federal government. If a president wanted to “fundamentally transform” the nation, he would likely start with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

The tentacles of the Division reach into virtually every crevice of American life.

And that’s exactly what happened, making things much much worse.

You can also read this piece about why Adams resigned from the DOJ.

It was around that same time – 2011 – that attorney Harvey Silverglate wrote the book Three Felonies a Day, a book with the thesis that the expansion of federal law allows the DOJ to successfully target anyone it wishes. This represents a grave and obvious danger to liberty. From the description at Amazon:

In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.

But as long as it’s the right that’s being targeted, Democrats don’t mind. In fact, they cheer.

Trump makes a second announcement today

The New Neo Posted on by

And this one is considerably more substantive:

More here.

As Ace points out, it should be made very clear that this would only apply to large – essentially, monopolist – social media platforms and not to other formats like blogs. The latter are vehicles for the views of one person (or just a few people) rather than huge social media forums with no central speaker and where the entire raison d’etre is discourse among the millions of commenters.

I believe, although I’m not sure, that all of what Trump describes would have to be passed though legislation rather than executive fiat.

China and the revenge of COVID

The New Neo Posted on by

I never trusted China’s COVID statistics to begin with. Could it be that a nation where COVID began, with the largest population in the world, had almost no COVID deaths and little COVID after an initial surge and then a draconian lockdown? That seemed improbable to the point of being nearly impossible.

But whatever was happening, it seems that the rigid reaction of China’s government did keep COVID at least somewhat in check for a while, until they couldn’t keep their fingers in the dike anymore. Now China appears to be experiencing a surge:

Empty streets, deserted shopping centers, and residents staying away from one another are the new normal in Beijing – but not because the city, like many Chinese ones before it, is under a “zero-Covid” lockdown.

This time, it’s because Beijing has been hit with a significant, and spreading, outbreak – a first for the Chinese capital since the beginning of the pandemic, a week after leaders eased the country’s restrictive Covid policy…

Similar scenes are playing out across Beijing, as offices, shops and residential communities report being understaffed or shifting working arrangements as employees fall ill with the virus. Meanwhile, others stay home to avoid being infected.

Pay now or pay later.

China isn’t even keeping a full range of statistics anymore – not that their statistics were ever reliable, as I said earlier. But it does seem clear that the number of cases are exploding there:

“The current strains will spread faster in China than they have spread in other parts of the world because those other parts of the world have some immunity against infection from previous waves of earlier Omicron strains,” said University of Hong Kong chair professor of epidemiology Ben Cowling.

At least the Omicron strains are milder in terms of very serious cases and deaths than the earlier strains were. That may keep the hospitals from being utterly overwhelmed. I read somewhere (can’t find it now) that the number of ICU beds per capita in China is a lot lower than in most Western countries.

China’s government propaganda organ says that the situation is under control and everyone should trust Xi. Sure thing.

It’s roundup time again

The New Neo Posted on by

So much is going on:

(1) Jonathan Turley opines on the Biden family’s threats against those who would testify against them:

(2) Trump says he’ll be making a big announcement, which turns out to be that he’s selling something called NFTs, in this case Trump Digital Trading Cards. What’s going on? Perhaps he’s trying to be funny. But let’s just say that he’s certainly not on a roll these days.

(3) There was praise in the comments for this interview, and although I haven’t read it yet I thought I’d call your attention to it.

(4) One Iranian exile’s opinion of what’s going on in Iran right now:

The demonstrations need to be continuous. The Iranian regime is very weak now. I know many people who were senior in the regime, in the IRGC, and who have stopped working with them. If the demonstrations continue, and larger numbers come to the revolution, and the strikes continue and spread, I think that step by step, the regime will begin to lose control. I think it’s going to happen.

Historically, that’s certainly the way these things tend to happen: first slowly, then all at once, and involving people in the regime or doing its bidding ultimately breaking off with it. I have no idea whether that’s the case in Iran right now, but I hope so.

(5) I’ve certainly noticed – have you? – a lot of people are sick lately. Someone I know who has a bad cough said the pharmacies are out of basic cough medicine and nearly out of more specialty types.

Kash Patel wants to know about the role of Wray and Barr in the FBI and DOJ liaison with Twitter

The New Neo Posted on by

And so do I.

Here’s Patel:

I decided to take a trip back in time and see what I wrote when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke and was suppressed, and we also discovered that the FBI had been sitting on the laptop for a long time. Here’s a repeat of a post of mine from October 29, 2020 [emphasis added now]:

Well, we already knew the FBI was given the Hunter laptop in December of 2019, didn’t we? That was the word from the computer repairman in Delaware.

And now the following has been reported by James Rosen:

“A Justice Department official confirmed to journalist James Rosen of Sinclair Broadcasting Group that in 2019 the FBI “opened up a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden and his associates that is focused on allegations of money laundering and remains open and active today.”…

“Bobulinski told Rosen he was interviewed by the FBI on October 23, 2020, for about five hours, with up to six agents present at one time. He made three cell phones available to the agents, who ‘carefully examined the digital evidence’ contained on the phones.”

So the FBI interview of Bobulinski was only recently, after Bobulinski had gone public with his role in the Hunter and Joe Biden story.

And I hope the interview was not merely for the purpose of Flynning Bobulinski at some future date, if you know what I mean. Because I would not put it past them.

So, what was the FBI doing with the laptop in the meantime? Perhaps Toobining themselves?

Whatever they were doing, they kept mighty mum about it, as President Trump was impeached by the Democrats for daring to suggest that the Ukrainians look into the Biden corruption allegations, and Joe Biden became the Democratic presidential nominee.

Perhaps the laptop was being saved as an insurance policy for Kamala.

I would guess that Wray and Barr would say the briefings were to warn about “Russian disinformation” that might affect the 2020 election. But weekly face-to-face meetings? Seems like a lot more must have discussed than that.

What are the legal ramifications of what happened between Twitter and the government actors, whomever they were? Philip Hamburger writes about it in the WSJ (I can’t read the whole thing because of the paywall, but Instapundit has a hefty excerpt):

Cooperation between government officials and private parties to suppress speech could be considered a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights. The current administration won’t entertain such a theory, but a future one might.

Therein lies the heart of the matter, of course: whether something is prosecuted or not depends on the prosecutors. Biden’s DOJ is really not going to prosecute the DOJ for doing what amounts to the Democrats’ bidding. And even any future Republican-appointed Attorney General would have to deal with the leftist nature of the DOJ itself (see this piece by J. Christian Adams for a fuller discussion of the problem). Some sort of more drastic reform is obviously needed.

More from the Hamburger WSJ article:

Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code provides: “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, . . . they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

This post-Civil War statute responded to the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan and similar private organizations. Then as now, government officers sometimes relied on private allies to accomplish what they couldn’t—sometimes violently, sometimes more subtly. Whether for government officers or cooperating private parties, Section 241 makes conspiracy to violate civil rights a crime…

Because the First Amendment doesn’t bar private parties from independently suppressing speech, Section 241 would apply to tech censorship only if government officers, acting as part of a conspiracy, have violated the Constitution. Doctrine on Section 241 requires this underlying constitutional violation to be clear. But clarity isn’t elusive. The type of suppression most clearly barred by the First Amendment was the 17th-century English censorship imposed partly through cooperative private entities—universities and the Stationers’ Company, the printers trade guild.

Government remains bound by the First Amendment even when it works through private cutouts.

I don’t foresee the likelihood of prosecution in this matter, and absolutely not in the near future.

Alien octopus?

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t really think so.

But the other day some commenter brought it up for discussion, and here’s the idea:

A paper published in the journal ‘Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology’ looked into the origins of life here on our planet. A team of no less than 33 researchers explored several theories. The one that catches the eye is that cephalopods, namely squid, octopus and cuttlefish, may have originated from somewhere other than Earth.

Well, they are surpassingly odd.

When I was a child I was a big aficionado of Classics Illustrated, and my brother and I had – among other comics of the genre – a well-thumbed copy of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Remember the Martians?:

The Martians are described as octopus-like creatures: the “body” consisting of a disembodied head nearly 4 ft across, having two eyes; a V-shaped, beak-like mouth; and two branches each of eight ‘almost whip-like’ tentacles, grouped around the mouth, referred to as the ‘hands’. They reproduce asexually, by “budding” off from a parent. Internally, the Martians consist of a brain, lungs, heart, and blood vessels; they have no organs for digestion, and therefore sustain themselves on Earth by mechanically transfusing blood via pipettes from other animals, notably humans…The Martians’ arrival on Earth is aboard large, cylindrical spacecraft launched from some kind of immense cannon on Mars. Their chief weapon of war is the ‘Heat-Ray’, a directed-energy weapon capable of incinerating any organism it strikes. This is mounted on an articulated arm attached to the front of the tall tripod, called a ‘fighting-machine’ in Wells’ novel, which travels across the landscape destroying humans and their habitat. A secondary weapon, the “Black Smoke,” is a toxic gas released from canisters launched at a distance from Bazooka-like tubes, referred to in the novel as a “gun,” which kills humans and animals alike; it is rendered harmless by Martian high-pressure steam jets and water.

Apparently there’s something about the octopus that seems otherworldly. From that first link:

“The genome of the Octopus shows a staggering level of complexity with 33 000 protein-coding genes more than is present in Homo sapiens.”

And here’s the pièce de résistance: “The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus […] to the common Cuttlefish […] to Squid […] to the common Octopus […] are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form – it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant ‘future’ in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.”

They offer the possibility that today’s octopuses are the descendants of creatures that arrived on Earth frozen in an icy comet. Why the octopus in particular? “Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch colour and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene.” This terrestrial evolution occurred thanks to “cryopreserved squid and/or octopus eggs” crashing into the ocean on comets “several hundred million years ago.”

The researchers also give another explanation. An extraterrestrial virus infected a population of early squid, causing them to evolve rapidly into the octopuses we know today.

Other scientists say this doesn’t hold up. H. G. Wells could not be reached for comment.

Twitter files #5: retrofitting the “rules” in order to ban Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Part V of the Twitter files can be found here.]

The powerful wokesters at Twitter wanted to ban Trump, the guy they all knew – just knew – is a Nazi. And so when he didn’t violate their rules, they made up a new one to enable them to ban him. Let’s call it retrofitting the rules in order to get Trump.

Oh, and they broke another rule, the one about making allowances for heads of state – the one that lets people like Khameini keep on tweeting that Israel is a cancerous tumor that must be destroyed (Bari Weiss lists many such examples from around the world of heads of state explicitly calling for massive violence and being allowed to tweet on). Then again, maybe it was the Twitter gatekeepers who were the election deniers, and didn’t think that Trump was president in the first place.

There were some rather lonely voices protesting the banning, including this one: “‘Maybe because I am from China,’ said one employee on January 7, ‘I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.'”

Maybe because I am from China. Let that sink in.

The MSM apparently isn’t covering any of this – except with a pillow, till it stops moving. They want the Twitter files to be trees that fall in the forest with only the right witnessing the crash. That’s why I think that Musk’s insistence that these revelations be published on Twitter itself, rather than on something like Substack or in the NY Post, was a good move that guarantees the widest possible audience given the MSM’s refusal to deal with it.

You can find more about how how it was done here, but the gist of it is this:

Twitter executives, including former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde, reinterpreted then-President Donald Trump’s final Jan. 8, 2021, tweets to overrule the initial finding of the site’s safety team that they were not in violation of the rules, according to internal messages published by journalist Bari Weiss Monday.

Trump first tweeted that the “75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me … will have a Giant Voice long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” before tweeting a follow-up roughly an hour later saying he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. Members of Twitter’s safety team initially rejected increasingly agitated calls from Twitter staff to ban Trump, saying that neither message was in clear violation of the rules, as they contained no overt or coded incitement to violence.

Less than 90 minutes after this initial assessment by the Twitter safety team, Gadde messaged another higher-ranking staffer that the safety team, suggesting that the team may have been incorrect to interpret the term “American Patriots” as being in reference Trump voters as opposed to the rioters present on Jan. 6…

Gadde said it was hidden code for incitement to violence. Talk about Orwellian interpretations! Or perhaps against a rule about “glorification of violence” – but to even imagine any of that, they had to interpret “American patriots” as the January 6th demonstrators rather than Trump’s voters, although Trump said the latter.

The left is used to running all the major media (except Fox) and social media outlets. It considers it their right to do so, because they are virtuous. The idea that someone else could now be in charge, allowing more voices to be heard, is anathema to them. Outrageous – how dare Musk?

Poll indicates support for Trump fading

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course, polls can be wrong, and opinion can change – sometimes rapidly. But my gut tells me that this is substantially correct:

The poll finds Trump deeply unpopular at 30% favorable, 62% unfavorable. That places him well below Joe Biden at 46%/50% and Kamala Harris at 36%/52%. In a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden, Biden wins easily, 47% to 40%.

Perhaps equally important, Ron DeSantis leads Biden by 47% to 43%. Only 25% of respondents want Trump to run in 2024. Among Republicans and Republican leaners, DeSantis is favored over Trump by 56% to 33%.

Deserved or not, the last couple of years in particular have taken a harsh toll.