Link here.

By Andrew Napolitano, Antiwar.com, 9/7/23

In a year, if a friend asks you if the CIA is in your underwear, you’d probably not take the question seriously. You’d be wrong. The CIA is spending millions in tax dollars to get into your underwear next year.

Eleven years ago, when this column asked if the CIA was in your kitchen, folks who read only the title of the column mocked it. Yet, then-CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus gave a talk to CIA analysts that he fully expected to be kept secret. In the talk he revealed that CIA vendors had discovered a means to log on to the computer chips in kitchen microwave ovens and dishwashers. From there, they could listen in real time to the conversations in a kitchen if those chatting were nearby the appliances.

Unfortunately for Petraeus, but fortunately for the Constitution, one of his analysts was so critical of the CIA’s disdain for constitutional norms that the analyst recorded a major portion of Petraeus’s talk and leaked it to the media. Is the CIA in your kitchen? Yes, not physically, but virtually.

The CIA, notwithstanding a clause in its charter that prohibits it from engaging in surveillance in the United States or from engaging in any law enforcement activities, has a long history of domestic spying without search warrants.

That last phrase “without search warrants” when used in conjunction with CIA spying is redundant. The CIA does not deal with search warrants. It behaves as if the Fourth Amendment – and the First (protecting the freedom of speech and of the press) and Fifth (protecting life, liberty and property), for that matter – do not exist or somehow do not pertain to its agents.

Not long ago, I was challenged to a public debate at the Conservative Political Action Conference by the general who was then the head of the National Security Agency, the CIA’s domestic surveillance cousin. The topic of the debate was whether domestic warrantless spying is constitutional. I accepted the challenge and aggressively pressed the general on the notorious lack of fidelity that the 17 federal spying agencies have for the Constitution in general, and specifically the Fourth Amendment.

The general gave me two answers, both of which would have flunked a bar examination. First, he argued that the Fourth Amendment only protects against unreasonable surveillance, and his 60,000 domestic spies were behaving reasonably. After the laughter died down, I pointed out that the Supreme Court has held that all searches and seizures – all surveillance – conducted without search warrants are as a matter of law unreasonable, and thus violative of the amendment.

Then he retreated to a post-9/11 argument crafted by the Department of Justice in the George W. Bush administration. That argument offers that the Fourth Amendment only restrains law enforcement; it does not restrain the intelligence community. I pointed out that this view is defied by both language and history.

The plain language of the amendment has no exceptions to it. Rather, it protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

I then reminded him – we were friends, mind you; but I could not let him get away with publicly trashing the document he and I had both sworn to preserve, protect and defend – that the Fourth Amendment was written in the aftermath of British intelligence agents breaking down the doors of colonists’ homes ostensibly looking for compliance with the Stamp Act of 1765 but really looking for subversive materials by folks whom today we call the Founding Fathers.

I present this brief background so as to offer a flavor for the mindset of the feds who spy on us and to address the latest craze among senior level intelligence folks in the Biden administration.

Last week, the Director of National Intelligence – she is the nominal head of all 17 federal surveillance agencies – revealed to Congress that she had spent $22 million in order to develop cotton fibers that she called smart clothing. The fibers will enable the CIA and other federal spies to record audio, video and geolocation data from your shirt, pants, socks and even your underwear. She billed this as the largest single investment ever made to develop Smart ePants.

Smarty pants – how appropriate is that name for federal intrusion? Smarty pants is the jerk who can’t stop talking and won’t change the subject.

The CIA does not directly develop its ability to connect to your kitchen microwave and dishwasher or your socks and underwear. Rather, it hires outside groups to do so. In the case of smarty pants, 28 American tech firms and laboratories have helped to develop this monstrosity. Most are not household names, but some are – like the University of Virginia (which is owned by the state of Virginia), Penn State (which is owned by the state of Pennsylvania) and DuPont (which owns most of the state of Delaware).

You can’t make this stuff up. The federal government’s appetite for surveillance is quite literally insatiable. And its respect for the individual natural right to be left alone is nonexistent. It traffics in evading and avoiding the Constitution, using absurd and puerile arguments that have never been accepted by the courts, even though every single federal employee has sworn an oath of fidelity to the Constitution as it is generally understood and interpreted.

When the DNI told Congress about this – while Congress was on its summer break – not a peep was heard from anyone in Congress or from the sleepy White House for whom the DNI works.

Does the government work for us, or do we work for the government? What employee gets to spy on his bosses by putting trick textiles into the bosses’ underwear and then gets away with it? When will Congress protect our liberties? When will enough of this warrantless spying be enough?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.

COPYRIGHT 2021 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO – DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

By Alexander Rubinstein, The Grayzone, 8/21/23

A PR offensive to inundate the American public with pro-Ukraine war advertisements during the 2024 election is the latest initiative of neocon chickenhawk Bill Kristol. While targeted at GOP voters, the campaign appears to be another Democratic Party front.

Defending Democracy Together, a neoconservative outfit led by career chickenhawk scribe Bill Kristol, has launched a new initiative called “Republicans for Ukraine” to transform the 2024 presidential election into a referendum on US funding for the NATO proxy war. 

Urging Republicans in Congress to support more funding for Ukraine in the upcoming appropriations bill is also a key item on the agenda.

Kristol had defined himself as a leader of the Republican Party’s neoconservative faction, bashing isolationist and antiwar GOP figures on the pages of his now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine while laying the intellectual groundwork for the invasion of Iraq through his Project for a New American Century. 

By fashioning his Defending Democracy Together as a bastion of Never Trumpism, Kristol was able to ingratiate himself with elite Democrats eager for Republican allies in their messianic battle against the Bad Orange Man. His anti-Trump efforts ultimately earned him a cringeworthy MSNBC tribute celebrating the unrepentant neocon as “Woke Bill Kristol.”

Now, as the Ukrainian counteroffensive fails and a majority of Americans declare opposition for the first time to sending more military aid to Ukraine, Kristol is launching a multimillion dollar ad blitz to keep the tanks slogging through the Donbas mud and the dark money flowing into his bank accounts.

“Ukrainian troops fought alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now they are fighting to defend their democracy,” Kristol’s campaign announces on its website. “Most importantly, American military, financial, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine has helped them weaken Russia.”

His initiative has therefore invoked the military debacles that turned the GOP base firmly against neoconservatism and into the arms of Trump, presenting Ukraine’s participation in these forever wars as justification for a new one. 

And as we will see, Kristol’s supposedly Republican operation has been funded by a top Democratic Party donor with close ties to US intelligence.

Pro-war ads for a GOP base turning firmly against NATO’s proxy war

To generate viral content for its $2 million “Republicans for Ukraine” campaign, Defending Democracy Together gathered testimony from 50 GOP voters, drawing from a base of mostly white collar baby boomers alienated by the non-interventionist direction of the party base. 

In each testimonial, the interviewees spouted boilerplate talking points on “defending democracy” and opposing authoritarianism that could have just as easily been produced by senior fellows at any arms industry funded think tank on DC’s K Street. 

One veteran featured in the campaign claims he spent two decades fighting the “Soviet Union’s threat to freedom,” and offers his hope that Republicans for Ukraine “can serve as counterprogramming to conservative radio and TV show hosts who are challenging additional aid to Ukraine.”

Some of the ads display a geopolitical paranoia far beyond the scope of average American voters. Teresa Benson from Minnesota, for example, is worried that “if nobody tries to stop [Putin] in Ukraine, that next he would attack Moldova and any other non-NATO countries in the area.”

The campaign’s advertisements will air “on cable and network TV and digitally on Youtube through the end of the year.” The outfit has even purchased ad space on Fox News during the first Republican primary debate on August 23 being held in Milwaukee.

In addition to the ads, the group has also purchased 10 strategically placed billboards in Milwaukee, urging debate attendees to “support Ukraine” and “Stand up to Putin.” Hints that the operation may expand can be found within a Google Drive folder maintained by the campaign, entitled “Billboards – August 2023.”

One image is labeled “ukraine-times-square-01.”

“Too many of the party’s leaders seem to think there’s no penalty to be paid for standing against Ukrainian democracy and America’s role in supporting the fight for freedom,” said Gunner Ramer, the campaign’s national spokesman. Among Ramer’s first positions out of college was an internship for the longshot pro-war 2016 presidential candidate and former CIA intelligence officer Evan McMullin.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Defending Democracy Together co-founder and former alcohol industry lobbyist Sarah Longwell lamented shifts within the Republican Party base. These included Republicans becoming “more protectionist on trade,” and “more populist.” But nothing causes her more concern than changes in “Republican attitudes around foreign policy.”

“It was alarming in the focus groups to see so many Republican voters talk about Ukraine or [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky in disparaging terms,” Longwell told the Washington Post.

The Omidyar connection

If Defending Democracy Together’s short history is any indication, the “Republicans for Ukraine” initiative may actually be powered by money from top supporters of the Democratic Party and the ultimate architect of the Ukraine war: President Joe Biden.

Defending Democracy Together was the top dark money spender in the 2020 election with its front, the Republican Accountability Project (formerly Republican Voters Against Trump) leading the charge. By injecting more than $15 million dollars into the campaign, the outfit more than doubled the spending of the second-highest ranked dark money outfit. Its ads urged Republicans to vote for the Democrat, Joe Biden.

Since the outfit is powered by dark money, it is impossible to know who greases its wheels. However, disclosures by one NGO offer insight into the liberal leanings of its main known backer: tech mogul and US intelligence partner Pierre Omidyar, whose Democracy Fund distributed $4.15 million into Defending Democracy Together and its offshoot, Republicans for the Rule of Law, between 2018 and 2021.

As I reported with Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal, Omidyar has leveraged the fortune he amassed as the founder of Ebay to support establishment Democratic candidates while his various foundations act as cutouts for regime change operations waged by US intelligence, including in Ukraine. 

Defending Democracy Together serves as the sponsor for a mind-boggling array of important-sounding initiatives, all supposedly representative of the GOP: Republicans for Voting Rights, the Republican Accountability Project, Republicans for the Rule of Law, the Becoming American Initiative, The Russia Tweets, and now, Republicans for Ukraine.

Its first project, Republicans for the Rule of Law, was introduced in a Washington Post column by Jennifer Rubin, a neoconservative former George W. Bush cheerleader who switched parties during the Trump era. Rubin hailed the Kristol-led campaign for launching an effort to “protect [Robert] Mueller,” the FBI’s special counsel investigator who ultimately failed to turn up evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia. The Republicans for the Rule of Law campaign pushed ads on Fox News and MSNBC touting Mueller’s Republican bonafides over footage of Marines firing off mortars in the jungles of Vietnam.

As calls to impeach President Donald Trump over his threats to withhold military aid to Ukraine reached a fever pitch in 2019, Republicans For The Rule of Law ran a million-dollar campaign to “run television ads on Fox and MSNBC, calling on Republicans to ‘demand the facts’ about Mr. Trump and Ukraine.” 

The name of Republicans For The Rule Of Law was tinged with an irony that is impossible to ignore: When US presidents have lied to the public to justify catastrophic military adventures and the sadistic torture of detainees, its founder demonstrated little interest in the rule of law. And today, the neocon guru may not even be a Republican at all.

By Thomas Harrington, Brownstone Institute, 9/1/23

In his marvelous Samba da Benção the Brazilian writer, singer, diplomat, and professional malandro Vinicius de Moraes speaks of the “art of the encounter” which, as the rest of the famous song-poem suggests, speaks to the essentially prayerful and therefore sacred nature of our attempts to understand each other, and the need to persist in the midst of life’s many tragedies and misunderstandings. It presumes, in other words, that there is unexplainable beauty and enchantment to be experienced, providing we can learn to be fully present in our encounters—including sad ones—with our fellow travelers. 

It’s not like Vinicius was inventing anything terribly new. The call to cultivate a state of expectant waiting in the midst of often sordid realities of life can be found, in one form or another, in all of the world’s major religious traditions. Indeed, it could be argued, and many have, that it is precisely the cultivation of the habit of stubborn hoping that separates us from the rest of the planet’s living creatures. 

Though I cannot be sure, I doubt the steers trudging toward their demise in the chutes at a stockyard are engaged in prayerfully remembering the beauty their eyes have taken in over the years or the internal warmth felt in the intimate communications with other bovines, or that they are hoping against hope that something approaching the sheer magic of those moments will once again visit them in this world or the next. Or that, conversely, they are obsessively contemplating the fate of what awaits them in the kill-house. 

But if, in fact, they did have this same cognitive and emotional tendencies, you can be sure that agricultural scientists, working for the ever smaller number of firms that control our food supply, would have used every genetic, behavioral, and pharmacological tool in their power to rid them of this way of being. 

After all, an angry steer is much more likely to act out in the chutes, thus putting a crimp on productivity, and from there, profit, the be-all and end-all of contemporary life. And all the cortisol in the system of the stressed and depressed ones probably does, as some have asserted, affect the quality of the meat. 

An important element of the practice of expectant waiting is presuming, at least initially, the essential goodwill of all with whom we share words and ideas in the course of our days. 

But of course, not everyone does come to encounters with others in a spirit of goodwill. In fact, many people often arrive at personal encounters with their minds set on extracting whatever material or spiritual good they can from the other person, and/or seeking the thrill certain of them seem to get from exercising one degree or another of control over that other’s life destiny. 

Again, there is little terribly novel in what I have just said. All of the great wisdom traditions have recognized the irretrievably dichotomous nature of the human being.

However, for reasons having to do with our relatively brief and fortunate history, and the fact that our collective was conceived, unlike those in most other places, within the relatively new paradigm of inexorable linear progress, Americans, it seems, have a harder time than most when it comes admitting the essentially coequal status of good and evil within the human heart. Unlike people from other cultures I have known, Americans seem to have a need to believe that human beings are more good than malevolent, and that somehow someway everything will work out well in the end. 

This lack of what Unamuno called the “tragic sense of life” was, up until a very short time ago, arguably our greatest asset as a people, and perhaps the prime source of the magnetism we’ve exercised over so much of the world during the last hundred or so years. 

But as times change, so must our assumptions about how the culture around us actually functions. If, in fact, we were ever truly the fresh-faced kid on the block sowing optimism and promoting justice around the world in anomalously generous quantities, that is clearly no longer the case. 

We are now a large and flailing empire whose elites, like the elites of all empires in decline, are seeking to desperately stave off the inevitable by barricading themselves (and as many of us as they can) inside the walls of their own propaganda edifice, and by bringing the same brutality they have used to tame distant others and steal their resources to bear on the great mass of their homeborn population. 

It is never fun to have to admit that someone or some social entity to which you have given your trust and your presumption of goodwill is not only manifestly incapable of reciprocating it, but is frankly bent on sacrificing your well-being and your dignity to its desperate attempts to cling to a few more months, years, or decades of obscene privilege. 

But that is where we are with our present government and the behemoth corporate entities with whom they now seamlessly cooperate in their desire to further control and exploit us. 

A minority of Americans, not surprisingly from the less favored classes where the brutality of day-to-day life tends to rob the elite’s non-stop happy-ending stories of their legs, has figured this out. And this is why they are systematically slandered in the media as frothing racists and violent extremists. 

The elite gambit here is to stigmatize such people so badly that no one on the cusp of perhaps accepting all or part of their grim but realistic social analysis will deign to go near them for fear of being seen as similarly tainted. Out of sight, the elites presume, out of mind. 

But that still leaves us with 65-70 percent of the population who are not quite ready to accept the reality of the intense disdain our predatory government and corporate elites have for them, and who still want to believe, in some measure, in the possibility of justice and dignity under the rules of the game as currently constituted. 

If the elite game with the openly pissed-off cohort of the population involves the forced disappearance of their social reality and their feelings of anguish, the one with this much larger and potentially more troublesome group revolves around the gradual anesthetization of their inherent desire to dream of better outcomes. 

And that is why they are doing everything in their power to discourage among us the age-old practice of looking into the eyes of others and listening mindfully to their take on the world, for they know that doing so forges bonds of empathy and links of complicity that have the potential to catalyze the creation of new social and political institutions more capable of sustaining our hopes of a more dignified life. 

I don’t know about you, but I never asked for “contact-free” service at restaurants and stores, or the ever-inefficient “efficiency” of online apps and bots rather than human beings when it comes to solving business and bureaucratic problems. Or being protected from the contamination possibilities of my fellow human beings through Plexiglas screens and useless, personality robbing masks. 

Rather, I have and always will seek contact-rich engagements with full face visibility and full vocal expression in all my social encounters because, like Vinicius, I understand the immense generative power of these things. 

I know that if I hadn’t been effectively forced into sometimes challenging engagements with widely varying people in crazily diverse social settings in these full-frontal ways I probably would have forever remained an only slightly less anxious version of the often timorous young adolescent I was.

And had I not grown in confidence through those experiences, I would never have gained my now enormous trust in the life-enriching power of serendipity; that is, how, if you give others the slightest opening for communication, you will find out surprising, if not near miraculous things about them and their life trajectories, stories that, like our dialogues with nature, tend to fill us with awe and enhance our trust in the power of human agency and resilience. 

Our current elites appear, unfortunately, to be more aware of all this than are most of us. 

And this is why they seek to mask our children, fill them with germophobic dread, and promote having them before screens filled with garbage content before they’ve ever has the chance to listen silently and without distraction to the birds as they wake up on a summer morning, or sit at a dinner table with people from different generations and different points of view, and learn about the inherent complexity, as well as the frequent hapless folly (great for learning tolerance!), of human relations. 

They want, in short, that our young never really become aware of the art of the encounter and the enormous power and suppleness it can bring to their lives. 

No, they want them incurious, history-less and feeling inert as they trudge along in the well laid-out chutes leading to the land of UBI and regularly scheduled injectable “enhancements” that will seamlessly insure that they can more efficiently serve the grand designs of those “experts” who, of course, understand better than they ever could the real reasons why each of them were put on this earth. 

And these hubristic social engineers will succeed in much of this unless the rest of us forcibly reclaim the art of the encounter in our own lives, and perhaps more importantly in our interactions with those in the generations following in our wake.

Thomas Harrington, Senior Brownstone Scholar and 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 8/30/23

The NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine has been trending towards a stalemate since the beginning of the year after Moscow’s growing edge in the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” ensured that it won’t be defeated. NATO is unlikely to be defeated either, however, since it’ll probably intervene directly – whether as a whole or via a Polish–led mission that draws in the bloc via Article 5 – to freeze the Line of Contact in the event that Russia achieves a breakthrough and threatens to sweep through Ukraine. 

The counteroffensive’s spectacular failure and the subsequently vicious blame game between the US and Ukraine strongly suggest that talks with Russia will resume by year’s end for freezing the conflict. Ahead of that happening, these wartime allies are frenziedly trying to convince their respective people that the other is responsible for this debacle simultaneously with formulating an attractive post-conflict vision of the future. The first is served by their vicious blame game while the second will now be discussed.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s now polling third after winning last week’s debate and had earlier attracted enormous media attention for his outspokenness on sensitive issues, just published his “Viable Realism & Revival Doctrine” in an article for The American Conservative. Of relevance to this piece is his plan for ending the NATO-Russian proxy war. Liberal–globalist policymakers and their media allies responded with fury, and it’s not difficult to see why.

Ramaswamy describes the conflict as a “no-win war” that’s needlessly depleted Western stockpiles to China’s benefit. With a view towards more effectively containing the People’s Republic in the Asia-Pacific, he therefore suggests extricating the US from its proxy war with Russia as soon as possible. To that end, he proposes recognizing the new ground realities in Eastern Europe, ending NATO expansion, refusing to admit Ukraine to the bloc, lifting sanctions, and having Europe shoulder the burden for its own security.

The explicit goal is to “get Putin to dump Xi”, and that’s why he says that the quid pro quo is “Russia exiting its military alliance with China.” Ramaswamy is convinced that his plan will “elevate Russia as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia” if it’s implemented into practice, but the problem is that no such “military alliance” exists between those two. Moreover, it’s unrealistic to imagine that the US will “get Putin to dump Xi” since they’re good friends and their countries are strategic partners.

Having said clarified that, this plan does have its merits. From the Russian side, it ensures that country’s objective national security interests and gives it the chance to rely on the EU for preemptively averting potentially disproportionate economic dependence on China upon the lifting of sanctions. On the home front, Ramaswamy’s plan appeals to the pragmatic policymaking faction whose influence is on the rise as proven by the success over the summer of their policy towards India that was detailed here.

The timing couldn’t have been better. The US is looking for a “face-saving” way to resume peace talks like was previously explained, and the rising influence of pragmatic policymakers could lead to them overruling the liberal-globalists’ objections to this, though their rivals could still try to sabotage this. The enormous media attention that Ramaswamy has already generated, not to mention what he’s now receiving as a result of his proposal, could reshape the national discourse on the proxy war’s endgame.

Americans are becoming fatigued with this conflict but no one had yet articulated an attractive post-conflict vision of the future until now. Irrespective of Ramaswamy’s political future, his plan serves to spark a wider conversation at all levels about the pragmatism of compromising with Russia in order to free the US up for more effectively containing China in the Asia-Pacific. This can in turn facilitate the resumption of talks with Russia, especially if it emboldens pragmatic US policymakers.

The vicious blame game between the US and Ukraine over the counteroffensive’s failure leads to the inevitable one over who’s responsible for losing this proxy war, with all of this preceding America’s formulation of an attractive post-conflict vision of the future for its people and policymakers alike. The first dynamic is continually intensifying and making more headlines by the day, while the second is also presently unfolding but mostly in silence, and it’s this dynamic that Ramaswamy’s plan contributes to.

Accepting the impossibility of Russia abandoning its mutually beneficial cooperation with China and acknowledging that lifting the sanctions likely won’t happen either, the rest of his proposals could form the parameters of a potential Russian-American deal for ending their proxy war in Ukraine. That former Soviet Republic wouldn’t join NATO, nor would that bloc expand any further, and the West would de facto recognize the new ground realities in Eastern Europe while the EU bears the burden for its security.

Russia would obviously have to agree to some regional compromises too in that scenario, such as Ukraine’s privileged post-conflict relationship with NATO and the hard security guarantees that the Anglo-American Axis will likely provide, but these could be acceptable if its other interests are met. If there’s any movement in this direction, then it shouldn’t be maliciously spun as Russia conspiring to facilitating the US’ containment of China, but seen for what it truly is: Russia putting its interests first.