The last time this page was published I celebrated a handful of heroes who defied “lockdown” usurpations on the basis of principle alone. Now, with a little effort on YOUR part, that defiance should become a tidal wave sweeping away misconceptions about how power is distributed and authorized in what people need to remember is the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
FRIENDS, ON THURSDAY, MAY 21, I sent you the rock-solid legal answer to every one of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s outrageous usurpations. This material plainly demonstrates the illegality of Whitmer’s decrees and empowers every single person in Michigan to immediately resume life as usual (which is to say, under his or her own control).
I have now added a “Lockdown” Liberty Key for Texas, as well, to the same post at the link above.
This material is indisputable on its face and as simple as 2 + 2= 4 (and in any event, as Jefferson reminded us, “A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate”). No one need wait for a court to tell them it’s ok to act on it.
THESE LIBERATION MECHANISMS should be already being trumpeted from every rooftop in Michigan (and now Texas, too) RIGHT NOW so the emotional momentum of the people– most of whom have been being successfully-conditioned toward quiescence for two months now– can shift from mumbling, “Oh, okay, I guess I have to… You’re the Governor, after all” to shouting, “No! Hell no! I see now that you don’t have and have never had the authority to make me helplessly watch my business wither away! Out of my way!!”
They should also be trumpeted from every rooftop across America, for the same reasons, adjusted for local particulars. What is laid out in my simple formulations for Michigan and Texas, from each state’s fundamental law, is also true in every other state, and under the terms and principles informing the United States Constitution, as well.
Indeed, it had been my expectation, when first posting the core material of these keys as part of an article more than a month ago (in the Newsletter edition of April 20 , 2020), that readers in each state would quickly apply the information to their home state Constitution and produce keys themselves, putting a quick end to the massive harm being done by the C19 delusion.
I was disappointed in that expectation. But having now done the practical work of using that material to produce simple syllogistic presentation for my home state, and now for Texas, as well (and having shown by those examples what everyone else can and should be devising by a drill-down into their own home state Constitutions), I have another hope on the table– that you all will spring into action putting these keys and the core information behind them, now consolidated here, on every screen in Michigan, Texas and elsewhere.
TIME IS VERY MUCH OF THE ESSENCE here. The “emergency powers” by which economic health, property rights, other liberties, and the rule of law itself have been eroded in America over the last several months have been mere pretenses, and always illegal. These facts are made crystal-clear in this little one-page key.
If these facts become broadly understood quickly enough, a sea-change in behavior will erupt, with a hugely virtuous impact on the ongoing relationship between citizen and state in every matter of law. The people will, by this example and the process unleashed by this cure, be reminded of their sovereignty.
On the other hand… take too long in trying to make that sea-change happen and people will have resigned themselves to the new normal and become acclimated to it. There will be no going back. We’ll just end up with another permanent ratchet-up of government power and the hobgoblin-floggers will have won the battle, even though at some point things return to a semblance of “normal”– by government permission.
PLEASE!! DO THAT TRUMPETING!! If you’ve got an email list, blast this URL: https://losthorizons.com/THS.htm#16 to EVERYONE on it (with an introduction explaining why they absolutely must click on the link and read the material). If you’ve got a blog or other media presence do it there, too.
Tweet, post, whatever. If you’re in a legislature or the media, share all of this with all your colleagues. Tell everyone to whom you direct it to re-amplify and spread it themselves, and repeat and don’t stop until every America has it on his or her screen. Every place (and manner) in which the “lockdown” is manifest today should be filled with free Americans (and be swept away) by the end of the week.
Seriously, my friends. Opportunities like this one to really drive a lesson home both to arrogant government officials and to the people of whom they take advantage are very rare. USE THIS ONE ROBUSTLY, which means right now and right hard.
Edward R. Murrow famously observed that, “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves”.
Let me add this: A nation of sloths will produce a nation of sheep.
Let it not be so.
“A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate”
-Thomas Jefferson
“It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.”
-United States Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson
PM claims cops, prosecutors et al want to oust him for ideological reasons. But his predecessor, Olmert, was also prosecuted. And he was set to cede settlements, parts of Jerusalem
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and former Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, left, attend the funeral of Likud MK Zeev Boim, in Binyamina, Israel, Monday, March 21, 2011. (AP Photo/Moti Milrod, Pool)
Honed over more than two years of attacks on the pillars of Israel’s democracy, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s incendiary assault on his accusers shortly before the start of his corruption trial Sunday was a brilliantly calculated assertion of innocence and victimhood.
Its core thesis, that a strong, pro-annexation, right-wing prime minister is facing an illicit attempt — perpetrated by a vast, leftist alliance of politicians, media, cops and state prosecutors — to oust him because of his ideology and policies, is also demonstrably ridiculous.
It relies on his audience becoming so swept along by the prime minister’s rhetoric — his calibrated mix of grievance and determination, and his citing of numerous ostensible flaws, failures, cover-ups and conspiracies in the marshaling of the “absurd” and “fabricated” charges against him, reinforced on Sunday by the sight of all those mute Likud ministers publicly identifying with his cause — as to forget the gaping logical hole at its center.
It relies, apparently to considerable effect, on short memories.
For it is the fate of Netanyahu’s immediate predecessor Ehud Olmert — the former Likud mayor of Jerusalem and Likud MK and minister, turned Kadima MK, minister and prime minister — that exposes the emptiness at the heart of Netanyahu’s inflammatory allegation that a leftist establishment is engaged in an attempted political coup.
Olmert’s was initially a career of singular political success. He won election to the Knesset at the tender age of 28; rose to ministerial office; left parliament after Likud’s 1992 defeat to Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin in order to successfully challenge Jerusalem’s legendary mayor Teddy Kollek, becoming the first Likud politician to run the capital; and then returned to the Knesset a decade later where he continued his rise all the way to acting prime minister under Ariel Sharon.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu points at a map of Jerusalem as Jerusalem’s mayor Ehud Olmert looks at it during a press briefing at Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem, Wednesday Feb 26, 1997, as Israel’s government approved construction of a Jewish neighborhood in disputed east Jerusalem. (AP PHOTO/Haitham Hamad)
Hitherto a fierce opponent of relinquishing territory captured in the 1967 war — he had even opposed Israel’s landmark peace treaty with Egypt — Olmert mirrored Sharon’s late-life radical political shift, backing the prime minister’s unilateral 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and following his leader when Sharon abandoned Likud to set up Kadima. When Sharon fell ill in January 2006, Olmert took over, temporarily at first, and then as Israel’s elected prime minister after his and Kadima’s success in the 2006 elections.
Former prime minister Ehud Olmert meets with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Paris in 2008 (photo credit: Thaer Ganaim/Flash90)
The hawkish mayor who had bitterly opposed any division of Jerusalem metamorphosed into a prime ministerial political dove, firmly supporting Palestinian statehood — indeed, offering more to the Palestinians than any Israeli prime minister before or since. In 2008 negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Olmert offered to relinquish almost all of the West Bank with one-for-one land swaps, to give the Palestinians sovereign capital territory in Jerusalem, and to cede Israeli sovereignty in the city’s Holy Basin, with an international trusteeship to instead take responsibility for the Old City and its holy sites, including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
According to the thesis Netanyahu presented Sunday, and has presented in one form or another during more than two years of seeking to discredit and tar those investigating, indicting and now prosecuting him, this dovish, leftist, Arab-appeasing, land-relinquishing prime minister Olmert would be just the man the leftist elites would want to insure was taking Israel’s most fateful decisions.
In fact, however, precisely as Olmert was presenting his unprecedented statehood offer to Abbas, he was felled — forced from office as criminal investigations into his conduct as mayor gathered pace. Urged by allies and rivals alike, including Netanyahu, to step down from the premiership and focus on his legal defense, Olmert agreed in principle in July 2008 to do so: He delivered a speech promising to keep trying during his final months in office “to bring the negotiations between us and our neighbors to a successful conclusion” even as he was, he said, being subjected to “ceaseless attacks by the self-appointed soldiers of justice, who sought to oust me from my position.”
Now a lame-duck prime minister, Olmert failed in his desperate attempts to finalize terms with Abbas — and a possible deal on Palestinian statehood, on terms highly unlikely to be offered again in the foreseeable future, was averted. Netanyahu took over as prime minister in March 2009, after winning elections that were held earlier than scheduled because of Olmert’s resignation, and has retained power ever since.
All four of the key establishments Netanyahu cites as using foul means to oust him for ideological reasons played a role in Olmert’s downfall
Olmert was indicted that August, and went to jail almost nine years later, at the end of a protracted legal struggle that saw him initially exonerated of some of the charges against him, but later convicted on appeal. All four of the key establishments Netanyahu cites as using foul means to oust him for ideological reasons played a role in Olmert’s downfall: Some of Olmert’s own dovish allies had exerted pressure for him to resign, he had suffered plenty of hostile media coverage, the police were self-evidently determined to get their man, and the state prosecutors pursued him doggedly despite some initial rulings against them. Then Israel’s judges, in whose impartiality Netanyahu conspicuously omitted to express his faith on Sunday, ultimately sent Olmert to jail.
The very sequence of events that helped bring Netanyahu to power in 2009, in other words, demonstrates the inanity of the prime minister’s insistence that he and the entire Israeli right is on trial in his case, victims of a thoroughly politicized process.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, surrounded by Likud lawmakers, gives a televised statement before the start of his corruption trial at the Jerusalem District Court on May 24, 2020. Among the Likud ministers pictured (from left) are Amir Ohana, Miri Regev, Israel Katz, Tzachi Hanegbi, Yoav Gallant, Eli Cohen and David Amsalem. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
“Citizens of Israel,” Netanyahu declared outside the courtroom in the first section of Sunday’s speech, which is worth quoting in full, “what is on trial today is an effort to frustrate the will of the people — the attempt to bring down me and the right-wing camp. For more than a decade, the left has failed to do this at the ballot box. So over the last few years, they have found a new method: elements in the police and the prosecution joined forces with the leftist media — I call them the ‘anyone but Bibi’ gang — to manufacture baseless and absurd cases against me.
“The goal is to bring down a strong prime minister from the right wing and thus keep the right-wing camp away from running the state for many years,” he continued. “By the way, they would not mind if some cooperative poodle came along from the right — those are always around — but me, I am no poodle. I am not willing to adjust my policies to receive better media coverage, I am not prepared to uproot settlements, I am not willing to do all sorts of other things, and therefore I must be removed by any means.”
No. This is manifestly false.
In fact, it was the police and the prosecution that tenaciously brought down his leftist predecessor, a prime minister who had played a central role in uprooting Gaza’s settlements, and who, far more dramatically, was ready to uproot most of those in the West Bank as well.
There can be little doubt that Netanyahu — just like Olmert before him — is convinced he is the victim of a terrible injustice. The charges against him are complex. Case 1000: At what point do gifts from friends become illicit? Case 2000: Does the discussion of a potentially illegal arrangement with a newspaper publisher, an arrangement that did not come to fruition, constitute a crime? Case 4000: Did a series of decisions he made as minister of communication, that allegedly benefited the controlling shareholder of Bezeq to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and allegedly set back urgent national internet upgrades by years, constitute an illegal abuse of his office, and were they part of an illicit quid pro quo arrangement via which he attained editorial oversight over the country’s second most popular news website?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and Chief of Police Roni Alsheich at an inauguration ceremony marking the opening of a new police station in the northern Arab Israeli town of Jisr az-Zarqa November 21, 2017. (Basel Awidat/Flash90)
The police chief who oversaw the investigations, Netanyahu’s own appointee Roni Alsheich, a former senior Shin Bet officer who grew up in the settlement of Kiryat Arba — no leftist, he — concluded that the prime minister should be charged.
The attorney general — a former IDF chief advocate general, and Netanyahu’s own former cabinet secretary, appointed to the top legal position by Netanyahu — reached the same conclusion. Now, the three judges of Jerusalem District Court will weigh the evidence, affording Netanyahu every legitimate opportunity to plead his case.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, speaks with then-Cabinet Secretary Avichai Mandelblit during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014. (AP Photo/Menahem Kahana, Pool)
As Israel’s prime minister, however aggrieved by his legal plight, Netanyahu is expected to serve as a role model for the rule of law in the country he leads, the country he has served for so long, the country he vowed Sunday to strengthen and safeguard, the country he described in his speech as his “life’s mission.” He failed to do so on Sunday, failed, amid his deplorable onslaught, to even assure the nation that, having castigated Israel’s police and prosecutors, he at least has confidence in Israel’s judges.
Israeli law affords him the right to stay on as prime minister even as he strives to prove his innocence. Much of the electorate applauds this state of affairs. Netanyahu is a formidable prime minister, who has repeatedly won the voters’ confidence, steered Israel through immensely complex and challenging times, advanced its cause on the global stage, built vital international relationships, and who just recently demonstrated highly effective leadership in the battle against COVID-19.
But his beloved Israel deserves more from him than that he abuse his right to retain office while on trial in order to misrepresent the legal process that is playing out, to foment internal dissent, to batter away at the credibility and the legitimacy of the rule of law. And it deserves better from other elected representatives than their sheepish assembly by his side, masked in mute acquiescence, as he levels patently unfounded allegations against his accusers.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the first Cabinet meeting of the new government at the Chagall Hall in the Knesset, Sunday, May 24, 2020. (Abir Sultan/Pool Photo via AP)
Netanyahu was required to present himself in Courtroom 317 of the Jerusalem District Court on Sunday not because a cabal of leftist politicians, journalists, cops and state prosecutors are determined to oust a strong right-wing prime minister, and keep him and his ideological allies from power for years. This is not The State of Israel versus the Israeli right-wing camp. Just ask Ehud Olmert.
Despite his best efforts to mischaracterize the process, and despite his spineless colleagues’ silent complicity in the fable, it is Benjamin Netanyahu, and only Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial.
Former US Vice President Joe Biden participates in a Democratic presidential primary debate at CNN Studios in Washington, March 15, 2020. (AP/Evan Vucci)
AFP — White House hopeful Joe Biden apologized Friday for telling a black radio host that African-Americans “ain’t black” if they are unsure who to support in November’s election, sparking accusations of racism.
The Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee to challenge US President Donald Trump made the remark during a spirited and sometimes contentious interview with popular syndicated radio personality Charlamagne Tha God.
“I shouldn’t have been such a wise guy. I shouldn’t have been so cavalier,” Biden later said on a call with black business leaders, after the remarks sparked uproar.
“I have never, ever taken the African-American community for granted,” he told members of the Black Chamber of Commerce, according to reporters on the call.
Biden — Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years — stumbled into the controversy as he was defending his ties to the African-American community, saying he has “overwhelming support” from black leaders and voters.
Charlamagne, whose real name is Lenard McKelvey, said he hoped Biden could return to his show because “it’s a long way until November [and] we’ve got more questions.”
“Well I tell you what,” Biden replied from a studio in his Delaware home, where he is riding out the coronavirus crisis. “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
The comments, which aired early Friday on New York-based syndicated show The Breakfast Club, quickly sparked reaction from Team Trump.
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, accused Biden of a “disgusting & dehumanizing racist mentality.”
Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, also had choice words.
“It’s sadly par for the course for Democrats to take the black community for granted and brow beat those that don’t agree,” Scott tweeted.
The president retweeted some of Scott’s criticism.
Trump himself has made several comments this week that have been criticized as racially insensitive or racist.
He raised eyebrows during a Thursday tour of a Ford automobile plant in Michigan when he praised the company’s founder, Henry Ford, as a man with “good bloodlines.”
US President Donald Trump holds his protective face mask as he speaks while touring Ford’s Rawsonville Components Plant that has been converted to making personal protection and medical equipment, May 21, 2020, in Ypsilanti, Mich. (AP/Alex Brandon)
Ford was famously anti-Semitic and promoted a belief of genetic superiority of the white race. In the 1920s in a newspaper he owned, Ford published several tracts denouncing Jews.
The head of the Anti-Defamation League called on Trump to apologize for his remark.
Meanwhile, Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson hastily arranged a press call Friday to slam Biden’s “racially demeaning” comments.
“White liberal elitists” telling communities of color what to think about policies or which candidate to support “is the definition of white privilege,” said Pierson, who is biracial.
Charlamagne, in his 18-minute interview, challenged Biden on that issue, saying he is concerned that “Democrats take black voters for granted.”
Biden, 77, countered that he had earned black votes by working in black communities for decades.
He pointed out that in South Carolina, where he won February’s Democratic primary and turned his lagging campaign around, “I won a larger share of the black vote than anybody had — including Barack.”
Biden also noted that institutional racism was “still prevalent in our society” and pointed to how African-Americans were dying of the coronavirus at higher rates than whites.
“Those essential workers, a disproportionate amount of them are African-Americans. And they’re breaking their necks, risking their lives, losing their lives,” Biden said.
Biden has repeatedly said he would have a diverse cabinet, and he has committed to naming a female running mate.
When Charlamagne highlighted the pressure to pick a black vice president, Biden said: “I guarantee you, there are multiple black women who are being considered.”
A senior Biden adviser, Symone Sanders, said the candidate’s controversial comments were made “in jest,” but that his message was serious.
“He was making the distinction that he would put his record with the African-American community up against Trump’s any day. Period,” Sanders said.
‘This depravity should dispel any notion the regime belongs in the community of nations,’ says US Secretary of State after Khamenei urges ‘final solution’ for Israel
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a press briefing at the State Department, May 20, 2020. (Nicholas Kamm/Pool Photo via AP)
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday accused the Iranian leadership of “echoing Hitler’s call for genocide” after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for “eliminating the Zionist regime.”
It is “incredible” that Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Khamenei “are echoing Hitler’s call for genocide,” Pompeo tweeted. “This depravity should dispel any notion the regime belongs in the community of nations. We stand with Germany and Israel against this oldest & most vile form of hatred, and say #NeverAgain”
Shortly after Pompeo tweeted his condemnation, the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East, Nikolay Mladenov, added a denunciation of his own.
“Dangerous calls for the destruction of #Israel should be condemned by all,” he tweeted. “Such inciteful rhetoric is a modern form of #antisemitism. The #UN will continue to stand against all forms of #racism, #hatred, and strive for #peace and stability in the #MiddleEast.”
Khamenei repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction this week.
“We will support and assist any nation or any group anywhere who opposes and fights the Zionist regime, and we do not hesitate to say this,” he tweeted Wednesday.
“Eliminating the Zionist regime doesn’t mean eliminating Jews. We aren’t against Jews. It means abolishing the imposed regime & Muslim, Christian & Jewish Palestinians choose their own govt & expel thugs like [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” he added the same day.
Khamenei also posted on his website an anti-Israel poster that invoked the term “final solution,” which is usually associated with Nazi Germany’s efforts to eliminate all Jews.
The poster showed people celebrating at the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem after apparently capturing it from Israel as a Palestinian flag is raised over the Al-Aqsa Mosque. “Palestine Will Be Free. The final solution: Resistance until referendum,” the text on the poster says.
The poster later appeared to have been deleted from the website.
Zarif on Thursday defended the poster, writing on Twitter that it was “disgusting that those whose civilization found a ‘Final Solution” in gas chambers attack those who seek a real solution at the ballot box, through a REFERENDUM.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif speaks on the second day of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, February 15, 2020. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer)
The European Union on Thursday evening condemned the Iranian leader’s threats against Israel with the bloc’s foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell issuing a consensus statement on behalf of all 27 members of the EU.
Such statements are totally unacceptable and represent a deep source of concern. They are also incompatible with the objective of a stable and peaceful Middle East region pursued by the EU,” the statement read. “The European Union reiterates its fundamental commitment to the security of Israel.”
Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff — who in previous positions at the Foreign Ministry focused on the Iranian threat — said Friday that the union’s statement did not go far enough.
Khamenei “did not just bring into question Israel’s legitimacy, he wrote explicitly about ‘eliminating the Zionist regime’ which goes from denying the Holocaust to promoting one,” the Israeli diplomat wrote on his Twitter account.
“The gravity of his remarks is not reflected in the EU reaction.”
He added that the EU “should go beyond words” in its response, though he did not go into further detail.
