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The values system dominating the West has “brought chaos,” the Hungarian prime minister believes

Western liberal hegemony has failed and must be destroyed, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban stated on Thursday, suggesting it could end as soon as this year.

Addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC Hungary) in Budapest, Orban criticized the existing “world order based on progressive liberal hegemony,” saying it has spawned numerous figureheads who are “not fit to be leaders,” with even “beauty pageants” knowing more about peace then they do.

He accused liberal politicians of building “hegemonic ideological control to which everyone must submit” instead of actual governing, while turning “state bodies into tools of oppression.” Such forces are a dangerous enemy whose time is coming to an end, Orban claimed.

“The progressive liberals sense the danger, the end of this era also means their end,” the prime minister argued. Their dominance could be overcome as soon as this year, Orban predicted, citing the upcoming EU Parliament and US presidential elections. 

“The proponents of the old world are sitting in Brussels, and although it is not my business to interfere in American politics, I fear that they are also sitting in Washington. This is what we are doing this year. This year, we will try to drive them out,” the Hungarian prime minister said.

This year, God willing, we can end the inglorious era of the Western civilization. We can end the world order built on progressive liberal hegemony. The progressive liberal world spirit has failed. It gave the world war, chaos, unrest and destroyed economies.

The emerging world order will be based on true sovereignty, with countries driven by their actual national interests rather than a global ideology, according to Orban.

READ MORE: EU leadership must go – member state’s PM

“Let the era of sovereignty come, let’s get back towards peace and security. Let’s make America great again, let’s make Europe great again,” he concluded.

Beijing has accused Washington of undermining peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region

Beijing has condemned Washington’s deployment of intermediate-range missiles in the Asia-Pacific region and will take all effective measures to prevent the US from “messing up” the South China Sea, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said on Thursday.

His comments come after the US kicked off its largest joint exercise with the Philippines since the Cold War in the South China Sea earlier this week. The exercise, dubbed Balikatan, is set to run through May 10 and is said to involve over 11,000 US soldiers and 5,000 Philippine servicemen. A French frigate as well as troops from France and Australia are also participating in the event.

Earlier this month, the US also held a separate two-week round of exercises with the Philippines dubbed Salaknib 2024, during which it deployed SM-6 missiles capable of reaching Taiwan. The weapon has a maximum range of more than 400km while a new medium-range MRC Typhon land missile system is capable of launching from the Philippines island of Luzon. 

Asked to comment on the move, Wu stated that Beijing “firmly opposes” the deployment of such weapons by the US in the Asia-Pacific and stressed that such an action by Washington “severely threatens the security of regional countries and undermines regional peace and stability. China will take resolute countermeasures.”

“We hope the relevant country could refrain from opening the door to the devil, which will only end up hurting everyone, including itself,” the spokesman said.

Wu stated that China sees the strengthening diplomatic relations between the US and the Philippines as the two countries’ business. However, he stressed that such relations must not harm China’s, or any other country’s interests, and must not undermine peace and stability in the region.

China's military will continue to pay close attention to the situation in the region and will take “all effective measures to respond effectively and will never allow relevant parties to mess up the South China Sea,” Wu added. 

Russia’s ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov said earlier that the Pentagon’s deployment of medium-range missiles in the Philippines would constitute a “dark day” for international security and accused Washington of deliberately escalating military confrontation, fueling hotbeds of tension and creating closed groups and military-political alliances in the region.

“[The US] is trying to return the world to the worst times of the Cold War and teetering on the edge of a nuclear conflict,” Antonov said earlier this month, urging Washington not to open this “Pandora’s box.”

Dear Senator

Members of the EPC board with training in the fields of disability studies and advocacy have noted that some assisted suicide advocates are trying to hijack disability rights for their own purposes. For instance, an able-bodied man named Christopher Riddle has done pro-assisted suicide advocacy in the Northeast while presenting himself as a “disability rights advocate.” Riddle is a colleague of Udo Schuklenk, one of the architects of Canada’s euthanasia program, and Riddle enthusiastically approves of that program.

Moreover, Riddle’s theories about disability rights have been reasonably criticized as lacking any empirical grounding in the experiences of disabled people. He has no experience or personal stake in the practical implications of his ideas.

Furthermore, Riddle’s scholarship dehumanizes disabled people who are harmed by assisted suicide; he frames anyone who might be harmed by assisted suicide as the equivalent of a car accident statistic. He asserts that harm that assisted suicide might cause for people with disabilities “ought not to be of special concern.” Hence, Riddle is willing to sacrifice people with disabilities for the right to die movement’s agenda; he is not the “disability rights advocate” he claims to be.

For a more accurate understanding of how the disabled community has approached the issue of assisted suicide, we encourage you to watch a video created by disability studies ethicist Harold Braswell about disability rights opposition to assisted suicide. Braswell has studied the right to die issue extensively.

There are other very important facts that legislators must take into account when considering how assisted suicide is impacting the disabled community:

The American Association of Suicidology made a 2017 statement saying that “MAiD” was not suicide. But in 2023 the AAS had to retract that statement because it was used in the 2019 Truchon decision that expanded assisted suicide to disabled Canadians, which was opposed by the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention.The consequences of the AAS’s statement are an example of how green lighting assisted suicide for the terminally ill easily results in violence against people with disabilities.

In 2021, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of People with Disabilities asserted that all assisted suicide laws violate its Convention On The Rights of People with Disabilities.

Peer-reviewed research establishes that people are more likely to view suicide as acceptable if the victim is disabled, and people with disabilities often lack access to comprehensive suicide prevention care. This bill exacerbates that problem by laying the scaffolding for “MAiD” to become a substitute for the suicides of persons with disabilities.

Well-known right to die leader Thaddeus Mason Pope has tweeted that it’s good for disabled people to die by suicide; the director of Compassion and Choices appeared on Dr. Phil with Pope in 2023. If you pass this bill, you empower and reward a contingent of people who want disabled people’s suicides to be a “medical procedure.”

We urge you to allow HB1283 to die this session because regardless of its content, it rewards a movement that is hostile to people with disabilities. Exacerbating the oppression that disabled people already face so that the proponents can plan their deaths is unwise and unjust.

Sincerely,

Meghan Schrader, Disability Rights EPC-USA
Josephine L.A. Glaser, MD.,FAAFP
Colleen E. Barry, Chairperson
Kenneth Stevens, MD
William Toffler, MD
Gordon Friesen
Alex Schadenberg
Epc_USA@yahoo.com

Endnotes

1. https://twitter.com/cariddlephd/status/1373071051631038470
2. http://www.lpbr.net/2014/08/disability-and-justice-capabilities.html?m=1
3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687599.2014.984931
4. https://philpapers.org/rec/RIDAD
5. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/vdpwdt26wwq42ak0eraee/Braswell_PAS-Statement_To-Send-1.mov?rlkey=05vve2sis2s4sy51hma27jx2u&dl=0
6. https://www.slu.edu/arts-and-sciences/bioethics/faculty/braswell-harold.php
7. https://suicidology.org/2023/03/08/aas-update-on-previous-statement/
8. https://twitter.com/TrudoLemmens/status/1666067817035190272
9. https://suicideprevention.ca/media/statement-on-recent-maid-developments/
10. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/01/disability-not-reason-sanction-medically-assisted-dying-un-experts
11. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26402344/
12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXVrgtTNN2Y&t=2108s
13. https://twitter.com/ThaddeusPope/status/1669450726831976449

Ballot propositions that will either expand access to abortion or place legal abortion into state constitutions will be on the ballot in as many as twelve states this November. It is hardly a secret that, in the years following the Dobbs decision, pro-lifers have not fared well in statewide democracy campaigns.

However, this year, Florida pro-lifers have a good chance to prevail at the ballot box. That is because ballot propositions to amend Florida’s state constitution need more than 60 percent of the vote to take effect.

Two separate surveys show that the proposed amendment to place legal abortion in Florida’s state constitution is polling well below this 60 percent threshold. An Emerson College poll released earlier this month found that the abortion amendment has the support of only 42 percent of Sunshine State voters. Additionally, a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll found the abortion amendment was ten percentage points short of passage.

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This is good news for pro-lifers. A body of polling data from both Ohio and Michigan show that amendments to place legal abortion in the state constitution fail to appreciably gain support during the course of the campaign. Obviously, Sunshine State pro-lifers still have plenty of work to do. Furthermore, both the presidential election and the enforcement of the Heartbeat Act may affect the dynamics of this direct-democracy campaign. However, these two polls show that a pro-life victory in Florida this November is within reach.

LifeNews Note: Michael J. New is an assistant professor at the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America and is an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_J_New

The post Two Polls Show Florida Amendment for Abortions Up to Birth Will Fail appeared first on LifeNews.com.

A top official for the militant group has said it will turn into a purely political party if Palestinians are given their own state

Hamas is willing to lay down arms if a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is reached along pre-1967 borders, a top political official for the group, Khalil al-Hayya, has told AP. Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel, had previously rejected such a possibility outright.

In an interview on Thursday, al-Hayya said Hamas wants to join the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to form a unified government that would control Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas would agree to “a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the return of Palestinian refugees in accordance with the international resolutions” along Israel’s pre-1967 borders, he claimed.

As a result of the Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of Arab nations, the Jewish state occupied the West Bank, Gaza, Syria’s Golan Heights, and other areas.

If a two-state solution is reached, the military wing of Hamas will dissolve, the official, who represents the group in the now stalled ceasefire and prisoner exchange talks with Israel, insisted.

“All the experiences of people who fought against occupiers, when they became independent and obtained their rights and their state, what have these forces done? They have turned into political parties and their defending fighting forces have turned into the national army,” al-Hayya explained.

According to AP, it is “unlikely” that Israel would consider such a scenario as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to keep fighting Hamas until its complete elimination, and has repeatedly spoken out against a sovereign Palestinian state.

In January, another senior Hamas official – Khaled Mashal – told Kuwaiti podcaster Amar Taki that “we have nothing to do with the two-state solution.” The group’s members “reject this notion, because it means you would get a promise for a [Palestinian] state, yet you are required to recognize the legitimacy of the other state, which is the Zionist entity,” he said.

Mashal insisted that the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, in which at least 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage, was a sign that the Palestinians could retake all their lands. “I believe that the dream and the hope for Palestine from the river to the sea and from the north to the south has been renewed,” he said.

READ MORE: Netanyahu should resign – ex-US House speaker

The death toll from Israel’s airstrikes and ground offensive in Gaza, launched in response to the Hamas incursion, has surpassed 34,305, with 77,293 others wounded, according to the latest data from the Palestinian enclave’s health ministry.

A top official for the militant group has said it will turn into a purely political party if Palestinians are given their own state

Hamas is willing to lay down arms if a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is reached along pre-1967 borders, a top political official for the group, Khalil al-Hayya, has told AP. Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel, had previously rejected such a possibility outright.

In an interview on Thursday, al-Hayya said Hamas wants to join the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to form a unified government that would control Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas would agree to “a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the return of Palestinian refugees in accordance with the international resolutions” along Israel’s pre-1967 borders, he claimed.

As a result of the Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of Arab nations, the Jewish state occupied the West Bank, Gaza, Syria’s Golan Heights, and other areas.

If a two-state solution is reached, the military wing of Hamas will dissolve, the official, who represents the group in the now stalled ceasefire and prisoner exchange talks with Israel, insisted.

“All the experiences of people who fought against occupiers, when they became independent and obtained their rights and their state, what have these forces done? They have turned into political parties and their defending fighting forces have turned into the national army,” al-Hayya explained.

According to AP, it is “unlikely” that Israel would consider such a scenario as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to keep fighting Hamas until its complete elimination, and has repeatedly spoken out against a sovereign Palestinian state.

In January, another senior Hamas official – Khaled Mashal – told Kuwaiti podcaster Amar Taki that “we have nothing to do with the two-state solution.” The group’s members “reject this notion, because it means you would get a promise for a [Palestinian] state, yet you are required to recognize the legitimacy of the other state, which is the Zionist entity,” he said.

Mashal insisted that the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, in which at least 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage, was a sign that the Palestinians could retake all their lands. “I believe that the dream and the hope for Palestine from the river to the sea and from the north to the south has been renewed,” he said.

READ MORE: Netanyahu should resign – ex-US House speaker

The death toll from Israel’s airstrikes and ground offensive in Gaza, launched in response to the Hamas incursion, has surpassed 34,305, with 77,293 others wounded, according to the latest data from the Palestinian enclave’s health ministry.

Joe Biden showed his bigoted side on April 23 when he spoke in Tampa, Florida about the glory of abortion. It wasn’t abortion, per se, that got him going—it was those whom he identified as pro-life that set him off.

To be specific, he railed against Donald Trump’s pro-life stance, saying the former president made “a political deal” with “the evangelical base of the Republican Party to look past his moral and character flaws.”

Fifty percent of all the money raised by the Democrats comes from Jews. Yet no one is going to say that Biden made a “political deal” with “the Jewish base of the Democratic Party to look past his cognitive flaws.”

Biden refuses to condemn the anti-Jewish rhetoric stemming from Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan. Yet no one is going to say that he made a “political deal” with “the Muslim base of the Democratic Party to look past his cognitive flaws.”

REACH PRO-LIFE PEOPLE WORLDWIDE! Advertise with LifeNews to reach hundreds of thousands of pro-life readers every week. Contact us today.

Notice that Biden’s comment in Tampa wasn’t about Protestants in general. He focused exclusively on evangelicals, and that is because to take a swipe at all Protestants would be to slam the mainline denominations; they are mostly in the pro-abortion camp. He chose a subset of Protestants who are known for their pro-life convictions.

Biden intentionally red-flagged evangelicals, knowing it would appeal to his bigoted base (survey data also show that Democrats do not think highly of Catholics, either). This was a classic example of religious baiting, and it should be condemned by everyone.

As the election year progresses, look for Biden to continue with this demagogic strategy. The “devout Catholic” has no problem manipulating religion to serve his militantly secular agenda.

LifeNews Note: Bill Donohue is the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

The post Joe Biden Trashed Pro-Life Christians at Abortion Rally appeared first on LifeNews.com.

I once read an essay lamenting the disappearance of what I recall the essayist calling, “negroes in white shirts and bow ties.”  The essayist was one of those late-onset conservatives we call “liberals mugged by reality.”  The “negroes in white shirts and bow ties” were the polite, often Christian, white-acting blacks who had won the late-onset conservative’s sympathy when the Civil Rights Movement was young.

What the late-onset conservative did not understand was that the success of the Civil Rights Movement entailed the disappearance of “negroes in white shirts and bow ties.”  Obviously, “white shirts and bow ties” here simply signify acting white.  That is what respectable white men were wearing around 1960, and because whites were hegemonic in 1960, respectable blacks wore them too.

The wardrobe of lower middle-class American males changed very markedly by the late 1960s, so there were very few blacks outside the Nation of Islam wearing white shirts and bow ties; but the disappearance of “negroes in white shirts and bow ties” was caused by something deeper than the sartorial revolution of the late 1960s.

The success of the Civil Rights Movement meant that blacks were now free to act black.  The key word that I just used is hegemony.  To this I must add the companion word toady.   A hegemon has the power to impose his vision on the world, the toady yields to that power and conforms to that vision.

What we can learn from the lament of the “mugged-by-reality” liberal (a.k.a the “late-onset conservative”) is that hegemons can fail to see their own power.  When they survey a throng that dresses and acts like down-market versions of themselves, the hegemon does not see toadies.  At least not always.  He sees “negros in white shirts and bow ties,” who’s unlikeness to him goes no deeper than to the color of their skins.

But the point of a liberation movement like the Civil Rights Movement is not to allow toadies to go on dressing and acting like their former masters.  It is to liberate the toadies from hegemony and allow them to act like themselves.

We see this in the liberation movements we call the Women’s Rights Movement and the Gay Rights Movement, both of which quickly went places that shocked some of their early supporters.  Thus the “feminine businesswomen” and “confirmed bachelors” quickly went the way of “negroes in white shirts and bow ties.”   They did not all become power-skirts, leather-boys, and black panthers, but enough did to make many former hegemons into “late-onset conservatives.”

The hegemony of straight white Christian males has been, of course, entirely destroyed.  This is why the teaching toadies of today’s actual hegemons do little but rail against it.  We must never forget that Cassandra was effectively mute, while the appointed oracles of the regime always shriek with contagious alarm at newfangled phantoms and ghosts of rivals long dead.

We must also never forget what I will call the Hegemon’s Illusion, which is to believe he is loved when he is in fact only feared.  I do not suppose that straight white Christian males will be in a position to fall under the Hegemon’s Illusion any time soon, but as toadies we may possibly use it to our advantage.

The EU must prove that it is not a vassal of the United States, the French president has said in a keynote speech

French President Emmanuel Macron has urged EU nations to make decisive changes to secure the bloc’s interests ahead of crucial parliamentary elections across the bloc. The US cannot be relied on for protection, he warned.

Opinion polls are projecting that EU voters will shift towards right-wing nationalist politics in the European Parliament elections in early June.

Macron called for significant policy changes as he addressed his counterparts across the continent from the Sorbonne University in Paris on Thursday.  

”Our Europe today is mortal and it can die,” Macron warned. “It can die, and this depends only on our choices.”

The French leader touted ‘strategic autonomy’ for Europe, particularly in terms of military production. He reiterated that member states should spend more on defense and give priority to locally-produced weapons – a suggestion that critics perceive as lobbying for French arms manufacturers. Macron said that this would reduce the continent’s dependence on Washington.

The EU “must show that it is never a vassal of the United States and that it also knows how to talk to all the other regions of the world,” the president said.

He also advocated a wider revision of policies on fair trade, manufacturing standards and other areas that affect the competitiveness of European businesses.

”It cannot work if we are the only ones in the world to respect the rules of trade – as they were written up 15 years ago – if the Chinese and the Americans no longer respect them by subsidizing critical sectors,” Macron declared.

He labeled Russia’s “uninhibited” behavior as a key threat to Europe. Moscow has argued that the EU has shot itself in the foot by following the US and joining what it regards as a proxy war against Russia, in one instance being waged in Ukraine.

READ MORE: Macron wants von der Leyen replaced – Bloomberg

Macron’s presidency will expire in three years. His political party Renaissance lost its majority in the French parliament in 2022, while the right-wing National Rally party, which is projected to win the EU elections in France in June, has threatened to demand a dissolution of the national parliament, should the president’s centrist coalition suffer a crushing defeat in June.

A recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times demonstrates what is a warped interpretation of the term “patriotism.” The op-ed is about former football player Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan twenty years ago. It’s written by Bill Dwyre, a former sports editor for the Times.

Dwyre reminds us that Tillman was motivated to join the military after the 9/11 attacks. He gave up a $3.6 million football contract to join the U.S. military and was hoping to be sent to Afghanistan to fight the terrorists.

Dwyre writes, “It was a can’t-miss story of patriotism. Americans applauded from the safety and comfort of our homes and communities.” (Since he uses the pronoun “our,” presumably Dwyre fell into the “safety and comfort” group rather than the “patriot” group.)

Unfortunately, however, Dwyre doesn’t explain why Tillman’s act was one of “can’t miss” patriotism. Apparently for him it’s a self-evident truth.

No declaration of war

The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land. It is the higher law that we the people impose on government officials. We are expected to obey their laws, and they punish us when we fail to do so. By the same token, they are supposed to obey our law, the Constitution.

The Constitution requires a congressional declaration of war as a prerequisite to a president’s waging war against any other nation-state. If a president and his army wage war without a congressional declaration of war, they are acting in violation of the law.

It is undisputed that President Bush did not secure a congressional declaration of war from Congress before he ordered his military to invade Afghanistan. That made their war illegal under our form of government.

How can participating in an illegal war be considered “patriotic”? Dwyre doesn’t explain that.

The U.S. was the aggressor under Nuremberg

Moreover, the common perception is that Bush invaded Afghanistan because the Taliban regime, which was governing the country, had been complicit in the 9/11 attacks by having knowingly harbored Osama bin Laden, who U.S. officials suspected had orchestrated the attacks.

Not so. Bush initiated his war because the Taliban regime refused to comply with his unconditional demand to deliver bin Laden into the hands of the Pentagon and the CIA. Yet, there was no extradition treaty between Afghanistan and the United States and, therefore, Afghanistan was operating within its rights under international law to refuse Bush’s unconditional extradition demand.

Nonetheless, knowing that the Pentagon and the CIA would torture bin Laden into confessing to the crime, Afghanistan offered to deliver him to an independent nation for a fair trial. In making the offer, Afghanistan sought the same amount of proof that would be required in a normal extradition hearing. The U.S. government refused the offer, perhaps because it was unable to provide such proof.

Therefore, given that Afghanistan had the authority under international law to refuse Bush’s extradition demand, that makes Bush’s invasion illegal under the war-of-aggression provision of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal.

How can participation in an unconstitutional and illegal war be considered “patriotic”? Unfortunately, Dwyre fails to explain.

If one assumes that the 9/11 attackers were the ones who did the attacking (as compared to the attacks being an “inside job,” as some believe), it’s worth pointing out that they were motivated by the death and destruction that the U.S. government’s foreign policy had wreaked in the Middle East. But of course, a real “patriot” does not bring up that discomforting fact and instead blindly supports the government’s claim that the terrorists attacked us out of hatred for our “freedom and values.”

Tillman’s opposition to the Iraq War

One of the fascinating aspects of Dwyre’s op-ed glorifying Tillman’s patriotism is what he leaves out of the op-ed. Tillman was an outspoken opponent of Bush’s invasion and war of aggression against Iraq. Dwyre doesn’t even mention that, which is revealing.

Keep in mind, after all, that Bush’s war on Iraq was also waged without a congressional declaration of war, making it illegal under our form of government. Bush’s claim that he was waging to war to enforce UN resolutions falls flat because only the UN can enforce its resolutions. The fact is that the U.S. war on Iraq was an even clearer case of a war of aggression under the Nuremberg principles than the U.S. war on Afghanistan.

Despite Tillman’s fierce objections to the U.S. war on Iraq, the U.S. military nonetheless ordered him to “serve” in Iraq, which he did. Keep in mind though that every U.S. soldier takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution and is under a legal and moral obligation to refuse to obey unlawful orders. Tillman chose to obey the unlawful order to deploy to Iraq.

U.S. government lies

After his “service” in Iraq, Tillman was deployed to Afghanistan, where he continued to speak out against the U.S. war on Iraq. It was there that he was killed. As Dwyre points out, the U.S. military initially lied about his death, claiming falsely that he was killed by enemy fire. In fact, what actually happened is that he was killed by his own men in what was described as “friendly fire.”

In 2006, Tillman’s brother, Kevin Tillman, wrote a scathing op-ed on truthdig.com, in which he echoed his brother Pat’s view of the Iraq war: “Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.”

Why would’t Dwyre mention Pat Tillman’s (and his brother’s) fierce opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq in his op-ed? My hunch is that it’s because he considers opposition to U.S. wars to be unpatriotic and, therefore, Tillman’s apparent lack of “patriotism” with respect to Iraq doesn’t fit conveniently within his patriotism narrative. Under Dwyre’s warped interpretation of patriotism, apparently it’s only those who blindly support the U.S. national-security state’s foreign wars and its interventionist foreign policy who should be considered “patriots.” Apparently, those who reject such wars and choose instead to remain in the “safety and comfort” of their homes instead of fighting them should be considered non-patriots.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

In the last days of East Germany, when government officials detected that their power was unraveling, they ratcheted up enforcement of the nation’s reporting laws. The reporting laws made it a felony to know of a crime and fail to report it. It was also a crime to tell the person of whose crime you learned that you had done so. There was no right to privacy and there was no freedom of speech.

This Orwellian tangle resulted, of course, in many false reports of crimes. It also resulted in many prosecutions for failing to report crimes or for warning others that they were being spied upon. As of this past weekend, we in America are headed to the same authoritarian place. Thanks to legislation that fell one vote short of demise in each house of Congress last weekend, America in 2024 will soon resemble East Germany in the late 1980s, where nearly everyone was a spy and no one could talk about it.

Here is the backstory.

The quintessential American right is the right to be left alone. Justice Louis Brandeis called it the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized persons. It presumes that you can think as you wish and say what you think and read what you want and publish what you say, that you can exclude whomever you wish — including the government — from your property and from your thoughts; and that you can do all this without a government permission slip or fear of government reprisal.

This natural right is also protected in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which requires a warrant issued by a judge based upon probable cause of crime before the government can invade your property or spy on you.

The warrant requirement serves three purposes.

The first is to force the government to stay in the lane of crime solving, rather than crime predicting.

This concern was initially manifest in 1765 when the British government entered colonial homes with warrants issued by secret courts in London based on governmental need, not probable cause, ostensibly looking to see if the colonists had purchased government stamps as the Stamp Act required. The true goal of these forced entries was to search for revolutionary materials in order to help the government predict who might be planning the revolution that came in 11 years.

The second purpose of the warrant requirement is to prevent fishing expeditions, hence the Fourth Amendment also requires that the warrants specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

The third and most fundamental purpose of the warrant requirement is to reduce to writing the right to privacy. All persons — even the federal spies themselves, now about 100,000 in number — want privacy. The Framers knew this and believed they had guaranteed it in the Fourth Amendment.

They were wrong.

After the abuses of the right to privacy orchestrated by President Richard Nixon and carried out by the CIA and the FBI during the Watergate era, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established a secret court to do to Americans what the British had done to the colonists — issue broad general warrants, based on whatever the government wanted and not specifying the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized. Much of the intelligence community gave only lip service to FISA and used high-tech means to spy on all persons in the U.S. all the time.

When the courageous Edward Snowden, who had been both a CIA and an NSA agent, revealed the warrantless spying, instead of curtailing it, Congress made it lawful; unconstitutional, but lawful.

The infamous Section 702 of FISA expressly authorizes the feds to spy on foreign persons and those with whom they communicate, inside the U.S. and elsewhere, without warrants. That means that if a foreign person communicates with an American, the feds can spy on the American as well, without a warrant. The FISA Court has interpreted 702 to permit the feds to spy on communications with foreigners — even innocuous communications, like family chatter, ordinary commercial transactions, or academic or medical consults — and the Americans with whom they speak to the third degree.

Hence, if you email your cousin in Europe, the feds can warrantlessly capture all the fiber-optic traffic you generate, as well as all the traffic of all persons in the U.S. to whom you communicate, as well as all the traffic generated by all persons to whom they communicate. If you do the math, you will see that these numbers of victims — Americans spied upon without suspicion, probable cause or warrants — can quickly reach into the hundreds of millions.

The new Section 702 is worse for freedom than its predecessor. Though shortened to two years before sunsetting — these sunsets are a joke as they never happen — the new 702 requires that any person in the U.S. who installs, maintains or repairs any fiber-optic system must assist the feds in using that system to spy on the person’s own customers. It also prohibits that person from speaking about this. What happened to the freedom of speech?

It gets worse. The new Section 702 exempts members of Congress from the thou shalt not tell. So, if you or I or a member of the Supreme Court is spied upon by our cable installer, he cannot tell anyone. But if your representatives in Congress are spied upon, the cable installer and the spies will inform them. What kind of a democracy is this? And if the cable installer does tell you or refuses to spy upon you, the terrors of East Germany will come down upon him.

Why do we permit Congress with a whimper to legislate away the freedom of speech and the right to privacy? Why do we repose the Constitution for safekeeping into the hands of those determined to kill it? Is it any wonder that cynicism about the government is so pervasive in the land?

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.

COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO

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Thousands of students have staged demonstrations in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza

US police arrested more than 80 protesters on Wednesday as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestine demonstrations which have gained momentum across American university campuses.   

A wave of demonstrations from Massachusetts to California began last week after students at New York’s Columbia University set up tent camps, demanding that universities cut ties to Israel and divest from companies allegedly contributing to the Gaza conflict. They also publicly called for a ceasefire in the Palestinian enclave.  

Companies being targeted include Amazon and Google, which are part of a $1.2 billion cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government. Microsoft, whose services are used by Israel’s Defense Ministry and Israeli civil administration, has also been condemned, as well as arms manufacturers profiting from the war such as Lockheed Martin.  

Students at schools including New York University, Harvard, and Yale demand that the US government “cease all funding for Israeli weapons and stop giving them any more money to continue this genocide,” Cameron Jones, part of Columbia’s Jewish Voice for Peace movement, said in a video statement on Wednesday.   

Visiting the campus at Columbia on Wednesday, US House Speaker Mike Johnson denounced the protests as “mob rule” and condemned what he called a “virus of anti-Semitism” at colleges nationwide.  

“And it’s detestable, as Columbia has allowed these lawless agitators and radicals to take over,” he claimed, calling for the resignation of the university’s president.   

Activists deny that the protests are anti-Semitic, and say Jewish students are largely involved in organizing the demonstrations.    

Hundreds of Columbia faculty members staged a walkout on Monday to criticize the university leadership and express their solidarity with the protesters. Demonstrators condemned the Columbia president’s decision to call police onto campus. History professor Christopher Brown publicly branded it “unprecedented, unjustified, disproportionate, divisive and dangerous.”

The rallies have led to mass suspensions and hundreds of student arrests in New York and other cities. At least 34 people, including a photojournalist, were detained after police stormed the campus at the University of Texas in Austin on Wednesday, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. At least 50 more were detained by police at the University of Southern California, local media reported.

A surge of demonstrations followed the deadly attack on Israel by the Palestinian armed group Hamas in October. The students are protesting Israel’s relentless retaliatory assault on Gaza, which has caused unprecedented destruction in the enclave and left more than 34,000 people dead, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

The defense minister’s remarks came after President Duda signaled Warsaw’s willingness to host US nuclear weapons

A potential deployment of US nuclear weapons to Poland would breach key arms control accords between NATO and Russia, French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu warned on Thursday. Polish President Andrzej Duda said earlier this week that his country was willing to host such weapons if Washington supported the idea.

Under NATO’s nuclear sharing program the US maintains some of its weapons of mass destruction in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Türkiye.

Last year, Russia placed its own tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, with President Vladimir Putin citing the two countries’ strategic alliance as well as increased NATO military activity close to Belarusian and Russian territory. The president pointed out at the time that Washington has for decades deployed its own nuclear weapons in allied nations.

In an interview with Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, published on Wednesday, Lecornu pointed out that a hypothetical deployment of US nuclear weapons to Poland would first require thorough discussions between NATO member states, as it “would undermine the NATO-Russia founding act.”

The minister also noted that France, the sole nuclear power within the European Union, does not participate in NATO’s nuclear planning group. Lecornu explained that Paris is “completely autonomous in our planning and in our deterrence system.”

On Thursday, Polish President Duda told reporters that he had invited Prime Minister Tusk for a meeting on May 1 to discuss their apparent divergence of opinion on the issue of US nuclear weapons.

In an interview with the Polish daily Fakt on Monday, President Duda revealed that such a development “has been a topic of Polish-American talks for some time.” The head of state – whose powers do not exceed those of the prime minister under Poland’s parliamentary system – added that he had “declared our readiness” in case “our allies decide to deploy nuclear weapons… on our territory.”

Commenting on President Duda’s remarks, Prime Minister Tusk, who represents a rival political force, stated that the president’s words warrant clarification as “this idea is very massive.”

The premier emphasized that at present Warsaw has no specific plans to host foreign weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told TASS news agency on Thursday that should Warsaw and Washington go ahead with such “deeply destabilizing” and “threatening” arrangements, the sites hosting American nuclear weapons would “definitely become targets” for the Russian military.