Julian Assange has been charged with a conspiracy to hack government computers, and violations of the espionage act, for his alleged role in helping Bradley Manning obtain the information Wikileaks notoriously released on his behalf several years ago, as well as for publishing that information. Glenn Greenwald and Micah Lee at the Intercept are pitching a fit that the Trump administration is attempting to “criminalize journalism” by going after Assange.

Per the Justice Department press release;

The indictment alleges that in March 2010, Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications. Manning, who had access to the computers in connection with her duties as an intelligence analyst, was using the computers to download classified records to transmit to WikiLeaks. Cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log on to the computers under a username that did not belong to her. Such a deceptive measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to determine the source of the illegal disclosures.

During the conspiracy, Manning and Assange engaged in real-time discussions regarding Manning’s transmission of classified records to Assange. The discussions also reflect Assange actively encouraging Manning to provide more information. During an exchange, Manning told Assange that “after this upload, that’s all I really have got left.” To which Assange replied, “curious eyes never run dry in my experience.”

Greenwald thinks this is no big deal, because the Obama administration decided that this was “journalism” and opted not to prosecute Assange.

The first crucial fact about the indictment is that its key allegation — that Assange did not merely receive classified documents from Chelsea Manning but tried to help her crack a password in order to cover her tracks — is not new. It was long known by the Obama DOJ and was explicitly part of Manning’s trial, yet the Obama DOJ — not exactly renowned for being stalwart guardians of press freedoms — concluded that it could not and should not prosecute Assange because indicting him would pose serious threats to press freedom. In sum, today’s indictment contains no new evidence or facts about Assange’s actions; all of it has been known for years.

Interesting theory. So because the Obama justice department opted not to indict Assange, that means he shouldn’t be indicted? I’d say that’s a pretty weak argument. The Obama administration committed a lot of crimes, and allowed a lot of criminals to go free, Manning included.

Obama didn’t indict Lois Lerner when she politicized the IRS to sabotage the Tea Party movement. He didn’t indict anyone for the Fast & Furious scandal that got a Border Patrol agent killed. There was not a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. Obama either pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,927 people during his presidency, more than any President since Truman. He broke a record by granting clemency to 231 federal inmates in a single day. His clemency has differed from that of his predecessors too, in that he almost always freed people from prison with commuted sentences, rather than pardoning people after their release.

The lawlessness of that administration should come as no surprise to anyone, and definitely should not set a precedent for future administrations.

This case is of particular interest to me, for a few reasons.

Back when this all happened, and the “Collateral Murder” video came out, I was heavily involved with the libertarians, and staunchly anti-war. All of my associates were pointing to that video as proof that the United States military was running around murdering innocent people for no reason whatsoever.

I saw things differently. I saw a grainy video from a helicopter of soldiers in a war zone observing a group of male adults walking down the street with god knows what in their hands, and after communicating with their superiors, opening fire. Even then, I thought this was completely blown out of proportion, even if it did turn out that those killed were non-combatants.

The war was wrong, but I saw those soldiers as completely blameless. I was infuriated by the libertarians and others who called them murderers.

Sorry, civilians! These things happen in war. This is just one of many reasons why we should be a lot more cautious about why, when, and where, we engage in martial conflicts.

Yet, I still supported Manning and Wikileaks. While manning was on trial at Fort Meade, I went there to cover the trial for Adam vs. The Man, and stayed at Kokesh’s house in Herndon, Virginia.

In fact, here’s a photo of me leaving the trial.

As I drove from New York to Virginia, I had “FREE BRADLEY MANNING” written with paint on the windows of my van. I did not care if what they did was illegal. I did not care if what they did hindered the war effort. I did not care if what they did jeopardized other interests of the United States government. As far as I was concerned, the war was based on lies, and unjustifiable. If people had to break the law and act deceptively to stop it, then that was just fine with me.

I feel differently today, and not just because Manning turned out to be a tranny communist, or Assange mocked me on Twitter when I was framed for crimes in Charlottesville.

My attitude began to change when Obama commuted Manning’s sentence.

Manning had been sentenced to 35 years in prison for his treason. In prison, he decided he was going to “gender transition,” which endeared him all that much more to the communists who celebrated his disloyalty to his country.

The Obama administration had never been big on transparency, or shy about using government force against anyone who stood in their way. It seemed profoundly curious to me, that Barack Obama would set Manning free, simply out of some desire to do the right thing. In fact, I was certain there had to be some other reason for his release.

It turns out, I was right.

Manning did not use his newfound freedom and notoriety to fight for liberty or transparency in government after his release. He used it to promote communism.

He cheered on the rioting Reds in Charlottesville, and encouraged antifa violence from coast coast.

When he ran for the US Senate, his platform read like an intentional plan to destroy the country. In fact, he all but confessed that it was on Twitter, by retweeting a fellow degenerate who said “abolish ICE, open the border, dismantle all detention centers and dance joyously in the rubble“.

I was all for ending the wars. Still am, all these years later. In fact, that was much of my motivation for supporting Trump, and his failure to stop this insanity remains one of my greatest disappointments in his administration. But that was and is out of a desire to see the best interests of my country put ahead of those of Israel.

Anybody wanting to reduce my country to rubble through immigration, lawlessness, and communism, surely has a very different agenda than I, and dare I say it, a far more radical one at that.

Come to think about it, reducing the country to rubble seems to be at the forefront of the policy agenda for the Democrat party at this point. Reliably, their propagandists in the media seem to have the same itinerary.

Back to the Intercept;

The other key fact being widely misreported is that the indictment accuses Assange of trying to help Manning obtain access to document databases to which she had no valid access: i.e., hacking rather than journalism. But the indictment alleges no such thing. Rather, it simply accuses Assange of trying to help Manning log into the Defense Department’s computers using a different username so that she could maintain her anonymity while downloading documents in the public interest and then furnish them to WikiLeaks to publish.

In other words, the indictment seeks to criminalize what journalists are not only permitted but ethically required to do: take steps to help their sources maintain their anonymity.

Another interesting theory.

Firstly, it is hacking a computer to crack a password. It is exceeding ones privileges to log in as another user. If Assange did this, then he did help Manning hack the computers, by definition. If he helped them hack the computers, then that explains why he was also charged with publishing the material. He wasn’t acting as a mere journalist who received information without participating in the crime. He actively conspired to obtain the material he wanted to publish, and then he published it. One act was in furtherance of the other.

The fact that Greenwald says journalists do this all the time should tell you something about journalism. These people are criminals, and they shouldn’t be granted special privileges just because they have broadcast licenses or newspapers. “Freedom of the Press” means freedom, as in, the same freedom you and I have, not license to do things we would go to prison for.

And for that matter, why should we grant journalists that much “freedom” anyway? Should they shoulder no extra responsibilities with the enormous power that they wield?

How many of you have seen Con Air? In that movie, Nicholas Cage plays Cameron Poe, a highly decorated United States Army Ranger, came home to Alabama to his wife, Tricia. He only to run into a few drunken regulars at the bar where Tricia works and they get in a fight. Cameron unknowingly kills one of the drunks by punching the guy’s nose into his brain, and is sent to a federal penitentiary for involuntary manslaughter for seven years, because his military training made his hands “deadly weapons”. Because he was so trained to kill, he was saddled with extra liability for the damage he did.

Same thing for anybody who carries a gun. There are things you can do while you are unarmed, which you cannot do while you carry, and for good reason.

Letting people run amok and endanger the country just because they call themselves “journalists” is as stupid as saying I can pick a fight with whoever I want, just because I’m carrying a pistol.

Julian Assange thought it was hillarious that I was in tears facing 60 years in prison for crimes I didn’t commit. I wonder if he’s crying now that he could spend the rest of his life in prison for crimes he actually did commit?

Fuck him, and fuck the media.

Assange was their hero when he was conspiring with Manning to leak government secrets. Using that Collateral Murder video to demonize the Bush administration was something they all universally supported. Then, when Wikileaks was publishing information that was unfavorable to Hillary Clinton, suddenly Assange was some kind of Russian spy.

Now that he’s being prosecuted for the leaks that they did like, he’s a martyr for the first amendment. Curious creatures, these journalists. They didn’t seem to think so much of the first amendment when they were were cheering on communists who attacked us at our permitted demonstration in Charlottesville. They didn’t seem to think so much about freedom of speech when they were calling for White Nationalism, a political idea, to be pursued like foreign terrorist organizations. They didn’t seem to think much about press freedom when they went after Infowars and Alex Jones.

And what’s so special about the first amendment, anyway? Why do journalists care so much about that one, but insist that the second amendment is just some anachronistic throwback to a less enlightened time? Why was there no eighth amendment outcry when me and my comrades were held without bail in Charlottesville? Why do they insist that the 4th amendment guarantees women the right to an abortion, but have no problem with Obama spying on the Trump campaign?

At some point you just have to conclude that these people are trying to destroy the country. That being the case, why should any of us care about their supposed “rights” while they do everything in their power to see ours violated?

This is clearly just war by other means. The pen, they say, is mightier than the sword, after all. So at what point do we take their swords away?

 

 

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If you’re a Game of Thrones fan and you’re not caught up, I must warn you that this episode of the Radical Agenda will contain spoilers. So hopefully you’re either caught up, or lucky enough not to be afflicted with the terrible disease of this addiction.

The 8th and final season of Game of Thrones reached a rather anticlimactic conclusion last night. Throughout the story, Kings and Queens were murdered, the dead waged war against the living, magic conjured ghosts and brought men back from death, and with the help of some dragons and an army of slaves and savages, a powerful and just woman nearly came to rule Westeros.

But the feminists were left disappointed in the end, as the final battle of the great war seemed to occur just as Daenerys Targaryen began to bleed from her most permanent wound. Rather than take the wisdom of her male advisors, and wait out Cersei Lannister, she laid waste to King’s Landing, killing countless innocent men, women, and children, including those loyal to her, as dragon fire rained down on the once great city, reducing it to rubble.

So grotesque was her brutality, that even the hand of the Queen, an imp who murdered his own father, refused to be party to her savagery going forward.

Undeterred, the Mother of Dragons imprisoned her most loyal advisor. She stood before her army and called on them to similarly “liberate” the whole world, vowing that the war would not end until every corner of the globe was under her rule.

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The SAT, formerly known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. As the name implies, it is, or was, designed to measure the readiness of potential students for the rigors of higher education.

As academia descended into the same Leftist filth that floods our Internet with porn traffic, and our televisions with material only slightly less perverse, intellectual ability began to matter less and less, thus ending the need for such testing.

What matters now, is how much you can contribute to the decline of the American Empire.

Thus the “Adversity Score” was born, from the same Jewish mind that gave you “Common Core“.

Today we will have live streaming video courtesy of JoshWhoTV. Subscribe to our JoshWho Channel here and watch live on JoshWhoTV.

The College Board is a New York-based non-profit that is in charge of overseeing the SAT. Like everything else that is not explicitly hostile to Leftists, it was eventually taken over by communists, and turned to communist aims. This new “adversity score” number is calculated by assessing 15 factors, purportedly to help admissions officers determine an individual student’s social and economic background. These factors are first divided into three categories: neighborhood environment, family environment and high school environment.

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Previously on the Radical Agenda, we discussed a sudden shift in jurisprudence during the FDR administration, often referred to as the “switch in time that saved nine”. This was in response to a Leftist plot to pack the Supreme Court, in which the court decided to approve some New Deal measures previously understood to be unconstitutional, on the hopes that it would prevent this court packing scheme from coming to fruition.

Courts are of course, in theory, supposed to be above politics. That is why Supreme Court justices are given lifetime appointments, so that they need not concern themselves with the popularity of their decisions. For over a century, this seemed to be working out pretty well.

Under FDR, this changed. Leftists being the cunning manipulators they are, with their limitless willingness to lie, cheat, steal, and coerce, found a way to intimidate judges, and by this mechanism, got their way in defiance of the US Constitution. They did not soon forget the lesson learned. Conservatives, sadly, did.

Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was not, as those on the Left would like to pretend, some kind of power grab by the far Right. Kavanaugh worked for the Bush administration, and was a gift by Trump to the establishment wing of the Republican Party. This concession was met, not with reciprocal deference and cooperation by the Left, but rather with an unprecedented wave of calumnies, which included false rape accusations and perjury. Protests against his nomination devolved from expressions of dissatisfaction, to mindless disruptions of the proceedings, and borderline if not outright political violence.

In the wake of his confirmation, Democrat presidential candidates took to the campaign trail to discuss their plans to replicate the FDR court packing scheme. Media organizations and other far Left activist groups, have called for Kavanaugh’s investigation and impeachment. Not because any honest person believes the claims against him, but because his confirmation is politically inconvenient.

They didn’t have to prevent Kavanaugh’s confirmation to accomplish the goals of their campaign. Nor do they have to accomplish his impeachment or any other means of removing him from the Court to accomplish the goals of that campaign. All they have to do is apply enough pressure to make him change his behavior, and in this, they seem to have been successful. He has been in the majority more often than any other justice so far this term, often allied with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is at the ideological center of the current court.

The most noteworthy example was in December of last year, as Kavanaugh joined with the Roberts and the Left in protecting Planned Parenthood’s public funding. This ran in stark contrast to the Left’s hysterics, as they wore “Handmaid’s Tale” costumes to their protests, insisting that Kavanaugh’s confirmation would result in women being enslaved to breed against their will.

Justice Clarence Thomas aptly noted in his dissenting opinion, joined by Alito and Gorsuch, that this was obviously politically motivated.

“So what explains the Court’s refusal to do its job here?,” Thomas wrote. “I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood.’”

“Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty,” Thomas added. “If anything, neutrally applying the law is all the more important when political issues are in the background.”

In a more recent case, a group of consumers had sued Apple, claiming that the company’s monopoly over its App Store led to inflated app prices. Apple disputed the legality of the suit, arguing the consumers had no standing to sue the company because it merely operated an intermediary between users and the developers who make and sell apps. The Supreme Court on Monday said that iPhone users can proceed with the class-action lawsuit. Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for the 5-4 decision, surprising many by breaking with his conservative colleagues and siding with the court’s liberal justices.

Some on the more populist Right may see this as a win for our side, given the tech censorship we’ve faced. I have similar inclinations, but it emerges as part of a pattern where Kavanaugh seems to be siding with the Left in hopes of avoiding their enmity should they regain control over the legislative and executive branches. Whatever the merits of each individual decision, the savvy observer is left to contemplate whether the Left’s pressure tactics are succeeding in altering the outcome of court battles.

But it is not just the courts that have been politicized.

We have seen the intelligence apparatus of the United States turned to Leftist aims. Most notably with the “Russia hoax” being used as an excuse to spy on the Trump campaign, and later to subvert his presidency. Of course, they were politicized well prior to that, as evidenced by bogus intelligence being used to justify the United States carrying out Israeli foreign policy in the Middle East, resulting in thousands of Americans needlessly dying in wars that served no legitimate purpose for the United States, not to mention a ceaseless emptying of our treasury on such fruitless pursuits.

We have likewise seen the law enforcement apparatus turned to explicitly political purposes. Both with the Mueller probe that followed this politicized intelligence operation, and with the prosecutions, and lack thereof, that ensued after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Nobody saw fit to go after the Clinton campaign for openly admitting to paying Russian sources for the “Steel Dossier”, even as the investigation vigorously pursued any connection between Trump and Russia. Likewise, nobody saw fit to prosecute any of the Left wing terrorism that was openly bragged about in Charlottesville, even as the FBI and local authorities relentlessly hunted down Right wingers who defended themselves against that terrorism.

Libertarian notions as to what motivates businessmen were likewise blown out of the water, as the tech and financial sectors mutually conspired to silence Right wing voices, first at the fringes, then moving ever more reliably toward the center. No profit motive could be found in these pursuits, as the politicization of their businesses has only sacrificed credibility with the broader public, chased away users, who are ultimately their products, and even caused them to turn away money from advertising sales that went against their political motivations.

The Left can do this of course, because they have no fear that the Right would ever replicate the behavior. We would view the use of our intelligence and law enforcement apparatus as a corrupt act, and so we would not do it. We attempt to draw a line of separation between politics and the market, and so we are not inclined to boycotts, or turning away business, over political disagreements.

Noble though these inclinations my be, we are sacrificing political advantage as a result. Same as we have with the use of criminal violence. The Left has politicized everything from the media, to the courts, to the intelligence agencies, to law enforcement, to business, right down to the criminal element. Meanwhile, the Right has attempted to play by decidedly outdated rules. We tend to view the political realm as a gentleman’s contest, where we abide by certain rules, even if it causes us to lose. This is an impossible worldview to maintain, once one has opened participation in their political system to hostile elements, who do not care for such gentlemanly standards.

 

There’s a lot more to get to, plus your calls…

Join us this and every Monday, and Friday from 5-7pm Eastern, for another exciting episode of the Radical Agenda. It’s a show about timeless ideas, the news of the day, and whatever is on your mind at  323-9-AGENDA

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If you think Clown World is a mess, imagine you’re Ron Paul right now.

You turn on the TV for your daily dose of Jewish nonsense, and you see Nancy Pelosi, of all people, talking about a “Constitutional Crisis”.

Her concerns are echoed, pun intended, by (((Jerry Nadler))).

You change the channel in disbelief, but everywhere you go, there’s a Democrat saying the same thing. Constitutional Crisis, Constitutional Crisis, Constitutional Crisis, and you think this would make more sense if it were some kind of deathbed confession. It’s almost as if the Democrat Party had finally decided to read the damn thing, and suddenly felt guilty about destroying the country for all these decades.

But of course, no such luck.

They aren’t feeling guilty about taking your guns away, or stifling your speech. They have no qualms about launching a counterintelligence operation against the now sitting President using the secret courts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They haven’t renounced their use of illegal immigration to alter the electoral college or the makeup of the House of Representatives. They haven’t come to grasp the meaning of the “general welfare” clause, and given up on wealth redistribution. They certainly haven’t stumbled upon the 10th Amendment and embraced the wisdom of states rights.

No, none of these eminently reasonable things have sparked the Democrat Party’s newfound interest in the Constitution of the United States.

Rather, they are complaining that Attorney General William Barr has not broken the law by releasing the unredacted Mueller report to the public, and have thus voted in committee to hold Barr in contempt of Congress. The matter will soon go before the floor of the House of Representatives for a full vote. The House being in Democrat hands, the measure is likely to pass.

Once approved, Pelosi, as House speaker then turns the matter over to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, “whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action,” according to the law. The Justice Department has to actually make the choice to take up a criminal case against someone, however, and in the past, the Justice Department has declined to prosecute criminal contempt of Congress cases. The current US Attorney for DC is Jessie Kong Liu, who was appointed by Trump in 2017, and like the rest of the Justice Department, is under his authority. So this route of presidential harassment is less than likely to bear fruit.

It is worth noting, of course, that Representative Nadler is more than welcome to go stop by the AG’s office and view the unredacted report at his leisure. This isn’t something that is being kept secret from him. He just doesn’t want to make the effort, and this means of review would not be nearly as helpful toward his blatantly obvious political motives.

While Congress has broad investigative powers, there are of course limits. The Supreme Court has said that congressional inquiries should have a “legitimate legislative purpose” and has explicitly stated that they should not be used for political purposes, or to embarrass, expose wrongdoing, or target a particular person or group.

Given Nancy Pelosi’s prior statements about subpoena power being an “interesting … arrow to have in your quiver in terms of negotiating on other subjects”, the motives here could not be more obvious. Add to this, Representative Al Green on MSNBC earlier this week, saying he fears that if Democrats don’t impeach Trump, he’ll be reelected, which of course, is what this is all about.

The White House, for their part, has invoked Executive Privilege over the material in the report, blocking further access to it.

Executive privilege, as you may be aware, is the power of the President and other members of the executive branch, to resist certain subpoenas and other interventions by the legislative and judicial branches of government, in pursuit of information or personnel relating to confidential communications that would impair proper function of their offices. The power of Congress or the federal courts to obtain such information is not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, nor is there any explicit mention in the Constitution of an executive privilege to resist such requests from Congress or the courts. Both are seen as “inherent” to the powers of the respective branches.

Historically conflicts between these competing powers has been handled through negotiation, rather than allowing the courts to decide. In this case, since the Democrats have taken it upon themselves to resist the Trump administration in every imaginable way, and a few which were previously beyond imagination, negotiation seems unlikely. The Democrats are thus left with the choice of whining about it impotently, or taking the matter to the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority is likely to side with the President, as would any liberal majority if liberals had any kind of standards beyond their own pursuit of power.

Hence the “Constitutional Crisis” could best be summarized as “the constitution doesn’t give the Democrats what they want”.

The impudence of the Left in this incident comes as no surprise to the savvy observer. Nancy Pelosi was unconcerned about the Constitution as she threatened that a future Democrat President might use his emergency powers to infringe on the 2nd Amendment rights of Americans. There is nothing in Article 1 Section 8 that would empower the Congress to ban fossil fuels, or any of the other lunacy contemplated in the “Green New Deal” nor for that matter, any power to enact the Affordable Care Act, or 90% of the other crap that gets crammed through each legislative session, by both parties. That, dear listener, is the real constitutional crisis.

Once upon a time, Congress understood limits on their powers. To enact alcohol prohibition, as the easiest example, Congress was well aware they had no such power, and thus the 18th amendment to the Constitution was necessary to send booze underground. Likewise, to end prohibition, Congress knew they lacked the authority to repeal a constitutional amendment on their own, and thus the 21st amendment was passed. Since then, Congressional restraint has been in steady decline.

I am not making a defense of drugs or advocating their legalization to say, that the example of alcohol prohibition makes it plain to see that Congress lacked the authority to ban drugs. This of course did not stop them from doing so. Nor did it stop them from empowering the Drug Enforcement Agency to ban substances at their discretion, without even Congressional say so, under the “Emergency Scheduling” powers in the Comprehensive Crime Control act of 1984.

Indeed, it would take an eternity to list the many examples of Congress exceeding their authority, so it might make more sense to address some landmark Supreme Court Decisions.

Take for example the incident historians sometimes refer to as the “switch in time that saved nine“. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom even conservative Americans foolishly and universally hail as a great President for defeating the Nazis, was on quite the run trying to convert our Nation to communism with his New Deal programs. Fortunately for you and I, the Supreme Court had the good sense to strike down most of these measures as unconstitutional.

Roosevelt and his Democrat controlled Congress saw this impedance of their coercive powers as its own constitutional crisis. In response, they formulated the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. This was to alter the Judiciary Act of 1869, in which Congress had established that the United States Supreme Court would consist of the Chief Justice and eight associate justices. Roosevelt intended to pack the court with judges who would overlook the constitutional challenges to his programs, a measure Democrats openly contemplate on the Presidential campaign trail even today.

This resulted in a sudden jurisprudential shift by Associate Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, in the 1937 case West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. The Court’s majority opinion was rightly seen as a strategic political move, to undermine the court packing plan. It worked, and thus you still see a Supreme Court of 9 Justices, at least until Democrats regain control over Congress and the White House. Unfortunately, this is also how you ended up with a federal minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all manner of other redistributive schemes as the Lochner era came to an abrupt and unjustifiable end.

It likewise paved the way another notable case known as Wickard v. Filburn in 1942. An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The US government had established limits on wheat production, supposedly to stabilize wheat prices. Filburn grew more than the limits that he was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty. In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone “interstate” commerce, referencing the “interstate commerce clause” which grants congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”

The Supreme Court disagreed, stating in the majority decision “even if appellee’s activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as ‘direct’ or ‘indirect.'”

This dramatically expanded the regulatory powers of the federal government to intervene in basically any matter that might impact the economy in any imaginable way.

You might be saying to yourself “But that would remove all limits on federal powers” and you would be exactly right.

Thomas Jefferson had expressed a similar concern in the earliest days of our then young Constitution.

The interstate commerce clause was one of the congressional power that Congress purported to exercise in creating our first central bank.

In his Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank in 1791, Jefferson was very concerned that the creation of a National Bank would open the floodgates for increased spending by the Federal government. His wisdom seems notably prescient in the current year, does it not? As a national bank was not one of the enumerated powers of the federal government in the constitution, Jefferson was opposed to its formation.

With regard to the interstate commerce clause, Jefferson wrote rather specifically, that to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the States, and with the Indian tribes.” did not extend to all economic matters. “To erect a bank, and to regulate commerce, are very different acts. He who erects a bank, creates a subject of commerce in its bills, so does he who makes a bushel of wheat, or digs a dollar out of the mines; yet neither of these persons regulates commerce thereby. To make a thing which may be bought and sold, is not to prescribe regulations for buying and selling. Besides, if this was an exercise of the power of regulating commerce, it would be void, as extending as much to the internal commerce of every State, as to its external. For the power given to Congress by the Constitution does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State, (that is to say of the commerce between citizen and citizen,) which remain exclusively with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes. Accordingly the bill does not propose the measure as a regulation of trace, but as `’ productive of considerable advantages to trade.”

He likewise was skeptical of the excessive reliance on the “general welfare clause” which states that the Congress shall have Power “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”

Of this Jefferson wrote that “To lay taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States, that is to say, “to lay taxes for the purpose of providing for the general welfare.” For the laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union. In like manner, they are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose. To consider the latter phrase, not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please, which might be for the good of the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless.

It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.”

The “Bank Bill” was signed into law by George Washington on February 25, 1791, beginning the neverending cascade of constitutional crises we’ve seen ever since, less than two years after the Constitution went into effect.

Thus, it is absurd on its face to see conservatives today fretting over the constitutionality of one matter or another, which would otherwise be to their political advantage. The lid was blown off the whole thing by the first Congress and the first President. The savior they hail for defeating the Germans in World War II, put the final nails in its coffin, and the rapid expansion of federal powers since has been little more than the predictable result of democratic elections.

We have many crises, but they are in no way rooted in the Constitution, no more than most of the laws passed by our Congress. The trouble lies in the quality of our citizenry, and the leaders they subsequently elect.

 

There’s a lot more to get to, plus your calls…

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Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó says he overestimated military support, as his hopes for a coup d’état were dashed against the rocks. To put it mildly, that’s one of those things one would be better off not “overestimating”. When you play the game of thrones, you win, or you die. There is no middle ground.

Luckily for Guaidó, Donald Trump has surrounded himself with neocon psychopaths who consistently insinuate that the United States will intervene militarily on his behalf, rather than allow Maduro to remain in power. How this benefits Americans in any sense remains to be explained by the administration which ran on an America first foreign policy, but I suppose most right thinking people figured that went out the window as soon as John Bolton obtained the title of National Security Advisor.

Humorously, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace this weekend, to, among other things, insist that “We want the Venezuelan people not to have interference from any country” when pressed on Russian interference in the conflict. He went on to say “The United States wants all other countries out of this nation, and allow the Venezuelan people to restore their own democracy”. He concluded by noting, with a straight face, that he would be meeting with Germany and the United Kingdom, to achieve this objective.

I don’t have to tell regular listeners that I have no sympathy for communists like Maduro, but I’ll note here for the sake of newcomers and hostiles, that I’m all for regime change in Venezuela. I’m just sick and tired of this idiotic Jewish neocon foreign policy agenda, which has the United States in the middle of every idiotic conflict that arises in the world. One wonders how long it will be before we “overestimate” our own capacities, and find ourselves on the losing side of a game of thrones.

It’s worth noting that the United States gained her independence from Britain in no small part due to the fact that the crown was stretched thin at the time of our revolution. Britain was in conflict with France and Spain at the time, and this in part motivated those governments to finance and provide other support to the American revolution. Given the polarized and dangerous political climate in the United States, the ongoing flood of left leaning third world migrants over our insecure border, the official and unofficial suppression of patriotic movements, and the unmitigated and ongoing surge of Leftist terrorism, the threat of a new revolution with far less noble intent, is very real.

I try hard not to be a conspiracy theorist, but let us toy with this idea a bit.

Suppose you were a group of elite internationalists, who found certain aspects of the United States Constitution, such as the first and second amendments, to be a severe inconvenience to your designs of a global government. Suppose you had managed to subvert nearly all other aspects of that nation’s way of life, but those two pesky hurdles stubbornly inhibited your endgame. How might you go about doing away with these most unwelcome obstacles?

Supporting revolutionary movements inside the country would surely be at the top of your agenda, much like the United States has done to numerous countries prior to invading them. Antifa and Black Lives Matter surely fit such a description, and we’ve all watched their violence be excused and celebrated by just these sort of internationalists (yes, I’m talking about Jews). We’re not sure exactly who is financing these things, but they are definitely being financed. Not only through whatever covert methods are surely taking place out of public view, but the unmitigated access of these violent groups to crowdfunding sites which patriotic groups have been banned from, surely provides a convenient cover for this financing.

But these groups are in no danger of overestimating military support for their aims, since they are openly hostile to our armed forces and police. So the classic military coup would be out of the question. In fact, you would want the military to be as weary and depleted as possible, which conveniently happens to be the case after nearly two decades of carrying out Israeli foreign policy in the middle east. So much so that one might be shocked to find the country still standing after such a lengthy and wasteful expenditure of blood and treasure.

To finish them off, a brand new series of conflicts in a wholly different region of the world might be in order. Just convince the short sighted dupes that they would only be going in to squish a tiny communist bug, and tell them it would lessen the immigration crisis at the forefront of their minds. Conveniently fail to mention that such conflicts are never so tidy as imagined at the outset, and before long one can reliably expect matters to spiral out of control into a South American repeat of the quagmire their prior series of adventures had become.

As money, men, and munitions steadily flow out of the country, and migrants from the regions in which they are fighting steadily and in greater numbers flow in, little would remain to stand against the aforementioned revolutionary forces. What little remained of the patriotic movements could easily be deprived of resources through your control of their financial system, and sabotaged with bad advice through anonymous sources, like suicide missions resulting in bad public relations.

This wouldn’t have to be an intentional conspiracy to be a recipe for disaster, mind you. What I’ve just described is happening, whether by happenstance or by intent. It’s just hard for me to believe that any reasonable person thinks this state of affairs could possibly be in the best interests of the United States, which makes the coincidence angle seem further fetched than a complex plot by malicious actors to overthrow the government.

I’d end on a positive note, if I could. I’m finding it difficult though. To that angle, I’d just say that it is entirely possible that I’m simply blackpilling for the sake of blackpilling.

I sure do hope that’s the case.

There’s a lot more to get to, plus your calls…

Join us this and every Monday, and Friday from 5-7pm Eastern, for another exciting episode of the Radical Agenda. It’s a show about timeless ideas, the news of the day, and whatever is on your mind at  323-9-AGENDA

You can listen live on the Radical Agendas Radio Network. Catch video on demand on our Bitchute channel!

The players on this site now have 24/7/365 streaming content!

You can always listen to live Radical Agenda episodes at

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I NEED MONEY!

 

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Donate cryptocurrency, or by postal mail

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