BLUF (scroll down for article): https://jewishcurrents.org/the-settlers-man-in-florida
Context: obviously explaining the enthusiasm some here have for DeSantis. And on the subject of the Foreign Agents Relations Act (FARA), as Chas shared in his email last night with the Subject line: "[Salon] Our times: Justice for Li Tang "Henry" Liang!” (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfryGjXc95SJzw1dT5NibfqiwmR68u4onkZ_qMtKsX9Q94wEg/viewform?pli=1), and how "the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has used FARA to intimidate peace activists, journalists, and others for voicing opposition towards hawkish U.S. foreign policy.” Furthermore, “Although the Trump-era DoJ China Initiative was shut down in 2022 because of allegations of racial profiling, racially motivated prosecutions in the name of false national security concerns are intensifying across the country. Someone undergoing trial should not be presumed guilty and should have the right to due process and the right to livelihood. Everyone should have the right to exercise free speech and the right to advocate for peace between the U.S. and another country.” ****************************************************************** Well, that’s just not in the “Traditional Conservative Movement” tradition, as any reading of its “Founders” scream at one, as I’ve shared here in the past. Particularly those of Willmoore Kendall and George Carey in their “legal treatise” The Basic Symbols (TBS), most celebrated by Traditional Conservatives. Which is an anti-Constitutional screed, and historical revisionism, in their “tradition” establishing the “conservative tradition” of denouncing the right to “free speech” and a “free press,” as the ideological basis of charges used against the likes of Dan Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange, John Kiriakou, Bill Binney, et al. Notwithstanding the duplicity of Trump/Roger Stone in using and abusing Assange with claims they were collaborating together, when they weren’t. And in fact, Trump always planned to elevate the charges against Assange to Espionage Act violations, as he did, as one can see from support he expressed for other repressive government provisions, such as Sec. 1021 of the 2012 NDAA (in effect as Public Law). Even while witless, Trump beguiled, Assange supporters started an insidious campaign suggesting that Trump would even consider dismissing his own Espionage Act charges against Assange, with the additional cruelty of giving hope to the Assange family that Trump might be their “Savior!” Haha. While I was exposed to the trial requirement of exercising “credibility judgments” in Law School, I suppose, it was in my first legal job as a Judicial Law Clerk, with an excellent Judge, that I really came to understand that (and incidentally, accelerated me away from “Law and Order Conservatism,” even though at a time of a very high crime rate) with a few corrupt cops falsely charging people with crimes coming before us, in which the Judge (and his Law Clerk) had to exercise credibility judgements to the max. Which is applicable as well to fields like History, Political Theory, International Relations, Intelligence, and Intelligence Law (both with an identical problem of intellectually corrupt intell officers falsely charging people with crimes under the Espionage Act, or as “Terrorists”). Or just plain “common sense. And with the Espionage Act corruption, I don’t mean Trump (read the Espionage Act, which describes in detail what Trump did as a “crime,” but also what probably all of us do when merely reading WikiLeaks, which is its real problem), though I do mean Assange. Which is what Kendall and his coterie of anti-Constitutional Conservatives and fellow McCarthyites would have loved the Espionage Act most for in the absence of legislation like the McCarran Act (https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1950InternalSecurityAct.pdf), which was revealing of their own ideological inclinations for despotism, as the “Right to Know,” as incorporated in the First Amendment, is the best guarantee against dictatorship; communist, fascist, or as simply the kind of “Americanism” they desired. One absent a Bill of Rights, and of the kind contemporary Trump supporting Straussian/Schmittian New Right Conservatives call for in the paper on “Patriotic Education” Hillsdale College President, and DeSantis friend, Larry Arnn calls for in his "1776 Report.” So one sees the “Conservative Tradition” of “regulating” free speech and press” as previously established by the very British Monarchs whom we’d had a Revolution against, in large part for their suppression of “free speech” in that very “common law tradition” (the “actual” British so called “Constitution,” as one sees if they read Blackstone, and see how repressive of speech/press that British “Constitution" actually was, into the 1900s, which is why the American colonists revolted against it!). And against British Martial Law which is/was foremost the suppression of speech/press (which today’s Conservatives always clamor for) if one reads just the two attached chapters fully attributed to George Carey (half the chapters were Kendall’s, which were equally as bad/half Carey’s, with all equally railing against the First Amendment in their duplicitous arguments). The “fault line” of American politics was established by the Madisonian/Hamiltonian division over the very idea of “Rights,” which Madison became more appreciative of throughout the Ratification debates to the point of becoming their chief proponent. With Hamilton their chief opponent, which Kendall and Carey and their fellow opponents of the “1789 Constitution” duplicitously used through their advocacy of the Federalist Papers as the “Final Word” on Constitutional interpretation, with their own selective choices from the “Papers.” To include Hamilton’s paper legitimizing "raison d’é tat.” With that political theory divide eventually becoming the “Basic Issues Between Conservatives and Liberals,” as described in the attached article with the problem today being that there are virtually no “Liberals” left, only bi-partisan “Conservatives,” jointly making up the “War Party,” with a shared militarist ideology, disagreeing only on domestic spending and the “intensity” of each faction’s militarism, evident in their military budget proposals. |
Attachment:
Basic Issues Between Conservatives and Liberals.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
But don’t take my word for it. Read Kendall and Carey yourself and make your own "credibility judgement,” but based on the evidence they provided themselves, and not on some “hecklers veto here who promotes the candidacy of Ron DeSantis (and before him, DJT). Read for yourself what Carey wrote in Chap. 7 of TBS and in Chap. 8 on the “Derailment.” A theme also prominent in the latest of the “trilogy” of anti-Constitutional Conservatism, all with titles of “Conservative . . .”, with No. 1 Bacevich’s panegyric to the very “ideological founders” of the Military Industrial Complex/American Militarism; No. 2, Yoram Hazony’s complete revision of history and anti-Enlightenment screed, following in the “tradition” of the Conservatives celebrated by Bacevich (yes, I appreciate all that he’s written against US wars and Militarism, leaving me perplexed to why he would then “celebrate” the ideological “originators” of American Militarism, including the “Original American Fascist,” of post-Civil War America, Teddy Roosevelt); and No. 3, the last in what I call the “Trilogy of American Militarism,” "The Failure of American Conservatism: ―And the Road Not Taken.” With Carey’s and Kendall’s theme of “Derailment,” beginning even before the Civil War as Carey, says here which can be correctly construed as this so-called “derailment” beginning with the nullification of the “Alien and Sedition Act” when Jefferson succeeded Adams and allowed it to expire, with that the restoration of free speech/press rights (albeit it yet limited). With Adams himself becoming more accepting of "rights” later in his life with his correspondence with Jefferson, and less in agreement with the advocate of the “Unitary Executive” so beloved by the founders of the Conservative Movement, Alexander Hamilton, and his idea of “unitary executive theory,” presented as “democracy.” Like Rousseau. |
Attachment:
7. The Tradition and the Bill of Rights.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
Attachment:
8. Derailment and the Modern Crisis.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
Another quote from what Chas shared "On the subject of the Foreign Agents Relations Act (FARA):" "These prosecutions are reminiscent of the shameful history of the McCarthy-era “Red Scare,” which destroyed the lives of many innocent people. These prosecutions also irresponsibly inflame racist hatred against Chinese people in the midst of worsening U.S.-China relations and surging anti-Asian hate violence.” So to the latter point, I hear all the way to St. Paul, MN, from the Kendallites and Hazonyites (I repeat myself, I’ll just say Republicans and the TAC and QI identified "New Right" always promoting them) this (worth opening): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEHYF264ME4
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