Well, more like a nest of snakes or roaches, at the CNN “townhall”. Here is coverage from the Jimmy Dore Show:

It seems that every silver-tongued devil that has ever lied a U.S. soldier to his death in some faraway land is now lined up to take on Tulsi’s intransigent stance against this hideous policy that acts as a meat grinder for American soldiers and whichever unfortunate Third World nation our government has fixated upon. Tulsi’s grace, patience, and steadfastness in the face of the smears and propaganda is currently winning the hearts and minds of thousands at a time. The Political Class that draws it’s lifeblood from endless war recognizes this, and will begin throwing everything it can at Tulsi. But Tulsi has ideas on her side, her adversaries only have guns. And, as we and her enemies know, ideas are bulletproof.

Oklahoma state senator Nathan Dahm discusses the amount of the time that legislators are given to read bills before a vote is cast on them. Dahm explains that legislators were given the agenda for 85 bills on Tuesday night at 10pm, with voting commencing the next morning at 9am. Follow the below link if it allows you to:

It is outrageous that this state of affairs is allowed in our government. Before anything else needs to happen, something needs to be done about this reckless speed-voting on a pile of bills all at once. The process must be slowed down, the bills must be read in their entirety, there must be a limit to how much extra crap that can be stuffed into a single bill, and the lobbyist who writes the bill must be made known. It would slow the process tremendously, which would be a good thing. That bills must not be voted on before they are read seems like common sense, and to vote on a bill you haven’t read sounds like the height on idiocy. Yet this is standard operating procedure for every level of government in the Unites States.

A war against “vaccine misinformation” is currently underway by the largest tech corporations, with a heavy nudge from Democratic rep. Adam Schiff, backed by the full faith and force of the federal government. A hearing was held on March 5th by the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, and Labor to address ‘vaccine misinformation’, and repeatedly state that vaccines are safe while pushing for social media censorship of this ‘misinformation’. A panel of scientists spoke briefly, followed by a testimony from 18-year old Ethan Lindenberger, on the subject of vaccine safety, but none of the arguments against vaccine safety were directly addressed, nor was anyone from the shadowy “anti-vaccine lobby” allowed to address the hearing. Why is that? I sense that, in much the same way that government sells war, they do not want anyone to hear the opposing arguments. If Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Del Bigtree, or Suzanne Humphries had spoken for just 10 minutes it would probably have taken all the wind out of the sails of the censorship campaign. Instead, we get no real debate, just an insistence that those who oppose mandatory vaccination must be silenced, in the same manner that Peter Hotez recently did on the Joe Rogan Experience, where, rather than debate anyone, he called for the “anti-vaccine lobby” to be dismantled, free speech and the Constitution be damned. Do they really have so little faith in their argument? Who do they think this lobby is, anyway? That “lobby” consists primarily of the crowd of mothers of vaccine-injured children sitting at the back of the hearing. How about letting them speak? Of course, it would be too heart-wrenching for the taste of the assembled manufacturers of consent, and would pull the rug out.

This post isn’t pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, it’s the question of why can’t the other side be heard? Before any frenzy of lawmaking commences, the accused should have a right to defend themselves, the public should hear it all out. This is how all bad wars and bad laws begin, and nothing good will come from muzzling the other side.

Colbert: “Do you think the Iraq war was worth it?”

Tulsi: “No.”

Colbert: “Do you think that our involvement in Syria has been worth it?”

Tulsi: “No.”

This is too good, and while the benefactors of endless war have declared a propaganda war against Tulsi, they will make themselves look like fools in the face of a polished Major in the Army National Guard. Could you imagine the upbraiding Trump would receive on the debate stage by her. Gabbard will make Trump look like a clown.

Notice also, in the below interview, how strangely pro-war Colbert comes across. He has utterly bought into the regime change talking points that have been regurgitated and retrofitted for each new intervention, most recently used to push for regime change in Venezuela. What is also interesting to see, is that it is clear that nothing that Tulsi is saying to Colbert seems to be getting across. His mind is captive to the endless war rhetoric that has been weaponized to support an endless string of wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Another gem from Tulsi during that exchange: “In order to be a force for good, we must actually do good.”

Watch the whole thing:

Department of Justice report, released on March 8th, shows that 307 vaccine injury petitions were filed between 11/16/18 and 2/15/19, with $110 million already paid out to the families of vaccine-injured individuals in the first quarter of this year.

From page 134 of volume 2 of his criminally underread trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty: 

Most people are still unwilling to face the most alarming lesson of modern history: that the greatest crimes of our time have been committed by governments that had the enthusiastic support of millions of people who were guided by moral impulses. It is simply not true that Hitler or Mussolini, Lenin or Stalin, appealed only to the worst instincts of their people: they also appealed to some of the feelings which also dominate contemporary democracies. Whatever disillusionment the more mature supporters of these movements may have experienced as they came to see the effects of the policies they had supported, there can be no doubt that the rank and file of the communist, national-socialist or fascist movements contained many men and women inspired by ideals not very different from those of some the most influential social philosophers in the Western countries. Some of them certainly believed that they were engaged in the creation of a just society in which the needs of the most deserving or ‘socially most valuable’ would be better cared for. They were led by a desire for a visible common purpose which is our inheritance from the tribal society and which we still find breaking through everywhere.”

Hayek, with his formal English, and penchant for 300-word sentences, can be intimidating to read, but it’s entirely worth it. I’ve found that it’s a skill, and once your mind has acclimated to his prose, you can glide through it.  The insight and wisdom packed into these three slender volumes is priceless, and reading them pays enormous dividends in the understanding of the nature of a free society.

The above quote is timely in that it reminds me of the hysteria currently seething around the vaccine debate. A pro-vaccine propaganda blitzkrieg is presently underway, and has the same feeling as the all-encompassing propaganda campaigns immediately before the US starts another overseas war. The suppression of dissent is an integral part of these campaigns, and we see it now in the intense pressure placed on the social media giants to de-platform anyone who holds a heterodox viewpoint of vaccines, or expresses concern that the vastly under-reported autoimmune crisis could be caused by another product of Big Pharma.  That appears to be an eminently reasonable concern. It was these pharmaceutical companies that gave us the opioid epidemic, laced our food with cancer-causing pesticides, and insanity-inducing antidepressants.

We shouldn’t be so quick to let our “moral impulses” be hijacked, and succumb to every manufactured crisis, particularly one in which the largest news organizations, governments, and corporations speak with one voice.

Yisroel Dvod Weiss, spokesperson for Jews United Against Zionism, makes clear the difference between Judaism and Zionism, and that the dishonest ‘anti-Semite’ smear directed at Ilhan Omar harms every Jew because it is being committed in the name of all Jews.

https://videopress.com/v/AF0PRr8x

Is a Police State really the only option for effective border security? That, apparently, is the operating assumption at the heart of current US border policy, where the Fourth Amendment is non-existent throughout the 100-mile wide area encircling the US. Border patrol operates with impunity, dragging US citizens out of their cars for searches and seizures that would be illegal in a free country, performing unnecessary body cavity searches which amount to rape by cop. The abuse is so widespread that the federal government regularly intervenes to pay abuse settlements against the agency, $60 million as of last May.

The logic of border security follows the logic of the ‘War on Terror’: the only way to protect you is to strip you of your rights, while spending hundreds of billions of dollars in the process.

The borderlands have long been a playground and testing ground for surveillance technology, dry-running new equipment before sending it inland to law enforcement across the country.

What truly protects us is the security of our rights from government, not a militarized border patrolled by thugs. The real crisis that almost no one pays attention to is the fact that the border is a Constitution-free zone, or the simple truth that no amount of “security” is worth the loss of liberty.

Facebook has announced that it will begin a slow purge of anyone questioning the absolute safety of vaccines, following the likes of Pinterest and YouTube. Of course, censorship backfires in many ways, and the push to censor vaccine skeptics will have the effect of dramatically growing their movement via the Streisand Effect, so called due to Barbara Streisand’s $50 million lawsuit against a photographer, for the crime of taking a picture of her house. She called it an invasion of privacy, but the ensuing publicity of the lawsuit resulted in a huge interest in the picture that was not there before.

Vaccine skeptics are intelligent, motivated, and organized. They will not just give up if they’re booted from the largest social media platforms. They will develop their own platforms, and, thanks to the attempted censorship, their audience will grow far more than it would have otherwise.

Much heat and little light has emerged from the debate about border security. The debate appears very superficial in its focus on a “wall”, which would be the least objectionable feature of the policy currently being pursued at our southern border. That policy is what the ACLU has dubbed a “Constitution-free Zone” which refers to the 100-mile wide zone, beginning at the border’s edge and extending into the US. In this area, your rights do not apply, and border agents can search, detain, harass, and bully US citizens as much as they like with no repercussions. 2 out of 3 US citizens live within this zone, patrolled by over 20,000 agents with an annual budget well over $14 billion. There is much written on the topic of the ‘Constitution-Free Zone, but it’s safe to say that no border security policy is worth the destruction of the rights of those supposedly benefiting from that security.