BREAKING: Leaked FBI Docs Show Conservatives Targeted As Domestic …

(BLP) Project Veritas has obtained an FBI guide from a whistleblower that shows exactly how constitutionalists are being profiled as domestic terrorists by an illegitimate federal bureaucracy gone rogue.

The FBI is classifying people as potential militia violent extremists if they display revolutionary war imagery like the Gadsden Flag or the Betsy Ross Flag. Other symbols noted as potential symbols used by domestic terrorists include the 2nd Amendment emblem, the black-and-yellow flag of anarchocapitalism, Molon Labe, and the punisher skull logo.

Additionally, Ashli Babbitt, who was executed in cold blood by a Capitol police officer in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, is listed as a martyr who inspires domestic terrorists. Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Timothy McVeighs Oklahoma City bombing are listed as catalyzing events for these FBI targets as well.

The actual documents leaked to Project Veritas can be seen here:

BREAKING Via Project Veritas: FBI Whistleblower LEAKS Bureaus Domestic Terrorism Symbols Guide on 'Militia Violent Extremists Citing Ashli Babbitt

Document references The Second Amendment, Gadsden Flag, Revolutionary War Imagery, & The Betsy Ross Flag pic.twitter.com/tsIYLuvrhf

Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) August 2, 2022

Big League Politics has reported on how the federal overreach has increased drastically since Jan. 6 as the war on terror is now focused primarily on the homeland:

The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation on Wednesday giving the Biden administration vast new domestic authority to combat supposed homeland terrorists.

The vote largely fell on party lines and was approved by a 222-203 margin. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), the neoconservative Never Trump RINO, joined the Democrat-led effort to eviscerate the Bill of Rights and Constitution.

The legislation, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, gives the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) increased snooping powers in order to target domestic threats. This will inevitably be used against patriotic Americans, who have been demonized as terrorists since the Jan. 6 protest at the U.S. Capitol.

The Democrats are exploiting the victims of the recent Buffalo mass shooting in order to initiate their illicit power-grab.

This past weekend, we had the shooting in Buffalo. We had a shooting in California. We had a shooting in my district, a gang shooting where a 14 year old boy was killed, said Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL), who was a co-sponsor of the bill.

We need to address what is an epidemic of gun violence in the country. We need to tackle the challenge of domestic extremism. And the only way we do that is finding a bipartisan way to push the ball forward together, he continued.

I cant say this law would have stopped what happened in Buffalo. What I can say is that if we give the abilities of the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security to try to intercept these threats before they become a reality, maybe we stop the next Buffalo or the next El Paso, the next Pittsburgh attack, Schneider added.

Some Republicans who supported the bill during the previous legislative session no longer support the measure because of the Biden regimes overreach.

The difference from two years ago and now is that the DOJ has started going after concerned parents showing up at school board meetings, labeling them domestic terrorists, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) said.

bigleaguepolitics.com/leaked-fbi-guide-shows-how-constitutionalists-are-profiled-as-domestic-terrorists/

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BREAKING: Leaked FBI Docs Show Conservatives Targeted As Domestic ...

Leaked FBI Guide Shows How Constitutionalists are Profiled as Domestic …

by Shane Trejo, Big League Politics:

Project Veritashas obtained an FBI guidefrom a whistleblower that shows exactly how constitutionalists are being profiled as domestic terrorists by an illegitimate federal bureaucracy gone rogue.

The FBI is classifying people as potential militia violent extremists if they display revolutionary war imagery like the Gadsden Flag or the Betsy Ross Flag. Other symbols noted as potential symbols used by domestic terrorists include the 2nd Amendment emblem, the black-and-yellow flag of anarchocapitalism, Molon Labe, and the punisher skull logo.

TRUTH LIVES on athttps://sgtreport.tv/

Additionally, Ashli Babbitt, who was executed in cold blood by a Capitol police officer in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, is listed as a martyr who inspires domestic terrorists. Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Timothy McVeighs Oklahoma City bombing are listed as catalyzing events for these FBI targets as well.

The actual documents leaked to Project Veritas can be seen here:

Big League Politicshas reportedon how the federal overreach has increased drastically since Jan. 6 as the war on terror is now focused primarily on the homeland:

The U.S. House of Representativespassed legislation on Wednesdaygiving the Biden administration vast new domestic authority to combat supposed homeland terrorists.

Read More @ BigLeaguePolitics.com

Original post:

Leaked FBI Guide Shows How Constitutionalists are Profiled as Domestic ...

What Is Classical Liberalism? | Mises Institute

[American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia , 2006]

"Classical liberalism" is the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. Up until around 1900, this ideology was generally known simply as liberalism. The qualifying "classical" is now usually necessary, in English-speaking countries at least (but not, for instance, in France), because liberalism has come to be associated with wide-ranging interferences with private property and the market on behalf of egalitarian goals. This version of liberalism if such it can still be called is sometimes designated as "social," or (erroneously) "modern" or the "new," liberalism. Here we shall use liberalism to signify the classical variety.

Although its fundamental claims are universalist, liberalism must be understood first of all as a doctrine and movement that grew out of a distinctive culture and particular historical circumstances. That culture as Lord Acton recognized most clearly was the West, the Europe that was or had been in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Its womb, in other words, was the particular human society that underwent "the European miracle" (in E.L. Jones's phrase). The historical circumstances were the confrontation of the free institutions and values inherited from the Middle Ages with the pretensions of the absolutist state of the 16th and 17th centuries.

From the struggle of the Dutch against the absolutism of the Spanish Habsburgs issued a polity that manifested basically liberal traits: the rule of law, including especially a firm adherence to property rights; de facto religious toleration; considerable freedom of expression; and a central government of severely limited powers. The astonishing success of the Dutch experiment exerted a "demonstration effect" on European social thought and, gradually, political practice. This was even truer of the later example of England. Throughout the history of liberalism, theory and social reality interacted, with theory stimulated and refined through the observation of practice, and attempts to reform practice undertaken with reference to more accurate theory.

In the English constitutional struggles of the 17th century a number of individuals and groups displayed significant liberal traits. One stands out, however, as the first recognizably liberal party in European history: the Levellers. Led by John Lilburne and Richard Overton, this movement of middle-class radicals demanded freedom of trade and an end to state monopolies, separation of church and state, popular representation, and strict limits even to parliamentary authority. Their emphasis on property, beginning with the individual's ownership of himself, and their hostility to state power show that the amalgamation of the Levellers to the presocialist Diggers was mere enemy propaganda. Although failures in their time, the Levellers furnished the prototype of a middle-class radical liberalism that has been a feature of the politics of English-speaking peoples ever since. Later in the century, John Locke framed the doctrine of the natural rights to life, liberty, and estate which he collectively termed "property" in the form that would be passed down, through the Real Whigs of the 18th century, to the generation of the American Revolution.

America became the model liberal nation, and, after England, the exemplar of liberalism to the world. Through much of the 19th century it was in many respects a society in which the state could hardly be said to exist, as European observers noted with awe. Radical liberal ideas were manifested and applied by groups such as the Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, abolitionists, and late-19th-century anti-imperialists.

Until well into the 20th century, however, the most significant liberal theory continued to be produced in Europe. The 18th century was particularly rich in this regard. A landmark was the work of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart. They developed an analysis that explained "the origin of complex social structures without the need to posit the existence of a directing intelligence" (in Ronald Hamowy's summary). The Scottish theory of spontaneous order was a crucial contribution to the model of a basically self-generating and self-regulating civil society that required state action only to defend against violent intrusion into the individual's rights-protected sphere. As Dugald Steward put it in his Biographical Memoir of Adam Smith (1811), "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and the tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." The Physiocratic formula, Laissez-faire, laissez-passer, le monde va de lui-mme ("the world goes by itself"), suggests both the liberal program and the social philosophy upon which it rests. The theory of spontaneous order was elaborated by later liberal thinkers, notably Herbert Spencer and Carl Menger in the 19th century and F.A. Hayek and Michael Polanyi in the twentieth.

One argument between liberals and Burkean and other conservatives who in important respects stand close to liberalism is related to this central liberal conception. While liberals typically expect the market in the widest sense the network of voluntary exchanges to generate a system of institutions and mores conducive to its continuance, conservatives insist that the indispensable underpinning must be provided by the state beyond the simple protection of life, liberty, and property, including especially state support of religion.

With the onset of industrialization, a major area of conflict opened up between liberalism and conservatism. Conservative elites and their spokesmen, particularly in Britain, often exploited the circumstances of early industrialism to tarnish the liberal escutcheon of their middle-class and Nonconformist opponents. In historical perspective, it is clear that what is known as the Industrial Revolution was Europe's (and America's) way of dealing with an otherwise intractable population explosion. Some conservatives went on to forge a critique of the market order based on its alleged materialism, soullessness, and anarchy.

To the extent that liberals associated conservatism with militarism and imperialism, another source of conflict arose. While a strand of Whiggish liberalism was not averse to wars (beyond self-defense) for liberal ends, and while wars of national unification provided a major exception to the rule, by and large liberalism was associated with the cause of peace. The ideal type of antiwar and anti-imperialist liberalism was provided by the Manchester School and its leaders Richard Cobden and John Bright. Cobden, particularly, developed a sophisticated analysis of the motives and machinations of states leading to war. The panacea proposed by the Manchesterites was international free trade. Developing these ideas, Frdric Bastiat proposed an especially pure form of the liberal doctrine that enjoyed a certain appeal on the Continent and, later, in the United States.

Liberalism's adherents were not always consistent. This was the case when they turned to the state to promote their own values. In France, for instance, liberals used state-funded schools and institutes to promote secularism under the Directory, and they supported anticlerical legislation during the Third Republic, while in Bismarck's Germany they spearheaded the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. These efforts, however, can be seen as betrayals of liberal principles and in fact were eschewed by those acknowledged to be the most consistent and doctrinaire in their liberalism.

The basis for a possible reconciliation of liberalism and antistatist conservatism emerged after the experience of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Its best exponent was Benjamin Constant, who may be viewed as the representative figure of mature liberalism. Faced with the new dangers of unlimited state power based on manipulation of the democratic masses, Constant looked for social buffers and ideological allies wherever they might be found. Religious faith, localism, and the voluntary traditions of a people were valued as sources of strength against the state. In the next generation, Alexis de Tocqueville elaborated this Constantian approach, becoming the great analyst and opponent of the rising omnipresent, bureaucratic state.

In English-speaking countries the hostility of antistatist conservatives has been exacerbated by an extreme emphasis on the role of Bentham and the Philosophical Radicals in the history of liberalism. J.S. Mill's On Liberty (1859) actually deviated from the central line of liberal thought by counterposing the individual and his liberty not simply to the state but to "society" as well. Whereas the liberalism of the early Wilhelm von Humboldt and of Constant, for example, saw voluntary intermediate bodies as the natural outgrowth of individual action and as welcome barriers to state aggrandizement, Mill aimed at stripping the individual of any connection to spontaneously generated social tradition and freely accepted authority as, for instance, in his statement in On Liberty that the Jesuit is a "slave" of his order.

It is the socialist state that classical liberalism has opposed most vigorously. The Austro-American Ludwig von Mises, for example, demonstrated the impossibility of rational central planning. Prolific for more than fifty years, Mises restated liberal social philosophy after its eclipse of several decades; he became the acknowledged spokesman for liberal ideology in the 20th century. Among the many students on whom Mises exercised a remarkable influence was Murray N. Rothbard, who wedded Austrian economic theory to the doctrine of natural rights to produce a form of individualist anarchism, or "anarchocapitalism." By extending the realm of civil society to the point of extinguishing the state, Rothbard's view appears as the limiting case of authentic liberalism.

Classical liberalism is often contrasted with a new social liberalism, which is supposed to have developed out of the classical variety around 1900. But social liberalism deviates fundamentally from its namesake at its theoretical root in that it denies the self-regulatory capacity of society: the state is called on to redress social imbalance in increasingly ramified ways. The plea that it intends to preserve the end of individual freedom, modifying only the means, is to classical liberals hardly to the point as much could be claimed for most varieties of socialism. In fact, social liberalism can scarcely be distinguished, theoretically and practically, from revisionist socialism. Furthermore, it can be argued that this school of thought did not develop out of classical liberalism around the turn of the century when, for instance, the alleged fraudulence of freedom of contract in the labor market is supposed to have been discovered. Social liberalism existed full-blown at least from the time of Sismondi, and elements of it (welfarism) can be found even in great classical-liberal writers such as Condorcet and Thomas Paine.

With the end of the classical-socialist project, classical liberals and antistatist conservatives may agree that it is contemporary social liberalism that now stands as the great adversary of civil society. The political preoccupation of classical liberals is, of necessity, to counteract the current now leading the world toward what Macaulay called "the all-devouring state" the nightmare that haunted Burke no less than Constant, Tocqueville, and Herbert Spencer. As older quarrels grow increasingly obsolete, liberals and antistatist conservatives may well discover that they have more in common than their forebears ever understood.

[This article originally appeared in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, edited by Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2006), pp. 498-502.]

Further Reading

Acton, John. "The History of Freedom in Antiquity" and "The History of Freedom in Christianity." In Selected Writings of Lord Acton, vol. 1, Essays in the History of Liberty, edited by J. Rufus Fears. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1985.

Bramsted, E. K., and K. J. Melhuish. Western Liberalism: A History in Documents from Locke to Croce. London: Longman, 1978.

Hamowy, Ronald. The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

Pocock, J. G. A. "The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution." In Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Raico, Ralph. Classical Liberalism in the Twentieth Century. Fairfax, Va.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1989.

Stewart, Dugald. Biographical Memoir of Adam Smith. 1811. Reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966.

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What Is Classical Liberalism? | Mises Institute

Steven Pinker on coronavirus and capitalism – Spear’s WMS

The psychologist explains why unfettered free markets dont exist and the pandemic might not reshape society

Professor Steven Pinker has already eaten his lunch. Its rude to talk with food in your mouth so I did consume my lunch before our meeting, he tells me via Zoom. I glance at the spaghetti puttanesca Ive prepared off-screen. Itll have to wait.

He does, however, reassure me that he is in possession of liquid: a cup of nice strong British tea, which he raises to the camera (no milk, it must be mentioned). This is going to be more liquid than lunch, then. Fine.

Pinker, 65, is that rarefied species of public intellectual whose opinion is sought and valued on just about anything in the world that matters. A cognitive psychologist by trade (he lectures at Harvard), he has written several books on language and psycholinguistics, but his oeuvre has come to encompass a broader array of societal themes.

His entry into public consciousness came in 2011 with the publication of The Better Angels of Our Nature. The data-stacked opus examines how and why violence in societies has steadily declined. It was a critical success: Bill Gates called it the most inspiring book Ive ever read. If Angels took Pinker mainstream, then 2018s Enlightenment Now confirmed his status as a generational thinker.

The book passionately makes the case that the Enlightenment values of reason, science and humanism have brought about consistent human progress over time a thesis that he displayed in 15 ways. Life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge and happiness are on the rise, folks, if you havent noticed. The Microsoft founder called that one my new favourite book of all time.

But as well as turning Pinker into an intellectual A-lister, Enlightenment Now also made him something of a lightning rod.

The book has provoked everything from cartoons to fierce criticism. The New Statesmans John Gray was among the harshest critics, deriding the embarrassing treatise as a feeble sermon for rattled liberals. The intensity of the debate that Pinkers views have aroused is at odds with the warm and disarming manner of the genteel man on screen. If theres an ego here, its hard to detect on first impression.

If anything, the most remarkable part of the screen in front of me is Pinkers sprightly ashen hair. Weve connected to discuss, of course, coronavirus. The pandemic has forced changes to daily life around the world, and these changes have led to a wider conversation about society.

Deepening fault lines in inequality and wealth have been painfully exposed. Among policymakers and business leaders, there is a serious conversation about whether things once thought sacrosanct, such as free-market capitalism, can continue in their current shape. For Pinker, this debate over free-market capitalism is misguided. His position is that there is a failure on the part-libertarian right and the socialist left to draw a sloppy equation of free-market capitalism with anarchocapitalism.

Simply put: there is no such thing as a country without some form of regulation and social safety net and this is unlikely to change.

Unbridled, untrammelled free-market capitalism doesnt exist, he states. Instead, its a question of degrees. It doesnt prove that the libertarian fantasy of an unregulated free market is impossible. Maybe there is some daring country in the future which will try to dismantle its regulatory framework and social safety net that would have better outcomes of any existing society.

But it seems unlikely that after a century of expanding the social safety net including in the United States, the country that would seem to be most ideologically hostile to it its telling us that you really cannot have a free-market democracy without regulation and redistribution, partly because there are many people who simply have nothing to offer the market in exchange for sustenance.

But has a new standard for redistribution been set? I mention the UKs furlough scheme as an example of the state picking up the bill. Will the pandemic yield a shift in what people expect of their governments?

Again, Pinker gently pushes back. Theres a great temptation to predict that measures that were living with now will be sticky, and one has to be sceptical of those predictions. If in two years there is an effective vaccine, and a combination of social distancing, sanitation, antivirals, vaccines and herd immunity returns life to something closer to normal, how many of the measures that weve taken in the emergency will people want to retain? Its so easy to imagine the present as the way things always will be, but I expect there is a lot of overestimation of how much inertia there will be.

Still, he concedes there will be some change, mentioning face-to face meetings. People will probably see that so much can be accomplished on video-conferencing platforms, he says. Its almost comically modest when compared to some of the epochal changes that several blue-sky thinkers have been positing.

What about his central idea of human progress, a notion that underpins his careers writings? Does Covid-19 pose a setback to it? Pinker grows animated.

When it comes to the pandemic and whether it challenges the idea that progress is a genuine phenomenon, I think it reveals a common misunderstanding of the nature of progress, he states. The misconception holds progress as an idea that bad things can never happen again, that things automatically get better and better by itself. Instead, these forces of the universe and nature are indifferent to our wellbeing.

The threat of infection has always been with us, as long as complex life has existed, he says. The problem that this consists of is not that there is some cosmic escalator, but rather that to the extent that we use human ingenuity to fight back against the forces that grind us down [and] can make incremental improvements. We can remember the things that work, discard the experiments that dont, and chop away at the problems that afflict us.

Problems are inevitable, he says, and even some solutions create new problems: There is something not quite Sisyphean about progress, but it always has to overcome the forces that are dragging us own.

Coronavirus is one such force. Itll be terrible but it will be temporary, he says, taking a sip of tea. Despite the apparent rosiness of this assessment, its not to be framed in terms of optimism and pessimism, but instead as an argument against fatalism.

To the extent that we do apply reason and science to humanistic aims that is, making people better off as opposed to other aims like maximising national glory or the race of the culture or the class then progress is possible, he says. Its conditional optimism, rooted in the understanding that left to themselves things get worse, that only by the application of ingenuity and concern for our fellow humans that progress can take place.

Case closed, then. I might not have had lunch, but the conversation with Pinker has left me plenty to chew on. His central thesis is presented with such dexterity that it sounds obvious beyond question. So I dont.

The pandemic is a blip, unfettered free markets are a myth, and the steady march of progress continues. He might not call it optimism, but its certainly reassuring. Time to reheat the pasta.

Illustration: Russ Tudor

This piece was first published in issue 75 of Spears magazine

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Steven Pinker on coronavirus and capitalism - Spear's WMS