Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

August 27, 2024

NICK GILLESPIE: Is Pavel Durov the Next Julian Assange? The Telegram co-founder may become a free-expression martyr for the terrible crime of enabling permissionless speech.

The French arrest and detention of Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov on poorly specified charges related to failures of content moderation and compliance with law enforcement is an outrage—and a reminder that, at least on the surface, Europe and the United States have fundamentally different approaches to unregulated speech that go back centuries.

Recall that John Milton’s world-changing defense of an unlicensed press, Areopagitica, pointedly excluded Catholics while his former Cambridge classmate Roger Williams was living in what would become Rhode Island and defending “soul liberty” for all people, “paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian.” Bringing charges against, say, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk for failure to moderate content? Maybe. But actually putting them in jail, however momentarily, seems unthinkable.

Unthinkable? I see this as prep for going after Elon Musk. Zuck they can control. Though he’s growing a bit more restive lately:

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 27th, 2024

DON SURBER: “As I watch the flamboyant antics of the marvelous Tampon Tim Walz skipping across the world stage to the seal-clapping applause of an idiot media, I recall how the media covered Dan Quayle, whose only crime was misspelling potato.”

Posted at 12:38 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 27th, 2024

I WONDER IF BIDEN/HARRIS WILL DO THE SAME THING AFTER OUR ELECTION? “It’s an unprecedented situation in the history of the 5th French Republic: the loser in the election effectively rejects yielding power to the winner. . . . This awfully inconvenient fact remains: Macron’s party got way less votes and MPs than the NPF, yet it is Macron’s party that’s still running the French government, and it is Macron himself making choices on who can or cannot assume power based on what he thinks would ‘weaken France’ or not. It’s insane when you think about it.”

Posted at 10:43 am by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 27th, 2024

STANDING UP TO BIGOTRY AND BULLYING: Bullied off campus by Boise State students, coffee shop owner continues battle. “A coffee shop owner, ousted from Boise State University due to student backlash over her support for law enforcement, is continuing her legal battle against the school. Sarah Fendley updated The College Fix ahead of an upcoming trial on the current status of the lawsuit she filed which argues her free speech rights were violated by the university.”

Posted at 10:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 27th, 2024

SELF-INFLICTED. Liberal Media Scream: ‘CNN’ has become a laugh line. “This week’s Liberal Media Scream features talker Bill Maher mocking CNN and its hosts for viewing the lefty cable network as politically centrist, citing unending ‘gushing’ over Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential nomination acceptance speech the night before. ‘I watched from 8:09 to 8:23. There was just gushing about how great a speech it was,’ the talk show host and comedian told CNN host Kaitlan Collins.”

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 27th, 2024

JOHN SCHINDLER IS OLD-SCHOOL NEVERTRUMP, BUT NOW HE’S HAVING SECOND THOUGHTS: Who Really Is Barack Obama? A Counterintelligence Inquiry: Our 44th president harmed the security of America, Israel, and the West – it’s time to ask why.

I’ve learned quite a bit over the past decade. Many liberals who became my superfans when I was asking necessary questions about Trump’s connections to Moscow got very upset when I did what any counterintelligence professional does and kept asking questions – not exclusively about Republicans and Russia. China now presents a far greater espionage and illicit influence threat to the United States (and the West more broadly) than Russia or any other country, but liberals don’t like to dwell on Chinese spy operations aimed at U.S. politics, since so many of these involve Democrats.

The same liberals who regard any Republican who ever shook hands with a Russian as a probable Kremlin operative think there’s nothing at all strange about Hunter Biden taking several million dollars from CEFC China Energy, a known Chinese intelligence front. (The less we say about the “Big Guy” and his ten percent, perhaps the better.) Similarly, the fact that the current Democrat vice-presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, made over 30 visits to Communist China, with some of his “educational” junkets there being funded by the Chinese foreign ministry (which is the standard cover for China’s Ministry of State Security), is considered a nothingburger by liberals. Anyone asking obvious questions in this weird case is “paranoid.”

Asking questions is the nature of counterintelligence work. Making hypotheses based on limited information constitutes the cornerstone of counterespionage. If you’re not judicious, you can wind up in the vaunted Wilderness of Mirrors alarmingly easily. “Just asking questions” here doesn’t mean social media sealioning, rather making informed inferences from intelligence fragments, looking for patterns. This is why counterintelligence must be left to professionals, while there are few things more toxic in a democracy than amateur counterintelligence weaponized for partisan purposes (see: Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy).

So, what happens when you employ a professional counterintelligence eye and look at today’s Democrats?

What jumps out immediately is the shocking extent to which foreign spies and extremists have gained a foothold at the upper echelons of the Democrats. Over the past 15 years, people possessing connections and views which would have been show-stoppers until quite recently have instead risen to the commanding heights of the Democratic party. President Bill Clinton endured a scandal relating to Chinese Communist money and his 1996 reelection campaign, a troublesome impropriety that’s been largely forgotten. But it’s not like the Clinton cabinet included people with questionable ties to Beijing and its spies.

Tim Walz and his many trips to the PRC combined with his stated affection for China and its Communist regime would have gotten more attention when Bill Clinton occupied the White House. Similarly, Walz’s dalliances with radical Islam would have been too much for 1990s Democrats to gloss over. It’s been reported that Walz, while campaigning in 2018 to be Minnesota governor, praised Asad Zaman, a senior Muslim cleric, as a “master teacher” among other accolades. Inconveniently, Zaman has pushed blatant Nazi propaganda and considered the Oct. 7 HAMAS attack on Israel a marvelous act of liberation rather than a massive war crime. Worse, Walz has hosted Zaman several times as Minnesota governor, giving $100,000 in state funds to Zaman’s organization. There’s the interesting part. Bad vetting happens, but Zaman’s the head of Minnesota’s chapter of the Muslim American Society, which is hardly a secret. MAS was established in 1993 and has chapters across the United States. It’s an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, which MAS doesn’t really even deny, and that matters because the Brotherhood, established in Egypt in 1928, is the world’s preeminent Sunni Islamic extremist organization. . . .

How did we get to this place, which from any counterintelligence viewpoint looks highly alarming (plus pretty bonkers)? Individuals with ties to FTOs like HAMAS, no matter how tenebrous, are not supposed to possess any security clearances, much less occupy senior security jobs in Washington, DC. Where did this all go wrong?

What happened was Barack Hussein Obama.

It’s now painfully clear that since Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, he and his people have been running the Democratic party at the top levels. The mainstream media isn’t bothering to elide this any longer. Cadres decide everything, per Stalin’s sagacious mantra, and Obama’s chosen cadres have run the show during President Joe Biden’s presidency (since Biden was suffering from age-related decline from early in his presidency, which became impossible to hide over the last year, it’s worth pondering how much Joe was really commander-in-chief at all: but that’s another matter for another time). We should expect the same cadres will be running things if we get President Kamala Harris. Obama-Biden will then become Obama-Biden-Harris: OBH, if you like. There’s been remarkable continuity in personnel across these administrations, especially in the national security arena, which is no accident.

It’s time to confront the difficult reality that Team OBH in its foreign policy has boosted avowed enemies of the United States like the Islamic Republic of Iran plus radical Islamists of many stripes, all of which have ample American blood on their hands. Why? It needs to be asked if such an outcome, which is unquestionably detrimental to the security of the United States, Israel, and the entire West, isn’t a bug but rather a feature of Democrat foreign policy since 2009.

Welcome to the party, pal.

Plus: “At the dawn of the Obama era, a Pentagon friend and colleague, now of blessed memory, warned me that the new administration was riddled with Islamist sympathizers and related Communist-adjacent types who were seeking to swing U.S. foreign policy in a direction more pleasing to the mullahs in Tehran and jihadists worldwide. Moreover, he predicted the emergence of a domestic front, an odd alliance of leftist radicals, terrorist fans, LGBT activists, environmentalists, and Islamists, all seeking to change America at a basic “anti-imperialist” level. I pooh-poohed his predictions as unduly alarmist, the output of a brilliant mind that was scattered by too many deployments. I was wrong.”

Related: Tehran Tries to Take Out Trump.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 27th, 2024

August 26, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 26th, 2024
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