Biden’s expulsion from the presidential race did not herald the arrival of truth. Most of the media still tolerates pervasive secrecy on prime issues of the 2024 campaign.

In bygone times, elections were about self-government.  Nowadays, voters merely have a cameo role to sanctify the nearly boundless power of officialdom. .  Every year, the federal government slaps a “secret” label on trillions of pages of information – enough to fill 20 million filing cabinets.  And since the government is automatically benevolent (if a Democrat is president), there is no need to trouble citizens with the grisly details of how they are being served.

At the same time Special Counsel Jack Smith is racing to fling all possible dirt at Trump before Election Day, each week we learn of new cover-ups designed to deceive Americans about how badly they have been misgoverned:

1. Biden administration has mostly succeeded in covering up the crime wave by illegal aliens ushered into the nation since 2021. Former Border Patrol Sector Chief Aaron Heitke testified to Congress last month that the Biden administration hid the adverse impact from deluging U.S. cities with illegal aliens, including those with terror ties.
2. The National Archives announced on Wednesday that it would delay until after the election the release of potentially damning records on Vice President Joe Biden’s dealings with his son and foreign wheelers-dealers – records that have been sought for more than a year by conservative lawyers and activists.
3. Biden’s Justice Department sought to bury all the tax charges against Hunter Biden but were thwarted thanks to courageous IRS whistleblowers.  Hunter’s guilty plea last month to the tax charges confirms that the Justice Department’s offer a wrist-slap plea bargain to Hunter last year was a shameless obstruction of justice.
4. Biden’s FBI last year created “a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers,” Newsweek reported. FBI whistleblowers have exposed the politicization of an agency that even secretly targeted traditional Catholics who prefer to hear mass in Latin. But the vast majority of FBI surveillance and entrapment abuses remain shrouded.
5. Team Biden is covering up both Trump assassination attempts. Biden appointees have stonewalled bipartisan congressional investigations into the abysmal Secret Service failures at Butler, Pennsylvania.  The Justice Department has indefinitely delayed hearings for Ryan Routh, the 58-year-old guy caught waiting to shoot Trump on his Florida golf course.  Delaying proceedings against Routh assures that Americans will not learn before the election whether the would-be assassin had ties to the CIA, Pentagon, State Department or other agencies that assisted Routh with his massively-publicized campaign to recruit foreign soldiers to fight for Ukraine.
6. The Biden administration continues covering up almost everything regarding its support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia.  The best info Americans have received was thanks to a young military computer technician who leaked revelations that the Ukrainian military was in far worse shape than Team Biden claimed. Americans have been forced to pay hundreds of billions of dollars but are left in the dark regarding Biden administration machinations that risk pulling this nation into World War Three.
7. The House Oversight Committee this week subpoenaed DHS for its records on Tim Walz’s possible ties to the CCP after being contacted by a whistleblower.  There is zero chance that the Biden administration will release any of those records before Election Day.
8. Political convenience is practically the sole determinant of what Americans are permitted to learn nowadays.  After Biden dropped his re-election bid, the administration disclosed records showing that his son Hunter sought U.S. government handouts for Burisma when Joe Biden was Vice President.  That scandal was buried until Joe Biden was no longer politically relevant.

Is censorship the biggest X factor for this election? Four years ago, the presidential election may have been swung by the coverup of the damning revelations in Hunter Biden’s laptop.  The FBI and the CIA hustled to censor and defuse that story with false rebuttals in October 2020.  According to multiple federal court rulings, federal agencies tampered with the 2020 election by censoring millions of comments by Americans who raised doubts about the trustworthiness of mail-in ballots and other election procedures. Federal judge Terry Doughty noted that  “virtually all of the free speech suppressed was ‘conservative’ free speech.”  A federal appeals court issued an injunction prohibiting federal officials from acting “to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce . . . posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

But the Supreme Court refused to recognize that the censorship victims had any legal standing and canceled the injunction.   Americans will likely have no idea how many muzzles and blindfolds were secretly attached by federal agencies and federal contractors before Election Day.

Don’t expect journalists to suddenly get hot to thwart those Biden cover-ups. When the media shrouded Biden’s mental debility, it directly endorsed de facto secret rule. How much effort has the New York Times or Washington Post or National Public Radio exerted to reveal who is actually exercising the supreme power nowadays? Exposing that issue could derail Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign so it is ignored. But ​​​​​Biden is as oblivious as ever. When asked by a reporter on Thursday about the situation in the Hurricane Helene storm zone, Biden replied that those states “are getting everything they need. They are very happy across the board.”

Earth to Uncle Joe?!?

But as long as Donald Trump is not elected next month, most of the Washington media doesn’t care who is in control. If the Wizard of Oz was a contemporary political campaign story, the media would overwhelmingly side with the guy behind the curtain. As long as the Wizard recited “Orange Man Bad,” the media would cover up all his abuses.

But “informed consent” is a mirage if the feds blindfold voters. As long as Team Biden keeps a lid on its worst outrages until Election Day, Democrats can snare four more year to abuse the Constitution, the law, and the American people. Unfortunately, self-government is not retroactive.

About the Author

James Bovard is a contributing editor for The American Conservative. He is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. His latest is Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, and a frequent contributor to The Hill.

I recently wrangled on this topic with former top-ranked New York City radio host Brian Wilson, with whom I do a weekly podcast. In one of his Substack essays on the topic, Brian stated that “anyone claiming the title ‘Journalist’ must come with the degreed qualifications”—possessing a journalism degree. He added, “I take principled offense at those who appropriate a title they never earned” by not possessing a journalism degree. Commenting on a recent dispute over the firing of former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Brian mentioned that some of the individuals that NBC identified as “journalists” had not graduated from college. Brian declared, “Wouldn’t you expect a professional ‘journalist’ to have bona fide credentials on a par with other professions”—such as doctors and lawyers —”to qualify for their titles”?

Brian stated that a journalism degree “should be obviously important to anyone looking for Integrity and Accuracy in the news.” But ethics is a shaky defense for “degreed Journalists.” In the past thirty years, the percentage of people working for print and broadcast media outlets who have journalism degrees has skyrocketed. At the same time, public trust in the media collapsed.

Brian stated that in all the years that he knew me and followed my work, he had never heard of anyone refer to me as a “journalist.” Actually, that is probably the most common non-profane term folks use to describe me.

But I am a mere Hokie dropout, since I didn’t finish a four-year sojourn at Virginia Tech. I never took any journalism classes. On the other hand, I zealously pursued classes and independent studies with professors to become a better writer. Once I took all those classes, I dropped out because having a degree from Va. Tech wouldn’t open the type of markets I planned to target. Early on, I found some editors that judged me by the words I submitted, not by any academic pedigree.

Maybe my career illustrates the shifting definitions and standards for journalism. After I moved to Washington in mid-1980, I applied to be a writer or researcher at the Heritage Foundation. At that point, Heritage did not have a grandiose law firm-style headquarters on Capitol Hill a stone’s throw from Senate office buildings. Instead, it was located in a ramshackle old wooden building on the dicey borderline of the safe part of Capitol Hill.

I was interviewed by a trim, mid-30ish guy who was immaculately coiffed and, despite the brutally hot Washington summer day, wearing a formal vest from a three-piece suit. His vibe that day left no doubt that he was conferring a celestial blessing by meeting with me.

He beamed as he sat in a swivel chair on the other side of a broad table. After the standard pleasantries, he looked down his nose and picked up the resume and stack of clips I had sent the previous week.

“Hmmm…“ he said almost absent-mindedly, as if talking to himself. “You’ve been published in New York Times…Chicago Tribune…Boston Globe…Washinton Star…Nice.”

When his skimming reached the bottom of the page, his face brightened with a triumphal gloat. “Oh!” he happily announced. A pregnant pause was followed by judicious raising of eyebrows to signify astonishment, if not shock and horror.

“I see that you didn’t finish college.”

“Yep,” I replied.

He tilted back in his chair, crossed his arms, and, with a condescending smirk, solemnly announced: “Mr. Bovard, you’ve got to pay your dues.”

I struggled mightily to repress a Cheshire cat grin.

“Go back to college, finish your degree, and then contact us after you graduate,” he announced as if he were bestowing the most valuable advice I’d ever receive.

I burst out laughing but preserved a modicum of decorum by not falling out of my chair. The “interview” ended moments later. If employers fixated on degrees and nothing else, I was as happy to ax them from my list as they were to disqualify me.

Four years later, I was writing regularly for Wall Street Journal, Reader’s Digest, USA Today, Washington Times and other newspapers. I was often covering hearings and other events on Capitol Hill. When I sought a press pass from the Senate Press Gallery as a freelance writer, I was given a couple 90-day temporary passes. When I returned for an extension, I ended up palavering with a couple Senate staffers who helped run the gallery. They were friendly guys with none of the officiousness that tainted other Hill staffers.

“We don’t give full-year passes to freelancers,” declared the older guy. “This would be a lot easier if you had a permanent affiliation.”

“Yep, I understand,” I shrugged.

His colleague had been nodding his head and then added, “If instead of being a freelance writer, if you were ‘Bovard News Service’….

“HEY!” I responded. “I am Bovard News Service!”

We shared a hearty laugh and for the next twenty years, I received annual Senate Press Gallery passes for Bovard News Service.

That press pass provided access to the Senate and House press galleries overlooking the congressional chambers. I spent many hours in the front row overlooking floor debates and colloquies, especially on topics on which I had closely followed and written.

At first, I was stunned by the pervasive falsehoods I heard from both political parties. But studying the eyes, movements, and vibe of veteran members of Congress, I soon realized that the Capitol was a Twilight Zone where facts and truth were simply irrelevant. Almost no one showed a speck of remorse or bad conscience regardless of their howlers. They weren’t lying: they were simply talking to their personal or party’s advantage. Words were simply tokens that congressmen played to seize power, burnish their image, or boost spending for a pet cause. When politicians contradicted themselves a few minutes or days later, it didn’t matter; that was irrelevant compared to legislative victories. The longer a person “served” in Congress, the more immune they became to both reality and decency.

Congressional debates often resembled a transcript from a village idiot convention. During battles over the 1990 farm bill, several congressmen characterized proposals to end handouts to big farmers as suspiciously akin to communism. Rep. Robin Tallon (D-SC), warned, “We do not have to imagine what life would be like without a responsible farm program. We need only look to the Soviet Union where people will wait in line for hours in hopes that they can buy a small portion of beef or bread.” Rep. Pat Roberts (R-KS) seconded the alarm: “This effort to end participation of our most successful farmers and investors in the farm programs sounds a lot like the way the Poles and Russians organized their agricultural policy before the Berlin Wall came down.” Communism was a bad thing, and ending farm subsidies was a bad thing, so anyone who advocated ending subsidies was a communist. Reducing political control over agriculture was the worst kind of tyranny. Those gems of logic sparked a Wall Street Journal piece titled, “How to Think Like a Congressman.”

In prior eras, the notion that politicians are untrustworthy rascals was part of American folklore. As Russell Baker, The New York Times Senate correspondent, lamented in 1962, “I spend my life sitting on marble floors, waiting for somebody to come out [of closed congressional hearings] and lie to me.” In a different era, Baker’s candor earned him a Times columnist spot.

But somewhere along the line, many or most Washington journalists lost their radar for government BS. The percentage of J-school grads became higher in Washington with each decade. Many of them were proud to write “The Government Told Me So” stories. Did the new cadres lose their instinctive skepticism in journalism school? I got some of my best stories in ways that would horrify journalism professors, including “How I Robbed the World Bank” and “Heisting the Secret U.S. Tariff Code.”

The changing standards were exemplified by Mary Lou Forbes, a Washington Times commentary editor who I wrote more than a hundred pieces for over twenty-five years. She was a sweet lady who was tough as nails. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for her coverage of Virginia desegregation battles while she worked at The Washington Star. In one of the final phone conversations we had before her death from cancer, she went on a tear about how she disliked the word “journalist.” She explained, “In my day, we were reporters”—a term she liked because it had zero pretension. In my R.I.P. blog tribute to her, I wrote that “her rare combination of grace, toughness, and sound judgment will not soon be equaled in Washington.” She never asked me whether I had a college degree, and I didn’t realize until checking recently that she had been a math major before she dropped out of the University of Maryland in the 1940s.

I view “journalist” as an occupation, not as a title or an honorific. In daily life, the term is simply another one of my flags of convenience—along with writer, reporter, investigator, muckraker, hooligan, policy analyst, author, and “innocent-looking bystander.”

But the push for professionalization of journalism snags Assange and brigades of citizen journalists who expose official wrongdoing. A 2022 survey found almost half of American television journalists favor government licensing for their occupation. This is indicative of how those journalists fail to understand either the nature of government or of journalism. Or perhaps they believe that kowtowing to officialdom is the high road to truth—or at least the greatest glory they will ever achieve? Perhaps this is what happens when the press corps becomes full of journalism majors with no clue on the long history of oppression.

Licensing knuckleheads have an ally in Oklahoma Sen. Nathan Dahm, who recently proposed the “Common Sense Freedom of Press Control Act.” Dahm, the state chairman of the Republican Party from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, touted a bill to compel journalists to become licensed, comply with criminal background checks, complete a “propaganda-free” training course approved by politicians or their appointees, and submit to quarterly drug tests. Regrettably, there are no current proposals to require state legislators or members of Congress to take regular IQ tests.

The First Amendment was never entitled to be a class privilege of the media establishment. Squabbles over who is a journalist distract from the grave peril of government oppression for anyone who offends Uncle Sam. After Julian Assange was hit by a federal indictment, a New York Times editorial declared that the charges were “aimed straight at the heart of the First Amendment” and would have a “chilling effect on American journalism as it has been practiced for generations.” Assange and Wikileaks provided a huge booster shot to democracy by alerting Americans to how they had been deceived and misgoverned.

Assange’s courage and credibility matter far more than his credentials. But the fight over his fate is taking place in a time of growing threats to freedom of the press. 55% of American adults support government suppression of “false information,” even though only 20% trust the government. Relying on dishonest officials to eradicate “false information” is not the height of prudence. A September 2023 poll revealed that almost half of Democrats believed that free speech should be legal “only under certain circumstances.” Support for censorship is stronger among young folks—a grim harbinger for American freedom. The peril is compounded because The New York Times and Washington Post have jumped on the Disinformation Suppression Bandwagon.

At a time of growing perils, journalists, writers, muckrakers, and hooligans need to make common cause to resist the latest wave of repression. In this battle for the survival of freedom, there is even room for Hokie dropouts. But any journalist who favors government licensing of their occupation deserves all the tar and feathers we can find.

You could be at risk of being pilfered by officialdom anytime you sit behind a steering wheel. Between 2001 and 2014, lawmen seized more than $2.5 billion in cash from sixty thousand travelers on the nation’s highways—with no criminal charges in most cases, according to the Washington Post. Federal, state, and local law enforcement have institutionalized shakedowns on the nation’s highways to the point that “forfeiture corridors are the new speed traps,” as Mother Jones observed.

Police can almost always find an excuse to pull someone over. Gerald Arenberg, executive director of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, told me in a 1996 interview, “We have so damn many laws, you can’t drive the streets without breaking the law.” The Washington Post reported that police set up “rolling checkpoints on busy highways and pulled over motorists for minor violations, such as following too closely or improper signaling,” and “looked for supposed ‘indicators’ of criminal activity, which can include such things as trash on the floor of a vehicle, or abundant energy drinks.”

In Tenaha, Texas, authorities confiscated $3 million from motorists passing through East Texas. The names of the court filings capture Tenaha’s rapacity, such as State of Texas v. One Gold Crucifix. “The police had confiscated a simple gold cross that a woman wore around her neck after pulling her over for a minor traffic violation. No contraband was reported, no criminal charges were filed, and no traffic ticket was issued,” the New Yorker noted. If drivers “refused to part with their money, officers threatened to arrest them on false money laundering charges and other serious felonies,” an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit charged. Tenaha police stopped a twenty-seven-year-old black man who worked as a chicken slicer in an Arkansas Tyson plant and fleeced him of $3,900 after accusing him of “driving too close to the white line.” After the police warned Jennifer Boatright that they would take custody of her children if she refused to surrender the thousands of dollars she carried to buy a used car, she burst into tears and thought: “Where are we? Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” The American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit and the Texas legislature compelled the town to cease the abusive seizures in 2012. However, most victims never got their property back.

In 2016, Muskogee County, Oklahoma, deputy sheriffs hit the sirens and pulled over a forty-year-old Burmese refugee driving down Highway 69 for a broken taillight. Eh Wah, a naturalized US citizen living in Dallas, was the manager for a Christian rock band that had been on tour raising more than $50,000 for a Thai orphanage and a Christian college in Burma. Police found the money and a drug dog alerted, so the money was seized—even though Wah had papers documenting his mission and the source of the income. No drugs were found on Wah’s vehicle, but a Muskogee deputy later insisted, “The fact that in this particular case we didn’t find drugs doesn’t mean it was a false hit” by the dog. Wah was interrogated and threatened for six hours; he was told, “You are going to jail tonight.” It was a terrifying experience for someone whose English was shaky and who fled a nation where the police were tyrannical. The sheriff’s department kept the money but let Wah travel on. Five weeks after he left Oklahoma, Wah was charged with “acquiring proceeds from a drug activity, a felony.” The primary “evidence” was the dog’s alert. The Oklahoma perfidy was torpedoed by Dan Alban, an Institute for Justice attorney who has thwarted many outrageous cash seizures. Alban took Wah’s case and told the Muskogee Phoenix that the timing of the charge suggests, “They were trying to strong-arm Eh Wah so that he would give up the money in the civil forfeiture case in exchange for a plea deal in the criminal case.” On the same day the Washington Post published an article on the case, Muskogee County dropped the charge and promised to send a full refund.

Perverse incentives propel plunder. Police in many states use confiscated property to pay their own salaries, bonuses, and vacations. A Missouri police chief said that forfeiture money was “like pennies from heaven . . . that get you a toy.” Federal agencies partner with local and state law enforcement to enable them to evade state laws limiting seizures of private property. Under a program euphemistically called “equitable sharing” (which sounds better than “shared plunder”), local and state law enforcement agencies retain most of the property they seize when they team up with the feds.

In South Carolina, police keep 95 percent of the assets they commandeer. Drivers’ cash is routinely seized after they are stopped for picayune offenses. As the Greenville News reported,

Ramando Moore was cited for having an open container [of alcohol] in Richland County in 2015; he lost $604. Plexton Denard Hunter was pulled over for a seatbelt violation in 2015 in Richland County and had $541 seized. Tesla Carter, another seatbelt violation, this time in Anderson in 2015. She lost $1,361.

Most police seizures of cash involved less than a thousand dollars—a trivial amount for serious drug traffickers. “Black men . . . represent 13 percent of the state’s population. Yet 65 percent of all citizens targeted for civil forfeiture in the state are black males,” according to a 2019 investigation by South Carolinian newspapers.

In Phelps County, Missouri, police have seized millions of dollars in cash and property from people traveling on Interstate 44. Two-thirds of Phelps County forfeiture victims have Hispanic names. Phelps County deputies justify seizures simply by asserting that the owners are shady characters—with evidence such as “driving a rental vehicle . . . bloodshot eyes, nervousness or even air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror.” Drivers were commonly stopped for failing to signal before changing lanes, another tell-tale sign of drug trafficking. Phelps County police “almost never file state criminal charges against those whose cash they seize, nor does it make big drug seizures during these stops targeting cash,” reported a 2020 investigation by St. Louis Public Radio.

In 2021, the feds partnered with local police to commence robbing armored cars. Though thirty-six states have legalized marijuana for recreational or medical use, federal law continues to prohibit engaging in cannabis transactions. Local police in California and Kansas began stopping and searching armored cars owned by Empyreal Logistics, which transported cash from licensed marijuana dispensaries. More than a million dollars was taken and split between local and federal lawmen. The Federal Bureau of Investigation justified the seizures because the proceeds were derived from narcotics crimes or money laundering—even though state law in California explicitly permits the transport of money from legal cannabis operations. In May 2022, the feds and California police departments agreed to return the seized money after Empyreal signed a settlement declaring, “San Bernardino deputies are not highway robbers as previously reported in the media.” Alas, the official statement did not deter a local paper, the Riverside Press-Enterprise, from summarizing the resolution: “The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has agreed to stop operating like highway robbers.”

Forfeiture is a rigged game in which low-income Americans suffer worst. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 2017, “These forfeiture operations frequently target the poor and other groups least able to defend their interests in forfeiture proceedings.” Similarly, Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett declared in a 2014 dissent, “Civil forfeiture . . . now disproportionately ensnares those least capable of protecting themselves, poor Texans who usually capitulate without a fight because mounting a defense is too costly.” “Due process” in forfeiture cases often depends solely on the media coverage an abuse receives. Sporadic government defeats are no consolation to forfeiture victims who cannot afford a lawyer to fight for their rights.

Almost two hundred and fifty years ago, Arthur Lee of Virginia aptly proclaimed, “The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is to deprive them of their liberty.” But increasingly, private property is something that officialdom merely tolerates until they concoct some pretext to seize it.

If police can detain and plunder Americans as they please whenever people drive down the road, all the other rights and liberties in the Constitution are of scant consolation. And if politicians and the Supreme Court don’t care enough to end the forfeiture travesty, all their other claims of devotion to freedom are not worth a tinker’s damn.

You could be at risk of being pilfered by officialdom anytime you sit behind a steering wheel. Between 2001 and 2014, lawmen seized more than $2.5 billion in cash from sixty thousand travelers on the nation’s highways—with no criminal charges in most cases, according to the Washington Post. Federal, state, and local law enforcement have institutionalized shakedowns on the nation’s highways to the point that “forfeiture corridors are the new speed traps,” as Mother Jones observed.

Police can almost always find an excuse to pull someone over. Gerald Arenberg, executive director of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, told me in a 1996 interview, “We have so damn many laws, you can’t drive the streets without breaking the law.” The Washington Post reported that police set up “rolling checkpoints on busy highways and pulled over motorists for minor violations, such as following too closely or improper signaling,” and “looked for supposed ‘indicators’ of criminal activity, which can include such things as trash on the floor of a vehicle, or abundant energy drinks.”

In Tenaha, Texas, authorities confiscated $3 million from motorists passing through East Texas. The names of the court filings capture Tenaha’s rapacity, such as State of Texas v. One Gold Crucifix. “The police had confiscated a simple gold cross that a woman wore around her neck after pulling her over for a minor traffic violation. No contraband was reported, no criminal charges were filed, and no traffic ticket was issued,” the New Yorker noted. If drivers “refused to part with their money, officers threatened to arrest them on false money laundering charges and other serious felonies,” an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit charged. Tenaha police stopped a twenty-seven-year-old black man who worked as a chicken slicer in an Arkansas Tyson plant and fleeced him of $3,900 after accusing him of “driving too close to the white line.” After the police warned Jennifer Boatright that they would take custody of her children if she refused to surrender the thousands of dollars she carried to buy a used car, she burst into tears and thought: “Where are we? Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” The American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit and the Texas legislature compelled the town to cease the abusive seizures in 2012. However, most victims never got their property back.

In 2016, Muskogee County, Oklahoma, deputy sheriffs hit the sirens and pulled over a forty-year-old Burmese refugee driving down Highway 69 for a broken taillight. Eh Wah, a naturalized US citizen living in Dallas, was the manager for a Christian rock band that had been on tour raising more than $50,000 for a Thai orphanage and a Christian college in Burma. Police found the money and a drug dog alerted, so the money was seized—even though Wah had papers documenting his mission and the source of the income. No drugs were found on Wah’s vehicle, but a Muskogee deputy later insisted, “The fact that in this particular case we didn’t find drugs doesn’t mean it was a false hit” by the dog. Wah was interrogated and threatened for six hours; he was told, “You are going to jail tonight.” It was a terrifying experience for someone whose English was shaky and who fled a nation where the police were tyrannical. The sheriff’s department kept the money but let Wah travel on. Five weeks after he left Oklahoma, Wah was charged with “acquiring proceeds from a drug activity, a felony.” The primary “evidence” was the dog’s alert. The Oklahoma perfidy was torpedoed by Dan Alban, an Institute for Justice attorney who has thwarted many outrageous cash seizures. Alban took Wah’s case and told the Muskogee Phoenix that the timing of the charge suggests, “They were trying to strong-arm Eh Wah so that he would give up the money in the civil forfeiture case in exchange for a plea deal in the criminal case.” On the same day the Washington Post published an article on the case, Muskogee County dropped the charge and promised to send a full refund.

Perverse incentives propel plunder. Police in many states use confiscated property to pay their own salaries, bonuses, and vacations. A Missouri police chief said that forfeiture money was “like pennies from heaven . . . that get you a toy.” Federal agencies partner with local and state law enforcement to enable them to evade state laws limiting seizures of private property. Under a program euphemistically called “equitable sharing” (which sounds better than “shared plunder”), local and state law enforcement agencies retain most of the property they seize when they team up with the feds.

In South Carolina, police keep 95 percent of the assets they commandeer. Drivers’ cash is routinely seized after they are stopped for picayune offenses. As the Greenville News reported,

Ramando Moore was cited for having an open container [of alcohol] in Richland County in 2015; he lost $604. Plexton Denard Hunter was pulled over for a seatbelt violation in 2015 in Richland County and had $541 seized. Tesla Carter, another seatbelt violation, this time in Anderson in 2015. She lost $1,361.

Most police seizures of cash involved less than a thousand dollars—a trivial amount for serious drug traffickers. “Black men . . . represent 13 percent of the state’s population. Yet 65 percent of all citizens targeted for civil forfeiture in the state are black males,” according to a 2019 investigation by South Carolinian newspapers.

In Phelps County, Missouri, police have seized millions of dollars in cash and property from people traveling on Interstate 44. Two-thirds of Phelps County forfeiture victims have Hispanic names. Phelps County deputies justify seizures simply by asserting that the owners are shady characters—with evidence such as “driving a rental vehicle . . . bloodshot eyes, nervousness or even air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror.” Drivers were commonly stopped for failing to signal before changing lanes, another tell-tale sign of drug trafficking. Phelps County police “almost never file state criminal charges against those whose cash they seize, nor does it make big drug seizures during these stops targeting cash,” reported a 2020 investigation by St. Louis Public Radio.

In 2021, the feds partnered with local police to commence robbing armored cars. Though thirty-six states have legalized marijuana for recreational or medical use, federal law continues to prohibit engaging in cannabis transactions. Local police in California and Kansas began stopping and searching armored cars owned by Empyreal Logistics, which transported cash from licensed marijuana dispensaries. More than a million dollars was taken and split between local and federal lawmen. The Federal Bureau of Investigation justified the seizures because the proceeds were derived from narcotics crimes or money laundering—even though state law in California explicitly permits the transport of money from legal cannabis operations. In May 2022, the feds and California police departments agreed to return the seized money after Empyreal signed a settlement declaring, “San Bernardino deputies are not highway robbers as previously reported in the media.” Alas, the official statement did not deter a local paper, the Riverside Press-Enterprise, from summarizing the resolution: “The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has agreed to stop operating like highway robbers.”

Forfeiture is a rigged game in which low-income Americans suffer worst. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 2017, “These forfeiture operations frequently target the poor and other groups least able to defend their interests in forfeiture proceedings.” Similarly, Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett declared in a 2014 dissent, “Civil forfeiture . . . now disproportionately ensnares those least capable of protecting themselves, poor Texans who usually capitulate without a fight because mounting a defense is too costly.” “Due process” in forfeiture cases often depends solely on the media coverage an abuse receives. Sporadic government defeats are no consolation to forfeiture victims who cannot afford a lawyer to fight for their rights.

Almost two hundred and fifty years ago, Arthur Lee of Virginia aptly proclaimed, “The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is to deprive them of their liberty.” But increasingly, private property is something that officialdom merely tolerates until they concoct some pretext to seize it.

If police can detain and plunder Americans as they please whenever people drive down the road, all the other rights and liberties in the Constitution are of scant consolation. And if politicians and the Supreme Court don’t care enough to end the forfeiture travesty, all their other claims of devotion to freedom are not worth a tinker’s damn.

Self-worship is obligatory in Davos. John Kerry, Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, hailed his fellow attendees as “extraterrestrial” for their devotion to saving the earth. Greenpeace complained that “the rich and powerful flock to Davos in ultra-polluting, socially inequitable private jets to discuss climate and inequality behind closed doors.” Being a climate change activist is “the privilege of rich and elite folks” who want to force people to use unreliable and ineffective wind and solar for energy, according to Daniel Turner of Power the Future.

The WEF on COVID and the Great Reset

People around the globe are still recovering from the last time WEF stampeded policymakers. “WEF was hugely influential, championing every form of COVID control from lockdowns to vaccine mandates. The WEF cares nothing for normal people living real lives. They are forging a Faucian nightmare,” warned Jeffrey Tucker, president of the Brownstone Institute. China had one of the most brutal and dishonest COVID lockdowns in the world (aside from perhaps fabricating the COVID virus in one of its own laboratories). But WEF founder Klaus Schwab touted China’s COVID crackdown as a “role model” and “a very attractive model for quite a number of countries.”

WEF is whooping up the “Great Reset” — “building back better” so that economies can emerge greener and fairer out of the pandemic. The Great Reset presumes that practically every nation has benevolent dictators waiting to take the reins over people’s lives. American entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy wrote, “The Great Reset calls for dissolving the boundaries between the public & private sectors; between nations; between the online & offline worlds, and the will of individual citizens be damned.”

Billionaire Elon Musk, who was not invited, scoffed, “WEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.” Musk ridiculed WEF’s “Master the Future” slogan: “Are they trying to be the boss of Earth!?”

Sounds good to WEF attendees.

Freedom of speech is the greatest barrier to inflicting the Great Reset. Law professor Jonathan Turley observed, “Davos has long been the Legion of Doom for free speech.” Accordingly, the biggest peril the self-proclaimed “Global Shapers” are targeting is “The Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation.” WEF searched long and hard to find an eminent disinformation panel host to incarnate Davos values. They selected Brian Stelter, a former anchor who was too squirrely even for CNN. After CNN ejected Stelter, he was snapped up by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to be their Media and Democracy Fellow.

The real masters of disinformation

The star of the panel was New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who proclaimed that disinformation is the “most existential” of every other major challenge that we are grappling with as a society.” Like most of the windy speakers in Switzerland, Sulzberger tormented the audience from the high ground:

Disinformation and in the broader set of misinformation, conspiracy, propaganda, clickbait, you know, the broader mix of bad information that’s corrupting information ecosystem, what it attacks is trust. And once you see, trust decline, what you then see is a society start to fracture, and so you see people fracture along tribal lines and, you know, that immediately undermines pluralism.

Sulzberger boasted, “When we make mistakes, we acknowledge them in public and we correct them.” Except for RussiaGate, its 1619 Project fairy tale, the January 6 Capitol clash, and a few dozen other howlers. The New York Times effectively refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election, giving an unearned boost to Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Sulzberger talked about the decline of trust as if it were the result of a leaking underground storage tank tainting the “information ecosystem.” But it was the media that poisoned the well upon which they depend. A 2021 survey by the Reuters Institute reported that only 29 percent of Americans trusted the news media — the lowest rating of any of the 46 nations surveyed. A Gallup poll revealed that “86 percent of Americans believed the media was politically biased.” Practically the only folks who don’t recognize the bias are the people who share the media’s slant.

Serendipitously, WEF also had a panel on “Disrupting Distrust.” The panel opened with a report grimly revealing that trust in government has declined in nations across the world. Maybe the profound, pointless disruptions from the COVID lockdowns that ravaged many countries were part of the blame? That panel was hosted by New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. Her paper recently ran an opinion piece which claimed that there had been “no lockdowns” for COVID in this country. All of the closed schools and shuttered small businesses were an optical illusion, apparently.

WEF’s support for censorship

The Davos procensorship fervor was epitomized by panelist Věra Jourová, European Commission vice president. She declared that the United States “will have soon” laws prohibiting “illegal hate speech,” like Europe has. Jourová previously urged expanding hate crime laws to ban “sexual exploitation of women.” Would possession of a 1957 Playboy centerfold be sufficient for a criminal conviction? Nude beaches are common in Europe. Would the European Commission backstop online prohibitions by deploying commissars on every beach to make sure no male had improper thoughts about the birthday suits he saw?

Hate-speech laws are a Pandora’s Box because the speech politicians hate the most is criticism of government. And some knuckleheads on Capitol Hill believe that the United States already has hate-speech laws. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) recently declared, “If you espouse hate, if you espouse violence, you’re not protected under the First Amendment. I think we can be more aggressive in the way that we handle that type of use of the internet.” What’s next — a federal Cordiality Czar with the prerogative to purify every tweet?

Disinformation panelist Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) blamed “misinformation” for not being able to “get people to take a COVID vaccine.” But the false claims by Biden and top officials that vaxxes prevent infection and transmission weren’t misinformation — they were just typos.

Davos attendees ignored the stunning disclosures of U.S. government censorship that occurred shortly before their private jets arrived in Switzerland. The #Twitterfiles recently revealed that federal officials pressured Twitter to suppress 250,000 Twitter users (including journalists). But according to WEF scoring, that wasn’t an outrage — instead, it was a tiny down payment for a Higher Truth. WEF ignored that the FBI was already suppressing free speech the same way that WEF panelists championed. As journalist Matt Taibbi revealed, “As the election approached in 2020, the FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending spreadsheets with hundreds of accounts” to target and suppress.

The official browbeating continued until very recently. In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post sent the FBI San Francisco field office (which dealt directly with Twitter) “a long list of accounts that ‘may warrant additional action’” — that is, suppression. The FBI pressured Twitter to torpedo parody accounts that only idiots or federal agents would not recognize as humor. Taibbi wrote, “The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which ‘FBI San Francisco is notifying you’ it wants action on four accounts.”

WEF is calling for a “Global Framework To Regulate Harm Online” — that is, worldwide censorship. One of the WEF’s favorite stars — a certified WEF Young Global Leader — was unable to attend because she was having a meltdown that ended with her resignation. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern became a progressive hero for making ever screechier demands for world censorship, comparing free speech to “weapons of war.” She told the United Nations last September: “We have the means; we just need the collective will” to suppress ideas that officialdom disapproves. Journalist Glenn Greenwald derided Ardern’s pitch as “the face of authoritarianism … and the mindset of tyrants everywhere.” But Ardern was there in spirit even if she was overwhelmed at home.

The WEF offers one of the best illustrations of how denunciations of “disinformation” are self-serving shams. In 2016, WEF put out a video with eight predictions for life in 2030. The highlight of the film was a vapid Millennial guy pictured alongside the slogan: “You will own nothing and be happy.” The slogan was inspired by an essay WEF published from Danish Member of Parliament Ida Auken: “Welcome to 2030: I own nothing, have no privacy and life has never been better.” But the anti–private property bias is no WEF aberration. Last July, WEF proposed slashing ownership of private vehicles around the globe. And then there was the WEF pitch to save the planet by having people eat insects instead of red meat. (The chairman of German manufacturer Siemens achieved heroic status at Davos by calling for a billion people to stop eating meat to save the plant.)

But according to WEF managing director Adrian Monck, the WEF has been the victim of a horrible conspiracy theory sparked by the “own nothing” phrase. Monck absolved WEF because the phrase in the video came from “an essay series intended to spark debate about socio-economic developments.” Monck claimed the phrase “started life as a screenshot, culled from the Internet by an anonymous anti-semitic account on the image board 4chan.” Bigots or zealots on 4chan howled in protest about that phrase. But as Elon Musk quipped, “Would be great if someone could compile a game contest of who said the craziest stuff between 4chan and WEF! My money is on the latter.”

At least WEF has not (yet) proposed mandatory injections to compel propertyless underlinings to be happy. Or maybe WEF would just recommend covertly adding drugs to the water supply.

Major media outlets were either participants or cosponsors of WEF. Former New York Times editor-in-chief Jill Abramson slammed the Times for being part of the Davos “corrupt circle-jerk.” While the event was portrayed as a chance for sharing ideas, it was instead little more than a chance to hobnob with fellow elitists. Author Walter Kirn noted that there is almost no disagreement among WEF attendees: “The largest matters on earth are at stake (supposedly) yet the conferees don’t argue. They don’t debate. All points seem smugly settled. It’s an ego orgy.” The hypocrisy was beyond hip-deep. Journalist Michael Shellenberger noted, “WEF doesn’t engage in even the minimal amount of transparency through public disclosure that it constantly preaches to corporations and philanthropies.”

What could possibly go wrong from turning common people around the world into serfs of their elitist overlords? According to WEF, individual freedom is a luxury that citizens — or at least their rulers — can no longer afford. But the benevolence of dictators is almost always an illusion created by their fawning supporters. And this year’s WEF gathering proved again that there will never be a shortage of media and intellectual bootlickers for tyranny.

Article cross-posted from Jim’s Blog.