If you have been pacing the floor over the possibility that the Russkies are trying to influence your vote in the 2024 elections, you can sleep well tonight. That’s because the feds are currently prosecuting four members of the African People’s Socialist Party in a trial in federal district court in Tampa.
What is the African People’s Socialist Party? Good question! I certainly had never heard of them, and I’m willing to bet that neither have you. It turns out that they are a small, obscure group of Americans who have been advocating socialism for around 50 years. In fact, one of the four defendants is in his 80s and another is in her late 70s. I suppose I should mention that one of the defendants recently ran for city council but lost the race after receiving only 18 percent of the vote.
So, why are the feds going after these people? To keep us safe, of course! The feds are saying that the defendants are serving as a conduit for the Russian government to “influence” the 2024 election. The feds are charging the defendants with violating a U.S. law that was enacted in 1938, during the regime of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was the president who converted the federal government to a socialist welfare state and also converted our monetary system to a paper-money system without even the semblance of constitutional amendments. That 1938 FDR law requires people who are operating as agents of a foreign government to register with the federal government.
Mind you, it’s not against the law for people to work for the Russian government or any other government. It’s also not against the law to lobby or advocate for the Russian government. It’s also not against the law to defend the Russian government or take positions that favor the Russian government.
That’s not to say that the U.S. government wouldn’t love those types of laws. It’s that U.S. officials recognize that there is an obstacle to enacting such laws. That obstacle is called the First Amendment. It prohibits Congress from enacting any laws that infringe on something called freedom of speech, a right that adheres to everyone, not just Americans.
So, how does the U.S. government circumvent that pesky obstacle? It enforces a 1938 law that forces people who work for foreign regimes or are funded by foreign regimes to register their names and positions with the federal government.
But how can such a registration requirement be reconciled with a constitutional restriction that states: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech”? It can’t be. In a free society, everyone is free to say anything he wants without having to register with the government or anyone else.
In fact, an irony here is that the Russian government has adopted and is enforcing the same type of registration law that the U.S. is using to target those socialists in Florida. The Russkies are using the law in the same way that U.S. officials are using it — to target and shut down media outlets that are funded by the U.S. government, such as Radio Free Europe. Talk about being hoisted on your own statist petard!
Intellectual Self-defe...Goldstein, CharlesBuy New $11.89(as of 06:32 UTC - Details)
And yes, you read that right: The U.S. government, through the force of taxation, funds media outlets, just like the Russian government does. How do you like that for a bit of socialist hypocrisy? Oh, did I mention that FDR was the president who brought into existence Social Security, which, as everyone knows, is the crown jewel of American welfare-state socialism, along with Medicare?
But let’s return to the criminal prosecution of that obscure socialist group for failing to register as Russian agents. The prosecution really goes to show the extreme idiocy of what has clearly become anti-Russia paranoia. U.S. officials themselves are using their own propaganda to instill fear of the Russkies, just like they were doing during the entire Cold War — and what they were doing to justify their intervention in Vietnam, which succeeded in sacrificing almost 60,000 American soldiers for nothing. The Russkies are coming, again! I feel like I’m back living in the Cold War, when we were all being exhorted to look for Reds under our beds. And what’s really funny is how the mainstream media is being influenced by all this U.S. government propaganda without even realizing that they are being influenced by it.
The federal prosecution of those people in Tampa is an absolute disgrace, one rooted in an inane anti-Russian paranoid mindset and a statist anti-freedom philosophy. It would be great to see the jury in that case send a powerful message to these people by returning a not-guilty verdict.
Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.
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