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Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

In the most recent and clearest sign yet that the Biden administration has not the slightest regard for the Constitution or the Supreme Court of the United States, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has issued another ban on the ability of landlords to evict renters who fail to meet their rental obligations.

Issued on August 3, the CDC’s latest move to void rental contracts for at least two more months is fraught with constitutional error, but such problems are of little importance to this administration because, in the view of CDC Director Rochelle Walensky,  it “is the right thing to do.”

“The right thing to do” has become the justification for many modern presidents to sweep aside the foundational constitutional principle that the powers of the federal government are, in the words of Founder James Madison, “few and defined” and do not include mass voidance of lawful private contracts.

The zeal with which Biden is taking advantage of the so-called COVID “emergency” to extend the powers of the federal government into areas in which it has no proper responsiobility, puts his predecessors to shame. One of this administration’s favored tools, but certainly not its only one, is to issue orders prohibiting landlords from evicting renters. The argument put forward in support of this dictatorial power is that  allowing landlords to enforce rental contracts will dramatically exacerbate the spread of COVID.

The government’s argument that evictions will lead to “new spikes in [COVID] transmission” is premised on the self-proclaimed notion that evicted renters necessarily will move into “congregate settings where COVID-19 spreads.” In the further opinion of the CDC director, such a presumed trend would be “very difficult” if not impossible to reverse, therefore justifying swift action by the CDC.

The CDC’s August 3 order broadly covers renters who earn no more than $99,000 per year ($198,000 for joint tax filers) and who, though using their “best efforts” to meet their contractual rent obligation, have failed to do so. The only real limitation on how many such renters are thus protected is that they must reside in a county with a “substantial” or “high” rate of COVID transmission. This limitation, however, means little in light of the fact that according to the manner by which the CDC measures such transmission rates, nearly 88% of all counties in the United States fall into these two categories.

The administration highlights the increased transmissibility of the recent “delta variant,” but the CDC order conveniently fails to mention that this variation of the initial COVID-19 virus has a substantially lower mortality rate than its predecessors. Also ignored are the facts that COVID vaccines now are universally available, and that current medical knowledge about how to treat infected individuals has made this variant far less lethal than earlier variants.

Facts are of little consequence, however, to an administration eager to show its extreme socialist base that it is fully committed to implementing measures wholly at odds with constraints placed on it by the Constitution. To this president, abrogating the right to enforce lawful contracts between landlords and renters is but a means to an end.

Unfortunately, on June 29 the CDC was aided in its drive to exercise dictatorial powers over property rights and the right to contract by the Supreme Court itself. In a split 5-4 decision, the High Court set aside a lower court finding that the CDC had exceeded its lawful authority in issuing its earlier eviction ban.  Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh sided with the four “liberal” justices to allow the CDC to continue with its unconstitutional activity, simply because in his view the ban would end on July 31.  Kavanaugh did at least concede that “clear and specific” legislation would be necessary for the CDC’s ban to continue beyond that date, but he did vote to allow the lawlessness to continue.

July 31 has come and gone. Congress has not passed legislation authorizing an eviction moratorium. And the Biden administration has thumbed its nose at the Supreme Court by directing the CDC to issue another unconstitutional eviction ban.

It remains to be seen whether the Court will have grown the necessary constitutional backbone before this ban expires in October. If not, and even if the Democrat-controlled Congress passes such a ban, the administration will have successfully driven another three-penny nail into the constitutional coffin.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

Ratings for the Olympics are at record lows, and it is no surprise why. Between the anti-American protests of some U.S. athletes, and the empty stands that make the competition feel hollow and flat, Americans are just not catching the Olympic spirit this year. It certainly did not help when Simone Biles, America’s top Olympic gymnast, threw in the towel in the middle of her sport’s biggest competition and on the world’s biggest stage.

For America, a country built on hard work, sacrifice, and a “never quit” attitude, Biles’ exit was a slap in the face to the quintessential “grit” that pioneered the very country she represented. Even more ironic, she quit not in an individual event where the fallout would impact only herself, but in the team final when her team was counting on her the most.

Some say Biles did not owe “us” anything, and that she was right to do what was “best for her.” Therein lies the problem, reflective of a corrosive selfishness in athletic competition where individual “o.k.-ness” is the highest priority. Contrary to the unsurprising gushing of marshmallow soft liberals, this psychobabble kumbaya spirit does not refect “strength,” but rather textbook weakness which in decades past was afforded no place in American sports.

Now, in the Age of Me, this phenomenon is being celebrated; for instance, rewarding tennis pro Naomi Osaka following her sudden withdrawal from the French Open for “mental health” reasons after ditching a press conference. Her actions netted her cover spreads in major magazines, complete with the quintessential woke headline, “IT’S O.K. NOT TO BE O.K.” This fawning coverage of the disgruntled prima donna was accompanied by a call that “sports need to change.”

If such a worthless platitude is adopted as the new standard of excellence in sports, what can we expect in the months and years ahead? A college football team cancelling a day ahead of a scheduled matchup because the team needs a “mental health day?” Lebron James walking off the court mid-game when he decides he is too stressed about the Lakers falling behind? The Olympic Committee refusing to permit an American team to participate because their dominance might adversely affect a less talented team’s sense of self-worth?

This is not the attitude of winners, but of narcissistic losers. If an athlete needs a break from competition, that’s fine – take a break – just not in the middle of, or right before, a competition on which your teammates, your school, or your country have a right to rely. Moreover, such decisions should not be celebrated as some sort of “heroic” effort.

Competition, especially at the highest levels of Olympic or NCAA Division One competition, requires phenomenal physical and mental training. To arrive and remain at the top, one must be relentless and virtually flawless in the execution of his or her sport. This is extremely stressful and comes with immense public pressure, but the sacrifice is not without immense rewards – championship trophies, lucrative endorsements, national celebrity status, and lasting notoriety for decades to come. For these athletes to demand a mental health day at their convenience is nothing short of an admission they are not cut out to be among the elite of their sport.

From a broader perspective, adopting the woke attitude that it is “ok” to take a break and back off whenever one feels like it, is another example of how America slides down from the top, and not only in sporting competition but in other far more significant policy arenas such as national security. Teaching our youth (and showing our adversaries) that it is okay to quit whenever “you are not quite feeling up to it” sends the unmistakable signal you are not really serious about winning.

It is a defeatist mind-set with serious and far-reaching consequences.

Neither Biles nor Osaka deserve the blame for all of this. Both young women are members of a changing society that rewards softness, shuns grit, and declares that “everyone is a winner” in order to make sure “no one is made to feel bad.”

However, permitting this trend to continue and take hold of our culture will inflict perhaps permanent damage to the American Fighting Spirit that has sustained our rise to the pinnacle of world power.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

One-hundred-and-seventy-four years ago a not-for-profit professional organization was formed “to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.” Today, the American Medical Association (AMA) is about as far removed from that lofty goal as is the contemporary Democrat Party from its avowed status as “the party of the common man.”

The length by which the AMA has strayed from its original goal of promoting the science of medicine is perhaps best illustrated by its recent decision recommending that birth certificates no longer include the gender of the newborn.

Such nonsensical assertion that human beings are not born with male or female physical attributes has taken hold in a number of medical schools across the country. This has led to absurd instances in which professors feel obligated to apologize to students for inadvertently intimating, even indirectly, that there are differences between men and women. As noted in an article last week by Katie Herzog, for example, a professor of endocrinology at a medical school in the massive University of California system apologized profusely to students for uttering the verboten phrase, “pregnant woman.”

It is in this same Bizarro World that a medical doctor, Valinda Riggins Nwadike, MD, lent her name to an article in Healthline.com in December 2018 that declared, “Yes, it’s possible for men to become pregnant.” With an assertion like this enjoying the imprimatur of medical doctors, and with professors of medicine afraid to use terms “male” and “female” for fear of being labeled “transphobic,” it may not be long before the AMA declares “the end of disease as we know it.”

The AMA’s conclusion that gender identity at birth is to be ignored, if not denied outright, follows a pattern by the formerly respected organization of involving itself in matters wholly unrelated to “the betterment of public health.”

The Association for years has advocated openly and aggressively for all manner of gun control legislation, including bans on “assault-style” guns and “high capacity” magazines, limits on “concealed carry” permits, advocacy of so-called “gun buyback” programs, and essentially any other mandated measures pressed in the political arena by activists like Michael Bloomberg and George Soros.

Then there is the issue of abortion. The AMA now stands firmly on the side of physicians performing abortions so long as such procedure is lawful in the state in which they practice. This is a position starkly at odds with the view of abortion as antithetical to the moral underpinnings of the medical profession for many decades prior to the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing the procedure in 1973’s well-known Roe v. Wade.

The practice of medicine at the time the AMA was established and until very recently, was founded in “science” and understood to be based on fundamental factors capable of identification, measurement, analysis and eventual cure. This reflects a process that has led to phenomenal breakthroughs in fields such as cardiology and oncology, with survival rates among cancer survivors and heart attack victims undreamed of a generation ago.

Yet, for today’s “woke” doctors and medical professors, worrying about whether “men can get pregnant” appears more important than the fight to treat and cure diseases such as cancer.

With the “science” of medicine seeming to drift from one political issue to another, and woke practitioners rushing to embrace the cultural phenomena du jour (no matter how unmoored from reality the issue may be), the formerly respected American Medical Association is in danger of losing whatever degree of  credibility it may still enjoy even among the minority of practicing physicians it represents. Then again, for the eighty or more percent of doctors who no longer pay dues to the AMA, this is hardly a noteworthy loss.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

The problem with having a reputation as a political bomb-thrower is that sometimes a good idea gets lost in the dust-up. This was the case last week when, in an interview, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) stated she would “kick out every single Chinese in this country that is loyal to the CCP.” Predictably, critics latched onto the word “Greene,” and immediately discounted the substance of what the freshman congresswoman proposed.

In fact, if you brush aside her phraseology, there is something worthwhile and timely in what Greene is saying, and which confronts a serious national security problem most leaders in Washington, D.C. refuse to acknowledge.

The dirty little secret is that our national security is being seriously undermined because far too many Chinese nationals are living and working freely here in America, even as their allegiance remains tied to the communist regime in Beijing, our primary adversary on the world stage (as I have noted previously).

Federal agents rounding up large numbers of Chinese immigrants holding visas or who have resident alien status, in order to scrutinize their “loyalty” to the Chinese Communist Party, does not make for an effective (or likely constitutional) response to the threat posed by China. As a public policy, it is akin to using a sledgehammer when a scalpel is the far better tool.

Moreover, were Republican leaders to adopt such a proposal, China’s leaders would sit back and smile serenely while the media, academia, and U.S. businesses with ties to the communist behemoth soundly bash the idea, thereby ensuring the proposal will fail to materialize as policy, while providing additional camouflage for their nefarious activities in our country.

The essential point Greene appears to be making, is that it is high time the federal government direct some of its vast intelligence apparatus toward identifying Chinese aliens who have verifiable, working ties to the CCP or its Red Army, and then take steps to send them home. On this point, Greene could not be more correct.

For far too long, federal officials in the Executive and Legislative Branches of our government have worn the same rose-colored glasses they donned in the 1990s, believing that increased economic ties would liberalize China and turn the Communists into allies. Instead, and quite predictably, under President Xi Jinping, China has hardened its position against the U.S. in economic matters as well as military.

Years of kowtowing to Beijing, especially a naive attitude towards Chinese students and those with work visas, have allowed Chinese intelligence assets to become embedded in American academic, technological, scientific, and even our military institutions. Members of Congress are not immune from being targeted as information assets; just ask Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA).

Identifying Chinese nationals involved in sensitive research or technology and who have links to the CCP or the Red Army, and revoking their visas in order to send them back to Beijing, makes sense however you look at it, except of course, if considered from China’s perspective. Clearly, the Chinese leadership is betting that American “wokeness” will prevail and such a bold move not taken seriously.

Implementing a policy such as at the root of what Greene is getting at would be neither easy nor uncomplicated. It necessarily would require participation by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, in addition to the departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security.

If our government performed as it should (and as it did in decades past), our intelligence agencies would expertly, but covertly, lead the charge. Unfortunately, this is 2021 not 1981 and these agencies are now far too busy surveilling, investigating, and prosecuting “white nationalists” and domestic “anti-government” groups, to be bothered countering the very real national security threats posed by foreign enemies (including those inside our borders).

This should not, however, dissuade Republicans from at least trying. Pressing the issue will, if nothing else, raise the profile of the threat China poses and hopefully move it from the backburner closer to the front.

Greene’s many critics may continue (as surely they will) to inaccurately label her proposal “racist” and xenophobic, but the longer our government fails to respond meaningfully to the threat she has stepped forward to identify, the harder it becomes to dislodge these real enemies among us.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

You hear it all the time, from Democrats as well as Republicans: “The most important responsibility of our government is to keep us safe.” It is so axiomatic that no one ever really questions it, regardless of whether it is posited in a discussion about COVID restrictions, national security policy or law enforcement. But it is not an accurate statement.

The primary responsibility of the federal government is not to keep us safe; it is to protect and guarantee our liberty and our individual rights as guaranteed by (not given by) our Constitution. This principle is clearly described in the Federalist Papers, and is every bit as relevant today as when those essays were drafted 233 years ago, regardless of the context in which it is applied.

In the context of the Second Amendment, for example, debating the pros and cons of gun control, if we start with the premise that the “primary responsibility of the government is to keep us safe,” then we have ceded to the Left the basic “playing field” on which the extent to which the right to keep and bear arms is to be decided. Flowing directly from this premise is the next building block of the gun control movement — that only those gun “rights” that can be shown by their advocates to be “needed” for self-defense are to be permitted. If the government and its advocates then show that a particular firearm or firearm accessory is not “needed,” it properly can be outlawed without violating the “right to keep and bear arms” guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Furthermore, if it is conceded that it is the responsibility of law enforcement officers employed by government to “keep us safe,” then the fundamental need for individual possession of a firearm is easily brushed aside as not “needed,” as indeed some 21st century law enforcement officials have asserted.

To the contrary, however, those who framed the construct of our government, as codified in the Constitution of the United States, understood it is the responsibility of the individual to protect themself, not the government’s. Were it otherwise, there would have been no need whatsoever for the inclusion of the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the  individual right to keep and bear arms in self-defense.

In furtherance of that foundational principle, the Supreme Court of the United States has explicitly recognized that the police, as agents of the government, are not legally responsible for protecting each of us as citizens, insofar as this is a responsibility that falls on the shoulders of each individual citizen.

Still, Republicans and Democrats alike continue to mouth the false premise that it is the government that enjoys this fundamental responsibility; a power from which flows all manner of restrictions not only on Second Amendment rights, but others as otherwise protected by the Bill of Rights, such as the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Democrats always have embraced the false premise that is the primary function of government to “keep us safe,” for the simple reason they want government to be able to exercise such powers. Republicans buy into it largely out of ignorance or fear.

The notion that certain firearms rights are not “needed” by individual citizens and therefore can be limited by government laws, regulations, and exercise of “police powers,” is reflected in the array of restrictions on the type and number of firearms already enforced by many states and municipalities. But gun control advocates do not rest on only those restrictions now in effect.

For example, if the Left asserts (as it does) that an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle — the most popular rifle in the country — is not “needed” for any legitimate purpose as they so define, then it becomes simple to declare such a firearm illegal. The same holds for so-called “high capacity” magazines, arm braces, bump stocks and sound suppressors, among other guns and accessories.

The fact that Republicans, traditionally considered to be of the party that supports the Second Amendment against being infringed by the government, so easily and often fail to push back against this line of reasoning, is indeed cause for concern if not alarm for the future of gun rights in America, especially with a president who openly advocates broad restrictions on the fundamental right to keep and bear arms.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

To some degree there has been a Cold War waged against conservatives since at least the Soviet infiltration of Hollywood in the 1940s. Under President Biden, however, this war has become red hot and very real. Leftists embedded across political, non-profit, academic, and government institutions are pulling out all the stops to destroy the conservative culture and political movement in America.

Never before in our history has such a concerted action been undertaken. It did not spring forth on January 20th when Biden was inaugurated. The left has been imbedding itself into institutions private and public for decades preparing for the right moment to openly launch its war. The January 6th protests on Capitol Hill provided that spark.

Earlier attempts by a political party in power to use government agencies to punish political opponents were limited in their impact, largely because they were not able to co-opt major elements of those agencies to join their unlawful plans. Thus, the Nixon Administration’s use of components of the IRS, the CIA, and the FBI to go after its critics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, failed to destroy its perceived enemy — the anti-war Left — because career elements within those agencies refused to join. In the end it was the perpetrators themselves who were destroyed, including the President.

Now, a half century later, the situation has changed dramatically, as demonstrated in the fact that Biden’s Department of Justice and the FBI, with their vast arsenal of tools with which to investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate those deemed enemies, are leading the effort to destroy the conservative movement.

Moreover, the technological tools now available, undreamed of by Nixon’s Watergate co-conspirators, make it immensely easier to identify and take action against those labeled by the Administration according to whatever term best fits their destructive narrative — usually today, “domestic extremists,” or the even more vilifying “white extremists.”

As the first sentences for the hundreds of those the government has deemed “insurrectionists” are now being handed down, it is clear just how serious the Administration is to secure its pound of flesh from those citizens being prosecuted for, in some cases, simply having entered the Capitol on January 6th.

The first felony sentence for someone who participated on that day has now been meted out. Paul Hodgkins committed no acts of violence and did not damage any property or person while he was in the historic building on January 6th. Notwithstanding this, and even considering his lack of a criminal record, he will have to spend eight months in a federal prison facility.

Even though in our federal system of criminal justice individuals are to receive sentences based on the circumstances involving their actions and their background, the federal prosecutor in Hodgkins’ case demanded that the judge send him to prison as a lesson to others; a “loud and clear message” to conservatives that they will in fact be severely punished by this Department of Justice for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and especially for possessing the wrong political views.

Clearly, this was just the opening salvo from Biden’s Justice Department, whose lawyers are routinely demanding that others arrested for participating in events on that day, or for simply being there, be held without bail for as long as it takes to have their cases heard in the pandemic-delayed federal court system. Sadly, government lawyers are having no trouble finding federal judges willing to go along with this travesty.

Still to come are cases involving evidence that in more rational times would be laughed out of court if presented as evidence of nefarious criminal activity; evidence such as a box of plastic Lego bricks depicting a model of the U.S. Capitol building.

In this environment, populated by individuals possessed of such zealotry, where might one turn for even a small degree of compassion or objectivity.

Actually, if a person found himself arrested not on January 6th of 2021, but during one of the riots in the summer of 2020, in Portland, Oregon or even in Washington, DC — incidents in which federal buildings were torched and otherwise damaged, and during which federal law enforcement officials and other government employees  were intentionally harmed — compassion is overflowing. Dozens of such prosecutions brought by the Trump Department of Justice are being dismissed outright by this Department of Justice.

The sound of double-standard justice now ringing throughout our government truly is deafening. Sadly, however, for an Administration whose goal is not to see that justice is done, but to destroy an inconvenient political movement, who’s listening?

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

To assist in its drive to demean American culture and history, the Biden administration has turned to the United Nations. Last week Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony “Tony” Blinken, actually invited the U. N. to come to America to study how racist and violative of human rights the United States is.

This study will be conducted under the leadership of former socialist Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who now serves as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She will be aided in this effort by the U. N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), a 117-member subsidiary of the United Nations with a history of anti-U.S. bias such that former President Trump in 2018 rescinded our country’s membership in the organization. Biden reversed that decision on Feb. 8, shortly after deciding to rejoin both the Paris Agreement and the World Health Organization.

Among the nations that will now sit in judgment on our country’s human rights record are such human rights luminaries as China, Cuba, Russia and Venezuela.

Biden always has held the U. N. in high esteem, with its massive bureaucracy headquartered on the banks of the East River in Manhattan that sits on real estate donated by the Rockefeller family seven decades ago. Despite many of the United Nations’ previous so-called “peace keeping” missions having themselves been plagued by serious human rights violations, Biden and Blinken obviously consider the international body an appropriate judge of U.S. culture and history.

Now, five months after we formally rejoined the UNHRC, one of its top officials, known as “rapporteurs,” will be among those studying and passing judgment on the systemic racism and human rights abuses this administration sees  as a driving force behind virtually every aspect of our nation’s culture and public policy history.

Specifically, Rapporteur E. Tendayi Achiume, a left-wing law professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, will be one of those leading the effort to uncover “contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” in the United States. Ms. Achiume has written and spoken widely on the prevalence of racism and racial injustice around the world and within the United States.

In an interview last September, for example, Prof. Achiume opined that “Black and brown communities” in the United States “are still [being] terrorized” by the police. She is among the most extreme of open border advocates, writing in 2019 that “First World” nations such as the United States, “have no right to exclude Third World migrants.” Given her background and that of the UNHRC generally, it is a foregone conclusion that the study Blinken has authorized will “discover” exactly what they are looking for – “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

All this will support the multi-faceted effort already well-underway by the FBI, the NSA, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense and other components of the federal government to hunt down and destroy “white extremism,” considered by this administration to infect virtually everything with which it disagrees. Adding the State Department and the United Nations to this conglomerate of domestic government agencies rounds out the administration’s team which it hopes will ensure that the Democrats retain their grip on power not only through next year’s midterm election, but far beyond.

Inviting the United Nations into our country so it can tell us how to “confront the scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia,” and in addition to propose “a wide range of reparations measures,” is demeaning and an affront to our sovereignty and national dignity.

Biden and Blinken may actually believe that their decision inviting the UNHRC to study and judge America’s record of “racism” and “human rights violations” will encourage other nations, including those like China that systemically and regularly do violate human rights, to follow Washington’s lead and admit of their own shortcomings. If they do actually believe this will happen,  both Biden and Blinken are possessed of a naivete that is not only laughable, but dangerous.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

In a 1983 speech before the National Association of Evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan labeled the Soviet Union the “evil empire;” perfectly capturing the moral and political danger presented by that communist regime. Reagan properly cautioned Americans not to “ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses” of an enemy that was “the focus of evil in the modern world.”

Unfortunately, what was clear to Reagan about the Soviet Union in 1983 appears only as a blur to Joe Biden about China today.

If the Soviet Union were the evil empire, then China is surely the evilest empire. The Soviet Union’s global ambitions for its evil empire were hampered by its own incompetence. China, however, actively spreads its insidious tentacles across the world with a shocking mastery, facilitated by the apparent unwillingness of global leaders, including Biden, to take the threat seriously.

Today’s China presents for the United States and other western powers a far more complex and multi-faceted danger than that posed by the Soviet Union in the second half of the last century. While China’s military build-up, and its well-documented willingness to use that power (especially as it relates to Taiwan) is a real concern, it is but one dimension of the broader threat, and in some ways not the most serious.

Take, for instance, China’s push for greater influence in American academic institutions by way of funding educational programs and centers, under the guise of benignly teaching Chinese language and culture. As a white paper published at the Heritage Institute earlier this year suggests, this funding is a Trojan horse for Beijing to expand its influence in American culture more broadly. Strings attached to such financial largesse ensure that recipient universities carefully avoid saying or doing anything that Beijing considers insulting or critical of its policies. This is, of course, when Chinese students themselves are not agents for their government, as the FBI itself had warned.

In the global economy, state-based hacking of U.S. companies operating in China to steal trade secrets and reverse engineer products for theft is common knowledge. However, consumer goods produced from Chinese companies are also routinely – and often literally – weaponized for the communist government and its military.

China made headlines a few years ago when it was discovered it used compromised microchips to infiltrate several major U.S. companies.

Evidence that the COVID-19 virus was the byproduct of Chinese military research persists, despite being routinely downplayed by the Biden Administration and other governments and international organizations. As I have written previously, even prior to the arrival last year of the COVID virus, it is insane that American companies and other institutions remain willing, and are permitted by our own government, to engage in highly sensitive research that can and will be used by China’s military.

Just this month it was revealed that a prenatal genetic screening test sold by a Chinese company was developed in tandem with the Chinese military and used to harvest genetic material for military and social research. If secretly stealing the genetic material of unsuspecting women is not the definition of evil, one might wonder what is.

China’s domestic agenda, with its brutal crackdowns on minority groups and on Hong Kong citizens, provides a horrifyingly clear picture for what this truly evil empire would have in store for the rest of the world.

Despite the naivety with which many commentators from both the left and right fawn over China’s booming “private” sector, this faux capitalism is simply another weapon for China to use against its global adversaries. The illusion of Chinese markets ready and waiting for foreign investors is merely the bait in the trap. After those investments are made, investors like Disney, Google, and the NBA discover that doing business in China comes with many “conditions.” It is no coincidence that the hyper-political NBA is deathly silent on China’s human rights abuses.

Unlike the Soviets, who were consumed with immediate expansion of their influence and power, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union, China is committed to playing the long game. A crucial part of this plan is undermining America’s historic role as the world’s moral compass. China does this by compelling our silence through political intimidation or economic ransom, thus giving tacit consent to their evil deeds.

Not only are the Biden Administration and its cohorts in the Congress blissfully ignorant of Reagan’s prescient warnings about dealing with evil empires, but they appear to be willing facilitators of China’s strategic goals.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

In a breathtaking assault on the Constitution of the United States, Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week signed a new law and an executive order targeting his self-declared “Gun Violence Disaster Emergency.”

While the governor’s disdain for the Second Amendment is well-known, the degree to which his July 6 executive order targets the amendment is unprecedented. His actions undercut not only the right to keep and bear arms codified in the Second Amendment, but also broader rights guaranteed against government intrusion by the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the fundamental right to contract protected in the main body of the Constitution.

Even before Cuomo’s brazen executive action last week, New York maintained among the broadest and strictest gun control measures of any state, according to which, among other restrictions, it is almost impossible for a citizen to obtain a required permit to purchase a handgun or secure permission for a concealed carry permit.

Despite the existing array of gun control mandates, Cuomo decided the Empire State now suffers from a “gun violence” emergency necessitating even more extreme measures. The executive order issued last week based on this bogus conclusion, is modeled after COVID pandemic executive mandates Cuomo issued last year, which were used by officials to strip New Yorkers of the most basic of civil liberties.

The “gun violence” on which Cuomo premised his dictatorial actions has nothing to do with lawful ownership of firearms by citizens of the state.

The increased violent crime under which New Yorkers are now suffering is a product of disastrous measures undertaken by the governor, the state’s attorney general, and New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio that stripped law enforcement of the tools needed to combat violent crime on the streets and in neighborhoods from Albany to the Bronx. These actions reflect the absurd notion that “reimagining” law enforcement by weakening law enforcement, will result in lowered crime rates. When, predictably, the opposite has happened, Cuomo’s response is to blame lawful gun owners and strip away their civil liberties.

Collaterally damaged by Cuomo’s most recent assault on the Second Amendment is another vital civil liberty — the sanctity of contracts expressly guaranteed by Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits a state from “impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” This provision reflects what our Framers understood to be one of the very pillars of a free people – the assurance that a legal contract between individuals would be protected against abusive government action.

Now, however, in New York contracts that in some vague manner might be considered inconsistent with what Cuomo considers his declared “gun violence disaster emergency,” are subject to being nullified. The extremely broad reach of these provisions in the executive order could be used, for example, to abrogate leases for properties relied on by lawful gun retailers, or to close out bank accounts or banking transactions that directly or indirectly involve the sale or purchase of lawful firearms.

As if these constitutionally troubling July 6 executive actions by Cuomo were not enough, on the same day he signed into law legislation permitting lawsuits against lawful firearms manufacturers and retailers for engaging in a “public nuisance.” This state law conflicts with a 2005 federal law that permits suits against gun retailers or manufacturers only in limited circumstances similar to the liability standard for other manufactured products that can be misused, such as automobiles.

As a result, any firearm manufacturer whose product is sold in New York, or any retailer within the state who sells such a product, now could be subject to being sued based on such action alone. This predicament reflects the extremely broad “public nuisance” laws in the state, coupled with the declaration of a gun-violence emergency under which any firearm can be considered as contributing to that “emergency.”

If all this sounds absurd, it is. However, until these laws and executive actions are challenged successfully (which they ultimately almost certainly will be), Cuomo’s destructive “reimagining” of individual rights has cast New York citizens into an even deeper and darker constitutional hole.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

by Bob Barr

California’s slide into a socialist wasteland is hardly news. What is somewhat surprising, or at least intriguing, are the depths of stupidity to which local and state officials in the “Golden State” will go to fulfilling their destiny. Take, for instance, San Jose’s latest anti-gun gambit – a compulsory tax to pay for the “costs” of criminal gun violence, coupled with a tax directly on lawful gun owners by forcing them to purchase liability insurance.

These ordinances most assuredly will be challenged in court, and all but certain to be eventually struck down, even if they survive appeal to the uber-liberal U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

This means significant public resources will be spent defending mandates not even considered by their proponents to be meaningful. City officials admit as much, saying the ordinances “won’t magically end gun violence,” but vowing to press forward regardless. This should remove any doubt that the city of San Jose considers law-abiding gun owners to be part of the problem and sees them as second-class citizens to be run out of town rather than respect their constitutionally protected rights as Americans.

In all their gushing over how smart and innovative they are with their latest anti-gun scheming, Mayor Sam Liccardo and his equally clueless cohorts on the city council fail to explain how punishing 99.9 percent of non-violent, law-abiding gun owners for the misdeeds of the other .1 percent will have any positive effect on crime in the city.

If California’s already highly restrictive gun laws could not prevent the horrific mass shooting at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority rail yard in May, what do these dunderheads think a tax and insurance mandate will do?

The same question applies when considering instances of “gun violence” perpetrated by criminals wielding illegal firearms, such as gang members and career criminals. Does Liccardo think these individuals themselves are paying into the system? The answer obviously is “No,” a reality again reflected in the mayor’s own admission that, “criminals won’t obey these mandates.”

This head-scratching, self-contradicting logic would be absurd if stopping gun violence truly was the goal. It is in fact worse. These mandates are designed directly and perversely to chill lawful gun ownership. Even where San Jose could make actual strides in tackling criminal gun violence, such as aggressively pursuing straw sales (already illegal under federal firearms law), the city instead has decided to further harass gun owners by ordering audio and video recordings of all retail gun sales.

Under current law, there is nothing to prevent law enforcement from tracking the serial numbers of guns used in crimes back to the original straw purchaser without such privacy-invasive recordings, but the opportunity to use the threat of a back-door registry via government surveillance in order to chill lawful gun purchases appears to have been too enticing for Liccardo to pass up.

While Liccardo and the San Jose city council may fancy themselves brilliant pioneers of anti-gun proposals, their vacuous ideas simply demonstrate their fundamental incompetence and their unwillingness to enforce laws already on the books to target criminals. For these municipal officials, it obviously is easier to scapegoat law-abiding gun owners for the costs of run-away gun violence by gangs and other criminals within their jurisdiction.

Such strategy, if it even qualifies as one, may score political points with liberal voters and the mainstream media, but the backslapping and fist-bumping will not last long when violent crime does not subside – which it will not. In fact, by running law-abiding gun owners out of town, San Jose will become even more of a haven for criminals. And, for a city that bellyached over “illegal” fireworks stretching their emergency response capabilities too thin, such a future is all but certain.

Instead of targeting citizens who obey the law and just want to be free from government harassment, perhaps Liccardo should ask why it is that so many people are fleeing California cities like his for the prairie towns of Texas. Asking such a question, however, would take a degree of objectivity and common sense clearly not present in today’s San Jose.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.