Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. I hope you are doing well as we head into the weekend, Memorial Day weekend. And we shall have a lot to remember. A lot of folks to remember. As many of our listeners know, my brother, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Martin, retired US Marine, served in Iraq and Afghanistan and has a perspective on Memorial Day, as you can imagine, because he lost some men and colleagues that is different than some and many there’s many people that live with that.
And so this weekend, I hope you’ll find an opportunity to be with family, to do the fun things you can do, but also to find time to remember. In our great history, there’s lots of moments where people have stepped up. Men have mostly stepped up, but men and women now have stepped up and died for our nation and for our freedom. And it’s great to remember. I’ve always thought that when it came to 9/11, I never liked 9/11’s use of Never Forget because forget feels like a bad word or a negative word, then never feels like something you have to sort of it’s a negative word, too. I always liked it when people used We Remember.
We Remember.
And I grew up in New Jersey and knew lots of people that were working in New York that day and knew a few that were in the towers and a couple of them that were lost. So it’s very personal. I remember I grew up my whole life seeing those towers, and so I will never forget. But I always thought We Remember.
And on Memorial Day, we remember.
At the heart of our American experiment are people who are willing to risk everything as well as end up having the risk play out. Right.
So happy Memorial Day. And for the many folks that will be gathered that are going to be celebrating or remembering and have a sadness, we remember them in a special way, too. All right.
But let’s get to what you need to know today. I’m trying to be a little bit mellow. We’re going to talk in a few moments with my old friend Paul Kengor. Paul Kengor, of course, is over at Grove City College, and he’s writing about Ukraine and Finland and Russia. And he’s a very astute observer of world affairs, primarily because he’s such an expert on communism and Soviet history, especially as it relates to Reagan. He’s a historian and a political scientist and very valuable guy. So we’ll talk with him, and then we’ll also speak about a big event coming up, Conservatives gathering in Colorado for a big event. Jeff Hunt, who heads up to a great gathering, will be with us. And he himself is a great observer of politics.
But here’s what I want to tell you. I started the week at the Supreme Court out front of the Supreme Court, and we thought maybe the Dobbs case comes down and it didn’t. Two other cases came down, right? So maybe the law courts would yield a decision on reversing. Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.
Then I spent time in St. Louis. I was in St. Louis for a couple of days this week, able to travel more now that we’re through all this silliness. And I was out there and I was spending time and we were looking at some of the issues that we’re facing across the country.
Tuesday was an election day. What sticks in my head this week is not so much the elections as they’re still ongoing, of course, recount stuff in Pennsylvania. They don’t know who won exactly. It looks like Dr. Oz is the winner, but now they’re fighting over it. But over in Michigan, the news broke that the legal requirement to put your name on the ballot to be a candidate for governor, you have to gather a certain number of signatures. A bunch of people, five of the candidates paid money to gather signatures and it was fraudulent and they got knocked off the ballot. And so it was a legal requirement. I don’t know yet. If we’ve confirmed that it was, in fact, sort of sabotage, it could have just been negligence. But the fact is that people who wanted to be a part of the political process got dinged by the law because of bad actors. In other words, the law was used to knock people off the ballot.
I’m not saying, by the way, it was used improperly. I think it sounds like it was used properly.
And then overlaying that this week, it’s now late in the week.
I’ve been back in Washington, DC, and I have a friend, a good friend of mine. Well, she’s been on the show. Cynthia Hughes and her son is one of the January 6 defendants. He’s been in jail this whole time, and his case is this week.
And at the time that, last I heard, there was not a jury verdict back. And we’ll see, next week we’ll know.
At the same time in the same courthouse, the lawyer, Michael Sussman is on trial for lying to the FBI, I may be simplifying that, there’s a different couple of charges, but the fact is that that case brought by Special Prosecutor John Durham has revealed how broken our political system is, how the use of the legal system, the FBI, the FISA courts was used by Hillary Clinton and her team against Donald Trump, not just against his campaign, but then against his administration.
And what you need to know now is the sophistication of the use of the legal system against We the People. It’s getting more and more sophisticated.
They use it with ballot initiatives.
They use it in Michigan. Ten days ago, the attorney general up there, a woman elected, Democrat, very Liberal. She said she won’t enforce the law as to abortion, she just won’t do it.
The Lawfare, what they count on with Lawfare is that if you are a conservative, by definition, you tend to abide by rules. That’s the definition of conservatives believe that certain things have come down through time, that they are worthy of conserving and preserving, whether it’s values, laws, principles, and in general, conservatives can be described as people who are rule abiders.
It doesn’t mean, by the way, they don’t cheat. It doesn’t mean that Republicans don’t cheat or steal or anything else. They’re human. They do. But in general, that’s what the parties do.
On the left, they see only one thing matters is power. And power is used in any way you can find it. So if you can’t pass through the regular Democratic Republic, a system, you can’t pass laws that you like, you use the courts and the courts become implementers of a far left agenda for 30 or 40 years. That’s what the Supreme Court did.
Now that it’s conservative, you’re seeing the left say, oh, it’s not valid. It shouldn’t be allowed. You shouldn’t be allowed to reverse all that stuff we did. But that’s obvious. The Supreme Court actions are obvious.
What you need to know is the amount of times now that people who are more conservative or better said, who are just opposed to the regime, the power regime, the number of times that they’re squashed the men that are in jail in Washington, DC, for January 6 are by and large, working and middle class, lower middle class people.
And whether you say that they were targeted, did someone say, go get those ones?
Not sure they ever said that. But what they ended up doing was if you had wealth, you bought your way out of the trouble with lawyers and others. And so it becomes a class fight.
And the law is used against We the People.
And over time, what you realize is the best way to be safe is to not cross the system. The regime, the power of the regime. Michael Sussman is on trial for, however, he deceived the FBI and all this stuff with John Durham. At the end of the day, I suspect that he will get a slap on the wrist.
And he, like some of the other lawyers that lied and one of the lawyers that lied on the FISA applications, I think his law license was suspended for a year. It’s already back. And he had some ten days or 30 day very short sentence and he screwed up America for years.
But what you need to know is we’re watching the power of government become more and more sophisticated in its use against We the People, and the way it’s used is Lawfare.
Now, you can say in our history, we’ve always had people that were corrupt. We’ve always had times where governments seem to be used against us.
But the difference now and the concern I have now and the reason why you should be worried now is that the power of government has gotten, grown so exponentially, so many, in just 25 years it’s grown.
After 9/11 we grew the surveillance state, we grew the security state, we grew the military industrial complex, that part of our government. Since, we’ve grown the education state, meaning that we have tens of millions of people tied up through loans, student loans in the system. We’ve grown all these aspects, spending in the last five years, spending through the roof. We grew the health industrial complex between NIH and CDC, the power of all these things, consolidation and who controls health care, health care systems, who are next to government because of Obamacare and Medicare and Medicaid.
Who pays is who matters.
The size and scope of government’s grown so much that the power and the use of the power through the legal system, through Lawfare.
And not just by the way, not just the legal system. All you have to do is notify people that you’re in the hot seat, regulatory wise or otherwise, and you see behavior change.
And we’re all the way back to what I think is the extension of that essay I refer to so often, and so many of you probably are tired of it, but I hope you read it. The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel in the late 1970s. He’s describing what became the Czech Republic, then Czechoslovakia, and the surrounding areas. And he’s describing behind the Soviet curtain how people behaved and why in his description, people behaved the way they did it.
They didn’t have to be told do this. They realized this was the best way to the best way to act, the way that was the best for their family was the way that was self censoring, was self limiting in terms of action, self-limiting in terms of freedom.
That’s what we’re seeing.
My argument is you can try to persuade people and you can even be nasty by the cancel culture. But that’s sort of old fashioned Western democracies and Western civilization.
Go ahead and fight about it and convince me what’s different now is that the government and the Lawfare and the systems.
Whether you’re running for office and knocked off the ballot because of a corrupt system, looks like the system is corrupt, whether you’re gathering to protest and you end up in jail for months and months and months with no trial, whether you’re finding yourself in a situation like a General Flynn again, Sidney Powell and all those lawyers who I think they were mostly making good faith arguments. Everything I’ve seen says they were. They’re finding their law license targeted by the left who are using the law license as another way to get at people.
It’s about Lawfare and how much it’s grown, how much it’s changed, how we function because of the size and scope of government is the real threat to us right now. And you watch big tech, big media, big government, work together to enforce the narrative, the Narrative Machine, as I’ve told you, that power is profound also.
So a lot to be concerned about. A lot to be concerned about. And then yet, and yet what we know is we do have the best system in the world, right? We have the best basics in the world. We have to get back to the basics. The way to do that is to reinvigorate institutions that are going to be just and about justice. But it’s also to limit the size and scope of government.
We don’t need a new majority in the House and Senate who simply want to run the government or influence the government better.
We need people that want to dramatically devolve power, not just because it’s the right thing to do to give more people power of their lives, but it’s also the best way to ensure that we stay together and hang together and work together and live together. All right. That’s what you need. A little bit of deep topic.
We’ll take a break. We gotta run. We’ll be right back. Lots to talk about. Ed Martin here on The Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
