What’s behind the push from “woke” CEOs who ought to know better to ruin their companies with Marxist policies? “There is More to BlackRock Than You Might Imagine,” an article that Bill Martin sent, explains:

In 2019 Larry Fink joined the Board of the Davos World Economic Forum, the Swiss-based organization that for some 40 years has advanced economic globalization. Fink, who is close to the WEF’s technocrat head, Klaus Schwab, of Great Reset notoriety, now stands positioned to use the huge weight of BlackRock to create what is potentially, if it doesn’t collapse before, the world’s largest Ponzi scam, ESG corporate investing. Fink with $9 trillion to leverage is pushing the greatest shift of capital in history into a scam known as ESG Investing. The UN “sustainable economy” agenda is being realized quietly by the very same global banks which have created the financial crises in 2008. This time they are preparing the Klaus Schwab WEF Great Reset by steering hundreds of billions and soon trillions in investment to their hand-picked “woke” companies, and away from the “not woke” such as oil and gas companies or coal. BlackRock since 2018 has been in the forefront to create a new investment infrastructure that picks “winners” or “losers” for investment according to how serious that company is about ESG—Environment, Social values and Governance.

For example a company gets positive ratings for the seriousness of its hiring gender diverse management and employees, or takes measures to eliminate their carbon “footprint” by making their energy sources green or sustainable to use the UN term. How corporations contribute to a global sustainable governance is the most vague of the ESG, and could include anything from corporate donations to Black Lives Matter to supporting UN agencies such as WHO. Oil companies like ExxonMobil or coal companies no matter how clear are doomed as Fink and friends now promote their financial Great Reset or Green New Deal. This is why he cut a deal with the Biden presidency in 2019.

Responding to Communist Canada, Charlie points to the usual hypocrisy from the Marxists in office:

I notice there is a large crowd at the Bell Center in Montreal to watch the Canadiens/Golden Nights Stanley Cup playoff game tonight. So why exactly was pastor Tim Stephens arrested? Shame on the politicians in Canada. May Almighty God thwart the ways of these wicked people! 

Speaking of which, I read a passage in Isaiah this morning of enormous comfort. We serve a just God, nor will His justice sleep forever, as Jefferson famously noted:

Woe to those who make unjust laws,
    to those who issue oppressive decrees,
² to deprive the poor of their rights
    and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
    and robbing the fatherless.
³ What will you do on the day of reckoning,
    when disaster comes from afar?
To whom will you run for help?
    Where will you leave your riches?

Who Is A “Terrorist” In Biden’s America? by Whitney Webb

Far from being a war against “white supremacy,” the Biden administration’s new “domestic terror” strategy clearly targets primarily those who oppose US government overreach and those who oppose capitalism and/or globalization.

Will an elephant suddenly fly out of my left ear?  Will the moon crash into Mars?  Will CNN start reporting actual news?

Catholic Charities receives more than 60 percent of its funding from the federal government, causing me to doubt the claims all over he Web that the bishops might vote to deny abortion lover Senile Joe the right to receive communion in the Catholic church.

By the way, if you are a left-wing clergyman you can preach politics from the pulpit all day long, but if you are more conservative you are perpetually terrified of losing your tax exemption for criticizing anything the state does.   That’s why they almost uniformly became Anthony Fauci’s trained monkeys from the beginning of the planned demic.

For a Christian minister who never missed a single Sunday service during the planned demic and who is not afraid to lambast any and all politicians for their sinful behavior, check out Pastor Chuck Baldwin  and his Liberty Fellowship.  I listen to his sermons every Sunday at 4:30 EST — even today during the final round of the U.S. Open.

Help make this extremely powerful and inspirational sermon go viral. It lays down the gauntlet of the peoples of God against satanic statism and oppression unlike any previous statement of affirmation of justice and righteousness.

The Minds of Men.

Mind Control – America’s Secret War.
It is one of the ill-kept secrets of America’s intelligence agencies — for decades, they have worked virtually non-stop to perfect means of controlling the human mind. But while many have suspected the existence of these projects, the details have long been preserved. Mind Control blows the lid off years of chilling experiments, drawing on documents reluctantly released through the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with some of the victims, including a woman whose past was literally taken away.

Hear from John Marks, the author of In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, who broke the story of the CIA’s abuses by unraveling the mysteries contained in financial records. All the other records pertaining to the experiments were destroyed by the agency in an attempt to prevent the details from ever being known.

I met John Marks in 1983 and discussed his book and the dangerous consequences of mind control with him.

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate – The CIA and Mind Control — Book by John Marks

Bad Trip To Edgewood.
An ITV Yorkshire (UK) documentary originally broadcast in 1993 about the secret chemical experiments carried out at Edgewood Arsenal on unsuspecting volunteers from the US military.

The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments — Stephen Kinzer article

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search For Mind Control — Book by Stephen Kinzer

The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, — Book by David Talbot

The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists — Book by Colin A. Ross

Project MKULTRA The CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification — Joint Hearing Before The Select Committee On Intelligence And the Subcommittee On Health and Scientific Research Of The Committee On Human Resources United States Senate Ninety-Fifth Congress First Session August 3, 1977

Project MKUltra — Wikipedia entry

Mind Control 1979 Project MKUltra documentary CIA experiments.

This 1979 ABC News documentary delves into the CIA’s secret MKULTRA project which experimented with various purported mind control techniques including giving soldiers and others LSD and various other drug concoctions.

Acid Dreams The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond — Book by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain

Operation Mind Control — Book by Walter Bowart

Operation Mind Control — an investigative report into government mind control through the use of drugs such as LSD, behavior modification, hypnosis, and other “psycho-weapons”. Bowarts «Operation Mind Control: The Cryptocracys Plan to Psychocivilize You» is a classic in the annals of conspiracy research. It is a disturbing account of the secret use of mind control technology, by a secret government (or «cryptocracy»), with an aim to pacifying whole populations and furthering private global-investment strategies.

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties  — Book by Tom O’Neill

Eeeeewww:

A group of parents in Gainesville, FL, concerned about potential harms from masks, submitted six face masks to a lab for analysis. The resulting report found that five masks were contaminated with bacteria, parasites, and fungi, including three with dangerous pathogenic and pneumonia-causing bacteria. No viruses were detected on the masks, although the test is capable of detecting viruses.

The analysis detected … 11 alarmingly dangerous pathogens on the masks…

Gary in Florida sent me this story Thursday, so thanks to him, I’ve saved money this week as I’m too nauseated to eat. (Pssst, Mom and Dad: compelling children to wear masks is yet another in a long line of reasons to yank them out of the propaganda centers Our Rulers hope you’ll mistake for schools.)

Meanwhile, we continue to enjoy a hiatus between wars: the one over masks is winding down, while the partisans in the Jab Battle load their needles. Perhaps I’m naive, but the latter doesn’t worry me yet: most of the country, with the exception of such Marxists dystopias as Seattle and Oregon, still struggles to inject a solid half of the population—and that’s despite enormous bribes. So long as we sensible folk number at least a substantial minority, let alone more than half, we’re likely safe.

Herewith, then, dispatches from various parts of the USSA from your fellow Patriots mounting a rearguard defense in the Mask War.

(more…)

Mainstream media losing viewers in droves consult the FBI to objectively assess the FBI. Yes, why hasn’t Matt Gaetz been charged yet?

Thanks to Tucker Carlson’s courage this week, facts about the “Deep State” that LRC’s readers have long understood—notably, that its operatives have for decades instigated most of the “domestic terrorism” besieging America—is going mainstream, so to speak. But long before innocent Patriots walked into a trap on January 6, political prisoners—people who have committed no actual crime but are instead caged at Leviathan’s whim—comprised most of the USSA’s incarcerated population. 

One such victim, Schaeffer Cox, describes this toxic system after his first-hand experience with it: 

   Here’s how the game really works. The government doesn’t tax people in order to provide services; they provide services so that the taxing doesn’t look so much like robbery. We are told that the services are the ends, and the taxes are the means. But the reality is the inverse of that — The taxes ARE the end goal.

    The Feds tax the people as much as they possibly can without completely suffocating them. Then they haul all the plunder back to Washington DC, where it gets divided up. Naturally, there is a line of people a mile long wanting a piece of this plunder-pie. The people with the best sounding excuse get to go to the front of the line, and get a bigger piece.

     The Justice System is custom built around getting to the front of that plunder-pie-line. The cops get a slice of pie to go capture the boogeyman. The prosecutors get a slice to shame and vilify the boogeyman. The public defenders get a slice to limp the boogeyman through the process. The judges get a slice to keep up the pretense of due process. The prison guards get a slice to house the boogeyman. The probation department gets a slice to supervise the boogeyman after everyone else is done with him. The slice itself is the objective. At best, the boogeyman is incidental.

     There are literally hundreds of thousands of people whose whole livelihoods are built around using the boogeyman as their golden ticket to get to the front of the plunder-pie-line. They live in fear of only two things: The Feds running out of pie, and the world running out of boogeymen. So far, the Feds have been able to plunder enough people to keep the pie flowing. But as the line gets longer, you must compete with other equally shiny golden tickets. Whenever the Justice System gets bumped back in line, the upper management panics, and tells the FBI they better produce some bigger and better boogeymen, or else we all go hungry! There just aren’t very many real actual boogeymen in the world, certainly not enough to keep the machine fed. So for the sake of keeping their business afloat, they have resorted to manufacturing their own pretend monsters.

     This is literally all the FBI does nowadays. They set up fake scenarios, have their own paid informants role-play the whole thing, then lead some poor sucker into the middle of the LARP game to be arrested and bear the penalty for whatever heinous monstrosity the FBI dreamed up to be the plot of their latest self-aggrandizing street performance. It’s called “security theater” by old-school cops who look down on the practice. The whole thing is as fake as a plastic banana. But it reliably gets the Justice System to the front of the plunder-pie-line. And they are all addicted to that pie.

    That is why there are so many people in prison in America. No other reason. The prison guards are not here for us; We are here for them. They NEED us. We are their golden ticket to the front of the plunder-pie-line, year after year. If the pie ever runs out, the courts will magically see the light and start believing in second chances, and not giving people decades in prison for petty, victimless crimes.

     As a matter of fact, it’s really none of the government’s business at all. In a free country you get dragged into court for a crime of injury against your neighbor. In a NOT free country you get dragged into court for a crime of disobedience against your government. Think on that.

    Truly “no victim no crime” are words to live by. Anything else is less than self-ownership, less than freedom, and less than human. America has really lost her way chasing after that plunder-pie. Perhaps if we had taken “Thou Shalt Not Steal” to heart we wouldn’t be in this mess.

~Schaeffer Cox

Please keep Mr. Cox and his fellow political prisoners in your prayers.

Thanks to Rudy Davis for sending me this shining essay. Mr. Davis issues a newsletter in which he lists various prisoners and ways of contacting them as well as updates on their conditions (many of these harmless folks endure beatings from guards, deprivation of medicine or food, and other abuse); if you’d like to subscribe, write him at ruddavis@yahoo.com. 

I don’t often say things like that. It is usually 2 or 3. Here are the names of the Republican House members who had the courage to vote against the bill to make Juneteenth a national holiday:

• Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala.
• Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.
• Rep. Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn.
• Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis.
• Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif.
• Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala.
• Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C.
• Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas
• Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.
• Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif.
• Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont.
• Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas
• Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky.
• Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.

They will, of course, all be smeared as racists who wished slavery had continued.

N.B.: I fail to see how “the official creation of a new holiday to celebrate the end of slavery kicking off a one-day government shutdown feels like a win for libertarians,” as one nutty left-libertarian commented about the new holiday.

Questions About the FBI’s Role in 1/6 Are Mocked Because the FBI Shapes Liberal Corporate Media, by Glenn Greenwald

The FBI has been manufacturing and directing terror plots and criminal rings for decades. But now, reverence for security state agencies reigns.

“My Favorite Things” is indeed one of them, so when Mark Carroll sent me this parody by Robert Pridgeon, I enjoyed it immensely:

The Liberal Woke

(With apologies to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II)

Triggered fanatics

And Covid derangement

Snowflakes and outbreaks

With face mask estrangement

Squandering billions

And leaving us broke

These are all things from

The Liberal Woke

 

Pending inflation

And Jihad Squad antics

Transgender morons

And pronoun semantics

Women with gonads who

Make sports a joke

These are all things from

The Liberal Woke

 

Hyena Harris is

Dodging the border

Criminals flourish with

No law and order

Partisan Twitter

Erases keystrokes

These are all things from

The Liberal Woke

When mean Joe bites

When fake news lies

When things are in doubt

I simply remember

My favorite hope:

Those jerks will be voted out

Well…my favorite hope’s a bit stronger, but the results are similar.

TimmyTaes sends this illuminating chart of “Per Capita Distribution”—ahem: shouldn’t that be “Redistribution”?—“of Federal Receipts and Expenditures, FFY 2017.” In other words, is your state robbing you to send more or less money to the Feds than it grabs in return?

Howmuch.net (“Understanding Money”), publisher of this study in 2019, reached several conclusions—and this was before COVIDCon’s assault on our wallets:

• 40 out of 50 states are getting more, sometimes a lot more, from the federal government than they’re paying in taxes.

• Taxpayers in Virginia receive more than $10,000 on a per capita basis than they pay, the biggest imbalance of any state in the country.

• Several states in the Northeast pay thousands more in taxes than they receive from the federal government.

Even better was TimmyTaes’ observation: “No surprise that Virginia and Maryland (home of all those overpaid government bureaucrats) make much more money from DC than they send to the Federal government in taxes.”

Despite Trump (as if Mr. Space Force and the guy who hired John Bolton had ever been any real resistance), the establishment and empire aren’t out of fashion by a long shot. NATO one of the greatest vehicles for social engineering ever.

This could morph like the COVID lab-leak theory. “No, way, that’s tinfoil hat conspiracy theory!” slowly becomes “So what that FBI informers participated? MAGA people still broke the law.”

The first all-gay Navy helicopter crew. The first of many. Hey Christians: What percentage of the military has to be gay before you finally quit upholding the military as a great institution that will make a man out of a boy?

Once upon a time students were well acquainted with The American’s Creed. It was a bedrock statement of the principles which defined the philosophical essence and aspirations of the United States. It was recited at school assemblies, and a parchment copy presented to high school graduates, often by their congressman/congresswoman. I still have my copy presented to me in 1970 by Congressman Page Belcher. How many students in school districts across the nation today from coast to coast still recite The American’s Creed, or are even aware of its existence? Why is this so? What has happened in five decades in eroding this self-confident affirmation and inner spirit of patriotic dedication among Americans?

Because of the deep division in America between Red States and Blue States, there has been much talk of secession. Is the United States too big? Would people be happier in smaller communities? Frank Buckley, a distinguished professor at the Scalia Law School, breaks with most of his fellow legal academics by taking these questions seriously. In a recent article in The American Mind, he suggests that secession today would be difficult but not impossible. “As I argued in  American Secession  (2020), a civil war would be unlikely, and we’d be more likely to see a pacific James Buchanan in the White House than an indominable Abraham Lincoln.”

Against those who argue that secession is unconstitutional, Buckley offers some strong arguments: “Finally, the legal barriers to secession are weaker than most think. Originalists on the Court would recognize that the framers had thought secession permissible, while its more liberal members would find it difficult to ignore the expressed wishes of voters in a state. Is an indissoluble union a more fundamental constitutional norm than democracy? Canada and Great Britain posed that question, and answered no. While the Supreme Court held that secession was unconstitutional in Texas v. White, that was a decision of a unionist Court right after the Civil War. Moreover, the decision assumed that the 1781 Articles of Confederation, which spoke of a “perpetual” union, had survived when the Constitution was adopted. Had that been the case, however, the Constitution would not have been ratified until the last state signed on in 1790, and George Washington’s election two years earlier would have been a nullity.”

Buckley is something who “thinks outside the box,” and we badly need this quality today

Many of you write that you are frightfully discouraged and depressed after 15 months of COVIDCon—and who can blame you? Not only did politicians and bureaucrats raze our lives with the enthusiastic cooperation of virtually all corporations (which grew into the behemoths they are because of our patronage, thus adding insult to injury), the mainstream media, and—unforgivably—”Christian” churches (at least so-called), but far too many of our fellow serfs allowed and even encouraged that destruction.

Yet some of you have had it worse than others. Imagine suffering through this last year by yourself, thousands of miles from your beloved spouse. That’s the situation for one of LRC’s readers I’ll call Adam. His wife is Venezuelan, and she was visiting family there when the government unleashed COVIDCon. Yes, Venezuela, Marxist dystopia where folks starve to death while Maduro fumbles from one commie policy to the next. 

I pray for Adam and Eva daily, asking the Lord to smite every politician and bureaucrat putting asunder what He has joined together. I’ve redoubled those prayers since receiving Adam’s latest email with its personal and heartbreaking witness to the toll Marxism exacts from its victims:

[Eva] was hospitalized a few days earlier with an infection of the cartilage between three of her vertebrae, apparently an after-affect of the COVID she had last Fall.  

Mere separation wasn’t enough: poor Eva sickened with her adored husband unable to fly to her aid thanks to closed borders.

She was in absolute agony and was prescribed medicine and physical therapy at home.  I ran into a situation I’ve been struggling with mightily since she’s been gone, and that’s the ability to send her extra money for emergencies.  I thank the Lord that we were able to buy some great health insurance for her and the family down there (you DO NOT want to be without health insurance in Venezuela right now; Socialists, once they run out of other people’s money to steal, renege on their promises of goodies like “free health care for everyone,” and that’s what the Maduro regime has done.  Unless you can afford health insurance and private hospitals, you’ll die of neglect in the public ones!) but the insurance didn’t cover her special medicine or physical therapy this time … Fortunately, I’ve been able to send her money, with the help of family…

When I asked Adam for permission to share this tragedy on LRC, he responded, 

ANYTHING that will help people to really understand what life under full-blown Marxist Socialism is really like (sometimes I think the MAJORITY Just. Don’t. Get. It – and that applies to many “libertarians,” too).  No one will truly understand until they’ve lived through it, but I think that everyone here in the USSA is about to get a firehose full of it soon, if present trends continue.

Please join me in upholding this couple before God’s throne while also praying for revival in our country. We cannot battle Satanic Marxism without a firm foundation in Christ’s Gospel. Only a Biblical and Christian people will reject as sinful the greed, envy, and exploitation on which communism thrives.

In some states, marijuana dispensaries will give you a joint if you get the vaccine at an in-store vaccination clinic. No thanks on either one, but perhaps the marijuana will offset the effects of the shot?

Some large corporations already observe Juneteenth. Now the Senate has passed a bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday to celebrate the end of slavery. The legislation will certainly pass in the House and be signed into law.

Suggestion: make every day a federal holiday and make all federal bureaucrats stay home every day. They won’t do as much damage to our life and property that way.

Update: the House has passed the bill. Liberals are upset that 14 “racist” Republicans voted against it.

All media outlets are reporting that 600,000 Americans have now died of Covid-19. According to the Huff Post, “The number of lives lost, as recorded by Johns Hopkins University, is greater than the population of Baltimore or Milwaukee. It is about equal to the number of Americans who died of cancer in 2019.”

But these numbers are not equal. When 600,000 Americans died of cancer in 2019 they died of cancer. When 600,000 are said to have died of Covid-19, we don’t know exactly how many actually did. Many died with Covid-19, not from it. Others were said to have had it because of some bogus test. Others died of multiple causes, but it was financially and/or politically expedient to label their death as Covid-19 related.

The Bolsheviks who occupy the White House are establishing an American Stasi to “report potentially radicalized friends and family members” (i.e., suspected Trump voters, conservatives in general, and especially libertarians) to the “authorities.”  Senile Joe himself has labeled all Trump voters as “white supremacists” and called them the greatest threat in terms of “domestic terrorism.”  His definition of domestic terrorism is, of course, voting Demo-Bolsheviks like himself out of office.

The Democrat Party is the party of totalitarian communism.

Why Marxist Organizations Like BLM Seek to Dismantle the “Western Nuclear Family”

Épater le bourgeois (shock the middle classes) has been the revolutionary rallying cry of the left in the cultural war against Judeo-Christian morality and the nuclear family for well over a hundred years.

It lies at the epicenter of Modernism, Marxism, Fascism, National Socialism, Progressivism, Feminism, Environmentalism, and Homosexualism.

For fascinating, in-depth explorations of bourgeois (middle class) culture, see Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914, by Peter Gay;  The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud Volume 1: Education of the Senses, Volume 1, by Peter Gay; The Tender Passion: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 2, by Peter Gay; The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3, by Peter Gay; The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 4, by Peter Gay; Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 5, by Peter Gay; Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideologies in Transition, by Gertrude Himmelfarb;  The De-moralization Of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, by Gertrude Himmelfarb; and One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution, by Gertrude Himmelfarb; The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, by Deirdre McClosky; Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t explain the Modern World, by Deirdre McClosky; and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capitol or Institutions, Enriched the World, by Dierdre McClosky.

The classic and definitive statement of elitist contempt for bourgeois culture is Eminent Victorians, by the scathing, bitchy biographer Lytton Strachey. Strachey, who along with his homosexual lover and fellow Cambridge Apostles initiate, economist John Maynard Keynes, were unabashed advocates of “the higher sodomy,” setting forth the destructive agenda for generations of anti-bourgeois subversion. Later the Apostles served as the breeding nest for treason by spawning Soviet espionage agents Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Michael Straight. 

Following in the degenerate path blazed earlier by Keynes, postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault sexually assaulted young boys while living in Tunisia.

See also Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, by Peter Gay; Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, by E. Michael Jones; Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution Out of the Spirit of Music, by E. Michael Jones; Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872-1927, by Daniel Albright; France: Fin de Siècle, by Eugen Weber; Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, by Carl E. Schorske; Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, by Peter Gay; Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, by Mel Gordon; Modern Times: The Word from the Twenties to the Nineties, by Paul Johnson; The Shock of the New, (DVD) by Robert Hughes; Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies, by Paul Buhle and David Wagner;  Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture, by Chris Robe’; Enemies of Society, by Paul Johnson; The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, by Robert Nisbet; and Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America.  

A traveler at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR)

I nominate this airport as the most inappropriately named one in the world.

was stopped at a TSA checkpoint last week after officers discovered a handgun in his carry-on bag. But this wasn’t just any handgun — it was a handgun somewhat disguised as a belt buckle. …TSA officers initially thought the item to be a “large belt buckle with a replica gun on it,” but found it to be “an actual real firearm that could pop out of its decorative metallic oval frame,” according to a press release.

Sounds like a cool accessory, so naturally, the government ginned up hysteria over it. The gentleman had forgotten it was in his bag, which allowed one of the TSA’s spokesliars to thunder, “Claiming to forget that you have a gun with you is inexcusable.”

No, routinely, willfully and totally eviscerating the Fourth Amendment is inexcusable, as are groping passengers and robbing them.

Forgetfulness is mere human nature.