It’s Tuesday and I’m back from a little bit of R&R. My thanks to Bruce Gust who filled in for me while I was gone. This is the third year in a row that he’s done that pro bono, and I truly appreciate his contributions. I learned a few things from him about the role that our Founders’ faith played in the days leading up to the Revoltionary War and the role that it played in the early days of our nation. I think some of his meditations can be very helpful in considering how God has guided our country even in its earliest forms (maybe especially in its earliest forms). I’m especially impressed that he’s pulling many of the posts he shared into a book called American Devotional Series: Part One: The Revolutionary War. It’s a great concept and it was Bruce’s gift to give us a sneak peek at his work.
Of course, we’re a long, long way from those “earliest days” of our country. Sometimes it feels like we’re a long, long way from any semblance of faith. I think it’s fair to say that while there still exists a Christian presence in our culture, most of our societal institutions, whether they are political, educational, judicial, medical, technological, business related, scientific or economic, Christianity by and large does not have the cultural influence it once did.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Big Business: Amazon locks a man out of his account and disrupts the function of his entire smart home system that uses Alexa to communicate with Amazon Echo gadgets.
Earlier this month, Amazon locked a man out of his account, disrupting his extensive smart home system. The suspension was driven by a delivery driver who claimed the man used a racial slur through his automated doorbell system. The only problem is that the man captured the entire interaction on his security system — the communication to the worker was an automated greeting of, “Excuse me, can I help you?”
You can read the linked article but I can save you the step by summarizing. The Amazon delivery driver falsely accused the Amazon customer of using a racial slur. Instead of giving both the driver and the customer the benefit of the doubt and thoroughly investigating, Amazon reacted as though the customer was guilty and punished him for it by essentially locking him out of their services.
Not only is that an inversion of our criminal code that protects the rights of the accused—who is presumed innocent until proven guilty—but it completely ignores a biblical principle that undergirds our system of justice.
Any story sounds true until someone tells the other side and sets the record straight. (Proverbs 18:17, LB)
Also, this is one reason I don’t use lots of “smart home” gadgets. Who wants to voluntarily give any unregulated, unelected, unaccountable organization control of their personal environmental systems? I don’t even like that the natural gas companies can read my meter from the comfort of their offices, much less make decisions at their discretion about whether I can continue to use the services I pay for.
What Amazon did borders on leveraging a social credit system in which they are the arbiters of “good” and “bad” social credit. Who gave them this power? They took it unto themselves.
Political: A suspicious raid on a gun seller in Montana by 20 armed IRS agents supported by members of the ATF.
Tom Van Hoose has owned Highwood Creed Outfitters in Great Falls, Montana for 13 years. As he pulled into work Wednesday morning, twenty heavily armed Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division agents swarmed his store. He tells TTAG that the IRS agents, in full battle rattle, had been mustered from as far away as Denver and Idaho to serve a warrant for his financial records.
He told us the IRS claims that he has under-reported and failed to report millions of dollars of income. Mr. Van Hoose denied that categorically and told us that anyone who knows anything about the gun business knows there’s not a lot of extra revenue in running a retail gun store and range.
Highwood Creek Outfitters was closed down Wednesday while the agents rifled through his records. The IRS CID troops took ten hours to copy the information on his computers and download his point of sale software information. But what Van Hoose says really concerns him is the fact that in addition to his accounting and sales records, the agents confiscated 13 years of 4473 forms and copied his firearm acquisition and disposition book.
Later in the article, the reporter writes,
Anyone who’s ever completed a 4473 form knows there’s no revenue or financial data there. That form is a record of a firearm purchase transaction used to facilitate a NICS background check and potentially trace a gun’s ownership down the road if it’s used in a crime. Gun dealers are required to keep those forms for at least 20 years.
The question then is, why would the IRS want customer transaction information? Van Hoose tells us the 4473 forms were not included on the list of financial records specifically listed on the warrant the IRS agents served him during the raid. Yet they took them anyway.
I’m sure I don’t know if Mr. Van Hoose has done anything illegal, but it doesn’t sound like he thinks he has, and we’re well aware that gun laws and tax collection are obsessions with the federal government.
What a coinkydink.
Remember that this administration asked for—and got—funding for 87,000 more IRS agents and that many of them will be armed. What happened in Montanta is exactly what we have to fear from a fully armed IRS; raids on unsuspecting citizens to intimidate and harass them.
You think you’ve seen branches of the government weaponized? I bet we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
There used to be a social contract between we the people and our government. We gave them power and they used that power constitutionally and legally. That contract has been torn up and thrown away by the Marxists because they don’t fear the law anymore and, more to the point, they don’t fear God anymore.