When the First Amendment Is Paused By the Pentagon

 1.  The New York Times is suing the Pentagon with regard to First Amendment restrictions at this time.  What are your thoughts on the current situation?

Answer:  The Pentagon finds itself between a rock and a hard place, frankly.  There are critical factors that cannot be revealed to the American public at this time, and Pentagon staff members are trying to navigate the straits.

2.  Would it be to the American people's advantage to know more?

Answer:  It would have been to the American people's advantage to know more seventy years ago and during many administrations since that time.  Truman and Eisenhower and many others decided to keep critical secrets from the American public immediately following World War II, and we are dealing with the consequences of those choices today.  

3.  Do you accept that there will continue to be critical pieces of information the public simply cannot know into the indefinite future?

Answer:  If we accept that assertion, then we sacrifice human sovereignty, and national sovereignty along with it, in perpetuity.  So, no, I don't think we can say that the current gap in knowledge between governance and the governed can persist to the far horizon.

But the Pentagon is currently saying that there are subjects they are unable to address with journalists, and the public is not going to be receiving access to those sensitive issues at this time.

4.  Not in any measure?

Answer:  Not in any direct, confirmed or formal way, no.  

5.  Does the Pentagon find itself under threat regarding subjects about which the American public knows nothing at all?

Answer:  That is fair to say.  The Pentagon is attempting to do the best it can within a highly challenging framework.

6.  What would happen to a journalist who continued to speak about off-limits subjects, given these new guidelines from Pete Hegseth and others?

Answer:  He or she would not be able to persist.

7.  How long will this period of time last, when there are questions that journalists are simply unable to ask of the Pentagon?

Answer:  Two to three years at a minimum.  My point is that this time can be used to plan for the reclamation of our sovereignty, both national and individual, in ways that will protect mankind's greatest potential into the future.

8.  What are the most critical sovereignty issues as you see them today?

Answer:  We don't want the FBI's falsified law enforcement reporting to endure forever, nor the FBI's involvement in human trafficking, the FBI's limits on freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and, of course, ultimately, we don't want the FBI and its affiliates limiting a free press.  The subject of the architecture of free and fair elections will be critical as well.

We will need our military leaders to be setting environmental goals for the public in the long term, so that these issues can be de-politicized.

And we will need to define key elements of territorial integrity that involve open disclosure to the public on a whole range of subjects in the long term.

We will need to evaluate our energy policy with great rigor into the future, if we hope to maintain the fundamentals of our sovereignty.

And we will need to assess the myriad means of individual sovereignty violations by the FBI and its affiliates that are currently being deployed, and have the potential to derail all self-determination of the individual into the indefinite future.

This list is by no means complete, but it is a starting point for thorough assessment by someone who knows what the persistence of these programs would mean through direct experience.

9.  Why?

Answer:  It's fairly easy for most people to abandon someone else's sovereignty, without understanding the structural implications which will necessitate that they relinquish their own in short order.

We need an evaluation of the path forward by someone who understands how catastrophic such an abandonment of human sovereignty would be.

10.  Someone who has directly suffered from the FBI's programmatic violations of human sovereignty?

Answer:  Yes.  Such an individual will possess the appropriate insight into the challenges at hand, as well as they consequences of failure of governance should we continue to see programmatic expansion in the long term.

11.  Thank you for speaking with us this afternoon.

Answer:  You are quite welcome.

Lane MacWilliams