PORTLAND, OR—In a heartwarming moment of self-reflection, local antifa protester Sparky Moonshine suddenly realized the true fascist was inside him all along.
As he lifted a brick to throw at a conservative reporter, the protester suddenly froze and said to himself, "Wait a minute -- all this time I've been searching for fascists out in the real world, when all along, the true fascist has been inside me."
"Maybe the real fascism is just all the antifa friends I've made along the way," he said.
His heart grew three sizes that day as he was comforted by the thought that among billions of people in the world, he had found his soul-fascist inside him.
"Maybe the real joy of fighting fascism isn't breaking windows or burning things with Molotov cocktails -- maybe the real joy of fighting fascism is finding the fascist inside all of us."
Having made peace with his inner fascist, he then threw the brick at the reporter.
It matters not that the few “Republican governors crusading against vaccine mandates are [allegedly] facing significantly lower approval ratings on their handling of the coronavirus pandemic than their counterparts,” asPoliticopurports. (Don’t believe Politico!)
What matters aregovernors like Texas’ Greg Abbott, who “flat-out banned vaccine requirements, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, [who] followed up by vowing to sue the Biden administration.”
These two governors are unique in upholding natural, inalienable, individual rights—the right of self-ownership and bodily dominion; the stuffmocked by Joe Biden, wearing a ghoulish grin.
Biden’s remark came at a recent, highly contrived CNN town hall, during which “moderator Anderson Coopernoted that as many as one in three emergency responders in some major cities are refusing to comply with city vaccine mandates.”
“I’m wondering where you stand on that,” inquired Cooper. “Should police officers, first responders be mandated to get vaccines? And if not, should they be mandated to stay at home, let go?”
“Yes, and yes,” replied the president.
Disinterred for the day, Biden went on to mock the quaint notion of personal autonomy with a demented quip, “I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID. I mean, come on, freedom.”
Were our representatives to frame the vexatious question of vaccine mandates in the correct language of natural rights—self-ownership and individual privacy—we’d get the right answers, more likely to be followed by rights-upholding legislation.
But are Republican representatives doing so? Are our representatives in D.C. doing anything but hanging out in Tucker Carlson’s green room?
When it comes to COVID-19, only the following arguments are considered permissible as an objection to the COVID vaccine mandate:
“Exemptions from employer-mandated coronavirus vaccines [are] in [these] three general areas: natural immunity, religious objection, [and] medical objection.”
Dr. Leana Wen’s position reveals the scandal of coercion:
Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, said she approves of the administration’s push for employer-based mandates because ‘frankly nothing else was working.’
Indeed, Republicans prattle on about religious exemptions (state-granted!) and natural-immunity based exemptions (state-granted!)—but they have not the vaguest urge to defend the natural, God-given right of self-ownership.
Enough then of the cheering for the ineffectual GOP and its frontmen and women, who arrive in the Idiocracy’s version of Rome, only to do nothing, decade after decade. Oh, yes, they turn in appearances on TV and before congressional committees; get lucrative book deals, and consolidate political and corporate power for a lifetime.
But as the West careens toward the COVID-centered anthill society, nobody identifies and defends the individual’s dominion over his own body and his right to reject the Pharma-State’s hemlock prescription for that body.As emphasized,Republicans’ case against COVID mandates indirectly capitulates to coercion.
During an October 19 appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” civil-rights attorney Harmeet Dhillon explained the genesis of the current COVID corporate tyranny. Business is allowed to screen out and reject employees based purely and solely on their vaccination status. The GOP (RIP) has, over decades, authored and facilitated laws the outcome of which is the current corporate tyranny. This fact needs the widest publicity possible.
Meantime, we have the ruling class, an example being New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardernboasting about having created an additional two classes of people in her diabolical democracy, where might makes right: the unvaccinated underclass (villains all) and the vaccinated upper-class (virtuous).
In a similar vein, an Austrian chancellorrevealed his plans to place Austria’s unvaccinated under house arrest. Stateside, Noam Chomsky, a progressive “intellectual,”wants to see the unvaccinated underclass reduced by the state to a “Hunger Games” type fight to survive: sequestered, waiting until dark to scrounge for scraps.
Loudoun County, Virginia, an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., represents the contentious zeitgeist bedeviling the body politic. As I reported elsewhere last year, the Loudoun County school board has become ground zero in an escalating culture war in which concerned parents oppose leftist indoctrination posing as curriculum.
The latest salvo—launched in the heat of a dead-even gubernatorial race in Virginia, and in the wake of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s much-criticizedmemo suggesting that disgruntled parents opposing school boards pose a national security threat—is captured in a Washington Postcolumn with the provocative headline “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.”
The Washington Post is the local paper widely read in the populous Northern Virginia suburbs that often determine the outcome of statewide elections in the Old Dominion. The column seemingly was written to buttress the statement made by Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe in a debate with his opponent, Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin, that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they teach.”
McAuliffe’s statement, regarded by many as a Kinsley gaffe—i.e., a controversial statement that inadvertently reveals the speaker’s true feelings—has been relentlessly exploited by Youngkin in the campaign, in the belief that Virginia parents are fed up with school boards pushing woke ideology. Youngkin counters, “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”
Recent polling confirms that Virginians overall—and especially Republicans and independents—favor greater parental influence over school curriculum. (Among Democrats, however, a stunning 70 percent of those polled wanted school boards to have more influence on school curriculum than parents.) The only poll that matters, however, is the Virginia gubernatorial election on Tuesday, November 2. Voters will decide whether McAuliffe’s arrogant disdain for parents will carry the day.
The Virginia governor’s race is important for reasons extending beyond the Commonwealth. First, it is seen by some observers as “a bellwether ahead of the 2022 midterms.” Democrats fear that public dissatisfaction with the struggling Biden Administration may tip voter sentiment in favor of the GOP. A Youngkin victory could be a harbinger for Republicans regaining control of Congress in 2022, foiling liberal hegemony in the nation’s capital.
Former President Obama made a rare campaign appearance for McAuliffe, dismissing residents’ concerns about the teaching of critical race theory and school boards covering up transgender sex crimes with the statement, “We don’t have time to be wasting on these phony, trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage that right wing media pedals to juice their ratings.”
Obama was not the only outsider to stump for McAuliffe. NBC reported“Obama’s visit was one in a series of visits from national Democrats marching in to boost voter turnout and lift McAuliffe in the closing weeks. . . . Joe Biden will return to Virginia [this] week for his second event with McAuliffe. First lady Jill Biden, [and] former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams . . . are among those who have rallied or are scheduled to rally with McAuliffe.” Gubernatorial elections do not generally warrant such concentrated firepower.
Second, Tuesday’s election may be seen as a referendum on the larger question of education reform. The partisan divide reflected in the campaign rhetoric and poll results in Virginia exemplifies the nationwide gulf between the education establishment (teachers’ unions, union-controlled school boards, and the uber-progressive colleges of education that train and credential public school teachers and administrators) seeking greater control over school children and, on the other hand, parents and taxpayers demanding accountability. This schism, not limited to Loudoun County or Virginia’s gubernatorial contest, is evident in state houses and school boards across the country. The education establishment would like to point to a McAuliffe win as evidence that public school accountability does not resonate in the electorate.
The Washington Postcolumn should be read in that light. One of the authors, Jack Schneider, is an associate professor in the school of education at the University of Massachusetts; his co-author, Jennifer Berkshire, is a freelance journalist who writes for the Nation, TheNew Republic, Salon, the Huffington Post, the Progressive, and other left-leaning publications. You get the drift. In 2020, Schneider and Berkshire co-authored a book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, the thesis of which is that school choice, opposition to critical race theory, and other forms of parental empowerment constitute “The GOP’s Grievance Industrial Complex.” Berkshire has described concerned parents as “a posse of vigilantes.” According to their publisher, education reformis “a radical vision to unmake public education.” Parents seeking accountability, the book contends, are “fixated on dismantling public education in the United States.”
Their Post column risibly argues that spontaneous parental opposition to policies adopted by local school boards (numbering over 13,000 and typically elected by the voters) is part of an orchestrated, national conspiracy by conservatives seeking to “deliver Congress in 2022.” This “frenzy” for parental rights, Schneider and Berkshire claim, is a “radical” assertion of “parental powers that have never previously existed.” Seriously? Parents have no right to determine what their children are taught? The Post column concedes that parents should be permitted some influence, but not if it conflicts with the state’s judgment regarding what is necessary “to prepare young people to think for themselves.” As evidence for this dubious proposition, Schneider and Berkshire cite state regulation of homeschooling, and claim that Supreme Court precedents such as Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) authorize measures deemed necessary for “the public welfare.”
This flimsy argument does not withstand scrutiny. The regulation of homeschooling (and compulsory education laws generally) do not confer on the state carte blanche authority over school-age children. Homeschooling is required to meet certain minimum standards but is not subject to micro-management of curriculum or teaching methods. Yoder allowed Amish parents to withdraw their children from public school after the eighth grade for religious reasons. The court rejected the state’s claim that further compulsory education was warranted.
Pierce overturned a state law mandating attendance at public schools only (in effect banning private schools or homeschooling), ruling that the law “unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control,” adding that “The child is not the mere creature of the State.” The court in Pierce cited Meyer v.Nebraska (1923), which held that a state law forbidding the teaching of any language other than English was unconstitutional because “the right of parents to engage [a teacher of German] so to instruct their children” is protected by the 14th Amendment.
Schneider and Berkshire are plainly wrong to contend that parents have no rights to control their children’s education. Such rights are fundamental and well-established. Engaging in classic leftist projection, Schneider and Berkshire accuse concerned parents of adopting the “paranoid style” of politics, going so far as to claim that objections to CRT (which most certainly is shaping“diversity, equity, and inclusion” curricula in in K-12 schools) are motivated by “White racial grievance.” Resorting to wild exaggeration, they accuse reformers of “bringing napalm to the fight” and harboring “conspiratorial fantasies.”
They conclude with this ultimatum: Parents unhappy with the current agenda of teachers’ unions and woke education vendors “can opt out of the public system if they wish, and pay to send their children to private or religious schools.” Reforming the schools funded with their tax dollars is not an option. Parents unable (or unwilling) to pay private school tuition must simply surrender their children to the far-Left leadership of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.
The authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door are apologists for a public education establishment that (in the words of the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley) is “owned and operated by Democrats and the teachers’ unions that finance their political campaigns.” They are cynically crying wolf—desperately attempting to prop up “their” candidate, Terry McAuliffe. The question is, will Virginia’s disgruntled parents fall for this gambit or express their dissatisfactionat the voter booth on November 2? Stay tuned.
On multiple fronts, prestigious institutions are driving wedges between parents and their own children. What if instead of mandated vaccines, masks, and critical race theory indoctrination, the social engineers were more concerned with avoiding jail?
The more uncertain the times, the more is at stake. This is why power grabs and resistance to them are growing to a fever pitch. Now, even children aren’t off-limits for those wielding institutional dominance.
The Tony Faucis and Merrick Garlands of society, the social engineers, join forces with central economic planners, the Janet Yellens and Jerome Powells, to trap children’s minds, bodies, and financial futures. Their edicts are enforced in the so-called private sector by everyone from bankers to bakers, in transportation or on TV.
In their grasp, these kids will be left with nothing.
This public-private partnership used to be the bane of the political left, who rightfully called out regulatory capture. It was only natural that giant corporations would lobby the government and infiltrate its agencies to serve their special interests. In fact, throughout much of the regulatory state’s history, this revolving door was erected by these corporate interests in the legislative process.
Now we have regulatory capture on steroids. It doesn’t just serve as a sweet deal for corporations. It actively perpetuates a parasitic relationship against the taxpayers and the whole social fabric of the country.
Take the recent FDA panel approval of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for children aged 5-11.
“I do think that it's a relatively close call,” FDA adviser Dr. Eric Rubin of Harvard University said during their approval process.
“We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it,” he added, before encouraging a vote of approval.
That was said so matter-of-factly, it perfectly shows the unaccountability and whole disconnectedness these grand decision makers feel towards those who are imposed upon by these decisions. Even if the imposed upon are children as young as 5 who just want to join their friends in kindergarten.
How do the people, how does anyone for that matter, stand up to power this brazenly flaunted?
Our managerial elite, which includes woke corporate power as well, created this crisis of crises and deems anyone who stands in the way of their solutions a domestic terrorist, white supremacist, or a dangerous disinformant. The ban hammer then comes down to cancel any challenge.
People will tolerate all of this up to a point, and that point has been tested for quite some time. Now with children involved, we have likely reached the point of no return.
If it doesn’t feel to you like the very heart and soul of our country is now in contention, then you’re probably too drugged up on pop culture to know any better. You’re certainly not one of the Build Back Better/Great Reset managerial elites. Their behavior proves the proposition is true.
Left, right, or center, one’s political alignment should be set aside upon stepping onto this terrain. Hundreds, likely thousands of parents across the country are shedding those labels and risking much more just to publicly voice opposition to the ongoing takeover of their children’s education and health.
They see that there is no security or prosperity for families and forthcoming generations as long as they are manipulated to serve at the feet of unelected masters.
To reverse this dynamic, more parents are needed to join with those already exhibiting courage during public comment and organizing single-issue campaigns or runs for local office like school board. This isn’t strictly about political change, but rather a re-entry into various institutions, taking them back to the form in which they were created.
Most progress will be made at the local level, where it also stands the greatest chance of being long-lasting. Decentralization efforts will outperform centralization tactics over time. Indeed, victory may be won in short order if enough people stand up.
Our current predicament is like a funhouse mirror image of what Alexis de Tocqueville reported in “Democracy in America” 200 years ago. At that time, formal institutions and informal associations mediated the voracious appetites of the state and the mob.
When the American people, particularly families and children, come first, that’s the true America First vision. It’s now clearly in the sights of millions of Americans what’s at stake, so if we all play our part selflessly and prudently, we will secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
It seems supporters of the Biden administration finally settled on a narrative they like for explaining away supply chain shortages.
Here’s the administration’s talking point: the US economy is rolling along so well that Americans are demanding huge amounts of goods. That’s overwhelming the supply chain and causing the backups roiling America’s ports and logistic infrastructure.
For example, transportation secretary Buttigieg this month declared "Demand is up … because income is up, because the president has successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession."
Similarly, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters supply chain problems are occurring because “people have more money … their wages are up … we’ve seen an economic recovery that is underway.”
This position has been mocked by a number of conservative politicians—including Senator Ted Cruz—and commentators, who find this to be an absurd assumption. Indeed, Cruz and other critics could point to a variety of factors ranging from the weight of government regulations to the problem of covid lockdowns limiting the productivity of supply-chain workers.
Yet the administrator’s defenders are right about consumer demand and spending—even if for the wrong reasons. As Mihai Macovei showed earlier this month, the global volume of trade and shipping volume in 2021 have actually exceeded prepandemic numbers. For example, in the port of Los Angeles, “loaded imports” and “total imports” for the 2020–21 fiscal year (ending June 30, 2021) were both up when compared to the same period of the 2018–19 fiscal year.
In other words, it’s not as if little is moving through these ports. In fact, more is moving through them than ever before. That suggests demand is indeed higher.
But why is it higher? It some ways, it's true that, as Psaki says, "people have more money." That, however, is where the veracity and usefulness of Biden’s defenders end in explaining the problem.
Much of the answer can be really found in monetary inflation. Obviously, Joe Biden hasn’t “successfully guided the economy” through anything, but it is accurate to say that people have more money in a nominal sense. Wages are up nominally. After all, if we look at the immense amount of new money created over the past eighteen months, we should absolutely expect people to have more money sloshing around. But this also means a lot more pressure on the logistical infrastructure as people buy up more consumer goods.
The idea that supply chain problems are “driving inflation” gets the causation backward. It’s money supply inflation that’s causing much of the supply chain's problems. Not the other way around.
After all, as of September 2021, M2 has increased from $15.2 trillion to $20.9 trillion since February 2020. That’s an increase of 35 percent. Yes, some of that has been kept within the banking system through the Fed’s payment of interest on reserves, but a lot of it clearly has entered the “real economy” through stimulus payments, unemployment insurance, and federal deficit spending in general.
Originally, the public was saving a lot of that stimulus and bailout money, with the personal savings rate hitting historic highs of over 25 percent. But this past summer the savings rate collapsed again, and as of September is back under 8 percent. The public is now flooding the economy with its former savings.
The American appetite for spending on consumer goods hasn’t gone away. Yet there are many reasons to suspect this spending spree is unsupported by actual economic activity and is a phenomenon of monetary inflation.
For example, today’s tsunami of spending raises questions when we consider there are still about 5 million fewer people working in the American economy than was the case in early 2020. That means fewer people being paid wages. Without monetary inflation, an economy with millions of fewer workers suggests there should be less spending.
Additionally, spending increases when the public suspects that inflation is going to increase. That is, if there is a perception the value of money will decline, the demand for money will decline also. As Ludwig von Mises noted: “[O]nce public opinion is convinced … the prices of all commodities and services will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and to restrict his cash holding to a minimum size.”
That means more spending. This phenomenon is already clear in home prices and grocery prices. The public may suspect rising prices are here to stay. Meanwhile, the Consumer Price Index—a very limited measure of goods price inflation—is nonetheless near a thirty-five-year high. That means now’s a good time to spend.
With 2020's panic-induced saving subsiding, people are now wondering if their savings produce any returns. But ordinary savers are surely now remembering that the interest returns from savings right now are next to nothing. Thanks to the central bank’s ultralow interest rate policy, we live in a yield-starved world. That’s okay for hedge funders who can participate in carry trades and other high-yield forms of investment. But regular people are stuck with interest rates that don’t keep up with price inflation. So it makes more sense to spend dollars rather than save them.
So, Biden’s people are correct in a certain sense that people have “more money” and that “demand is up.” This is just what we would expect in an inflationary environment. We should expect demand for everything (but money) to be up.
The question, however, is how much of this windfall will continue in real, inflation-adjusted terms. It’s too early to tell, although we can also see that inflation-adjusted median earnings collapsed 6.3 percent, year over year, during the second quarter of 2021. We can see that real GDP growth has dramatically slowed.
But at least as far as the third quarter is concerned, it’s fairly clear the US was—and likely still is—in the midst of an inflationary boom. But how long will it last?
In a magnificent piece of investigative reporting, the Associated Press has discovered that the viral phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” is actually “code” for a far more vulgar insult of our beloved president Joe Biden.
The AP “wire service” — a misnomer in a wireless age — took great pains to explain where “Let’s Go Brandon” originated and the shocking truth about the people shouting it: They don’t like Joe Biden very much.
But how did Republicans settle on the Brandon phrase as a G-rated substitute for its more vulgar three-word cousin?
It started at an Oct. 2 NASCAR race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. Brandon Brown, a 28-year-old driver, had won his first Xfinity Series and was being interviewed by an NBC Sports reporter. The crowd behind him was chanting something at first difficult to make out. The reporter suggested they were chanting “Let’s go, Brandon” to cheer the driver. But it became increasingly clear they were saying: “F—- Joe Biden.”
Well, it was no mystery what the crowd was chanting — especially to the poor NBC reporter who didn’t quite know how to cover up the obscene chant.
This sort of thing just isn’t done, is it? I mean, using a vulgar expletive in any connection with a beloved president like Joe Biden is beyond redemption. It’s unprecedented. It’s dangerous.
Except when the same exact insult is applied to Donald Trump.
On Sunday, June 14, the Echo Park-based creative production studio and art gallery iam8bit launched fu**trump.art, a hybrid virtual exhibition and protest where all of the works read “F**k Trump” and are available to download for free as web and print resolution files so that anyone can share the message online or IRL.
The date of the launch was significant—it was Donald Trump’s birthday and Flag Day, as well as a day often used to celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride—and the message was strong. Jon M. Gibson and Amanda White, co-founders of iam8bit, describe it as a “primal scream.”
But while the AP report mentions a past history of insults to presidents, it somehow gets fact and fiction mixed together.
A portion of the U.S. was already angry before the Brandon moment, believing the 2020 presidential election was rigged despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, which has stood the test of recounts and court cases. But now it’s more than that to die-hard Trump supporters, said Stanley Renshon, a political scientist and psychoanalyst at the City University of New York.
He cited the Afghanistan withdrawal, the southern border situation and rancorous school board debates as situations in which Biden critics feel that “how American institutions are telling the American public what they clearly see and understand to be true, is in fact not true.”
There’s absolutely nothing shocking about using the phrase “F” Joe Biden. Liberals have been “speaking truth to power” for so long, shocking us with their vulgarities and obscenities about America and its government, that the “F” word has lost its power to startle us.
It’s like how the word “racist” is so overused that it’s lost its power to injure or even destroy. Now, being called a “racist” in many quarters is a badge of honor. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. But who’s fault is that?
There’s an old comedy record album by the late, brilliant comedian George Carlin, “7 Words You Can’t Say on TV.” Today, that number might be four — and even those words are allowed on over-the-air TV or “family” cable channels if the broadcaster posts a disclaimer warning viewers of “strong language.”
When barriers to protect decency and good taste are knocked down for no other reason than that they exist, a small slice of what makes our civilization good and decent falls by the wayside. There are always consequences for this kind of mindless destruction. And we’re paying that price today in the ugly vulgarity of our politics.
Alexander Vindman, the retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who helped plot the botched impeachment of former President Donald Trump in what amounted to a failed coup attempt, thinks Tucker Carlson should be “censured” for saying things Vindman doesn’t like about the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
In a tweet Thursday responding to a trailer Carlson posted for his new documentary, “Patriot Purge,” Vindman asked, idiotically, “How is this different than yelling fire in a crowded theater? Carlson is attempting to incite a riotous mob. He should be censured. I’d like to hear the arguments for/against this being protected speech.”
Well since you asked, the argument for Carlson’s documentary being protected speech is right there in the Bill of Rights, on the first page, where it says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. That includes reporting and commentary that some people, even disgraced former Army officers who try to remove duly elected presidents, disagree with.
It’s embarrassing for Vindman that this needs to be spelled out for him, but “protected speech” under the First Amendment includes pretty much everything except a handful of specific situations, none of which remotely have to do with Carlson’s documentary.
For example, you can’t call for imminent lawless action (or incitement). You also can’t issue what’s called a “true threat,” which the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 defined as “those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” Fighting words is another, quite limited category of unprotected speech that’s restricted to face-to-face interactions meant to provoke a violent reaction from the person being addressed. Not covered in any of these categories is, say, political reporting and commentary that Vindman doesn’t like.
Vindman, the man who broke the chain of command and illegally leaked the contents of a phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to a “whistleblower” in order to jump-start the Ukraine impeachment circus, is also confused about what “yelling fire in a crowded theater” means. People like Vindman always invoke the fire-in-a-crowded-theater line every time they want to justify censorship, and every time they reveal their bone-crushing ignorance.
The line comes from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in a 1919 opinion in Schenck v. United States wrote, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” But Schenck was one of the most loathsome free speech decisions in the court’s history, and it was overturned 50 years ago.
In Schenck, the Supreme Court was tasked with deciding whether Charles Schenck, the secretary of the Socialist Party of America, could be convicted under the Espionage Act for distributing a pamphlet that opposed the draft during World War I. The pamphlet didn’t call for violence or even civil disobedience, but merely urged Americans to petition for a repeal of the draft and to “assert your rights.”
Holmes’ crowded theater line was simply his way of saying the First Amendment isn’t absolute. But it had no legal authority and wasn’t part of the actual ruling, which was that Schenck’s pamphlet posed a “clear and present danger” to the country. This absurd ruling was one of a trio of odious free speech decisions the Supreme Court issued in 1919 that landed peaceful anti-war protesters in prison.
But Schenck was overturned in the landmark 1969 caseBrandenburg v. Ohio, which held that inflammatory speech, even speech that advocates violence — even, say, if the speaker is at a Ku Klux Klan rally where klansmen are burning crosses and carrying firearms — is protected by the First Amendment unless it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
In other words, the First Amendment is expansive, and by trotting out the crowded theater line about a political documentary he doesn’t like, Vindman is putting himself on the side of the worst censorship decision ever handed down by the Supreme Court, a decision that has since been discredited, disgraced, and thrown into the dustbin of history.
But then Vindman should be well familiar with that.
How Did Thomas Paine Get the Colonies to Throw Off the British Monarchy?
In college we are
taught that one of the founders of American Revolution, Thomas Paine,
was a deist. Indeed, he was. What the professors did not tell us was
that Paine's masterpiece, "Common Sense"
— the pamphlet that persuaded the American people to move from merely
seeking some redress of grievance from the British government to flat
out seeking independence — made almost all of its arguments from the
Bible.
Paine knew that the American people were
the most biblically literate people in the world at that
time. Arguably, they were the most biblically literate generation of
all history. They were not going to be moved to a war of independence
from the reasonings of Enlightenment thinkers. The appeal had to come
from Holy Writ, or it would not come at all.
In a masterful polemic, after citing passages in Scripture about the fallacy of monarchy, Paine sums it all up with this:
These portions of scripture are direct and positive. They admit of no
equivocal construction. That the Almighty hath here entered his protest
against monarchical government is true, or the scripture is false. And a
man hath good reason to believe that there is as much of kingcraft as
priestcraft in withholding the scripture from the public in popish
countries. For monarchy in every instance is the popery of government.
Paine had used Scripture to show that monarchy is idolatrous.
The Revolution was on.
Within a year, the Declaration of
Independence would be signed. Thomas Jefferson would later write that
the Declaration "placed before mankind the common sense of the subject,
in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent."
It was an allusion to Paine's pamphlet.
However,
it was not just a rejection of monarchy. Paine's pamphlet even used
Scripture to decide the form of government that men should have.
Near three thousand years passed away, from the Mosaic account of the
creation, till the Jews under a national delusion requested a king.
Till then their form of government (except in extraordinary cases where
the Almighty interposed) was a kind of Republic, administered by a judge
and the elders of the tribes. Kings they had none, and it was held
sinful to acknowledge any being under that title but the Lord of Hosts.
Our government was to be a republic. We were not to merely replace a
foreign king with a local monarch, but we were to change our form of
government altogether.
Now, why is this important?
It is
important because freedom and liberty are quickly evaporating from the
world scene. According to observers, the rising world power is China,
and what strikes the historian is the almost total lack of desire for
freedom in the Chinese
during their history. They will revolt to overturn bad government, but
never to set up a free government. They are comfortable with well-run
tyrannies.
The Chinese will rebel when things like what happened during those
awful years are allowed to go on for too long, and they have the
Confucian classics to teach them that they are right to do so. But in
ordinary times, they are conformists, and they care little for
democratic government, freedom of speech, racial equality, or the right
of minorities to practice eccentric religions.
Indeed, this is true. It is the complacency not only of
the Chinese, but of most men throughout history. Give them enough
food, along with a degree of prosperity, and most men will fall in
line. In modern terms, give them fast food, a PlayStation, and easy
access to creature comforts, and the people will not care how the
government is run, nor who runs it.
The problem is that, at most
times, most men do not even desire liberty. It is a rarified concept,
which is often foreign to their nature.
A desire for liberty has to be instilled in men. It is
not natural to them. All too often, the default form of government
among men is tyranny. Even the anarchism of tribalism defaults to the
autocracy of chiefs.
So from whence do we get this love of liberty?
Well,
as Tom Paine — yes, the deist Tom Paine — was forced to acknowledge,
the love of liberty come from the Bible: "proclaim liberty throughout
all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof" (Lev. 25:10). That
particular passage made it unto the Liberty Bell.
Or how about this passage from Paul?
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us
free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. (Gal 5:1)
Paul was speaking in a spiritual sense, but the precept
flowed over into every aspect of life. Ancient pagan religions — and to
a certain extent, halachic Judaism — required a plethora of religious
rituals and practices. Do this. Don't do that. Avoid that food. Eat
this. Wear this. Don't wear that.
A tyranny of the mind will spill over into a tyranny of society.
An
Islam that deprecates women, that honor-kills them, that destroys their
libido with FGM, will, of necessity, have no brake, no governor of the
excesses of male behavior. Hence, it will descend into violent
anarchy. A paganism that destroys the female will produce a tyranny of
male excess. A tyranny of the mind, born of superstition, will produce a
dearth of science. And so on.
To counter this, Paul introduces only one real law: love one another.
Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. (Romans 13:10)
Unnecessary rules were gone. This was the source of liberty.
Such
a society can operate only if the society is Christian. If a society
is not Christian, the individual tyranny that is in the mind of the
unbeliever will eventually work its way out into society and destroy
it. Without such Christianity, the slide into tyranny is inevitable.
Men are too comfortable with agreeable dictators.
Men do not need
the license of transgender, homosexual confusion to be free. The answer
to Islam, to tyranny, is the gospel. But the West cannot bring the
good news if we have abandoned it. We forget that rights are God-given,
not state permissions. And, as Christianity is abandoned, we are
becoming less free.
One has to be taught to desire liberty. The teacher is Christ.
