Author: jamesgillen@yahoo.com

It’s the Fourth of July. It’s time for our yearly patriotic message. And this year, my message is: Maybe this country was a mistake.

Why? Because this country was founded for a reason. Not just an abstraction of “freedom” or “liberty” but an attempt to create such in the face of a historical context in which a previous standard of freedom and liberty were threatened by the arrogance of a remote government. The United States of America is now 244 years old. And in this year it is now further away from the principle behind the Declaration of Independence than ever and closer than ever to being the servile colonial state that it was before 1775.

And it would serve well to use Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to demonstrate the issue. For now, put aside the whole issue of whether the whole Revolution is invalidated by slavery or whether Jefferson himself (as opposed to Yankee Founders) is invalidated by being a slave owner. The premise of our revolution was that we were our own country, not merely someone else’s colony, and that our rights are universal and inherent, and that we had a right to rebel because the government abused its powers and denied our equal rights. The premise of our Constitution is that once we had achieved independence, we had to create a republic not only to protect our sovereignty but to protect the general welfare. By comparison to our Founders’ stated reasons for creating this country, where is America now in terms of freedom?

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

In Congress, July 4, 1776.

“The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Again, don’t focus too much on the inherent contradiction of a slaveholder declaring “all men are created equal” or whether rights are endowed by God. At this point, I will say that the premise of the paragraph is that Jefferson was declaring “self-evident” something that many did not see as self-evident, that at least all white men are created equal, which was revolutionary enough, given that it meant that a British “noble” has no greater inherent worth than a commoner, and that people from Europe do not have greater inherent worth than white Americans (especially since in other American colonies the caste system was even more formalized).

As for the “Creator” I will say that it speaks to the inherent contradiction, especially with modern “conservatives” who insist that rights are endowed by God: I find it interesting that the people who most loudly insist that rights are endowed by a Creator are ones most uncomfortable with the “all men are created equal” part. Given that religion has been invoked on both sides of the debate, it undermines the idea that religion is an objective source of moral values. But even if Jefferson was asserting a moral value inconsistently or hypocritically, he WAS asserting a moral value. It holds as a universal principle even if it is not applied universally. And in this particular year, as in the time of the Civil War, the challenge to the universal principle is from those sections of the country that think that freedom means only freedom for them.

And that faction is the one supporting the direct threats to freedom that we face now.

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. “

In other words, one does not change the national government lightly or for trivial reasons. Even such problems as exist with the current government are usually preferable to throwing it out. But when “a long train of abuses and usurpations” clearly intends to create an intolerable despotism, overthrowing such is not only a human right but a duty.

“Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. “

Having established that one only removes a government for valid reasons, we come to the question: What are our reasons for removing ourselves from the current government? Those reasons follow.

“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.”

At this point in the 18^th Century, Parliament was not effectively supreme over the British Monarchy and it was possible for King George to step in to create his own policies, especially where the colonies were concerned. In this system, we technically have an independent legislature, but for all the bills that are passed by the Democrat-majority House of Representatives, few if any are passed by the Republican Senate, because Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is given effective control of the legislative process. This is not something that the current president is actively involved in, but McConnell would be unlikely to pursue a legislative course without the Republican president’s assent.

“He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.”

Donald Trump has specifically threatened the State of Nevada (among others) by withholding federal funds because he says voting by mail is “illegal” (it’s not) thereby denying our own right to representation without succumbing to blackmail over already allocated funds.

“He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.”

Again, we have a complaint which is not directly relevant to the current situation as it concerns administration of an overseas colony rather than domestic policy. There are still parallels. I will address them later.

“He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

The focus, maybe the raison d’etre, of the Trump Republican Party is “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners” and refusing to allow any to come into the country. Except of course, during the initial stages of the coronavirus, when Trump knew that coronavirus had spread to Italy and other parts of Europe, yet only declared a travel ban from Europe more than five weeks after announcing a travel ban from China.

“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.”

The politicization of judicial appointments under both parties has become that much more blatant under Republicans, which is another case where Mitch McConnell takes the initiative when Donald Trump doesn’t. It was of course McConnell who refused to have the Senate address President Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, thus not only acting as a veto on the president but on McConnell’s entire chamber. Since being elected president, Trump has made a point of choosing judges only from a Federalist Society approved list, and at lower levels, Trump, with help from McConnell’s Senate, has appointed almost 30 percent of our active circuit court judges in less than four years.

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”

This ties into “He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.” The Trump Organization has become rather infamous for the number of federal offices it has chosen to leave open or with only “active” heads, even though most bureaucracies have to have their administration heads approved by Congress. By this means Trump is able to create a situation where he does in fact administer by decree, since there is no oversight approval, and such “acting” heads can be fired at will. Earlier this year, he criticized pro forma Senate sessions (which were intended by Republicans to limit Barack Obama’s ability to make recess appointments) and said, “The Senate should either fulfill its duty and vote on my nominees or it should formally adjourn so that I can make recess appointments. If the House will not agree to that adjournment, I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers.”

Of course, Trump, unlike Mitch McConnell, always says the quiet part loud.

“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:”

Especially in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the American public is coming to grips with the militarization of many police departments, which implies a larger militarization of the civil society. One of the steps Trump took in reaction to riots that disturbed even some in Middle America was to have our national monuments occupied by masked, armed men with no unit insignia. In a Politico article about that subject, it was mentioned in passing that “Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”

It has already been mentioned with the concept of qualified immunity, police departments are in effect given permission to commit acts (including killing) which would guarantee prosecution were they committed by civilians. This is why Black Lives Matter and other groups have demanded that the federal government act to ban qualified immunity. Democrats included such a ban in recent legislation, but refused to vote for a Republican Senate bill that did not include the ban.

This is to say nothing of Trump’s own attempts to render “his” troops unaccountable. The most notorious example is the case of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who had been charged with ten offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, for among other things murdering an ISIS prisoner in custody, taking a photo of the corpse and sending it to friends. This was the one charge he was actually convicted of. Since Gallagher had already served the stated amount of time on his sentence, he was released. However, Donald Trump personally intervened to insure that Gallagher’s pre-discharge rank be reinstated (to protect his retirement benefits) and that his SEAL pin be restored, against the verdict in the court martial.

Make no mistake: If he had his way, Donald Trump WOULD run everything by fiat. And if you are voting for Donald Trump, you, like the Republicans who acquitted him in the Senate, are voting to approve conduct that Thomas Jefferson thought was tyrannical and worthy of revolution. You are working against everything Jefferson wanted to achieve.

“For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:”

On this score, I refer to the libertarian argument: A tariff is a tax on the consumer.

“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.”

This part, unfortunately, has less to do with Donald Trump in particular and more to do with the general trend of government under both parties, a trend where Donald Trump is more a symptom than a cause. In the wake of our “War on Terror”, both the Bush and Obama Administrations were criticized for the practice of “extraordinary rendition” where the US government arranged for or accommodated the transfer of suspects to countries outside the United States, where torture is specifically illegal and “enhanced interrogation” techniques can be investigated.

Similarly, it was under the Obama Administration that there was a drone strike on Anwar al-Awlaki, an American expatriate who advocated for jihad in Yemen. When Awlaki was killed in 2011, he became the first US citizen to be targeted by drone strike, effectively execution without trial.

This is the sort of thing that libertarians have been going on about for years. But if there was reason to criticize a government that abandoned the principles of our founding simply out of expedience or neglect, the danger is that much greater when the people in charge of government are deliberately acting against that principle because they are against the principles of our founding.

“He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”

As with many Trump initiatives, the current president may not have actively declared war, but he has withdrawn protection and aid, not only in the general case of the coronavirus but in the specific case of Puerto Rico, which is not a State but whose residents ARE American citizens. This has had the effect of ravaging the coasts, towns and livelihoods of that people.

“He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat [sic] the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”

In context, this refers to King George’s recruitment of mercenaries from Hesse (Germany) and other areas to suppress the already active American rebellion. The Republicans’ corps of mercenaries are homegrown.

“He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

[Okay, this is the part that hasn’t aged well, college kids.]

“In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

“Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish [sic] brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”

In the 18^th Century, there was technically a means of redress of colonists’ grievance through the British Parliament, which is why the Founders had at first tried to make their case to the British government rather than advocate for radical separatism. But the Parliament was partisan for Britain, with only a few exceptions. This in itself was a cause for alienation from the mother country.

Similarly there is a mechanism in the Constitution for removing an unfit chief executive, called impeachment, but just as the ruling class of Britain decided that their job was to protect their own and not the people of the Colonies, the Republican majority in Senate of the United States decided that its goal was to protect their own rather than the country. And just as Parliament’s alienation from the Americans served to alienate this nation from the mother country, the Republican Party’s choice of sides has served to further alienate them from America. Especially since every thing that Donald Trump has done to America since the end of impeachment is something that Republicans were warned about. In acting to protect Trump, they took on responsibility for his actions, and in choosing Party over country, chose to antagonize the country.

“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. “

And how well did that work out?

For the most part, very well. Again, however hypocritical and self-serving it was for white colonials to insist that only all (white) men are created equal, that was a revolutionary declaration for the time. The American Revolution was a direct inspiration for the black people of Haiti and the white Hispanic revolutions in Spanish America. It also set a precedent for the more radical French Revolution, which created its own changes to the structure of Europe, even as Britain’s Parliament passed reforms and became a more democratic body. As with the contradiction of American slavery, Western civilization’s conquest and exploitation of the rest of the world also spread its liberal ideas to other lands and demanded a resolution of the contradiction, which ended Europe’s colonial empires.

None of which changes the fact that we have lived in contradiction from the beginning, a contradiction that caused many white Americans, including those whose ancestors came here after the Civil War, to think that a declaration of freedom for white men meant ONLY freedom for white men. We have survived this long because we have basically agreed to disagree. We have passed incremental reforms to voting laws and acclimated people to the idea of equality for different races and genders.

The problem is not with the people who critique this government because it is untrue to the classical liberal ideas of its foundation. That has always been the libertarian and conservative critique, alongside the leftist arguments that Jefferson was self-serving or didn’t go far enough. The immediate threat to America is not conservative but reactionary; it is from the people who do not simply disagree as to the ultimate meaning of Jefferson’s words, but who are against Jefferson’s declaration itself. The threat to America is from the people whose concept of good government is regressed even further back than King George, whose ideal is not parliamentary monarchy but absolute monarchy. And review of Jefferson’s grievances from 1776 only makes it more clear that for all the progress we have made, we are ending up in much the same situation.

So this year especially, I have to ask: What is the point of America?

What was the point of our Revolution?

What was the point of all this if you want to go back to a tyranny that even the British themselves would not tolerate in their modern government?

If your whole concept of patriotism is “America Fuck Yeah” (unironically) or “Trump That Bitch”, then you really need to look at our founding documents and ask yourself if you would have chosen the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson or the madness of King George.

In the last week or so, events have indeed been moving very quickly. For a few days, we were looking at a resurgence of the coronavirus, and “conservatives” expressed concern that Black Lives Matter protestors were violating quarantine to march, even though a few weeks ago they thought that white people marching together with guns and no masks against coronavirus restrictions were just defending their civil rights. (I wonder what changed?)

But the big news right now is a social movement/hashtag to #DefundThePolice. Since I’m more of a bleeding-heart-libertarian, some might ask what my opinion is on the idea to pull money and power away from a part of government most people actually like.

My reaction is, “Great! Can we do the Pentagon next?”

Given that libertarians have been saying for QUITE some time that police have far more paramilitary firepower than most districts need, and that much of the history of our increasingly federalized and militarized law enforcement is an attempt to clamp down on black people in particular, the question is why this idea, which is not really that new, is only now suddenly becoming popular. Maybe because the party that always thinks government is the best solution is finally starting to realize that it isn’t. Meanwhile the right-wingers who claim that government can’t do anything right suddenly change their tune when it comes to beating people up.

Well, on the bright side, in the increasingly likely event that the November elections wipe the Republican Party like the fecal matter it has become, “conservatives” might suddenly remember that libertarianism is about maintaining a healthy skepticism towards government in general, and not just giving intellectual support to the ulterior motives of Koch Industries.

But on another level, “Defund the Police” is just another example of the Left failing to pitch its ideas beyond their own audience because they assume that everyone is on the same page. Like how we had to start saying “climate change” because the Right were able to joke about freak snowstorms in May as an example of “global warming.” Or how they use “white privilege” to describe the normal state of affairs – not getting harassed by police, not being disadvantaged in applying for a loan, going out to vote, et cetera, as though this was a “privilege” that is unearned and needs to be ended instead of a set of rights that ought to be extended to all. Just as white people see “privilege” as normalcy, most of us see the police as functional and constructive (at least until very recently), and using the shorthand phrase without defining what we mean by “police” and what we mean by “defund” is what allows the Party of Trump to sell us-vs.-them rhetoric that would otherwise not be feasible. Some people hear “Defund the Police” and think “Who’s gonna protect me from armed robbery?”

I may seem flippant, but this is a serious moment. Just as Viceroy Trump in trashing the “norms” that the duopoly held to as a substitute for Constitutional government has thrown out the idea that the standards in Washington are fixed and unchangeable, events in Minneapolis are moving towards historic change. There is now a very strong likelihood that at least one major city will in fact end its police force as they had previously known it. This is not a hypothetical. If you’re going to end a major part of local government, what does that mean, and what follows it?

Some of what I’m getting at was well-addressed in a column from Jim Wright, no Ayn Rand fan he:

https://www.stonekettle.com/2020/06/down-with-sogans.html?fbclid=IwAR38OVX__Rm9xzEaaWch_8TDUaB63ClQuNcPZzoyEgaROCGpdY1EavoSw8U

Most of this extremely extended piece is basically Jim posting and referring to the various idiots he has debated this issue with on Twitter, but I direct you to skip towards the later part, where he says: “The current government of America is a pretty good example of what happens when you don’t demand the details up front.”

I have gone over this more than once, and I’m gonna have to do it again: During the Obama Administration, Republicans spent at least six years hopping mad about “socialist” Obamacare, they spent six years voting for repeal after repeal that they knew would get vetoed, and they had six years to come up with a plan that would be better (since even liberals, or especially liberals, knew the ACA has much to be desired). They had a successful candidate for President who asked that the Republican-run Congress give him an Obamacare repeal and replacement that he could sign on Day One. And of course, they didn’t do that. And as I’ve also said, that lack of policy is not simply unhelpful, it is actually harmful to the political movement. Rather than “repeal and replace,” Republicans clearly want to get rid of the current healthcare system without having a serious alternative in mind other than going back to the status quo ante, and if people liked that, we never would have had the Affordable Care Act. And once it became obvious that Republicans planned to kill one of the few parts of government that everybody (including their senior citizen constituents) actually liked, this position became a liability to Republicans in the midterms, and one reason they lost the House in 2018. Similarly, if the other faction of duopoly gets taken over by its scalphunter contingent, and they push an agenda that they have not defined and don’t really know how to pass, they will be in the same fix as the Republicans – either let the institution (in this case, local police) hobble along in a crippled state, which becomes a liability to them as the party in power, or try to outright eliminate one of the few institutions that (however imperfect) most people still want to have. The third alternative, which Republicans never had the imagination to work on, would be to have an actual repeal-and-replace program.

And there are ideas for that. The Movement for Black Lives site says that “communities most harmed by destructive policing (should) have the power to hire and fire officers, determine disciplinary action, control budgets and policies, and subpoena relevant agency information.” It also mentions (under ‘End The War On Black People’) “an end to zero-tolerance school policies and arrests of students, the removal of police from schools, and the reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services” as well as “An end to money bail, mandatory fines, fees, court surcharges and ‘defendant funded’ court proceedings”, “the end to the use of technologies that criminalize and target our communities (including IMSI catchers, drones, body cameras, and predictive policing software) ” and “An immediate end to the privatization of police, prisons, jails, probation, parole, food, phone and all other criminal justice related services.”

Yeah, but… we get into details. In particular, body cameras and software are ostensibly intended as a means of making police more accountable to the public, and, as with having police in schools, would require rethinking some of the security procedures that were already instituted by public demand, and admitting that maybe they aren’t working.

Moreover, as with rethinking an “education” system whose funding is largely dependent on local property values, we need to recognize how much of this bullshit law enforcement system is based on a need to fund government, or make it self-funding as in the case of privatizing services. It is certainly not news that institutions seek to perpetuate themselves, and as with ticket quotas and adding fines and fees for things that previously didn’t used to require such, we create more, not less, incentive for government to be intrusive and oppressive. You could certainly add more income and property taxes into the system so that the funding isn’t so regressive, but that simply shifts the issue and raises the question of how many of these government “services” we actually need.

It’s almost as if, in seeking to remove only one support pillar of a system that seems especially problematic, we find out how many other parts of the system need to be questioned!

In summary, leftists: Be careful what you wish for, smash the state, and thank you for boosting libertarianism!

When I said these protests could spread to Washington in November, I underestimated them.

The George Floyd protests already had the city of Minneapolis on edge, but violence really started on May 28 when the 3^rd Police Precinct was burned, along with several businesses. The local government’s inability to stop the violence led to the Governor authorizing the National Guard. Over the weekend the protests became national, and then global. In response to the growing outrage, Viceroy Donald Trump threatened Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey if he couldn’t get control, and said, among other things, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts!”

(Trump also said, ‘less talk, more rock’, ‘the more cushion, the less pushin’, and ‘It puts the lotion on Its skin, or else It gets the hose again.’)

For some reason all this bluster failed to impress. It got to the point where protesters in Washington DC rattled the White House barricades and almost reached the perimeter, prompting staff to turn off the visible lights on the property and haul Trump off to the facility’s bunker (hashtag: #bunkerbitch). This made King Dick Who Be The Most Macho and Tremendous of Dicks look even less impressive. So after yelling out a virtual conference of governors on June 1 for not being “tough” enough, he announced himself as the “law and order” president and then, 25 minutes before the mayor’s curfew was to start, got the police forces to disperse a peaceful crowd so he could walk out to the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, which had just been vandalized by rioters. This also served to demonstrate Trump’s potency by proving he can still walk about a tenth of a mile without a golf cart. At least one Episcopal priest serving at the church was among those tear-gassed. And at the site, Trump held aloft a Bible as though he had never seen a Bible – or a book – before, and posed for the cameras with an expression that was almost cartoony in its sourness, a frown whose gravity created its own singularity. It was the face of a mean little boy who had finally gotten to stick a live M-80 up a cat’s ass to see it run off screeching into the night, only to realize that he was still unhappy.

It would be one thing if Trump had just blustered about The Insurrection Act and casually violated local laws and American legal traditions. Or as we call it in America, “Monday.” But even as the forces of authority, officially led by Trump, focused on the looters and people who assaulted civilians and police, there have been numerous incidents recounted by journalists of police forces actively initiating violence. Indeed, while protests in places like Las Vegas were fairly civilized and even friendly between population and police, SOME motherfuckers decided they had to cause grief. And then there were several social-media documented cases where police not only initiated violence, in their haste to beat on marchers, they moved away from neighborhoods and businesses that the Right has been so upset about getting looted, and which of course DID get looted because the police had higher priorities.

It’s almost as if the government was more about protecting its own privileges than protecting the public!

Not only that, you have at least one Republican Senator openly agitating for American elite military units to shoot civilians, and wouldn’cha know, the 82^nd Airborne has just been deployed near the capital!

Make no mistake: What we are watching is authoritarianism’s dry run for November. Assuming of course that the Trump Organization and its enablers will wait that long.

I’ve said before that unless the Democrats have a complete blowout victory on Republicans in November – or maybe even especially if they DO – Trump is gonna come up with some weasely, bullshit excuse that the election was “rigged” or “fake” or “unfair” and all the Republicans in Congress are gonna goosestep in line to approve his ascension, half of them because they truly want a dictator and half of them because they just don’t want the responsibility of doing their jobs. And I get the impression that a lot of Democrats would go along with it, because their public posture over a generation is learned helplessness, and a lot of them just don’t want the responsibility of doing their jobs.

This becomes that much more likely because of coronavirus, and just as the powers that be discovered the wisdom of curfews only after poor black people went out in public, the states and Federal government will use the barriers that were already in the way of voting and smooth elections to justify not doing anything about those barriers, which would make votes that much less likely to be counted, which the Banana Republican Party would see as a feature and not a bug. Why do you think they’re so desperate to stop certain state initiatives to vote by mail?

What can the average civilian do if the shooting starts? Not a whole lot, frankly. Which is why we need to contain this to the political realm while we still can.

Now, just as Joe Biden doesn’t have control of a military, he has also been restricted by the coronavirus. But now that Our President has given us leave to break quarantine by going back to golf, Joe seems to be going out more. So he might be in position to make a political gesture that will raise the stakes for Trump without any sacrifice on his part.

All Biden has to do is to announce the obvious, that Trump’s actions have gone beyond the pale and violate his oath of office, the recent period being only the most noxious example, and as a result he must resign. Biden should then ask Mike Pence to take over according to Constitutional procedure, and say that this is the only way to save the Trump Administration, and the Republican Party.

Because it is.

It’s not like anyone in the lickspittle Banana Republican Party will take up the offer. I’ve gone over all the reasons why they’ve aligned with Trump; he has probably done more to adapt to them than the other way around. He is the figurehead and personality cult that they need to foist ideas that would otherwise be even less popular than they are. Not only that, the minute Trump is no longer President, he is subject to investigation, indictment and prosecution in state and Federal courts, and let’s face it, he’s too pretty for jail.

What this maneuver would do would be to undermine the legitimacy that the Trumpublicans would need for a serious takeover. Because as blatant as the thugs are being, all they need, just as in 2016, is a perception of legitimacy or a perception of the enemy’s illegitimacy, in order to sway the undecided. That’s why the thugs are staging riots and agitation. They know that fearful people who don’t pay much attention will cry out for Law and Order ™ and they’ll be more than happy to oblige.

Declaring that Trump has made himself illegitimate would shift the focus back to him. It would be merely stating the obvious. And at this point, somebody HAS to state the obvious. Somebody has to say this “Emperor” is no longer clothed in legitimacy. And the beautiful thing is that for Biden to do such would be to shift the burden onto the Banana Republicans at little or no cost to himself. After all: he’s the designated major-party opponent to the incumbent. He’s EXPECTED to oppose him. Saying “Don’t listen to Sleepy Joe, cause he’s a meanie, and he hates me, and he’s a meanie hater” isn’t going to count with people who aren’t already in the choir. The rest of the country will have to ask: Is he wrong? Does the president need to resign?

Saying that Trump needs to make way for Pence, again, is the correct Constitutional process. For one thing, it attacks the Trumpnik dogma that non-Trumpniks are just mad that they lost the 2016 election and want to overturn it. To me, at least, Trump won the Electoral College fair and square and if Clinton couldn’t figure out the victory conditions, that’s her fault. Trump is illegitimate not because he beat Queen Hillary the Inevitable, but because of everything he’s done since being inaugurated. And what all that means is that by retaining a Republican from the winning ticket, the election is not in question. The person who has abused his office is in question. The Trumpniks should not get away with saying otherwise.

Here’s the other element of this: this puts the focus on the Banana Republican Party as a whole. It has been said, and exhaustively demonstrated, that Republicans always choose Party over Country. But it really goes beyond that. Ultimately they choose Trump over Party. After US v. Nixon, certain Republican Senators like Barry Goldwater went up to the White House to tell President Nixon that he would not have Republican support in an impeachment trial. That was why he resigned. Most would say that the Senators chose country over party, which is true, but pragmatically, they chose party over Nixon. They did get shellacked in 1974 and 1976, but they came back in 1980 under Reagan. And that’s partly because at least they retained enough legitimacy to create a transition, and of course it was Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, who was able to pardon him. If Nixon had rode it out, it would have been that much worse for the Party, and there wouldn’t have been that many people in place to rehabilitate him.

When the Banana Republicans acquitted Trump in impeachment, making it as obvious as possible that they weren’t going to hear the evidence, Susan Collins of Maine said that Trump had learned his lesson. He sure did. The lesson he learned is that he can do anything he wants and his Party won’t do anything to stop him. That means that every thing he has done and will do since that time is on them. We all know that the Banana Republicans are not going to back a plea for their sweet, innocent little boy to resign, but in opposing such a plea, their own legitimacy is called into question. They have to be asked if they support a call to have federal troops shoot civilians just because The Most Americanest President Evar said so. If he’s bluffing, that threat becomes a campaign issue for them. If he’s not – they can’t assume that everyone in the military, or even every Second Amendment fan, is on board, and those people will hold them accountable if Trump’s pussy-power-grab goes Tango Uniform.

The Party of Trump serves him because they see it as in their interest to do so. He is more of an asset than a liability. They choose not Party over Country but Trump over Party because they don’t see a Party outside of Trump. They have to be made to understand the stakes. Trump is one man who will not live forever. They COULD survive Trump, just as the Democrats survived being the Party of the Confederacy- but if they choose to tie their fates to his, they will not.

And this is the nasty part: The more Republicans are made to confront the reality of their choice, the more they will have to reconsider their loyalty. And if Biden makes such a challenge publicly, that means Trump will have to reconsider the loyalty of his troops. I keep saying: a man who has no external sense of reality besides consensus and the media is more vulnerable to gaslighting than the liberals. But at the same time, they know how much The Leader hates even the perception of disloyalty, and the more on edge they will be. The more America is forced to confront the obvious, the more the Party of Trump will have to do so, and the less the Party and Trump will be able to trust each other. After all … he can sacrifice any number of them to the mob. They only need to sacrifice one man.

So with one maneuver, Biden’s campaign can challenge Trump’s telegraphed coup, challenge the legitimacy of his government and plant a seed of discord between Trump and his institutional followers.

Of course, I have no belief that Biden or his people would do something like this, because they are at pains not to be evil and Machiavellian, and even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t know how. But then again while the Trumpniks are evil, most of them wouldn’t know Machiavelli from a macchiato.

That’s my idea, anyway. But we ought to discuss tactics, because I get the feeling that things are going to be moving very quickly.

“If you’re not with me… you’re my enemy.”

“Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

I see a whole bunch of people reacting to Viceroy Trump’s attempt to label “Antifa” a terrorist organization, despite the fact that it technically doesn’t exist. And I see a whole lot of these people posting on their Facebook walls saying “I am anti-fascist.”

So let me get something straight.

I am NOT anti-fascist.

I am anti-collectivist.

I am pro-liberty, pro-individualism and pro-thinking for yourself.

And that means, IN ADDITION TO being anti-fascist, I am also anti-communist. Among other things, this means I am against people who rationalize the crimes of Castro’s Cuba by saying the Castros “gave people free education and healthcare”, which is on par with the old Right saying “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time.”

Not all anti-fascists are the same. STALIN was anti-fascist. I am also anti-Stalinist. And because I am anti-collectivist, I am ALSO anti-racist and anti-fascist. Specifically, I am against anybody who acts like National Socialism or the Confederacy were good for anybody, including their ostensible support base.

That means I am against any “conservatives”, “libertarians” or “freedom lovers” who talk a good game about protecting the Second Amendment to make sure citizens can defend against a tyrannical government but when they see REAL people getting shot by THIS government, they go, “Yay! Finally, Law and Order!”

It means I am against any white boys, leftist or white nationalist, who turn peaceful protests into excuses for violence, because more than fascism or communism they hate “normie” government and just want an excuse to hurt people.

It means I am against the Republican Party, a pagan cult of the state that used to be the Party of Lincoln, which worships a gold-plated calf because they know the rest of the country is against them, and the only way they can maintain their power is through force and fraud.

It means I am against cultists who worship an “anti-communist” who praised President Xi on January 24 for containing the coronavirus in China, and who previously came out of a closed-door meeting with Vladimir Putin slumped over and walking funny.

And it means that I am against any attempt to brand “Antifa” as some kind of Enemy of the State, because if the leftists are correct and the Trump Organization’s declaring war on anti-fascism means that they have implicitly identified with fascism, that is quite likely what they are counting on, because apparently all you need to do is change people’s programming is to change the labels they use, to define censorship as “free speech,” violence as “peacekeeping”, the Electoral College as “democracy” and Trump as “your president.” And because the Right is that much more reductionist and simple-minded than the Left.

Basically, I am against any bullshit attempt to use labels to foist a package deal of ideas that are anti-liberty, anti-individual, and anti-thinking for yourself.

There are two serious problems in this country that might not seem to be related, but they are.

On May 25 in Minneapolis, a black person, George Floyd, was arrested – apparently for trying to pass a $20 counterfeit bill – and during the arrest, officer Derek Chauvin, guarded by three other police, restrained Floyd by putting his knee to Floyd’s neck, a maneuver that most police departments disavow precisely because it is likely to cause breathing problems. The incident was caught on video and the officers were yelled out at the time. As a result of his restraint, Floyd was pronounced dead by paramedics after they got him to the hospital.

The Minneapolis Police Department did immediately fire the four officers involved in the arrest, but outrage in the city continued to build as Chauvin was not arrested, even after the Mayor said that should happen, and the FBI had a Thursday press conference to announce an investigation. It got worse when it turned out that Chauvin in his time as a police officer has had at least 12 complaints against him, including use of excessive force.

(It turned out that in at least one of these incidents, Amy Klobuchar was the state prosecutor who declined to press charges on Chauvin, and this revelation has made it a bit less likely that she will be Joe Biden’s running mate, which would be a crying shame.)

The public outrage might seem to be an overreaction, IF one believes this is an isolated incident.

Thursday on Facebook I saw a clip from 2019 about a case that actually occurred in 2016. The Dallas Morning News posted it in 2019 because it took them three years to get the records in court. In the incident, a disturbed man – a white man – named Tony Timpa called the police himself in an adult store and told them he was off his meds and couldn’t control himself. By the time the cops got there the site security had already handcuffed Timpa and got him on the ground. However rather than simply wait for the paramedics, the cops first pushed Timpa down, keeping him in a “controversial” hold and lying on his chest. Paramedics then gave him a sedative. After a few minutes they realized Timpa was unconscious. A few minutes later they got him in the ambulance, but he died afterward.

Which is ultimately proof that the cops don’t JUST fuck with black people. They fuck over whomever they can get away with fucking over.

Most free speech advocates – and other people who study how democracies become authoritarian – have observed that if we do not think of rights as universal, if we can say that “certain people” don’t deserve them, then certain people become test cases and legal precedents for what the authorities can get away with. This is why anybody who thinks that all lives matter – or that their lives matter – ought to think that black lives matter, because if the authorities don’t have to care about black lives, there is no reason, other than social conditioning, why they have to care about yours either. And on a political level, such authoritarians often start with an unpopular target whose punishment would have some level of popularity, in order to make an example of them and show that they can do so.

Which leads to the second serious problem: Donald Trump.

The Heather-in-Chief, as part of his snitfit feud with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski on MSDNC, continued to make sleazy insinuations on Twitter that Scarborough was behind the death of an aide, even as Brezinski claimed she was talking with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over the subject of Trump’s tweets. And so, possibly because letting the issue go on might end up in legal liability for either Twitter or Trump, Twitter announced this week that it was going to post fact checks in questionable tweets. This outraged Trump, which is perfectly understandable, cause it’s not like Dorsey had EVER imposed Twitter’s own standards on him before. And yet, after Trump twitted out another misleading statement that vote-by-mail leads to voter fraud (since after all, it would not be subject to hacked ballot machines or coronavirus health orders), Twitter did in fact post links, not censoring Trump’s words, but saying in so many words that this position was incorrect. In response, Trump cried like Lucille Ball and said that Twitter was violating his “FREE SPEECH!”

So, in order to (ahem) protect free speech, Trump excreted an Executive Order declaring the authority to review and revise protections given to social media, attacking Twitter specifically because social media outlets have “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences.”

Which is to say: “Not treating Your President, Donald Trump, as an omniscient, omnipotent GOD whose every word is objective Truth and whose every desire is an unbreakable law of Nature, at least until I change my mind again.”

By at least January, Trump knew from government contacts in China that the Chinese hadn’t contained the Wuhan virus. He didn’t stop travel from China until the virus was already a pandemic in Europe, so when he closed travel there, it was like closing the barn door after the horses had run out. We have never had federal containment orders. We have (officially) 100,000 dead and counting from coronavirus. We STILL don’t have a national testing regime.

But Twitter puts a fact check link on just two of Trump’s tweets, and they get an executive order in 48 hours.

I ask again: How DID this man sire five kids with that mosquito dick?

Pretty much every news article is saying that Trump’s premenstrual political maneuver is not going to get anywhere in the courts, but most of them are saying that’s not the point. Jack Shafer said in the centrist Politico: “Even if a state attorney general assures a governor that Trump can’t legally punish his defiance, what governor wants to force the test match? No less a liberal luminary than Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, who has been savaged by Trump, just admitted she censors herself when talking about him publicly.

“Trump doesn’t pay a political price for his threatmanship for a couple of reasons. First, even though we act like we think Trump means all of the wild things he says, 3½ years of his presidency have conditioned us to understand that much of what he says is bluster and that we should wait for action before we scramble the jets. Second, we tend to let many of the outlandish things Trump says slide because the last thing Democrats want to do is hold his feet to the fire and force him to make good on his threats. In a weird sort of gentleman’s agreement, Trump gets to say wild things and the Democrats get to shout back their displeasure until the portable outrage generator runs out of fuel and a peaceful silence returns. Except for when it doesn’t.”

The implication that Shafer doesn’t spell out is that even when the “portable outrage generator” doesn’t do anything concrete, Trump’s caterwauling sets a precedent that allows him to do what he wants, even if legally he can’t. Part of this is simply because he’s the president, and we are all technically obliged to treat him as the president, which means that his job (ostensibly) is to protect the government and the country, as opposed to screaming like a retarded ape-boy that he is the Most Exalted Potentate while acting as though he were the paid stooge of a hostile power whose real job is to fuck this country in every manner possible. And part of that means that the government officials underneath him are obliged to take his Jackson Pollock-meets-Dada art and translate it into geometric forms. So even if legal experts tell us that Trump’s whim has no more enforceability than the hormone shifts of a teenager, it’s kind of the government’s job to make what the president wants enforceable. There’s a good piece on Trump’s Executive Order in Reason’s website: “Somehow, out of Trump’s several paragraphs of paraphrasing Section 230 with random erroneous asides, federal officials are supposed to intuit a new paradigm and “apply section 230(c) according to the interpretation set out in this section.”

“The FCC is also tasked with defining this bit of Trumpian gobbledygook: the conditions under which content moderation will be considered “the result of inadequate notice, the product of unreasoned explanation, or having been undertaking without a meaningful opportunity to be heard.”

@jess_miers

If you’ve ever wondered why Internet companies don’t follow their own rules, this is it. The one time Twitter attempts to elevate social discourse by experimenting with moderation that goes outside the binary leave up/takedown scheme, it’s met with an #executiveorder.

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6:23 PM – May 27, 2020

Which gets to the point that Trump is gaming the system just as much as Twitter is. He can say that none of his twits are an official presidential statement (ex cathedra, so to speak), because they’re on his personal Twitter account. But Jack Dorsey will never enforce the same Code of Conduct on Trump that applies to other users, cause he’s the president, so what he says is newsworthy!

Well, in this brain-dead celebrity culture, Kylie Jenner is newsworthy. Does she get to quote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fact without being called on it?

Of course, as Jello Biafra might say, we’ve got a bigger problem now. On Thursday, after 8 pm local time, the police protests in Minneapolis turned violent. There is no report on if anyone has died, but there is a tremendous level of property damage and the 3^rd Precinct police building was put to flames. And if Mayor Jacob Frey seemed to be a bit deer-in-the-headlights at his press conference and unwilling to use the National Guard, certain other authorities seem a little TOO willing to use force.

Libertarians like me are often criticized – usually by the Left – because we don’t give enough deference to government. But at times when people lash out in reaction to something that is the fault of government, and in their nihilism destroy their own neighborhoods, it’s the “conservatives” and “liberty lovers” who complain that libertarians are anti-police because we don’t give enough deference to government. If anything, Americans on the whole give too much deference to government. And actually, that’s because in order for government to even work, there needs to be a certain level of deference to it. We understand that the police have a tough job. You never know who’s got a gun. And we know how important the national government is, even if we might want it to be smaller. A national disaster, like the spread of a pandemic to this country, is something beyond the power of a state government to handle, and you would want to assume in such case that the federal government is run by competent and conscientious people, as opposed to a tweezer-dick Putinya suka who literally doesn’t care about anything but himself.

People like me are cynical because as much as we want and need government to be run by competent and conscientious people, they are likely to be run by the worst of us: People who see public responsibility as a means of using the public to their will. And they prey on the herd need for order and stability by holding us hostage to their malice and incompetence. They game the social contract in order to expand the range of what they can get away with.

But the political bargain assumes that those with a monopoly on force are better than us. When it becomes clear that they are not, and that they will not follow the rules they enforce on the rest of us, people start to realize that there is no reason for the public to follow the rules either. You can only game the system for so long before there is no longer a system to game.

In 2014, it was Ferguson. In May, it is Minneapolis. In November, it may be Washington DC.

I’m just tryin’ to protect my stacks

Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax

-Kanye West, “To The World”

If the current occupant of the White House wishes to see himself as a “wartime president,” the results help explain why libertarians and some liberals are so leery of the government’s attempts to phrase every major government endeavor as a “war.” Not just because “war is the health of the state”, but because as with the Energy Crisis, the War On (some) Drugs and the less-rhetorical War On Terror, the main results of our war on coronavirus seem to be spending gigantic amounts of money that mostly goes to people and companies that already have money and government influence while the population at large get crumbs at best, and our personal liberties and standard of living all continue to erode… for the sake of “freedom.”

It’s been mentioned by quite a few people that we can’t keep up coronavirus shutdown, or quarantine, or whatever you want to call it, forever. And so after two months of a haphazard, half-assed, containment regime that is more state-by-state than federal, more governors are starting to open their states, greatly aided by Russian Viceroy Donald Trump riling up his redcaps to “liberate” their states from the majority who wanted to keep things locked down. Of course, just because we call America a democracy doesn’t mean that the majority rules. This week the same Wisconsin Supreme Court that mandated a physical state election in the face of the coronavirus and poll shutdowns also decided that they would approve a Republican legislative challenge against Democrat Governor Tony Evers’ stay-at-home orders.

Not that other countries have been able to keep up a containment regime indefinitely, but they were doing a better job of it than we were, and even they are experiencing their own virus resurgence as they start to relax controls. But the mostly (not entirely) Republican leaders in state government, following their Leader, don’t even have that level of patience, and knowing we haven’t gotten anywhere close to beating this virus, have decided that America is going to declare victory and go home.

Except we already are home. If we had achieved victory, we could leave.

It might be that the Trump Organization thinks they can live with this because unlike some people, they could actually live with this. They have a regular coronavirus testing regime in the White House and for Vice President Pence, even as they have refused to standardize testing for the nation, since, as Trump put it, “by doing all this testing we make ourselves look bad“. But Trump said that last Thursday, and this was a day after one of the presidential valets, a military man not identified, was confirmed as positive for coronavirus. Trump was reportedly “lava level mad” when he heard about this, and you know what? I would be TOO! The whole purpose of presidential security is so that the President and Vice President are protected from immediate danger. And yet less than 24 hours after this, Mike Pence’s aide, Katie Miller, tested positive for coronavirus just before his plane was about to take off, delaying his schedule by an hour. Miller is the wife of Trump advisor Stephen Miller. It is not yet determined if Stephen Miller himself got the coronavirus, because that would require a second jump between species. In response to this, Trump said, “She’s a wonderful young woman, Katie, she tested very good for a long period of time, and then all of the sudden today she tested positive. She hasn’t come into contact with me. She’s spent some time with the vice president. This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great.” So because a prophylatic measure isn’t necessarily perfect, better not to use it at all. I think Stormy Daniels said this was pretty much Trump’s approach to condoms.

But if this is the level of security that the elites can expect in their ivory house… how safe is anybody?

Memo to Donnie: Sanitary measures to contain the spread of coronavirus, in addition to washing hands and surfaces, wearing masks in public and practicing social distancing, also include not walking around with your thumb up your ass for over two months.

But here’s the thing, whatever sense of Schadenfreude I might feel at Trump’s suffering is counterbalanced by the fact that it wouldn’t do any good. I mean really, he’s already wheezy, coughy, discolored and suffering obvious circulation problems, so if he got coronavirus, who would know? If he got it – which at this rate might be inevitable – he would either continue in oblivious denial or do what he usually does and make his position the standard that all the other Republicans have to follow if they want to stay in the Real American Patriot He-Man Woman Haters Club.

“Oh yeah, I’ve got a doozy of a virus. Nobody’s sicker than me. You see that lung I just coughed out. Ooh, that’s a beautiful lung. That I can tell you.”

Again, if even governments that don’t have their thumbs up their asses can’t contain the virus under normal conditions, we need to get serious about treating it rather than declaring victory or wishing it away. Let’s look at another issue that’s got everybody’s undies in a wad. There’s supposed to be an impending meat shortage that has already affected prices in most markets – and thus the business chances of those restaurants that are re-opening. Why is that? “It’s actually not a supply problem. It’s really more of a production issue,’ said Katherine Jacobi, President of the Nevada Restaurant Association.” Last month, Smithfield Foods had to close a major meat-processing plant in South Dakota because nearly 300 employees tested positive for COVID-19. This isn’t because the industry is getting shut down. The governor of South Dakota is a Trump supporter. Viceroy Trump, no vegetarian he, actually bothered to use the Defense Production Act to mandate that meat plants stay open, when he was reluctant to do so to boost the manufacture of testing supplies. (Or as I like to say: ‘Priorities.’) The production issue isn’t that the industry was shut down. The meat industry is essential. It’s still running. There is no evidence that the virus can be spread through packaged meat. The problem is that as plants have continued to run at the same or higher pace, more people have been getting the virus and spreading it, and plants have been shut because it is no longer feasible for those people to work. This is exactly what you would expect to happen at the current rates of infection if we do nothing, which we basically are. And that means that what happens at meat processors will happen in other industries. So rather than “recover” the economy and then deal with the virus, we need to deal with the virus and then re-open the economy. If the virus wasn’t already undermining the economy, we wouldn’t have shut it down in the first place.

In the immortal word of Billie Eilish: “Duh.”

Which leads to another private industry that a lot of people think should be public. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, hospitals were closing across the country, especially in the rural areas where Trump has usually been strongest. And part of that is because hospitals are private businesses that operate on profit motive like everything else. Part of this is that the public system is state funded and a lot of states are not funding Medicaid services. By contrast, urban hospitals rely largely on “elective” procedures to cover their margins and most of their patients are covered by employer plans, whom they can charge more than Medicare/Medicaid services. But now those hospitals are swamped with COVID-19 cases. It doesn’t help that health coverage is also a for-profit business, which for practical reasons is tied to employment for most people, and the economic shutdown means tens of millions have lost their health insurance along with their jobs.

When liberals disparage the concept of libertarian government or public services, they usually say something like “let’s privatize the fire department.” And actually, we can see from the current clusterfuck that we would be better off with a stronger, more organized federal approach to medical care and redistribution of resources. The problem is that the real reason why we would be better off also reveals why a lot of libertarians would rather privatize the fire department. The point of having less national control over everything is not that things wouldn’t be more organized under a stronger government, it’s that that would only work depending on who’s doing the organizing. A privatized fire department would in theory be worse than a public one that is not built around profit incentives. But even if the public institution were acting on profit incentives, it would make a difference if the company is run by Bill Gates versus Donald Trump. And the fact is that Trump is not a president who just happens to be a businessman, he is a businessman who just happens to have the world’s largest government in his portfolio. Because that’s the way he runs it. And putting a public resource under such a businessman means that rather than socializing our resources, you’ve taken the worst-case scenario of privatization and applied it to the entire country.

The liberal conceit is that we not only can socialize resources, but must do so, and it’s a conceit because it assumes that everyone in government is going to be civic-minded. The premise of libertarianism and (former) conservatism is that we cannot and should not socialize everything because we CAN’T trust that everyone would be civic-minded, and since there is nothing inherently different between humans in the private and public sectors, any person who would be corrupt and vicious in the private sector would be corrupt and vicious in the public sector, only in their case they would have the government’s monopoly on force and authority.

For instance, this week the Supreme Court has been hearing a case between prosecutors in the state of New York and Mr. Trump (using the Justice Department basically as his defense team) in which the prosecutors are asking for the defendant’s financial records and the defendant saying he should be immune to subpoena simply because he’s the president. A legal question which Trump’s old buddy and predecessor has already decided.

If the business sector is corrupt and out of control, there’s a balance against that: the government. But what if the government is corrupt and out of control, and is in fact taken over by corrupt businessmen? Vote them out! But what if the majority vote against the (more) corrupt party doesn’t matter due to the Electoral College? “It’s a republic, not a democracy!” And if what’s left of our checks-and-balances try to hold the corrupt Administration accountable to existing laws and standards? “They’re thwarting the will of the people who elected Our President!!”

Not like it’s going to matter, because the screaming incompetence of government under Trump is going to lead to an even bigger government under Joe Biden, in the increasingly more likely event that he’s elected. A recent New York Magazine focus takes excerpts from Biden’s brainstorming while sitting in quarantine, such as “he said he would forgive federal student-loan debt – $10,000 per person, minimum – and add $200 a month to Social Security checks.” Author Gabriel Benedetti: “And while 2009 shows that spending unprecedented amounts of money alone doesn’t necessarily make a presidency transformational, the pandemic and the economic collapse it has produced have expanded Biden’s sense of not just how much relief will be required but what will be possible to accomplish as part of that recovery. … While it’s impossible to tell where the country is headed, Biden’s camp is in the disorienting position of scaling up its laundry list of proposals to match the ambition, and the political appetite, he thinks the American people – desperate for relief – will have in January.”

And any Republican wails against all this will be taken as just more bad faith from the same people who wail about Tara Reade after over four years of worshiping Monsieur Coup de la Pousse’. These same people will look at the new New Deal, or Great Society, or whatever it’s going to be called, and they will invoke “checks and balances” and the “rule of law”, and all the Democrats will have to do is play the tapes of Adam Schiff at the impeachment trial invoking “the rule of law” to Republican Senators while they sneered and played with fidget spinners.

Thanks to “conservatives” who would rather identify with Russian autocrats than American liberals, most non-Trumpniks see any calls for “freedom” and “states’ rights” as meaning only some people’s freedom to do what they want regardless of who gets hurt.

All the Trumpniks, even the former conservatives whom I know have good brains, have rationalized their worship of the gold-plated calf as a “lesser evil” because he’s supposed to be the only thing protecting American capitalism from a takeover by socialism. Yet as we’ve seen, the capitalist economy, which Trump can only take credit for insofar as he passively chose to not interfere with what he inherited from Obama, is now ruined because of Trump’s active policy of confusion and incompetence. And his ultimate legacy, in creating a need for government assistance, government healthcare, and organized government policy, is that Donald Trump will end up doing more to create socialism in America than any president since FDR.

And that’s if he loses in 2020.

If he wins re-election, of course Trump will do that much more to turn America into a socialist country. Of course, since Trump is a self-described nationalist, his Socialism would be more of the National type.

“Do not think that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of these answers. They know that their statements are empty and contestable, but it amuses them to make such statements; it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words. They have a right to play. They even like to play with speech because by putting forth ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutor; they are enchanted with their unfairness because for them it is not a question of persuading by good argument but of intimidating or disorienting. If you insist too much, they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed. Not that they are afraid of being convinced: Their only fear is that they will look ridiculous or that their embarrassment will make a bad impression on a third party whom they want to get on their side. Thus if the anti-Semite is impervious, as everyone has been able to observe, to reason and experience, it is not because his conviction is so strong, but rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen to be impervious.”

• Jean-Paul Sartre, “Anti-Semite and Jew”, 1944

A few weeks ago the frequent accounts of Joe Biden’s “handsy” behavior parted way for a more serious accusation. In April 2019, a former staffer for Senator Biden, Tara Reade, accused him of inappropriate touching while she was on his staff in the 1990s but did not describe anything graphic. But in March of this year she approached a journalist and escalated the complaint, saying that in 1993, Joe Biden had pressed her against a wall and penetrated her with his fingers. Only after this did she file a report with Washington, D.C. Police. Reade says she did file a written complaint at the time with the Senate personnel office, but she says she does not have a copy and it has not been found in the Senate records.

The latest developments are that (after cancelling an interview with Fox News) Reade did secure an interview with Megan Kelly on Kelly’s own social media pages, where Reade declared she would take a polygraph if Joe Biden takes one, and escalated further by calling on Biden to suspend his campaign. Not only that, on May 7 Douglas Wigdor, whose firm has represented six victims of convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, has announced he is representing Reade.

While it seems (to ‘conservatives’) that the liberal media were trying to sweep this whole thing under the rug, that is less and less the case.

The goal here is not any old-school journalist sense of both-sides fairness and objectivity, but the media’s need for sensationalism and ratings, and if that means making Discount Caligula more feasible than he would be otherwise, then they’ll do it. Trump has said more than once that the media will save him because he’s great for their numbers. And more than once, I’ve said he may be right.

Because as I’d mentioned a few weeks ago, it’s a bit suspicious that this particular accusation came up at exactly the point that Trump is beset by unfriendly news on all sides and it looks like all Biden has to do to win in November is show up and not die of old age. The same people who fret about balancing “#metoo” with the need to support a liberal over Trump aren’t going to stress how Reade made a story already damaging to Biden that much more of a criminal accusation, or how her anti-Biden efforts increased as she supported Bernie Sanders politically, or how she wrote a 2018 article (since deleted) on the left-wing Medium site waxing rhapsodic about “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin” and talking about her political evolution “after reading authors like Noam Chomsky, (and) my eyes opened to the great extent of our nation’s hypocrisy and imperialism.” But this is the money quote: “President Putin’s genius is his judo ability to conserve his own energy and let the opponents flail, using up their energy, while he gains position. Currently, President Putin has a higher approval rating in America then the American President, particularly with women. [‘Citation needed‘ – Wikipedia] President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity. It is evident that he loves his country, his people and his job. Although his job may seem like in the words of writer, Elizabeth Gilbert on genius, ‘trying to swallow the sun.’ This is a whole lot to deal with for one mere mortal… President Putin’s obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports is intoxicating to American women. Especially since the bloated, American President is so negative, denigrating and dismissive of anyone but himself as he stumbles even playing golf (which is not a real sport anyway but a past time, sorry golfers). “

(It shouldn’t be a surprise that someone could support Putin while denigrating Trump; after all, most open Trumpniks are more fond of Putin’s approach to government than our nation’s hypocrisy and imperialism.)

A Vox journalist who is personally sympathetic to Reade said, “If Reade had told a consistent story and shared all of her corroborating sources with reporters, if those sources had told a consistent story, if the Union piece had shaken loose other cases like hers, or if there were “smoking gun” evidence in Biden’s papers, her account might have been reported on differently in mainstream media a year ago. It is not fair to an individual survivor that their claims require an extraordinary level of confirmation, but it’s what reporters have found is necessary for their stories to hold up to public scrutiny and successfully hold powerful men accountable. So we are here.”

Which is another reason that news outlets have been leery of getting more involved, because this could all blow up in their faces. But with the involvement of Wigdor, the stakes have been raised, and this campaign is at least less amateur hour than the Party of Pizzagate attempt to smear Anthony Fauci as a sexual assaulter.

The problem being that escalating the stakes to the level of “suspend your campaign or we have a rape investigation” means that someone’s bluff is gonna be called. And lest we assume that having a hot lawyer means that your case is solid, I’m old enough to remember when Michael Avenatti was a hot lawyer. That would make me at least two.

Until this actually does get investigated, this is just the rationalization for some people to say (with a straight face) “I won’t vote for a creepy senile rapist who used his office to get his kid a cushy job.”
Well. Good thing we’ve got TWO parties, so there’s a real CHOICE.

Let us go straight to the worst-case scenario, because let’s face it, this is Trumpworld, and in Trumpworld, the worst-case scenario is the most likely one. The worst-case scenario of course is that Joe Biden actually did rape Tara Reade. That would of course require a serious investigation actually proving the charges, which at this point are no more substantiated – or capable of substantiation – than E. Jean Carroll’s recent charge against Trump, or 22 other separate allegations from individual women over the years, before he ran for president, and are certainly no more grounded than Trump actually confessing on tape that he could “grab ’em by the pussy” or telling Howard Stern that as owner of the Miss Universe pageants he could walk into contestants’ dressing rooms. (The Miss Universe franchise includes Miss Teen USA.)

So for this to get beyond where the Trump accusations have already gone, there would have to be a more developed investigation of Reade’s charges. There’s a recent piece in The Daily Beast, succinctly titled, “Hell No, Joe Biden Shouldn’t Play By Rules That Donald Trump Never Has.”
Yes, I know, it’s Michael Tomasky. But he’s not wrong. In particular, I point out the following:

“I’d like to live in a world where Biden could do the clearly honorable and above-board thing here. But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where the level of morality is defined by the least moral actor. That’s Trump. “

Let me re-emphasize: We live in a world where the level of morality is defined by the least moral actor.

That’s Trump.

When Democrats in 2020 had an amazing surfeit of candidates, and a very strong Bernie Sanders run, and yet Joe Biden attained a strategic victory even before the virus shutdown, that indicates that voters in his party wanted Joe Biden. They may have been thinking strategically, but ultimately, they wanted Joe Biden. When Republicans in 2016 had a surfeit of candidates, most of whom did not have Trump’s vices, his pettiness, his disrespect, and they nominated him anyway, that indicates to me that Republicans, and the others who voted with them that election, wanted Trump, not despite his pettiness and disrespect but actively because of these vices. For Democrats, supporting a potential rapist is a contradiction. For Republicans, it’s the whole point.

If you’re going to say rape is the disqualifier… you’re going to give TRUMP a pass?? You’re so desperate to win that you’ve completely thrown away your Christian ™ morality, but you assume Those People aren’t so desperate to win that they wouldn’t throw away their feminist morality? Why should NotTrumpniks care about their guy committing rape when YOU DON’T??

This is the standard YOU’RE operating on. You don’t get to cry foul when the enemy plays by your rules.

And yes, Trumpniks, I DID tell Clintonoids this four years ago.

If your position is that They’re All Crooked, and They All Suck, you haven’t actually abandoned the responsibility of judgment. You have merely changed the standard of judgment to They’re All Crooked, and They All Suck. In which case, Trump is clearly the superior to both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but then what is the point of acting like their vices are disqualifying?

This is the problem. Not just that tu quoque works both ways, which was Clinton’s problem facing Trump. The key is the Trumpnik desire to have it both ways. Saying They’re All Crooked and They All Suck is their rationalization for worshiping the most crooked and sucktastic politician of all time, precisely because of his flaws. But it’s also a means of disarming anybody who actually believes in morals and standards. After all, hypocrisy is disloyalty to a standard that one actually believes in, and one cannot be a hypocrite if he has abandoned all standards. The Trumpnik’s only standard is Trump, and if Trump changes his mind whenever he feels like it, so does the Trumpnik.

(This, incidentally, is why Trumpism can’t be considered ‘conservatism’ because conservatism was always based on the idea that there are human standards that should be more durable than one dysfunctional person’s whim. But then, the problems with conservatism in practice help explain how these guys went for Trump.)

There was a recent journalistic effort through the New York Times called The 1619 Project, which was about how the slave economy of colonial America was in fact at the foundation of colonial culture and thus at the foundation of the American republic. Right-wingers (with some reason) have critiqued the articles as an attack on the generally positive message of the American Dream and the premise of freedom. There are in fact a lot of leftists who act as though the whole American project is invalidated “because slavery”, not withstanding the inspiration of the United States as a colonial revolt to people in Haiti, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. But in February, on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah hosted the main writer of 1619, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and among other things she talked about was how her black father was the only person in her Missisippi neighborhood who flew the American flag. And Noah asked her Jones about her thesis that “black people have the job of making it a truth.” And her response (3:39) is, “When Thomas Jefferson writes those famous English words, ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal’, he owns 130 human beings, even some of his own family members. And he understands that one-fifth of the population will enjoy none of these rights and liberties. We are founded on a hypocrisy, a paradox. But black people read those words and said, ‘oh we believe that those words are true and apply to us, and fight.”

As I say: It is possible for two things to be true at the same time. It is a fact that Jefferson was both a slaveowner and a founder of classical liberalism. You can look at the hypocrisy of that and throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater in rejecting the American project over its contradictions, or you can see what is good in the project and work to make it more consistent and apply its rewards to everybody. It is in fact the anti-liberals (not conservatives, but people who hearken back to the age before Jefferson) who insist that freedom is zero-sum and that only some people can have it.

If you’re going to say the two factions of duopoly are both hypocrites, the difference is between the one that might reform towards actual progress and consistency and the one that wants to go in the other direction. If that’s not good enough for you, liberals, well again: THAT’s why I’m a Libertarian. Rationalizing that the corrupt party that might clean up it’s act is actually going to do so is not good enough in the short run, and it’s a large part of why people didn’t trust you guys enough to carry Hillary Clinton in the states where she needed it. Which is why even more than minimum wage or national health care, what this country really needs are election reforms like mail voting and automatic registration (as opposed to making people jump through flaming hoops just to exercise a civil ‘right’) and especially ranked choice voting so there’s MORE than two people to vote for. That might hurt Democrats, which is why they haven’t done it yet. But at this point, it’s a matter of their survival, not just ours.

In point of fact, both major parties ARE crooked, and they DO all suck, but this is my comparison. Democrats are the Mob. Republicans are that scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker sees the mountain of money that the Mob has compiled for him, lights one side on fire, and says “I’m only burning MY half.”

It might be one thing to play “I’m rubber, you’re glue” in a world where the economy is good, and politics is just a game and people take it on the same level as rooting for the Cowboys over the Redskins. (NFL team metaphor being completely intentional.) But now there’s coronavirus, and while Trump is not the direct cause of the actual virus, his policies, or lack of such, have made him the proximate cause of the problem in this country. And for a lot of people, especially those who were already in compromised health, the choice in November is a bet on whether they will be alive next year – assuming that they survive long enough to vote this year.

Not to mention that even Trump, with that walnut between his ears, seems to understand how a truly serious investigation of Biden could backfire on him, just as an investigation of Brett Kavanaugh would have caused real problems if it hadn’t been carefully manicured from beginning to end by the Republicans in control of the confirmation process. Republicans will not be in control of this process. After all, it’s not like someone on the Left couldn’t make a strategically timed accusation against Trump. And if “the liberal media” takes an investigation of Biden seriously without doing a serious investigation of Trump’s “playboy” history, it won’t just be the Right questioning their credibility.

No, however likely it is that Tara Reade is not lying, it is far more likely that the charges she makes against Biden will go the way of all the other charges against Trump: stoked for sensationalism and ratings, but nothing will ever come of them, because taking them seriously would turn over the wrong stones.

So Democrats (and hopefully other non-Trumpniks) will go back to supporting Biden even knowing he had problems with women, which they already did. And Trump will go back to his otherwise successful Karl Rove approach of always accusing the enemy of the thing he’s been doing all along.

So next month, he’s probably going to blame Joe Biden for bankrupting Atlantic City.