Category Archives: Politics

Liberal FieldTurf

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Nancy Pelosi famously called the Tea Party “AstroTurf” alleging it was a synthetic grass roots movement just as AstroTurf is synthetic grass. It was a clever line and whoever wrote it for her deserves credit. Pelosi then went on to repeat a million time like some sort of malfunctioning robot. The rest of her cult followed suit, like chanting monks in a monastery. Within a week it was self-parody.

The person who came up with the line is also a member of the cult and as such assumes the world beyond the walls works just like the world within the wall. Inside the walls, everything is carefully choreographed. Nothing is spontaneous. Unity and conformity are essential to the functioning of a hive so the adherent naturally assume their enemies operate the same way.

Reality, as we often see with the Cult of Modern Liberalism, is 180 degrees out of phase with their perceptions. It is primarily their group that is responsible for synthetic protests and marches. It turns out that the attempts to angry up blacks in Ferguson was a George Soros operation.

There’s a solitary man at the financial center of the Ferguson protest movement. No, it’s not victim Michael Brown or Officer Darren Wilson. It’s not even the Rev. Al Sharpton, despite his ubiquitous campaign on TV and the streets.

Rather, it’s liberal billionaire George Soros, who has built a business empire that dominates across the ocean in Europe while forging a political machine powered by nonprofit foundations that impacts American politics and policy, not unlike what he did with MoveOn.org.

Mr. Soros spurred the Ferguson protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across the U.S., according to interviews with key players and financial records reviewed by The Washington Times.

In all, Mr. Soros gave at least $33 million in one year to support already-established groups that emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground activists in Ferguson, according to the most recent tax filings of his nonprofit Open Society Foundations.

The financial tether from Mr. Soros to the activist groups gave rise to a combustible protest movement that transformed a one-day criminal event in Missouri into a 24-hour-a-day national cause celebre.

The proof that the opposition to the Cult is non-existent is right here. Soros should have died of lead poisoning long ago. If the opposition had any strength at all, someone would have made the call. Instead, Soros operates with impunity in the US.

“Our DNA includes a belief that having people participate in government is indispensable to living in a more just, inclusive, democratic society,” said Kenneth Zimmerman, director of Mr. Soros‘ Open Society Foundations’ U.S. programs, in an interview with The Washington Times. “Helping groups combine policy, research [and] data collection with community organizing feels very much the way our society becomes more accountable.”

I’m working on a longer post that goes into the consequences of letting the Cult control the language. Mr. Soros is a fascist and pours tens of millions into stifling dissent. Everything about his operation is intended to stifle debate and silence dissent. Yet, he calls his operation the Open Society Foundation. By open, he means closed. It’s the Opposite Rule of Liberalism.
The other proof that the opposition is non-existent is this story took months to get out into the public domain. Surely the GOP operatives knew what was happening. Team Obama was trying to whip up black anger in order to get their base out on election day. That meant the money men were there paying for the riots. Waving the Soros connection around would have been good business for the GOP, but they couldn’t muster the resources to get the story out.

Contra Derb

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Way back in the mists of time I had an exchange on Marginal Revolution with Steve Sailer, regarding the book The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. I pointed out the phenomenon of surname drift as an obvious counter to what Clark appeared to be arguing. Surname drift is how last names die out and slowly the number of last names diminish. Given enough time an isolated population would end up with everyone having the same last name. It’s just simple math.

Sailer got cross with me as he is a bit of genetic determinist and Clark’s book fits nicely into that belief. He’s not alone. John Derbyshire is a determinist, as well. In all honesty, I’m far closer to that view of human biology than most, but I think serendipity plays a much larger role than most of these guys would allow. Bill Gates was the son of bright parents. There were millions of coin flips by others, whose outcome shaped his life, between conception and his days stealing code out of dumpsters.

I thought about that when reading this from Derb the other day. I suspect we will hear a lot of sensible people discount the dynasty complaints with regards to Jeb. Derb was born and raised into a monarchy so I guess he can be forgiven with thinking such arrangements are sensible. I suspect many Americans will accept these arguments and dutifully vote for Bush in the primary and general election. I give Jeb a better than 50% chance of winning the nomination. Derb’s argument rests on this:

I write with feeling there, as a person hopeless at practical politics. If there is a PQ analogous to IQ, I’m down in the bottom decile. In my years working at corporate offices, I never had a clue who was up and who down. When X was suddenly fired or Y given a sudden dazzling promotion, I was always flabbergasted: “I had no idea …!” My colleagues would respond with a roll of the eyes: “Oh, Derb. Try to keep up, please …”

It is reasonable to suppose that this skill, or lack of skill, is rooted in the contours of the individual human personality. Now, most of the features that define personality are heritable, often highly so. (The paper at that link gives heritability for the “big five” core personality traits as: Extraversion 0.86, Openness 0.92, Neuroticism 0.59, Agreeableness 0.85, Conscientiousness 0.81.) We should therefore expect political skill to travel in families, like freckles or hairy elbows.

Presumably nature gets some reinforcement from nurture, too. Evelyn Waugh remarked somewhere that most men are best suited to the work their fathers did.

It seems to me that history argues against this line of thought. The line of Ida had a very good run, but many in his line were inept, crazy or deranged. The Julio-Claudian line was a train wreck. These are the two most successful family dynasties in the Occident and we see it as hit and miss, as far as hereditary leaders. Medieval Europe has a lot of hilariously insane rulers who came to power merely by their having won the lucky sperm contest, so the results can be quite dreadful.

The Founders certainly had a dim view of political dynasties. They had that in mind when designing the national government. They wanted the best and brightest to be attracted to state and local government, not the national government. This was, in part, to make political dynasties difficult to establish. A look through the biographies of the Founders say they knew a thing or two about the children of powerful men turning out to be nitwits, so they thought about it a lot.

There is an old time expression that goes, “shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.” The first generation builds the family fortune, starting from the working class. The next generation does its best to maintain it, but mostly lives off the fruits of the father. The third generation blows through what’s left and ends up back in the same level as the founding generation. The Kennedy family is a good example.

I think the children of the king probably do, on average, possess more of the magic stuff that makes for a good king than most children. I also think they have precisely the wrong environment to cultivate that magic stuff. Poppy Bush served in WW2 and almost died in the Pacific. In other words, as a young man he had to cultivate his leadership assets under duress. His kids cultivated their assets getting drunk and chasing tail at elite preparatory schools. Seeds amongst the stones.

That said, any argument against Jeb Bush will find a friendly reception from me. If I were a religious man, I could be convinced that he is the Anti-Christ, heralding the end times. But that’s just me.

Opening Up Old Wounds

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The Paris attacks are like a bad storm that blows through and reveals a lot long forgotten items that were buried under the water. The people who put them under the water are not happy they have come to the surface. Everyone else is shocked by their existence and can’t be distracted from their sudden appearance. This is what jumps out  about this story.

Jews are fleeing terror-hit Paris because of growing anti-Semitism in France, one of Britain’s most influential Jewish journalists said today.

Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, spoke out after an Islamic terrorist took six people hostage and held them captive in a Kosher supermarket in the French capital.

This afternoon police ordered all shops in a famous Jewish neighborhood in central Paris to close.

The mayor’s office in Paris announced the closure of shops along the Rosiers street in Paris’ Marais neighborhood, in the heart of the tourist district and less than a mile away from the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo where 12 people were killed on Wednesday.

Hours before the Jewish Sabbath, the street is usually crowded with French Jews and tourists alike.

Mr Pollard said today’s terror attack in Paris, linked to the massacre at the office of Charlie Hebdo, will force more French Jews to flee the country.

Many are moving to Britain or to Israel, according to a report published in the newspaper last year.

He said the fact that a terrorist had chosen to target a Jewish store was no ‘fluke’.

In a series of tweets he said: ‘Every single French Jew I know has either left or is actively working out how to leave’.

‘So, it’s a fluke that the latest target is a kosher grocer, is it?

‘What’s going on in France – outrages that have been getting worse for years – put our antisemitism problems in perspective’.

The hostage situation in the Porte de Vincennes part of the city is ongoing today.

But amid fears the terror attack may be linked to anti-Semitism police have also demanded that shops on Rue des Rosiers, in the Jewish quarter of Paris, to close early ‘as a precaution’ in case of further violence.

18 months ago France had around 500,000 Jewish residents – the largest population in the EU – but this may now be below 400,000, Mr Pollard’s newspaper said.

In America, Jews are all over the place. There’s a tendency to think all the Jews are in New York City and Los Angeles, but that’s not the case. Maryland and Massachusetts, for example, are 4% Jewish, almost all of whom live in suburbs and exurbs. In Europe, Jews are still packed into cities. In France, almost all of their Jews live in Paris, making them an easy target for Muslims.
Despite the aftermath of you know who, continental Europe has maintained a mild antisemitism. It’s not official or overt, but it’s there if you look. The waves of Muslims invited in by French elites are now exposing that for the world to see. The Paris attacks not only highlighted the insane immigration policies; they have reminded the world that the French are still not all that fond of Jews.
The low countries have been struggling with the same problem. Jews have been chased out of some cities while the authorities stand aside, hoping no one will notice what is happening or maybe not caring. It’s reminiscent of the pogroms that erupted with the onset of the Black Plague in the 14th century.  Many Jews fled east to what is now Poland and the Ukraine.
This time around the plague sweeping north and east is the tide of Muslims invited in by European rulers, angry with their people for wanting to share in the bounty of modern life. The Jews of France are unlikely to flee west this time, despite Putin working hard to invite back the Jews who fled after the fall of the Soviet Union. Maybe this time the people will take it out on their rulers, instead of the Jews.

The War of the Wimps

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There were rumors during the 2012 election that the Bushies did not go all in for Romney and maybe worked to undermine his campaign. The argument being that they wanted to make sure the field was clear in 2016 for Jeb to run. On its face it never made a lot of sense because Jeb looked like a guy uninterested in running. Unlike his brother, Jeb never got a chance to cash in on the family name. He made some decent money in the 80’s, but not plutocrat money.

Here we are two years on and that theory is sounding more plausible. Maybe Jeb was plotting this move all along. Romney winning would have scuttled that plan. The earliest Jeb could make a run would have been 2020 and that would be pushing it. Odds are he was looking at 2024 when he was in his late 60’s and a political has-been. Running in 2016 looked a slot better for Jeb so undermining Romney would have made a lot of sense, assuming they are that Machiavellian.

Romney is sort of confirming those suspicions now that he is plotting to get in the race.

Mitt Romney forcefully declared his interest in a third presidential run to a room full of powerful Republican donors on Friday, disrupting the fluid 2016 GOP field as would-be rival Jeb Bush was moving swiftly to consolidate establishment support.

Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, has been mulling another campaign for several months, but his comments Friday mark a clear step forward in his thinking and come amid mounting tensions between the Romney and Bush camps.

“I want to be president,” Romney told about 30 donors in New York. He said that his wife, Ann — who last fall said she was emphatically against a run — had changed her mind and was now “very encouraging,” although their five sons remain split, according to multiple attendees.

Advisers said Romney discussed the race with his family over the holidays, where they spent time skiing in Park City, Utah, but he insisted that he has not made up his mind whether to run. Advisers said he recognizes that he would not be able to waltz into the nomination and that the intra-party competition is shaping up to be stiffer in next year’s primaries than it was in 2012.

Bush’s sudden focus on the race in recent weeks has put pressure on Romney to decide soon. Romney has been in regular conversations with major donors, some of whom are pushing him to run again, but confidants have also warned him that his window of opportunity could shut if he does not declare his intentions within 30 to 60 days.

Conservatives may still mad about the Bushies pulling their punches in 2012, so goosing Romney to run again would severely complicate the Jeb coronation. His game plan relies on the field splintering amongst a number of candidates, letting him hoover up the big money and establishment support so he can outlast whoever emerges from the scramble. Romney will have plenty of money and plenty of organizational support, so it would be a two-man battle.

For those hoping for a white knight emerges to cobble together the disparate components of the Right and carry the nomination in 2016, this is good news. Jeb Bush is probably the worst possible choice for president. Even Elizabeth Warren would be better and she’s as dumb as a plank and has a head full of nonsense. Jeb Bush would go a long way toward discrediting the Republican establishment and the neocons who still infest the party, as well as Conservative Inc.

Never Cross The Left

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I’m fond of comparing the Left with Islam, as I think there are a lot of points of comparison between the two. That and it drives Progressives bonkers, but both religions do have a lot in common. One good example of a commonality is the willingness and ability to hold grudges. Once either religion puts you on the list, they never forget about you. The Friday news dump brings word that the Feds plan to charge General Petraeus will be indicted for pillow talk.

The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against retired Gen. David H. Petraeus for providing classified information to his former mistress while he was director of the C.I.A., officials said, leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison.

The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other highly classified information. F.B.I. agents discovered classified documents on her computer after Mr. Petraeus resigned from the C.I.A. in 2012 when the affair became public.

Petraeus was put on the proscribed list back in the Bush years when he managed to change the course of the Iraq mess, thus stealing a victory from the other fundamentalists going crazy at the time, the Democratic Party. The fanatic website MoveOn.org ran full page ads in the New Cult Times issuing a fatwa denouncing Patraeus as a heretic traitor. The Islamists Democrats continued to call him General BetrayUs through the remainder of the Bush years.

The Left never forgets about these things. They finally got their man when he foolishly decided to accept the CIA post from the Obama administration. That was probably a setup. In order to get the job he had to submit to a full FBI background check. You would think this happens with generals while they serve, but that’s not the case. The FBI is supposed to do regular background checks on people holding security clearances, but they don’t. Nominating Patraeus to the CIA post was like the mob boss setting up a meet with his arch enemy in order to whack him.

As Steve Sailer pointed out at the time, the affair that got Patreaus jammed up was surely turned up long before it was revealed. It is one of those useful things in the sort of war-band politics played in DC these days. Whether or not they dropped the dime on him to cover up their shenanigans in Libya is debatable, but they put the screws to him for a reason.

The decision to send the guy to prison leads me to believe it is revenge, not some Libya conspiracy. The press did all the hard work covering up the gun running the administration was doing in the Maghreb. There was no need to blackmail Patraeus. I could be wrong, but that’s my sense. The White House put the hit on the general to pay a debt to the fanatics. This is just the finishing blow.

It is yet another example of how the the normals simply don’t get what they are dealing with in regards to American liberalism. They keep thinking these people can be reasoned with like normal people. Instead, what we call the Left is more like the Scientology. Their primary motivation is defense of the cause. That trumps everything. All enemies within striking distance must be struck, no matter the cost.

 

Jeb Bush is Smiling

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Given the mood of the electorate, anyone named Bush would have a tough time winning votes in the 2016 GOP primary. A good share of primary voters share my view that W was a decent and honest guy, but horribly wrong about most everything. His presidency caused so much damage to the nation we may never live to see it repaired.

That does not mean he cannot win. The elites love the Bush family. They are reliable on the important issues. The reason the Cult went bonkers over W was they saw him as a class traitor. His overt Christianity was horrifying just as it would be to fanatical Muslims. W represented the triumph of the wrong sort of white people, even if was merely symbolic.

Anyway, in order for Jeb to become president, he needs some things to happen. One is he needs the GOP field to be splintered. If conservatives of different stripes find a single guy they like enough to back, Bush is doomed. He needs every faction to be married to their guy until the money runs dry. Bush will have all the money he needs to run in the early contests so he can outlast everyone.

Seeing Huckabee jump in and now maybe Santorum has to make the Bush Klan smile.

Rick Santorum has invited former aides to Washington next week for a “private briefing” on his plans for a possible 2016 presidential bid.

The “Personal Invitation from Senator Santorum,” provided to CNN by a Republican who received it, was sent by a Santorum aide to more than two dozen “friends and former colleagues” from past campaigns and his time in the U.S. House and Senate.

“As you probably know, RJS is seriously considering a run for the White House in 2016,” Santorum adviser Matt Beynon wrote in the email, using Santorum’s initials.

“With the midterms and the new year behind us, he is beginning the final stages of preparation and consideration of another campaign,” Beynon wrote.

Santorum, he wrote, “would like to give you a personal update on his plans” at a “private briefing” on Jan. 13 at the offices of the American Continental Group, a lobbying and public affairs office in Washington.

Among the Santorum alumni invited to the session are a number of top lobbyists and political strategists who once worked for the former congressman and senator from Pennsylvania, including former George W. Bush spokesman Tony Fratto and former Republican National Committee finance director Rob Bickhart.

It’s important to understand that this is not a strategy session. Santorum is feeling these guys out to learn what the other guys are doing. He’s also signalling to Jeb his interests. Everyone assumes it is the GOP’s turn in 2016 so there will be a lot of jobs to be had in the next administration for Republicans. Santorum may be willing to run as a straw to sink Huckabee in Iowa, as long as the Bush people will help him out down the road.

This is looking a lot like 2000 to me. Everyone knew the Democrats would run Al Gore as the sober, more liberal Bill Clinton. When W started raising money in 1998 it became clear he was the establishment’s guy. George Schultz had recruited him and all the party big shots fell in line. By the time the campaign season started, everyone knew the game was rigged. Only McCain decided to challenge W, but he had no chance.

This time it is the open borders wing of the establishment recruiting a Bush to lead them in the GOP primary. They are deeply worried about what’s happening with the voters. The defeat of Eric Cantor was the shot heard around the Beltway. It’s why they have been pushing the House GOP to sign off on the ObamAmnesty. If they can make that stick, Jeb Bush can go around the voters to implement their agenda.

HuckleBerry

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I said in my predictions post that Mike Huckabee will run as the snake handler candidate in the 2016 GOP primary. My reasoning was pretty simple. This cohort needs a champion and they are a large cohort. Someone will always step forward. Second, and most important, Huck needs the work. He parlayed his last run into a TV job, but that has now run its course.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee announced Saturday night that he would be ending his Fox News talk show to gauge support for a possible presidential campaign.

“There has been a great deal of speculation as to whether I would run for President,” Huckabee told his followers on Facebook. “I won’t make a decision about running until late in the spring of 2015, but the continued chatter has put Fox News into a position that is not fair to them.”

Roger Ailes is no dummy. He knows Huck is running so he put him on the clock. Whatever juice Huckabee has as a TV personality has waned as the Evangelical movement dissolved in the last decade. Those people are still there and they are still going to church, they just don’t hold much interest to TV these days. The Libertarians are the cool new toy for the cable outlets.

“I feel compelled to ascertain if the support exists strongly enough for another Presidential run. So as we say in television, stay tuned!” he added.

Huckabee, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2008 and hosted his show for more than six and a half years, had drawn renewed attention by criticizing former secretary of state Hillary Clinton last month after she said “smart power” also means empathizing and showing respect for enemies.

“How can we empathize with terrorists who think nothing of beheading innocent men, women and children?” Huckabee asked in a blog post on his website last month.

Huckabee is a savvy political animal and he should not be under estimated. He learned a lot from his last run. What he needs now is an issue that lets him break out of the social conservative reservation. Immigration would be the ideal issue, but he is an open borders fanatic.

The 2016 race is already well underway online.

Even before Huckabee had made his announcement, Rand Paul’s PAC was firing away on the digital front. Just as the Kentucky Republican’s political arm had done when Jeb Bush signaled last month he was weighing a White House campaign, Paul’s team bought prime real estate for any Google searches using the terms “Huckabee record,” “Huckabee announcement,” “Huckabee taxes” and “Huckabee common core.”

I find it interesting that the Paul camp is taking aim at Huckabee. Rand Paul’s operation has hired a few key Santorum people. Rand has been courting the Christian Right by defending Christians in the Middle East. He may be thinking that he can run a subterranean, outsider campaign in the primary. On the one hand he has that loyal libertarian following and on the other, he is picking up the cause of Evangelicals, a group ignored of late by the GOP.

Huckabee would a problem, obviously. It’s why I suspect Rand Paul eventually decides to sit this one out. Maybe he flirts with it, but eventually declines to run. He has a pretty safe seat in Kentucky and Mitch McConnell owes him some favors. That means he’ll get plenty of money to win re-election. The Huckabee move probably seals the deal.

That’s what rank and file conservatives miss. The people running the GOP are professional schemers, skilled at playing the long game within the GOP. McConnell and Boehner crushed the Tea Party during the last cycle. Now the Rovians are working on 2016 trouble makers. Huckabee will never be president and he has a manageable price for his services. He can run interference for the party with the Evangelicals, making sure they don’t rally to a trouble maker like Paul or a Ted Cruz. Once it is all over maybe he gets a job in the Jeb Bush administration.

That’s the theory anyway.

Rambling about MSNBC

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I saw this on Drudge.

MSNBC president Phil Griffin, whose cable news network is the only one among the big three to lose primetime viewers this season, told staffers he would look to turn things around by continuing a push for younger viewers in 2015.

Griffin, in a memo sent Monday, also promised “to get on the road — and outside of Washington” to broaden the network’s coverage.

“It’s no secret that 2014 was a difficult year for the entire cable news industry and especially for msnbc,” Griffin wrote.

“We have a long history of finding and nurturing great talent — and with an eye toward 2016 — we continued to build our next generation of top-notch journalists,” Griffin wrote.

The memo then singled out such 20-something hosts as Ronan Farrow, Kasie Hunt and Alex Seitz-Wald.

The fact that I had to run Kasie Hunt, Mike’s brother, and Alex Two Names through the google machine tells me they need to keep looking for the next “great talent” to nurture. The only reason I know anything about that squealing sissy, Ronan Farrow, is he was fun to mock at one point. Clips of him having a hissy fit would turn up in my mailbox. If Frank were alive today, Ronan would not be.

It also touted Shift, MSNBC’s just-launched streaming news service, which “is already allowing us to reach new, younger audiences.”

MSNBC’s push to embrace youth makes sense for the only cable news network to see its primetime audience erode in the current season, as measured by Nielsen.

Its 548,000 primetime viewers age 2 and older — down 18 percent from the comparable season a year ago — ranked third to CNN’s 560,000 (up 15 percent) and Fox News Channel’s 1,845,000 (up 1 percent).

Viewers “2 and older”?? You’ve got to be kidding me. The fact there’s a metric for toddlers left in front of the TV while mommy gets another glass of wine says that TV ratings are mostly bullshit. Regardless, in a country with over 100 million cable homes, getting one half of one percent to tune in says you’re about as appealing as ass cancer. There’s no way to spin those numbers.

This is why a la carte pricing of cable should be at the top of the conservative agenda. MSNBC would not exist without cable fees. If people could drop it, everyone would and 99% of the money to this outfit would disappear. The same is true of CNN. Fox would make it because they have a solid audience with money to buy stuff. The ad dollars would probably go up for Fox once the others folded. Just as Fox tries to play both sides of the street, competing news outlets would be forced to follow suit. The news would start to look like America.

This is a microcosm with what’s gone wrong on the professional right. They never understood the long game. Public sector unions were never about public sector workers. It was about taxing those workers to finance liberal causes. Grants to non-profits were never about charity. They are jobs programs for liberals, usually engaged in get out the vote activity. Up and down American society you see a skim. Wherever money changes hands, the Left is getting a cut to finance their operations. In that regard, they operate just like the Mafia.

The Feds finally broke the Mafia by cutting off their money. Tax laws turned out to be the best weapon. The annual audits of unions, pension funds and front companies made it impossible for the mob to make a living. The American Right needs to take the same view. Scott Walker paved the way in Wisconsin, of all places. Now that he has cut the Left off my from union money, the state is suddenly a lot less progressive.

Libertarians and Prison Reform

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Now that weed is legal in many places, the next great cause of libertarians is something equally pointless. That is prison reform. Rand Paul has been banging the drum for a year now. He is motivated, in part, by political concerns. He wants to inoculate himself against charges of racism so teaming up with a famous black on prison reform is his way to prove he is not racist. He thinks that because blacks dominate the prison scene, this will appeal to blacks. He’s wrong of course.

The rest of the libertarian cult has been jumping on board as well. The other day Kevin Williamson had a piece up on it. He was basing his article on the NYTimes article singing the blues about the state of New York prisons. I imagine they just went into the archive and fished out some articles from the 60’s and 70’s. Since the beginning, radical politics has been about letting the criminals wreak havoc on society.

Libertarians are always looking for ways to make nice to the Left. It used to be free weed and complaints about the Christians. That was how you could reject liberalism, without getting in trouble with the Left. Now that weed is legal and many Republicans are declaring themselves libertarians, these guys need a new bed to hide under. They seem to have landed on prison reform. Like drug legalization, it appeals to liberals, who fashion themselves as populist.

That last bit is vital to libertarians. Taking on topics like homosexual marriage, a proxy for cultural dominion, will put you at odds with the Left. Pushing for the end of public sector unions could ruin your life. Tackling issues that have no practical impact on Americans is a safe way to stand apart from the Left and the Right.

When it comes to prison reform, you’ll note that libertarians are mostly offering up warmed over ideas from the 60’s. The resulting mayhem brought about the end of the New Left in an orgy of violence. From Rand’s bill:

The REDEEM Act proposal would encourage states to raise the age of criminal responsibly to 18 years of age; expunge or seal the records of juveniles who commit non-violent crimes before they turn 15; place limits on the solitary confinement of most juveniles; and establish a system to allow eligible nonviolent criminals to petition a court to ask that their criminal records be sealed. Sealing the records would keep them out of FBI background checks requested by employers and likely make it easier for those former offenders to secure a job.

A massive amount of crime in the ghetto is committed by teenagers. My guess is Rand simply has no idea what happens in the ghetto so this sounds reasonable to him. Like all libertarians, he probably suffers from the belief that all people, regardless of race, will flourish if left to their own devices. Take away the game keepers from the black ghetto and you get Detroit, but you have to live here to know that, I guess.

That may be what’s at work here. Kevin’s piece is mostly a rehashing of the Times article with some complaints about government bureaucrats. He takes it on faith that the reporting is accurate, despite the long history of fabrication by the New York Times. The state abusing innocent citizens is considered the highest crime imaginable by libertarians, so that’s probably what got his attention. Even so, it is a safe topic on which to be outraged, which is what makes it attractive to libertarians in general.

As I pointed out in the comments, the main reason our prisons are so horrible is they are full of criminals. Fill up our prisons with cub scouts and nuns and they will not be so bad. Fill your state legislature with members of the local street gang and see what happens. Our jails are full of very bad people. Most of them will keep committing crimes until they are dead or too feeble.

The sorts of people attracted to daycare work are not the same type attracted to prison work. There’s a reason Mary Poppins was not the chief executioner of the state. Warehousing evil, violent men is dangerous work. It will attract a fair number of sociopaths and sadists. That means prison abuse will always be a part of prisons. As is true in all human endeavors, there are trade-offs. In this case, we put up with some abuse in order to keep the streets safe.

I also pointed out in the comments that the reforms that would make prisons less chaotic and dangerous are simply not permitted. Prisons should be segregated by race and sentence. Putting blacks and whites in the same cage is insane. Putting violent lifers in the same cage as common thieves and drug dealers on short sentences is equally nuts. But, the Cult will never permit such segregation so we are left with human warehouses.

Similarly, the people working in prisons should be segregated by race and sex. Frankly, it may not make any sense to have black prison staff, given that most of the prisoners are black. Too many guards are from the same neighborhoods as the prisoners. Maybe geographic segregation would solve the problem. Again, there’s no way the Cult would permit this sort of reform as they want the mayhem that comes from guards working as go-betweens for the prison gangs.

Having women guard male convicts is probably the craziest thing a society can do. This story from Baltimore is fairly typical. Women and men are different as a matter of biology, evolution, culture and psychology. Men guarding women or women guarding men will have predictably bad results. There should be no women permitted in male prisons and no men at women’s prisons. But, we know that will never be permitted.

There are other reforms that would make out prisons vastly more humane and peaceful. The Cult running our society simply refuses to do them. The reason is the people running the Cult of Modern Liberalism would prefer to fling open the prison doors and send the criminals out to feast on the hated core of society – the white middle-class. Libertarian interest in prison reform is just another way to avoid taking part in the culture war.

Post-Christian Madness

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I’ve written a lot about the religious aspects of modern liberalism. The idea is not my creation. Rousseau wrote about Civil Religion in the Social Contract. His was a compromise between a religion of the state, the Catholic religion, with which he was most familiar, and Christianity in general. Later writers picked up on this theme. HG Wells pitched socialism as a universal religion. American Progressives in the early 20th century argued for a social gospel that was a fusion of Continental socialism and American Protestantism.

This concept was fairly well known and understood amongst leftist writers and thinkers into the 20th century, then it sort of disappeared. Talk to a modern liberal today and they will think you’re nuts if you compare their thing with religion. This is especially true of economists and fake nerds. They have it in their heads that their thing is a model of dispassionate logic, the very opposite of religion. That post the other day where I called Neil deGrasse Tyson a circus clown is a good example. To the people worshiping Tyson, religion is the opposite of science. In their binary world, the former is evil and the latter is good, Satan versus God.

Back in 2000 when Al Gore wandered off to Mt. Sinai to get the good word on climate change, I pointed out to the amazing number of new converts in my peer group that Al Gore was falling back on his religious training. He was playing the role of Old Testament prophet. It was pretty obvious that he was having a breakdown during the campaign. His bizarre behavior in the debates was later explained by his wife as him cracking under the pressure. She went onto to say that losing the election to Bush sent Gore into a tailspin and she thought he was having a breakdown. Instead, he came back as a convert to a new religion that looked a lot like the Old Testament.

Anyway, there’s a long piece in The Weekly Standard from a month back that comes at modern liberalism from the religious angle. I’m behind on my magazine reading so I’m just getting around to it. The fact that no one on the Right in the chattering classes has mentioned it says a lot, I think, about the general dimness of modern conservative movement. It’s well worth reading. The writer comes at it from a slightly different angle than I do, but it is a good take. Bottom, despite being a Catholic, really gets the messianic quality of 19th century American Protestantism.

I would quarrel with him on the apocalyptic section of his piece. I’m not so sure the Zero Hedge crowd is preaching doom because they think the gods are angry. They simply think they are right about the current economic arrangements.  Similarly, the preppers and doomsday types building bunkers in the woods have always been with us. They think the fragile nature of society will inevitably lead to collapse. That and many of them are just nuts. They are not motivated by religiosity. The various end of times fads on the left, however, are a part of their over all religious impulse.

The lack of interest by the professional Right in this way of looking at the American Left has always puzzled me. Reagan, having gone head to head with commies in Hollywood, knew they operated with a religious zeal. He was a big fan of Eric Hoffer, from whom I got my understanding of the Left. Reagan is practically worshiped by the professional Right, yet this part of Reagan’s thinking is never mentioned. That Bottom article should be the sort of thing to get the chattering skulls on the Right going as it is easily quotable. But, they skip past it.

There’s a reason for it, but I don’t know it.