1619 Project - White Supremacy

The Mythical Trump Hydra VDH

The Mythical Trump Hydra

We forgot that hydras are mythical creatures and only the delusional believe them to be real.

 

Victor Davis Hanson

 

- August 25th, 2019

Many are the hissing heads of the polycephalic Donald Trump—at least according to the progressive Left and the NeverTrump Right, who see the president of the United States as some sort of mythical nightmare. Here are a few of his supposedly monstrous manifestations.

Trump, the Profiteer 

Candidate Trump never really wanted to be president. His entire amateurish and buffoonish candidacy was designed only to enhance his brand. Once he was unexpectedly elected, Trump was more shocked than anyone, and quickly sought to maximize his profits from the Oval Office. Thus, followed the constant progressive evocation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution to prevent chronic Trump profiteering.

In reality, the Trump empire reportedly has declined by nearly $1 billion in net value, aside from the tens of millions of his own money that Trump spent on the 2016 campaign. Trump’s business interests are the most thoroughly investigated of any recent president in memory. Obama and the Clintons made millions from their presidencies; Trump may well end up losing billions.

Trump, the Liberal 

NeverTrumpers insisted that the politically polymorphous Trump was lying about his hard conservative agendas during the 2016 primaries. In truth, they warned, Trump was a Manhattan liberal wolf in right-wing fleece clothing. 

If ever elected, Trump would adopt progressive abortion policies, become another radical environmentalist in the fashion of a squishy Arnold Schwarzenegger, select liberal justices like his moderate federal justice sister, ignore evangelicals, and in general defer to the liberal foreign policy establishment. In sum, Trump would keep none of his conservative promises and govern to the left of the McCain wing of the Republican Party 

In reality, the Heritage Foundation in January 2018 found that the first months of the Trump Administration were more conservative than any prior Republican in recent memory, including Ronald Reagan at a commensurate time in his first term. Trump’s positions on illegal immigration, deregulation, foreign policy, and social issues such as abortion and radical environmentalism are markedly to the right of most in the Republican Party.

Trump, the Russian Asset

Trump ran for president to enhance his prior partnership with Vladimir Putin. His team connived and colluded with the Russians to ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat and, in quid pro quo fashion, endangered U.S. security by giving concessions to their Russia puppet-masters. Trump admired autocrats like Putin, so it was natural that he would favor Kremlin interests rather than those of his own country. It would be embarrassing to list all the distinguished pundits who assured us, in the frenzy of May 2017, that Trump would certainly soon be indicted, impeached, or disgraced due to his slam-dunk collusion with the Russians. 

In reality, Trump utterly rejected Obama Administration’s appeasement policies—the so-called Russian reset—that included a hot mic promise to be “flexible” about (read: discontinue) agreed-upon joint missile defense systems in Eastern Europe. Robert Mueller spent $32 million and 22 months to find Russian “collusion” or “obstruction” of such an investigation. Yet, Mueller’s hyper-partisan legal team found no instance of collusion and no proof that Trump could be legally indicted for obstruction of justice. 

In reality, and in contrast with the Obama Administration, Trump slapped tougher sanctions on Putin’s circle; pumped far more U.S. oil and gas that helped lower world energy prices to Putin’s chagrin; killed scores of Russian mercenaries in Syria; vastly beefed up the U.S. military; jawboned NATO into spending more on collective defense against Russia, while withdrawing from asymmetrical short-range missile treaties with the Kremlin due to Russian cheating. All the former and current federal officials, who peddled the “collusion” and “obstruction” mythologies eventually were rendered as incompetent partisans who dishonestly promulgated fantasies at best and outright lies at worse—among them John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Gerald Nadler, and Adam Schiff.

Trump, the Unhinged 

Donald Trump is mentally and physically ill, unfit to be president, and thus should be removed under the 25th Amendment. His ample girth, garish orange tan, and comb-over pompadour hairstyle, horrific diet, chronic insomnia, age, and stress offer proof that he is unhinged and delusional. He is a sick man, who can scarcely utter a coherent sentence and is suffering from pre-dementia as he rails about buying Greenland. 

In reality, Trump easily aced the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which calibrates pre-dementia, administered by his presidential physician—a test that Joe Biden, presidential aspirant, might have far greater difficulty passing. In terms of age, Trump seems far more vigorous than most men at 73—and downright youthful compared to a faltering and often confused and addled 76-year-old Biden. Trump is able to speak extemporaneously for extended periods of time while holding the attention of an audience of thousands. No one seriously believed that talk of removal through the 25th Amendment was anything other than a last-ditch effort to remove Trump from office after the failure of impeachment proceedings and the Mueller investigation. 

Trump, the Racist and White Supremacist

According to this narrative, and to paraphrase the New York Times, after the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Mueller investigation, progressive elites and the media scrambled hand-in-glove to resurrect a new narrative that might remove Trump from office—given that obstruction and collusion stories were exposed as partisan fantasies. 

Trump expressly condemned white supremacists and Antifa thugs after the violent confrontation in Charlotte. His chief sin was saying that both those who were there to protest in nonviolent fashion white supremacists, and those who were not white supremacists but opposed the toppling of Confederate statues, were alike “fine people.” He later emphasized his disgust with and opposition to white supremacy as he has most recently following the El Paso shooting.  

Trump’s real crime in matters of race and ethnicity is that, all during his pre-presidential career and during his time in office, he simply ignored race and thus felt no compunction about deriding anyone—white, black, brown, Asian, or Latino. And such equal opportunity invective and personal disparagement are seen in our race-obsessed culture as proof of “racism” and “white supremacy” by a failure to exempt the non-white. 

In reality, a recent Zogby poll suggests that Donald Trump may well attract more combined Latino and black voters than any recent Republican president. The current minority unemployment rate may well be the lowest in history—a fact quietly acknowledged by millions of minority youth who for the first time in their lives are being courted by employers. Certainly, President Trump’s has not used inflammatory explicit racialist language in the fashion of Joe Biden, Harry Reid—and Barack (“typical white person”) Obama.  

Trump, the Incompetent Buffoon

Trump is purportedly an utter incompetent executive. His administration is in shambles, directionless, characterized by massive firings, resignations, and utter chaos—reflective of his previous bankruptcies, failed business ventures, thrice-married personal life, and constant Twitter vendettas. The Trump economy, social policy, and foreign policy are in freefall. We will be lucky to avoid a depression or major war—or both—by 2020.

In reality, previous presidents had not achieved 3 percent annualized GDP growth since 2006, prior to the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. Unemployment is at near-record peacetime lows. Interest rates and inflation are low. Gas and oil production is at record highs. The United States is finally addressing three decades of Chinese commercial banditry and neo-imperial aggression. Most in the know privately criticized the Iran Deal and the Paris Climate Accords, but few other than Trump thought it possible to exit both. Many NATO allies are addressing broken promises to spend more on defense. Trump entered office with North Korea pointing nuclear-tipped missiles in our direction. International organizations and transnational elites are as loud in their hatred of Trump as privately many foreign bureaucrats appreciate the Trump standoff with China and his tough stance with North Korea and Iran.

The Trump, the Certain Loser

Trump was shocked by the improbable 2016 victory, and supposedly he has already accepted defeat in 2020. Indeed, he may prefer in 2021 to exit to an obscure retirement, defeated, exhausted, and repudiated. Trump accepts that he has driven the brightest Republican minds out of the party. Meanwhile, Trump supposedly disgraced conservatism by bringing in the carnival crowd of Omarosa and Anthony Scaramucci, and thus just wants everything to go away. He will go through the motions of reelection in 2020, but privately concedes that he has failed, disgraced the country, and will be happy to leave with his tail between his legs.

In fact, in 2016 the outspent Trump ran a far more efficient and effective campaign than did Hillary Clinton, especially in the field of sophisticated analytics and electronic data, in targeting swing-state voters who mattered rather than dispersing finite resources in areas that had no role in winning the Electoral College. His energy dwarfed the anemic efforts of a younger Hillary Clinton. 

In 2020, Trump has already raised vast sums of money, will field an even more sophisticated team of data and social media analysts, and fully expects to defeat his Democratic opponent and use the ensuing four years to advance his agenda, by sealing the border, reforming legal immigration, forcing bilateral symmetry with China, addressing massive national debt, and translating his nationalist-populist agenda into Republican orthodoxy. 

The problem is not Trump’s crisis of confidence, self-reflection or depression, but whether his mid-70s health will match his schedules.

Trump Is What He Always Was

The strange thing about these various hydra heads of Donald Trump is that very few of them were based on any empirical evidence. Instead, they revealed more about the conspiracist than the object of his conspiracy theory—namely a pathological hatred of Trump and his supporters that blinded them to the actual record of governance. 

In truth, Trump was never hard to figure out. While his narcissism and ego may in part have driven him to run for president, far more important was his sense that the country was mired in stagnation and  frequent self-inflicted miseries, and that his own unorthodox theories about overregulated business, Chinese cheating, European free-riding and mercantile trade policies, and overregulation would allow American free-market capitalism to lift the country out of self-induced lethargy. 

Call all of that hocus-pocus or sheer craziness, but it is sincere nonetheless. Trump is what he always was: he believes that he is a self-anointed updated version of the anti-hero who claims the crude skill sets to confront the cattle barons of the world—with the full knowledge that by doing so, his beneficiaries will soon resent they ever stooped to call in such a crass outsider—a realization that explains Trump’s constant efforts to win praise and to be appreciated.

Otherwise, we forgot that hydras are mythical creatures and only the delusional believe them to be real.

Property Rights as the Stumbling Block Against Slavery

Property Rights as the Stumbling Block Against Slavery

It’s the natural right to property—and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—yesterday and today.

 

Ken Masugi

 

- August 29th, 2019

The recent charge that the United States was founded on slavery and racism is nothing new. It is a charge that has been leveled repeatedly—and refuted—ever since the Founding. The most decisive response, of course, was the devastating American Civil War, which freed the slaves on the basis of America’s founding proposition that “all men are created equal” in their right to self-government.

But having forgotten the most elementary parts of our history—see Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inauguralfor a tutorial—we need to revive our citizenship through recovering our past. When human beings make other human beings their property, our rage should know no bounds. If such slavery is not wrong, then nothing is.

Fortunately, a splendid work that combines sterling scholarship with citizen zeal has just been published, Property and the Pursuit of Happiness, by Edward J. Erler, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. While the standard intellectual criticism of America is that it has preferred property over humanity, Erler obliterates this and other banalities with his powerful argument that the protection of the right to property, rightly understood, is the same as the protection of the pursuit of happiness. This was the intention of America’s founders, advanced by Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War, and it is available to us today if we dare to understand it.

Freedom and Flourishing

The key to understanding the central importance of property rights to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, and the other founders was their expansive definition of property. Madison put it succinctly in his Party Press essay of 1792:  “In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.” Property covered more than material possessions—it also included one’s thoughts, religious views, and physical safety.

Moreover, the founders distinguished between the right to acquire property and holding on to the property one already possessed. They were not seeking to cement the status of the already rich but rather to encourage a dynamic economy, where striving for wealth would reward the talented, capable, and ambitious. In fact, the freedom and flourishing of the mind are at the core of protecting property rights and the ability to obtain wealth.

The Continental Congress that drafted the Declaration of Independence replaced Jefferson’s original inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and property” with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Again, for the cognoscenti, this substitution points to a romantic American vision of fulfillment of the spiritual self. Erler has a sobering reprise to such foolishness:  the “founders understood the ‘pursuit of happiness’ as both a right and a moral obligation” (emphasis mine).

America is not a stage for some self-realizing herd of radical individuals, entrepreneurs one day, flower children the next. The Declaration of Independence is a deadly serious document, designed to create a new nation of free, self-governing men and women. They pledge to each other their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” in the cause before them. Their “pursuit of happiness” includes these most solemn duties to each other. There are no free riders.

Thus, Erler is right to observe, “Not since the promulgation of the New Testament has a document had such a profound influence on world opinion as the Declaration of Independence.” The intertwining of religion and politics, properly understood and made famous by French republican Alexis de Tocqueville, was present from the beginning. The first English settlers were New England Puritans and (the ones who bought slaves) Virginia adventurers, but these are to be distinguished from the first Americans who were those created by the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

 

The Duty of Justice

The best example of how protecting an individual right can serve to protect the community can be found in what became the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms. For this right illustrates “the relationship between rights and obligations that is at the heart of the social compact.”

In fact, Erler goes further, maintaining that “Anyone who is unwilling or incapable of fulfilling his obligation to cooperate in the defense of his fellow citizens cannot be a member of civil society.” The purpose of our freedom in the pursuit of happiness is the duty of justice.

Incidentally, of all my memories of Erler—either as a lecturer or wit—none is more vivid than the time I watched him rapid-fire his old Army M-1 rifle, slamming lead into a target at a firing range. You see, Erler is a man of practice as well as a teacher and scholar of the theory of political practice. A combat veteran, he speaks with practical as well as philosophical authority on the Second Amendment.

But have we in these reflections on property and the pursuit of happiness left behind fellow Americans who were themselves once considered property? Americans of an earlier, more patriotic generation couldn’t live with this contradiction, which Lincoln repeatedly pointed out. Once freed of the yoke of slavery and thus entering into the social compact of American society, the freedmen knew the beginnings of a longer struggle for freedom.

A New Serfdom?

Today, however, we note that the threat to freedom from the modern administrative state, with its bureaucracy and regulation, is a danger not just to a class of Americans but to all Americans with its claim to be the “universal landlord”—see, for example, the property rights case of Kelo v. City of New London.Erler quickly seizes on the conclusion: If the administrative state is the government “agent for the redistribution of property, then the conclusion is inevitable that ultimately all property . . . belongs to government.”

And this property that the government holds in trust cannot be accessed by individuals unless they show to bureaucrats that they can serve the public better by using it. We live in a time of total regulation, or a new serfdom. “The unregulated life is not worth living.”

Thus, property we know as income, land, and even our capacity for speech (as in radio and television broadcasting licenses) and thoughts (political correctness) all belong—in theory and, increasingly, in practice—to the administrative state, which determines whether the “freedom” involving our supposed property is in the public interest.

So near now to serfdom and lordship, this is the time when those descended from slaves should appreciate both the potential and the perils of the moment. And those who do not have such a legacy can see their fraternity with those whose ancestors once were property.

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Stephan Wright Quotes

If I had a dollar for every girl that found me unattractive, they'd eventually find me attractive

I find it ironic that the colors red, white, and blue stand for freedom, until they're flashing behind you.

Today a man knocked on my door and asked for a small donation towards the local swimming pool, so I gave him a glass of water.

I changed my password to "incorrect" so whenever I forget it the computer will say, "Your password is incorrect."

Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

I'm great at multi-tasking--I can waste time, be unproductive, and procrastinate all at once.

Take my advice — I'm not using it.

My wife and I were happy for twenty five years; then we met.

I hate it when people use big words just to make themselves sound perspicacious.

Hospitality is the art of making guests feel like they're at home when you wish they were.

Every time someone comes up with a foolproof solution, along comes a more-talented fool.

I'll bet you $4,567 you can't guess how much I owe my bookie.

Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.

If you keep both feet firmly planted on the ground, you'll have trouble putting on your pants.

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.

When I married Miss Right, I had no idea her first name was Always.

My wife got 8 out of 10 on her driver's test--the other two guys managed to jump out of her way.

There may be no excuse for laziness, but I'm still looking.

Women spend more time wondering what men are thinking than men spend thinking.

Give me ambiguity or give me something else.

Is it wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly?

Women sometimes make fools of men, but most guys are the do-it-yourself type.

I was going to give him a nasty look, but he already had one.

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

The grass may be greener on the other side but at least you don't have to mow it.

If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.

Sometimes I wake up grumpy; other times I let her sleep.

If tomatoes are technically a fruit, does that make ketchup a smoothie?

Money is the root of all wealth.

No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

The Real History of the ACLU

Posted on September 19, 2010 in Communism with 22 Comments.  Printer Friendly

“I am for socialism, disarmament and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal.” ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, 1935

The left wing bias prevalent on college history faculties colors just about everything that shows up in mainstream history books. Textbook portrayals of Joseph McCarthy, for example, are very negative because liberals, including the great majority of university history professors, view McCarthy with hostility. The beneficiaries of this bias are persons and groups whom liberals view with favor.

One such group is the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU’s leaders and admirers are always claiming that the group exists to protect the individual rights of all Americans, without any political bias; but the claim is disingenuous. In reality the agenda of the ACLU is very similar to that of any other left wing group.

The group fights tooth and nail for abortion rights, for example, despite the lack of any clearly stated right to abortion in the Constitution, because the Democratic Party and the left in general are pro-abortion. They refuse to support gun rights, even though a citizen’s right to keep and bear arms is clearly spelled out in the Second Amendment, because Democrats and liberals opposed gun rights.

Defending Socialists and Inventing New Rights

In his widely used textbook Give Me Liberty, Columbia  Professor Eric Foner introduces the ACLU this way:

The arrest of antiwar dissenters under the Espionage and Sedition acts inspired the formation in 1917 of the Civil Liberties Bureau, which in 1920 became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). For the rest of the century, the ACLU would take part in most of the landmark cases that helped bring about a “rights revolution.” Its efforts helped give meaning to traditional civil liberties like freedom of speech and invented new ones, like the right to privacy.

What Dr. Foner doesn’t say is that ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, and charter members like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, were ardent left wingers who identified with the Communist movement from the start of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

Professor Foner does, however, display admirable candor when he credits the ACLU with helping to “invent new rights, like the right to privacy.” He’s referring to the 1965 US Supreme Court decision in Griswold v Connecticut, in which the Court overturned a stupid, but perfectly constitutional, Connecticut law against contraception. Eight years later this chimerical “right to privacy” would form the basis of the Court’s Roe v Wade decision, overturning state laws against abortion.

Most liberals claim that the “right to privacy” cited in the Griswold decision was based in the Constitution, despite the absence of any language to that effect in the actual document. Professor Foner is much more accurate and honest when he credits the ACLU with urging to court to “invent” such a right.

Radical Origins

Roger Baldwin was a leftist radical long before he founded his famous “civil rights” union. Biographer Robert C. Cottrell admiringly describes him as “one of the nation’s leading figures in left-of-center circles.” Baldwin was a friend and admirer of Anarchist leader Emma Goldman, who once conspired with self-described “Communist Anarchist”  Alexander Berkman to murder a businessman who was hiring strikebreakers to replace union workers.

Other charter members of the ACLU included Socialist Crystal Eastman and Communists Elizabeth  Gurley Flynn; and William Z. Foster, who would later serve as General Secretary of the Communist Party USA.

The ACLU and Atheism

One of the ACLU’s proudest moments, according to many history texts, is its success in 1925 in persuading a Tennessee schoolteacher named John Scopes to violate a state law against teaching Darwinian evolution. The freshman textbooks America’s Promise and Nation of Nations, along with Dr. Foner’s book Give Me Liberty, all cite the so-called “Scopes Monkey Trial” as a triumph of modern science over primitive superstition.

Atheism was the prevailing religious belief among the ACLU’s leadership then as now, and is widely popular among history faculties today, so it’s not surprising that history profs would give the Scopes trial prominence in their textbooks.

Labor vs Management

Organized labor is another darling of both history professors and the ACLU. In Give Me Liberty Professor Foner tells us how the ACLU began defending the proletarian victims of property-owning capitalists in the 1930’s. “By 1934,” said Foner, the ACLU had “concluded that the ‘masters of property’ posed as great a danger to freedom of speech and assembly as political authorities.”

Stalin Loses Roger Baldwin

In 1939 Roger Baldwin suddenly renounced Communism and kicked everyone with Stalinist sympathies, including charter member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, out of the organization.

It wasn’t Josef Stalin’s genocide in the Ukraine that alienated Baldwin; that had happened back in 1932 and ’33, and Baldwin had managed not to notice. The thing that turned Roger Baldwin against Stalinist Russia was the ironically named “non-aggression pact” that Stalin and Adolf Hitler signed, in which they agreed to stay out of each other’s way while conquering and enslaving different parts of Europe. Flynn and Foster were willing to support Hitler if it helped Stalin; Baldwin was not.

It’s hard to find a negative word about the ACLU in modern history books, but Baldwin’s 1939 rejection of Communism did rub historian Howard Zinn the wrong way. In his widely used textbook A People’s History of the United States, Professor Zinn (himself an undercover Communist, according to his FBI file) accuses the ACLU of a lack of resolve:

Even the American Civil Liberties Union, set up specifically to defend the liberties of Communists and all other political groups, began to wilt in the cold war atmosphere. It had already started in this direction back in 1940 when it expelled one of its charter members, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, because she was a member of the Communist party.1

It’s worth noting that the ACLU was not the only organization expelling Communists during that period. The Hitler-Stalin pact, which was in effect from August of 1939 to June of 1941, caused a backlash against Communism all around the US.

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In 1940 the federal government passed the Smith Act, which made it a crime to “teach, advocate, or encourage” the violent overthrow of the US government. State legislatures in California, New York, Oklahoma, and Texas all established committees to screen public employees for loyalty to the United States. Twenty one states quickly passed laws requiring public school teachers to sign loyalty oaths.

The New York anti-subversion law forced colleges and universities around the state to fire some sixty faculty members with Communist or Fascist sympathies, fully two thirds of them from one campus. City College of New York was such a hotbed of Communism in those days that the new state law forced CUNY to dismiss forty faculty members, one of whom was Jack Foner, the father of the modern day history professor who wrote Give Me Liberty.

The younger Professor Foner addresses the 1940 New York law in his textbook, portraying it as an immoral product of anti-Communist “hysteria,” but he fails to mention that his father was one of the fired Communist sympathizers.

The ACLU Today

On its homepage, the modern day ACLU boasts of “90 YEARS OF PROTECTING YOUR LIBERTY,”  but the group’s consistently leftist bent results in some interesting definitions of the term “liberty.”

They bring lawsuits to force state governments to give bigger welfare checks to the prolific poor. They call on the federal government  to regulate the compensation businesses pay their employees.

When malcontent feminists tried to force a privately owned country club to change its admission policies through public protests, media campaigns, and punitive lawsuits targeted at the club’s members, a truly non-partisan civil rights group would have defended the club’s right of association. The ACLU apparently values political correctness over Constitutional rights; they joined the feminists in trying to pressure the club to change its policies.

It is easy to understand why college professors and other leftists would admire the ACLU. It stands for all the same values that liberals hold dear.

Al Fuller

1 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (2003 edition), p. 436