“Just say it. Cry out. Mercy,” said the magistrate to William Wallace in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995). Wallace had already been drawn and quartered, so the king’s torturer was not offering to save his life. He promised only an end to the torture with a quicker, more merciful death.
The Wallace of the film refuses to speak the words the king’s magistrate commands and cries “Freedom!” instead. Realizing further torture will not produce the desired result, the magistrate reluctantly gives the order to cut off Wallace’s head.
Gibson’s film is short on historical accuracy but serves as a perfect metaphor for life in America today. The citizens of the former “land of the free” are being metaphorically tortured to say the words their rulers wish them to say, whether they be “safe and effective” or “they/them” or “plucky little democracy.” For some, like Gonzalo Lira, it is not metaphorical.
Lira was an American citizen, born in Burbank, California, and living in Ukraine – the supposed “plucky little democracy” – where he had two young children. Lira was arrested in May of 2023 and charged with violating laws prohibiting certain types of speech. Specifically, Lira criticized the Zelensky government, contradicted the narrative that the Russian invasion was unprovoked, and generally painted a much more pessimistic picture of Ukrainian success in the war than was claimed by the Ukrainian government and western media.
Importantly, virtually all of the “disinformation” Lira was accused of spreading turned out to be true. As Tucker Carlson has said on more than one occasion, one is not punished for lying about the regime. One is only punished for telling the truth.
That it was not the U.S. government that tortured and killed Lira directly should fool no one. Since the U.S. overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine (for the second time) in 2014, nothing has happened in that country that wasn’t either directed or given tacit approval by the U.S. government.” We have direct evidence of that from the leaked recording of Victoria Nuland discussing her plans for who would run Ukraine with Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt.
This includes Zelensky’s nonstop shelling of civilian neighborhoods just before the Russian invasion in February 2022 and the imprisonment and death of Gonzalo Lira over the past several months.
As Daniel McAdams wrote in his piece about Lira, “One call from the White House or State Department could have saved California-born journalist Gonzalo Lira’s life.” But that phone call never came, because the U.S. government wasn’t interested in saving the life of a U.S. citizen critical of its pet project on Russia’s border. If it were, it certainly would have been easier to get Lira out of Ukraine than it was to get Brittney Griner out of Russia.
Dolly Parton is immensely talented and her talent has made her very rich. Not only can she sing, write songs, and act, but she has wisely kept control of the publishing rights to her music, meaning she receives royalties both on her own recordings of songs she wrote and those of others, like Whitney Houston’s mega-selling recording of “I Will Always Love You.” Forbes estimated her net worth at $350 million in 2021, attributing substantial portions to her publishing rights and to Dollywood, the theme park Parton cofounded in the 1980s.
As impressive as all of the above is, it begs the question: why isn’t Parton a billionaire like Paul McCartney, who doesn’t own the publishing rights to his most lucrative material, cowritten with John Lennon?
The answer given by numerous articles and popular social media memes is that Parton is not a billionaire because she has given away so much of her money to charity. One viral meme claims:
“Let’s be clear: Dolly Parton is a millionaire and not a billionaire because she *keeps giving money away. * Being a billionaire is MORAL FAILING. She gives away shockingly large amounts of money every year and is STILL RICHER THAN YOU AND I WILL EVER BE.”
Other variations encourage people to “be like Dolly.”
There are two assertions here to examine. The first is counterfactual. If Dolly Parton hadn’t given so much of her earnings away, would she today be a billionaire? It’s impossible to know for certain, but it’s certainly plausible, even likely. Let’s assume it’s true. That means Parton has foregone the accumulation of at least $650 billion in additional net worth by directing earnings she could otherwise have invested in profitable ventures towards charitable causes. The second assertion is that it is a “moral failing” to direct one’s own capital in the opposite way. This is demonstrably false even if one accepts the meme author’s moral premise.
Just as it was becoming impossible to deny the empire’s proxy war in Ukraine is lost, along comes another one.
How convenient.
Of course, we heard the usual pronouncements from U.S. politicians about their commitment to “our close ally Israel,” meaning their commitment to send billions of dollars to them, most of which will be spent with American defense contractors.
Anyone familiar with my writing over the past two decades can probably guess my position: no, not a penny. However, I also expressed my opposition to the empire dictating to Israel about how to respond. That’s the real reason for the foreign aid, besides enriching defense contractors. The empire buys compliance with its wishes.
For expressing these opinions, I was immediately called “antisemitic” on social media. If the source of this smear was the shrieking neocon harpy, Nikki Haley, or anyone of her ilk, I wouldn’t even bother to respond. But since some of this is coming from friends, both of the real world and social media variety, I thought I would write about this from a personal perspective.
I consider myself first and foremost an American. But like every American who ever lived, including “native Americans” [sic], my ancestors came from other countries. As you may have surmised from my surname, the ancestors on my father’s side came from Ireland.
So, how could an Irish American possibly understand having your country violently attacked by terrorists? Those of you with historical knowledge beyond three weeks ago are already chuckling. For the rest, Ireland was embroiled in a violent civil war for a large part of the 20th century. A religiously inspired, non-governmental paramilitary group launched frequent terrorist attacks on both government officials and civilians alike. They assassinated people. They kidnapped people. They bombed parades. You may remember a U2 song about one such incident. Good tune.
Peace was finally established in the 1990s, before I had formed much of a political philosophy. But were it still going on today, I would oppose any aid by the U.S. government to either side of the dispute and any U.S. intervention into the internal affairs of Ireland.
I suppose that makes me “anti-Celtic” to the terminally limbic currently parroting the empire’s “antisemitic” slur against me or anyone else who opposes U.S. involvement in the current conflict in Israel.
Let me say for the record that I do not hate my fellow Irishmen. That does not follow from my mere opposition to taxing Americans to subsidize them. Nor does my criticism of the Irish government’s abysmal Covid policies translate to hatred for the Irish people. One would think this goes without saying. Apparently, it doesn’t.
I can imagine there are some who consider my analogy a poor one. After all, Ireland is a “western” country of “white people” and can’t compare to what the Israelis are facing in the Middle East. While I don’t share that view, I will respond to it.
Perhaps I’ve buried the lede, but my mother’s ancestors came from Lebanon. Specifically, they were part of the Maronite Christian majority of that country before large influxes of Palestinian Muslims in 1948 and 1967. Some of my mother’s ancestors had already come to America to escape Ottoman rule before WWI. Her own parents came in the late 1920s after a financial crisis cleaned out my industrialist grandfather. But many are still there.
Beirut was once called, “The Paris of the Middle East.” It was a breathtakingly beautiful city in a country with a 5,000-year history of advanced civilization. It was all but destroyed by the same people the Israelis are fighting today.
I have relatives who were killed or displaced during the bloody civil war that raged in Lebanon 1975-90. Violence continues in Lebanon to this day thanks to the presence of Islamic paramilitary groups like Hezbollah (which is also a political party). It is not an exaggeration to say that Lebanon’s and Israel’s problems are virtually identical.
Still, I disapprove of the previous U.S. interventions in Lebanon and would oppose any new subsidies or interventions there in the future, even if ostensibly to rid Lebanon of the violent fanatics who have destroyed it. This doesn’t mean I hate my fellow Lebanese any more than I hate the Irish or the Jews, for that matter. It’s simply a political position. And it’s the right one, for several reasons.
First, I am in a political relationship (whether I like it or not) with 330 million or so other Americans, most of whom do not have familial relationships with people in Ireland or Lebanon. Said political relationship does not give me the right to force them to defend the countries of my ancestors any more than it gives them the right to do likewise to me.
I would consider it especially bad behavior on my part to try to shame other Americans into involving themselves in the affairs of other countries because I happen to have relatives there. And it would be foolhardy of them to allow me to do so.
Second, we already have quite a bit of data on the results of U.S. interventions in the Middle East and those data are not difficult to interpret. Every intervention has been an unmitigated disaster, without exception yielding results precisely opposite of the stated goals. Every. Single. One. And in return for this long train of debacles, American taxpayers have received nothing but $30 trillion in debt and an economy disproportionately skewed towards producing weapons of war that add nothing to their quality of life.
There is no reason to believe it’s going to be any different this time.
Lastly, for those naïve enough to believe the U.S. government’s involvement in this affair is humanitarian or based on any sympathy for the Jewish people, it isn’t. This is pure imperial politics, nothing more. The empire wishes to maintain its hegemony and this conflict will help it do that. It never stopped fighting the Cold War against Russia, despite the fall of the USSR.
Operating under the “Whoever controls Eurasia controls the world” thesis, the empire has done everything it can to keep Russia from establishing economic relationships with Europe or the Middle East. Thus the “humanitarian” regime-change operations in Syria and Ukraine throughout this century, in countries which “coincidentally” are home to Russia’s only warm water ports on this side of the world.
This is also the reason for the disproportionate hatred of Iran. Were Iran and Syria to form a “Shiite corridor” in the Middle East, Russia would have an opportunity to exert enormous influence in the region. That the Iraq War made this corridor far more possible by handing Iraq to the Iran-friendly Shiites is proof that the empire can be both evil and stupid at the same time.
Were Russia still supplying Europe with most of its energy through the Nordstream pipelines, the empire’s control over Eurasia would be seriously threatened.
So, the empire badgered the Russians into invading Ukraine and now has a proxy war in the Middle East to, at the very least, keep that region in a state of chaos, making it difficult for Russia (or China) to strengthen relationships there.
It’s also an opportunity for another large scale rip off of the American taxpayer. Notice that the media are already preparing the American public that this will be a “long war” that will require America’s full support. Translation: we’re about to lose Ukraine as a funding vehicle and we’re going to pivot back to the Middle East.
The empire will send billions to Israel because it wants Israel to respond to the Hamas attack in a way that will benefit the empire, not the Israeli or American people.
This not a binary choice between U.S. support or the destruction of Israel as a nation. Israel is a rich country with a modern military, including over 200 nuclear warheads. It could crush the Palestinians in Gaza in a single day and is capable of defeating every hostile nation in the region.
The empire doesn’t want that. It wants its “long war,” meaning years of funding, with complicated rules of engagement for the Israelis so that everyone can tell themselves the lie that they are not killing civilians. Meanwhile the empire can go on sucking the lifeblood out of both Israeli and American taxpayers for the benefit of its corporate partners.
One might be tempted to think it is at least a good thing that the empire restrains Israel. After all, no one wants to see the whole region turned to glass, no matter how heinous the attacks on Israel may have been.
Neither does Israel. When the war is over and the enemy defeated, Israel still has to go on existing in the region. It does them no good to create a desert around their country. Absent U.S. involvement, Israel would have to tailor its response to its consequences. It must do enough to eliminate the threat, if possible, while not going so far as to alienate the rest of the region.
Contrary to neocon talking points, Israel is not “surrounded by enemies bent on its destruction.” Egypt tried to warn Israel about the Hamas attack. Its government has no more love for the Palestinians than Israel does. Much progress has been made between Israel and its Muslim neighbors in the past decade. It is not in Israel’s nor its neighbors’ interests to return to 1967.
It is not in American taxpayers’ interest to be involved in this conflict. Americans are constantly told Israel is a “key ally” but are never told how they benefit from this alliance. They don’t. The empire benefits. And like every other empire in human history, its interests run contrary to those of its citizens.
Like Great Britain before it, America became the richest country in the world with a limited government and a free market economy. Also like Great Britain, it is bankrupting itself trying to maintain a global empire. Adding a proxy war in Israel to the debacle in Ukraine might just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back (no pun intended).
While the source of the danger is hotly disputed, one thing pundits across the political spectrum agree upon is that “our democracy is in danger.” Liberals believe former President Trump is the culprit based on his contention, right or wrong, that the votes in the 2020 election weren’t counted correctly. Tucker Carlson makes the equally obtuse claim that repression of free speech on private property is a threat to democracy.
The latter argument is doubly wrong since democracy has been a recognized danger to free speech since the drafting of the Constitution. Thus, the insistence upon a Bill of Rights that defended free speech against the democratically elected Congress.
At the risk of burying the lede, and for the sake of readers who may wish to make a thoughtful comment without scrolling past vast megabytes of midwittery to do so, I will address the republic-not-a-democracy thing before getting to my main point.
No, neither the United States nor any of its constituent states have ever been “a democracy.” The U.S. Constitution created a republic, with both democratic and anti-democratic elements. One could argue most of the document is anti-democratic – the bicameral legislature, the presidential veto, the appointed judiciary, and the enumerated powers. These are all there to protect us from democracy.
The Bill of Rights is wholly anti-democratic.
In fact, even the notion that elected representatives are supposed to do “the will of the people” is incorrect. The representatives are supposed to do what they think best for the public, regardless of the public’s wishes. “The people” are merely invested with the power to decide who decides. The framers believed this would work.
So, they built their Constitution to allow “the people” to directly elect one house of the bicameral legislature and then put a bunch of roadblocks in place to try and limit the damage such a preposterous plan would do to the property (life, liberty, possessions) of anyone who had anything to lose.
The 20th century saw systematic destruction of those roadblocks, beginning with the direct election of senators, denuding the state governments of any power to oppose the federal. It was during this period that Americans ceased calling their system of government “republic” and began imprecisely calling it “a democracy.” Today’s “our democracy” styling adds a quasi-religious and simultaneously childish connotation, appropriate to the population it governs.
Putting all of the above aside and just accepting that the republic can just as well be called “a democracy,” even that ended for all intents and purposes in the 1930s. The abominable FDR offered a “New Deal,” inspired by Mussolini, whom Roosevelt constantly referred to as “that estimable Italian gentleman,” or words to that effect, until his advisors told him to knock it off for reasons obvious with hindsight.
This New Deal proposed that the rules “the people” had to live under would no longer be made by legislators they elected. That made it too difficult to “get anything done.” No, under this new deal, unelected bureaucrats would make the rules, ostensibly at the direction of the elected president, but in practice wholly at their own discretion.
Americans not only liked the idea; they demanded it. So there would be no confusion on this, they elected the maniac who proposed it four consecutive times. So much for “our democracy.”
Another day, another set of classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s possession. Just in case anyone missed the first two times that this is an inside job by the Democratic Party to ensure somebody besides Biden heads the party’s presidential ticket in 2024, a third cache of documents was revealed on Saturday.
They’re so committed to making this an ongoing news story they’re even working weekends. It’s a old but effective trick to make one event that happened years in the past seem like multiple events recurring in the present. “Breaking! Five more classified documents discovered! Gasp! Red alert!”
The most important thing to remember about all of these classified documents scandals is what they are not. And that is they are not any real concern for the public. The media and interested political operatives would have you believe these documents contain information so sensitive that their falling into the wrong hands could result in us all speaking Russian or Chinese. They don’t.
The truth is there are very few secrets national governments try to keep that allies and adversaries alike haven’t stolen. The government likes to portray itself as secretly protecting the public from all sorts of unseen danger, both state-sponsored and otherwise. “If you only knew what goes on behind the scenes, you’d be terrified,” they’d like you to think. Many of the bureaucratic rank and file believe this themselves.
In reality, most of what even the national security state does is cooked up nonsense to justify legions of government drones and billions per year in wasted spending. The histrionics over the discovery of compromised classified material is usually just political posturing. If it weren’t, then we’d have seen some significant consequences by now from the classified documents stored on Hillary Clinton’s infamous private server, which even podunk governments in Eastern Europe and Africa probably have their hands on by now. We haven’t and we won’t.
When the alarm over mishandling of classified documents is genuine, it isn’t for fear of any danger to the public. Everyone should realize that’s the last thing these people are concerned about. What they are concerned about is the real reason most of these documents get classified in the first place: the embarrassing to themselves or potentially incriminating information the documents may contain.
One of my favorite moments in the Star Trek movie franchise occurs near the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. The details of the plot aren’t important here, other than that the Klingon villain, Kruge, played by Christopher Lloyd, is holding Kirk, Spock, and an Enterprise landing party hostage on a planet that is in the process of destroying itself. Kruge threatens to doom himself and his hostages if Kirk doesn’t surrender something called, “the Genesis Device.”
Spock, who had died in the previous film, has been brought back to life by the Genesis device but is aging rapidly because of it and must get off the planet immediately or die. When Kruge has the rest of the landing party beamed up to his ship as prisoners, the following exchange occurs between Kirk and Kruge:
Kirk: Take the Vulcan, too.
Kruge: No!
Kirk: But, why?
Kruge: Because you wish it.
Kruge doesn’t know what is happening to Spock or why Kirk has an interest in getting Spock off the planet, especially considering he’d be Kruge’s prisoner. He only knows Kirk wishes it and anything Kirk desires is likely against his own interests.
What a wonderful analogy for so many of the figures who have stood up to oppose the Washington, D.C. empire over the past several years. I don’t agree on much with Donald Trump, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, or Bari Weiss. But it is apparent the empire fears and loathes these people and will do anything it can to destroy them.
Therefore, I am inclined to do whatever I can to defend them against the empire’s attacks. Should the empire deign to ask why I wouldn’t allow this collection of mercantilists, socialists, and statists (but I repeat myself) to be crushed, my answer is the same as Kruge’s:
“Because you wish it.”
The latest in this cast of opposition characters is self-described socialist Elon Musk. Musk claims to have purchased Twitter primarily to change its content moderation policies to allow for freer speech, something he claims is essential to “democracy.”
That all sounds wonderful to the average, miseducated American and there is good reason to believe Musk is sincere. He spent $44 billion on a company that currently makes $5 billion in gross revenues – and loses money. No likely combination of revenue growth or cost cutting will make this a wise business investment anytime soon.
Taking Musk at his word, it is worthwhile to unpack just what Musk is championing. On one hand, anything the empire is opposing this strenuously is on its face a good for the rest of us. But we should have open eyes about what Musk is offering in its place. There are several assumptions most people take for granted that need to be challenged. They include free speech, democracy, and liberty.
Musk evidently shares the empire’s stated ideal of democracy as an end in itself. In deciding whether to allow former President Trump to return to Twitter, Musk held a Twitter poll. When it came out in favor of allowing Trump’s return, Musk tweeted the results with the Latin phrase, “Vox Populi Vox Dei (“the voice of the people is the voice of God”).
Of course, the American system has never assumed democracy is an end in itself. On the contrary, it includes many anti-democratic elements alongside the democratic ones. The reason for having a bicameral legislature, presidential veto, independent judiciary, and Bill of Rights is to protect individuals and constituent polities from democracy.
That’s what makes Musk’s Trump poll so ironic. He suggests a majority vote has something to do with free speech when the First Amendment was written to defend free speech against democracy. The 2nd Amendment was written to protect the right to keep and bear arms against democracy. And so on with all ten amendments in the Bill of Rights, the last to protect individuals from the accumulation of power even in one, central government, however democratically elected its representatives.
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jay Powell surprised no one on Wednesday by announcing the Fed has raised its target for the federal funds rate another 50 basis points to the 4.25% – 4.50% range. What did surprise the stock markets, based upon the sharp selloff following his remarks, was his statement,
“Restoring price stability is essential to set the stage for achieving maximum employment and stable prices over the longer run. The historical record cautions strongly against prematurely loosening policy. We will stay the course, until the job is done”
That’s basically what he has said during every public announcement since embarking on an historically steep round of interest rate hikes over the past six months. That this surprised investors indicates how deeply ingrained the “Fed put” has become in the psyche of the financial community. The stock markets continue to fluctuate below their all-time highs, therefore everyone assumes the Fed will announce a “pivot” at the next meeting, since it always in the past.
So, as each meeting approaches, the market begins to rally in anticipation of an announcement or even a hint of said pivot at Powell’s press conference. Then, Powell reads the same statement he has given after every previous meeting and the market sells off.
Needless to say, this is a terrible way for capital to be allocated, even given the existence of a central bank in lieu of a free market. But over a decade of zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) has trained investors to act even more irrationally and for equity prices to become even more separated from fundamentals than they have been in the past.
The Fed’s Balance Sheet
Ironically, Powell made another statement which is demonstrably false and is receiving no attention from investors or the financial media. He said, “In addition, we are continuing the process of significantly reducing the size of our balance sheet.”
The Fed has not significantly reduced its balance sheet. Let’s remember that in August 2019, the Fed’s balance sheet stood at approximately $3.7 trillion, down from its peak of $4.4 trillion 2014-17. The Fed reversed its modest tightening policy and began easing, increasing its balance sheet to $4.1 trillion by February 2020.
Once the Covid-19 lockdowns began, the Fed exploded its balance sheet to over $7 trillion in just three months, eventually taking the total to $8.9 trillion by March 2022.
One would think that “significantly reducing the balance sheet” would mean something more than Powell’s announced plan to reduce it by a mere $45 billion per month June-August 2022 and then by $90 billion per month every month thereafter. But the Fed hasn’t even managed to do that. As of this writing, the Fed’s assets still total almost $8.6 trillion.
In other words, while the Fed has raised the federal funds rate significantly this year, it has not attempted to reduce the supply of money. As a result, M2 has barely decreased since its peak of $21.8 trillion in March 2022. And without decreasing the money supply, the Fed cannot significantly reduce price inflation anytime soon.
While much of American politics in the 21st century has been dominated by foreign policy, the past two and a half years have not. The hysterical government response to Covid-19 forced Americans to shift their focus back home and grapple with basic questions of liberty in the face of an increasingly totalitarian state.
Former President Trump has a checkered record at best on Covid. While he maintains to this day locking down American “saved millions of lives,” he did ultimately leave that decision to the states, administratively, if not financially.
Unfortunately, while Republican governors were generally less severe in imposing lockdown policies and tended to begin easing them more quickly than Democratic governors, very few took a principled stand. Exceptions that rule were Governors Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Noem deserves top honors on principle for never locking down her state a single day. She also took the most libertarian approach to Covid vaccines, neither mandating them nor prohibiting businesses or other private organizations from mandating them on their own property.
DeSantis was the first governor to drop all statewide Covid restrictions and was more willing to use government power against the private sector in both prohibiting vaccine mandates and in combatting “woke” cultural issues according to the preferences of his supporters.
Both Noem and DeSantis were rewarded with landslides in 2022 after having won much narrower victories in 2018. Both correctly cited their stands for individual liberty during the pandemic as political risks that paid off in their acceptance speeches.
While Noem’s policies were much purer on these grounds, DeSantis is the governor of a much more populous and politically important state. Unsurprisingly, he has emerged as a credible challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination for president.
Having listened to DeSantis’ stirring victory speech on November 9, I couldn’t help wondering what a DeSantis presidency might look like. While DeSantis is certainly a more polished politician and more disciplined person than Trump, and while I would have rather lived in Florida in January 2021 than California, I couldn’t help being concerned about DeSantis’ foreign policy instincts.
Like Governor Noem, DeSantis has had few opportunities to opine on foreign policy. Also, like Noem, DeSantis has on those occasions spouted generic, establishment rhetoric about the threat China represents.
More telling is DeSantis’ record in Congress, to which he was elected as a veteran and supporter of the Iraq War. DeSantis opposed Obama’s war ambitions in Syria, as did a lot of Republicans just because it was Obama. Otherwise, he sounded much more like a neocon.
He supported President Trump’s decision not to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2017 making all the arguments one might expect from any establishment Republican. DeSantis certainly isn’t Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, but he’s no Rand Paul, either.
Neither is Donald Trump, one would correctly argue, but here is the rub. Trump seems to have a genuine aversion to war that not only exceeds that of most of the politicians in his party, but even that of most of his supporters.
The biggest news coming out of the midterm elections is the failure of the Republican Party to win a more decisive victory. They had predicted a “red wave” since well back into 2021 (an immediate reason to be skeptical) but will at best have a modest advantage in the House and a razor thin majority in the Senate.
Not only were the Republicans denied a resounding victory, but the Democrats did better in a first term midterm election than either party has while holding the White House in decades. There is no denying this was a good night for the Democrats.
This has many scratching their heads. This election was supposed to be, at least in large part, a referendum on the massive damage done to the American economy and society in general by Covid tyranny imposed by Democrats. “Never forget what they did to you” said many a meme on social media in the days before the election, especially after Emily Oster’s infamous plea for amnesty.
There is only one problem with that narrative. Covid lockdowns and other mandates were, with a few notable exceptions, largely bipartisan.
Where resistance won
Where it was possible for Covid lockdowns to be put on the ballot, they were. Governor Kristi Noem, who never locked down her state a single day in 2020, improved upon her three-point victory in 2018 with a thirty-point trouncing of her Democratic rival on Tuesday.
During her victory speech, she said, “Here in South Dakota, we protected your constitutional rights. I trusted in you to use personal responsibility and take care of each other.” The vote totals speak for themselves.
The less libertarian but more well-known Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida also won in a landslide in traditionally purple Florida. Desantis was elected by a razor thin margin in 2018. As governor, he famously convened a panel of non-government epidemiologists in September 2020 and dropped all Covid restrictions based on their televised recommendations.
Governors Gregg Abbot of Texas and Kim Reynolds of Iowa, both of whom dropped Covid restrictions in early 2021, were re-elected by comfortable margins. Senator Rand Paul, who grilled Fauci during multiple congressional appearances, also won easily.
By contrast, Republican Lee Zeldin, whom some polling indicated had a real chance to defeat incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul in deep blue New York, didn’t really compete on Tuesday. He was forced to campaign mostly on traditional Republican tough-on-crime talking points because that’s all he could do. He certainly couldn’t run a strident anti-lockdown campaign after failing to question lockdowns at all during 2020.
Congratulations to Elon Musk. He’s managed to get both the left and right furious with him over the course of a single week. He took a victory lap himself over this on Thursday, tweeting, “Being attacked by both right & left simultaneously is a good sign.”
Ironically, left, right, and Elon Musk himself are wrong about content moderation on Twitter being “a free speech issue.” Twitter is and always has been private property, even when it was publicly traded. It is not “the new public square.” This is commie talk.
Now, many would argue that the people previously running Twitter were communists themselves. There is good evidence this is true, including the admission by one of Twitter’s employees to a Project Veritas undercover journalist that the Twitter workforce is “commie as f—.” But the personal views of the employees, executive or otherwise, is not at issue. The company was and is privately owned by its shareholders.
That the platform is widely popular has given rise to the notion, especially among those aggrieved by being censored or banned, that one has a right to be on the platform and express one’s views, based on a right to free speech. Musk says he bought the platform to protect free speech on this supposedly “public forum.”
Let’s take a moment to consider what is a Twitter account. A Twitter account is a bundle of code, residing on a physical server, created and maintained by Twitter employees. It interacts with various applications that combine to make up the Twitter platform, all also created and maintained by Twitter employees or vendors.
In other words, the Twitter platform, each individual Twitter account, and all the other software and hardware that combine to make Twitter run are the products of the labor of other people. Ultimately, all this labor is paid for by private owners just like the labor in a clothing factory or a supermarket. And no one can have a “right” to the labor of other people.
By way of preemption, please spare me the “but it uses tax funded infrastructure to operate!” I shouldn’t have to point out that if one applies that standard across the board to all businesses the commies win. I’m all for abolishing publicly funded infrastructure and making every business provide their own, but until that happens, I want as much private property and capitalism as possible.
Every argument against government healthcare or the welfare state in general rests upon the principle that no person can have a right to the labor of another. There is no ambiguity here. You don’t have a right to a Twitter account. Period.
Corporatism vs. Captialism
When I make this argument, I’m often told by midwits I don’t understand the difference between corporatism and capitalism. The thrust of this argument is that the existence of the regulatory state, particularly the FCC and other federal agencies, create a government-controlled market that gives advantages to preferred corporations over others. I am very aware of this argument and agree wholeheartedly. I’ve written extensively about the damage FDR’s New Deal continues to do to the American business environment.
The problem is that argument doesn’t apply to this situation. Nothing stopped me from joining MeWe, Parler, Gab, Gettr, or even former President Trump’s own platform, Truth Social. If the 74 million people who voted for Trump did likewise, then every one of those platforms would have more U.S. users than Twitter, which has 70 million.
Instead, these same people cry out for the government to regulate Twitter like a public utility – most of which are terrible precisely because they’re regulated like public utilities – rather than simply availing themselves of the costless opportunity to create accounts on competing platforms.
They also have the prerogative of deleting their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or any other platform whose policies offend them. If they could all coordinate their activities to vote for Donald Trump on the same day, they could certainly coordinate their activities to delete their Facebook accounts on the same day. This would deal a devastating blow to the platform without an iota of government intervention, which would do no good and much harm anyway.
The Public Accommodation Concept
The idea that private companies which sell products to the public or “accommodate” the public on their premises are subject to government regulation of their policies has its roots, at least in this country, in the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century. And as almost everyone conveniently forgets, that civil rights movement was dominated by socialists and communists.
That’s not to say there wasn’t a problem that needed to be addressed, but the communists, following the advice of Marcuse and other critical theorists, made sure they dominated the movement as a front in the war to abolish capitalism. That is why it is not surprising that the idea of “public accommodation” was central to the solution they came up with.
If you can’t abolish private property – the communists’ ultimate goal – the next best thing is to water it down. And that’s just what the public accommodation concept did. It made private property not entirely private anymore since the owner could no longer dispose of it as he or she saw fit. It was now at least partially owned by the public, since the public could override the owners’ decisions about who was allowed on the property.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act works just fine without Titles II and VII. The market certainly would solve the problem of discrimination on private property. In fact, it had already begun to do so, even in the Deep South, as evidenced by the existence of Jim Crow laws prohibiting integration. Had some restaurants and other hospitality businesses not tried to integrate, there would have been no need of passing those laws in the first place.
Both partisan censorship and racial discrimination on private property are odious. The latter was arguably much worse, since as long as I tweet or post like a good little commie, Twitter and Facebook will let me remain on their platforms. But a black man in 1960 Alabama wasn’t staying at a restricted hotel no matter what he said or did, even if his only other choice was to sleep in a morgue with the stiffs.
Regardless, it is a property owner’s unqualified right to exclude anyone he or she wants. Once you begin making exceptions, you are working with the communists, intentionally or not, to dilute private ownership itself.
A Colossal Strategic Error
The Civil Rights Act didn’t stop with racial discrimination. Once the boundaries of private property had been breached, the government charged in to start making all sorts of other rules. The public accommodation concept underlies the Americans with Disabilities Act, which required every business at the time to make physical changes to their properties to accommodate people with disabilities, whether they could afford to or not. Those that couldn’t went out of business.
Everything people despise about the modern office environment, with its ludicrous rules purporting to prevent sexual harassment, racial discrimination, age discrimination, or any number of other supposed offenses, all spring from the idea that the owners of businesses that serve the public don’t have all the rights of other property owners.
It also underpins the Christian baker being forced to bake the gay wedding cake. It’s all the same principle.
One could argue social media is already even worse, and that its stifling environment is the result of government coercion. I don’t agree for two reasons.
First, speech on social media platforms is still far freer than it is in any corporate office. I have facetiously lamented many times that I had never been suspended or even warned by a single platform during my illustrious, anti-government career (I recently erased this black mark from my record). In the corporate world, I would have been called into HR and/or fired for hundreds of the things I’ve said on Twitter and Facebook this year alone.
Second, I don’t believe the executives at Facebook or Twitter feel coerced by the government. Libertarians would like to believe they do, but an honest evaluation of Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about being contacted by the FBI before banning the Hunter Biden laptop story can only conclude he welcomes the FBI partnership. Note that they didn’t have to tell him what specific content to ban. Zuck wasn’t intimidated at all. It was more like, “Thanks for the heads up, we’re on it!”
The argument that there is anything to be done about social media censorship is an argument that unregulated markets don’t work. Anarcho-capitalists especially should agree with this. Does anyone think that in a society without government censorship wouldn’t exist? Of course it would. The same impulses that motivate governments to censor and people to support governments censoring would motivate people in anarchatopia. There would be only one solution there: the market.
And I’m sorry, it is not good enough to rant against social media censorship as a free speech issue and mumble under one’s breath or in the fine print that one does not want government intervention against it. Libertarians should know full well that 95% of the people listening will assume they do.
Neither are the arguments that social media companies “aren’t really private companies” helpful to our cause. Let’s be honest. These are just rationalizations for infringing their property rights. And our enemies already have plenty of those. They don’t need our help.
All arguing the free speech or “public square” angle does is help build the consensus the commies will use for the next great incursion into private property. There is nothing to gain by making these arguments and plenty to lose.
Hampered as it is, the market still provides ample opportunity for people to fight social media censorship without infringing the property rights of those perpetrating it. Anyone making this a free speech issue is both mistaken in principle and playing right into the hands of the communists. If you believe in private property and freedom, this is an opportunity to champion it in the face of adversity. Waffling now will be disastrous.
