Who Are the Bigots?

Valerie asked a good question in a recent thread-
 
"Who are the bigots? The ones over at The Donald subreddit, who give a rowdy welcome to the ladies, hispanics, jews, Muslims, and LGBTers, their candidate, who states his goal as making the country great for all of its citizens, or the political party that insists that people must vote their skin color or biological parts, or sex lives?"
 
I think Ami Horowitz has illustrated the answer to this in a powerful and simple way with this video:
Pretty clear, right?

A Good Argument, in Part

Fellow could use an editor, but he's got something to say if you're willing to dig it out. I'll try to limit the field somewhat.
The real issue is whether in the future we will have open discussion of political issues and free elections. Think about what we have now — a federal bureaucracy that is fiercely partisan. An IRS that tries to regulate speech by denying on a partisan basis tax-exempt status to conservative organizations. A Department of State that hides the fact that its head is not observing the rules to which everyone else is held concerning security of communications and that colludes with a Presidential campaign to prevent the release of embarrassing information. A Department of Justice that ought to be renamed as the Department of Injustice, which does its level best to suppress investigations that might embarrass the likely nominee of the Democratic Party. An assistant attorney general that gives a “heads up” to that lady’s campaign. An Attorney General who meets on the sly with her husband shortly before the decision is made whether she is to be indicted....

Think about what else we have now — a press corps that colludes with a campaign, allowing figures in the Clinton campaign to edit what they publish. Television reporters who send the questions apt to be asked at the presidential debates to one campaign. A media that is totally in the tank for one party, downplaying or suppressing news that might make trouble for that party....

The Democratic members of the Federal Election Commission have pressed for regulating the internet — for treating blogposts as political contributions and restricting them. Members of the Civil Rights Commission have argued that freedom of speech and religious freedom must give way to social justice. There is an almost universal move on our college campuses to shut down dissent — among students, who must be afforded “safe spaces,” and, of course, in the classroom as well. There, academic freedom is a dead letter.... If you do not think that a discussion of [forbidden] matters is off limits, you are, as the Democratic nominee put it not long ago, “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic.” You are “deplorable and irredeemable.” You are, as she said this week, “negative, dark, and divisive with a dangerous vision.” It is a short distance from demonization to suppression. And, let’s face it, the suppression has begun — in our newspapers, on television, on our campuses, on Facebook, on Reddit, in Google searches.
There has been rampant collusion, over the course of years, to bring us to this passage.

A Riddle

Wretchard asks:
Let's suppose I had an array of email stores that were going to be the subject of investigation. I know this because someone in the investigative agency tells me so.

In order to protect the organization(s) I first back up the array of email databases and put them on removable media. I can then screen the original databases for inappropriate entries and delete them as private secure in the knowledge that all past deals and correspondence can be referenced by very careful and surreptitious restores from the hidden archive.

I will have lost no data, just put them where it cannot be found. This archive, to have any relevance, must be close at hand and airgapped from the other computers. Could work right?

But suppose the person consulting the archive is observed by a third party, whose is ignorant of the arrangement and is probably ignorant period. Neverthless his sly nature leads him to suspect that data on the removable media is important owing to the secrecy with which it is consulted.

So he watches silently with his curiosity piqued.

At a moment of opportunity said ignorant person copies the contents of the removable media, still oblivious to its important. There it lies, unremarked, until one day it is discovered by a serious of fortuitous events by someone investigating an unrelated matter.

He has the Ring of Power in his possession but to him it is just a bauble.

What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees Up, up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?
What Bilbo? What?
AVI has some Lord of the Rings thoughts, too.

Australia: God's Own Horror Show


Pretty much everything in Australia will kill you. Except the huntsman spider. But recently a woman photographed a huge one that looks like it might.

I wouldn't have posted on it, except for this bit:

The bite of a huntsman isn't dangerous to humans – it’s their fearsome appearance that’s the real concern.

The spiders are notorious for popping out of car dashboards at unexpected times, with disastrous consequences.

On Tuesday a man crashed his car into Lake Cathie in NSW after a huntsman fell on his lap, causing him to accidentally slam his foot on the accelerator.
 It probably says nothing good about my character that I can't stop laughing at this.

Do You Hear Yourselves?

Nick Palmisciano: "Lena Dunham Says Extinction of White Men Will Lead to Better Men."

Extinction, is it? Up until now I thought the plan was just to invite so many other kinds into America that "white men" would be a comfortably contained minority.

We can be sophisticated about this, and suggest that it's not the actual men but the concept of "white" men that she (and her father) are arguing ought to be extinguished. I might even have some sympathy on the point, if it were to be conducted as an intellectual exercise in re-examining concepts. I'm not sure that "white" has done us much good, although it was useful as a way of resolving the last American crisis brought on by mass immigration (from Germany, from Ireland, from Italy, and so forth). It was a stopgap solution, but its usefulness may have expired.

That, though, requires us to have a conversation about what we ought to be instead. What's the new ideal to which we would, as a culture, ask immigrants to assimilate? It doesn't have to be "white," but we do have to have some standard or we will cease to be a culture at all.

I like this one:



That seems sufficiently inclusive.

Le Jeux Sont Fait

They Are Apparently Serious About This

Headline: "The Parents Of This Dead Robber Are Really Mad His Victim Had A Gun."

Well, you know, I'm not that sorry for your loss. But the worst argument is this one:
“If there was to be a death, it was not the place of the employee at Pizza Hut. That is the place of law enforcement,” said Hairston.
No, it is not the place of law enforcement to serve as the dedicated killers of American citizens. We all have a duty to uphold the common peace and lawful order. If your son violated it to the degree that it placed others in immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm, then any of us has a right to stop him by any means necessary.

The idea that the government should stand over us in this way, like the riflemen over Harambe, is disgusting. If we have a problem, we'll sort it out like free men.

You Don't Say

Headline: "Massachusetts law firm donated $1.6M to Democrats including Hillary Clinton and received bonuses that precisely matched their political donations in massive 'straw-donor scheme.'"

There's just no end to the corruption around her.

Well... possibly, there's an end in sight.

A Call for Unity

It is addressed to Republicans, but I see a lot to like in it anyway. It's the kind of argument that, were the candidate himself able to make it, would be compelling. Perhaps even convincing, if I were sure that he was a man who truly understood the agenda they assert for him and truly believed in it. It would help if he could manage to treat people decently.

I am still divided. I have to vote before Election Day, because I have to travel that day, but I have not yet done so. I will thus have to do it tomorrow or the next day. I am certain that I cannot vote for Hillary Clinton, for the very valid reasons lain out so well in that argument. I am not convinced that Donald Trump is fit for the office, or that he will make a good President, or even a decent one. I do not like the idea of giving my assent to his ascension to an overly-powerful office ripe for abuse by a man of appetites, pride, and disdain, and he has shown himself to have all of those qualities.

But so has his opponent, in spades. Even her virtues become vices, for her habits of careful study and hard work are turned toward corruption and self-enrichment, toward maintaining a dense nest of lies, and toward the single-minded grasping for power, for control. Under no circumstances would I like to live under her authority. I have the very real sense that she considers herself the enemy of me and mine, and of everything I hold dear about the Republic and its Constitution.

I could simply write in the candidate of my choice, which was always Jim Webb. (Remember Jim Webb? Imagine if we could substitute one of these two with him, and perhaps my faith in him will become clearer.) I'm told they don't even count the write-in votes, but I wasn't expecting my vote to count anyway. Georgia is said to be close this year, but AVI fields a strong argument that, in fact, neither my vote nor any of yours actually count. They matter, he says, but they won't count for anything in terms of the outcome of the election.

So I am thinking about what matters. In the end, a protest vote in the manner of a write-in would only leave me with the illusion of clean hands. On the other hand, voting for Trump -- should he win -- would leave me with an illusion of dirty ones: after all, he wouldn't have won based on my vote, so I would be no more guilty of his victory than of his defeat.

Why worry over illusions? Because they matter, as AVI says.
We should be grateful for exactly these sorts of decisions that God sends to us. The November election is a practice version of a decision that has real consequences. Jesus is letting us have a sandbox to play in every election, where we can try out the various lessons and build our little castles for practice. Because your answer is going to have no effect on anything. This is a test. Rejoice! Most lessons in the Christian faith are expensive, considered worth it only in retrospect. This one is cheap. Use this opportunity with joy.
Alas, I am not yet wise enough to be joyful. But I suppose I know what I have to do.

The Pope Warns on Refugees

Good advice, Father Francis.

"Racially Conscious" Without Being "Racist"?

I'm not convinced that the concept of "race" refers to anything real. Indeed, I am convinced it is a concept that was created to justify the re-introduction of slavery to Europe following its elimination by Christianity, once Portugal developed new trade routes to a West Africa that was hungry for trade but that had nothing much of value to offer but other human beings.

Still, the New Republic is pretty invested in the idea that race is real at least for some people, and that a connection to others of one's race -- performed at the ballot box -- yields something like social justice. So it's interesting to see them talking this way.
In a study of white Americans’ attitudes and candidate preferences, we found that Trump’s success reflects the rise of “white identity politics”—an attempt to protect the collective interests of white voters via the ballot box. Whereas racial prejudice refers to animosity toward other racial groups, white identity reflects a sense of connection to fellow white Americans.
Fair enough, I guess, but what are those interests? A defense of mores, of home, of culture? Aren't we usually told that having that interest is per se racist, as it suggests that one prefers (or worse, thinks superior) one's own versus another's culture or mores?

Green Party Endorses Trump Over Clinton

It's from Daily Kos, but it does sound like they're right on the facts.
The Green Party’s presidential candidate, Jill Stein, posted today on Facebook a link to an “Open Letter from the Social Media Director of the Stein/Baraka Campaign,” by someone whose name was given only as “Jillian.” The message reads:

…A Clinton presidency is D A N G E R O U S … If a Trump presidency would mean that we have to fight ignorants in the streets—I’m ready for that. “

Stein commented “I couldn’t have said it better.”

Not even the “we have to fight ignorants in the street” part, Jill? Is that a call to a gang fight or a misspelling?

Literary criticism aside, I consider this sufficiently official. Journalists have been pushing Stein to answer this question throughout the campaign; it has now been answered.

Stein has been increasingly preparing her followers and the public for this idea over the last few weeks. She tweeted on Oct. 14:

Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy is much scarier than Donald Trump’s, who does not want to go to war with Russia. #PeaceOffensive

She retweeted an article by her running mate Ajamu Baraka on Oct 15 titled “Why Hillary Clinton Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump,” which states:

The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton.

and on Oct. 16 retweeted Baraka’s tweet:

Expecting people of color to fear Donald Trump after all we’ve been through the last 200 years, is absurd.

On Oct. 21 she posted on Facebook an article titled:

What’s scarier than Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton’s plans to gut Social Security

Greens have been spreading this message heavily on social media and in articles like this that state “Donald Trump as president will do ‘less damage‘.”
The Greens are pretty radical -- I spent a lot of time with them up in Philadelphia during the DNC. Fun folks, to be sure. A lot of them were willing to come on board the Democrats for Bernie, but have the (quite accurate) sense that the DNC was rigging its process to make sure he never had a chance. A Trump protest vote would be natural for them, in a way.

And it really is the protest vote, this year. There is no one more establishment than the Clintons at this point. The whole establishment has bowed down to them, and rendered them all possible service.

Lin Carter on Conan the Barbarian

Lin Carter was most famously a writer of science fiction and sword & sorcery, but he was also a US Army infantry veteran of the Korean war. I happened across an introduction he wrote for a book building out the Conan mythology with L. Sprague de Camp. The introduction was authored in 1971, long enough ago that the book could be dedicated to "the greatest living creator of swordsplay-and-sorcery, J. R. R. Tolkien."

Even then, it seems, Carter felt it was necessary to justify the project. The justification sounds shockingly familiar.
These days, many people, including (alas!) many of my fellow science-fiction writers, seem to feel it is somehow vaguely immoral to read purely for pleasure. A story, say these wise men, should really come to grips with something critical and important, like the oil slick on Laguna Beach, or the vanishing Yellowcrested Sandpiper. At very least, such persons advise, the hero should be a Negro striving to free his people, a homosexual gaily battling for social recognition, a concerned college youth protesting the iniquities of the Pentagon by blowing up his English Lit class, or an Amerindian getting back at the paleskins by seizing control of Alcatraz.
He goes on to say that he doesn't think this is necessary, and that in any case he doubts that his generation or the next one will solve any of the social problems afflicting society. I suspect his contemporaries, looking back on recent history, would say that they are justified by the subsequent progress on social recognition for gays at least; perhaps in other ways.

Still, I transmit his words because they go to show just how long this conversation has lasted. It's not at all new: 1971 is now 45 years ago, and the fight over making sure that all the heroes are this-or-that minority resisting this-or-that oppression is still going strong.

In any case, it perhaps explains some of the attraction of barbarism. 45 years is a long time to be lectured -- longer, indeed, than most of the American population has been alive.

The Feast of All Saints

On this day, how appropriate that we can read about a very recent excavation of Jesus' tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I was there in 2014, and it is quite a site. As with the archaeologists who followed up on the legends of Troy, or the similar ones who were amazed to discover how precisely the Beowulf preserved descriptions of war-gear that would have been ancient when the poem was written, scientists who followed up were surprised by the accuracy of the tradition:
Researchers have continued their investigation into the site where the body of Jesus Christ is traditionally believed to have been buried, and their preliminary findings appear to confirm that portions of the tomb are still present today, having survived centuries of damage, destruction, and reconstruction of the surrounding Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City....

When the marble cladding was first removed on the night of October 26, an initial inspection by the conservation team from the National Technical University of Athens showed only a layer of fill material underneath. However, as researchers continued their nonstop work over the course of 60 hours, another marble slab with a cross carved into its surface was exposed. By the night of October 28, just hours before the tomb was to be resealed, the original limestone burial bed was revealed intact.

"I'm absolutely amazed. My knees are shaking a little bit because I wasn't expecting this,” said Fredrik Hiebert, National Geographic's archaeologist-in-residence. "We can't say 100 percent, but it appears to be visible proof that the location of the tomb has not shifted through time, something that scientists and historians have wondered for decades."

Fixing the Culture

The author of Hillbilly Elegy offers his thoughts at the end of a longer interview.
This is a problem that government can help with, but it can’t be the only solution to a number of these issues. So where I would like to think it leaves us is that each individual actor in a community is going to have a different view on how to address some of these problems.

An individual parent should pick up the book and think maybe the way I’m interacting with my kid is causing a lot of problems down the road and maybe I should try to do it a little bit better. Maybe a social worker picks up the book and says, this is the reality of how these folks are living, maybe this changes how I approach my work. Maybe a church pastor picks up the book and says look, it’s really problematic that there are so few poor kids in our churches, but there are a ton of upper- and middle-income kids in our churches — maybe I need to go out and minister to the least of these as Christ said.
There's also a diagnosis of what he thinks the left, and the right, get wrong about culture.

"Clinton Voters are Naive"

So says Molly Ball, who nevertheless seems sympathetic in a way. Not blindly so, however.
Everything that came out seemed to confirm the worst suspicions.

Her paranoid opponents said she was a part of the elite globalist cabal secretly plotting to impose one-world government by surrendering national sovereignty. And there she was, according to emails between her advisers hacked and released by Wikileaks, telling a Brazilian bank in 2013, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” She was paid $225,000 for the speech. (The campaign has not confirmed that the emails from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta are authentic, but many of them have been corroborated by third parties.)

Her critics had long charged that she said whatever people wanted to hear, and there she was saying behind closed doors that when it comes to policymaking, “You need both a public and a private position.” They said she was a member of the out-of-touch elite, and there she was saying she was “kind of far removed” from regular people’s struggles. They said she was too cozy with wealthy donors, and there she was telling the CEO of Goldman Sachs that she feels sorry for rich people, because “there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.”

In a Democratic debate in April, Bernie Sanders charged that while he was introducing legislation to break up the banks that caused the financial crisis, “Secretary Clinton was busy giving speeches to Goldman Sachs for $225,000 a speech.” And sure enough, the hacked emails showed...

This goes on for quite a while. There's a very long list of ways in which her critics have been proven right about everything.

Still, she says: "The people who believe in Clinton are naive enough to think she might actually make things better."

But why would she use her power against these things, when these things are the very source of her power?

The Scandal at the Heart of the Campaign

It is the existence of a ruling class, writes Thomas Frank:
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves....

In one now-famous email chain, for example, the reader can watch current US trade representative Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank email address in 2008, appear to name President Obama’s cabinet even before the great hope-and-change election was decided (incidentally, an important clue to understanding why that greatest of zombie banks was never put out of its misery)....

Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of mundane emails in which petitioners for this or that plum Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to Podesta – the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered in the ear of a powerful crony.

This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.
Emphasis added.

John Yoo Makes a Quick Comment on Comey

He says Comey was wrong on his reading of the statutes, wrong to make the announcement he did last summer, and wrong again to violate DOJ internal guidelines and historical practice now by announcing a re-opening of the investigation.

His reasoning is at the link, but I respect Yoo as a lawyer.

Um, admittedly, part of that respect came from watching him tie John Stewart in knots on Stewart's own show, but still.

Samhain


Always like a good bonfire on Halloween. Watch out: the fairy mounds will be open until dawn.

Ever Held A Security Clearance, Professor Lakoff?

I ask the question rhetorically, because I think the answer is apparent.
'It's not about emails; it's about public communication by a woman’
Well, sort of: it's about the communication of classified secrets in a way that was entirely too public. People have given their lives to protect classified information, and for good reason: other lives frequently depend on it.
FBI Chief James Comey has shown himself to be another bully of the same kind. He has repeatedly talked down to Clinton, admonishing her as a bad parent would a 5-year-old. He has accused her of “poor judgment” and called her use of a private email server “extremely careless.”
With all due respect, she was delighted to receive that scolding in place of the prosecution she deserved. Far from an act of bullying, this was an act of intense protection of her interests by a man whose duty pointed in the other direction. If you've misunderstood the context that badly, I'm not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea to publish an article from you on the subject of this case.
And since it’s a woman, doing what decent women should never do—engaging in high-level public communication—well, there must be something wrong with that, even if we can’t quite find that something. We will invoke the terminology of criminal law to account for our feelings. She’s getting away with treason! Put her in jail! We can’t quite put our fingers on it, but the words sure do make a lot of people feel better, so they must be right.
I'm pretty sure we can put our fingers on it. She treated classified information in a way that violated the law, endangered America's national interests and the lives of Americans charged with protecting it, and she did so for no better reason than that it was convenient for her. That's the kind and generous reading of why she did it. The more likely reason is that she was trying to dodge public records laws, which is a separate crime, in order to conceal the degree to which she was treating her office as a source of income through influence peddling.

It would not be difficult to prove that case to a jury, if we were allowed to go to a jury with it. All we ask is the chance to try.

Saudi Arabia and Feminism

Two articles:

1) A female Saudi scholar comes under fire for what some are calling feminist views, views that question whether Islamic societies protect the rights of women to a correct degree. Some who feel that societies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia most fully realize God's plan on earth find her questions to be an insult to Islam and, indeed, even to God.

2) A Saudi court has assented to a woman's request to watch her husband's judicially-ordered flogging, as it is being administered to punish him (and to recompense her) for his wife-beating. For some reason, many men are objecting to her watching as inappropriately humiliating -- but not to the beating itself, which would strike me (pun intended) as the real humiliation being inflicted.

Still, it's a move to press a woman's right to be free from domestic violence in a way not permitted in the West. I suppose in the spirit of free inquiry, it's worth asking: is this a way in which Islamic law really is stronger on women's rights, even if only in this discrete matter?

Discuss, if you like.

NYC Kills Free Speech

Excerpts from Eugene Volokh:

We can’t be required to even display a license plate that says “Live Free or Die” on our car, if we object to the message; that’s what the court held in Wooley v. Maynard (1978). But New York is requiring people to actually say words that convey a message of approval of the view that gender is a matter of self-perception rather than anatomy, and that, as to “ze,” were deliberately created to convey that a message.

What’s more, according to the City, “refusal to use a transgender employee’s preferred name, pronoun, or title may constitute unlawful gender-based harassment.” The label “harassment” is important here because harassment law requires employers and businesses to prevent harassment by co-workers and patrons and not just by themselves or their own employees ...

And this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak. Nor is this likely to stay in New York City ... the federal government is taking the view that existing federal bans on sex discrimination also in effect ban gender identity discrimination, and the New York analysis would equally apply to that view; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already taken the view that it is illegal under federal law to persistently call employees by pronouns that correspond to their anatomical sex but not their gender identity, though it has not yet had occasion to opine about “ze.”

A Good Weekend


That's Tennessee in the distance, looking north out of Cloudland Canyon. It's on the west side of Lookout Mountain, an impregnable fortress if -- like the Confederate army -- you put artillery on the long ridge, and the two ridges behind it. Armies would break like water on the central rock. The Northern forces were wise enough to wait until they could take Lookout Mountain, and then go around to the east.

I rode up there and hiked yesterday, rode back today. I stopped by my father's house on the way. He had bought a box of .22 for that revolver I mentioned. I brought it home and shot it out of my Ruger Single Six instead. Tonight I'm grilling marinated steak over a charcoal and hickory fire, while drinking a bit of pilsner.

Mountains, motorcycles, guns, and beer. Maybe it gets better than that. Maybe not.

Ricochet?

Their tagline is: "Ricochet.com is the leading place for civil discussion of the center-right and beyond."

However, they ask $5 a month or $39.99 a year to be a member with full privileges.

From time to time I read the free articles, and generally I like the tone of the place, but that's about the extent of my experience with them so far.

Does anyone have any comments on Ricochet? Is it worth it? Has anyone here tried it out?

The Empire vs. the Republic

James Pethokoukis, AEI fellow and CNBC contributor, argues that America right now looks like the Roman empire at the height of its power rather than Rome about to fall.

If you listen to America’s pessimistic populists, America is so over. We are all in the position of Emperor Honorius watching the Visigoths come over the seventh hill as the sack of Rome begins. (Guess who the Visigoths are in this analogy. Some, I assume, were good people.)
Or to update things a bit, this is the “Flight 93” election, at least according to a recent viral essay. This argument, as I recently described it, posits America’s doom “unless those who value an isolationist, protectionist, and perhaps paler America ‘charge the cockpit’ in Washington and seize control from the open borders–loving, free trading, perpetually warfighting ‘Davoisie oligarchy.’”
That’s not how I see things. My views are more in sync with this notion put forward recently in by Jonathan Margolis in the Financial Times:
So for all its failings and warnings that the US is “over”, in reality, it is not just the new Roman empire, but a reincarnation of the Roman empire at the height of its power, perhaps around 117AD — 170 years before it began to fall apart.
But he misses the point. The pessimists are not arguing that America is the Roman empire ready to fall. We are arguing that America is the Roman republic about to be destroyed and replaced by the empire. It's not the Visigoths we worry about, it is Julius Caeser and his army. The consuls and senate are about to be replaced by an emperor, or maybe already have been.

He links an article he wrote at Vox which argues more in depth that, since America's economy is still strong, America is OK. His entire argument is economic.

I don't care how well the economy is doing if I am not free. If the republic is dying, the state of the economy is irrelevant. After all the ink and pixels that have been used to get that point across, to not understand that the populist argument is fundamentally about political freedom and the culture of freedom is a form of self-imposed intellectual blindness.

Ammon Bundy's Lawyer Facing Charges?

In the article that Grim posted on this earlier, it was shocking that US Marshals had tackled and used a stun gun on Ammon Bundy's lawyer, Marcus Mumford.

A new report suggests Mumford may be facing charges. In this news article, it seems that when US Marshals moved to take Bundy into custody, Mumford confronted them.

Mumford got into a heated argument that ultimately led to the attorney being led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. Our reporters say Mumford started repeatedly yelling to Judge Brown that his client was free to go.

"When you get acquitted, you get released. That's how I understand it," said Mumford.

He said he asked the U.S. Marshals to see their paperwork that gave them authority to keep his client in custody.

It seems the marshals didn't just rush him without warning or provocation, but it is still shocking.