Suppose you were a vast global conspiracy plotting to foster discord among Americans. How would you approach your task? You might try to spread some salacious but dubious accusations—say, that a politician is a “devotee of Bigfoot erotica.” But that particular charge would feel kind of stale, since a Democratic congressional candidate already lobbed it at her rival this summer. Maybe you could think bigger, and make a video that tries to red-bait a candidate by linking him loosely to George Soros and, from there, even more loosely to “antifa.” But that would be superfluous because the...
Don’t Rebrand the ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Program—Just End It
The question shouldn't be which groups the program ought to target. It's whether the program should exist at all. For the Southern Poverty Law Center, the move suggests that "President Trump wants the government to stop its efforts to prevent terrorism by far-right extremists." For Jezebel, it's "another victory in a long series of wins for Neo Nazis, the KKK, and other violent and terroristic groups." Salon calls it "pandering to white supremacists." The target of their ire: a plan to rebrand the federal government's Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program. According to Reuters, which...
FDR’s Internment Policies Haunt Us
FDR's Wartime Violations of Civil Liberties Are Not a Good Precedent for Anything And you don't get points for not being as bad. Last night on The Kelly File, Carl Higbie, the spokesman for a pro-Trump PAC, defended the idea of a federal registry of Muslims by citing the World War II–era internment of Japanese Americans as a precedent, weakly adding "call it what you will, it may be wrong": Megyn Kelly immediately leaped on this, and Higbie quickly declared that he did not in fact favor internment camps. The video then went viral. The video also gave me a dose of deja vu. Last...
Welcome to the Fight Against Unchecked Power
You may have heard of whataboutism—the practice of rejecting criticisms of a regime on the grounds that other regimes do bad things too. Well, whataboutism has a cousin. Call it wherewereyouism: the impatient disdain that civil libertarians start to feel right after an election, when many members of the newly disempowered party suddenly rediscover the virtues of limiting government power. It's an understandable feeling, and I've sometimes been prone to it myself. (Back in 2009, when the Tea Party protests started taking off, my initial response was: "Why weren't you marching when Bush was...
Did Nonfatal Violent Crime Come Down Last Year After All?
Jesse Walker
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Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War
From the Foreword by Lawrence B. Wilkerson: “[T]he debate over whether oil was a principal reason for the 2003 invasion has waxed and waned, with one camp arguing that it absolutely was, while the other argues the precise opposite.” “Mr. Vogler, himself a former...
Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism
Imagine the Catholic Church (or any person or group of people) doing what the government does every day: Everyone who doesn’t give the Catholic Church 25% of his annual income every year will be put in jail. If he resists the Jesuit officer, the officer has the right...
Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania
FOREWORD BY JAY BHATTACHARYA, MD, PHD Diary of a Psychosis is different from all other books on Covid: it traces the development of the government response as it happened, bit by bit, and subjects it to relentless scrutiny: did any of it do any good? It thereby...