Giulio Meotti : Slavery Rampant in Africa, Middle East; The West Wrongly Accuses Itself

Slavery Rampant in Africa, Middle East; The West Wrongly Accuses Itself

by Giulio Meotti
  https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16195/slavery-africa-middle-east

July 5, 2020 at 5:00 am

• For the intersectional activists, the US is the world's biggest oppressor -- not China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, or Iran.
• "What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems are far from racist". — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Twitter, June 9, 2020.
• "The new anti-racism is racism disguised as humanism (...) It implies that every white person is bad... and that every black person is a victim". — Abnousse Shalmani, born in Tehran, now living in Paris, to Le Figaro, June 12, 2020.
• "America looks different if you grew up, as I did, in Africa and the Middle East". — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2020.
• It is high time for the United States to stop funding the United Nations.... The United Nations is now being used to perpetuate injustice, not stop it.
• Real slave traders and racists -- those who believe Western societies and values should not exist at all -- most likely look at the current Western self-flagellation and cheer their approval.
  

According to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who fled her homeland of Somalia and now live in the US: "What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems are far from racist". (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The United States abolished slavery 150 years ago, and has affirmative action for minorities. It is the country that elected a Black president, Barack Obama -- twice! Yet, a new movement is toppling one historic monument after another one, as if the US is still enslaving African-Americans. Activists in Washington DC even targeted an Emancipation Memorial, depicting President Abraham Lincoln, who paid with his life for freeing slaves.
Today slavery still exists in many parts of Africa and Middle East, but the self-flagellating Western public is obsessively focused only on the Western past of African slavery rather than on real, ongoing slavery, which is alive and well -- and ignored. For today's slaves, there are no demonstrations in the streets, no international political pressure, and virtually no articles in the media.
"We must not forget that Arab-Muslims have been champions in this field," Kamel Bencheikh, a Muslim poet, wrote in Le Matin d'Algerie.

"Emirs and sultans bought entire convoys of young black ephebes to make into eunuchs to guard their harems. And this continued with Ottoman emperors.... Even today, Mauritania and Saudi Arabia are still housing their own Ku Klux Klan. Slavery is still the order of the day in Nouakchott [Mauritania]. As for Riad, all you have to do is find out about young Asian girls that the potentates hire as maidservants".

An investigation by BBC Arabic found that domestic workers in Saudi Arabia are even being sold online in a slave market that is booming.
According to Bencheikh, George Floyd's death was an opportunity for many in Europe to turn a respectable fight into an unimaginable depravity.

"So, on the Place de la République in Paris or the Avenue Louise in Brussels, there are vengeful thugs, fed with hatred, taking advantage of the allotments that these two countries offer them, and attacking the past of those who enabled them to free themselves from their dictatorships...
"In France and Belgium, we do not execute apostates, crucify heterodox people, throw stones at unfaithful women, spit at heretics...
"... this anti-racism is biting its tail to turn into racism. You only have to see the angry crowd, the drool on their lips, to realize that we are dealing with people who have come to insult the white man guilty of having had, more than a hundred years ago, inappropriate gestures or shameful thoughts, and to insist, like the wolf in La Fontaine who said to the lamb: 'If not you, then your brother'... Totalitarianism is among us again".

He calls it a "Stalinism of communitarianism (sectarian politics) that makes itself into an indigenous victimization". People who fled from Bouteflika and Gaddafi, the oppressors and tyrants of Kinshasa and Niamey, "come and spit incomprehensible hatred in Paris or Brussels".

Bencheikh's article shows just one brave group of dissidents in the Islamic world who are defending the West better than the Westerners are doing. These dissidents love freedom of expression and conscience; they know the difference between democracy and dictatorship; they enjoy religious tolerance, pluralism in the public sphere, and they outspokenly criticize the practice of Islam from which they fled. They also know that arousing historic and racial resentment is a dangerous game. For political Islam, their voices are revealing and devastating. For Western multiculturalism, they are "heretical" and annoying. Le Figaro pointed to this paradox: "Seen by their communities as 'traitors', they are accused by the elites in the West of 'stigmatizing'".
In The Spectator, Nick Cohen, explained:

"In the liberal orientalist world view the only 'authentic' Muslim is a barbarian. A battery of insults fires on any Muslim who says otherwise. They are 'neo-conservatives,' 'native informants,' and 'Zionists': they are as extreme as jihadists they oppose, or, let's face it, worse...".

Like Bencheikh, Algerian author Mohammed Sifaoui reminds all of us that "Mauritania, in North Africa, is the most slavery-supporting country in the world today. Qatar in the Middle East is as well, just as much, [as is] Saudi Arabia, under the banner of the Guardians of the Holy Places of Islam".
The author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who fled her homeland of Somalia and now live in the US, writes:

"What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems are far from racist".

Black, female and gay, the apex of "intersectionality." According to Andrew Sullivan:

"'Intersectionality' is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it's a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. "

For the intersectional activists, the US is the world's biggest oppressor. Not Saudi Arabia or Iran. Hirsi Ali, who fled Somalia and experienced female genital mutilation, knows about oppression better than anti-statues activists. According to Hirsi Ali, writing in The Wall Street Journal:

"When I hear it said that the U.S. is defined above all by racism, when I see books such as Robin DiAngelo's 'White Fragility' top the bestseller list, when I read of educators and journalists being fired for daring to question the orthodoxies of Black Lives Matter—then I feel obliged to speak up... America looks different if you grew up, as I did, in Africa and the Middle East".

Writing in Le Monde and Le Point, Algerian writer Kamel Daoud indicted this hypocrisy. "There is an instinct for death in the air of the total revolution", Daoud notes.

"According to some, the West is guilty by definition, we find ourselves not in a demand for change but, little by little, in [a demand for] destruction, the restoration of a barbarity of revenge".

Daoud calls these "anti-Western Soviet-style trials".

"It is forbidden to say that the West is also the place to which we flee when we want to escape the injustice of our country of origin, dictatorship, war, hunger, or simply boredom. It is fashionable to say that the West is guilty of everything".

In Le Point, Daoud states that "with the great announcement of antiracism, the Inquisition returns".
Daoud has been accused by twenty leftist academics, in an appeal in Le Monde, of "orientalist clichés" and "colonialist paternalism". This new accusation of racism serves publicly to shame, mark and disqualify a politician or an intellectual who comments with too much frankness on the damage of multiculturalism.
Zineb el Rhazoui, a Moroccan-born anti-Islamist French journalist facing death threats, recently said:

"The only racism I suffer from comes from North Africans. For the Algerians, I am a Moroccan whore. For Moroccans, I am an Algerian whore. For both, a 'whore of the Jews'".

Arabs threaten other Arabs for speaking the truth about real racism and Islamization. They are the invisible victims of racism in France. Rhazoui claimed that "France is one of the most tolerant and least racist country in the world" and that real threat is not racism, but communitarism [importance placed on groups rather than individuals], denounced as well by French President Emmanuel Macron.
The Iranian writer Abnousse Shalmani, born in Tehran but now living in Paris, said to Le Figaro:

"The new anti-racism is racism disguised as humanism (...) What resonates in this discourse is the prison of victimization....It implies that every white person is bad -- as witnessed by the recent debunking of the statues of Victor Schoelcher, father of the abolition of slavery, in Martinique -- and that every black person is a victim".

While the economist Thomas Piketty, in Le Monde, invited the West to make amends for its colonial past, the Franco-Senegalese author, Fatou Diome, called for the abandonment of a discourse on decolonization:

"It is an emergency for those who do not yet know that they are free. I do not consider myself colonized. The catchphrase on colonization and slavery has become a business".

The "ideology" is simple: colonialism is supposedly still at work, people from formerly colonized countries continue to be oppressed, in particular Muslims who are said to be targets of a "racist" and "Islamophobic" hate. In this view, "White Western males" are always the oppressors, and the minorities are always victims.
A prominent anti-racism campaigner, Rokhaya Diallo, has said that France is "racist" in an opposition between "the dominator" and "the dominated". It is a view that sees racism everywhere, especially where it does not exist. It has also produced many of the disasters of multiculturalism throughout Europe by making it impossible to criticize the consequences of mass immigration and Islamist separatism. The French author Pascal Bruckner has called this stance "imaginary racism". It is a penitential creation that leads the public in the West -- even though presumably no one in the West either was a slave or had a slave -- to believe that anti-Western hatred is deserved.
The border between this Marxist view, in which someone always has to be a victim, has become porous with Islamism. In the movement named after Adama Traoré, the "French George Floyd", you will find an alliance of organizations such as SOS Racisme and Muslim Salafists. Human rights organizations also rally with the "Union of Islamic Organization of France", considered fundamentalist.
Manuel Valls, the former French prime minister, in an interview with Valuers Actuelles magazine said, "Human rights associations have been lost and have opened the doors to Tariq Ramadan". This instead of taking the side of the many great Muslim reformers. Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:

"Reformers such as Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji, Tawfiq Hamid, Maajid Nawaz, Zuhdi Jasser, Saleem Ahmed, Yunis Qandil, Seyran Ates, Bassam Tibi and Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari must be supported and protected... These reformers should be as well known in the West as Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Havel were generations earlier." Instead, so-called human rights associations, politicians and the media have chosen to back political Islam.

By contrast, a group of 12 writers put their names to a statement in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo warning against Islamic "totalitarianism".

"After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all".

Among the 12 signatories, eight came from the Islamic world.
These anti-Islamist Muslim intellectuals were not born free; they fled dictatorships for democracies, where they still suffer death threats and abuses, but where they are far freer and prouder of the West than those Westerners who know only freedom but now practice a dreadful feeing of guilt -- mostly for things they did not do.
The West not only turns its back the new slave markets; the UN Human Rights Council actually welcomes states such as Sudan, where tens of thousands of women and children from mostly Christian villages were enslaved during Jihadi raids; Kenya and Nigeria, where the police last fall rescued hundreds of men and boys chained in an Islamic school; Pakistan, where Christians are condemned to servitude, and Mauritania, where two in every 100 people are still held as slaves. It is the same UN Human Rights Council that now, thanks to pressure by African countries, wants to investigate "systemic racism in the US". US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo noted:

"If the Council were honest, it would recognize the strengths of American democracy and urge authoritarian regimes around the world to model American democracy and to hold their nations to the same high standards of accountability and transparency that we Americans apply to ourselves".

It is high time for the United States to stop funding the United Nations. The United Nations is being used to perpetuate injustice, not stop it.
Real slave traders and racists -- those who believe Western societies and values should not exist at all -- most likely look at the current Western self-flagellation and cheer their approval.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

The neoliberal counter-revolution–latest phase in Democrat’s War Against Trump

Posted on July 6, 2020 by therearenosunglasses

The neoliberal counter-revolution

We’re witnessing a reaction to the nationalist uprising

 

Sohrab Ahmari

 

A demonstrator faces up to police as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest in Seattle is dismantled

America is not in the middle of a revolution — it is a reactionary putsch. About four years ago, the sort of people who had acquired position and influence as a result of globalization were turfed out of power for the first time in decades. They watched in horror as voters across the world chose Brexit, Donald Trump and other populist and conservative-nationalist options.

This deposition explains the storm of unrest battering American cities from coast to coast and making waves in Europe as well. The storm’s ferocity — the looting, the mobs, the mass lawlessness, the zealous iconoclasm, the deranged slogans like #DefundPolice — terrifies ordinary Americans. Many conservatives, especially, believe they are facing a revolution targeting the very foundations of American order.

But when national institutions bow (or kneel) to the street fighters’ demands, it should tell us that something else is going on. We aren’t dealing with a Maoist or Marxist revolt, even if some protagonists spout hard-leftish rhetoric. Rather, what’s playing out is a counter-revolution of the neoliberal class — academe, media, large corporations, ‘experts’, Big Tech — against the nationalist revolution launched in 2016. The supposed insurgents and the elites are marching in the streets together, taking the knee together.

They do not seek a radically new arrangement, but a return to the pre-Trump, pre-Brexit status quo ante which was working out very well for them. It was, of course, working out less well for the working class of all races, who bore the brunt of their preferred policy mix: open borders, free trade without limits, an aggressive cultural liberalism that corroded tradition and community, technocratic ‘global governance’ that neutered democracy and politics as such.

Conservatives generally don’t tend to pay much attention to class analysis. But in this case, it does help to explain what’s going on. And it helps to illuminate the true nature of social movements that pose as, and can get mistaken for, revolutionary leftism.

Does anyone seriously believe the American establishment — Walmart, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, the trustees of Ivy League universities, the major sports leagues, even Brooks Brothers, for God’s sake — would sign on to a movement that genuinely threatened its material interests? And yet these and many other firms and institutions are falling over themselves to express solidarity with the ‘uprising’, some going so far as to donate millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter, an outfit that lists among its objectives the abolition of the nuclear family.

 

Over the past four years, every trick in the book has been used to end the ‘nightmare’ of national conservatism and populism. The methods deployed by the elite reflect its tendencies and preferences as a class. Just think of recent skirmishes. A decisive majority of British voters resolved to leave the EU and then had to spend three years fighting a political establishment that marshaled all its vast resources to thwart Brexit. It failed. 

In America the liberal establishment tried harder, failed harder, but learned more. From the minute Trump won the presidential election, Democrats, elements of the security apparatus, and their media allies set out to undo the result. The marquee events were the ‘collusion’ probe and an impeachment push that was perhaps the single biggest insult ever to the intelligence of the American people. There were also countless smaller attempts to unseat Trump and destroy his entourage.

Trump survived it all. Now comes the new wave of rioters and mad iconoclasts, which many corporates and Democratic governors and mayors have actively encouraged, even as they continue to bar children from public parks and families from holding outdoor funerals, citing COVID-19 risks.

But wait: riots and statue-toppling — such things aren’t congenial to establishment figures, are they? The logic becomes apparent when you see it as a form of class struggle. For all its fury, the storm of the riots ends. There is little resembling demands for ongoing redistributive justice of the kind the old left championed. No labor solidarity, nothing to do with wages and job security. Just demands for ‘representation’ or diversity (on corporate boards, in university curricula, etc). And, of course, the firing of those who say the wrong or awkward thing in the digital public square, in workplaces or in classrooms.

The goal isn’t to rectify concrete economic injustices: massive inequalities in wealth, health and job security. The goal is precisely the opposite: to mitigate, to defer, to smooth over, to mask these substantive disagreements and instead have battles on procedural mechanisms for upholding manners.

Which social class most excels at politically correct manners? That would be the professional-managerial class, the laptop class. Its children learn the patois for discussing ‘issues of race, gender and sexuality’ from an early age. They’re expected to have mastered it by the time they take their entry-level jobs. It’s a skill that private schools are doubtless teaching already.

Working-class people, meanwhile, are most likely to struggle with this language. Even when they mean well they don’t always get it right, not least because the rules constantly shift with the vagaries of critical race theory and LGBTQ acronyms. By fortifying the requirements to speak and think correctly — and raising the stakes for failures — the neoliberal class has now built a repressive new mechanism for staying at the top and keeping the oiks down. Especially those who voted the wrong way in 2016.

So whatever you do, don’t call it a leftist revolution. With the flags, the protests, the kneeling and the new language, it’s a counter-revolution. The outcome remains uncertain, but the class war is well and truly under way.

Sohrab Ahmari is op-ed editor of the New York Post. His next book, The Unbroken Thread, will be published in spring 2021. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine

The Real Civil War Was the Rich Against Everyone Else, Just Like Now

Posted on July 7, 2020 by therearenosunglasses

The True War

At his trial in Nuremberg, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring is recorded as saying, “Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein,”   In common speech, this is often misquoted as, “History is written by the victor.”  The actual words are, “The victor is always the judge and the loser is the accused.”  Truer words he probably never spoke.

To this I would add that the judge always positions himself as the moral superior.  After all, might makes right, sine qua non?
America is convulsing because its history is a bedtime story told to itself to hide the painful truth.  On all sides of the current mess there, folks are asking, or rather stating that Civil War 2.0 is underway.  In a profound sense, it is just a continuation of the original, much like World War 2 was inevitable because the wrongs of World War 1 where never settled.
After orgies of violence we humans call wars, the winners – and losers – are in a rush to turn away from the horrors that were committed on all sides, and in that rush a convenient narrative is concocted to ease the vivid nightmares.  The winners absolve themselves of the crimes by heaping guilt on the shoulders of the losers, regardless of right or wrong, or the truth.
As any good lawyer will tell you, there are three sides to every story – your side, my side and the truth.
When it comes to the American Civil War of 1860-63, the soothing narrative the winners concocted was that the evil South wanted slavery, and the bright shiny North wanted to abolish it.  Since the North won, their side of the story has dominated the narrative, but that makes it neither right nor the truth.  The real story is much more complex with plenty of guilt to go ’round.  As we proper Southerners know it, it was the War of Northern Aggression.
As the great Greek tragedian Aeschyius reminds us, “The first casualty of war is the Truth.”
The issue of slavery began simmering in the Union before the ink was dry on the Constitution.  Abolitionists wanted to end slavery primarily because it was a vestige of British colonialism, but also because it was antithetical to the ideals of the new nation.
Many abolitionists advocated sending slaves back to Africa, which eventually happened when a US colonial group created the western African nation of Liberia and offered passage to any slaves wanting to emigrate there.  Abraham Lincoln recognized Liberian independence in 1862, and liked the idea of repatriating slaves, as he was not a fan of racial integration.
In 1824, the Democratic Republican Party split into two factions – the Democrats and Republicans – over support for John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.  Among the issues at the core of the split was slavery and abolition.  The Democrats were willing to compromise on slavery, as demonstrated by The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which brought the free state of Maine and the slave state of Missouri into the Union.
While the compromise placated both sides for  atime by maintaining the balance between free and slave states, it was undone by the Kanas-Nebraska Act of 1858.
Aside from all the idealistic rhetoric, the underlying tensions were primarily economic.  The northern states were dominated by industrial and financial interests, while the southern states were agricultural.  The balance that the politicians sought to maintain was between the suppliers of raw materials and food in the south, and the factories and banks in the north.  This tension was exacerbated by the apportionment of representation using population.  This one fact is the seed from which the Civil War and two centuries of social unrest have sprung.
The north benefitted from cheap raw materials that made its finished products highly competitive in global markets.  This made the industrialists and financiers grossly wealthy.  But they also faced increasing pressure to raise wages and offer benefits to labor, an issue that didn’t affect the slave states.  Furthermore, it was in the best interests of the northern parties to maintain the supply of cheap raw materials.
The south, on the other hand, found that they could fetch much better prices for their goods in Europe, and could buy manufactured goods cheaper than from the north.  More and more of the south’s output was shipping overseas.  The southern plantation owners were also hiking the prices for northern buyers, while buying fewer and fewer finished goods from the north, and their wealth was beginning to rival that of the industrial-financial interests.  Thanks to slavery, the plantation owners didn’t have an expanding middle class to deal with.
The United States enacted Protective Tariffs almost as fast as the nation came into being.  While they were initially intended to be temporary to help fill up the Treasury, they were never lifted and became a tool of northern interests to maintain control over the south.  By making southern goods more expensive overseas, they forced the flow of raw materials to their factories.  Import tariffs were levied to force the south to buy finished goods from the north.
This made the industrial-financial interests happy, and the expanding middle class enjoyed rising wages, who thus threw their support behind the tariffs, as well.  In the election of 1860, the Morill Tariff was a major plank in the Republican party’s platform, and James Buchanan ended up signing the Morill Tariff into law before Abraham Lincoln took office on 4 March 1861.
In November of 1860, frustrated by tariffs, economic shenanigans and the northern dominance of Congress, the southern senators walked out and secession soon followed on 12 April 1861.  The northern bankers and financiers, fearing a middle class uprising and shrinking profits, persuaded Lincoln to set up a blockade.
The blockade was a blatant act of war against sovereign states who were exercising their Ninth Amendment and Tenth Amendment rights.  The blockade covered 3,500 miles of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, cutting off the newly formed Confederacy from their trading partners in Europe.  The same act today is still considered an act of war against a sovereign nation, though the US still uses it as a routine sanction against nations it doesn’t like (i.e. the banking and financial interests disapprove of).
There was and is no law preventing secession from the Union and every foundational document of the united States recognizes this fundamental right.  Thomas Jefferson himself wrote in the Declaration of Independence that a people had the right to sever ties with another when the government of the latter was abusive to their interests and liberty.
We must pause here to note that the abolutionist argument at the time was not about ending slavery, but whether new territories conquered by the federal government in its war on the native population would expand slavery into those regions or not.  We must also note that not a single slave ship ever flew the Confederate flag.  They were either British of Union flagged ships.
Having undermined the Confederate economy and brutally invaded a sovereign state (a common practice of the US), the Union forces decimated the South, which produced raw materials and not the finished goods of the north.  So the north cut off the South’s livelihood, while protecting their interests by purchasing raw materials from colonial powers abroad.
Note well that the Confederate states were exercising their rights, as recognized and memorialized in the US Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Also note that the Union invaded the Confederacy, and not the other way around.
The north clearly profited from slavery on all sides and had no intention to end its practice.  On the other side, the cost of purchasing and maintaining slavery was becoming a burden on the southern producers and would have ended one way or another before the end of the century.
On 1 January 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  Contrary to the legend propagated by the victors, this document did not “free” any slaves.  It promised escaped slaves that made it past the Mason-Dixon line that they would not be returned to the Confederacy.    It did not grant equal rights or suffrage or even freedom – just that they would not be returned to their owners.  In other words, it was yet another act of deception by the Union, which it was quite adept at even then.
In fact, slavery in the north did not end for several years after the Civil War and emancipation proclamation.  There was a slave market right where Wall Street is today into the 1870s.
The Dred Scott decision, which affirmed the right of property to a human being, was not overturned until the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, a full three years after the end of the Civil War, and even then the practice of slavery in the north tapered off slowly.
That the Fourteenth Amendment destroyed God-given rights in favor of “privileges and immunities” is the topic of many a long and dry essay.  Suffice it to say that the bankers and financiers did not free any slaves, but rather made slaves of every citizen of the “United States,” itself a corporate entity created by the Act of 1871. (note “united States” versus United States)
It may seem like legal hair-splitting, but there is a profound difference between a “right” and  “privilege”.    In Enlightenment philosophy, a right is the sacred property of an individual by virtue of birth.  A privilege is granted by an authority and requires a license or permission to exercise.  Go back and read the Fourteenth Amendment again.  As Thomas Jefferson noted in the Declaration of Independence, rights are “unalienable” or incapable of having a lien placed on them.  In other words, no authority may claim possession of those rights.
The American Civil War was not about slavery as we commonly think of it.  It was in point of fact about expanding slavery to everyone, not ending it for some.  It was a key expansion of the banking and financial interests in the US, and by means of two world wars, expanding that error to the entire world.
Until we recognize the truth of the Civil War, and acknowledge that we are all slaves to the banking class, we will never be truly free.  In many ways, this one Great Lie has caused so much death and destruction in our modern world.  Because we labor under a profound deception, we can never cure the ills that afflict us at this very moment.
Think about how many times you have heard or said, “The Constitution grants us the right to…”  It does no such thing, nor does the government grant rights.  We are born with them as a gift of Nature and Nature’s Creator.
The American Civil War never ended, it only became a global conflict with vile banksters pulling the strings.  We need only look a bit closer at where groups like Black Lives Matter or Antifa get their funding to see the subversive hand of banking and finance.
It is not just American blacks who are owed reparations, it is every human being on this planet born since the banksters took over.
New York Slave Market
Dred Scott decision
Franklin Pierce

Dr. Ron Paul Challenges Texas Exaggeration of Covid Virus Numbers

Posted on July 7, 2020 by therearenosunglasses

SOURCE

Is the Texas Covid ‘Spike’ Fake News?

written by ron paul

On July 2nd, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order mandating the wearing of face masks across the state, whether indoors or outdoors, when six feet cannot be maintained between people. In the governor’s decree, he cited a rise in Covid cases, a rise in test positivity, and a rise in hospitalizations as justification to force people to cover their faces in public.

The move is not only a violation of the civil liberties of all Texans. Abbott may have based his executive order on inaccurate information about a “rise” in Covid cases due to the Texas State Department of Health Services changing the definition of what constitutes a “Covid case.”

Thanks goes to Collin County Judge Chris Hill for blowing the whistle on what appears to be a move in mid-May to redefine what was a “Covid” case to open the door to a massive increase – all to match the mainstream media line that a “second wave” was on the way. In a Commissioners Court hearing for Collin County on May 18th, it was revealed that while previously the determination of a Covid “case” was a confirmed test result, the definition was suddenly changed to count “probable” cases as “cases.” At the same time, the threshold for determining “probable” was lowered to a ridiculous level.
As Judge Hill said at that May 18th meeting, “If you have a subjective fever and you have a headache and you live in Collin County, you now meet the qualifications to be a probable COVID patient. It is remarkable how low the standard is now.”

Even worse, once a “probable” case was determined based on possibly unrelated subjective criteria, up to 15 people in possible contact with that “probable” case were also listed as “probable cases.” And “probable cases” were considered cases.

Repeat that farce across Texas and is it any wonder there was a “spike” in “cases”? Also, Governor Abbott’s claim that hospitals were being over-run by Covid patients was refuted by the Houston hospital directors themselves, who said they were nowhere near actual capacity and in fact were about the same level as they were last year.
The basis for Abbott’s unconstitutional “executive order” has been shown to be false. Will he admit his mistake?
It is encouraging to see so many local and county officials across Texas announcing they will refuse to enforce Governor Abbott’s unconstitutional face mask order. Thankfully the spirit of freedom and love of liberty is still alive in Texas.
The “second wave” is driven by propaganda. Across the country, Covid testing increased from about 150,000 to more than 700,000 per day. You can’t drive through Houston without seeing a flurry of signs advertising “Free Covid test! Results in 15 minutes!” Last week Reuters reported that tests shipped around the country by the federal government were contaminated.
Deaths from coronavirus – even the deaths “with” coronavirus rather than deaths “from” coronavirus – are down more than 90 percent since the peak in April. The decline in deaths continues. That means we are closer to the “herd immunity” that will finally kill this virus. Yet Governor Abbott and others across the country see this as a reason to lock the country back down.

John W. Whitehead : Real Democracies Do NOT Cast Votes For “the lesser of two evils” - The Deep State’s Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Is Working

Real Democracies Do NOT Cast Votes For “the lesser of two evils”

Posted on July 10, 2020 by therearenosunglasses

The Deep State’s Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Is Working

Tyranny Without a Tyrant

by John W. Whitehead

In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

― Hannah Arendt, On Violence

What exactly is going on?
Is this revolution? Is this anarchy? Is this a spectacle engineered to distract us from the machinations of the police state? Is this a sociological means of re-setting our national equilibrium? Is this a Machiavellian scheme designed to further polarize the populace and undermine our efforts to stand unified against government tyranny? Is this so-called populist uprising actually a manufactured race war and election-year referendum on who should occupy the White House?

Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free speech rights, the violent blowback after years of government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is overwhelming the rights of the individual, the oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us anywhere good.
Certainly it’s not leading to more freedom.
This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding.

It must be said: the Black Lives Matter protests have not helped. Inadvertently or intentionally, these protests—tinged with mob violence, rampant incivility, intolerance, and an arrogant disdain for how an open marketplace of ideas can advance freedom—have politicized what should never have been politicized: police brutality and the government’s ongoing assaults on our freedoms.

For one brief moment in the wake of George Floyd’s death, it seemed as if finally “we the people” might put aside our differences long enough to stand united in outrage over the government’s brutality.

That sliver of unity didn’t last.
We may be worse off now than we were before.
Suddenly, no one seems to be talking about any of the egregious governmental abuses that are still wreaking havoc on our freedoms: police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none?
You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.
This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

It works the same way every time
The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence, illegal immigration, and so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.
Having allowed our fears to be codified and our actions criminalized, we now find ourselves in a strange new world where just about everything we do is criminalized, even our ability to choose whether or not to wear a mask in public during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Strangely enough, in the face of outright corruption and incompetency on the part of our elected officials, Americans in general remain relatively gullible, eager to be persuaded that the government can solve the problems that plague us, whether it be terrorism, an economic depression, an environmental disaster, or a global pandemic.

We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are neither wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests. Yet having bought into the false notion that the government does indeed know what’s best for us and can ensure not only our safety but our happiness and will take care of us from cradle to grave—that is, from daycare centers to nursing homes—we have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and turned into slaves at the bidding of a government that cares little for our freedoms or our happiness.
The lesson is this: once a free people allows the government inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny.
Nor does it seem to matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm anymore. Indeed, the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government, whose priorities are to milk “we the people” of our hard-earned money (by way of taxes, fines and fees) and remain in control and in power.

Modern government in general—ranging from the militarized police in SWAT team gear crashing through our doors to the rash of innocent citizens being gunned down by police to the invasive spying on everything we do—is acting illogically, even psychopathically. (The characteristics of a psychopath include a “lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others.”)

When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, and then jails us if we dare step out of line, punishes us unjustly without remorse, and refuses to own up to its failings, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”
So where does that leave us?
Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.

Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.

The pickle we find ourselves in speaks volumes about the nature of the government beast we have been saddled with and how it views the rights and sovereignty of “we the people.”
Now you don’t hear a lot about sovereignty anymore. Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. 

Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.
In other words, in America, “we the people”— sovereign citizens—call the shots.
So when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.
That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?

In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.
The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.” Worst of all, “we the people” have become desensitized to this constant undermining of our freedoms.
How do we reconcile the Founders’ vision of the government as an entity whose only purpose is to serve the people with the police state’s insistence that the government is the supreme authority, that its power trumps that of the people themselves, and that it may exercise that power in any way it sees fit (that includes government agents crashing through doors, mass arrests, ethnic cleansing, racial profiling, indefinite detentions without due process, and internment camps)?
They cannot be reconciled. They are polar opposites.
We are fast approaching a moment of reckoning where we will be forced to choose between the vision of what America was intended to be (a model for self-governance where power is vested in the people) and the reality of what it has become (a police state where power is vested in the government).
This slide into totalitarianism—helped along by overcriminalization, government surveillance, militarized police, neighbors turning in neighbors, privatized prisons, and forced labor camps, to name just a few similarities—is tracking very closely with what happened in Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.

We are walking a dangerous path right now.
No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people.
Despite what is taught in school and the propaganda that is peddled by the media, the 2020 presidential election is not a populist election for a representative. Rather, it’s a gathering of shareholders to select the next CEO, a fact reinforced by the nation’s archaic electoral college system.
Anyone who believes that this election will bring about any real change in how the American government does business is either incredibly naïve, woefully out-of-touch, or oblivious to the fact that as an in-depth Princeton University study shows, we now live in an oligarchy that is “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.”

When a country spends close to $10 billion on elections to select what is, for all intents and purposes, a glorified homecoming king or queen to occupy the White House and fill other government seats, while more than 40 million of its people live in poverty, more than 40 million Americans are on unemployment, more than 500,000 Americans are homeless, and analysts forecast it will take a decade to work our way out of the current COVID-induced recession, that’s a country whose priorities are out of step with the needs of its people.
Be warned, however: the Establishment—the Deep State and its corporate partners that really run the show, pull the strings and dictate the policies, no matter who occupies the Oval Office—is not going to allow anyone to take office who will unravel their power structures. Those who have attempted to do so in the past have been effectively put out of commission.
Voting sustains the illusion that we have a democratic republic, but it is merely a dictatorship in disguise, or what political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page more accurately refer to as an “economic élite domination.”
In such an environment, the economic elite (lobbyists, corporations, monied special interest groups) dictate national policy. As the Princeton University oligarchy study indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. As such, the citizenry has little if any impact on the policies of government.

We have been saddled with a two-party system and fooled into believing that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when in fact, the two parties are exactly the same. As one commentator noted, both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty

We’re drowning under the weight of too much debt, too many wars, too much power in the hands of a centralized government run by a corporate elite, too many militarized police, too many laws, too many lobbyists, and generally too much bad news.

The powers-that-be want us to believe that our job as citizens begins and ends on Election Day. They want us to believe that we have no right to complain about the state of the nation unless we’ve cast our vote one way or the other. They want us to remain divided over politics, hostile to those with whom we disagree politically, and intolerant of anyone or anything whose solutions to what ails this country differ from our own.
What they don’t want us talking about is the fact that the government is corrupt, the system is rigged, the politicians don’t represent us, the electoral college is a joke, most of the candidates are frauds, and, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we as a nation are repeating the mistakes of history—namely, allowing a totalitarian state to reign over us.
Former concentration camp inmate Hannah Arendt warned against this when she wrote, “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”
As we once again find ourselves faced with the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the people” have a decision to make: do we simply participate in the collapse of the American republic as it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for government that is being fobbed off on us?
Never forget that the lesser of two evils is still evil.

 

 

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Read other articles by John W..

Stephen Daisley : When Democracy Gives Way To Mob Rule - The creeping nihilism of the American left

When Democracy Gives Way To Mob Rule

Posted on June 30, 2020 by therearenosunglasses

The creeping nihilism of the American left

If the mob believes it is justified, anything it does is justifiable

Stephen Daisley

 

The twin temptations of American liberalism are to radical excess and conservative stasis. Because liberalism is a practical philosophy of government, given its most comprehensive expression in the Democratic party, it sometimes lists left and other times right. The Minneapolis moment is different in that it sees liberalism lean in two directions at once and get it wrong on both counts.

Scenes of rioting, looting and the firebombing of a police station bring out the Rousseauean id of the liberal psyche and a righteous impatience to burn it all to the ground and start over. (‘Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death/ The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies/ We, the people, must redeem…/ And make America again!’) The drift towards radicalism on the center-left did not begin with the killing of George Floyd. Some American progressives are done with America, as the New York Times’s flawed, fervently defended and Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project illustrates. The taking of another black life has poured accelerant on this process.

The creeping of nihilism into the mainstream American left has brought with it a decadent attitude towards mob violence. If the mob believes it is justified, anything it does is justifiable. Commenting on the riots, the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones (creator of the 1619 Project) says: ‘Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence… When we have people who say people should respect the law — they’re not respecting the law because the law’s not respecting them. You can’t say that regular citizens should play by all of the rules when agents of the state clearly are not.’ We are so accustomed to being told speech is violence that it hardly fazes us to hear that violence is not.

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo monologues: ‘Too many see the protests as the problem. No, the problem is what forced your fellow citizens to take to the streets, persistent, and poisonous inequities and justice. Please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.’ That would be the First Amendment, adopted, in part, to protect ‘the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances’. 
CNN’s primetime line-up: the last line of defense between Donald Trump and the Constitution they haven’t read.

Steven Thrasher, assistant professor in journalism at Northwestern University, writes in Slate:

‘As any military tactician or social justice organizer can tell you, direct action gets the goods. The destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response, and a predictable one. The uprising we’ve seen this week is speaking to the American police state in its own language, up to and including the use of fireworks to mark a battle victory.’

 

Thrasher may believe that re-enacting the plot of Assault on Precinct 13 is a legitimate response to what he calls ‘the lynching of George Floyd’, but what is a liberal magazine like Slate doing publishing his manifesto?

Liberals have leapt on a leftwards-zipping conveyor belt that will carry them far from the philosophy that has until now defined them and defined American progress. They will have to accede to the slander that America is at root a racist enterprise systemically geared towards white supremacy. They will have to declare the rule of law illegitimate and the rule of the mob the path to justice. They will have to embrace racial division rather than work to overcome it. They will have, in short, to stop being liberals.

Radicalism might burn with a virtuous fury but it harbors its own prejudices, as rioters’ attacks on synagogues in Los Angeles and Richmond underline. 
 Liberals should resolve to remain liberals, but that does not mean standing still. This is a moment to reassess American liberalism’s surrender to conservatism on criminal justice, traceable to the 1994 Crime Bill drafted by Joe Biden and signed by Bill Clinton. 
The Marshall Project best sums up this bloated sack of good intentions, bad intentions and terrible policies: ‘The crime bill did not inaugurate the era of mass incarceration, but it certainly escalated the scale of its impact.’ 
What it also did was cement a bipartisan consensus that to be ‘tough on crime’ meant more cops with bigger guns enforcing more laws with harsher penalties. Police, as the frontline of this authoritarian spasm, were transformed into civilian soldiers and symbols of fear for citizens, not least minorities.

In the roll call of black men killed by police, George Floyd is another name to be forgotten. Michael Stewart (Brooklyn; 1983; blunt force trauma; all officers acquitted) was meant to stick in the public consciousness, as were Amadou Diallo (Bronx; 1999; 19 gunshot wounds; all officers acquitted) and Samuel DuBose (Cincinnati; 2015; gunshot wound to the head; mistrial, hung jury, charges dismissed). Time isn’t a healer, it’s an accomplice. We don’t know if George Floyd was killed because he was black but we do know he was killed by a cop. For eight minutes and 46 seconds, an officer’s knee pressed down on his neck, all the while he pleaded: ‘I can’t breathe.’ That is not police brutality; that is sadism.

This is an immediate policy problem liberals can direct their energies to. Start by removing the roadblock to reform: police unions. Restrict collective bargaining to salary and benefits so that police commissioners and oversight bodies, not union negotiators, determine internal disciplinary regimes. Legislate mandatory 360-degree bodycams for all patrol officers and demilitarize the police by limiting procurement of armored personnel carriers, riot equipment, and military-grade weapons. (Between 2006 and 2016 US police forces acquired more than 83,000 M16s, an assault rifle favored by the Kurdish Peshmerga.) The next step up involves stripping police of the qualified immunity that makes it perversely difficult to bring civil rights suits against excessive force or racial discrimination.

Overpolicing is only one dysfunction in a multi-dysfunctional criminal justice system. 55.7 percent of state prisoners (and only 7.8 percent of federal prisoners) are serving time for a violent offense and, while black prisoner numbers are falling, black male incarceration is still 5.8 times that of whites. Sentencing reform aimed at minimizing custodial terms for non-violent crimes should be a lively liberal cause.

The failed war on drugs has destroyed too many lives and too many families. Getting government out of the prohibition business would remove more than a quarter-million inmates from US prisons, 80,000 of them black. Liberals should also revive their opposition to the death penalty. 
For all the other arguments against capital punishment, racial bias should particularly trouble liberals: Black Americans constitute 13.4 percent of the general population but account for 42 percent of death row inmates. Democrats fearful of the electoral consequences of adopting a reform agenda should know they have Republican allies in organizations like Right on Crime and Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.

The cry ‘no justice, no peace’ is in the air but without peace there can be no justice. Revolution and reaction can deliver one or the other but only liberalism promises both.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.

Charles Lipson : Defund the thought police–Put An End To Political Correctness

Defund the thought police–Put An End To Political Correctness

Posted on July 11, 2020 by therearenosunglasses

Defund the thought police

• By CHARLES LIPSON

Due process is not the strong suit of mobs. Neither is nuance, open discussion or disagreement. These inherent defects should be painfully obvious as mobs pull down statues, seize sections of cities and demand the public approach them on bended knee, literally.

Anyone who dares push back faces immediate censure. If the mob is successful, any offenders will lose their jobs. Feckless employers are all too eager to appease the mob and hope it turns on another target.

In this perilous environment, the most frenzied voices do more than dominate the public square. They monopolize it by silencing dissent. They have received full-throated support from the tech giants that control discussion and the media giants determined to shape the narrative rather than report the news.

Twitter and NBC are the poster children for this assault on free discussion. Their suppression in the name of “social justice” betrays the idea, best articulated in John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” that competing, divergent views lead to greater understanding.

The idea of an open forum, so basic to democracies, already lies a-moldering in the grave of academia, at least in the humanities and social sciences. Imagine applying for a job in gender studies and saying you oppose abortions after, say, week 38. The term for such a person is “unemployed.”

Imagine merely calling for a discussion on the pros and cons of affirmative action, taking the negative side, and hoping to win tenure. Bad career move.

University administrations are equally rigid. Rejecting affirmative action, questioning the implementation of Title IX or opposing Black Lives Matter would end your chances of being hired at nearly every U.S. university. Yet all of them proudly tout, with no sense of irony, their “office of diversity and inclusion,” fully staffed and generously funded. For them, of course, diversity never includes diverse viewpoints. It’s all about DNA and gender identity.

Modern universities are now well-oiled machines to stamp out dissenting views. That’s been true for decades. What’s new, and disturbing, is seeing this orthodoxy spread to K-12 education, corporate HR departments, churches and newsrooms.

The “thought police” are on patrol, twirling the twin batons of guilt and moral superiority. Dissent from their views is not just considered an error, much less an innocent one. It is considered immoral, illegitimate and unworthy of a public hearing.

Although both left and right have moved steadily toward this abyss, the worst excesses today come from the left, just as they came from the right in the 1950s. Opponents are seen as apostates who deserve to be symbolically burned at the stake.

The last time we saw this frenzy was during the dark days of Joe McCarthy and the Hollywood Blacklist. People flocked to Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible,” because it likened the moment to the Salem witch trials. Today’s audiences would be appalled to hear the critique applies to them. Alas, it does.

Suppressing free speech is not the same as violence, but the two are invariably intertwined. The threat of violence not only underscores the intensity of particular views — it heightens the danger of voicing disagreement.

Large-scale violence, whatever its source or purpose, undermines social stability and assails democratic procedures. It won’t stand for long because the public won’t tolerate it. They will demand leaders who restore order. The only question is what kind of order and at what cost.

The first duty of any government is to establish order and safety, ideally with popular support. Constitutional democracies have procedures to establish order, enforce it and administer penalties for violating it.

In the U.S., we have one additional constraint, a fundamentally important one: personal rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, cannot be overridden, even by large majorities. This social and political order is not static — it is always evolving — but there are well-established procedures to make those changes, ensure all voices are heard and protect each citizen’s inalienable rights.

Calls to “defund the police” attack the very idea of establishing this peaceful public order. Cities foolish enough to attempt it will unleash violence and predation and meet a predictable backlash from citizens determined to protect their lives and property. They will either stand and fight or flee to safer spaces.

Although mobs are not always violent, rule by mobs is always a threat to constitutional democracy. Even peaceful protests can morph into mob rule when they stamp out dissenting voices or quash democratic procedures.

We are seeing some of that today, where peaceful protests, guaranteed under the First Amendment’s rights to free speech and assembly, attempt to suppress speech, topple symbols they claim to hate and smear anyone bold enough to disagree.

To preserve our democracy, we must resist the mob. That begins with understanding the gravity of the threat. Yielding the public square to this “thought police” is the road to tyranny. It leads away from our hard-won achievement of ordered liberty and constitutional democracy.

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago. This article is reprinted with permission from Real Clear Politics, where it first appeared.

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