Year: 2016

Liberty Links 11/19/16

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Must Reads Ringside With Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots “An Entirely New Political Movement” (The Hollywood Reporter) Trump’s Pick for Attorney General Scoffed at ‘Too Big to Fail’ (Sessions seems pretty good on corporate crime, Bloomberg) Harsher Security Tactics? Obama Left Door Ajar, and Donald Trump Is Knocking (The New … Read more

What’s the Truth About Steve Bannon?

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The demonization of Stephen K. Bannon from all angles as soon as he was named Trump’s chief strategist was unlike anything I can recall. It was even worse than what the media said about Trump throughout his campaign, which immediately made me wonder — is this guy really as horrible as they say?

If I, someone who reads news constantly, can’t be sure what to make of Bannon, how is it possible that millions of Americans on Twitter and Facebook could be so sure he’s a “white nationalist” and anti-Semite? The simple answer is that the media told them so, which is extremely dangerous. As such, I decided to start reading as much as I could about Bannon.

Unlike 90% of these overnight Steve Bannon experts, I had already read the lengthy 2015 Bloomberg article on him, This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America. I remember finding it so interesting that I tweeted it out to my followers, imploring them to take a read. I can’t recall the details of the piece, but I remember my major takeaway was that this man is a force to be reckoned with. Of course, reading one article about Bannon a year ago gives you very little real knowledge about him. As such, given all the recent scrutiny, I went on a hunt for both pro and anti-Bannon articles. I figured I might be able to come to some sort of better, although naturally still quite imperfect, conclusion.

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Brilliant, Must Read of the Day – ‘You Are Still Crying Wolf’

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Scott Alexander has just penned what is perhaps the most brilliant, and important, post-election article I have read. It’s titled, You Are Still Crying Wolf, and here are the first few paragraphs:

[Content warning: hate crimes, Trump, racism. I have turned off comments to keep out bad people who might be attracted by this sort of thing. Avoid sharing in places where this will attract the wrong kind of attention, as per your best judgment. Please don’t interpret anything in this article to mean that Trump is not super terrible]

[Epistemic status: A reduction of a complicated issue to only 8000 words, because nobody would read it if it were longer. I think this is true but incomplete. I will try to discuss missing parts at more length later.]

I.

A New York Times article from last September that went viral only recently: Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump. It asks whether Democrats have “cried wolf” so many times that nobody believes them anymore. And so:

When “honorable and decent men” like McCain and Romney “are reflexively dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a G.O.P. electorate that doesn’t listen to admonitions when the genuine article is in their midst”.

I have a different perspective. Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as “the white power candidate” and “the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era” was overblown. I said that “the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data”, and predicted that:

If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.

Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data (source).

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Trump made gains among blacks. He made big among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.

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Zerohedge Included in What NY Magazine Calls ‘Extremely Helpful List of Fake and Misleading News Sites’

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Before I get into the meat of this article, I want to remind you of a few paragraphs I wrote back in the August post,  Questioning Hillary’s Health is Not Conspiracy Theory:

As I look at the landscape in 2016 to-date, I observe emergent signs that alternative media is finally beginning to take over from the legacy mainstream media when it comes to impact and influence. The mainstream media (unlike with John McCain in 2008), had decided that Hillary Clinton’s health was not an issue and chose not to pursue it. Many in the alternative media world took a different position, and due to mainstream media’s failure to inform the American public for decades, the alternative media drove that issue to the top of the news cycle. That’s power.

This is an incredibly big deal, and the mainstream media intuitively knows what it means. It means a total loss of legitimately, prestige and power. All of which is well deserved of course.

So here’s the bottom line. 2016 represents the true beginning of what I would call the Media Wars. Alternative media is now capable of driving the news cycle. Mainstream media now has no choice but to fight back, and fight back it will. It will fight back dirty. This is going to get very ugly, but by the time the dust has settled, I think much of the mainstream media will be left as a shell of its former self.

With Hillary’s loss, the mainstream media and its distressed and discredited allies are in a panic like we have never seen before. They understand that alternative voices now influence the public as much, if not more so, than the mainstream press, and they are now out to destroy those voices. The way they are going about this is by placing anti-establishment voices under the blanket umbrella of “fake news,” or in the case of Twitter, they just seem to purge people they don’t like from the platform altogether.

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Draining the Neocon National Security Swamp? Don’t Count on It

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Now that things have gotten serious, it’s time for Donald Trump to kiss the ring.

Since clinching the Republican nomination, Trump’s true colors have started to emerge. He named a former Goldman Sachs partner to run his fundraising efforts, he named petty authoritarian, gangster wannabe Chris Christie to run his transition team, and he chose “everyone’s a terrorist” Rudy Giuliani as his planned head of the domestic gestapo, the Department of Homeland Security. He’s also been endorsed by Orc King Sheldon Adelson, who said he was prepared to spend $100 million to get him elected. Now he’s off to kiss the blood-soaked hands of Henry Kissinger.

– From the May 17, 2016 post: Donald Trump Will Meet War Criminal Henry Kissinger Tomorrow

Two names continue to be bandied about regarding Trump’s anticipated Secretary of State choice, neither of which are good. Those names are Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton. Rather than “draining the swamp,” this is more akin to me reliving either my 1990’s NYC childhood, or the post-9/11 neocon bonfire known as the George W. Bush administration.

For starters, John Bolton is about as reprehensible as you get, as Rand Paul so perfectly outlined in an Op-ed published earlier today over at Rare. Here’s some of what he wrote:

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Meet California’s 218,667 Public Employees Making Over $100,000/Year

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Open the Books is back with another important government transparency report. This time, the organization looked closely at California payrolls, and found that 218,667 public sector employees earn six-figure salaries (in many cases far above that threshold), at a cost of $35 billion.

If Californians are fine with this sort of thing, more power to them, but it’s important to be knowledgable about where and how tax dollars are spent.

Below are a few highlight’s from Adam Andrzejewski’s (founder of Open the Books) recent article published at Forbes titled, ‘$100K Minimum Wage’ For 220,000 Highly-Compensated California Public Employees Costs Taxpayers $35B:

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Students and Professors Send Letter to University of Virginia Head Criticizing Her For Quoting Thomas Jefferson

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I want to tell you how welcome you are to the White House. I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. 

Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet. Whatever he may have lacked, if he could have had his former colleague, Mr. Franklin, here we all would have been impressed.

– John F. Kennedy, at a dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners of the Western Hemisphere, 1962

Snowflake university culture in America may have just hit peak safe-space stupidity.

Here’s what happened according to the University of Virginia’s Cavalier Daily:

Several professors on Grounds collaborated to write a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan against the inclusion of a Thomas Jefferson quote in her post-election email Nov. 9. 

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President Obama Leaves Behind a Deplorable Civil Liberties Legacy

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More disappointing than the Obama administration itself (which was very disappointing), were the seemingly endless hordes of fake liberals constantly justifying and making excuses for his well documented litany of civil liberties abuses. Naturally, I likewise expect countless Trump supporters to instinctively make similar excuses for Trump if he should end up naming former Goldman Sachs Partner, and overall finance miscreant, Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary. This is a huge part of our problem as a nation. Rather than having well defined principles and defending them, we tend to pick personalities we like and then cheer them on as uncritically as our favorite sports teams.

Moving along, a New York Times article published yesterday highlighted some of the extremely illiberal policies perpetrated by so-called “liberal” champion, Barack Obama.

Here are a few key excerpts:

Over and over, Mr. Obama has imposed limits on his use of such powers but has not closed the door on them — a flexible approach premised on the idea that he and his successors could be trusted to use them prudently. Mr. Trump can now sweep away those limits and open the throttle on policies that Mr. Obama endorsed as lawful and legitimate for sparing use, like targeted killings in drone strikes and the use of indefinite detention and military tribunals for terrorism suspects.

And even in areas where Mr. Obama tried to terminate policies from the George W. Bush era — like torture and the detention of Americans and other people arrested on domestic soil as “enemy combatants” — his administration fought in court to prevent any ruling that the defunct practices had been illegal. The absence of a definitive repudiation could make it easier for Trump administration lawyers to revive the policies by invoking the same sweeping theories of executive power that were the basis for them in the Bush years. 

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Can President Trump Really ‘Open Up Libel Laws’?

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Ken White over at law blog Popehat has written a very useful article on whether or not Trump is likely to be the existential threat to free speech that so many are concerned about.

Fortunately, he argues that free speech is pretty well protected at the judicial level, adding that most contemporary attempts to whittle away at First Amendment rights actually emanate from “liberal” judges targeting hate speech, as opposed to conservative ones.

Here are notable excerpts from, Lawsplainer: About Trump “Opening Up” Libel Laws:

Donald Trump famously said he’d like to “open up” libel laws. How much should that concern you?

From my perspective — as a First Amendment advocate and an opponent of Trump — it should concern you as an attitude about speech, but not much as a policy agenda.

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Must Read – ‘You’re Afraid of Power, Not Trump’

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Something to think deeply about, irrespective of where you fall on the ideological spectrum.

Written by Jason Stapleton and published at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE):

You aren’t scared of Trump the person. Trump has been on this earth for 70 years and other than a general distaste for him, no one ever feared for their life because Trump walked the earth. He could do what he wanted because he didn’t affect your life. He had no control over you. What you fear is the power he now wields.

Republicans felt the same way eight years ago when Obama was elected, only for them, it was gun rights and religious persecution. We all remember the mass hysteria that drove gun prices up 200 even 300 percent. Obama called them bitter clingers; many others called them crazy right-wing conspiracy theorists.

Those of you on the progressive left fear Trump because he is going to have control over you. He has the power to affect your personal life and the lives of those you love and he has threatened to use that power in a way you find unthinkable.

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