Category Archives: libertarianism

Jihad’s Triumph On Westminster Bridge

Britain, GUNS, Intelligence, Islam, Jihad, libertarianism, The West

“Jihad’s Triumph On Westminster Bridge” is the current column, now on Townhall.com. An excerpt:

… The story of Khalid Masood is certainly festooned with the kind of studied failures you find in the tale of American homeboy Omar Mateen, who murdered 49 gay club-goers in Orlando, Florida, wounding 53 others. Mateen might have been a latent homosexual, but he was loud and proud about his orientation as an aspiring Muslim terrorist.

For his part, Masood was a violent criminal with many faces, in-and-out of the Islamized British prison system for inflicting “grievous bodily harm” on his countrymen. At every turn, Masood’s life of crime was met with soft responses. He slashes the face of a café owner in the village of Sussex but receives only two years in jail. A similar, but more severe, offense nets Masood, then Adrien Elms, a brief jail sentence for “the possession of an offensive weapon.”

A penal system that singles out for criminalization and punishment not the deadly assault and the intent behind it, but the possession of a weapon during the commission of said assault, is inviting escalation. (Oh, and once in jail, how about converting this kind of inmate to Christianity? That’s guaranteed to save lives in the future by giving inmates a higher purpose that precludes killing for rewards in the afterlife.)

So it was that Masood journeys from Sussex to Saudi Arabia, like any ordinary English lad would. (Is this now a rite of passage in Britain? BBC News’ correspondent Dominic Casciani seems to think so.) There, he can be found hard at work at the General Authority of Civil Aviation. (Yeah, right!) Then it’s back to East Sussex. With a nicely fattened, fraudulent CV, Masood goes to work for Aaron Chemicals, in Bodiam, a company which, as it appears, hired him despite his criminal record and predisposition to violence.

Speaking of corporate culture, how dangerously politically correct is it? How likely are corporations to put virtue-signaling and politically correct piety ahead of public and worker safety? You be the judge: British security firm G4S employed Omar Mateen, who was out of the closet about his Jihadi sympathies and aspirations. The Swiss security firm Securitas employed Dahir Adan, the Somali, Minnesota mall stabber. Out of all their St. Cloud applicants, Adan seemed like the best bet. …

… Read the rest. “Jihad’s Triumph On Westminster Bridge” is now on Townhall.com.

UPDATE IV (2/26): Julie Borowski’s Wrong: Judge Andrew Napolitano Is NO Rightist Libertarian

Ethics, Free Speech, libertarianism, Old Right, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Private Property

I call Judge Andrew Napolitano a left-libertarian. I prove it. Have done so over years.

Consistency is the touchstone of truth. If you keep changing your philosophical orientation as evinced by your changing positions, you’re more of a creedal politician, than a principled thinker.

Julie Borowski, on the other hand, asserts that Judge Andrew Napolitano is a bona fide rightist libertarian.

Ms. Borowski, do some digging. A search on Barely A Blog is a start. Here’s some of the yield:

Andrew Napolitano: Some Libertarian

Ann Coulter Offers A Corrective To Judge Andrew Napolitano

Judge Napolitano’s Left-Libertarian Confusion

Fighting Words From Left-Libertarian Egalitarians

Napolitano-Koch Connection? (Sixth Sense)

The Neoconservative & Left-Libertarian Positions: Liberty Is Universal

14th Amendment Jurisprudence For Dummies

She is “speaking” (I wish I could do that baby-doll voice) in response to Richard Spencer crashing the Students for Liberty Conference, a bit of performance art that brought out the leftist in the apoplectic attendees. (Yes, free speech belongs to the person who paid for the event. Still, don’t be so rude.)

I’ve tracked the Judge for a while. Unless a recent political conversion makes you a creedal rightist, then he isn’t one. A LOT of libertarians have suddenly found their inner rightist recently, when they crashed into the reality of Trump Nation. I respect the likes of Julie Borowski more. She sticks with her left-libertarian positions.

So, do opportunistic libertarian converts who, say, were open-borders until Trump, count as principled, creedal rightists? What CRAP. Actually, a good percentage of Fox News commentators were Never Trumpsters. For example, the Schlapp couple now riding high:

Much like neocons or liberals, libertarians move in tribes (although I have yet to be invited to join any of their intramural gatherings). Certain groups position themselves as top dogs. They enjoy donor and think-tank backing, and can reinvent themselves the way a slut like Madonna does (although, to her credit, Madonna is consistent philosophically. It’s her face that keeps mutating).

Many of those dubbed Right libertarians flirted with open borders and other abominations (as has the Judge), until recently. At the same time, these libertarians have ostracized me for a consistent, restricted immigration position, and a support, since time immemorial, of Israel’s rights in the land (as against those of the MOPE, Most Oppressed People Ever, etc). Our reformed libertarians (many of whom fell out with me over Israel), now make their new-found case for Israel, ponderously, by citing obscure Israeli/Jewish teens. It’s amusing, and certainly leftist. Cultural leftists love “authoritative” kids. Maybe arguing with and citing kids is an intellectual cop-out (like Bill O’Reilly who feels more comfortable with a 22-year-old blondie on his show than with Ann Coulter).

To this hard rightist, there is no kid worth listening to (except for Milo , seriously). To quote Florence King: “… children have no business expressing opinions on anything except, ‘Do you have enough room in the toes?’ More on being culturally rightist in “THE IMPORTANCE OF BOUNDARIES.”

In any event, Judge Nap is certainly not Right, although he’s smart enough to so position himself, since the Trump tsunami.

As for Jeffery Tucker. Yes, he has moved left. But, as a personal matter, Jeff has always been respectful and decent to me. (I know him as a good man.) When allowed, he also published my work (“Democratic Despotism,” for example). There is a saying in Hebrew, I remember you the grace of youth or beginnings …

UPDATE I (2/26): Love him, just don’t mislabel Judge Nap as a rightist libertarian:

UPDATE II: Facebook Thread.

UPDATE III: “Napolitano-Koch Connection? (Sixth Sense)”

UPDATE IV (2/27): Jack Kerwick has chronicled this phenomenon of Hollywood of the punditry like no other. Have fame, will travel. No matter what you say or promote, you get to redefine yourself anytime, anywhere.

UPDATE V (3/27): Civil Rights.

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Mosque Call To Prayer A Form Of Noise Pollution, Trespass

Christianity, Islam, Israel, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Private Property, Religion

In Muslim countries, the remaining Christians and Jews worship under duress. Witness the latest massacre of Coptic Christians in Egypt, where a “bomb blast has killed at least 25 people during Sunday mass inside a Cairo church near the main Coptic Christian cathedral,” reports Egyptian state TV.

All Israel wants is for mosques to turn the volume way down. What a difference. I would ask that the muezzin stop screaming from the spire, or minaret of the mosque. Surely Muslims know what time service begins? Get the mosque to text you, if you forget.

A libertarian case can be made that penetrating, amplified yelps that travel far are a form of noise pollution. Citizens can seek redress in a libertarian universe for such trespass.

‘God Bless Ilana,’ Writes British Libertarian Dr. Sean Gabb

Britain, Donald Trump, Elections, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism

Dr. Sean Gabb is director of the Libertarian Alliance, based in the United Kingdom. He is a prodigious libertarian writer and scholar. Dr. Gabb writes the following on the popular Libertarian Alliance blog (to which I contribute):

Our own Ilana Mercer was one of Mr Trump’s earliest and most vocal and consistent supporters. When he announced he would run for election, and when she immediately went into drum majorette mode, I thought she had gone a little funny in the head. Here was a businessman and television personality, trying to break into the closed shop of American politics. I thought Ilana was funny in the head, and I thought Mr Trump a bit of a joke.

Then he showed his teeth, and I sat up. I began to read Ilana with more attention. I said nothing to her when she strained our charitable status to the limit. I watched astonished as the crowds began to gather, and as the most unlikely candidate anyone could have imagined began to tell truths I never thought to hear in front rank politics. Until close to the end, I doubted he could win. I thought Ilana would be terribly depressed by his losing, and that she would go away and sulk for a decade.

But he’s now President-elect Trump, and Ilana was right all along.

I think we should be grateful to Ilana for two reasons: …

… “God Bless Ilana” is at the British Libertarian Alliance. Subscribe to the RSS feed.

Still in the Trump context, historian Dr. Clyde N. Wilson has blessed “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016) with a review in Chronicles magazine, the flagship publication of principled paleoconservationism. “Sounding The Trump” appeared in the October 2016 issue of Chronicles (subscribe). A short excerpt:

In important ways, a revolutionary process has begun. So argues Ilana Mercer in the best extended analysis yet published of the Trump phenomenon: “Trump is getting an atrophied political system to oscillate” in “an oddly marvelous uprising.” For us revolutionaries there is still a long way to go, but we are entitled to a “modest hope” that “an utterly different political animal, Donald Trump, might actually do some good for the countrymen he genuinely seems to love.”

It is not Trump who is transforming American politics, the author asserts; “it’s the people of America doing the transforming.” Trump is the first politician in a long, long time who has regarded America as a country rather than a “proposition” and has actually spoken to and for “the people.” Far from being “divisive,” his plain speaking has enthusiastically united large numbers of Americans. …

… “White Lives Matter Less” has been, in Mercer’s words, “the creedal pillar” of our public life. Without ungraciousness to any, Trump has shown that it is OK for white Americans to declare that they have had enough of “the pigment burden” that has been piled on their backs. This paleo-libertarian author does not disguise her disgust at the fashionable statism, indistinguishable from the collectivist left and without a clue to what “free trade” really means, that passes for libertarianism today. …

… as Mercer points out with tough realism, … In this post-constitutional time, it may be that “the best liberty lovers can look to is action and counter-action, force and counterforce in the service of liberty.” A president hoping for reform will face 160,000 pages of federal laws and regulations and relentless sabotage by the Banksters, Bombers, Bureaucrats, and Busybodies who now govern us. He cannot be a moderate if he hopes to accomplish anything.

On “Mercer’s Menckenesque ability to coin memorable phrases describing the empowered fools of our time,” Professor Wilson’s asks: “Does any contemporary writer do it better?”

Finally, a reviewer with a sense of fun; someone with the good sense to have a hearty chuckle at this verbal swordplay:

Mercer on the media: “news nitworks,” the “War Street Journal,” “idiot’s lantern,” “unsharpened pencil,” “tele-tarts,” a “circle jerk of power brokers,” “one-trick donkeys,” “celebrated mediocrities,” “another banal bloviation,” the “cable commentariat as a cog in the corpulent D.C. fleshpot.”

Mercer on our rulers and would-be rulers: “parasites in waiting”; “nation-building at the point of the bayonet makes [Hillary] barking happy”; “Banana Republicans”; “dwarf-tossing” (William Kristol’s promotion of nonentities as Trump alternatives); the “quaint expectation that voters, not party operatives, would choose the nominee”; the “silent majority that dare not speak its name”; “what our crypto-leftist conservatives are ramming down our proverbial gullets are dogmas, not values”; the “master-servant relationship between Republicans and the Religious Right”; the “think tanks’ industry for the god of war”; “neoconservatives speaking like Tocqueville but acting like Robespierre”; “neoconservatives standing athwart every valid form of American conservatism yelling stop.”

What a review and what an honor! Subscribe to Chronicles here.