In Praise Of The Whip: To Whip Or To Rein Is Not The Question

Argument, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Israel, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Nationhood, Reason, Republicans

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©2021 ILANA MERCER

What on earth is wrong with the whip? The reference is, as CNN put it, to “recent images that appear to show US Border Patrol agents on horseback confronting migrants along the Rio Grande.” So far so good.

Videos taken by Al Jazeera and Reuters appear to show law enforcement officers on horseback using aggressive tactics when confronting migrants, who are largely Haitian, to prevent them from crossing into the US.

Wonderful.

“The Biden administration is expressing horror,” promising to proceed aggressively against these poor horseback officers, who work in near-impossible conditions, without institutional support and for meager wages.

How does the Right respond? Is it a whip or is it a rein, they kibitz. Look, if it’s not a whip, it ought to have been one, and if the border patrol agent used a rein as whip—then hooray for him. The End.

That’s the Right’s problem. The anatomy of every single left-manufactured national scandal sees our side always conceding to the legitimacy of the left’s case, and then going on the defensive, instead of attacking.

In short: asinine. stupid. defeatist.

The anatomy of a good response is never, but never, to apologize and equivocate about a principled behavior, in this instance, the right of self- and national defense.

The right response: “What if US Border Patrol agents on horseback were wielding whips? Got a problem with repelling and whipping outlaws, who are charging you, your horse and into your country?”

Vice President Kamala Harris called the images “horrible” and said she supports an investigation into the matter.

Heroic, not horrible. Part of the job of the law is to round up the likes of the Haitian invaders and turn them back. If the law is not doing this—it’s because natural morality has been inverted. Good is bad and bad is good. Right is wrong and wrong is right.

What a moral inversion it is that forces US law enforcement to process and pander to outlaws; instead of arresting and expelling them IN JUST THIS MANNER.

* Image via Tracey Ann Whitehill on LinkedIn

 

UPDATE II (12/21/021): NEW COLUMN: Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech (Part 3)

Free Speech, Individual Rights, Justice, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Republicans, Technology, The Courts, THE ELITES

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NEW COLUMN: “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech,” is now on WND.COM, The Unz Review, CNSNews, and The New American.

This column is Part 3 of a 3-part series. Read Part 1, “Big Tech’s Financial Terrorism And Social Excommunication” and Part 2, “Justice Thomas’ Solution to Big Tech’s Social And Financial Excommunication.”

An excerpt:

It is inarguable that by financially crippling and socially segregating, and banishing politically irksome people and enterprises—the Big Tech cartel is flouting the spirit, if not the strict letter, of the Civil Rights Act.

For how do you make a living if your banking options are increasingly curtailed and constantly threatened, and your ability to electronically communicate with clients is likewise circumscribed?

Do you go back to a barter economy (a book for some bread)? Do you go underground? Cultivate home-based industries? Do you keep afloat by word of mouth? Go door-to-door? Return to stamping envelopes? How can you, when your client base is purely electronic?

Telling an individual he can’t open a bank account on account of the beliefs and opinions swirling in his head teeters on informing your innocent victim he might not be able to make a living, as do other, politically more polite Americans, and despite his innocence: Our only “offenses” as dissidents are thought crimes, namely, speaking, or typing or wafting into the air unpopular, impolite words.

“[I]n assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power,” Justice Clarence Thomas has argued, “what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.”

To paraphrase this Supreme Court jurist: Sure, there are alternatives to The Big Tech, but these make a mockery of the outcast. It would hardly be hyperbole, in driving home Justice Thomas’s point about comparability, to put it thus:

With respect to financial de-platforming, barring someone from PayPal is like prohibiting a passenger from crossing the English Channel by high-speed train, via ferry and by means of 90 percent of airplanes. “Have at it sucker.”

By Deep Tech decree, some Americans are worth more than others, based not on their actions, but on the voiced thoughts in their heads. This cannot stand.

The letter of the law needs changing. Do it.

Civil Rights Act

Thus, the preferred remedy to Deep Tech depredations would build upon existing Civil Rights Act jurisprudence.

As a reality-oriented conservative libertarian, I inhabit and theorize in the real world. From the conservative-libertarian’s perspective, Barry Goldwater got it right. Civil Rights law is an ass, for it infringes on property rights. But the onus is on flaccid Republican lawmakers to ensure that that ass can be ridden by all equally (with apologies to adorable, much-abused donkeys for the cruel metaphor).

These are existing laws that are already enforced. I see no reason to reject the application of civil rights solutions to wicked, woke bullies because existing laws that’ll never be repealed go against my core beliefs. What is libertarianism? The art of losing in life because of a slavish devotion to theoretical purity? …

… NEW COLUMN, “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech,” can be read now on WND.COM, The Unz Review, CNSNews, and The New American.

UPDATED (10/26/021) I:

UPDATE II (12/21/021) II: “Berenson v. Twitter“:

Twitter is indisputably a messenger service. A longstanding California law regulates messenger services as “common carriers.” This means that they must accept all messages they receive. Twitter thus must accept all tweets it receives. It has no First Amendment rights to refuse them on the basis that it does not agree with them.
A federal law commonly called Section 230 “preempts” the California law, giving Twitter the right to reject tweets or ban users. (Whether that right is universal or whether Twitter must act in “good faith” in restricting service is a separate question; whether Twitter acted in “good faith” in this case is still another question. But put those issues aside for the moment.)
Section 230 is what enables Twitter to claim a First Amendment privilege that supersedes the California law and restrict my own First Amendment right to speak; thus federal courts have the right to review 230 on First Amendment grounds.

MORE.

With Friends Like Gen. Mark Benedict Milley, America Doesn’t Need Enemies

Britain, China, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Military, Republicans

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NEW ON HARD TRUTH: In “With Friends Like Gen. Mark Benedict Milley, America Doesn’t Need Enemies,” David Vance and myself marvel at the institutional tolerance in the United States—among spineless Republicans, especially—for Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

In the dying days of the Trump presidency, Milley is alleged to have contacted the Chinese to promise them he’d give them plenty notice if the United States were to attack them. Azimuths and all, presumably.

Finally, pundits are using the “T” word; pundits, but not Republicans on Capitol Hill.

WATCH:

OR, LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE TO THE HARD TRUTH PODCAST:

Sure enough—and this is so very curious—Fox News has shelved the Milley breaking-news story, on its website and in live reporting. As David and I were had predicted, the GOP and its TV appendage would back-down.

UPDATED (9/28): NEW COLUMN: No, Lara Logan, Only Simpletons Think Afghanistan Is Simple

Argument, Asia, Critique, Foreign Policy, Islam, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, War

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NEW COLUMN, “No, Lara Logan, Only Simpletons Think Afghanistan Is Simple,” is currently on WND.COM, The Unz Review, Townhall.com, CNSNews and American Greatness.

And excerpt:

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson appears in thrall to Lara Logan’s political observations—to her “philosophical” meditations, too. Alas, Logan is no Roger Scruton.

You might have heard Logan claim, recently and repetitively, that everything in the world is simple. “Everything is simple,” she keeps intoning in her appearances on Fox News.

Applied to the fiasco in Afghanistan, Logan’s Theory of Simple is that, considering that America is omnipotent, whatever occurs under its watch is always and everywhere planned and preventable.

Ridiculous and wrong, yet Tucker, whom we all love to bits, giggles in delight.

“They want you to believe Afghanistan is complicated,” lectured Logan. “Because if you complicate it, it is a tactic in information warfare called ‘ambiguity increasing.’”

“So now we’re talking about all the corruption and this and that,” she further vaporized. “But at its heart, every single thing in the world… always comes down to one or two things …”

Logan likely recently discovered Occam’s Razor and is promiscuously applying this principle to anything and everything, with little evidence or geopolitical and historic understanding in support of her Theory of Simple.

Occam’s Razor posits that, “the simplest explanation is preferable to one that is more complex,” provided “simple” is “based on as much evidence as possible.”

A nifty principle—and certainly not a philosophy—Occam’s Razor was not meant to apply to everything under the sun.

Misapplied by Logan, why? Primarily because Logan’s explanation for America’s defeat in Afghanistan—that the United States threw the game—is hardly the simplest explanation, despite her assertion to the contrary.

The simplest explanation to the US defeat in Afghanistan, based on as much information as is possible to gather, is that, wait for this: America was defeated fair and square. As this columnist had argued, the US was outsmarted and outmaneuvered, in a mission impossible in the first place. …

… READ ON. NEW COLUMN, “No, Lara Logan, Only Simpletons Think Afghanistan Is Simple,” is currently on WND.COM, The Unz Review, Townhall.com, CNSNews and American Greatness.

UPDATED (9/28): Afghans have hereditary disorders due to marriage between relatives.