As we approach the 2024 presidential election, which will also see the whole of the House and a third of the Senate up for grabs, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep my blog essays and posts to one a day. I will do my best to resist this. But today will be one of the days that I can’t. So here’s an afternoon post.
Doesn’t the man who tends to the First Amendment—freedom of conscience, speech, press, assembly, petition, association—also have First Amendment rights? Only the progressive left is allowed to have a politics? What if Samuel Alito owns a gun? Can he still sit in judgment of the Second Amendment? Just like the Harrison Butker frenzy, we are once more seeing a pathetic and transparent attempt to manufacture a controversy. (I thought call out culture was for the young and dunderheaded?)
Ruth Bader Ginsberg was one of the most politically active justices in the history of the Court. Where were the demands for an investigation of her associations or recusal from key cases in which she clearly had ideological investments? Yet, when Samuel Alito expresses his politics, progressives lose their shit. They don’t merely criticize the justice (that’s fair game), they call for investigations and demand the judge recuse himself from interested cases (we’d hope they’d all be interested cases). They do the same with Clarence Thomas, another outspoke conservative (who is especially despised by progressives because he is the wrong kind of black man, the kind of black man who probably won’t vote for Biden). It’s not just the judges they go after. They go after their wives, too. Progressives really don’t believe in free speech and association. But most of you already knew this.
Democrats believe conservatives have no right to their politics. They don’t believe in an independent judiciary. They’re exploiting the presence of conservative justices to simultaneously delegitimize and politicize the court. Progressives want recusals because this raises the relative number of progressive judges, which they believe helps they interests before the Court. They’re laying the groundwork for court packing if Biden wins reelection.
(It’s looking bad for Biden, but given the full spectrum campaign against Trump, the former president may not be around to trounce him. It’s not only the lawfare being waged in courts across the nation, but the palpable desire to see bodily harm done to Trump. We learned yesterday that the warrant to raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate—likely to retrieve, among other documents, the one detailing Crossfire Hurricane, the Obama-Clinton plot to initiate the coup against the Trump presidency—authorized the FBI to use lethal force against occupants of the estate. Newly unsealed court document reveal that DOJ and FBI were prepared for Secret Service resistance during the raid.)
We are reminded why they want recusals and more progressive justices by today’s ruling in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, where the majority held that courts must generally credit lawmakers’ assertions that their goal in redistricting was partisan, which is permissible, rather than based on race, which is not (see The NYTimes coverage here). “We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Justice Alito wrote for the majority. Right, because if maps were drawn to benefit Democrats in states like South Carolina, then it would have to be based on race. Democrats accuse Republicans of racism, not because Republicans draw the maps based on race, but because Republicans don’t draw maps to advantage Democrats.
Since progressives control the institutions that manufacture and control the narrative, even rational people sometimes work within the hegemonic assumptions and are tricked by the antiracist narrative, which is actually the cover for racist law and policy. That’s why it’s so important to extract oneself from the system of tacit assumptions and think through the problem rationally. Progressives are aggressively politicizing the Court because, in the corporatist model, in the racial system Democrats have maintained for centuries (the chattel slavery, Jim Crow, affirmative action, DEI), racism is cloaked in the legitimacy of the law—and to do that the party needs to reduce the presence of and undermine the authority of colorblind jurisprudence and its defenders.
Democrats employ subterfuge to hide their corporate statism, the fascism of which becomes more obvious every day, by smearing Trump as a fascist. Consider the freakout over the video produced by the Dilley Meme Team (named for its founder Brenden Dilley), shared by a Trump operative on his social media platform Truth Social early Monday morning while Trump was in a Manhattan courtroom defending himself from a zombie case arranged by the Department of Justice. The video was initially reported as a campaign ad. “This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court,” Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Soon Biden was piling on, remarking, “A unified Reich? That’s Hitler’s language, that’s not America’s.” (See Reductio ad Hitlerum and the Witch Problem.) The Biden campaign is now punctuating its absurdity daily. “Reich” is the German word for “nation.” The faux-news articles in the video in question, styled like newspapers from the early 1900s, recycles text from reports on World War I, including references to “German industrial strength” and “peace through strength.” The outrage depends on ignorance of basic history and the incurious character of the average Biden supporter. When was World War I? July 1914–November 1918. Hitler came to power in January 1933. (Associating Trump with Hitler has been around for a while. See my June 2018 essay Immigration, Deportation, and Reductio ad Hitlerum. Trump isn’t the only target of the smear. See, e.g., “DeSantis is a Nazi” and the Hysterical Left’s Anti-Working Class Politics.)
In an op-ed masquerading as a news article published by The NYTimes, Chris Cameron tells readers about a recycled headline in the video that suggests that a second Trump term would reject globalism, misleading his audience by claiming that the term “has been widely adopted on the far right and that scholars say can be used as a signal of antisemitism.” Actually, “globalist” is a term used by left-wing international political economists. One of two areas of specialization in my PhD credential is political economy. I have shelves overflowing with left wing critiques of globalism, globalization, and transnationalism. It’s the bread and butter of international political economy. Progressives do the same thing with the word “cosmopolitan,” linking it to antisemitism, as well.
The NYTimes is lying without shame here—and they think they can get away with it because they think you don’t know enough to know they’re lying. They’re not only trying to tie Trump to antisemitism to deepen the propaganda portraying Trump as fascistic (for the most part, the man is a typical liberal from Queens), but they’re also trying to whitewash the role of transnational corporations in the practices of off-shoring and mass immigration that is hammering the working class. Indeed, Joe Biden (not a Jew) has been one of the major proponents and enablers of globalization since the late 1970s.
But Cameron is a like a dog on a bone. He writes that “Mr. Trump has repeatedly denounced Jews who vote for Democrats, accusing them of hating their religion and Israel. In one video this month, he said that ‘if Jewish people are going to vote for Joe Biden, they have to have their head examined.’” Is that more offensive than what Joe Biden said about black people? Remember what he told Charlemagne? “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Trump didn’t say that Jews who voted for Biden weren’t Jews. He was perplexed why Jews would vote for Biden. So am I. I am also perplexed why blacks would vote for the man or his party.
freedom and reason 