Jamie Raskin and people like him are a threat to the existence of an independent judiciary (read his op-ed in The New York Times here). Protecting the integrity of the Court is how a people secure the stability of a constitutional republic over time. Disqualifying judges, eliminating tenure, and imposing ethical rules derived from the ideology of political parties rather than the emergent logic of the law rooted in a rights-based approach politicizes the judiciary. More than any power of government, the judiciary in a common law system must remain independent. That the Court makes decisions Democrats don’t like is hardly a good reason to undermine the independence of the judiciary. On the contrary—it’s the worst reason.
On a practical level, the attitude makes a whip for its advocates’ own back. If ever there is a conservative government in place that lasts for any period of time, Raskin and his ilk will sorely miss the progressive judges who were tossed by the conservative majority the first chance they got. Raskin’s argument is drunk on a period where progressivism runs the administrative state and the White House. That may not be a permanent situation. His argument is a lot like a majority religious persuasion wishing to impose its faith based doctrine on the people; those advocating its hegemony will sorely miss religious liberty when another religious persuasion dethrones it.
But Democrats think like authoritarians and know they control the administrative apparatus. Raskin wants the Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland to intervene and collude with the other judges to take out Alito and Thomas so that Democratic Party wishes will have a better chance before the Court. This is not only action politicizing the judiciary; it’s also election interference. The Democrats already crossed the Rubicon by waging lawfare against a former president. We are already hearing threats from the other side that they will do the same. Imagine if partisan Attorney Generals on the other side when in power determine which judges are not impartial and remove them the bench for selected cases.
I’d like to think Raskin is just a fool on the hill. But there are many fools on the Hill. More than fools, though—they’re authoritarian. Progressivism is truly a totalitarian mindset. You can see the spirit at work in the ubiquitous presence of the double standard. Progressives want Alito to muzzle his wife. The clip to which Steve Bannon and Mark Paoletta refer in the clip below finds Melissa Murray (NYU law professor) complaining to Joy Reid about the hypocrisy of a jurist who overturned a 1970s ruling on abortion that even Ruth Bader Ginsberg said was a bad ruling failing to control his wife. Alito had responded to Senators Richard Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse’s request that he recuse himself in cases pending before him in a letter by reminding them: “My wife is a private citizen, and she possesses the same First Amendment rights as every other American. She makes her own decisions, and I have always respected her right to do so.” (For more, see Would it Be Better if Judge Alito Appealed to Hell? See also Politicizing the Court and More Reductio ad Hitlerum.)
Speaking of hypocrisy, what’s up with this?
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There is a 19-year-old Florida man who is facing felony charges for peeling out on the Pride Progress flag mural—his tire marks washed away by sunlight and rain. Dylan Brewer, 19, of Clearwater, turned himself into the Delray Beach Police Department yesterday. The incident took place around 8:30 pm on February 4 at the intersection of Northeast First Street and Northeast Second Avenue. The flag needs repainting anyway because, as all road paint fades and peels. Moreover, there are new tread marks on the flag (Brewer is not alone in finding the flag objectionable. Any man in a truck peeling out on that flag might commit some misdemeanor, ordinance, etc. (noise, perhaps), but the idea that this is a felony or (effectively) a hate crime is ludicrous.
While you may think it petty, peeling out on the flag is an expression of dissent. Does the dissent originate in antipathy towards gender ideology? Perhaps. But not necessarily. And there’s nothing wrong with antipathy toward gender ideology. It is wrong to use taxpayer money to paint the Pride Progress flag murals on public streets. It’s the same wrong as painting BLM flag murals on public streets or murals of Saint George Floyd of Fentanyl with angel wings on public buildings. Public spaces should remain politically and ideological neutral spaces. Get this nonsense out of our public schools and libraries. Get it off our police cars. Stop flying these flags over government buildings. To compel people who travel public roads or enter public buildings or whatever to receive propaganda messages on a daily basis violates the First Amendment. We don’t live in North Korea. (For the record, I said the same thing about Louisiana to become first state requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in schools. “When Muslims take over a state, what’s to stop them from posting the five pillars of Islam in public schools? This is a people making a whip for their own backs—and ours.”)
Here’s an idea for progressive elites: how about going after the robbers and thieves preying on flesh and blood human beings instead of those dissenting from the mainstreaming of paraphilias by marring the symbols of a neo-religion that don’t belong in public spaces in the first place? We know why they won’t: neither public safety nor freedom of conscience concern them in the least.
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The Biden campaign is making something of Trump’s alleged racism. So the GOP is making something of Biden’s long and unambiguous record of expressing racist sentiment. It’s hard to think of any politician in the modern era who is more racist than Joe Biden—especially judged by the lights of progressive ideology. Racist beliefs are intrinsic to Biden’s belief system. It’s the way he ticks. The most disgusting expression of this is in the way he sees black people as his lackeys.
At the same time, he reflects the general attitude of progressives towards race. When Biden said that any black man who doesn’t vote for him isn’t black, anybody who pays even the least bit of attention to such things recognized that attitude in the way progressives talk about Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and every other black man wo strays from the plantation.
When Barak Obama was running for president in 2008 I had a colleague who remarked to me during lunch at convocation something like, “You in particular must be really excited to vote for the first black man for president.” As the professor on campus who taught race and ethnic relations and who had spoken publicly numerous times on racial issues, my reputation as a civil rights advocate was well known. She was of course referring to Obama, who I was not voting for. I responded with, “You mean Alan Keyes?” To say that she was taken aback is an understatement—she never talked to me again. Alan Keyes isn’t really a black man, you see—by the lights of progressive ideology. (Look up Alan Keyes. Look into his 2008 presidential campaign. Is he black?)
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Finally, I have yet another example of the problem of inaccuracy and imprecision in language. In this example, former president Ronald Reagan misrepresents the terms “conservative” and “liberal.” He also errs in defining fascism. So you know what I am referring to, here’s an accessible clip:
As he describes it, what Reagan presents as conservatism is actually liberalism. Liberalism is about limiting government to maximize individual freedom. To be sure, today’s conservatives are substantially liberal, but conservatism still comes with the desire to control people’s minds and bodies, so it quite doesn’t work as a synonym. What Reagan presents as liberalism is actually progressivism, again, as he describes it. Progressivism advocates private control over capital with government regulation of people for the sake of corporate power and profit (he leaves this piece out of his definition of fascism). Progressivism is the ideology of the corporate state, which comes in soft and hard fascist versions, all of which are self-evidently antithetical to liberalism.
The disappointing thing about this is that, at this time, Reagan knew this and blew an opportunity to explain to the people the meaning of the words elites use to confuse the people. Given his communication skills and populist sensibilities this would have been of great benefit. Progressives tagged their standpoint “liberal” to disguise the establishment and entrenchment of the corporate state over against democratic republicanism. Because citizens rightly see progressivism and the technocratic apparatus it animates as freedom-stealing, liberalism misused as euphemism caused the word to take on bad connotations (which Rush Limbaugh’s daily three-hour rants pressed into the public consciousness); meanwhile progressivism became confused with populism to appeal to justice-loving people to trick them into supporting soft fascism.
I have people tell me all the time that words change meaning. But what they actually mean to say is that is that words change usage, including misuse for propagandistic purposes. Liberalism is not like a political party, e.g., the Republican Party, that starts off as a populist abolitionist party and then becomes a part of the corporate state establishment. Liberalism is a word referring to a set of principles. If you do not believe in the principles, then you are not a liberal. You don’t get to carry the label with you when you leave the principles. It’s like Christianity—there are only so many tenets of the faith you can abandon before you are no longer one. If we are not clear on the meaning of words, then cannot have meaningful communications. This is why I am so stubborn about using the right words to accurately convey ideas. (See The Problem of the Weakly Principled; Gender and the English Language; Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words; Linguistic Programming: A Tool of Tyrants.)
freedom and reason 